Most of us here today want to get in touch with our past-to reach out and feel its haunting presence, as you can at Mount Independence and Fort Ticonderoga. Perhaps we need to remind ourselves how fortunate we are to be Americans, remember how hard our forefathers struggled to make this nation possible.

Unfortunately--tragically, I think--most Americans are woefully ignorant of their history. To put it bluntly, we are historical illiterates. According to a Department of Education study, 60% of our high school seniors don't even have an elementary knowledge of this country's rich and endlessly exciting past.

This is real tragedy, on a national scale. If we don't know where we have been or what went wrong-or what went right-along the way, how can we possibly know what road to take now or in the future?

History is not a civics lesson. It is not something called social studies. It is not about political correctness. Nor is it a wax museum.

History is us. It is the story of ourselves-our entire national family with its wondrous diversity of complexions and religions and origins and political beliefs, and how they coalesced to produce the greatest nation in the world.

I got my love of history from my father, who took me to places where history happened and told me who was there and what they did. We lived in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and we visited Fort Pitt and the great battlefield of Gettysburg and the obscure one of Bushy Run, the sites of forts in the Allegheny Mountains and General Braddock's fateful road, and we went to see the steel mills of that vibrant industrial city. Each of these places had a wonderful story to tell.

If we fail to tell our children those stories, if we don't bring them to places such as Mount Independence, we are doing them-and our country-a terrible disservice. We are depriving them of their heritage, and this country will be the poorer for it. We have to insist that the schools we support teach history interestingly and teach it well, enabling our young people to know and appreciate what Americans have believed and stood for.

I applaud the State of Vermont and the people on this platform and many in the audience for giving us this splendid opportunity to make our past accessible to the present.

I have to admit that my first impression of Mount Independence was of a place where nothing much happened. After all, George Washington never slept here, no important battle was fought here, its original name-Rattlesnake Hill-had an unpromising ring to it. And if it was famous, it was as the scene of one of the Revolutionary War's most inglorious events -the evacuation under cover of darkness by rebel defenders of Fort Ticonderoga and Mount Independence in the face of a British army. As one rebel soldier said, "Such a retreat was never heard of since the creation of the world."

For four years I have been working on a book about General John Burgoyne's invasion from Canada-the expedition that ended with his surrender at Saratoga. In that time I have been listening to the voices of the intensely real people who were once here-hearing their dialects and colloquialisms, living with them, sharing their innermost thoughts. And the more I heard from these ghosts of Mount Independence the more I realized that something very important did happen here and it says everything about the war of the Revolution.

The ghosts who inhabit this place include rebels and Tories, British and Germans, some Frenchmen, at least one Pole, men and women, whites, blacks, native Americans-they were all here, and the stories they can tell us, if we will listen, are as thrilling as any work of fiction.

When the rebel soldiers left home to come here, no one could know what lay ahead as they kissed their wives and children and sweethearts good-bye, mustered in tiny hamlets, and marched bravely down a dirt track to the tootle of fifes and the ratatat-tat of drums.

Certainly a sense of high adventure was in the minds of many. After all, most of these fellows had never been away from the farm before. What is most apparent in the letters, diaries, and journals of these men are four powerful convictions that guided their lives -- devotion to their family, reverence for their Maker, love of their country, and a deeply-held belief in freedom. Four faiths--family, God, country, and liberty.

They didn't wear these convictions on their sleeves. Belief was part and parcel of these men's everyday lives, as natural to them as the air they breathed. And it is worth asking where we would be if they had not held those convictions and whether something of what is wrong with America today is that we've lost touch with their ideals.

It is impossible to read their diaries and letters without realizing the enormous hardships and suffering they endured-hunger, smallpox and other diseases, lack of clothing and blankets and shoes, deprivation of all kinds. And day after day the kind of backbreaking, endless work that went into the building of Mount Independence.

Some of the ghosts of this place you already know--Benjamin Franklin, who passed this way in 1776; four generals of the Continental army: Philip Schuyler, Horatio Gates, Arthur St. Clair, and Benedict Arnold. But I want to introduce you to several lesser-known figures.

Let me tell you first about Ebenezer Wild, a 17-year-old Massachusetts corporal who remained in the army for six years. He left Boston with his regiment on August 7, 1776 and arrived at Ticonderoga August 3 1. To us, that three-week march would be unimaginably difficult: it rained constantly, the primitive roads were almost impassable, the men seldom had enough to cat, and some of them came down with smallpox, yet they took it in stride.

Wild's journal for August 29 tells us they broke camp early, marched half a mile, and came to a river 5 feet deep and 50 feet wide. "We met with much trouble getting over," he said. (Something of an understatement when you consider that the water was 5 feet deep and a lot of these soldiers were not much taller than that.) On the opposite shore they marched 4 more miles and had to cross another river--not as deep as the first, but too swift for comfort, so they felled some trees and bridged it.

