Marlborough, Massachusetts - “General Burgoine Went By My House”
On November 4, 1777, many of the British troops who had surrendered at Saratoga reached the Middlesex County town of Marlborough, Massachusetts. Some, including British Lieutenant Francis (Lord) Napier of the 31st Regiment of Foot, stopped for the night. Others, it was noted by Massachusetts Militia Lieutenant Israel Bartlett and Private David How, continued on to Sudbury. [1]
The following day German troops arrived. The usually loquacious German sources offer little detail on their stay, one writing: "November 5th, we marched through Shrewsbury and Northborough to Marlborough, sixteen miles."; and another: "We marched through Shrewsbury and through Northborough up to Marlborough, where we received quarters. We had marched 16 Engl. miles altogether. The roads were good." [2]
Marlborough resident Alpheus Woods was able to sum up the coming and going with one entry (although he struggled with the spelling of the name of captured British Lieutenant-General John Burgoyne, and like many others referred to all of his German troops as "Hessians"), noting: "The Britans lodged in Marlborough last Night [Nov. 4] and Marched out about 9 O Clock [Nov. 5] and General Burgoine went by my house this morning And the Hessians arrived about noon and Tarried all day & all Night." [3]
Brigadier-General William Whipple, who together with Brigadier-General John Glover and others was escorting Burgoyne to Cambridge, faced a new challenge in keeping up with the group, noting in his journal: “5th set out from [illegible] at ½ after 6 horse gave out at Marlborough hired a horse of the tavernkeeper and left mine with Jon’w Temple to be sent to Boston overtook the Company at Westtown [sic - "Weston"] ate dinner after dinner set out for Watertown where arrived before night”. Whipple’s list of expenses in his journal clarifies that it was the horse his enslaved man Prince was riding that gave out, not Whipple’s, as he notes there: “P[ai]d Benja Swain for horse For Prince”. [4]
Marlborough was almost wiped out a century before the Convention Army passed through. Residents of the town of Sudbury, to the east, had petitioned the General Court of Massachusetts for approval to establish a settlement in what would become Marlborough in 1656, and the town was incorporated in 1660. Marlborough was attacked in March and April of 1676, during King Philip's War, by Native warriors fighting to reclaim their ancestral homelands which had been occupied by European settlers. While a number of settlers were able to defend themselves in one of the several fortified houses, a third of the homes and the town's meetinghouse were destroyed in the first attack, and all but a few buildings were destroyed in the second attack. [6] The site of one of the buildings destroyed in those attacks, the Williams Tavern, is noted by a historical marker on what is Route 20 today, and was the Post Road in 1777.
German troops from the Convention Army would march through Marlborough again, in 1778. That march would take them out of Massachusetts, to Virginia, and likely dashed any remaining hope of release under the terms of the Articles of Convention. One would note that on November 11, 1778: "The division marched as far as Marborough, a township similar to Sudberg. Although our escorts had treated us rather well and had allowed our men to walk as they pleased during the march, we had to submit to being marched through all the places with fifes and drums. They lost no opportunity to show us that we were miserable prisoners, subject to the authority of adventurous peasants, who were set to watch us." [7]
[2] Letters From America, 128. Specht Journal, 109.
[3] Ella A. Bigelow, Historical Reminiscences of the Early Times in Marlborough, Massachusetts, and Prominent Events from 1860 to 1910 (Marlborough, MA: Times Publishing Company, 1910), 186.
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