But the admiral’s embrace was genuine, and Washington was given the assurance he had come for. Even though de Grasse’s orders were to depart Chesapeake Bay on October 15, he took it upon himself to guarantee that the fleet would stay until the end of October. Near sunset Washington left the Ville-de-Paris amid a salute of guns from the flagship while thousands of French sailors crowded the decks for a glimpse of America’s most famous man.
On his return aboard the cutter, squalls kept Washington at sea for four days. Finally he became so impatient to get back to headquarters that he climbed into a small open boat and was rowed thirty miles up the James River. The delay hardly mattered, because at Yorktown Lord Cornwallis was only continuing to dig in. Washington assumed from the British preparations that Cornwallis was preparing to defend his position to the end. Washington himself had a despairing moment when Admiral de Grasse sent a message that because British ships were reportedly on their way he was going to leave the bay after all. Washington wrote a heated protest—“Your leaving the Bay ruins the cause to all intents and purposes”—and the admiral answered cheerfully that, although his plan to leave had been brilliant, his officers had overruled him. The French fleet would stay on to keep Cornwallis trapped at Yorktown.
At 5 A.M. on Friday, September 28, 1781, the drums in General Washington’s camp at Williamsburg struck the tattoo to march. The American officers wanted their men to begin this crucial campaign as freshly groomed as their French allies and ordered them to be well shaved. One brigade commander issued each regiment twelve pounds of flour so that his troops could powder their hair. American riflemen and cavalry, interspersed with cannon, moved along the sandy road that would take them through a dozen miles of pine and black cedar to Yorktown. General Rochambeau’s French troops followed them, also with their artillery mixed into the column and not dragged along at the rear. They passed the spot across the river where the Indian princess Pocahontas was said to have saved the life of Captain John Smith nearly a hundred and seventy-five years before.
After the first five miles, the troops reached a fork in the road. The Americans swung left, the French took the more direct path on the right. General Washington rode near the front of the American line on a new light sorrel horse with a white face, named Nelson. By evening the two columns had come within sight of the battlements at Yorktown.
Because the headquarters tents had not arrived, General Washington spent the first night under a mulberry tree. When a few of Cornwallis’ dragoons were spotted scouting around the American camp, two companies of American grenadiers easily chased them back to their lines. Cornwallis had built his inner ring of defenses—with seven redoubts for guns—on a rise overlooking a sandy plain. Washington pitched camp there, amid cactus and dried grass and out of range of the British artillery. He was waiting for his own heavy guns, which the French were supplying and bringing up from the banks of the James River six miles away.
—
On the morning of September 30, Washington discovered that overnight the British had evacuated three of their forward works. It gave the Americans such a critical advantage Washington had to wonder what Cornwallis was thinking. He immediately moved French and American troops into those defenses and turned them toward Yorktown rather than away. Both sides were firing only sporadically, and, though his aides tried to discourage him, Washington made his own reconnaissance just three hundred yards from the British advance posts. He assumed that Cornwallis intended to round up boats along the York River one night and rely on his artillery to hold off the French fleet while he evacuated his men. To frustrate that escape, Washington asked de Grasse to send up several frigates and block the river. The admiral replied that the risk to his ships would be too great. Besides, de Grasse assured Washington, Cornwallis would never try anything so foolish.
—
Behind his barricades at Yorktown, Lord Cornwallis appeared unperturbed by the mounting crisis. His insouciance did not calm his officers but only spurred them to try to puncture it. Cornwallis was doling out provisions sparingly and seemed convinced they would outlast the siege. Hessians in the camp found the meat putrid and the biscuits wormy, but their complaints didn’t reach Cornwallis. He seemed to be relying on his threat to Henry Clinton that he must send aid or “be prepared to hear the worst.” Clinton had promised that Admiral Graves’s ships would be repaired quickly and would leave New York no later than October 5. But Cornwallis was unaware of the shortage of lumber that was delaying Graves or that Prince William, King George’s third son, had arrived in New York. Parades and parties in the sixteen-year-old prince’s honor had set back work two days. Even without knowing that, Banastre Tarleton warned Cornwallis not to depend on Clinton’s assurances. As soon as the French and the Americans first arrived, Colonel Tarleton had wanted Cornwallis to attack them before they could get their guns in place. Cornwallis had paid as little heed to that advice as Horatio Gates had given to Benedict Arnold at Saratoga. In one argument, Tarleton’s brother showed Cornwallis how inadequate his earthworks were by nimbly leaping over one of them. Cornwallis was not shaken. “In that case,” he said, “the blame will fall on Clinton, and not on me.”
