Local NYer standing up for Horatio Gates
For a 14th straight year, James S. Kaplan spent the Fourth of July walking in the middle of the night among ghosts of the American Revolution....
Mr. Kaplan, a tax and estate lawyer for whom history is an avocation, feels that the general has been slighted for far too long. This goes beyond the unmarked grave. Historians today are more likely to give Benedict Arnold — yes, that Benedict Arnold, before he became synonymous with treason — the credit for victory at Saratoga.
Arnold was a field commander. Gates wasn’t. “But the whole organization of the battle was really Gates’s,” Mr. Kaplan said after completing this year’s tour. What turned things around for faltering American forces, he said, was Gates’s ability to persuade New England militias to join up with the New York troops....
HE has sparked interest among some in the National Society of the Daughters of the American Revolution. One of them is Denise Doring VanBuren, who lives in Dutchess County and will be installed on Sunday as regent, or chief officer, of the society’s New York State Organization....
Read entire article at NYT
Mr. Kaplan, a tax and estate lawyer for whom history is an avocation, feels that the general has been slighted for far too long. This goes beyond the unmarked grave. Historians today are more likely to give Benedict Arnold — yes, that Benedict Arnold, before he became synonymous with treason — the credit for victory at Saratoga.
Arnold was a field commander. Gates wasn’t. “But the whole organization of the battle was really Gates’s,” Mr. Kaplan said after completing this year’s tour. What turned things around for faltering American forces, he said, was Gates’s ability to persuade New England militias to join up with the New York troops....
HE has sparked interest among some in the National Society of the Daughters of the American Revolution. One of them is Denise Doring VanBuren, who lives in Dutchess County and will be installed on Sunday as regent, or chief officer, of the society’s New York State Organization....