The Glorious Cause - Saratoga

In June of 1777, General John Burgoyne led a British army south from Canada to cut New England out of the war and end the rebellion in a single stroke. This is the story of how that army was swallowed whole. Burgoyne took Fort Ticonderoga in a morning and thought the campaign as good as won — and then the wilderness, and a scorched-earth retreat that felled forests across his path, and a rising tide of New England militia, ground his beautiful army down mile by starving mile, while the help he was promised sailed the other way toward Philadelphia. At Freeman’s Farm and Bemis Heights, Daniel Morgan’s riflemen picked apart his officers and Benedict Arnold rode into a battle he’d been forbidden to join and broke the British line. And on October 17th, for the first time in history, a British field army laid down its arms — 5,895 men, in dead silence, before an American army. Three thousand miles away, an old man in a plain brown coat had been waiting in Paris for exactly this news.