The 1777 March of the Saratoga Convention Army

Reenactors, scholars and historians will remember the Revolutionary War with a variety of events in September and October of 2024.  Several will commemorate Lieutenant-General John Burgoyne's failed 1777 campaign, including his surrender on October 17th, as shown in this photo taken last year at a recreation of the event in Schuylerville, New York. September and October are great months to visit historic sites in New York and New England.  First up on my list is "Soldiers on the Mount", on Labor Day weekend at Mount Independence, a Vermont State Historic Site in Orwell, Vermont .  Several reenactor groups will camp out there to portray the American occupation of the site from July 1776 through July of 1777.  Site staff are organizing what they call their "Walkabout" on Saturday, August 31st.  This will feature a number of reenactors and historians at several points along the site's Baldwin Trail, who will interact with visitors on a variety of topics. ...

Did Brigadier-General James Brickett of the Massachusetts Militia embarrass himself as an officer and a gentleman during the Revolutionary War?  Several sources would have you believe that he did, but I question the accuracy, motivation or intent of each. Brickett, unlike Brigadier-General John Nixon , has a well documented connection to the 1777 march of the Convention Army following Lieutenant-General John Burgoyne's surrender at Saratoga on October 17, 1777.  Brigadier-General John Glover, who was assigned the overall responsibility for getting the prisoners to Boston, confirmed this in a statement he made to Massachusetts officials in 1780, noting:  "That Brigadier General James Brickett, was appointed to the Command of About five Hundred Militia, Detached from General Gates Army, to Guard a Division of the Convention Troops, from Saratoga to Cambridge, in October 1777...." [1] An assessment of Massachusetts officers written before the Saratoga campaign is especiall...

Is there a direct connection between the march of the Convention Army after the surrender at Saratoga October 17, 1777, and Framingham, Massachusetts?  Several secondary sources would lead one to believe that there is.  Only one primary source which I am aware of suggests there may be one, and its not the connection that others claim exists. Multiple authors have drawn a connection between the 1777 march of the Convention Army and Framingham by way of Brigadier-General John Nixon, who was born in Framingham.  They claim Nixon (whose Revolutionary War service is commemorated by the tablet pictured here, in Framingham's Edgell Grove Cemetery), escorted British Lieutenant-General John Burgoyne from Albany to Cambridge after the surrender.  Most prominent among these is a 1926 biography of Nixon by John M. Merriam, which indicates that he did, but provides no documentation to support it. [1]  A recent online biography of Nixon references a number of sources within ...

Did part of the Convention Army pass through Westborough, Massachusetts, on their way to Cambridge after the surrender at Saratoga on October 17, 1777?  One primary source suggests that they did, as do several town histories written over one hundred years ago - but one hundred years or more after their 1777 march. The majority of the accounts of the 1777 march of the Convention Army track their progress through Middlesex County from Northborough to Marlborough , then Sudbury , Weston , Waltham, and Watertown, before arriving in Cambridge.  The journal of the 47th Regiment of Foot goes in a different direction on November 4th.  As seen in the image below, from a scanned copy of the journal on the website of the Huntington Library , its author left Worcester on November 4th, and marched twelve miles to what appears to be "West-bury" but most likely was "Westborough", Massachusetts, given the distance involved.  The following day they marched twenty miles to ...