How the French Saved America

by Tom Shachtman

  On the French side were two regiments, the Deux-Ponts and the Gâtinais, both under the Comte de Deux-Ponts. Many of the Gâtinais, originally from the Auvergne region, were unhappy at having to fight in a regiment not named for their birthplace. Rochambeau solved this. “My children, I have need of you to-night,” he later recalled saying to them. “I hope that you have not forgotten that we served together in the brave regiment of ‘d’Auvergne sans tache’ [Auvergne without reproach], an honorable name.… They replied that if I permitted them to win back their name they would go to the death to the last man.” Rochambeau promised that if they fought well, he would petition the king to change the regiment name.

  Closen, part of the Deux-Ponts, commanded fifty men for the attack. The signal to commence was three shells lofted in rapid succession. These were sent up, and the French and American units advanced. At the same time, as a diversion, Choisy began firing into Gloucester.

  The French ran through the trench and emerged close to redoubt Nine, where they were met by rifle fire. Some French were cut down, but because the French force was triple or quadruple the size of the defending British, they were able to reach the outer defenses of the redoubt and have their sappers and miners start to hack through the abatis while the riflemen covered them. Things did not go well for a time. Some of the French heard, above the fray, Rochambeau’s voice urging them on, shouting “Auvergne sans tache!”

  The American attack on Ten featured Hamilton, Gimat, and Armand in the lead, with Laurens going around the side, and Martin and his fellow sappers and miners jumping over a moat and then hacking away at the abatis and tearing at its stakes with their bare hands. He and the other sappers evaded enemy fire, Martin realized, because they had fallen into deep shell holes produced by allied cannon fire. The first man over the top of the redoubt gave a shout that echoed Fleury’s at Stony Point: “The fort’s our own!” At virtually the same time Laurens was able to capture the British commander of the redoubt. In the endeavor the Americans had not fired a single gun.

  The American attack was successful, and accomplished in less time and with far fewer casualties than the French one. A military expert later suggested that the French took more casualties because their soldiers hung back and let their unarmed sappers and miners work the abatis before joining them—most of the dead were from those sappers or from the Gâtinais Regiment, a third of whom perished—while the American soldiers and officers joined the sappers and made short work of the abatis.

  The overall tally of the French dead continued to mount. A later accounting of Frenchmen who died in actions in defense of the United States during the Revolutionary War identified 2,112 individuals by name, several hundred of whom perished at Yorktown. Moreover, since the total American casualties in the war, according to official estimates, were approximately 6,800 dead on the battlefields, another 6,100 who succumbed to wounds or illnesses contracted while under arms, and as many as 8,000 to 10,000 more who died as prisoners of war—the number of French who lost their lives in the service of the American Revolution was highly significant.

  As soon as the redoubts were taken, Cornwallis’s forces opened fire on them. “It seemed as if all that side was in flames,” Closen reported, and he worried that some of his comrades had been killed or injured; they had been, including a lieutenant and the Vicomte de Deux-Ponts, nearly blinded and made deaf by an incoming ball. Rochambeau awarded two days’ extra pay to the soldiers, and bonuses of two louis for the surviving sappers. The historian Edward Lengel, summing up the attacks on the redoubts, describes them as a “little masterpiece of tactical cooperation” between the allies. Taking them allowed Washington and Rochambeau to bring forward shorter-range weapons, howitzers, and mortars, and to use the formerly British redoubts as platforms from which to lob deadly missiles into Yorktown.

  In Washington’s general orders the next morning, he articulated the meaning of the successful attacks: “The General reflects with the highest degree of pleasure on the Confidence which the Troops of the two Nations must hereafter have in each other. Assured of mutual support he is convinced there is no danger which they will not chearfully encounter—no difficulty which they will not bravely overcome.”

