by Sarah Vowell
Mark Schneider recalled portraying Lafayette in the freedom fries era: “Well, I would say it was more of a challenge to tell the story, to talk about French help [during the revolution]. Quite often from my guests I would get, ‘Hey, I wish they would help now!’ or something to that effect. But telling the story, the truth speaks for itself. One of the greatest compliments I’ve ever received portraying Lafayette was from an older gentleman who listened to the story of Lafayette, with me telling the personal sacrifice that he made and then the sacrifice France made by getting involved in this war and helping us win independence. It brought him to tears, and he said at the end, ‘You know, I hated the French until I came in this room. Thank you for sharing that story. I needed to hear that story. I no longer feel that way about the French. Thank you for telling me the truth and the facts about this. Now maybe I’ll reevaluate my opinions on the French.’ I had accomplished my goal, and that was to tell the true story of the American Revolution and the sacrifice that so many people made—the people here in America, but also those that helped us.”
The next morning, my relatives and I went to Yorktown for the anniversary festivities. “Happy Yorktown Day!” hollered the ladies from the Comte de Grasse Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution marching in the annual parade. At the memorial ceremony put on by the town, after the French national anthem was sung, General Jean-Paul Paloméros, a French commander at NATO, spoke of America’s enthusiasm over the return of Lafayette in 1824 and expressed his country’s gratitude “to the Americans who twice traveled across the ocean to fight a world’s war.” Over at the battlefield, we drove from the site of the French encampment to the French artillery park to the French Cemetery, where someone had left a single yellow daisy on the plaque commemorating the burial of fifty unknown French soldiers. Then we went for lunch on the York River waterfront at the Water Street Grille, a few yards away from a statue of Admiral de Grasse. There were freedom fries on the menu.
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On September 17, 1781, a few days before the allied army surrounded Yorktown, Cornwallis wrote to his commander in chief Henry Clinton in New York, “This place is in no state of defense. If you cannot relieve me very soon, you must be prepared to hear the Worst.”
At the end of the month, Cornwallis abandoned his newly built outer defenses to crouch his troops close to the river, where he hoped to be rescued by a British fleet that would somehow also fight off Admiral de Grasse.
Clinton replied to Cornwallis, “Your Lordship may be assured that I am doing every thing in my power to relieve you.” Mentioning that Admiral Graves was busy repairing his fleet (after the damage suffered in the Battle of the Capes), Clinton comforted Cornwallis that they would depart New York Harbor as soon as possible “if the winds permit, and no unforeseen accident happens.” Though Clinton added ominously, “This, however, is subject to disappointment.”
The lesson of Yorktown is the value of cooperation—the lack of it among Britain’s top commanders, and the overwhelming strength of the Franco-American alliance. Nine thousand American regulars and militia, nine thousand French land forces, and a whopping twenty-eight thousand Frenchmen serving on board the fleets of de Grasse and Barras in the Chesapeake were always going to defeat Cornwallis’s eight thousand troops if the British fleet failed to show.
A more interesting aspect of the Franco-American collaboration was the way the French and American officers kept talking each other out of bad ideas. Just as Admiral de Grasse cornered Washington into exchanging his reckless obsession with retaking New York City for the more attainable goal of ensnaring Cornwallis in the Chesapeake, Washington and Rochambeau convinced Admiral de Grasse to stay the course after the Battle of the Capes, pressing him to extend his self-imposed deadline of returning to the Caribbean by October 15.
At the end of September, Washington passed along to de Grasse what he considered routine intel about rumors of a new British fleet with an unknown quantity of ships, perhaps three to ten, having arrived in New York, presumably intending to head south to help Cornwallis. Alarmed, de Grasse replied to Washington, “The enemy are beginning to be almost equal to us”—a blatant falsehood—“and it would be imprudent of me to put myself in a position where I could not engage them in battle.” De Grasse concluded, “I shall set sail as soon as the wind permits me.”
