by Ron Chernow
Perhaps restoring his spirits, too, was knowledge that, for the first time in six years, he would soon set eyes on Mount Vernon. He spent a long day in Baltimore, trying to get more transports to ferry his men and enduring the ceremonial occasions he loathed. Then early the next morning he set out on horseback with a single aide, David Humphreys, and streaked across sixty miles of Virginia countryside in a day. The last time Washington had set eyes on Mount Vernon was May 4, 1775, when he departed for the Second Continental Congress, little realizing how his life would be turned topsy-turvy. To experience Mount Vernon anew after his long, itinerant military life must have been a heady sensation. The household was now enlivened by newcomers, especially the four children of Jacky and Nelly Custis, whom he had never seen; the baby boy had been christened George Washington Parke Custis. Humphreys, a young man of literary aspirations, versified the slaves’ reaction to Washington’s return: “Return’d from war, I saw them round him press / And all their speechless glee by artless signs express.”15 One wonders whether this homecoming was staged by slaves eager to parade their fidelity; the “speechless glee” doesn’t jibe with the discontent of the seventeen slaves who had raced to freedom aboard the British sloop Savage.
Within twenty-four hours Washington’s and Rochambeau’s entourages had arrived at Mount Vernon, ready to chart the Yorktown siege. For these battle-tested veterans, the mansion was a refreshing oasis. It was a tribute to Martha Washington’s talents that she could entertain in style amid wartime conditions. Colonel Jonathan Trumbull, Jr., complimented the gracious and well-appointed reception lavished upon the visitors. “A numerous family now present,” he wrote in his diary. “All accommodated. An elegant seat and situation: great appearance of opulence and real exhibitions of hospitality and princely entertainment.”16
The French officers appraised Mount Vernon and its hostess with considerable curiosity. After the frippery of the French court, Martha Washington struck them as the pattern of republican austerity. “Mrs. Washington is . . . small and fat, her appearance is respectable,” wrote Claude Blanchard. “She was dressed very plainly and her manners were simple in all respects.”17 In surveying the estate, Blanchard detected the tarnished glory inflicted by neglect. “As to the house, it is a country residence, the handsomest that I have yet seen in America . . . There are in the places around many huts for the negroes, of whom the general owns a large number . . . The environs of his house are not fertile and the trees that we see there do not appear to be large. Even the garden is barren.”18 Baron von Closen found the house’s relative modesty suitable for America’s hero: “The spacious and well-contrived mansion house at Mount Vernon was elegantly furnished, though there was no remarkable luxury to be seen anywhere; and, indeed, any ostentatious pomp would not have agreed with the simple manner of the owner.”19
Washington must have been distressed by the creeping signs of decay everywhere. Whatever the war’s outcome, he would be left a poorer man, which weighed heavily on his mind. That June, in a letter to William Crawford, the steward of his western lands, he broke down and confided his concern about his wealth withering away as the war progressed: “My whole time is . . . so much engrossed by the public duties of my station that I have totally neglected all my private concerns, which are declining every day, and may possibly end in capital losses, if not absolute ruin, before I am at liberty to look after them.”20
Among the pleasures of his return was the chance to see the mansion’s new north wing and the stylish dining room where he would entertain state visitors. It was likely here that he held a dinner for his guests on the night of September 12 before departing for Williamsburg the next morning. Jacky Custis prevailed upon his stepfather to take him along as a personal aide, a belated stint of service that must have awakened mixed feelings in Washington.
Arriving in Williamsburg late on the afternoon of September 14, Washington settled into the two-story brick home of George Wythe, a signer of the Declaration of Independence and Thomas Jefferson’s old law professor. Washington moved about the town in a casual, unobtrusive fashion. “He approached without any pomp or parade, attended only by a few horsemen and his own servants,” observed St. George Tucker, a well-to-do young Virginia lawyer and militia colonel.21 Although Washington eschewed the swagger of power, his self-effacing presence sent an electric jolt through the ranks of soldiers.
