The American Revolution was won on October 17, 1777, when John Burgoyne surrendered his British and German troops in upstate New York after losing a pair of battles—the disastrous ending of the British campaign to drive a line along the Hudson River Valley and thereby isolate radical New England from what they assumed were the more moderate colonies of the central and southern seaboard.
Or so the story has often been told. It was hardly new when in 1928, for example, Hoffman Nickerson published The Turning Point of the Revolution, his book about the Battles of Saratoga. And this view of the consequences of the British defeat has certainly remained the established one: The National Park Service titles its lecture series on the battle-sites "Saratoga: The Tide Turns on the Frontier."
Thus we have Richard M. Ketchum's 1997 Saratoga: Turning Point of America’s Revolutionary War and Brendan Morrissey's 2000 Saratoga 1777: Turning Point of a Revolution. It was almost a relief when John F. Luzader gave us his 2008 Saratoga: A Military History of the Decisive Campaign of the American Revolution—since he managed at least to resist the metaphors that infect the titles of most books on the topic. But the pull of those titles is just too strong, and now in 2016 the historian and archeologist Dean Snow has fallen back into the old established modes, giving us 1777: Tipping Point at Saratoga, just in time for the Christmas book-buying rush.
Anyone fairly well read on the Revolution will be tempted to sigh about Oxford University Press's decision to publish the book. What is there left to say about Saratoga? The American general, Horatio Gates, was effective and annoying, while his subordinate, Benedict Arnold, was brave and even more annoying. The British general, John Burgoyne, was certainly over his head, but once the battle lines were drawn probably no general would have been talented enough to save the British. The Americans won, and the victory set in train the eventual retreat of the British from their American colonies—since, after news of Burgoyne's surrender was broadcast, France was far more willing to help the Americans and Spain more willing to pressure the British.
But Snow’s 1777 is, in fact, an easy-reading and well-structured look at the battles that produced the British defeat, and the book arrives in an era in which there has been some contrarian argument against the old received opinion. Gavin Watt's 2002 Rebellion in the Mohawk Valley hinted that Gates's victory at Saratoga was less significant than we have been taught, while Theodore Corbett's predictably named 2012 volume, No Turning Point: The Saratoga Campaign in Perspective, brought the notion into full view.
Then, too, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Alan Taylor—whose latest book, American Revolutions, appeared this fall to wide acclaim—seems to share something of this idea that the aftermath of Saratoga was the breakdown of American control of central and northern New York and the rise of a Loyalist militia that took local government into its own hands. We should be grateful when Dean Snow reminds us that just because a historical view is old, it's not necessarily wrong. Saratoga really did matter, both as its consequences echoed on the world stage and as it encouraged American soldiers to continue their fight despite the hardships of Valley Forge later that winter.
For all that, Snow's 1777 is not much concerned with the "tipping point" that Saratoga signified, either in the campaign's birth as a foolish British plan or in its grand results on the course of the Revolution. Snow aims instead to look at the individuals involved, in their authentic voices, during the narrow period of September 15, when the initial skirmishes began, to October 17, when Burgoyne surrendered.
Personal histories are nothing new. The dean of American historians, Henry Steele Commager, put his imprimatur on the technique when he published The Spirit of Seventy-Six: The Story of the American Revolution as Told by Participants all the way back in 1967, and innumerable such works have followed in the years since. Still, Snow uses all the right letters, diaries, and memoirs to form a continuous narrative of the 33 days that led to Burgoyne's surrender at Saratoga after the Battle of Freeman's Farm on September 19 and the Battle of Bemis Heights on October 7.
In some sense, 1777 is the work that Dean Snow has been writing for years. Trained as an archeologist, he was a young professor at SUNY Albany in 1972 when the National Park Service appointed him to lead an archaeological survey and dig at the Saratoga battlefields in anticipation of the nation's grand bicentennial celebrations in 1976 and the battles' own anniversary in 1977. He made a number of discoveries in the course of his work, including finding the body of a woman, probably a British camp follower, shot in the face and lightly buried in a trench at the Balcarres Redoubt. Another of his discoveries led the park service to relocate the Boot Monument (which commemorates Benedict Arnold's wounding during his brave ride across the British line) to the spot where Arnold was actually wounded.
In the more than 40 years since he and his students undertook those excavations, Snow has maintained his interest in the general course of the Revolutionary War—but even more, his interest in the specifics of the conflict that came to a head in the Battles of Saratoga. There's not much genuinely new in 1777, but after decades of living with the material Snow is as familiar with the course of the fight as anyone has ever been, and he lays it out in an accessible and clear way.
One consequence is that 1777 takes Saratoga's importance mostly as an obvious and accepted fact. Still, the initial and concluding chapters point out how the new republic's fortunes were weak in the years after the April 1775 uprisings in Concord and Lexington. The Revolution looked lost on, say, August 27, 1776, when the British victory over George Washington at the Battle of Long Island drove American troops out of Brooklyn and ensured the capture of New York City.
Whether or not Burgoyne's surrender was genuinely significant in a military sense, it looked significant in a political and diplomatic sense—which made it significant in truth. The upstart yokels of the Yankee republic had actually defeated a significant European force in the wilds of upstate New York, and the world knew it.
All of which means that Dean Snow sees what is necessary to see about the founding moments of the country: The American Revolution was won on October 17, 1777, when John Burgoyne surrendered after losing the Battles of Saratoga. It was a turning point, to coin a phrase. A tipping point. That decisive moment when the tide turned.