Washington’s response to receiving such worrisome news was to politely explain to de Grasse how this update filled him with “painful anxiety.”
In his diary, Rochambeau’s officer Closen complained that these “turbulent men of the sea . . . think of nothing but cruising, with no desire to cooperate with the land forces.”
Because de Grasse’s ships were keeping Cornwallis from making a break for it and guarding against a possible British rescue operation, because the outcome of the entire operation and therefore the outcome of the war depended on Cornwallis looking out at the water and seeing dozens of French battleships staring back at him, Washington beseeched the admiral, “If you withdraw your maritime force from the position agreed upon . . . that no future day can restore to us a similar occasion for striking a decisive blow.”
Washington dispatched Lafayette and Closen to de Grasse’s flagship, the Ville de Paris, anchored at the mouth of the York River. Lafayette was to hand de Grasse Washington’s letter and give the admiral the hard sell about remaining in the Chesapeake. By the time they arrived, de Grasse’s own captains had already voted against leaving. De Grasse agreed to stay. Prompting such a gale-force sigh of relief from Washington, it’s a wonder the fleet wasn’t blown back to Bermuda.
Sir Henry Clinton—and by extension Cornwallis—was no less beholden to the “turbulent men of the sea” than his fellow landlubbers Washington and Rochambeau. After the war, Clinton would end up taking all the blame for dithering in New York instead of hastening to save Cornwallis; his reputation would never recover. Yet Admiral Graves should share some of the blame. The diary of a forty-year veteran, Captain Frederick Mackenzie, one of Clinton’s adjutants in New York, estimated that repairs to Graves’s ships would not be completed until October 10. Then, he figured, it would take three days for all the ships to clear the bar of New York Harbor and another seven for them to make it to Virginia. Mackenzie’s predictions were close. Clinton and Graves did not arrive in the Chesapeake until October 24, unaware that Cornwallis had already surrendered on the 19th.
In the meantime, Washington kept on beefing up his team. He implored Virginia’s new governor, his old friend Thomas Nelson of Yorktown, “that every exertion may be made to feed and supply our army while we have occasion to continue in the State.” Unlike his brainier predecessor—former governor Jefferson had happily “retired to my farm, my family and books from which I think nothing will evermore separate me”—Nelson called for “vigorous exertions” by the people of Virginia to scare up food, supplies, and transport for the incoming armies. Nelson also called upon militiamen to head to Yorktown “with a gun of any sort,” and ended up personally leading three thousand Virginians in the siege that damaged his own home. There were even tall tales about Nelson offering a cash reward to the first artillery team to successfully shell his house.
With Nelson leading the militia, Washington assigned Generals Lafayette, Steuben, and Benjamin Lincoln to lead the three divisions of Continental regulars. Lincoln was officially Washington’s number two, having been with the Continentals since the siege of Boston, serving in the New York campaign and at Saratoga before his career low of surrendering Charleston to Henry Clinton.
Lafayette divided up the command of his two brigades between his friends and fellow members of Washington’s military family, Alexander Hamilton and John Laurens. (Laurens’s father, Congressman Henry Laurens, was at that moment imprisoned as a traitor in the Tower of London. The British captured his ship when he was en route to the Netherlands to negotiate an agreement with the Dutch. After the surrender, Lafayette would help
broker the prisoner exchange that traded Laurens for the Americans’ new POW, Cornwallis.)
On October 3, Dr. James Thacher, a surgeon with the Sixteenth Massachusetts Regiment, recorded in his diary one of the more sickening consequences of how the arrival of the allies on the outskirts of Yorktown had blocked the redcoats from foraging in the countryside for food—for themselves and their animals. The British, preparing to withstand the coming siege, were “killing off their horses in great numbers; six or seven hundred of these valuable animals have been killed, and their carcases are almost continually floating down the river.” If the thought of looking at a river clogged with six hundred horse corpses sounds repugnant, consider the smell.
On October 6, Washington wrote to the Congress, “We shall this night open trenches.”