Now they had another problem: "We were in great want of provision for we had none for 2 days." Another 4-mile march and they found some green corn, which they ate. When they reached Skenesborough (now Whitehall) at sunset, "We were obliged to take up our lodging on the ground without anything to cover us." You have to bear that statement in mind when you read the next moming's entry in his joumal: "Last night it rained very hard the biggest part of the night"

Colonel Jeduthan Baldwin is one of my favorite Mount Independence ghosts. He was the solid stuff of which the Revolution was made. The rebellion had its rabble-rousers and firebrands, of course, but Baldwin and his likes were essentially moderate men who stuck it out through good times and bad (mostly bad) and provided the leadership and stability the Revolution had to have in order to survive.

Baldwin was a man of action, forever at work, except when he paused to share a meal or a bottle with a friend or was down with what was called the camp distemper. And he is the exemplar of the incredible labor that turned this wild peninsula into a burgeoning military base.

He was a prosperous citizen of Brookfield, Massachusetts, with a wife and four children, who decided he had an obligation to serve his country. During the French and Indian Wars he was part of an expedition against French-held Crown Point, where he was badly wounded in the leg. A surgeon told him they would have to wnputate, whereupon Baldwin hauled himself up on the cot, reached for his bayonet, and said he would run anyone through who tried to hold him down for an operation. When he departed this life, he said, he planned to go out intact--in one piece.

Like Benjamin Franklin, Jeduthan Baldwin hoped a reconciliation with the mother country could be worked out, but that hope died on June 17,.1775 in the Battle for Bunker Hill when his brother was killed. Baldwin never looked back and for the next seven years worked tirelessly for the cause he believed in.

A week after arriving at Ticonderoga in July 1776, all his clothes, money, papers, and surveyor's compass were stolen and he fumed as he scribbled in his diary that he was "heartily tired of this Retreating, Ragged, Starved, lousey, thevish, Pockey Army in this unhealthy Country." But the clothes were found, the thief (a rebel deserter) was caught, and the momentary despondency passed. He spent the rest of the year in poor health and left for home early in December, but by midFebruary of 1777 he was back in Albany, from which he traveled by sleigh down Lake George (barely making it across two very bad cracks in the ice), and returned to Ticonderoga carrying elaborate orders from General Schuyler that included building abridge to connect the fort to Mount Independence.

By the time Major General Arthur St. Clair took command of the post, Baldwin could point with pride at an extraordinary array of achievements: he had designed and built or repaired sawmills and ships, batteries and barracks, awharf, two guard houses, a boom of logs across the lake to impede enemy vessels, an artillery park, cwnp sites, a huge store house, hospitals, and a bakery. He had laid out for Dr. Jonathan Potts a vegetable garden (one of several totaling 25 acres), and supervised construction of what he justifiably called the Great Bridge. An awed German officer later termed it one of the seven wonders of the modem world and it was Baldwin's crowning achievement.

When you go inside the Visitors' Center I hope you will look closely at the two massive timbers on display there, because these great white pine logs are tangible reminders of Jeduthan Baidwin's work and they symbolize what went on here in 1776 and 1777. They are so well preserved because they have been at the bottom of the lake for more than 2 centuries.

Notice the size of those logs and think how many enormous trees had to be chopped down with axes, cut to length, hauled across the frozen lake in winter, and laid up log-cabin fashion in a shape resembling half a pyramid and then filled with rocks-heaven only knows how many tons of rocks. These were the caissons for Baldwin's 12-foot-wide Great Bridge and when they were complete he cut holes in the ice around them and they sank to the bottom. Now I have no idea how many timbers went into this construction project, but think of it-there were 22 of those caissons, so hundreds of the great logs had to be dragged out on the ice by hand, since they lacked draft animals and were running out of time. (After all, the British were coming.)

Baldwin also erected a crane on Mount Independence for hoisting provisions from the lake 50 or 75 feet up to this plateau, and even constructed a house for himself. All this while recruiting, managing, and paying what amounted to more than two hundred artificers--'House & Ship Carpenters, Smiths, Armourers, Roap makers, Wheel and Carriage makers, Miners, Turners, Coalyers, Sawyers & Shingle makers. . . ." He also directed hundreds of men in fatigue parties working on his projects-among them 100 black freemen, with the result, he said, that "I have my hands & mind constantly employed night & Day, except when I am asleep & then sometimes I dream."

He made that entry in his diary on Sunday, July 28, 1776, the same day Arthur St. Clair read the Declaration of Independence for the first time to the assembled troops, and ended with the shout, "God save the free independent States of America!" On the following day Jeduthan Baldwin began referring to the place as "Point Independency" and before long the name Rattlesnake Hill had happily slipped into limbo, to be replaced by Mount Independence.