—
General Washington had hoped for a dark night for his men to begin digging a trench opposite Cornwallis’ main defenses where they would station the French and American cannon. But it was still early autumn—the Virginians called the season Indian Summer—and the moon was barely starting to wane. Washington had to send workmen out with only an occasional cloud to protect them. As the digging continued, the weather turned and the nights were rainy. Washington and the French engineers worked to position their cannon as the mire spread across the plain. He walked out on the line with a cloak disguising his rank, and those watching him stand exposed wished they had the nerve to scold him and pull him back to safety. On the night of October 6, Washington returned to the line with a pickax and struck a few ritual blows to indicate that the siege of Yorktown would soon begin. While the trench was being dug, British guns kept up a steady fire against the Americans. At one point, a cannonball landed close to Washington’s party and sprayed sand over the hat of his chaplain, Israel Evans. The clergyman took off his hat to brush it, but Washington stopped him. “Mr. Evans, you had better carry that home and show it to your wife and children.”
By the dawn of October 7, the Americans had moved their trenches close enough that they could see the British flag fluttering over Yorktown.
Two days later, when the French completed their batteries, the American line was secure on its extreme right, and General Washington was ready to launch his siege. At three o’clock on an afternoon of brilliant sunshine, Washington told the French that they would have the honor of beginning the bombardment. Two hours later, American soldiers ran their flag, which they called the Star-Spangled Banner, up its pole, and Washington came forward to fire the first shot from the American lines. He was led to a newly developed French gun with fitted ammunition and a precision greater than anything he had ever seen. A French adviser pointed to a target on the British walls, and Washington fired and hit that spot. Henry Knox, the bookseller who had made himself an artillery expert, repeated a British deserter’s story that Cornwallis, trying to raise his men’s morale, had assured them that neither the French nor the Americans had brought any heavy artillery.
After those first shells, the British troops knew better. Over the next twenty-four hours, Yorktown and its harbor took more than thirty-six hundred shots. Shells flew across the night sky in bright arcs, trailing long streams of fire, and the Americans thought the display was the most brilliant they had ever seen. Across the barricades, a Hessian soldier watched the shells hurtle toward him and said they shook the ground like earthquakes.
Cornwallis wrote despondently to Henry Clinton at midnight on October 11, 1781, that the enemy batteries had been firing without pause for two days, and he estimated that the barrage was coming from forty pieces of cannon and sixteen mortars of eight to s
ixteen inches. Cornwallis had already lost seventy men. He concluded, “Against so powerful an attack, we cannot hope to make a very long resistance.”
Each day Washington’s guns got closer to the town. They had been six hundred yards away when Cornwallis wrote his letter. The next day the Americans opened a second parallel and cut the distance in half. The American troops expected that this development would compel Cornwallis to venture out from behind his defenses and fight. But Cornwallis had built a bunker in the grotto of his headquarters and was living underground.
On October 14, a Sunday, the Americans trained their fire on two advance British redoubts near the river. That night General Washington granted Alexander Hamilton’s request to lead the attack on one of them. Colonel Hamilton had chosen as his password “Rochambeau,” which, said quickly with an American accent, sounded like “Rush on, boys.” Hamilton ordered his men to unload their muskets to avoid accidental shots that would alert the British. They were to charge with bayonets. French soldiers would storm the second redoubt, and before the two parties set out each commander addressed them. Washington spoke briefly and simply, urging the Americans to be brave. General Rochambeau pitched his appeal in a higher key. “My children,” he began, “I have great need of you tonight.” When he finished, a French soldier called from the darkness, “We will fight like lions. Until the last man is killed.”
