Editor’s note: This commentary is by Phil Holland, who lives in Shaftsbury and is the author of “A Guide to the Battle of Bennington and the Bennington Monument.”
[B]ennington Battle Day is a commemoration, an event designed to enable a group of people to share a public memory. The day of the battle has been commemorated in Bennington since its first anniversary in 1778, in the form of speeches, poems, parades, banquets, barbecues and occasional re-enactments, and Aug. 16 been a Vermont state holiday since 1894. But what is it exactly that we are celebrating, and why is it important that we remember?
Imagine what it must have been like to be in Bennington in the second week of August 1777. The country to the north of Manchester and to the west in New York was in upheaval. British Gen. John Burgoyne’s 8,500-man army of British, German (Hessian), French Canadian and Loyalist troops, with a vanguard of 500 Indians sowing terror, had advanced from Canada into the Hudson Valley as part of a British plan to put down the rebellion once and for all. A much smaller American force was stationed above Albany, but to the east New England lay exposed. A Committee of Safety operating from Fay’s Tavern in Bennington and functioning as the government of the newly proclaimed Republic of Vermont had sent urgent requests to New Hampshire and Massachusetts for assistance. A storehouse with valuable supplies for the Continental Army was located in Bennington, on the site of the future Bennington Monument. Col. Seth Warner, commander of the regiment known as the Green Mountain Boys, warned his superiors that seizure of the stores, which included cattle and wagons, would be fatal to the American cause in the north.
Patriot families fleeing Burgoyne’s advance streamed through the town. “I can never forget,” wrote Sarah Rudd, “my flight on horseback, with my babe and two other small children and my eldest daughter running on foot by the side of me from Bennington to Williamstown, under circumstances of great alarm and fear from Hessians, Tory-enemies, and Indians.” When battle came, her husband Joseph Rudd, a captain in Elijah Dewey’s Bennington militia company, was one of the men who charged the fortifications on the top of the hill and fought hand to hand against the Hessians.
Although Albany was his immediate target, Burgoyne had envisioned a secondary attack on New England’s soft western flank, by way of Arlington and Manchester. His army was low on provisions, horses and carriages. When he learned of the storehouse at Bennington, which was supposedly lightly guarded, he sent a force of 650 mostly German soldiers under Lt. Col. Friedrich Baum to seize the supplies.
What Burgoyne failed to realize was that 750 New Hampshire militiamen under Gen. John Stark had just arrived in Bennington in response to Vermont’s call to arms. Stark led his army as well as local militia out to meet the British advance, coming face to face with Baum’s troops, and his two three-pound cannons, at a bridge over the Walloomsac a few miles over the New York line.
The two sides skirmished, but neither was ready to mount an all-out attack. Stark encamped on Harrington Road in North Bennington; Baum fortified his position on a sharp rise of ground above the bridge and sent for reinforcements. Loyalists (and a few Patriot spies) came from surrounding towns into his camp; meanwhile, Patriots from the Berkshires and southern Vermont were continuously arriving to join Stark’s forces. Seth Warner was by Stark’s side, but his Green Mountain Boys were still in Manchester; they were urgently summoned to Bennington.
The following day it rained heavily. The British continued to entrench behind three separate fortifications, one manned entirely by Loyalists. Stark, Warner and Bennington’s Col. Herrick drew up a daring plan that called for a double envelopment of the British forces and a coordinated attack on their positions.
History – or is it legend? – has it that on the morning of the 16th Gen. Stark vowed to his men that they would “beat them today, or this night Molly Stark sleeps a widow.” After stealthily enveloping the British positions, the Patriots struck at three o’clock in the afternoon in a sudden burst of musket fire. Baum’s dragoons and cannons gave it right back. The sound, said Stark, was like “a continual clap of thunder.” The Americans assaulted the German and Tory redoubts and overran them “with irresistible impetuosity,” in the words of the Rev. Thomas Allen, the so-called fighting parson of Pittsfield. The Indians beat a strategic retreat, and large numbers of Baum’s forces were killed or taken prisoner. The Americans, who sustained only modest casualties, savored a victory, some by draining their rations of rum.
At that moment, however, 600 British reinforcements under Lt. Col. Breymann arrived, led by a military band and two six-pounders firing canister shot. The scattered Americans had to regroup to resist this new advance and were suddenly at a disadvantage. And at that moment Seth Warner’s Green Mountain regiment arrived from Manchester with a score from the Battle of Hubbardton to settle. The fighting was intense and ended in the rout of the British force as darkness fell.
The result shocked both sides. For the first time in the war, Patriot militiamen had defeated an entrenched force of professional soldiers defended by artillery. Burgoyne had lost more than a thousand men and had been denied critical supplies. He had to delay his advance to Albany, where American strength was building day by day. When the moment of truth arrived at Saratoga, the Americans prevailed. Burgoyne surrendered on Oct. 17, his invasion a spectacular failure. When the news reached France, Benjamin Franklin was there to propose an alliance. Though independence was still some years away, French support proved critical to American victory. The dominos had begun to fall at Bennington.
In 1809, when he was 81, John Stark reflected on the meaning of the Battle of Bennington in a message to the men he had commanded there. He wrote, “As I was then, I am now – the friend of the equal rights of men, of representative democracy, of republicanism, and the Declaration of Independence, the great charter of our national rights: and of course the friend of our indissoluble Union and Constitution of the states.” “Live free or die,” he added.
When Grandma Moses painted her “Battle of Bennington” in 1953, she showed a group of Patriots holding the Stars and Stripes at an Iwo Jima angle, thereby folding World War II into her picture. She also famously included the Bennington Monument: She knew that expressions of public memory, from works of art to parades, are essential to keeping our civic identities alive and understood.
On Bennington Battle Day, we honor veterans of all U.S. wars, including Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as those currently serving in our armed forces. But it’s the volunteer firemen who dominate our local commemoration; they are a kind of militia without muskets, ordinary citizens who muster for drill and are always ready to respond to alarms – as our forebears did so memorably in August 1777.
