The 1777 March of the Saratoga Convention Army

This post, according to the automated count on my "Blogger" dashboard, is the one-hundredth that I've made since I began documenting the 1777 march of the Convention Army in January of 2023.  It's been well worth the effort to find and explore the people, places and events of the march, across sixty or so communities in three states (or what was two states and a republic in 1777), and to track the path they followed as accurately as possible.   Doing so has had its challenges, and perhaps at times mirrored the frustration of British Ensign Thomas Anburey  noted with regard to the Saratoga campaign that:  "... this expedition appears to have been planned by those, who, sitting in their closets, with a map before them, ridiculously expect the movements of an army to keep pace with their rapid ideas..."  [1]  Anburey, or whoever drew the map which was included in his account of his travels, has not only frustrated but definitely confused at least a ...

The prisoners of the Convention Army traveled through a region most had likely heard about, but never seen.  Their march from the Saratoga battlefield in the fall of 1777 took them through Hudson Valley villages settled by Dutch and German farmers, isolated hamlets in the Berkshires which had sprung up beyond prosperous English settlements along the Connecticut River, and the towns of Worcester and Middlesex Counties which marked a century and a half of expansion from the settlement of Boston in 1630; all land occupied by a Native population for countless generations before the arrival of Europeans.   What did they see?  Most obvious was the terrain: two major rivers and two mountain ranges before reaching the hills of central Massachusetts, and then their barracks overlooking Boston Harbor.   A painting in the collection of the Worcester Art Museum, " Looking East From Denny Hill"  seen in an image © Worcester Art Museum , offers a glim...

My first impression after reading Massachusetts Militia Private David How's diary , and British Ensign Thomas Anbury's Travels Through the Interior Parts of America  was that in 1777 the Convention Army had marched as a whole from Saratoga, New York, through the southeast corner of Vermont and across Massachusetts to Cambridge.   Early on in my research I encountered evidence that the British and German troops who surrendered at Saratoga followed two routes into central Massachusetts, and a common route on to confinement in Cambridge and on Winter and Prospect Hills.  Brigadier-General John Glover, assigned by Major-General Horatio Gates to supervise the march, clearly states in his letter dated October 22, 1777, that he had split his prisoners into two columns, and  "... sent on one Division of the prisoners, Consisting of 2,442 British troops, by Northampton, the other by way of Springfield, Consisting of 2,198 foreign troops. ... I have endeavoured to collect...

On September 18, 1777, British Ensign Thomas Hughes of the 53rd Regiment of Foot noted in his diary that he and a detachment of two other officers and 50 men stationed about a mile outside Fort Ticonderoga in New York were "Surprised by a party of 600 men, under a Col. Brown." [1]  Hughes was not only surprised, but captured and held for a year as a prisoner of war in Massachusetts, then paroled to New York City until he was released and allowed to sail to England in June of 1781. Hughes was captured in what is known as " Brown's Raid ", the topic of an article in the on-line Journal of the American Revolution by friend and colleague Mike Barbieri.  In mid-August of 1777 the 53rd Regiment was detached from Lieutenant-General John Burgoyne's expedition from Canada to garrison Fort Ticonderoga and the landing on Lake George, of which Hughes says "I was unfortunately station'd here. ...".   At some point prior to September 18th, he and those cap...