Posted on by Charlie Frye

Battles of Saratoga 243rd Anniversary

Of all the work and research I put into the writing of Honor and Valor, chapters 7 and 8 which deal with the Battles of Freeman’s Farm and Bemis Heights proved the most challenging. Over the last two decades I read many books about these battles. I particularly enjoyed the works of Richard M. Ketchum and Sean Snow, and Don Troiani & Eric Schnitzer.

Plaque dedicated to the New Hampshire Continentals who fought at Saratoga in 1777.

My goal in reading those and many others was to get my bearings and then shadow the 3rd New Hampshire Regiment and my ancestor, then Captain, Isaac Frye on these battlefields. I cross-referenced the sources from the above-mentioned works and several others to piece together a series of minute-to-minute sequences that plausibly occurred on the afternoons of September 19 and October 7, 1777.

I also spent a day walking the battlefields, doing my best to see the terrain as soldiers saw it in 1777. Many first-hand accounts of the battles included the tremendous sounds of cannon, musketry, and anguished screams of the wounded and dying men. Combine that with all the smoke and smells and I found myself duly impressed with the valor of those who fought.

If you’re like me and have pursued a deeper understanding of these battles, and wondered what it was like to have been there, please invest some time and read Honor and Valor. I learned a great deal writing it, especially when it came to realizing the great fortitude and commitment the men on both sides of these battles brought to bear through the brutality of war and the sufferings produced by 18th Century armies in a months-long campaign.

The best histories are the stories of specific people and why they did what they did. In my writing, I strive to revive the stories of several people that many historians might only include as flavoring in their writings rather than the main course. Names like Isaac Frye, Ezekiel Goodale, William Adrian Hawkins, and Will Burton do not make the indexes in most histories and historians have not written about their families or their everyday concerns for well over a century.

-CEF

P.S. If you should read or have read Honor and Valor or The War Has Begun, and any of the other books mentioned above, their authors and I would very much appreciate a review on Amazon, as more reviews means Amazon helps promote my books and others on the American Revolution.

I am also happy to include that the e-books editions are now available to borrow from libraries that use the Biblioboard service for loaning e-books to their patrons.

Posted on by Charlie Frye

Freeman’s Farm: The more I read …

For the past few weeks, I’ve been writing the scenes during the Battle of Freeman’s Farm. The perspective is from inside the 3rd New Hampshire Regiment; imagining what it was like to be in the ranks, commanding platoons and companies, and orchestrating the positioning of a regiment on that battlefield.

Most histories are written from a bird’s-eye view with the occasional tidbit coming from the diary or memoir of one of the men on the field. No complaints as those are great reads for getting introduced to the events and people involved. That said, between such histories and paintings of these battles, both new and old, something has been troubling me. How is it, given that each side had roughly 3,000 men, each man roughly twenty cartridges, and fired most of them over the 4-6 hours they were on the battlefield, that there were only a little over 1,000 total casualties?

Do that math:  The Americans fired upwards of 60,000 bullets, and maybe 1,000 found an enemy soldier. The British fired about the same number and only hit half as many Americans.

For having fired a musket and demonstrated, hundreds of times, how a firelock works, while explaining the range and just how far off target they could be at a distance of 75 yards, I was still surprised by these numbers.

As I considered the possible reasons for this, some notions of what must have been happening, strategically and tactically, began to develop.  First, the 18th-century battlefield was more like a chess match than a shooting gallery. Colonels and captains had to preserve their troops by maneuvering on the field with the dual intent of catching their enemy within range of their muskets.

Sidebar:  Is the right word musket or firelock?  If Google’s NGram Viewer is reliable, it looks like it was similar to “flip phones” versus “cell phones”. It seems that firelocks were a specific new form of the musket class of weapon. 

Smoke from firing volleys, providing the fog of battle to hide movements, was only the beginning. Advancing or retreating while firing volleys by platoon allowed for relatively high rates of sustained fire to push groups of enemy troops out of the way, or respectively slow their advance.  Getting close enough, perhaps by flanking (coming around to the side of an enemy’s formation), to warrant a bayonet charge while your enemy reloads was a tempting and dangerous goal. Execute poorly and the tables could be turned rather quickly.

Given that, my respect has risen considerably for the American Colonels (Cilley, Scammell, Cook, Adams, and Hull) who directed their men in the field around Freeman’s farm against Burgoyne and Hamilton on this day 241 years ago. These men did not just rush onto the field ala Mel Gibson (as Benjamin Martin or William Wallace) and clash with their enemy. One of the consistent recollections by the men who were there was of the tremendous amount of musketry.  That meant firing volleys, advancing, wheeling, and retreating if no advantage was gained.

Another thing to take into account was the likelihood that Morgan’s riflemen, and the Jaegers who carried rifles, accounted for a double-digit percentage of the casualties. There were points during the battle where the fighting came to hand-to-hand combat. Both of these facts imply that those muskets accounted for even fewer casualties than the 1 in 60 that my initial estimate suggested.

Consider that not all men on either side were killers. Aiming a firearm with the intent of taking a life is no small thing. Given all the smoke, there were certainly times when finding a target was impossible–just point into the smoke and pull the trigger when commanded to fire.

It seems only one man in five or even six fired a shot that struck an enemy that day. The credit for keeping the American casualties so low goes to the officers who guided their troops on the field and in the woods while they fought for something more than a sixpence.*

-CF

* From a Henry Dearborn quote: “But we who had Something more at Stake than fighting for Six Pence Pr Day kept our ground til Night, Closed the scene, & then Both Parties Retire’d”