On November 28, the French completed a crucial battery on one of the high ridges, and began firing on an allied fort at a lower elevation. O’Hara ordered an attack on the French position for November 30. “The night before the action he was as nervous as it is possible to conceive, and was wretched about the whole business and its possible issue,” Elliot said.6
But the attack was successful. About 2,350 allied soldiers stormed and overran the French position. “We succeeded in surprising and forcing the enemy, and were soon in full possession of the battery and height,” said O’Hara’s second-in-command.7
Then things went wrong. The undisciplined allied troops chased the French instead of securing their success. They met overwhelming numbers of French soldiers, and were not only forced to retreat, but also forced to give up the position they had captured. Bonaparte helped lead the successful counterattack. He later described how he and his men advanced unperceived through an olive-tree grove, and began “a terrible fire” on the allied troops. The French “poured down with great superiority of numbers,” Elliot said next day, and it was during the British retreat that “so many were killed and wounded.” It was “a bad day for us.”8
One of the casualties was O’Hara. At the first success, he joined his troops on the ridge, and, like his men, was surprised by the counterattack. As he tried to rally them, a bullet wounded his hand. Losing blood, he sat at the foot of a wall, and there, French soldiers seized him. Bonaparte took credit for the capture:
I . . . seized him by the coat, and threw him back amongst my own men, thinking that he was a colonel. . . . He cried out that he was the commander-in-chief of the English. . . . I ran up and prevented the soldiers from ill-treating him. He spoke very bad French; and as I saw that he imagined they intended to butcher him, I did everything in my power to console him; and gave directions that his wound should be immediately dressed, and every attention paid to him.9
Bonaparte’s secretary—not an eyewitness—didn’t credit him, but corroborated the gist of his account. “General O’Hara . . . was wounded in the hand by a musket-ball, and a sergeant seized and dragged him prisoner.”10
O’Hara spent twenty-one months as a prisoner of war. Classified as a political criminal—this was the Reign of Terror—he was forced to watch mass executions. Mobs paraded him through the streets, and he suffered from his wounded hand, which never healed properly. He was brought to the Luxembourg Palace in Paris, once a symbol of luxury but now “a huge loathsome prison.”11
He was exchanged in 1795 for a French lieutenant general, Donatien Marie Joseph de Vimeur, the Viscount de Rochambeau. Ironically, Rochambeau’s father, Jean-Baptiste, had been detained by the revolutionary regime for six months.
O’Hara had met the Rochambeaus fourteen years earlier. They had even dined together. The day before they met, O’Hara had surrendered a British army to the French and their American allies at Yorktown, Virginia.
O’Hara may have been born in 1740, probably in Lisbon, Portugal. He was one of at least fourteen bastard children by any of three mothers and the “singularly licentious” James O’Hara, a British soldier and diplomat.12
James was close to Charles, and he mentored and championed him. Charles started his military career around the not-unusual age of eleven, in 1751, when he became an infantry ensign. The next year, James bought Charles a commission as cornet in a dragoon regiment. Charles joined the Coldstream Guards as a lieutenant in 1756; his father was regimental colonel. At nineteen, he fought in his first major battle, Minden, in Germany, where the British and allies defeated the French and their allies. The experience gave O’Hara what later generations would call networking opportunities. He became acquainted with two other future generals, Henry Clinton and Charles Cornwallis, whose careers became linked two decades later in the American war.13
More postings and promotions ensued. By 1765, he was commander and governor of Gorée (now part of Dakar, Senegal). There, he commanded pardoned military criminals who had agreed to serve the rest of their lives in Africa—a Hobson’s choice given the likelihood of contracting fatal tropical diseases.
