In late August 1777, Britain’s King George III received momentous news. The great tidings so thrilled the monarch that he burst into his wife’s chambers waiving the message in the air exclaiming: “I have beat them! I have beat the Americans!” He had just learned that British Lieutenant General John Burgoyne and his army had captured the vital American fortress of Fort Ticonderoga, which sat astride the great Lake Champlain-Hudson River invasion route from Canada. This victory, achieved with almost no casualties, convinced the king and his ministers that the military strategy they had put in place the preceding spring to end the American Revolution was going according to plan. But less than two months after the king’s impromptu celebration, Burgoyne and his army met with an unprecedented disaster and the British were subsequently faced with a very different war.
The campaign’s basic outlines are well known and straightforward. In June 1777, two British armies invaded New York from Canada – a large army under the command of Burgoyne was to move south on Lake Champlain, capture Fort Ticonderoga and continue to Albany, where it would meet another smaller British force, which was to come down the
