Bennington

Bennington: The Raid That Broke an Empire's Campaign

Long before the first shots of the American Revolution echoed across Massachusetts, the rough country of the New Hampshire Grants — the territory that would become Vermont — was already a place defined by defiance. Bennington, nestled in the southwestern corner of that disputed region, had been the political and organizational heart of resistance for nearly a decade before independence was even declared. It was here, beginning in 1769, that Ethan Allen, Seth Warner, Remember Baker, and other frontier leaders organized the Green Mountain Boys, a militia force originally formed not to fight the British Crown but to resist the colonial government of New York, which claimed jurisdiction over lands that settlers held under grants from New Hampshire. The Green Mountain Boys were rowdy, ungovernable, and effective — qualities that would prove remarkably useful when the nature of the enemy changed. By the time the Revolution began, Bennington had already cultivated a culture of armed self-reliance and suspicion of distant authority that made it a natural cradle of rebellion.

The town's first major contribution to the Revolution came early and dramatically. On May 10, 1775 — barely three weeks after Lexington and Concord — Ethan Allen led roughly eighty Green Mountain Boys, joined by Benedict Arnold, in a predawn assault on Fort Ticonderoga at the southern tip of Lake Champlain. The British garrison, numbering fewer than fifty soldiers, was caught entirely by surprise. Allen famously demanded the fort's surrender "in the name of the Great Jehovah and the Continental Congress," though some historians have questioned whether his actual language was quite so elevated. Regardless, the capture of Ticonderoga was a galvanizing moment for the patriot cause. It secured a vast store of artillery — cannon that Henry Knox would later haul across the frozen wilderness to Boston — and it demonstrated that Americans could seize a British stronghold, not merely defend a bridge or a hilltop. The men who accomplished this feat had been recruited, organized, and drilled, such as they were, in and around Bennington. The town could fairly claim to have furnished one of the Revolution's first offensive victories.

But Bennington's defining moment came two years later, in the pivotal summer of 1777, during a campaign that would determine the fate of the entire war. General John Burgoyne, one of the most ambitious and theatrical officers in the British Army — he was also a successful London playwright — had devised a grand strategy to sever New England from the rest of the rebellious colonies by driving south from Canada through the Lake Champlain–Hudson River corridor. In late June 1777, Burgoyne's army of roughly 7,000 British regulars, Hessian professionals, Loyalists, and Native allies crossed into New York from Canada with considerable confidence. The early days seemed to justify that confidence: on July 6, the Americans abandoned Fort Ticonderoga almost without a fight, a humiliation that sent shockwaves through the Continental Congress and led to the relief of the Northern Department's commander, General Philip Schuyler.

Yet Burgoyne's progress slowed to a crawl as his army pressed deeper into the wilderness. Supply lines stretched thin. Horses died. The dense forests, swampy ground, and felled trees placed in his path by retreating Americans turned every mile into an ordeal. By August, Burgoyne was running dangerously short of provisions, draft animals, and forage. It was this desperation that turned his attention toward Bennington. American forces had established a significant supply depot there — a storehouse of flour, beef, horses, and munitions that represented a lifeline for the patriot militia gathering to oppose him. Burgoyne reasoned that a swift raid could replenish his army and simultaneously demoralize the countryside. On August 11, he dispatched a force of approximately 800 men — Hessian dragoons, British marksmen, Loyalist volunteers, Canadian militia, and Native warriors — under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Friedrich Baum, a professional Hessian officer who spoke no English and had little understanding of the terrain or the people he was marching against.

What Baum did not know was that he was walking into a gathering storm. New Hampshire, alarmed by the fall of Ticonderoga and the British advance, had called out its militia and placed it under the command of John Stark, a weathered veteran of Rogers' Rangers, Bunker Hill, and Trenton. Stark was a soldier of extraordinary ability and equally extraordinary stubbornness. Earlier in 1777, he had resigned his Continental Army commission in disgust after Congress promoted junior officers over him — a slight he considered intolerable. When New Hampshire offered him command of its militia, he accepted on the explicit condition that he would answer to New Hampshire alone, not to the Continental Army's chain of command. This insistence on independence created friction with the regular military establishment, but it also meant that Stark moved fast and answered to no one. By mid-August, he had assembled nearly 1,500 men at Bennington and its environs, with reinforcements including Colonel Seth Warner's regiment of Green Mountain Boys and additional Vermont militia on the way.