O’Hara was commissioned as a regimental captain and army lieutenant colonel in 1773, but by 1776, his career was at a dead end. He was an obscure officer in an obscure location, and reports of administrative incompetence led to an investigation and his firing. The next year, with the rebellion in America unresolved, O’Hara was posted to New York. There, he was assigned administrative duties, including arranging prisoner exchanges. “O’Hara was a very agreeable man, very talented and witty—in fact, a specimen of a well-bred Irish gentleman,” said one colleague.14
He was “remarkably handsome . . . a bon vivant, an unrivalled boon companion, one to whom society was as necessary as the air he breathed.” A friend said O’Hara’s face was “as ruddy and black and his teeth as white as ever.”15
In New York, the new commander, Henry Clinton, was O’Hara’s acquaintance from Minden. Clinton recognized O’Hara’s military engineering ability, promoted him to brigadier general, and gave him command of “a few battalions” to defend Sandy Hook, New Jersey. A barren, fishhook-shaped sandspit, Sandy Hook pierced New York’s outer harbor for five miles. Sandbars, shoals, and inevitable shipwrecks surrounded the strategically crucial position. Its defense, Clinton said, was needed “to deter the French fleet from entering the harbor.” France had joined the rebelling Americans fighting the British three months earlier.16
O’Hara’s command was short-lived. “I soon found he was the last man I should have sent with a detached corps—plans upon plans for defense; never easy, satisfied, or safe; a great, nay plausible, talker,” Clinton said. In February 1779, O’Hara returned to Britain on leave. Again, his career had little future.17
Perhaps with the help of political friends—including a former prime minister, Augustus Henry Fitzroy, Duke of Grafton—he returned to America twenty months later commanding a brigade. His letters to Grafton from the colonies were angry, hardline, and pessimistic. He advocated a scorched-earth policy:
America in every respect is hostile to the interests of Great Britain, as when I left this place two years since. . . . England has not only lost this country forever, but must forever consider the people of this continent as the most inveterate of her enemies. . . . Our experience should now produce an immediate resolution, either to give over so ruinous and fruitless a pursuit, or adopt that mode of war that might probably lead to permanent advantages. . . . I mean a war of desolation, as every part of the continent is exposed to invasion, where the object is only to ruin and devastate and not make establishments. This idea is shocking to humanity, but however dreadful, it must be undertaken upon the principle that I am persuaded either this country or England must be sacrificed; that they never can, or will exist at the same time.18
Lieutenant General Charles Cornwallis and O’Hara, both Minden veterans, renewed their acquaintance in January 1781 when O’Hara reported for duty about 145 miles upcountry from Charlestown, South Carolina (renamed Charleston after the war). Cornwallis believed that O’Hara’s strength was as a field general, not as an administrator: O’Hara’s brigade became the army’s advance column as part of Cornwallis’s new, risky strategy: He would jettison the bulk of his train—all but medical supplies, salt, and ammunition—and turn his army into a fast-moving predator that would catch and destroy the southern rebel army, led by a Rhode Island forge owner-turned-general, Nathanael Greene.
“In this situation,” O’Hara wrote Grafton, “without baggage, necessaries, or provisions of any sort for officer or soldier, in the most barren inhospitable unhealthy part of North America, opposed to the most savage, inveterate perfidious cruel enemy, with zeal and with bayonets only, it was resolved to follow Greene’s army to the end of the world.”19
O’Hara’s first major fight was on February 1, at Cowan’s Ford, twenty miles north of Charlotte, North Carolina. He led the army in crossing the swollen Catawba River in the early hours of
a “very dark and rainy” morning. The river was “broad, deep, and rapid water, full of very large rocks, the opposite shore exceedingly high and steep . . . [with] a powerful current that carried many of the strongest men down the stream, under a very heavy fire.” O’Hara’s horse lost its footing in the riverbed, and the current swept man and horse downstream for forty yards. But the crossing succeeded, despite four men killed and thirty-six wounded. The Americans—self-described as “Whigs”—retreated, and their commander, a militia general, was killed.20
The next month, deeper in North Carolina backcountry, more than two hundred miles from the coast, O’Hara fought at Guilford Courthouse. It was a two-hour battle, in dense woods, tangled underbrush, gullies, hills, and muddy cornfields, through three rebel lines spread over three-quarters of a mile. At the end of the day, the Whigs retreated, but British casualties were heavier than the rebels’. One of the fatalities was Artillery lieutenant Augustus O’Hara, described by different sources as Charles’s half-brother, out-of-wedlock son, or nephew. Nearly half of O’Hara’s regiment were killed or wounded. O’Hara himself suffered severe injuries to his chest and thigh. Cornwallis praised him: “After receiving two dangerous wounds, he continued in the field whilst the action lasted.”21
O’Hara gave Grafton a blunt assessment about Guilford Courthouse: “Every part of our army was beat repeatedly. . . . The rebels were so exceedingly numerous as to be able constantly to oppose fresh troops to us, and be in force in our front, flanks, and rear.” For two days after the battle, “we remained on the very ground on which it had been fought covered with dead, with dying, and with hundreds of wounded, rebels as well as our own. A violent and constant rain that lasted above forty hours made it equally impracticable to remove or administer the smallest comfort to many of the wounded.”22
O’Hara recovered from his own wounds over the summer and rejoined Cornwallis as second-in-command. With the strategy to secure the Carolinas thwarted by the constant resupply of the rebels from Virginia, Cornwallis decided to go after those supply bases. He and his army left North Carolina in late April for Virginia—a 260-mile march to the rebel capital—leaving behind ten garrisons in the Carolinas and Georgia, including Charlestown and Savannah. A month later, he joined other British troops near Richmond.
