On the south side of the York River, facing Yorktown, the French were on the west and the Americans on the east, arrayed in a broad semicircle whose farthest point was about 1.5 miles from Yorktown. At the midpoint of that semicircle, the large French artillery pieces were emplaced and, to their rear, the headquarters of Rochambeau and Washington. On the north side of the river, in a smaller semicircle around Gloucester, the Montbarrey rules had the French positioned on the east flank and the Americans on the west.
The three American columns facing Cornwallis were led by Lafayette, Steuben, and Lincoln. Rochambeau’s forces, consisting of the Soissonnais, Bourbonnais, Deux-Ponts, Saintonge, Agénois, Touraine, and Gâtinais Regiments, were under the command of the Baron de Vioménil, the Comte de Vioménil, and Saint-Simon. Across the river, near Gloucester, facing troops led by Lt. Col. Thomas Dundas and Tarleton, were the Virginia Militia, the infantry brought by de Grasse, and Lauzun’s Legion, all commanded by the Marquis de Choisy.
The Continental army at Yorktown and Gloucester included nearly all of the French and European officers who had previously played important roles in the Revolutionary War: Lafayette, Duportail, Steuben, Fleury, du Bouchet (who had hot-footed it down to Yorktown once the big field pieces had gone ahead with Barras), du Plessis, Armand, Gimat, Gouvion, and L’Enfant. Du Ponceau’s frail constitution had failed him and he had returned to Philadelphia, where, since he had finally turned twenty-one, he took the oath of allegiance to the United States and became an assistant to the new secretary of state, Robert Livingston. Most of the American veteran officers were also at Yorktown—Knox, Lincoln, Wayne, and even Laurens, who had hastened from Boston and had been once again serving as an aide-de-camp until the British captured the major in charge of a regiment, whereupon Washington awarded part of that command to a grateful Laurens. The only serving senior American officers not at Yorktown were General Heath and a small army guarding West Point, and General Greene and his contingent, who were closing in on the coast of South Carolina. Washington and his staff knew very well that it had been the work of Greene and Marion, in keeping other British forces occupied, that had made possible the encirclement of Cornwallis at Yorktown.
In the French army’s ranks were officers who had sought for years to serve in the American Revolution, including Lauzun, Chastellux, and Noailles, who had already seen action with d’Estaing. These visitors too were imbued with a sense of mission beyond the achieving of personal gloire; all had been impressed by the Americans and their zeal for independence, and had embraced the American cause as their own. Moreover, they had become admirers of the ragtag American army whose soldiers continued to fight despite conditions that would have made any European professional soldier refuse to carry on.
In the lower ranks were such long-serving soldiers as Joseph Plumb Martin, the diarist whose work under Fleury at Fort Mifflin had spurred him to volunteer for the “sappers and miners” of Duportail’s corps; he and that corps would be at the forefront of the digging of trenches for the siege. Also in the ranks were such stalwarts as the First Rhode Island Regiment, composed mostly of blacks, who had acquitted themselves well at Newport and ever since. Closen estimated that a quarter of the American troops at Yorktown were black.
For all of these French and American officers and soldiers, there was a tremendous sense of approaching culmination, of all the roads and the ups and downs of the war having finally led to this juncture, this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to achieve the decisive victory and to win not only a war but also, and even more important, the full emancipation of a country dedicated to republican principles.
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“If the Enemy should be tempted to Meet the Army on its March” from Williamsburg to Yorktown, Washington’s order of September 27 said:
the General particularly enjoins the troops to place their principle relyance on the Bayonet—that they may prove the Vanity of the Boast which the British make of their particular pains in deciding Battles with that Weapon—He trusts that … the french whose National Weapon is that of close fight; and the troops in General that have so often used it with success will distinguish themselves on every Occasion that offers—the Justice of the cause in which we are engaged and the Honor of the two Nations must inspire every breast with sentiments that are the presage of Victory.
