Standing in Burgoyne's way was the fort at Ticonderoga, sometimes called the "Gibraltar of North America". Located on the western side of the narrows of Lake Champlain, it dominated the choke point of access to nearby Lake George and, from there, to the Hudson. Burgoyne knew that in order to reach Albany he would have to go through Ticonderoga.
The Americans knew this as well and had been hard at work strengthening the defenses, which included building a whole new set of fortifications on the opposite shore of Lake Champlain, on heights that were now, in keeping with the spirit of the day, called Mount Independence. The two fortifications were joined by a floating bridge, with a log-and-chain boom thrown across the lake to prevent British ships from passing. In the minds of the American political and military classes, and in the mind of the American public at large, it was inconceivable that Ticonderoga could fall.
But there were chinks - gaping holes, in fact - in the defensive armor, and General Arthur St. Clair, who arrived to take command of the fort in mid-June (at just about the same time as Burgoyne was setting out from Canada) was acutely aware of them. "If the enemy intend to attack us", he wrote to General Philip Schuyler from Ticonderoga on June 13th, "we are very ill-prepared to receive them". He was referring to the number of troops (less than 2,500 fit for duty where it was estimated that 10,000 were required to adequately man both forts), their quality (his disdain for the militia units - "who go off whenever they please" - was quite evident and, as matters turned out, well-justified) and the lack of adequate equipment and supplies.
And yet, despite all of these weaknesses, the Americans might have been able to check Burgoyne's advance at Ticonderoga had it not been for the one fatal flaw that everyone - well, almost everyone - had overlooked. When Colonel John Trumbull had made an examination of the site in 1776, he noticed that the entire position was dominated by a lofty eminence, Mount Defiance, at its center. As with the site's former French and English commanders, the current American command gave it no thought, believing that it was too distant as well as being unscalable, but Trumbull was able to demonstrate otherwise. Nevertheless, his warnings went unheeded, and Mount Defiance was left unoccupied.
When Burgoyne's brigadier general Simon Fraser arrived on the scene in early July of 1777, he likewise quickly realized the mountain's strategic importance and, unaware of Trumbull's previous recommendation, wondered why, considering all the battles that had previously been fought at Ticonderoga, "it never occurred to any person to occupy it". It wasn't easy - it took a detachment of axemen and a work party of some four hundred men to clear a way to the top - but it was done. By July 5th a battery of twelve-pound cannon was established on Mount Defiance. Overnight, the American position had become untenable, and St. Clair gave the order to retreat.
Among the American defenders stationed at Mount Independence that day were two regiments of Hampshire County Massachusetts militia: Colonel Leonard's regiment, led by its lieutenant colonel, Jonathan Hale, and Colonel Wells' regiment, led by its lieutenant colonel, Ezra May. The Mays and the Narramores had been neighbors going back some twenty years, first in Woodstock, Connecticut, and now in Goshen, Massachusetts, and the connection between the two families would be further strengthened in 1789, when Nathaniel Naramore married Ezra May's daughter, Molly. But all that was far in the future in July 1777, when nineteen year-old Nathaniel was getting his first taste of military experience under the command of his future father-in-law. In a strange twist, however, it was not the first time that a young Narramore was in military service at Ticonderoga: nineteen years earlier, almost to the day, Nathaniel's uncle, Joseph Narramore, had taken part in the disastrous British assault on Ticonderoga as a private in the Third Connecticut Regiment of colonial militia under General James Abercrombie.
Looking back, it is all too easy to gloss over the rough patches and idealize our Revolutionary War forbears, but whatever Nathaniel's own motivations and actions may have been (and in point of fact, we know absolutely nothing about either), there was nothing special in general about the militia units that Massachusetts had sent to the defense of Ticonderoga. As with any group of men, some were brave, and some not so. Some, no doubt, had joined out of a sense of patriotism and for the love and defense of their country, but others joined because they needed the money, or because they were compelled to do so (alhough it doesn't figure prominently in the history books, in the alarms attending Burgoyne's advance, the Massachusetts General Court imposed drafts, which had legal teeth to them). As a whole, the militia's behavior at Ticonderoga, and during the retreat that followed, was, to be frank, something less than stellar.
On the evening of July 5th, with Burgoyne at the doorstep and in a spectacular instance of lousy timing, the two lieutenant colonels of the Massachusetts militia took the opportunity to inform General St. Clair that their units considered their terms of enlistment to be up - although, for a small bounty, the men might be induced to stay. The units had been raised in early May for a term of two months, but St. Clair had insisted that the clock started with their arrival for duty, and not when they marched from home. The militia insisted otherwise. St. Clair managed to put them off for the time being, but it was to be only a short delay.
On the retreat along the military road to Castleton on July 6th, the two militia units were in constant disorder. They had had enough of the army, and wanted to go home. At one point, things got so bad with Lt. Col. Hale and his men that General Poor had to order forty of his Continentals to make ready to fire on them if they would not get back in the line of march. In Castleton on July 7th, St. Clair had had enough: he paraded the two Massachusetts regiments and, in an emotional address, shamed them into staying with the army "as long as there was any prospect of immediate danger from the enemy". But again, it was only a short reprieve, and by the time the army reached Manchester, St. Clair dismissed them in disgrace.
And so ended, rather ignominiously, Nathaniel Naramore's first term of service in the Massachusetts militia. But a second chance was not long in coming - and this time, the militia would do much better.
- Thomas (ca. 1640 - ca. 1690) -> Samuel (ca. 1680 - ca. 1754) -> Samuel (1706 - 1789) -> Samuel (1730 - 1777) -> Nathaniel (1757 - 1809)
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