News of these things came to Burgoyne just after the disaster at Bennington.Since Fort Stanwix was in a country counted upon as Loyalist at heart it was especially discouraging again to find that in the main the population was against the British.During the war almost without exception Loyalist opinion proved weak against the fierce determination of the American side.It was partly a matter of organization.The vigilance committees in each State made life well-nigh intolerable to suspected Tories.Above all, however, the British had to bear the odium which attaches always to the invader.We do not know what an American army would have done if, with Iroquois savages as allies, it had made war in an English county.We know what loathing a parallel situation aroused against the British army in America.The Indians, it should be noted, were not soldiers under British discipline but allies; the chiefs regarded themselves as equals who must be consulted and not as enlisted to take orders from a British general.
In war, as in politics, nice balancing of merit or defect in an enemy would destroy the main purpose which is to defeat him.Each side exaggerates any weak point in the other in order to stimulate the fighting passions.Judgment is distorted.The Baroness Riedesel, the wife of one of Burgoyne's generals, who was in Boston in 1777, says that the people were all dressed alike in a peasant costume with a leather strap round the waist, that they were of very low and insignificant stature, and that only one in ten of them could read or write.She pictures New Englanders as tarring and feathering cultivated English ladies.
When educated people believed every evil of the enemy the ignorant had no restraint to their credulity.New England had long regarded the native savages as a pest.In 1776 New Hampshire offered seventy pounds for each scalp of a hostile male Indian and thirty-seven pounds and ten shillings for each scalp of a woman or of a child under twelve years of age.Now it was reported that the British were offering bounties for American scalps.Benjamin Franklin satirized British ignorance when he described whales leaping Niagara Falls and he did not expect to be taken seriously when, at a later date, he pictured George IIIas gloating over the scalps of his subjects in America.The Seneca Indians alone, wrote Franklin, sent to the King many bales of scalps.Some bales were captured by the Americans and they found the scalps of 43 soldiers, 297 farmers, some of them burned alive, and 67 old people, 88 women, 193 boys, 211 girls, 29infants, and others unclassified.Exact figures bring conviction.
Franklin was not wanting in exactness nor did he fail, albeit it was unwittingly, to intensify burning resentment of which we have echoes still.Burgoyne had to bear the odium of the outrages by Indians.It is amusing to us, though it was hardly so to this kindly man, to find these words put into his mouth by a colonial poet:
I will let loose the dogs of Hell, Ten thousand Indians who shall yell, And foam, and tear, and grin, and roar And drench their moccasins in gore:...
I swear, by St.George and St.Paul, I will exterminate you all.
Such seed, falling on soil prepared by the hate of war, brought forth its deadly fruit.The Americans believed that there was no brutality from which British officers would shrink.Burgoyne had told his Indian allies that they must not kill except in actual fighting and that there must be no slaughter of non-combatants and no scalping of any but the dead.The warning delivered him into the hands of his enemies for it showed that he half expected outrage.Members of the British House of Commons were no whit behind the Americans in attacking him.Burke amused the House by his satire on Burgoyne's words: "My gentle lions, my humane bears, my tenderhearted hyenas, go forth! But I exhort you, as you are Christians and members of civilized society, to take care not to hurt any man, woman, or child." Burke's great speech lasted for three and a half hours and Sir George Savile called it "the greatest triumph of eloquence within memory." British officers disliked their dirty, greasy, noisy allies and Burgoyne found his use of savages, with the futile order to be merciful, a potent factor in his defeat.
A horrifying incident had occurred while he was fighting his way to the Hudson.As the Americans were preparing to leave Fort Edward some marauding Indians saw a chance of plunder and outrage.They burst into a house and carried off two ladies, both of them British in sympathy--Mrs.McNeil, a cousin of one of Burgoyne's chief officers, General Fraser, and Miss Jeannie McCrae, whose betrothed, a Mr.Jones, and whose brother were serving with Burgoyne.In a short time Mrs.McNeil was handed over unhurt to Burgoyne's advancing army.Miss McCrae was never again seen alive by her friends.Her body was found and a Wyandot chief, known as the Panther, showed her scalp as a trophy.
Burgoyne would have been a poor creature had he not shown anger at such a crime, even if committed against the enemy.This crime, however, was committed against his own friends.He pressed the charge against the chief and was prepared to hang him and only relaxed when it was urged that the execution would cause all his Indians to leave him and to commit further outrages.The incident was appealing in its tragedy and stirred the deep anger of the population of the surrounding country among whose descendants to this day the tradition of the abandoned brutality of the British keeps alive the old hatred.
