WARS and BATTLES
From Ancient Greece - to modern day.

The loss of the British in these engagements was trifling. The army moved southward along Lake George to Skenesborough, and thence, slowly and with great difficulty, across a broken country, full of creeks and marshes, and clogged by the enemy with felled trees and other obstacles, to Fort Edward, on the Hudson River, the American troops continuing to retire before them.

Burgoyne reached the left bank of the Hudson River on the 30th of July. Hitherto he had overcome every difficulty which the enemy and the nature of the country had placed in his way. His army was in excellent order and in the highest spirits, and the peril of the expedition seemed over when once on the bank of the river which was to be the channel of communication between them and the British army in the South. But their feelings, and those of the English nation in general when their successes were announced, may best be learned from a contemporary writer. Burke - in the "Annual Register" for 1777, describes them thus:

"Such was the rapid torrent of success, which swept every/tiling away before the Northern army in its onset. It is not to be wondered at if both officers and private men were highly elated with their good fortune, and deemed that and their prowess to be irresistible; if they regarded their enemy with the greatest contempt; considered their own toils to be nearly at an end; Albany to be already in their hands; and the reduction of the northern provinces to be rather a matter of some time than an arduous task full of difficulty and danger.

"At home, the joy and exultation was extreme; not only at court, but with all those who hoped or wished the unqualified subjugation and unconditional submission of the colonies. The loss of reputation was greater to the Americans, and capable of more fatal consequences, than even that of ground, of posts, of artillery, or of men.

All the contemptuous and most degrading charges which had been made by their enemies, of their wanting the resolution and abilities of men, even in their defense of whatever was dear to them, were now repeated and believed. Those who still regarded them as men, and who had not yet lost all affection to them as brethren; who also retained hopes that & happy reconciliation upon constitutional principles, without sacrificing the dignity of just authority of government on the one side, or dereliction of rights of freemen on the other, was not even now impossible, notwithstanding their favorable dispositions in general, could not help feeling upon this occasion that the Americans sunk not a little in their estimation.

It was not difficult to diffuse an opinion that the war in effect was over, and that any farther resistance could serve only to render the terms of their submission the worse. Such were some of the immediate effects of the loss of the grand keys of North America - Ticonderoga, and the lakes.

The astonishment and alarm which these events produced among the Americans were naturally great; but in the midst of their disasters, none of the colonists showed any disposition to submit. The local governments of the New England States, as well as the Congress, acted with vigor and firmness in their efforts to repel the enemy.

 General Gates was sent to take the command of the army at Saratoga; and Arnold, a favorite leader of the Americans, was dispatched by Washington to act under him, with re-enforcements of troops and guns from the main American army. Burgoyne's employment of the Indians now produced the worst possible effects.

Though he labored hard to cheek the atrocities which they were accustomed to commit, he could not prevent the occurrence of many barbarous outrages, repugnant both to the feelings of humanity and to the laws of civilized warfare. The American commanders took care that the reports of these excesses should be circulated far and wide, well knowing that they would make the stern New Englanders not droop, but rage.

Such was their effect; and though, when each man looked upon his wife, his children, his sisters, or his aged parents, the thought of the merciless Indian "thirsting for the blood of man, woman, and child," of "the cannibal savage torturing, murdering, roasting, and eating the mangled victims of his barbarous battles," might raise terror in the bravest breasts; this very terror produced a directly contrary effect to causing submission to the royal army. It was seen that the few friends of the royal cause as well as its enemies, were liable to be the victims of the indiscriminate rage of the savages and thus "the inhabitants of the open and frontier countries had no choice of acting: they had no means of security left but by abandoning their habitations and taking up arms.

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