The besiegers would encircle the besieged with a series of parallel trenches, choking them with each advance. Hence the real heroes of Yorktown were the Corps of Sappers and Miners, the men who dug the ditches laid out by the French engineers. (The commander of the Continental Army’s Corps of Engineers, Louis Duportail, was also French, having been recruited by Franklin in 1777.) The first siege line would be roughly two miles long, positioned about six hundred yards from the outermost British fortifications.
According to Joseph Plumb Martin, who had joined the Sappers and Miners as a sergeant the year before, “We now began to make preparations for laying close siege to the enemy. We had holed him and nothing remained but to dig him out.”
In a ranger talk out on the battlefield, Linda Williams of the National Park Service walked us through the siege. She said, “If you have fifteen hundred French and American soldiers with picks and shovels digging and three thousand soldiers keeping an eye out while they’re digging, you’re going to be making some noise. They wanted to dig the first siege line without the British knowing they’re out here.”
She continued, “On October the 5th it began to rain heavily, and it continued to rain into the night of October the 6th. And what that rain did—first, the clouds covered the moon; second, the rain made the ground a little easier to dig; and third, the rain softened the ground and helped mute the sound of all those tools. So the night of October 6 they snuck up and they started digging. I’m sure they were scared. They completed it in one night, and the British didn’t know they were out there. So when the British looked out at first light and saw the siege line upon them, they must have done some sort of collective gulp.”
Once the trench was completed, the allies let rip their artillery. Sergeant Martin recalled that the signal for commencing to fire was the raising of an American flag and that his pride swelled when he saw it “waving majestically in the very faces of our implacable adversaries . . . A simultaneous discharge of all the guns in the line followed; the French troops accompanying it with ‘Huzza for the Americans!’”
Cornwallis wrote to Clinton, “On the evening of the 9th their batteries opened, and have since continued firing without intermission.”
According to Ranger Williams, “It was going to be an intense, nonstop bombardment, averaging seventeen hundred cannonballs and mortar shells a day. They said the peninsula was shaking as if from thunderbolts. One American officer described how at night you could see the mortar shells raining down on Yorktown with the fuses shooting off sparks. He described them as falling comets.”
According to the Marquis de Chastellux, Henry Knox “scarcely ever quitted the batteries.” The French officer admired “the extraordinary progress of the American artillery, as well as the capacity and knowledge of a great many officers employed in it.”
Dr. Thacher wrote in his journal, “I have more than once witnessed fragments of the mangled bodies and limbs of the British soldiers thrown into the air by the bursting of our shells.”
Cornwallis warned Clinton, “Against so powerful an attack we cannot hope to make a very long resistance.”
On October 11, Sergeant Martin of the Sappers and Miners wrote, “We now began our second parallel, about half way between our works and theirs. There were two strong redoubts held by the British, on their left.”
“A redoubt is a heavily defended earthen fort,” said Ranger Williams. Pointing toward the river at “that mound of earth with stakes coming out of it,” she told us, “That is Redoubt Number 9, and beyond those large oaks, there’s Redoubt Number 10. It was necessary for us to possess those redoubts before we could complete our trenches. The British soldiers defending those were hard-core. The Americans and the French had to capture them. So the night of October 14th, four hundred French troops were going to try to overwhelm Redoubt Number 9, and four hundred Americans were going to try to overwhelm Redoubt Number 10. And the Americans were told they were going to attack this heavily defended position with unloaded muskets, just with their fixed bayonets. It was a nighttime attack and they didn’t want to be shooting each other. They were commanded by that gentleman on your ten-dollar bill, Alexander Hamilton, the future secretary of the Treasury.”
Originally, Lafayette had assigned his fellow Frenchman, longtime aide, and Victory shipmate Lieutenant Colonel Jean-Joseph de Gimat to lead the infantry’s bayonet charge on Redoubt 10. Hamilton, aware the war was winding down and that this was likely his last shot at glory, went over Lafayette’s head and appealed to Washington, who overruled Lafayette and allowed Hamilton to lead.
