British general and playwright John Burgoyne surrenders 5,000 British and Hessian troops to American General Horatio Gates at Saratoga, New York, on October 17, 1777.
In the summer of 1777, General Burgoyne led an army of 8,000 men south through New York in an effort to join forces with British General Sir William Howe’s troops along the Hudson River. After capturing several forts, Burgoyne’s force camped near Saratoga while a larger Patriot army under General Gates gathered just four miles away. On September 19, a British advance column marched out and engaged the Patriot force at the Battle of Freeman’s Farm, or the First Battle of Saratoga. Failing to break through the American lines, Burgoyne’s force retreated. On October 7, another British reconnaissance force was repulsed by an American force under General Benedict Arnold in the Battle of Bemis Heights, also known as the Second Battle of Saratoga.
Burgoyne retreated north to the village of Saratoga with his 5,000 surviving troops. By October 13, some 20,000 Americans had surrounded the British, and four days later Burgoyne was forced to agree to the first large-scale surrender of British forces in the Revolutionary War.
Burgoyne successfully negotiated that his surviving men would be returned to Britain by pledging that they would never again serve in North America. The nearly 6,000-man army was kept in captivity at great expense to the Continental Congress until the end of the war.
Soon after word of the Patriot victory at Saratoga reached France, King Louis XVI agreed to recognize the independence of the United States and French Foreign Minister Charles Gravier, Count de Vergennes, made arrangements with U.S. Ambassador Benjamin Franklin to begin providing formal French aid to the Patriot cause. This assistance was crucial to the eventual American victory in the Revolutionary War.
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American Political History Might Have Turned Out Differently if a Louisiana Congressman’s Plane Hadn’t Mysteriously Vanished Out of Thin Air 51 Years Ago
The passengers on the plane were Alaska Democratic Congressman Nick Begich, 40, his aide Russell Brown, 37, and Louisiana Democratic Congressman Hale Boggs, 58, the House Majority Leader who was poised to be the next House speaker…
The man who tipped off New Orleans D.A. Jim Garrison about the corruption of the Warren Commission was poised to be the next Speaker of the House before his plane went down in October 1972 and could have potentially been president…
John H. Davis asserts in his 1989 book, Mafia Kingfish: Carlos Marcello and the Assassination of John F. Kennedy, that Boggs came to believe that either the CIA was involved in the Kennedy assassination, based on his conviction that the CIA had withheld critical information from the Warren Commission.[4]
Boggs was one of the first to investigate the Watergate scandal and according to The Los Angeles Star, had startling revelations on that as well. Richard Nixon made some unintelligible remarks about Congressman Boggs which were recorded on the White House tapes, just seven days after the Watergate break-in.
Believing that J. Edgar Hoover was totally corrupt, Boggs began to openly feud with the FBI before his death, warning that the U.S. was becoming increasingly totalitarian.
https://covertactionmagazine.com/2023/10/16/american-political-history-might-have-turned-out-differently-if-a-louisiana-congressmans-plane-hadnt-mysteriously-vanished-out-of-thin-air-51-years-ago/