  The British still held out. The allied lines were pervaded by a postbattle cockiness, including a bantering Hamilton and Knox atop a captured redoubt. Their argument was over whether, when a missile came their way, anyone who saw it should shout “A shell!” rather than “A shot,” the former preferred by Knox because shells did not explode until after they hit the ground and therefore could be warned against, while there was no avoiding a cannonball. Then two shells entered the redoubt. Both men took cover, Hamilton behind the copious body of Knox. After they managed to avoid being killed, Knox needled Hamilton to accept calling a shell a shell, and also “not to make a breastwork of me again.”

  On October 15 Cornwallis advised Clinton: “The safety of the place is … so precarious that I cannot recommend that the fleet and army should run great risque in endeavouring to save us.” At dawn on the sixteenth he sent out 350 men who overran part of the extended allied trench, killed guards, spiked batteries, and threatened to do much more until Noailles, recognizing the British accent of their commander, directed his men to repel the force, killing a few, taking some prisoners, and causing the rest to flee back to Yorktown. Washington wondered, in a note to General Heath—then still guarding West Point—why Cornwallis had bothered with such an attack. The French did not; they recognized it as a baroud d’honneur, the final gesture of a soldier who knows he must soon capitulate.

  Cornwallis planned one last try at escape, to extract his forces over the river to Gloucester and then away, using the British boats and command of the upper river. He and Dundas figured they could get everyone across in three trips. On the night of the sixteenth, the first trip was successfully launched and reached Gloucester. Then the rain became so torrential that it drove some boats downriver, toward the French ships, and the maneuver was halted and the troops returned to Yorktown.

  In the morning the allies began a new, incessant bombardment, and a few hours later Cornwallis sent out the white flag of capitulation. At that signal the allied batteries were ordered to stop firing, and did.

  It was October 17, 1781, four years to the day after the surrender of Burgoyne’s army at Saratoga. As Washington and his officers knew in their hearts, while that victory at Saratoga had been an American one, albeit due in significant part to the arms, cannon, and ammunition sent by France, the victory at Yorktown was a joint one, as much a result of France’s military as of that of the United States of America.

  19

  “The English are purchasing the peace rather than making it.”

  —Comte de Vergennes

  John Laurens and Noailles handled the surrender negotiations for the allies, but the tone and basic terms had been fixed by Washington in a note to Cornwallis: “The same honors will be granted to the Surrendering Army as were granted to the Garrison of Charleston.” This was revenge, for it meant that the defeated army would march out with flags furled and with their bands not permitted to play a tune of conquest. Laurens had been among the humiliated officers at Charleston, and as far back as 1777 had been aware of Cornwallis’s “barbarous treatment of the inhabitants” near Philadelphia; he also knew that in the more recent ravaging of Virginia, Cornwallis had been as guilty as Tarleton of unnecessary violence. Thus Cornwallis, having repeatedly behaved as anything but a gentleman, was doubly ineligible for the good treatment usually granted to vanquished warriors.

  The British dragged out the talks for two days, mainly to use the time to destroy some armaments, scuttle two warships, and turn loose the remainder of the several hundred black slaves lured into their service with promises of freedom. Many of the released were ill with smallpox.

  At 11:00 a.m. on October 19, the articles of capitulation, already signed by Cornwallis, were countersigned by Washington, Rochambeau, and Barras, the latter also for
de Grasse, who had taken ill with asthma. At 2:00 p.m. the British marched out, wearing newly issued uniforms, to a tune that was later identified as “The World Turned Upside Down,” although it probably was another song whose cadence was more amenable to slow marching. As the British paraded between the ragtag American and the spiffed-up French troops, they fixed their eyes only on the French. Some accounts have Lafayette then asking the American band to play “Yankee Doodle Dandy” to turn curious British heads toward the Continentals; other accounts say that the playing of that particular tune had been forbidden. Sapper Martin thought that the marching British had stared with malice at the French, while Closen thought the British had gazed scornfully at the Americans. A New Jersey officer wrote that the British officers “behaved like boys who had been whipped at school. Some bit their lips; some pouted; others cried.” Across the river at the same time, the British marched out of Gloucester to surrender to Choisy.

