Within a few hours Burgoyne and his officers were making merry in the great house, drinking the Schuyler wine, and on the following day the mansion was burned to the ground.  But fate played the British leader a curious trick; for within a few days Burgoyne found himself defeated and a guest in the Schuyler home at Albany.  “I expressed my regret,” he has testified, “at the event which had happened and the reasons which had occasioned it.  He [Schuyler] desired me to think no more about it; said the occasion justified it, according to the rules and principles of war, and he should have done the same."[311]

As Chastellux declared:  “Burgoyne was extremely well received by Mrs. Schuyler and her little family.  He was lodged in the best apartment in the house.  An excellent supper was served him in the evening, the honors of which were done with so much grace that he was affected even to tears, and could not help saying with a deep sigh, ’Indeed, this is doing too much for a man who has ravished their lands and burnt their home."[312] Indeed, all through his stay in this house he and his staff of twenty were treated with the utmost courtesy by Catherine Schuyler.

But was not this characteristic of so many of those better class colonial women?  The inherent delicacy, refinement, and tact of those dames of long ago can be equalled only by their courage, perseverance, and loyalty in the hour of disaster.  Whether in war or in peace they could remain calm and self-possesed, and when given opportunity showed initiative power fully equalling that of their more famous husbands.  They could be valiant without losing refinement; they could bid defiance to the enemy and yet retain all womanliness.

Is it not evident that woman was charmingly feminine, even in colonial days?  Did she not possess essentially the same strengths and weaknesses as she does to-day?  In general, accepting creeds more devoutly than did the men, as is still the case, often devouring greedily those writings which she thought might add to her education, yet more closely attached to her home than most modern women, the colonial dame frequently represented a strange mingling of superstition, culture, and delicate sensibility.  Possessing doubtless a more whole-hearted reverence for man’s ideas and opinions than does her modern sister, she seems to have kept her aspirations for a broader sphere of activity under rather severe restraint, and felt it her duty first of all to make the home a refuge and a consolation for the husband and father who returned in weariness from his battle with the world.