ongress.
The rout of his little army of seven thousand men at Brandywine forced
Washington to abandon Philadelphia, and after a bold but unsuccessful
attack on his victors to retire into winter quarters on the banks of the
Schuylkill, where the unconquerable resolve with which he nerved his
handful of beaten and half-starved troops to face Howe's army in their
camp at Valley Forge is the noblest of his triumphs. But in the north
the war had taken another colour. Burgoyne's movement had been planned
in view of a junction with at least a part of Howe's army from New York;
a junction which would have enabled him to seize the line of the Hudson
and thus cut off New England from her sister provinces. But Howe was
held fast by Washington's resistance and unable to send a man to the
north; while the spirit of New England, which had grown dull as the war
rolled away from its borders, quickened again at the news of invasion
and of the outrages committed by the Indians employed among the English
troops. Its militia hurried from town and homestead to a camp with
which General Gates had barred the road to Albany; and after a fruitless
attack on the American lines, Burgoyne saw himself surrounded on the
heights of Saratoga. On the 17th of October his whole force was
compelled to surrender.

[Sidenote: France and America.]

The news of this calamity gave force to the words with which Chatham at
the very time of the surrender was pressing for peace. "You cannot
conquer America," he cried when men were glorying in Howe's successes
over Washington. "If I were an American as I am an Englishman, while a
foreign troop was landed in my country, I never would lay down my
arms--never, never, never!" Then, in a burst of indignant eloquence he
thundered against an outrage which was at that moment nerving New
England to its rally against Burgoyne, the use of the Indian with his
scalping-knife as an ally of England against her children. The proposals
which Chatham brought forward might perhaps in his hands even yet have
drawn America and the mother country together. His plan was one of
absolute conciliation. He looked forward to a federal union between the
settlements and Great Britain which would have left the Colonies
absolutely their own masters in all matters of internal government, and
linked only by ties of affection and loyalty to the general body of the
Empire. But the plan met with the same scornful rejection as his
previous proposals.