The Saber and Scroll Journal Volume 1, Issue 1, April 2015 | Page 15

Great Britain, had become a worldwide war which then threatened Great Britain and
its colonies across the globe. When Spain and the Netherlands entered the conflict
the following year, British forces were stretched too thin.
As a result, when a combined French and American army and naval
blockade forced the surrender of General Charles Earl Cornwallis’s army at
Yorktown in 1781, the British realized they had lost the conflict. Peace was
negotiated in 1783. Before Saratoga, the American rebels were barely hanging onto
their newly declared freedom, suffering two years of almost complete defeats and
the losses of both New York City and Philadelphia. After Saratoga, the Americans
were able to secure foreign allies and expand the conflict beyond North America.
The Saratoga campaign, ill planned and ill executed by the primary British
commanders involved, turned out to be the strategic victory that ultimately secured
the independence of the United States of America in the American Revolution.
Notes
1. John S. Pancake, 1777: The Year of the Hangman (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama
Press, 1977), 79.
2. Fred J. Cook, Dawn Over Saratoga (Garden City: Doubleday & Company, 1973), 5.
3. John R. Elting, The Battles of Saratoga (Monmouth Beach: Philip Freneau Press, 1977),
14.
4. Ibid., 21.
5. Ibid., 38.
6. Cook, Dawn Over Saratoga, 87.
7. John Ferling, Almost a Miracle: The American Victory in the War of Independence
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 220.
8. Cook, Dawn Over Saratoga, 6.
9. General George Washington, “Washington’s General Orders, September 5, 1777,” The
American Revolution, 1763-1783, http://www.loc.gov (accessed July 17, 2010).
10. Baroness Frederika von Riedesel, Baroness von Riedesel and the American Revolution:
Journal and Correspondence of a Tour of Duty, 1776-1783, trans. Marvin L. Brown (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1965).
11. Cook, Dawn Over Saratoga, 132.
12. Cook, Dawn Over Saratoga, 152.
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