Facing almost no opposition, although they took some fire, on the twenty-eighth the allied troops made it into position around Yorktown. They were next set to work making thousands of sharpened-stick fascines and earth-filled gabions. A few wondered when the trench-digging would begin; the answer was not until completion of the fascines and gabions, which would serve as barriers so that the trenches were not over-run by the enemy. While the troops worked, the British began bombardment. Their cannonading was kept up at all hours. A single ball could do tremendous damage—one killed four Americans.
On the twenty-ninth the combined French and American army engineers made a reconnaissance of the grounds to be enfiladed with trenches, and recognized formidable obstacles in the manned British emplacements and the redoubts on the perimeter. A French engineer reported to his journal:
They had encamped part of their troops between the redoubts and the batteries, and the main town, in a way that indicated they could extend them and defend them with the advantages of the lay of the land and of the high ground. We would be obliged to attack them with great force, and we should not have been able to do this without great loss.
But that night Cornwallis abruptly withdrew his forces from the perimeters of Yorktown and, across the river, from outside Gloucester. He was hunkering down because Clinton had assured him that British troops would come to his rescue, and would depart New York for the Chesapeake by October 5.
Cornwallis’s withdrawal presented an opportunity, Washington reported to Congress: “By this Means we are in possession of very advantageous Grounds, which command in a very near Advance, almost the whole Remaing Line of their Defence. All the Expedition that our Circumstances will admit, is using, to bring up our heavy Artillery & Stores, & to open our Batteries—this Work I hope will be executed in a few Days, when our Fire will begin with great Vigor.”
As these preparations were being undertaken, new units continued to arrive and augment the Continental forces. One was commanded by Alexander Hamilton. Since Hamilton’s break with Washington in the spring, he had worked assiduously to obtain a command, and on July 31 Washington had relented and allowed him that of a New York light infantry battalion. Marching separately from the main armies, Hamilton’s battalion made it from New York to Yorktown just as the siege was being readied.
On October 3, as Choisy was moving closer to Gloucester, Tarleton’s cavalry charged out. Lauzun would recall that it was three times the size of his own, but he nonetheless ran at them. “Tarleton saw me and rode towards me with a pistol raised. We were about to fight single-handed … when his horse was thrown by one of his dragoons pursued by one of my lancers.” The intercession of other British troops kept the two commanders apart, and the encounter ended with the British unable to deter the allies from tightening the circle around Gloucester.
That day Washington received a dispatch from Greene telling of the battle of Eutaw Springs a month earlier; in it Greene had lost ground but captured five hundred British soldiers and prevented further British progress; British troops in the south, confined to Savannah and Charleston, would be unable to assist Cornwallis. As Greene wrote to his friend Knox, “We have been beating the bush, and the General has come to catch the bird. Never was there a more inviting object to glory.”
On the night of October 5–6 the second stage of the siege began—on schedule and with tremendous force and very precise instructions. Those from Washington covered fifty-five different matters, from the exact size of the fascines to the position of flags to be planted to what to do if the enemy attacked the diggers while they were at work. Shifts of the fifteen thousand men available from both armies enfiladed trenches at a distanc
e 2,800–3,200 feet from the British lines, and parallel to them. The right end of the works was flanked by the river escarpment, the left was anchored on a small ravine. Most of the picks and shovels used were French—Rochambeau had brought along four thousand. The trenches were deliberately situated outside the range of Cornwallis’s grapeshot, though not beyond that of his cannons. The diggers threw the dirt above the trench and onto the side closest to the British to screen them from enemy fire; some was thrown into the newly made gabions, which were three feet higher than the embankment. The trenches were made four feet deep and ten feet wide, allowing soldiers to course through without being overly exposed to enemy fire. Redoubts at each end, and some in the middle, housed guards to defend the diggers. Zigzag side trenches were dug to bring troops even closer to the British. A diversion was made by having a number of campfires, well off to the side, in front of which men constantly passed; the diarist Martin reported that “the British were led to imagine that we were about some secret mischief there, and consequently they directed their whole fire to that quarter, while we were entrenching literally under their noses.”