The assault began and it looked as though the volunteers had chosen suicide. As they stormed barricades of felled trees under intense British fire, the soldiers sometimes stumbled into holes blasted in the ground by their own artillery—holes deep enough, one American sergeant thought, for burying an ox. American sappers and miners ran ahead with axes to cut a way past the British defenses, but the troops jammed up and blocked their way. Alexander Hamilton was too short to climb over the wall, but he ordered one of his men to kneel, hopped up on his back and leaped over. As the British gave up their position they threw in crackling grenades, and taking the redoubt cost the Americans nine dead and twenty-four wounded. Lafayette, directing the operation from the rear, was glad to see his American friends performing well in the eyes of the French. He entered the redoubt with Hamilton’s forces and sent a teasing message to the French officer charged with taking the other position: “I am in my redoubt. Where are you?”
The French had been assigned the larger of the two positions, and their commander sent back a message: “Tell the marquis I am not in mine but will be in five minutes.”
After the British had been driven from both outposts, the nightly rains began, but the American troops waded willingly through the mud to secure the captured redoubts. Now no section of Yorktown was safe from enemy fire. George Washington praised Hamilton, Lafayette and the others for intrepidity and coolness and awarded one of the wounded, Sergeant William Brown of Connecticut, a new medal for valor called the Purple Heart.
Cornwallis inspected his losses on the morning of October 15 and wrote to General Clinton that his position had become so precarious that he couldn’t recommend either the British army or navy risking an attempt to save him. But Cornwallis was being driven to the desperate measures the Americans had been expecting. The night of his report to Clinton, he ordered a heavy barrage of artillery down from his walls and sent out three hundred and fifty men to penetrate the enemy lines and silence their guns. One British unit, pretending to be an American relief party, succeeded in getting inside the second parallel. As several British soldiers stabbed the French sentries, others broke off their bayonets in the touchholes of the cannon. Before they were discovered and driven back, they had killed or wounded seventeen French and American soldiers. But they had disabled only six guns, which were repaired before sunup.
The next afternoon Lord Cornwallis gathered all the small craft on the riverbank and had some of his wounded rowed to safety on Gloucester Point. That night, he ordered Banastre Tarleton to prepare to break out from Gloucester and lead a forced march to New York. Though many of their boats had been damaged by the constant shelling, Cornwallis thought he could get his able-bodied troops over the river in three crossings. He would travel with the second and leave behind a letter for George Washington, asking mercy for the sick and wounded he would have to abandon at Yorktown. It was the maneuver Washington had predicted, the one Admiral de Grasse had shrugged away.
Cornwallis’ entire first division reached Gloucester before midnight. But then rain and squalls scattered the boats and blew two of them downstream, where they were captured by the Americans. The storm went on until 2 A.M., and Cornwallis gave up all hope of escaping. At noon the next day, the men who had made the first crossing returned to Yorktown, amid a severe barrage from the French. On October 17, French and American commanders celebrated the fourth anniversary of John Burgoyne’s surrender at Saratoga with the heaviest thunder of shell they could muster. This was also the day Henry Clinton received Cornwallis’ dispatch warning him that Yorktown was probably past saving. All the same, Clinton went ahead with his preparations. He signed a new will and got ready to sail to Virginia to snatch victory away from George Washington.
—
The October 17 bombardment had begun at daybreak. Before 10 A.M., a young boy wearing a red coat and carrying a drum climbed up on a British parapet and beat the signal for a parley. Immediately, an officer appeared behind him holding a white flag on a standard. He moved outside the British fortification with the drummer at his side. The boy’s drum couldn’t be heard above the cannon roar, but American soldiers saw the two figures moving toward them and gradually stopped firing. An American officer sprang forward, ran to meet the British soldier, tied a handkerchief over his eyes and led him to a house at the rear of the American parallels. The drummer boy was sent back to Yorktown.
