The 1777 March of the Saratoga Convention Army

British accounts of the 1777 march of the Convention Army after the  surrender at Saratoga  are brief, with the exception the letters published by Ensign Thomas Anburey in 1789 under the title "Travels Through The Interior Parts Of America" .  German accounts of the march are rich in detail, and describe not only where they went and when, but what they saw and did along the way.  In addition, a series of drawing available online through  The New York Public Library Digital Collection  by Hessian Captain Friedrich von Germann show us what various German regiments looked like before the Saratoga campaign started, such as this soldier from the Brunswick Regiment von Specht.   German accounts of the 1777 march range from the memoirs and letters of its commander, to the brief diary entries of one of his soldiers, and include one kept by a woman, the wife of Major-General Friedrich Adolph Riedesel , the commander of General Burgoyne's German troops....

On October 22, 1777,  "... after plodding fifteen miles..." from Greenbush , the German column of the Convention Army reached the town of Kinderhook, New York. [ 1]  The name, meaning "children's corner" in Dutch, may have been given to the area in the early 1600's by Dutch explorers who saw Native children on a river bluff watch them sail past - or maybe by Dutch traders, as a Swedish settler with numerous children lived there.  What makes up the town today is set on the Kinderhook Creek, seven miles northwest of the Hudson River, and twenty miles southeast of Albany, though the town's boundaries initially extended all the way to the river.   Kinderhook's first European residents were Dutch and Swedish settlers who arrived around 1650. [2]  The Dutch exploration and settlement of the Hudson River valley was more apparent to the Convention Army, in towns as far north as Stillwater, New York , and as east as Pownal, Vermont , than it is to many of us ...

"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 Convent...