  Cornwallis was absent from this carefully choreographed scene. He claimed illness and sent his second in command, Charles O’Hara, who in an attempt at a deliberate slap rode to the allied chiefs’ enclave and asked for Rochambeau. O’Hara was about to offer his sword to the French commander when a Rochambeau aide interposed his horse between him and the French general and directed him to Washington, as Rochambeau also did by a gesture. Washington might have accepted surrender from the hand of Cornwallis but he would not do so from a subordinate, and so by his own hand gesture he further redirected O’Hara to Lincoln—the general who had had to surrender at Charleston. Lincoln accepted the sword, held it for a symbolic moment, and returned it to O’Hara. The British regulars and their allies, Hessians and Bavarians from Anspach, continued marching through the gauntlet and laid down their arms, some of the British doing so with enough force to break the firelocks, until O’Hara ordered them to stop doing that.

  Washington in his report of the surrender to Congress devoted most of his letter to detailing his gratitude to the French forces: “Nothing could exceed this Zeal of our allies,” he wrote of Rochambeau and his army, and “I wish it was in my Power to express to Congress how much I feel indebted to The Count de Grasse and the officers of the Fleet under his command.”

  * * *

  A month after the surrender, as Louis XVI was visiting Marie Antoinette, who was recovering from the birth of the long-awaited Dauphin, the Duc de Lauzun entered and reported the victory at Yorktown. This news was not unexpected, as progress bulletins had long been filtering in. The king ordered a Te Deum. Lauzun then visited his longtime mentor, Maurepas. He found the first minister dying but responsive, and delivered to him a letter from Lafayette about Yorktown, which began: “The play is over, Monsieur le Comte, the fifth act has just come to an end.” A few days later, Maurepas died.

  In the streets of Paris the three-night celebration of the victory at Yorktown intermingled with the festivities for the birth of the Dauphin. The conjunction made it impossible for the French not to wonder, now that the Americans had been liberated, when their turn at liberty might come, since the arrival of a Dauphin, with its promise of extending the monarchy far into the next century offered scant hope of Louis XVI ever giving his people America’s sort of freedom.

  In London the rumor of Cornwallis’s surrender arrived on November 21 and on November 26 copies of the articles of capitulation were printed in the newspapers. There was rampant speculation that Parliament, when it reopened the next day, would produce a change in ministers, and that the next government would begin peace talks in earnest. George III said no to both ideas, telling the cabinet that the loss of America “would annihilate the rank in which this British Empire stands among the European states,” and therefore that the war must continue and that Lord North must remain in office.

  North conveyed the message to the legislators, telling them, “A melancholy disaster has occurred in Virginia. But are we, therefore, to lie down and die? No, it ought to arouse us to action.… By bold and united exertions everything may be saved; by dejection and despair everything must be lost!” Yet privately North advised George III: “Peace with America seems necessary, even if it can be obtained on no better terms than some Federal Alliance, or perhaps even in a less eligible mode.” He sent Nathaniel Forth to Vergennes to see if a separate peace could be made with France.

  Vergennes quickly rejected this effort by a disgraced messenger, but he believed that the British would tell the Americans anyway that the French were negotiating a separate peace, in a ploy to separate the allies.

  Silas Deane added fuel to that fire by advocating in British newspapers an American reunion with Great Britain, based on what he viewed as contemptuous French treatment of the United States. His articles crossed the Atlantic and brought him further vilification: Congress revoked the name of the Continental navy frigate Deane because “the person after whom she was called has by his perfidy and defection forfeited all title to every mark of honor or respect.”

  In the Commons, votes to oust Germain and Sandwich, the ministers who were deemed most responsible for losing the war, failed but damaged the North government. In late February 1782, General Henry Seymour Conway introduced in the Commons a motion that summed up British public feeling:

  That it is the opinion of the House that the further prosecution of offensive war on the continent of North America for the purpose of reducing the revolted Colonies to obedience by force will be the means of weakening the efforts of this country against her European enemies, and … by preventing a happy reconciliation with [America], to frustrate the earnest desire graciously expressed by His Majesty to restore the blessings of public tranquility.

