Hamilton the "hair buyer" gave up the defense as a bad job, and surrendered the fort, defended by cannon and occupied by regular troops, as he says in his journal, "to a set of uncivilized Virginia backwoodsmen armed with rifles."
Tap! tap! sounded the drums, as Clark gave the signal, and down came the British colors.
Thirteen cannon boomed the salute over the flooded plains of the Wabash, and a hundred frontier soldiers shouted themselves hoarse when the stars and stripes went up at Vincennes, never to come down again.
The British authority over this region was forever at an end. It only remained for Clark to defend what he had so gallantly won.
{ 17} Of all the deeds done west of the Alleghanies during the war of the Revolution, Clark's campaign, in the region which seemed so remote and so strange to our forefathers, is the most remarkable. The vast region north of the Ohio River was wrested from the British crown. When peace came, a few years later, the boundary lines of the United States were the Great Lakes on the north, and on the west the Mississippi River.
A splendid monument overlooks the battlefield of Saratoga. Heroic bronze statues of Schuyler, Gates, and Morgan, three of the four great leaders in this battle, stand each in a niche on three faces of the obelisk. On the south side the space is empty. The man who led the patriots to victory forfeited his place on this monument. What a sermon in stone is the empty niche on that massive granite shaft! We need no chiseled words to tell us of the great name so gallantly won by Arnold the hero, and so wretchedly lost by Arnold the traitor.
Only a few months after Benedict Arnold had turned traitor, and was fighting against his native land, he was sent by Sir Henry Clinton, the British commander, to sack and plunder in Virginia. In one of these raids a captain of the colonial army was taken prisoner.
"What will your people do with me if they catch me?" Arnold is said to have asked his prisoner.
"They will cut off your leg that was shot at Quebec and Saratoga," said the plucky and witty officer, "and bury it with the honors of war, and hang the rest of your body on a gibbet."
{ 19} This bold reply of the patriot soldier showed the hatred and the contempt in which Arnold was held by all true Americans; it also hints at an earlier fame which this strange and remarkable man had won in fighting the battles of his country.