Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: FROM TICONDEROGA TO SARATOGA. Pbikted In The Unitarian Review, November, 1877. NO part of the war for American independence has in it more elements of real or of visible interest than what may be termed the flux and reflux of the Revolutionary invasion of Canada. From that gray dawn in May, 1775, when Ethan Allen, in the name of the great Jehovah and the Continental Congress, compelled the British colonel to surrender the strong fortress of Northern New York, to that bright October day in 1777, when Burgoyne closed a campaign, begun with proud expectations and brilliant successes, with a painful surrender, ? from Ticonderoga to Saratoga, ? the American colonists and the British government were engaged in a continuous struggle for mastery in the then almost uninhabited border land between Canada and Northern New York and New England. The hope of the Bostonians, as the Canadian peasants styled the rebels, was to add to the thirteen Colonies all the recent conquests from France, and so to leave King George, on the whole North American continent, no foothold and no base for hostile operations. The purpose of the English was to obtain full control of that remarkable chain of waters which stretches from the St. Lawrence to New York harbor, and thus to cut off from the confederacy the head and heart of the rebellion, ? Puritan New England. It is simply impossible to narrate here, even in the most concise manner, the events of three campaigns,crowded with striking incidents, in which successes and reverses succeeded each other with wonderful rapidity, and at the end of which the war died almost within a day’s march of the spot of its audacious birth. As the surveyor, planting at intervals a stake or flag, marks to an observing eye his course, so we, recalling here and there a few…