Cornwallis was smart, daring, and tough. An enemy general described him as “a modern Hannibal.” In Britain, the public recognized him as one who “fights away and beats his enemies, be they few or many.”23
With skill and brutality, Cornwallis turned Virginia into a laboratory for O’Hara’s “war of desolation.” His army moved quickly and unpredictably, destroying rebel camps, property, food, and supplies, terrorizing the civilian population. One modern scholar talked of “how close Cornwallis came to subduing Virginia.”24
Whig governor Thomas Jefferson’s experience was typical. Cornwallis, he said, “destroyed all my growing crops of corn and tobacco. He burned all my barns. . . . He used . . . all my stocks of cattle, sheep, and hogs for the sustenance of his army, and carried off all the horses capable of service: Of those too young for service he cut the throats, and he burnt all the fences on the plantation, so as to leave it an absolute waste.”25
Helping the British, “employed in different branches of the public service,” were African Americans—at least three thousand. Some, the British conscripted. Many more volunteered, having “flocked to the enemy” to escape slavery. The British used them for stealing horses for the cavalry; serving as orderlies, cooks, personal servants, spies, guides, and foragers; and building fortifications.26
Those who were sick were also useful—for biological warfare. About seven hundred former slaves infected with smallpox escaped to British general Alexander Leslie’s lines. “I shall distribute them about the rebel plantations,” he wrote Cornwallis. Black corpses and animal carcasses also were useful; they were tossed down wells to contaminate them for rebel use.27
In June, Clinton, concerned about a French attack on New York, ordered Cornwallis to seek and secure a safe harbor from which the British navy could operate. “With regard to a station for the protection of the king’s ships,” Clinton said, “I know of no place so proper as Yorktown,” on the York River near the entrance to Chesapeake Bay. Cornwallis concurred, and, in August, began fortifying the town.28
O’Hara commanded the rear guard. His duties included making arrangements for white Loyalist refugees and figuring out what to do with the hundreds of black refugees. Both groups burdened the army’s resources, but the blacks were especially problematic. Not only were they less likely to have been inoculated against smallpox, and almost certain to be returned to slavery if recaptured by their rebel “owners” and possibly punished, but they were . . . black.
O’Hara and Cornwallis traded letters trying to figure out a solution:
O’Hara: “What will you have done with the hundreds of infected Negroes, that are dying by scores every day?”
Cornwallis: “It is shocking to think of the state of the Negroes, but we cannot bring a number of sick and useless ones to this place [Yorktown]; some place must be left for them and some person of the country appointed to take charge of them to prevent their perishing.”
O’Hara: “I will continue to victual [feed] the sick Negroes, above 1,000 in number. They would inevitably perish if our support was withdrawn. The people of this country are more inclined to fire upon than receive and protect a Negro whose complaint is the smallpox. The abandoning of these unfortunate beings to disease and famine, and what is worse than either, the resentment of their enraged master, I should conceive ought not to be done.”