As Tucker discovered, Washington had a retentive mind for detail and a politician’s knack for remembering names: “To my great surprise, he recognized my features and spoke to me immediately by name.”22 The young man also witnessed the fervent reunion between Washington and Lafayette, conjuring it up in a letter to his wife the next day. The marquis “caught the General round his body, hugged him as close as it was possible, and absolutely kissed him from ear to ear once or twice . . . with as much ardor as ever an absent lover kissed his mistress on his return.”23 Washington also remained accessible to ordinary soldiers. “He stands in the door, takes every man by the hand,” twenty-year-old Ebenezer Denny of Pennsylvania wrote home, still atremble with excitement. “The officers all pass in, receiving his hand and shake. This is the first time I had seen the general.”24
That evening Washington was entertained with an elegant supper and the overture from a French opera. The next morning he informed de Grasse of his wish to confer with him. The French admiral had already issued a rather huffy letter to him, questioning the dilatory pace of the Continental Army. “The season is approaching when, against my will, I shall be obliged to forsake the allies for whom I have done my very best and more than could be expected,” he wrote reprovingly.25 It was easy for the French admiral to quibble. The soldiers marching south from Head of Elk to Annapolis faced an exhausting trek through an inhospitable landscape that one soldier depicted as “abominable, cut by deep ravines and many small rivers, which the soldiers were obliged to ford after removing their shoes and stockings.” The next day they negotiated a riverbed “so rocky that the horses risked breaking their legs. All the way across we were in water up to our waists, and the horses up to their knees.”26 At Annapolis the soldiers could finally sail the rest of the way down the Chesapeake to the James River.
On September 17 the Count de Grasse sent a boat to convey Washington, Rochambeau, and their aides to his flagship, the Ville de Paris, riding at anchor off Cape Henry. Not since his Barbados trip as a teenager had Washington spent so much time afloat. It was noon the next day before the generals reached the French armada and gazed at the grand spectacle of thirty-two giant ships spanning the horizon. Reputed to be the world’s biggest warship, the towering Ville de Paris— a gift from the city of Paris to the king—bristled with 110 guns and 1,300 men. Varnished to a high gloss, it was given an extra coat of French glamour by flowers and plants festooning the quarterdeck. Admiral de Grasse turned out to be a good-looking man of imposing height and girth. “The admiral is a remarkable man for size, appearance, and plainness of address,” noted Jonathan Trumbull, Jr.27 A scion of an aristocratic family, de Grasse had naval experience dating back to the War of Jenkins’ Ear in 1740, when he had fought against Lawrence Washington. At six foot two, de Grasse was slightly taller than Washington, whom he embraced with gusto, kissing him on both cheeks and exclaiming, “Mon cher petit général!”28 Never comfortable with physical affection, Washington was less amused than Knox and his officers, who roared with unrestricted laughter.
Despite the formal dinner and other marks of courtesy that de Grasse had arranged, the talks did not go smoothly. He set a deadline of no later than November 1 for his time in Virginia, and Washington hoped the Yorktown siege would fit into this abbreviated timetable. He gave de Grasse a mixed grade, calling him a “gallant officer” while also bemoaning his “impetuosity.”29 Mostly Washington felt powerless in dealing with the arrogant admiral. When their talks ended, de Grasse devised an elaborate sunset send-off for Washington, with crewmen on all the ships scrambling up into the riggings and firing muskets in the sequence
known as a feu de joie.
For three days Washington’s departing boat was buffeted by gusts, and he didn’t return to Williamsburg until September 22. By then, the last remnants of the Continental Army had tramped in from their marathon journey. No sooner was Washington back than he received an unpleasant surprise. Admiral Graves had returned with his fleet to New York, where he hoped to be reinforced; to avert this, de Grasse contemplated a move north to cut off any British movements by sea. Writing to de Grasse, Washington communicated his “painful anxiety” at any action that might compromise the Yorktown siege. “The enterprise against York[town] under the protection of your ships is as certain as any military operation can be rendered by a decisive superiority of strength and means,” he pleaded.30 Washington by now had gotten religion about the Yorktown mission, and de Grasse decided to cancel the voyage to New York. Nevertheless, in a mildly irritated tone, he told Washington, “Your Excellency may be very sure that I have, so to speak, more at heart than yourself that the expedition to York may terminate agreeably to our desires.”31
On September 28 Washington and his army began the twelve-mile march to Yorktown through scenery he depicted as “beautiful, fertile country.”32 The day was so sultry that at least two men perished from the heat. That night Washington slept safely behind the lines in a wooded glade under “the small spreading branches of a tree,” with a spring running nearby.33 The next day he pitched a couple of tents, including a large dining marquee that would enable him to entertain up to forty guests at a time during the siege.
