In the Hurricane's Eye

by Nathaniel Philbrick

  Without Cornwallis’s head-scratching insistence on remaining, in Washington’s words, “passive beyond our expectation,” the Chesapeake strategy originally promulgated by Rochambeau would have been an anticlimactic failure. As Alexander Hamilton had written back on August 22, “It is ten to one that our views will be disappointed by Lord Cornwallis retiring to South Carolina by land.” Instead, Cornwallis had remained on his lonely point between the James and York rivers as first a vast fleet of French ships and then an equally large enemy army assembled around him. He later claimed that Clinton’s assurances of rescue had given him no other choice but to wait it out. But that required him to ignore irrefutable evidence of the impossibility of a British fleet penetrating the French-occupied waters of the Chesapeake. Instead of providing Clinton with a realistic assessment of the situation from the start, Cornwallis had jauntily advised his commander in chief not to “hurry too fast.” In the end, only Washington—and perhaps Spanish envoy Francisco Saavedra, who had urged de Grasse to take as many ships as possible north from the Caribbean—understood just how crucial it was for an army to have the navy at its back. As Washington wrote to Lafayette in the weeks after Yorktown, “It follows then as certain as that night succeeds the day, that without a decisive naval force we can do nothing definitive, and with it, everything honorable and glorious.”

  On the day after the British surrender, Henry Knox received a letter from his good friend Nathanael Greene. After fighting yet another bloody but indecisive battle at South Carolina’s Eutaw Springs, Greene and his small band of soldiers continued to work their way toward the ultimate prize, British-occupied Charleston. He was, of course, very glad to hear of the promising developments in Virginia. However, he was too honest not to admit to having mixed feelings about the glorious victory that was about to come Washington’s way. Only after suffering an exhausting winter chasing Greene’s army across North Carolina, capped by the Battle of Guilford Courthouse, had Cornwallis decided to head to the Tidewater. “We have been beating the bush,” Greene wrote, “and the General has come to catch the bird. . . . The General is a most fortunate man, and may success and laurels attend him. We have fought frequently and bled freely, and little glory comes our share.”

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  FOUR YEARS BEFORE AT SARATOGA, American commander Horatio Gates had agreed to the outrageously lenient terms of surrender insisted on by John Burgoyne. Washington quickly made it evident that this time negotiations were to proceed on his terms. Knowing Cornwallis wanted to prolong discussions for as long as possible in hopes the British fleet would finally make an appearance, Washington insisted that his lordship provide him with “proposals in writing” in no less than two hours. When the proposals failed to appear at the appointed time, the allied artillery resumed firing. That resulted in the almost immediate appearance at the parapet of Cornwallis’s second in command, General Charles O’Hara, with his superior’s response. Washington found several of Cornwallis’s proposals “inadmissible,” but had seen enough, he recorded in his diary, “to believe that there would be no great difficulty in fixing terms. Accordingly, hostilities were suspended for the night.”

  “The night was remarkably clear,” Lieutenant Colonel St. George Tucker remembered, “and the sky decorated with ten thousand stars.” Instead of the fiery tails of explosive shells, the American, French, British, and German soldiers were treated to another kind of pyrotechnics. “[N]umberless meteors gleaming through the atmosphere afforded a pleasing resemblance to the bombs which had exhibited a noble firework the night before,” Tucker continued, “but happily divested of all their horror. At dawn of day the British gave us a serenade with the bagpipe . . . and were answered by the French with the band of the regiment of Deux Ponts.” When the sun rose at 5:59 a.m., both the allied and British works were crowded with soldiers as the two armies stared at each other in the soft light of morning.

  No one knew what the ultimate repercussions of Cornwallis’s surrender would be, and yet everyone realized that something of tremendous importance had already occurred. After six and a half years of fighting, a war that had started with a skirmish on a village green in Lexington, Massachusetts, had come down to this: two armies gazing at each other across the burned and torn-up remains of Yorktown.

  Later that morning Cornwallis received Washington’s summation of the terms he would accept. His lordship had proposed that “the British [troops] shall be sent to Britain and the Germans to Germany under engagement not to serve against France, America, or their allies,” and that his army receive “the customary honors.” Washington would have none of it. The year before, at the fall of Charleston, the American army under Benjamin Lincoln had been denied those honors, despite putting up a brave six-week defense. Cornwallis’s army would suffer the same indignity, and needless to say, the troops would remain prisoners of war in America.

  “Your Lordship will be pleased to signify your determination either to accept or reject the proposals now offered,” Washington wrote, “or a renewal of hostilities may take place.” Cornwallis promptly agreed to Washington’s terms as long as the British sloop of war Bonetta was “left entirely at my disposal from the hour that the capitulation is signed.” In addition to carrying Cornwallis’s dispatches (but not Cornwallis himself) back to Clinton, the vessel would provide the loyalists and deserters in Yorktown with a way to escape to New York.

  Two commissioners were appointed on each side (with the allies represented by John Laurens and Lafayette’s brother-in-law the Vicomte de Noailles), and formal negotiations began that morning. Cornwallis was resigned to the fact that his soldiers must remain prisoners in America, but he had a much harder time with being denied the terms of an honorable surrender. As the British commissioners pointed out, it had been Clinton, not Cornwallis, who had been in command at Charleston. But as Laurens countered, “it is not the individual that is here considered. It is the nation.”