Baum, advancing cautiously, became aware of the size of the American force gathering against him and sent urgent messages to Burgoyne requesting reinforcement. He took up a defensive position on a hill near the Walloomsac River, a few miles west of Bennington proper — across what is now the New York state line — and fortified it with breastworks and a redoubt. Rain delayed the engagement for a day, but on August 16, 1777, Stark launched a carefully planned envelopment. He sent columns around both flanks of Baum's position while diversionary parties pinned the Hessians in place. The attack, when it came, was overwhelming. Stark reportedly rallied his men with words that have become one of the Revolution's most quoted battlefield exhortations: "There are your enemies, the Red Coats and the Tories. They are ours, or this night Molly Stark sleeps a widow!" Whether the phrasing is exact, the spirit was genuine. The Americans swarmed Baum's position from multiple directions. The fighting was fierce and close — Baum himself was mortally wounded — and within two hours the Hessian position was overrun. Loyalist units broke and fled. Prisoners were taken by the hundreds.

The battle might have ended there, but Burgoyne had dispatched a relief column of roughly 650 men under Lieutenant Colonel Heinrich von Breymann, which arrived in the late afternoon just as Stark's men, scattered and disorganized from their victory, were looting the captured camp. The situation turned dangerous. Breymann's fresh troops, advancing with field guns, threatened to reverse the day's outcome. It was at this moment that Seth Warner arrived with approximately 350 Continental soldiers and Green Mountain Boys. Warner's timely counterattack, combined with Stark's efforts to rally his militia, drove Breymann's column back in a running fight that continued until nightfall. Breymann lost his cannon, a quarter of his men, and any hope of relieving Baum. By the time darkness ended the fighting, the Americans had killed or captured nearly 900 of Burgoyne's soldiers at a cost of roughly 30 killed and 40 wounded — an astonishingly lopsided result.

The consequences of Bennington rippled outward with devastating effect on the British campaign. Burgoyne lost not merely 900 men but any realistic prospect of resupply or reinforcement from the east. The victory electrified the American cause across New England and New York. Militia that had been reluctant to turn out now flocked to the American Northern Army under General Horatio Gates. Within weeks, Burgoyne found himself surrounded at Saratoga, where he surrendered his entire army on October 17, 1777 — the first time a British army had laid down its arms to a foreign enemy in modern memory. The Saratoga victory, in turn, convinced France to enter the war as an American ally, a diplomatic revolution without which independence might never have been achieved. Bennington was the crack in the foundation that brought the whole structure down.

What makes Bennington distinctive in the broader story of the Revolution is the way it illustrates the power of local mobilization and citizen-soldiery. This was not a battle won by the Continental Army's regulars or by Washington's strategic genius. It was won by New Hampshire farmers, Vermont frontiersmen, and Berkshire County militia who organized themselves, chose their own leaders, and fought on their own terms. Stark's refusal to subordinate himself to Continental authority was, in a sense, the same spirit of independence that had animated the Green Mountain Boys a decade earlier. Bennington reminds us that the Revolution was not a single movement directed from Philadelphia; it was a mosaic of local struggles, local grievances, and local courage that, taken together, produced a nation.

Modern visitors to Bennington encounter a town that has not forgotten its Revolutionary heritage. The Bennington Battle Monument, a 306-foot stone obelisk completed in 1891, dominates the landscape and marks the site of the supply depot that drew Burgoyne's ill-fated raid. The nearby battlefield site across the border in Walloomsac, New York, preserves the ground where Baum made his last stand. For students and teachers of the Revolution, Bennington offers a case study in how logistics, terrain, personality, and timing can converge to change the course of history. It demonstrates that a supply depot — unglamorous, administrative, far from the main theater of war — can become the pivot on which an empire's strategy collapses. And it honors the memory of men like Stark, Warner, and the hundreds of unnamed militia who marched toward the sound of guns on an August afternoon and, in doing so, helped set in motion the chain of events that would secure American independence. Bennington deserves to be remembered not as a footnote to Saratoga but as the battle that made Saratoga possible.