Proposition.

1.  General Burgoyne’s army being reduced by repeated defeats, by desertion, sickness, etc., their provisions exhausted, their military horses, tents and baggage taken or destroyed, their retreat cut off, and their camp invested, they can only be allowed to surrender as prisoners of war.

Answer.

1.  Lieut.-General Burgoyne’s army, however reduced, will never admit that their retreat is cut off while they have arms in their hands.

Proposition.

2.  The officers and soldiers may keep the baggage belonging to them.  The generals of the United States never permit individuals to be pillaged.

Answer.

2.  Noted.

Proposition.

3.  The troops under his Excellency General Burgoyne will be conducted by the most convenient route to New England, marching by easy marches, and sufficiently provided for by the way.

Answer.

3.  Agreed.

Proposition.

4.  The officers will be admitted on parole and will be treated with the liberality customary in such cases, so long as they, by proper behaviour, continue to deserve it; but those who are apprehended having broke their parole, as some British officers have done, must expect to be close confined.

Answer.

4.  There being no officer in this army, under, or capable of being under, the description of breaking parole, this article needs no answer.

Proposition.

5.  All public stores, artillery, arms, ammunition, carriages, horses, etc., etc., must be delivered to commissaries appointed to receive them.

Answer.

5.  All public stores may be delivered, arms excepted.

Proposition.

6.  These terms being agreed to and signed, the troops under his Excellency’s, General Burgoyne’s command, may be drawn up in their encampments, where they will be ordered to ground their arms, and may thereupon be marched to the river-side on their way to Bennington.

Answer.

6.  This article is inadmissible in any extremity.  Sooner than this army will consent to ground their arms in their encampments, they will rush on the enemy determined to take no quarter.

And, later on, “If General Gates does not mean to recede from the 6th article, the treaty ends at once:  the army will to a man proceed to any act of desperation sooner than submit to that article.”

Here you have the man at his Burgoynest.  Need I add that he had his own way; and that when the actual ceremony of surrender came, he would have played poor General Gates off the stage, had not that commander risen to the occasion by handing him back his sword.

In connection with the reference to Indians with scalping knives, who, with the troops hired from Germany, made up about half Burgoyne’s force, I may mention that Burgoyne offered two of them a reward to guide a Miss McCrea, betrothed to one of the English officers, into the English lines.