Cornwallis’ white flag of truce came a week earlier than George Washington had expected. He knew that British provisions at Yorktown were scarce, but he thought Cornwallis could feed his troops for seven more days and would hold out in hopes that the British Navy would save him. Instead, Cornwallis proposed that hostilities cease for twenty-four hours while representatives drew up the terms for a British surrender. General Washington ordered that the siege continue until an aide drafted a reply for his approval. The answer was ready at 2 P.M.
“An ardent desire to spare the further effusion of blood will readily incline me to listen to such terms for the surrender of your post and garrisons of York and Gloucester as are admissible,” was Washington’s message. But before scheduling a conference, he demanded the British terms on paper and would permit only a two-hour cease-fire while Lord Cornwallis wrote them out.
Late that afternoon, the proposals arrived in the American camp, along with Cornwallis’ complaint that Washington had not given him time to go into proper detail. Cornwallis asked for the same generous terms Horatio Gates had given John Burgoyne at Saratoga. Before the siege had begun, Cornwallis had been adamant about never surrendering as cravenly as Burgoyne had done. Now, without a single British cannon to fire, he had to trust Washington for favorable concessions. He asked specifically that his surrendering troops be returned to Britain or Germany if they pledged not to rejoin the fighting. Gates had been severely criticized for that same provision; even if these same soldiers didn’t return to America, they eased Britain’s military burden by relieving her forces elsewhere. After Saratoga, the Congress had discovered a lapse in the agreement by Burgoyne and had declared the entire treaty void. Most of his troops were still prisoners in Virginia. George Washington had no intention of being as lenient in victory as General Gates, and he rejected the British terms. But he extended the cease-fire for the night.
The silence of that cold October night was solemn for the Americans. Meteors streaking through the sky reminded them of trailing bombs but without the same horror. The next morning, the British stood along their battlements and serenaded the peaceful dawn with bagpipes. The French responded with their regimental band. As the sun rose, officers and men from each side lined up alo
ng their parapets to study their foe across two hundred yards.
Washington had never been in the position to dictate peace terms, and, like Cornwallis, he relied on a recent precedent. When Henry Clinton had taken Charleston, General Benjamin Lincoln of Massachusetts was among the prisoners. He had been exchanged later and had joined Washington at Yorktown. General Washington now extended the British conditions at Charleston to Cornwallis. The harshest was a point of honor. Clinton had forbidden General Lincoln to march out his vanquished men with drums beating and flags unfurled. Now Washington denied Cornwallis the same courtesies and gave the British commander two hours to agree. After that, the music would stop and the artillery would resume.
Even with all of Washington’s planning and nerve, he could not have succeeded without the French Navy. He invited Admiral de Grasse to come ashore and join him at a ceremony that was beginning to look certain, but the admiral was confined to his ship with asthma and sent Barras in his place. Despite the American deadline, negotiations continued throughout the night of October 18 while the British representative tried to ease the terms by pointing out that Lord Cornwallis hadn’t been responsible for Henry Clinton’s harshness at Charleston. Early the next morning, Washington approved an overnight compromise that gave way on the music. The British army could come out from behind their walls playing a marching tune, but it had to be one of their own melodies, not a mocking rendition of “Yankee Doodle.” Washington refused, however, to grant immunity to the Tory civilians at Yorktown or to his own deserters.
Lafayette’s brother-in-law, heir to one of France’s great fortunes, had served as the French delegate during the talks and protested that, since Cornwallis’ war chest held only eighteen hundred pounds sterling, it was undignified to worry about what became of it. America’s negotiator replied that to a new country with a devalued currency the money meant a good deal, and the chest must become the property of the United States. General Washington informed Cornwallis that he was to sign, the surrender by 11 A.M. and be ready to turn over his troops three hours later.
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