“Before Morning the Trenches were in such forwardness as to cover the Men from the enemys fire,” Washington wrote after that first night. “The work was executed with so much secresy & dispatch that the enemy were, I believe, totally ignorant of our labor till the light of the Morning discovered it to them.” Duportail supervised the work to the point of exhaustion, relying more and more on his subordinate officers, particularly Gouvion, who laid out the path of the trench.
That evening the entrenchers were subjected to concentrated enemy fire on a single position, producing casualties—the result, they learned, of an allied deserter having told the British the trench’s location. Saint-Simon’s troops created a diversionary attack that allowed more progress. British deserters told of famine and pestilence thinning the British ranks. Moreover, everyone could smell the results of one desperate Cornwallis move, the killing of four hundred horses whose carcasses were then dumped in the river.
On October 7, when a Pennsylvania unit sought to parade with flags and drums in the trench, Hamilton stepped in. Citing Vauban, he decreed the classical way of doing so, which culminated in the marchers climbing out of the trench and flaunting their power by performing the “manual of arms”—rifle-handling maneuvers—in full view of the enemy. Fortunately, none of the show-offs was killed.
At various points in the entrenching process, Rochambeau and Washington, emulating Shakespeare’s Henry V’s “a little touch of Harry in the night,” separately, and in Washington’s case incognito in an overcoat that hid his uniform, visited the front to speak quietly with their sappers. When Martin heard a superior officer whisper to the visitor, “Your Excellency,” he deduced it was Washington. “Had we dared, we might have cautioned him for exposing himself too carelessly to danger at such a time, and doubtless he would have taken it in good part if we had.”
By midafternoon on October 9, the trench was close enough to the British lines to allow the commanders to bring forward fifty-two big guns, plus mortars and smaller-bore cannons. The allies were several days ahead of the siege schedule due to the lightness of the soil to be moved and the relative absence of British harassment of the diggers. Many of the American cannons had originally been French and were a generation older than the heavy pieces brought across the Atlantic by Rochambeau. The largest had even more recently been brought from Newport by Barras, and by ox teams provided by Virginia’s governor that had appeared at Williamsburg just in time to haul the big guns overland to Yorktown.
As dusk approached, at an agreed-upon signal—an American flag hoisted atop an American emplacement and a French one atop one of theirs—allied cannon fire began. Washington granted Saint-Simon the first shot, from a French twenty-four. Knox lit the flame for the second, and then handed it to Washington, who ceremoniously touched off the initial American fuse. As with virtually everything done at Yorktown, the cannonades were conducted in equal measure by American and French forces, even when, as with the quality and accuracy of the cannons, the French troops’ equipment was far better than that of the Americans. In charge of the French artillery was François-Marie, Comte d’Aboville, an expert who had worked out the theory of concentrating masses of fire on a single objective, a theory he had occasion to put into practice at Yorktown. The French naval corporal Simon Pouzoulet, after fighting at sea with de Grasse, had come ashore to serve with the artillery, and marveled to his diary at how well-coordinated were the salvos of d’Aboville and Knox. D’Aboville and his lieutenants—among them, du Plessis—had more experience than the Americans; but Chastellux noted, in regard to Knox:
One cannot sufficiently admire the intelligence and activity with which he collected from different places and transported to the batteries more than 30 pieces of cannon and mortars of large caliber for the siege.… The artillery was always very well served, the general incessantly directing it and often himself pointing the mortars; seldom did he leave the batteries.
Within hours Washington was able to record in his diary that the combined forces’ cannons had “good effect as they compelled the Enemy to withdraw from their ambrazures the Pieces which had previously kept up a constant firing.” That day, 3,600 allied balls were lobbed at Yorktown, virtually destroying it above ground. A blazing ball, heated in a French oven especially constructed for that purpose, hit the HMS Charon, which caught fire and burned completely. All through Yorktown soldiers and civilians were dying in the streets, their limbs cut off or otherwise grievously wounded, but the incessant bombardment preventing the injured from being brought indoors for medical attention.
