As summer turned to autumn, Maj. Gen. Horatio Gates replaced the sickly and exhausted Schuyler. Gates ordered a Polish-born engineer officer, Col. Tadeusz Kosciuszko, to stake out defensive fortifications on high ground belonging to local Patriot farmer named John Neilson. Gates wished to convey a message to both sides: the Americans would retreat no farther. Heartened by General Gates energy and determination, a new sense of purpose spread throughout the Revolutionaries’ camp.
"Fortune, as if tired of persecuting us, had begun to change & Burgoyne had suffered materially on both his flanks—but these things were not of our doing; the main Army, as it was called, was hunted from post to pillar and dared not to measure its strength with the enemy; much was wanting to reinspire it with confidence in itself—with that Self respect without which an Army is but a flock of Sheep—a proof of which is found in the fact, that we have thanked in General Orders a detachment double the force of that of the enemy, for having dared to return their fire. From this miserable State of despondency & terror, Gates’s arrival raised us as if by magic. We began to hope and then to act—our first step was to Stillwater and we are now on the heights, called Bhemus’s looking the enemy boldly in the face. Kosciusko has Selected the ground and has covered its weak point (its’ right) with redoubts from the hill to the river."
Lt. Col. Udney Hayhttps://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/44377883.pdf Pg. 145.