Battles of Saratoga

In September and October 1777, American and British armies fought the Battles of Saratoga near the Hudson River in New York. Horatio Gates held overall command for the Americans, Benedict Arnold drove key attacks in the field, and John Burgoyne led the British invasion from Canada. Burgoyne's surrender on October 17 gave the United States its most important battlefield victory of the Revolutionary War.

The two engagements at Freeman's Farm on September 19, 1777 and Bemis Heights on October 7, 1777 resolved the immediate British plan to split New England from the rest of the United States along the Hudson River. Burgoyne's capitulation on October 17, 1777 also answered a diplomatic question that had preoccupied Versailles, because France wanted proof that the Continental Army could destroy a major British field force before risking open alliance. The fighting further exposed the command quarrel between Horatio Gates and Benedict Arnold, whose defiant return to the field at Bemis Heights became one of the most debated leadership episodes of the war.

Benjamin Franklin used the Saratoga victory as leverage at Versailles, and France signed the Treaty of Amity and Commerce and the Treaty of Alliance on February 6, 1778. The French alliance then brought fleets, troops, and subsidies that sustained the war through Yorktown in 1781, making Saratoga a direct precondition for the coalition that defeated Britain.