In Captain Cabell’s Footsteps at Saratoga

By Bill MacIntosh

The National Park Service is not given to hyperbole, especially on permanent signs.  But the statement is pretty definitive — “The Best Soldiers in the Northern Army”. The interpretive sign is at the site where Morgan’s Rifle Battalion camped for three weeks near the Nielson Farmhouse on Bemus Heights leading up to the final Battle of Saratoga in October 1777. Colonel Daniel Morgan’s corps numbered 500 soldiers in any army of 11,000.¹ Captain Samuel Jordan Cabell, 21, commanded the 2^nd Company of eight in the Battalion². He and his riflemen hailed from Amherst County – now Nelson County, Virginia. 

In early August, Bill MacIntosh visited Saratoga National Historical Park to try to trace the footsteps of Captain Cabell. A licensed battlefield guide, Patrick Niles, gave a personal tour that focused on Morgan’s Rifles during the two Saratoga battles and the weeks between. A goal for this “boots on the ground” visit was to understand how the lay of the land affected events.  NPS Ranger and Park Historian, Eric Schnitzer, also provided detailed information and further research tips to understand what the soldiers in Morgan’s Rifle Battalion experienced. 

The unit was a group of sharpshooters hand-picked by Colonel Daniel Morgan, himself a Virginian from Winchester. Cabell’s Amherst rifle company was detached from their 6^th Virginia Regiment for this special unit. Unlike muskets, Pennsylvania rifles were accurate to over 200 yards. General Washington sent the Rifle Corps north from Morristown, New Jersey to Albany, New York in late summer 1777 to reinforce General Gates, whose task was to stop the invading British Army from Canada, led by Lieutenant General John Burgoyne. Trained in guerilla tactics, Washington wrote that Morgan’s companies were “well acquainted with the use of rifles, and with that mode of fighting, which is necessary to make them a good counterpoise to the Indians.”³. Ottawa and some Iroquois nations allied with the British and served as scouts. They also raided northern settlements. Congress pressured Washington to address the alarm this caused. After arriving in Stillwater, NY, Captain Cabell and the riflemen found themselves with help from native scouts, Oneida, and Stockbridge-Mohican warriors allied with the patriot side, who wore army-issued red knit caps to avoid being mistaken for the enemy. Gates forbade his soldiers “from crouding around the Indians Encampment” and stipulated that “the first person detected in abusing them will be severely punished.” ⁴

Saratoga was actually two battles. During the first, the Battle of Freeman’s Farm on September 19, 1777, Morgan’s Rifles led the attack and briefly routed the British, but then were pushed back and scattered when a larger enemy force arrived. As large infantry brigades of the opposing  armies charged and counter charged each other for hours, Morgan’s Rifles went around the British left flank and established a position along a shallow ravine in the woods, which they turned into an impromptu fortification with felled brush and sharpened sticks. From this position behind British lines, the riflemen effectively targeted redcoat officers, artillery crews and infantry from 200 yards. The 20^th Regiment of Foot was ordered into the woods with fixed bayonets to dislodge the “shirtmen”, but found this futile.  The redcoats found the riflemen “strongly posted in a wood with a deep Ravine in their front” with the makeshift abatis.⁵ The rifle corps finally had to retreat once a force of Braunschweig soldiers arriving in their rear threatened to encircle them.  By nightfall, the British had won the farm field, but had lost significantly more soldiers. It was a victory they could not afford to repeat. The ravine in the woods can be seen today, looking out over a meadow of wildflowers.

In the second and decisive Battle of Bemus Heights on October 7, Morgan’s Rifles were again ordered to lead the attack. They charged down a hill by surprise behind the British right flank, helping to cause a route, with the redcoats leaving their artillery. The British and German soldiers fell back to two redoubts. Morgan’s Rifles were part of the attack on the fortification which anchored the end of the British line, Breymann Redoubt. The riflemen used the topography – dead ground shielded from artillery fire by rise in the land – to approach the German fortification safely until the last few yards. Today, this mistake in the placement of the redoubt and artillery is striking. A German engineer reportedly had objected to the location, but was apparently over-ruled by a British engineer. Morgan’s Rifles and Massachusetts infantry stormed Breymann Redoubt and captured it.⁶ They were led by Major General Benedict Arnold, who rode on horseback fearlessly into the fort on the opposite side as the riflemen. Soon after, he was shot in the leg. His horse, shot dead, fell on his other leg, pinning him down. The loss of the linchpin fort caused a collapse of the British forces. Captain Cabell may very well have witnessed his wounded commanding general (and future traitor) being carried off the field, unless his company was pursuing the retreating German troops eastward.

The Saratoga battlefield has been well preserved. Today, the clearings in the woods are pretty much where they were in October 1777, now full of wildflowers. Recent archeological digs have located Breymann Redoubt precisely. A visitor can see how the ground and hidden sightlines helped turned the tide of this pivotal battle, which days later caused Burgoyne to surrendered his encircled army, and which four months later led to the French alliance with the United States.

The National Park Service had pretty good ground to stand on when they stated Morgan’s riflemen were the best soldiers in the Northern Army.  General Horatio Gates in his October 12, 1777 dispatch to John Hancock and the Continental Congress on the victory at Saratoga wrote “Too much Praise cannot be given to the Corps commanded by Col. Morgan consisting of his Rifle Regiment…”⁷ Defeated Lieutenant General John Burgoyne would later write that Morgan’s Rifles were among the “best classes of Rangers”⁸, adding that there were “perhaps few better in the world.” Captain Samuel Jordan Cabell was a key part of this renowned unit.

1. Size of Morgan’s corp: George Washinton letter to John Hancock, August 21, 1777, Founders Online, National Archives, 09-02-0571; Size of the Northern Army, October 7, 1777: The Compleat Victory, Saratoga and the American Revolution, Kevin J Weddle, Order of Battle, p. 413 ↩︎
2. US Army Pension Record, Samuel Jordan Cabell; “A Guide to Virginia Military Organizations in the American Revolution, 1774-1787, E. M. Sanchez-Saavedra, Virginia State Library, Richmond, VA, pp.88-89 ↩︎
3. Letter from Gen. Washington to New York Governor George Clinton, August 16,1777 ↩︎
4. Campaign to Saratoga – 1777, NPS Historian Eric Schnitzer and Don Troiani, p. 206; The Stockbridge Company, Native Americans Siding with the Revolutionaries, Nov 21, 2024, The American Battlefield Trust ↩︎
5.  Campaign to Saratoga – 1777, NPS Historian Eric Schnitzer and Don Troiani, p. 179; The Burgoyne Expedition – April 1776 to October 13, 1777 – Diary of Joshua Pell, Jr.”, Bulletin of the Fort Ticonderoga Museum, July 1929, p. 11 ↩︎
6.  National Park Service; The Decisive Moment – 7 – Breymann Redoubt ↩︎
7.  Dispatch Letter, from Major General Horatio Gates to John Hancock, President of the Continental Congress, October 12, 1777, manuscript collection of the American Philosophical Society, Phila., PA ↩︎
8.  John Burgoyne, A State of the Expedition from Canada: As Laid Before the House of Commons, London, 1780, p. 102 ↩︎