Cornwallis: “I leave it to your humanity to do the best you can for the poor Negroes . . .”
O’Hara: “We shall be obliged to leave near 400 wretched Negroes; I have passed them all over to the Norfolk side [of the river], which is the most friendly quarter in our neighbor and have begged of the people of Princess Ann and Norfolk counties to take them.”29
O’Hara, his troops, and his refugees—minus the sick blacks—arrived in Yorktown on August 22. Cornwallis assumed his army and refugees would be supplied, if not evacuated, by the British fleet. It didn’t happen.
Soon, Cornwallis was surrounded by the rebel and French armies, as well as the French fleet. Cut off from supplies, soldiers and refugees survived on “putrid meat and wormy biscuits.” Half the cavalry were without weapons, and what weapons they had were mostly inferior, taken from captured or killed soldiers of the “ill-appointed” rebels. As for infantry, they “are much reduced in numbers by desertion, . . . unremitting fatigues, and by death; while those remaining are much shattered in point of constitution,” a commander reported.30
Within the camp, smallpox, typhus, typhoid, malaria, and hunger plagued them. Sick soldiers were given “stinking salted meat and some flour or worm-eaten biscuit. These unfortunates die like flies from want, and the amputated arms and legs lay around in every corner and were eaten by dogs.” Throughout the siege, a deafening, constant effective cannonade. “We had no rest or sleep, for the enemy kept up heavy firing,” one soldier wrote.31
When the siege began, Yorktown had about sixty empty houses, its residents having been imprisoned or ordered to leave. Now, the buildings were “prodigiously shattered.” Cornwallis moved his headquarters to a bunker dug into the thirty-foot-high river cliffs that Yorktown was built upon.32
The bombardment killed many. Everywhere, a French chaplain reported soon after the surrender, lay “carcasses of men and horses, half covered with dirt, whose moldering limbs, while they poisoned the air, struck dread and horror to the soul.” Outside the camp, “almost every thicket affords you the disagreeable prospects of a wretched Negro’s carcass brought to the earth by disease and famine,” said a rebel officer.33
As for the black survivors, “We had used them to good advantage and set them free, and now, with fear and trembling, they had to face the rewards of their cruel masters,” said a Hessian captain
. “This harsh act had to be carried out, however, because of the scarcity of provisions.”34
3. Rochambeau and Washington
BESIEGED, CORNWALLIS’S ARMY SURRENDERED ON FRIDAY, October 19, 1781.
It was a French victory, made possible by a French strategy; two French fleets; French siege engineers; French artillery that pounded the British; fought largely by French soldiers, marines, and sailors who outnumbered their American allies four-to-one; and set up by a French expatriate, the Marquis de Lafayette, who commanded a small rebel force that had shadowed Cornwallis since the summer. During the siege, Whig troops captured one of two key British fortifications; the French took the other. It was a victory financed by French money that paid, armed, clothed, and propped up the Whigs.1
And it was French diplomacy that ordered its commander-in-chief, Jean-Baptiste Donatien de Vimeur, Comte [Count] de Rochambeau, 56, to publicly defer to the Whig general, George Washington, 49, without overtly ceding him any authority. Washington had no choice but to accept the implicit French terms.
Before his overt campaign in 1775 to become the Whig commander—he wore an army uniform to Congress to announce his availability—Washington’s previous military experience included triggering a world war: In 1754, leading a small force of Virginia militia, Washington ambushed a then-enemy French army officer on a diplomatic mission to the British. Washington then failed to stop the scalping and murder by his Indian allies of several French soldiers who had surrendered. It became an international incident, setting off the Seven Years’ War (French and Indian War, in America). He later surrendered to pursuing French troops after building a crude fort in an indefensible meadow. The next year, to his credit, Washington warned British general Edward Braddock about the danger of a French and Indian ambush; Braddock ignored the advice, was ambushed, and killed. Washington helped regroup the fleeing troops. In 1758, he was one of the commanders of the successful effort to retake French-held territory in the Ohio River Valley.
After Yorktown Page 2