Cornwallis and his troops were holed up on the bluff of Yorktown village, which was set above the broad, gleaming expanse of the York River, with the town of Gloucester lying directly across the water. This bucolic spot was more salubrious than the low-lying swamps nearby. Most British troops stayed behind the main fortifications, but Cornwallis had expanded the defensive perimeter with ten low earthen redoubts that projected into the sandy battlefield. From the outset it was an uneven contest, for Cornwallis had almost 9,000 troops versus nearly 19,000 French and Americans. Seeing his precarious situation, Cornwallis counted on Sir Henry Clinton to redeem his pledge and relieve him with thousands of fresh troops. “This place is in no state of defense,” Cornwallis warned on September 17. “If you cannot relieve me very soon, you must be prepared to hear the worst.”34 Failing to heed the urgent warning, Clinton procrastinated, in one of the foremost blunders of the war.
As British soldiers peered from behind their earthworks, they could see French troops and artillery to their right and American to their left. The Frenchmen looked almost fashionably garbed compared with their impoverished American counterparts. As Anthony Wayne said of the troops who came with de Grasse, they made “a very fine soldierly appearance, they being all very tall men, their uniform is white coats turned up with blue, their underclothes are white.”35
The Battle of Yorktown proceeded like a textbook European siege. The patriots were poorly tutored in this military science in which the veteran French engineers excelled, relegating Washington again to a secondary position. On October 1 Washington and Rochambeau scouted ground for the first of several parallel trenches that would edge progressively closer to the enemy. Each morning the two men reviewed the progress, but Washington deferred to French expertise about sieges, putting the French general in command. As Rochambeau wrote, “I must render the Americans the justice to say that they conducted themselves with that zeal, courage, and emulation, with which they were never backward,” although they were “totally ignorant of the operations of a siege.”36
The British camp showed early signs of extreme distress. On October 2, while scouring the York River through his spyglass, St. George Tucker noticed dozens of dead horses bobbing in the water. Having run short of forage, the British had shot the animals and dumped them in the river, crowding the water with four hundred carcasses. A fetid and lasting stench hung over the town as dead animals rotted in the tidal flats. Two days later two British deserters drifted into the allied camp and retailed horror stories of widespread disease among Cornwallis’s men—two thousand were already laid up in the hospital.
On the night of October 5, laboring in darkness and secrecy, the allies began to carve out a trench two miles long. By the next morning they had thrown up sufficient dirt to form earthworks in front of it, enabling them to work while shielded from British fire. Washington toured the nocturnal site, wrapped in a cloak, without revealing his identity. During the clear, unseasonably mild autumn days, the British raked the allied lines with almost continuous fire, making it risky to move about. They threw everything imaginable at the allies: a thick hail of musket fire, cannonballs, grapeshot, shells, and bombs. Washington again showed preternatural calm in braving shots and never deviated from his fearless stand. It was futile for people to insist that he protect himself. One day a cannonball landed near him, tossing a huge cloud of sand in the sky, which filtered down on Chaplain Israel Evans. He removed his hat, examined it, and said to Washington, “See here, general!” “Mr. Evans,” Washington replied, “you had better carry that [ball] home and show it to your wife and children.”37 Washington bore the stress gracefully, and Jacky Custis wrote home that “the general, tho[ugh] in constant fatigue, looks very well.”38
When the first parallel was completed on October 9, the French, in a gesture of respect, allowed Washington to ignite the first gun aimed at the British, which scored a memorable shot. “I could hear the ball strike from house to house,” recalled Philip Van Cortlandt of New York, “and I was afterwards informed that it went through the one where many of the officers were at dinner, and over the tables, discomposing the dishes and either killed or wounded the one at the head of the table.”39 While American gunners lacked pinpoint accuracy, they wreaked terrible devastation on the enemy. “One could not avoid the horribly many cannonballs, either inside or outside the city,” said one of Cornwallis’s soldiers. “. . . Many men were badly injured and mortally wounded by the fragments of bombs . . . [so that] their arms and legs [were] severed or themselves struck dead.”40