The signal to begin the attack was “Rochambeau,” which Sergeant Martin considered “a good watchword, for being pronounced Ro-sham-bow, it sounded, when pronounced quick, like rush-on-boys.”
Afterward, describing his division’s accomplishments to Washington, Lafayette commended “Colonel Hamilton, whose well known talents and gallantry were on this occasion most conspicuous and serviceable.” He wrote, “Our obligations to him, to Colonel Gimat, to Colonel Laurens, and to each and all the officers and men, are above expression. Not one gun was fired . . . and, owing to the conduct of the commanders and the bravery of the men, the redoubt was stormed with uncommon rapidity.”
It was over in five minutes. Nine Americans were killed, and Gimat, hit in the foot, was among the twenty-five who were wounded. With only sixty men to hold off four hundred Americans, the British commander of the redoubt, a Major Campbell, surrendered to Laurens. Afterward, when an unhinged captain from New Hampshire threatened Campbell with his bayonet, Hamilton stepped between them, because rules were rules.
Lafayette was down in the trench when he got word of Campbell’s surrender. Admitting that it gave him “unspeakable satisfaction,” he sent a note over to Baron de Viomenil, his condescending French counterpart (and Rochambeau’s second in command), explaining that the Americans had already taken Redoubt 10 and did the French need any help with Redoubt 9?
“Now the French had a much harder time capturing Redoubt 9,” explained Ranger Williams. “They took loaded muskets and they paid a heavy price. They had a hard time getting through, and they were accidentally shooting some of their own. They had a lot more casualties, but they finally captured Redoubt 9 in thirty minutes.”
On October 15, a glum Cornwallis wrote to Clinton, who was still in New York, “Last evening the enemy carried my two advanced redoubts in the left by storm . . . My situation now becomes very critical . . . The safety of the place is, therefore, so precarious, that I cannot recommend that the fleet and army should run great risk in endeavoring to save us.”
“So now Cornwallis is pretty much surrounded,” said Ranger Williams. Planning to leave behind in Yorktown hundreds of ill, bedridden men, “he was going to try and take his troops who were able by boat and get them across the York River where it narrows to join the thousand he already had there at Gloucester Point.” (Nowadays there’s a bridge.) Washington did have a few troops blocking the small redcoat garrison across the York at Gloucester, but Cornwallis planned to fight his way through them.
“So the night of October 16th and early in the morning October 17th
,” Ranger Williams continued, “they started taking those troops across by boat. They managed to get a thousand across. But again weather intervened. A terrible storm came up and scattered and damaged the boats. Cornwallis now realized that he had no choice but to offer to surrender.”
Contemplating Cornwallis’s years in America, Lieutenant Colonel “Light-Horse Harry” Lee of Virginia would reflect, “Battle after battle had he fought; climate after climate had he endured; towns had yielded to his mandate, posts were abandoned at his approach; armies were conquered by his prowess . . . But here even he, in the midst of his splendid career, found his conqueror.” (The same could be said of Lee’s youngest son, Robert E., a great general who would also surrender to Ulysses S. Grant in Virginia eighty-four years later.)
Ranger Williams: “On the morning of October 17th, a drummer came up on the earthworks beating for a parley with an officer beside him waving a handkerchief. Cannonballs were literally bouncing all over the place. And the Americans said if they had not seen the bright red jacket of the officer through all the smoke, they would not have heard that drummer beating for a parley. But when they saw the officer’s jacket, the Americans and the French silenced the cannons, and it got quiet for the first time in eight days. They could hear that drummer beating for a parley, and the Americans said it was one of the most incredible sounds they ever heard. Cornwallis sent a message saying he would like a cessation of hostilities for twenty-four hours while he thought about things. Washington knew he was stalling and said, ‘You tell him he’s got two hours.’ Cornwallis knew he had no choice. He sent commissioned officers over to the Moore house, and it was there they spent hours negotiating the terms.”
