[Schuyler’s magnanimity] Schuyler had indeed come, with unruffled soul, to look on while the fruit which he had sown, with the gallant aid of Stark and Herkimer, Arnold and Morgan, was plucked by an unworthy rival. He now met Burgoyne, who was naturally pained and embarrassed at the recollection of the beautiful house which his men had burned a few days before. In a speech in the House of Commons, some months later, Burgoyne told how Schuyler received him. “I expressed to General Schuyler,” says Burgoyne, “my regret at the event which had happened, and the reasons which had occasioned it. He desired me to think no more of it, saying that the occasion justified it, according to the rules of war.... He did more: he sent an aide-de-camp to conduct me to Albany, in order, as he expressed it, to procure me better quarters than a stranger might be able to find. This gentleman conducted me to a very elegant house, and, to my great surprise, presented me to Mrs. Schuyler and her family; and in this general’s house I remained during my whole stay at Albany, with a table of more than twenty covers for me and my friends, and every other possible demonstration of hospitality.” Madame Riedesel was also invited to stay with the Schuylers; and when first she arrived in the house, one of her little girls exclaimed, “Oh, mamma! Is this the palace that papa was to have when he came to America?” As the Schuylers understood German, the baroness coloured, but all laughed pleasantly, and put her at ease.
[Bad faith of Congress] With the generosity and delicacy shown alike by generals and soldiers, it is painful, though instructive, to contrast the coarseness and bad faith with which Congress proceeded to treat the captured army. The presence of the troops in and about Boston was felt to be a hardship, and General Heath, who commanded there, wrote to Washington, saying that if they were to stay till cold weather he hardly knew how to find shelter and fuel for them. Washington replied that they would not be likely to stay long, since it was clearly for Howe’s interest to send them back to England as soon as possible, in order that they might replace other soldiers who would be sent over to America for the spring campaign. Congress caught up this suggestion with avidity, and put it to uses quite remote from Washington’s meaning. When Sir William Howe proposed Newport as a point from which the soldiers might more speedily be shipped, Washington, for sound and obvious reasons, urged that there should be no departure from the strict letter of the convention. Congress forthwith not only acted upon this suggestion so far as to refuse Sir William Howe’s request, but it went on gratuitously and absurdly to charge the British general with bad faith. It was hinted that he secretly intended to bring the troops to New York for immediate service, in defiance of the convention, and Congress proceeded to make this imputed treachery the ground for really false dealing on its own part. When Lord Howe’s transports reached Boston, it was not only ordered that no troops should be allowed to embark until all the accounts for their subsistence should have been settled, but it was also required that these accounts should be liquidated in gold. In the instructions given to General Washington a year before, a refusal on the part of anybody to receive the Continental paper money was to be treated as a high misdemeanour. Now Congress refused to take its own money, which had depreciated till it was worth barely thirty cents on a dollar. The captured army was supplied with provisions and fuel that were paid for by General Heath with Continental paper, and now Congress insisted that General Burgoyne should make his repayment dollar for dollar in British gold, worth three times as much.
In fairness to the delegates, we may admit that in all probability they did not realize the baseness of this conduct. They were no doubt misled by one of those wonderful bits of financial sophistry by which the enacting mind of our countrymen has so often been hopelessly confused. In an amusing letter to Washington, honest General Heath naïvely exclaims, “What an opinion must General Burgoyne have of the authority of these states, to suppose that his money would be received at any higher rate than our own in public payment! Such payment would at once be depreciating our currency with a witness.” Washington was seriously annoyed and mortified by these vagaries,—the more so that he was at this very time endeavouring to arrange with Howe a general cartel for the exchange of prisoners; and he knew that the attempt to make thirty cents equal to a dollar would, as he said, “destroy the very idea of a cartel.”
While these discussions were going on, Congress, like the wicked king in the fairy tale, anxious to impose conditions unlikely to be fulfilled, demanded that General Burgoyne should make out a descriptive list of all the officers and soldiers in his army, in order that if any of them should thereafter be found serving against the United States they might be punished accordingly. As no such provision was contained in the convention, upon the faith of which Burgoyne had surrendered, he naturally regarded the demand as insulting, and at first refused to comply with it. He afterwards yielded the point, in his eagerness to liberate his soldiers; but meanwhile, in a letter to Gates, he had incautiously let fall the expression, “The publick faith is broke [sic];” and this remark, coming to the ears of Congress, was immediately laid hold of as a pretext for repudiating the convention altogether. It was argued that Burgoyne had charged the United States with bad faith, in order to have an excuse for repudiating the convention on his own part; and on the 8th of January, Congress accordingly resolved, “that the embarkation of Lieutenant-General Burgoyne and the troops under his command be suspended till a distinct and explicit ratification of the Convention of Saratoga shall be properly notified by the court of Great Britain to Congress.” Now as the British government could not give the required ratification without implicitly recognizing the independence of the United States, no further steps were taken in the matter, the “publick faith” was really broken, and the captured army was never sent home.
ENCAMPMENT OF THE CONVENTION TROOPS IN VIRGINIA
[The behavior of Congress was simply inexcusable] In this wretched affair, Congress deliberately sacrificed principle to policy. It refused, on paltry pretexts, to carry out a solemn engagement which had been made by its accredited agent; and it did so simply through the fear that the British army might indirectly gain a possible reinforcement. Its conduct can be justified upon no grounds save such as would equally justify firing upon flags of truce. Nor can it be palliated even upon the lowest grounds of expediency, for, as it has been well said, “to a people struggling for political life the moral support derivable from the maintenance of honour and good faith was worth a dozen material victories." This sacrifice of principle to policy has served only to call down the condemnation of impartial historians, and to dim the lustre of the magnificent victory which the valour of our soldiers and the self-devotion of our people had won in the field. It was one out of many instances which show that, under any form of government, the moral sense of the governing body is likely to fall far below the highest moral standard recognized in the community.