Burgoyne Dispatches Baum's Raiding Column

# Burgoyne Dispatches Baum's Raiding Column — Bennington, 1777

By the summer of 1777, British General John Burgoyne was leading an ambitious campaign southward from Canada, aiming to cut New England off from the rest of the rebellious colonies by seizing control of the Hudson River valley. His army had scored an early triumph at Fort Ticonderoga in July, but as his forces pushed deeper into the wilderness of upstate New York, they began to outrun their supply lines. Horses were in desperately short supply, provisions were dwindling, and the dense forests slowed every wagon to a crawl. Burgoyne needed to find food, draft animals, and materiel quickly, or his campaign would stall before it ever reached Albany. Intelligence reports suggested that the small town of Bennington, in the contested territory that would soon become Vermont, housed a lightly defended Continental supply depot stocked with flour, cattle, and horses. It was exactly the kind of prize Burgoyne needed, and he resolved to take it by force.

To lead the expedition, Burgoyne selected Lieutenant Colonel Friedrich Baum, a professional Hessian officer who commanded a regiment of dismounted Brunswick dragoons — heavy cavalrymen who had been marching on foot for weeks because they lacked mounts. Baum's column numbered roughly eight hundred men, a mixed and unwieldy force that included his own Hessian dragoons, a detachment of British regulars, companies of Loyalist volunteers, Canadian auxiliaries, and a contingent of Native American scouts. Though respectable in size, the column was hampered from the start by the slow-moving dragoons, who wore heavy cavalry boots and sabers ill-suited to a rapid march through rough terrain. Burgoyne gave Baum instructions to gather horses and supplies and to rally local Loyalist support along the way, apparently confident that the population of the Hampshire Grants — as the Vermont territory was then known — would welcome the king's soldiers or at least submit without serious resistance.

This assumption reflected a fundamental misreading of the political temper of the region. Far from being sympathetic to the Crown, the settlers of Vermont and the surrounding New Hampshire Grants were fiercely independent and overwhelmingly Patriot in their loyalties. News of Burgoyne's advance, and especially reports of atrocities attributed to his Native American allies, had inflamed rather than intimidated the countryside. Into this volatile atmosphere stepped General John Stark, a veteran frontier fighter who had seen action at Bunker Hill and Trenton. Stark had recently resigned his Continental commission in a dispute over promotions, but when New Hampshire's legislature asked him to raise and lead a militia brigade, he accepted with characteristic bluntness, reportedly promising his wife, Elizabeth "Molly" Stark, that he would return with victory or she would hear that he had died on the field. Stark marched his rapidly growing force toward Bennington, gathering volunteers from farms and villages along the way until his numbers swelled to nearly two thousand men — more than double the size of Baum's approaching column.

Burgoyne had no accurate picture of what Baum was marching into. His intelligence had underestimated both the number and the determination of the militia assembling at Bennington, and the cumbersome composition of Baum's force meant it could neither strike quickly nor retreat easily. The dispatch of this raiding column set the stage for one of the most consequential engagements of the entire Saratoga campaign. When the two forces finally clashed on August 16, 1777, Stark's militia surrounded and overwhelmed Baum's command in a devastating double envelopment; Baum himself was mortally wounded, and a British reinforcement column under Lieutenant Colonel Heinrich von Breymann was mauled in turn. The twin defeats cost Burgoyne nearly a thousand irreplaceable soldiers and shattered any hope of resupplying his army from the countryside.

The consequences rippled far beyond Bennington. Burgoyne's weakened force stumbled on toward Saratoga, where it was surrounded and forced to surrender in October 1777 — a capitulation that persuaded France to enter the war as America's ally. In this sense, Burgoyne's fateful decision to dispatch Baum's column was not merely a tactical blunder; it was a strategic turning point, born of overconfidence and ignorance, that helped reshape the entire trajectory of the American Revolution.