Cornwallis could not help but be appalled. On the tenth there were two other discouraging matters: His attempt at embarking eighteen barges loaded with British troops to land on the Gloucester side was foiled by Choisy’s use of his cannons to blast them and force their return to the Yorktown side. Also, a messenger in a whaleboat, rowed all the way from New York by men who on the last leg managed to slip through de Grasse’s fleet, handed Cornwallis precisely the message from Clinton that he had dreaded: No British rescue expedition had yet started out.
As the allied land forces tightened the circle around Yorktown and the siege neared its climax, in the harbor de Grasse was becoming irritable at fellow senior commanders who asked him for everything—more troops, more vessels to ferry them and their supplies, and even more flour. “You’re taking my flour, that’s pulling the covers off me too far,” he wrote to Rochambeau. “How happy I will be when I’m out of the Chesapeake.” Rochambeau apologized and offered to replace the flour. In refusing Washington’s request to station ships above Yorktown to facilitate communications, de Grasse asked him to furnish rowboats to tow the French ships out of danger of fire ships, but the next day he apologized. “I am a Provençal and a sailor. Those are sufficient reasons for being impulsive. I admit my guilt and depend on your friendship.”
By October 11 the Franco-American bombardment had done so much damage and disabled so many enemy cannon that Rochambeau began the next step of the siege, the digging of a second trench, within 1,152 feet of the city—nearly half a mile closer to it, a bold leap forward, as decreed by the Vauban principles. Great progress on that new trench was made by morning. But during the next day it became apparent that two redoubts, numbers Nine and Ten, were preventing the second trench from being extended farther. These redoubts were on the eastern side of Yorktown and were extremely well-fortified, in essence mini-forts, each with a moat, abatis and other sharpened sticks, and defended by determined, well-trained British regulars. For the allies to reach within storming distance of the town itself, those British redoubts had to be taken. Plans were made to do so on the night of the 14th.
Here were prime opportunities to achieve gloire, and everyone knew it and wanted to take part in storming these particular barricades. The Baron de Vioménil proposed that his grenadiers, his most elite troops, do the honors. Was
hington and Rochambeau said no, for while the grenadiers were the most experienced fighters, the tasks needed to be divided equally among the armies. Washington assigned redoubt Nine to the French and Ten to the Americans.
Both assignments caused difficulties in the ranks. First, Washington, in awarding the task to Lafayette, had to pass over Steuben. The baron acquiesced without objection because he owed Lafayette, who had protected him earlier in the year from Virginia politicians angered at his reluctance to attack a powerful enemy force. Then Lafayette wanted to award command to Gimat, now a battalion leader. Hamilton, learning of this, erupted. After all, the soldiers to be led were Americans, and he had more seniority. He also demanded command because it would be his last—indeed his only—chance for battlefield glory. Should he remain on the sidelines and the fighting end soon, he would have been through the war without a command. Washington overruled Lafayette and gave Hamilton command, with Gimat leading one of its battalions. Laurens headed another, which would attempt to prevent the British from retreating without being captured. At nearly the last minute, Armand de la Rouërie, who had ridden to Yorktown on his own after serving elsewhere in the South, pleaded with Washington and Hamilton to be allowed to take part in the assault on redoubt Ten. They accepted the marquis and some of his men as volunteers.
The password of the night was “Rochambeau,” which to some American soldiers sounded like “Rush on, boys,” a phrase they deemed highly appropriate. Also among Hamilton’s men that night were the First Rhode Island, and Duportail’s sappers and miners, one of them Martin. When the diarist saw officers affixing their bayonets to the ends of staves that were much longer than rifles, he knew the fighting was going to be intense, close, and dangerous.
How the French Saved America Page 27
