ANSWER.
1. Lieut.-General Burgoyne's army, however reduced, will never
admit that their retreat is cut off while they have arms in
their hands.
PROPOSITION.
2. The officers and soldiers may keep the baggage belonging to
them. The generals of the United States never permit
individuals to be pillaged.
ANSWER.
2. Noted.
PROPOSITION.
3. The troops under his Excellency General Burgoyne will be
conducted by the most convenient route to New England,
marching by easy marches, and sufficiently provided for by the
way.
ANSWER.
3. Agreed.
PROPOSITION.
4. The officers will be admitted on parole and will be treated
with the liberality customary in such cases, so long as they,
by proper behaviour, continue to deserve it; but those who are
apprehended having broke their parole, as some British
officers have done, must expect to be close confined.
ANSWER.
4. There being no officer in this army, under, or capable of
being under, the description of breaking parole, this article
needs no answer.
PROPOSITION.
5. All public stores, artillery, arms, ammunition, carriages,
horses, etc., etc., must be delivered to commissaries appointed
to receive them.
ANSWER.
5. All public stores may be delivered, arms excepted.
PROPOSITION.
6. These terms being agreed to and signed, the troops under his
Excellency's, General Burgoyne's command, may be drawn up in
their encampments, where they will be ordered to ground their
arms, and may thereupon be marched to the river-side on their
way to Bennington.
ANSWER.
6. This article is inadmissible in any extremity. Sooner than
this army will consent to ground their arms in their
encampments, they will rush on the enemy determined to take no
quarter.
And, later on, "If General Gates does not mean to recede from the
6th article, the treaty ends at once: the army will to a man
proceed to any act of desperation sooner than submit to that
article."
Here you have the man at his Burgoynest. Need I add that he had
his own way; and that when the actual ceremony of surrender came,
he would have played poor General Gates off the stage, had not
that commander risen to the occasion by handing him back his
sword.
In connection with the reference to Indians with scalping knives,
who, with the troops hired from Germany, made up about half
Burgoyne's force, I may mention that Burgoyne offered two of them
a reward to guide a Miss McCrea, betrothed to one of the English
officers, into the English lines.
The two braves quarrelled about the reward; and the more
sensitive of them, as a protest against the unfairness of the
other, tomahawked the young lady. The usual retaliations were
proposed under the popular titles of justice and so forth; but as
the tribe of the slayer would certainly have followed suit by a
massacre of whites on the Canadian frontier, Burgoyne was
compelled to forgive the crime, to the intense disgust of
indignant Christendom.
BRUDENELL
Brudenell is also a real person. At least an artillery chaplain
of that name distinguished himself at Saratoga by reading the
burial service over Major Fraser under fire, and by a quite
readable adventure, chronicled by Burgoyne, with Lady Harriet
Ackland. Lady Harriet's husband achieved the remarkable feat of
killing himself, instead of his adversary, in a duel. He
overbalanced himself in the heat of his swordsmanship, and fell
with his head against a pebble. Lady Harriet then married the
warrior chaplain, who, like Anthony Anderson in the play, seems
to have mistaken his natural profession.
The rest of the Devil's Disciple may have actually occurred, like
most stories invented by dramatists; but I cannot produce any
documents. Major Swindon's name is invented; but the man, of
course, is real. There are dozens of him extant to this day.