Finally, I want to mention the ghost of Ebenezer Allen, a captain of Herrick's Vermont Rangers. In September of 1777, just before the first battle of Freeman's farm near Saratoga, he led his company up Mount Defiance across the lake and captured the British battery on the summit. After Burgoyne's surrender at Saratoga, the British and Germans who still occupied Ticonderoga and Mount Independence pulled out and were heading back to Canada. Just to make sure they left the area, Allen had his scouts follow them and those fellows got into a skirmish with the enemy near the Bouquet River and took a few prisoners, including a black woman named Dinah Mattis.

The scouts brought her back to headquarters at Pawlet and after checking with his men to make sure they approved what he was going to do, Captain Allen gave her a letter to take with her wherever she might go. I think you'll agree it was a most unusual letter. Simple and straightforward. it stated eloquently that belief in freedom I mentioned earlier.

"To whom it may concern," Allen wrote. "Know ye that whereas Dinah Mattis a negro woman with Nancey her Child of two months old was taken Prissnor on Lake Champlain by a scout under my command, and according to a Resolve passed by the Honorable Continental Congress that all [prisoners] belong to the Captivators thereof I being conscientious that it is not right in the sight of god to keep Slaves, I do therefore give the said Dinah Mattis and Nancey her child [their] freedom to pass and repass any where through the United States of America as though she was born free, without being Mollested by any Person or Persons ...

(signed) Ebenezer Allen Capt."

That letter was written four score and six years before Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclwnation.

---

(C)Copyright, 1996 Richard M. Ketchum

Richard M. Ketchum is the author of eleven books:

The Borrowed Years, 1938-1941: America on to War

Second Cutting: Letters from the Country

The World of George Washington

The Winter Soldiers: The Battles for Trenton and Princeton

Decisive Day: The Battle for Bunker Hill

Will Rogers: The Man and His Times

The Secret Life of the Forest

Faces from the Past

The American Heritage Book of Great Historic Places

Male Husbandry

What is Communism?

As director of book publishing activities at American Heritage Publishing Company for twenty years, he edited many of that firm's volumes, including The American Hertiage Book of the Revolution and The American Heritage Picture History of the Civil War, which received a Pulitzer Prize Special Citation.

He was the co-founder, in 1974, and editor of Blair & Ketchum's Country Journal, a monthly magazine about rural life.

Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, he graduated from Yale University and commanded a subchaser in the South Atlantic during World War II. He and his wife have a working sheep farm in Vermont and are active conservationists.

New Book on the Burgoyne Campaign Coming Soon!

As he mentioned in this keynote address, Richard Ketchum has been working for four years on a book about General Burgoyne's invasion from Canada and subsequent defeat at Saratoga. This book is now in the hands of the publisher and should be available this year. Following is the author's description of what we can look for when the book appears:

Saratoga: Turning Point of the Revolution

As the subtitle of the book states, Saratoga was the turning point of the war of the Revolution. To put it another way, the British campaign that was supposed to end the rebellion ended instead in a battle that changed the history of the world.

More than the Civil War, more than World War II, the American Revolution was the most significant event in our past. It was what led to independence and nationhood, and in this book I have tried insofar as possible to tell the story of the Saratoga campaign from the American point of view.

It is customary to list a host of reasons why the British lost this battle-the length of their supply line, the rigors of a wilderness campaign, a shortage of draft animals, terrible problems of communications, the failure of Britain's commander-in chief in North America to support the operafionand on and on. While all of these factors are true enough and certainly helped bring about Britain's defeat, they fail to take into account how the battle was won.

The miracle of Saratoga was the coming together of citizen-soldiers from the farrns and workshops of New England and New York within a short penod of time to fight General John Burgoyne's professional army of trained, seasoned professional soldiers. Burgoyne's advance from Canada up Lake ChampWn had been unopposed. The outnumbered American garrison at Fort Ticonderoga was outmaneuvered and fled in confusion during the night, leaving enormous quantities of precious supplies and weapons behind. Several battles followed, with Burgoyne victorious in each one, until finally the Americans had about 2,000 men with whom to oppose Burgoyne's 7,000.

Then suddenly everything changed. I believe the tide turned when Burgoyne unloosed a large number of western Indians, whose savagery introduced an entirely new element into his campaign. A critical event was the brutal murder of a young white woman-a story that traveled by word of mouth, letters, and newspaper accounts to every comer of the country, warning people of what could happen to their families unless they put a stop to it.

The result was that when Burgoyne reached Saratoga with an army reduced by attrition and a shortage of vital supplies, more than 13,000 aroused, determined rebels were there to confront him.

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