  The haggling among the commissioners was “so procrastinated” that by the time they retired for the night, no formal treaty had been drafted. Refusing to allow the negotiations to continue any longer, Washington told Laurens and Noailles to write up “the rough draft of the articles,” and he would send them to Cornwallis in the morning with the understanding “that I expected to have them signed at 11 am and that the garrison would march out at 2 pm.” And so, before noon on October 19, the “Articles of Capitulation” were signed, according to a note made at the bottom of the document, “in the trenches before Yorktown.”

  Under the terms of the capitulation, approximately seven thousand British and German soldiers had been subtracted from the ranks of the king’s forces in North America. That in itself did not represent a deathblow to the British war effort. The question was what the symbolic value of the surrender would be back in England. Even if the king should prove unyielding, would his ministry and, most important, would Parliament begin to believe that the time had come to acknowledge the independence of the former colonies?

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  ON THAT VERY SAME DAY, October 19, the British fleet finally departed from Sandy Hook. Five days later, a small boat bearing three men who had escaped from Yorktown on the night of the capitulation managed to wave down one of the British frigates sailing in advance of the giant fleet. Lord Cornwallis, they reported, had surrendered.

  Admiral Rodney later insisted that in Graves’s place, he would have established a blockade at the Capes of Virginia so as to “block [the French fleet] up to eternity.” But Graves was no Rodney, and after several aimless days cruising in sight of Cape Henry, the British fleet returned to New York. It was, Samuel Hood wrote to a friend in England, “a most heartbreaking business.”

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  ON THE MORNING OF OCTOBER 19, a portion of the trenches and fortifications surrounding Yorktown were leveled so that the British could march out of their works o
nto the road leading to Williamsburg for the “grand exhibition.” The Americans were lined up on the right side of the road; the French on the left. At the end of the half-mile-long gauntlet of soldiers, the Duc de Lauzun’s hussars encircled the field where the British were to deposit their arms. In addition to the nineteen thousand allied soldiers were an equal number of spectators. Around two o’clock, the British, led not by Cornwallis, who claimed to be ill, but by General O’Hara, marched out of Yorktown to the slow beat of the drum, their twenty-two regimental flags ignominiously furled and stored in their cases, and the band playing what was later said to be the mournful tune “The World Turned Upside Down.”

  From the first, the British made no attempt to hide their contempt for the Americans. O’Hara knew perfectly well who was the commander in chief of the allied forces, but instead of presenting his sword to Washington, who sat astride his reddish-brown horse at the head of the American army, the British general turned to his left and asked for Rochambeau, who quickly directed him to Washington. Feigning embarrassment, O’Hara presented his sword to Washington, who directed him to give it to his second in command, Benjamin Lincoln.

  Whether or not it happened just then, at some point during the ceremony, the horse on which sat Admiral de Barras (who was there in place of the genuinely indisposed de Grasse) arched its back and, according to Baron von Closen, “vent[ed] himself.” This so flustered the French admiral (who was “anything but a good horseman”) that he cried out, “Good heavens! I believe my horse is sinking!!”

  The contrast between the two allied armies could not have been more pronounced. According to von Closen, the Americans were “eclipsed by our army in splendor of appearance and dress, for most of these unfortunate persons were clad in small jackets of white cloth, dirty and ragged, and a number of them were almost barefoot.” Of course, the shabby appearance of the Americans only made the shame felt by the British all the more difficult to bear, and they showed, according to von Closen, “the greatest scorn for the Americans” by directing their eyes only to the French as they marched between the two lines of soldiers. Angered by “their studied disregard,” Lafayette ordered his drum major to begin playing “Yankee Doodle,” and “[t]he band’s blare made them turn their eyes toward his side of the line.”

  The British were clearly not at their best. Some said they were drunk; others said they “behaved like boys who had been whipped at school.” The German soldiers, on the other hand, who, in Martin’s words, “did not greatly care whose hands they were in,” remained calm and dignified throughout. It was in the field at the end of the two lines of soldiers that the pride of the British was, according to James Thacher, “put to the severest test. Here their mortification could not be concealed.” Biting their lips and in some cases openly weeping, the soldiers hurled their weapons to the ground in a clear attempt to damage them. “This irregularity,” Thacher wrote, “was checked by the authority of Lincoln.” Once divested of their arms and their colors, the soldiers marched back to Yorktown, where they were to remain under guard until they could be removed to their places of imprisonment.

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  ON THE NIGHT of the British surrender, Washington hosted a dinner to which both French and British officers were invited. Already it had become obvious that despite being allies, the French and Americans did not necessarily like each other, which was perhaps not unsurprising given that only thirty years before, during the Seven Years’ War, the two peoples had been mortal enemies. Johann Ewald claimed that if the armies of France and America had not been separated during the previous winter, “many a French grenadier’s saber would have been plunged into American blood. . . . For one continually hears, ‘Fripons, ces Américans!’ [‘Knaves, these Americans!’]. . . . And how many quarrels I have seen between officers and sentries of these nations . . . [which] certainly results from national enmity.”

