For Mothers Day - "A Soldier's Wife Was Delivered Of A Child"

"Remember the Ladies..." Abagail Adams urged her husband John in a letter begun March 31, 1776.  Mothers Day 2023 is a day to remember the women who were or are also mothers, including those of the Convention Army, or impacted by the Saratoga campaign, though the holiday was not established in the United States until well after the eighteenth century.  

The idea of wives (or today civilian husbands, as some of our nation's Soldiers are women and mothers themselves) and children accompanying soldiers to war is foreign to us today.  It was not in some armies of the eighteenth century.  Continental Army Chaplain Enos Hitchcock noted that those surrendered at Saratoga on October 17, 1777, totaled 5,840 "... besides Women & Children which were many."  [1] 

Frederika Charlotte Riedesel, and her three children Augusta, Frederika and Caroline, ages six, three and one, were among those women and children who would march with the Convention Army.  The Baroness von Riedesel, wife of Major-General Friedrich Riedesel, commander of Lieutenant-General John Burgoyne's German troops, joined her husband on August 15, 1777, at Fort Edward, New York.  Present with the army for the remainder of the campaign, she spent its final days in the cellar of what is now the Marshall House, sheltering her children and caring for the wounded.  She recalled that following the surrender on October 17th, as she rode away in her carriage "... while driving through the American camp I was comforted to notice that nobody glanced at us insultingly, that they all bowed to me, and some of them even looked with pity to see a women with small children there." [2]

Ensign Thomas Anburey wrote of two other mothers, as shared previously in a post of the British column's march out of New York.  One drew his admiration, giving birth to her baby along the way, in the back of a wagon, during a snowstorm.  The other, the mother of "Jemima ... a very pretty black-eyed girl, of about 16, or 17..." astonished him when she invited him to spend the evening in their small log hut in the same bed as her daughter, "... that indelicate custom [Americans] call bundling."  [3] 

British Sergeant Roger Lamb, of the 9th Regiment of Foot, included the story of a birth in his reminisces of the campaign.  He recalled that he was selected to go on his own from Fort Miller, New York, to Fort Ticonderoga to serve as a guide to bring up new recruits and the army's baggage.  Along the way he found a house, where he was informed "... a soldier's wife had been just taken in from the woods, where she was found by one of his [the owner's] family, in the pains of child-birth. ... The woman was delivered of a fine girl soon after...".  Lamb asked the family to allow her to stay until he came back, when he would be able to transport her to Fort Miller with the baggage wagons.  Returning some days later he learned "to his astonishment ... on the morrow after he left her there in child-birth, she set out to meet her husband against the wishes and repeated entreaties of the whole family ... on foot with her new-born infant, and arrived safe with her husband, whom she followed with such fond solicitude.  She thus gave an instance of the strength of female attachment and fortitude, which shows that the exertions of the sex are are often calculated to call forth our cordial admiration." [4] 

Motherhood in the eighteenth century was complex, same as today.  Burgoyne's life story illustrates this as well as any.  A biography prefacing a collection of his plays and poems stated "... the time and place of his birth are unknown.  Even his parentage is doubtful."  Burgoyne and his wife Charlotte were not parents, as she died on June 5, 1776, while he was in Boston, before having any children.  Burgoyne would never re-marry, but following his return to England he would father four children with opera singer Susan Caulfield. [5]

On the American side, one of Major-General Philip Schuyler's children supposedly entered the room in their Albany home where Burgoyne was staying briefly after his surrender at Saratoga, saying "Surrender.  You are all my prisoners." [6]  Schuyler's wife Catherine is said to have been five months pregnant with the couple's first child, Angelica (born February 20, 1756 - the oldest of "The Schuyler Sisters" popularized in the song from the musical "Hamilton") when the two married September 7, 1755. [7] 

For some, motherhood during the period of the Saratoga campaign would include the loss of a child.  Ann Eliza Bleecker experienced that with the death of her infant daughter Abella in 1777.  Bleecker, a writer and a poet as well as a wife and mother, noted her daughter's death in the poem "Written In The Retreat From Burgoyne".  In it she recalled the grief she felt over her loss, as she left the family's home in the Schaghticoke, New York area for the perceived safety of Albany.  Bleeker suffered additional trauma as the war continued, being forced to flee her home again in 1779, and with the capture of her husband by Loyalist or British forces in 1782.  Devastated, she died in 1783 and was buried in Albany.

The loss of one's mother is sorrowful at any age, but especially so for a young child.  English poet William Cowper's mother died in 1737 when he was six years old.  Cowper shared his grief in the poem "On Receipt Of My Mother's Picture" written half a century later, after being given a picture of her in 1790, that begins with this reflection:

Oh that those lips had language! Life has pass'd
With me but roughly since I heard thee last.
Those lips are thine—thy own sweet smiles I see,
The same that oft in childhood solaced me;
Voice only fails, else, how distinct they say,
"Grieve not, my child, chase all thy fears away!"
The meek intelligence of those dear eyes
(Blest be the art that can immortalize,
The art that baffles time's tyrannic claim
To quench it) here shines on me still the same...

[1] Hitchcock, p. 161.  British and German armies planned for and accepted the presence of wives and children on the campaign.  The practice occurred in the Continental Army, but appears to have been less prevalent among New England units, and especially the militia.  

[2] Baroness von Riedesel Journal, pp. 35-36, 44 and 63.  The Marshall House is a private home, open on only a limited basis.

[3] Anburey, pp. 39-42.

[4] Lamb, Memoirs, pp. 182 and 189.

[5] The Dramatic and Poetical Works of the Late Lieut. Gen. J. Burgoyne, pp. 6 and 15-16.  Conversely, an online history of Parliament indicates he was born February 4, 1723 to Captain John Burgoyne and wife Anna Maria, though a footnote to the article indicates the captain was not actually Burgoyne's father.  Burgoyne's first son, John Fox Burgoyne, would rise to the rank of Field Marshall in the British Army, and like his father fight in the United States, including at another major British defeat, the Battle of New Orleans in the War of 1812.

[6] Tharp, Louise Hall, The Baroness and the General, Little, Brown and Company, Boston, MA, 1962, p. 242.  No source for the story is provided, a footnote to the chapter simply noting "The Schuyler mansion in Albany is open to the public, and well worth the visit." p. 431.

[7] May, Susan L., "Catherine Schuyler: The Study Of An Individual For The Understanding Of An Era", Schuyler Mansion State Historic Site, Albany, NY, 1983, pp. 4-5, accessed online at: http://npshistory.com/publications/sara/catherine-schuyler.pdf.

Next Week: Williamstown - "The First Township We Came To"

For more on the Convention Army's 1777 march from Saratoga to Boston, see:

1777 March Blog Home          Overnight Stopping Points          Towns and Villages Along the Way

 Annotated Bibliography