Even General Burgoyne now saw no way open but surrender; either he must do this, or let his soldiers be slaughtered where they stood. Cannon and rifle shot were searching every corner of his camp; retreat was cut off; his provisions could be made to last but a day or two longer at most; the bateaux were destroyed; his animals were dying of starvation, and their dead bodies tainting the air his soldiers breathed; water could only be had at the risk of life or limb, as the American sharpshooters picked off every one who attempted to fetch it from the river; and no more than thirty-five hundred men could be mustered to repel an assault;—a crisis had now been reached which loudly called on the British general, in the name of humanity, to desist from further efforts to maintain so hopeless a struggle.
Burgoyne called his officers together in council. The absence of such men as Frazer, Baum, Breyman, Ackland, Clarke, and others from the meeting, must have brought home to the commanding general, as nothing else could, a sense of the calamities that had befallen him; while the faces of the survivors no less ominously prefigured those to come. A heavy cannonade was in progress. Even while the council was deliberating, a cannon-ball crashed through the room among them, as if to enjoin haste in bringing the proceedings to a close. The council listened to what was already but too well known. Already the finger of fate pointed undeviatingly to the inevitable result. A general lassitude had fallen upon the spirits of the soldiers. The situation was manifestly hopeless to all.
There could be but one opinion. Enough had been done for honor. All were agreed that only a surrender could save the army.
Oct. 14.
Without more delay, an officer was sent to General Gates. At first he would listen only to an unconditional surrender. This was indignantly rejected. Two days of suspense followed to both armies. Indeed, the vanquished seemed dictating terms to the conqueror. But if the British dreaded a renewal of hostilities, the Americans knew that Clinton's forces[57] were nearing Albany from below. Gates lowered his demands. The British army was allowed the honors of war, with liberty to return to England, on condition of not serving against the United States during the war. These terms were agreed to, and the treaty was duly signed on the seventeenth.
Burgoyne's situation when gathering up his trophies, and issuing his presumptuous proclamation at Ticonderoga, compared with the straits to which his reverses had now brought him—a failure before his king and country, a captain stripped of his laurels by the hand he professed to despise, a petitioner for the clemency of his conqueror—affords a striking example of the uncertain chances of war. It really seemed as if fortune had only raised Burgoyne the higher in order that his fall might be the more destructive at last.
WHERE THE SURRENDER TOOK PLACE.