  Much to Washington’s distress, it also became evident during the dinner on October 19 that while the British despised the Americans, they did not feel the same toward the French. “The English and French got on famously with one another,” Comte de Clermont-Crèvecoeur observed. “When the Americans expressed their displeasure on this subject, we replied that good upbringing and courtesy bind us together and that, since we had reason to believe that the Americans did not like us, they should not be surprised at our preference.”

  Anyone who has been left out of the conversation at a star-studded dinner party knows what the American officers were feeling. “Such a jealousy came over General Washington,” Ewald remembered, “that he cast stern expressions toward the French generals over the too-friendly relations between the French and our officers. . . . [A] cool conduct began to prevail among the two diverse nations which, in good fortune, had formed only one.” Making matters worse, Lord Cornwallis, who had failed to attend Washington’s dinner, chose to accept the invitation of General de Vioménil.

  What the French officers failed to appreciate was that by serving the cause of the American Revolution, they had helped to undermine their own privileged position in France’s ancien régime. They might look with disdain on the lowly Americans, but those uncultured commoners were the living embodiment of the forces that would, in just a decade’s time, tear their own society apart. More than a few of the French officers who chose to ignore their American allies that evening were destined to lose their exquisitely coifed heads to the guillotine.

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  THE DAY AFTER THE SURRENDER, Baron von Closen accompanied General Rochambeau on a trip to Yorktown to visit Cornwallis. “I will never forget how frightful and disturbing was the appearance of the city . . . from the fortifications on the crest to the strand below. One could not take three steps without running into some great holes made by bombs, some splinters, some balls, some half-covered trenches, with scattered white or Negro arms or legs, some bits of uniforms. Most of the houses riddled by cannon fire, and almost no window panes in the houses.”

  They found his lordship in the wreck of a house that was serving as his residence. “His appearance gave the impression of nobility of soul,” von Closen remembered, “magnanimity, and strength of character; his manner seemed to say, ‘I have nothing with which to reproach myself, I have done my duty and I held out as long as possible.’”

  Given the evidence of suffering and death surrounding him, it must have been a difficult pose to maintain. The British and German casualties (about 300 killed and twice that many wounded) had been relatively light given the amount of metal that had rained down on Yorktown. It was a different story, however, when it came to the 4500 slaves Cornwallis had welcomed into his camp.

  Untold numbers had been killed by allied fire during the siege (according to the German soldier George Flohr, African Americans made up “the majority of the dead” in Yorktown) but there were hundreds, if not thousands, more who had died—or were about to die—of disease, starvation, and exposure. “During the siege,” Joseph Plumb Martin remembered, “we saw in the woods herds of Negroes which Lord Cornwallis (after he had inveigled them from their proprietors) in love and pity to them, had turned adrift with no other recompense for their confidence in his humanity than the smallpox for their bounty and starvation and death for their wages. They might be seen scattered about in every direction, dead and dying with pieces of ears of burnt Indian corn in the hands and mouths, even of those that were dead.”

  It is one of the great and deplorable ironies of our country’s history that in the days after the victory that did more than any other to win the citizens of the United States their liberty and freedom, the slaveholders of Virginia descended on Yorktown to ensure that those African Americans who had not already died were denied their liberty and freedom. Some of the slaveholders had traveled from as far away as Richmond, but there was at least one who was already on the scene: His Excellency George Washington.

  Washington ha
d lost seventeen of his slaves to the British the previous spring. To facilitate the recapture of his and other African Americans, he had been sure to include a clause in the Articles of Capitulation that read: “It is understood that any property obviously belonging to the inhabitants of these states, in the possession of the garrison, shall be subject to be reclaimed.” He had even designated what might be termed an official slave catcher, David Ross, to whom all officers and soldiers were to turn over their black servants for return to their proper masters. According to Daniel Trabue, who along with his brother ventured into Yorktown after the siege, “The Negroes looked condemned”—as, of course, they were.

  One can only wonder what the hundreds of African American soldiers in Washington’s army felt about this horrifying scene. As had been proven time and again throughout the war—from the Battle of Bunker Hill to the Siege of Yorktown—the black soldiers were more than deserving of the freedom their service had earned them. If two of the white officers who led the charge on redoubt number 10, Alexander Hamilton and John Laurens, had had their way during the winter of Valley Forge—when they hatched a plan by which enslaved African Americans in the south would gain their freedom by serving in the Continental army—the American force at Yorktown might have been mostly black. Washington had initially approved of Hamilton and Laurens’s plan, writing that “blacks in the southern parts of the continent offer a resource to us that should not be neglected.” Several years later, however, when Laurens brought his proposal before the South Carolina legislature, Washington changed his mind, claiming the plan would be “productive of much discontent in those who are held in servitude.” As commander in chief of the Continental army, he knew he needed all the soldiers he could get. As a private citizen, however, he feared the plan might endanger his way of life, a life built on slavery. And as might be expected, without Washington’s approval, Laurens’s proposal went nowhere.