A standard siege inched forward in a slow, creeping motion, with each trench nearer the enemy. On October 12 a second trench was begun only three hundred yards from enemy lines, and once again miners and sappers worked diligently through the night, astounding the British the next morning with their overnight progress and doubtless inducing a claustrophobic feeling. Day and night the cannon fire was deadly, cacophonous, and incessant. Cornwallis issued a cri de coeur to Sir Henry Clinton, asking him to send a fleet and asserting that “nothing but a direct move to York River—which includes a successful naval action—can save me.” He concluded bleakly that “we cannot hope to make a long resistance.”41
As the second parallel neared completion, the next priority became seizing two outlying British defenses, redoubts nine and ten, which blocked any further advance. In a spirit of Franco-American harmony, Washington assigned one redoubt to the French, the other to Americans under Lafayette. Since the siege had been the handiwork of gunners and engineers, affording little opportunity for swashbuckling heroism, a spirited competition arose to lead the charges. At first Lafayette drafted his personal aide, the Chevalier de Gimat, but this seemed unsporting to American soldiers, especially the determined Alexander Hamilton. After wearing down Washington with petitions for a field position, he had been rewarded with command of a New York light infantry battalion. Now Hamilton, claiming seniority over Gimat, applied his persuasive powers to win the assignment of leading four hundred men against redoubt ten. That Washington acceded to his wishes shows not only his respect for Hamilton’s ability but his willingness to rise above personal pettiness to patch up a quarrel.
John Adams later insisted that Hamilton had blackmailed Washington into granting him the assignment. “You inquire what passed between Washington and Hamilton at Yorktown?” wrote Adams (who wasn’t there) to Benjamin Rush. “Washington had ordered . . . another officer to take the command of the att
ack upon the redoubt. Hamilton flew into a violent passion and demanded the command of the party for himself and declared if he had it not, he would expose General Washington’s conduct in a pamphlet.”42 The idea that Washington would have been cowed by a crude threat shows little understanding of the man. Such patent blackmail would have cost Hamilton his relationship with Washington forever.
At dusk on October 14 Washington delivered a pep talk to Hamilton’s men, urging them to “act the part of firm and brave soldiers” in storming the redoubt.43 “I thought then that His Excellency’s knees rather shook,” said Captain Stephen Olney, “but I have since doubted whether it was not mine.”44 The artillery pounded the two redoubts to weaken them for the assault. Then, as night fell, with shells illuminating the sky, Hamilton and his party rose from their trenches and sprinted across the open field. To ensure speed and surprise, they had orders not to shoot their muskets but only to employ fixed bayonets. Standing on elevated ground, Washington watched the dramatic scene with Generals Lincoln and Knox. “Sir, you are too much exposed here,” urged Washington’s aide David Cobb, Jr. “Had you not better step a little back?” “Colonel Cobb,” Washington said coolly, “if you are afraid, you have liberty to step back.”45
When they reached the redoubt, the sappers had to leap a moat and contend with an abatis—felled trees sharpened to lethal points—which they slashed with axes to form an opening. The French operation against redoubt number nine suffered high casualties, while Hamilton’s group sustained minimal losses. Among the heroes of the charge was the largely black First Rhode Island Regiment. “The bravery exhibited by the attacking troops was emulous and praiseworthy,” Washington recorded in his journal. “Few cases have exhibited stronger proofs of intrepidity, coolness, and firmness than were shown upon this occasion.”46 By capturing the two redoubts, the allies could now install short-range howitzers that fired ricochet projectiles, which bounced along the ground toward their target, then killed and maimed with ghoulish efficiency.