  The resolution lost the first time around but when reintroduced passed by a vote of 234 to 215. Its directive to cease offensive operations meant that peace must now be offered to America, if not to France, Spain, or the Netherlands. Accordingly, North resigned on March 20, 1782.

  The Cornwallis surrender at Yorktown and the fall of the North government did more than set the stage for peace negotiations: they radically changed the relationships of the war’s major participants. Those current enemies, the United States and Great Britain, now had to look beyond the end of the war and embrace the idea that each must become the other’s principal trading partner. As for those current allies, America, France, and Spain, their realization was the opposite one: they understood that henceforth in the scramble to end the war they were competitors for territory and resources, and that each must defend its rights against the others’ claims.

  * * *

  George Washington had predicted that there would be no peace so long as New York remained in British hands, and it did, along with Charleston, Savannah, and Wilmington, North Carolina. Washington’s certainty about peace still being far off was reinforced when, despite his pleas for de Grasse’s help in retaking Charleston or Savannah, the admiral left for the Caribbean in early November.

  In February 1782 Florimond du Bouchet, with Rochambeau’s troops in Virginia, was assigned to make a French-British exchange of ailing prisoners. Some British ones, then in a hospital near Gloucester, were to be traded for French soldiers and sailors held on the prison ships in New York Harbor. Du Bouchet transported his ailing British charges to New York, and with them entered the office of the provost marshal. It was William Cunningham, the same Tory who had run the prison ships four years earlier when du Bouchet had been aboard one, and whose cruelty had resulted in the deaths of thousands of prisoners. “Major, you give me the idea that I’ve seen you before,” Cunningham said to him. Du Bouchet knew all too well where and when Cunningham had seen him before, but denied any such encounter and deflected the conversation to issues of the exchange. Many French prisoners were released into his custody. They were so ill that after they reached Rochambeau’s winter quarters in Newport, Virginia, they all died. Du Bouchet also became quite ill and was hospitalized for months. For du Bouchet’s feat in rescuing the French prisoners, Rochambeau appointed him a major general.

&nbs
p; In winter camp Rochambeau received some new French troops, two million livres to pay his men, and some officers who had long sought to participate in the American conflict, among them the young Ségur.

  Elsewhere in the world, British war losses continued to mount. In the early months of 1782 Spain captured Minorca, France captured the Caribbean islands of Nevis, Montserrat, and San Cristóbal (later renamed St. Kitts), and off India Suffren’s squadron bested a British one. Hood’s fleet arrived in the Caribbean too late to prevent the French governor of Martinique from retaking Saint Eustatius, its garrison of 750 British soldiers, and four million livres that Rodney had collected. Deducting from the total 170,000 pounds that Rodney had planned to keep as his share, the governor distributed that to his own officers and gave the rest back to the Dutch.

  * * *

  Since George III would not accept as replacement for Lord North any of the more radical Opposition leaders, in March Lord Rockingham was appointed as first minister, a position he had held in 1766. Rockingham’s new government became quite popular for promising to reduce the expense of maintaining the royal family, for taking steps to appease the Irish, for rejecting new taxes on soap and salt as too great a burden for the poor, and for opening negotiations to end the Revolutionary War.

  Charles James Fox, now chief of the Northern Department, insisted that such matters were his concern because he handled foreign affairs; long an advocate for American independence, Fox considered independence as a precondition to negotiations, as it would enable Great Britain to withdraw troops and ships from America and be in a better position to fight against and negotiate with France, Spain, and the Netherlands. Lord Shelburne believed that the negotiations were his to conduct since his brief was colonial affairs and in his view the Americans were still colonists; his strategy was the opposite of Fox’s—to withhold recognition of America’s independence, granting it only in exchange for territory and concessions from the various belligerents.