The Compleat Victory: Leadership and Strategy in the Saratoga Campaign of 1777

Part of Saratoga's Fall Lecture Series presented in partnership with the Friends of Saratoga Battlefield.

In the late summer and fall of 1777, after two years of indecisive fighting, the outcome of the American War of Independence hung in the balance. Having successfully expelled the Americans from Canada in 1776, the British were determined to end the rebellion and devised what they believed a war-winning strategy: sending General John Burgoyne south to rout the Americans and take Albany.

When British forces captured Fort Ticonderoga on New York’s Lake Champlain with unexpected ease in July of 1777, it looked as if it was a matter of time before they would break the rebellion in the North. Less than three and a half months later, however, a combination of the Continental Army and militia forces commanded by Major General Horatio Gates and inspired by the heroics of Benedict Arnold, forced Burgoyne to surrender his entire army. The American victory at Saratoga—described by one Patriot general as "the Compleat Victory"—stunned the world and changed the course of the war. In the end, British plans were undone by a combination of faulty military strategy and superior American leadership. Weddle will discuss the two themes from one of the most pivotal events in US history. Email us at sara_reservations@nps.gov to reserve your spot! Please include the date of the program you wish to attend.

Colonel (Ret.) Kevin Weddle, Ph.D. is a Distinguished Fellow and the former Elihu Root Cahir of Military Studies at the U.S. Army War College. He is a graduate of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and served over 28 years as a combat engineer officer. Throughout his career he worked in a variety of command and staff positions in the United States and overseas including command of a combat engineer battalion, operations officer for a combat engineer group, and assignments at the Pentagon, West Point, and the Defense Intelligence Agency. He is also a veteran of Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm and Operation Enduring Freedom.

He leads military and civilian groups on tours and staff rides of battlefields in the United States and Europe, including Gettysburg, Antietam, Normandy, Sicily, Anzio, Gallipoli, Waterloo, Agincourt, and others. In 2019, he served as the William L. Garwood visiting professor at Princeton University and has won several teaching awards.

Colonel Weddle holds master’s degrees in history and civil engineering from the University of Minnesota and a Ph.D. in history from Princeton University. He is the author of Lincoln’s Tragic Admiral: The Life of Samuel Francis Du Pont (University of Virginia Press, 2005), and appeared as an on-air expert in the 2020 History Channel documentary “Washington.” His second book, The Compleat Victory: Saratoga and the American Revolution (Oxford University Press, 2021), was awarded the Gilder Lehrman Prize for Military History, the Society of the Cincinnati Prize, the Daughters of the American Revolution Excellence in American History Book Award, and the Fraunces Tavern Museum Book Award. He lives in Carlisle, Pennsylvania with his wife, Jeanie.