by Ron Carter
It all came in a jumble of fleeting images.
He half-opened his eyes to peer out at the shapes taking form in the approach of sunrise—the skyline, the trees, the lean-tos at the place where the Americans were camped, and the scarcely discernible canvas tents of the French set in orderly rows, one hundred fifty yards to the east.
Good soldiers, the French. Turned Yorktown in our favor—good men—good officers—Rochambeau one of the best.
He straightened in his blanket and lay on his back to stretch leg muscles stiff from being curled for warmth half the night. His thoughts rolled on.
The British surrender of October nineteenth—watching the redcoats march into that field to lay down their arms—their brass band banging out “The World Turned Upside Down”—the hatred in their eyes at the sight of the French—the quiet afterwards—the strangeness of having no one to fight and wondering what they should do next.
He came wide awake and sobered as the image of his older brother came clear and sharp in his mind. Matthew, tall, dark, serious, a born leader, expert navigator, and six years away from hearth and home fighting for independence—married to Kathleen—one square, blocky child—a toddler son who was clearly the grandson of John Phelps Dunson—Matthew, who led the French to victory in the crucial sea battle of the Chesapeake and then came to find him on the Gloucester side of the river after the British surrender.
Twenty-four? Can Matthew be twenty-four? And can I be twenty? I haven’t thought on it since I left home.
He reached to the bottom of the blanket and felt for his shoes and socks, buried next to his Deckhard rifle in the pine boughs he had spread on the ground for a bed beneath the slanted roof of the lean-to. The socks were stiff and had holes in the toes and heels, and the battered shoes were cold as he put them on and tugged at the laces beneath the blanket while his thoughts ran on.
Billy Weems—like a lifelong brother—coming with Matthew to find him after the surrender—Billy the faithful, the steady, the sensible—round, homely face, sandy hair, unbelievably strong, with thick shoulders and barrel chest and tree-stump legs, now a lieutenant with a sergeant named Turlock, who had been nearly killed by a cannon blast at the storming of British Redoubt Number Ten on the York River just five days before the surrender—with them a man dressed like an Iroquois Indian with a tomahawk thrust through his weapons belt and a long Pennsylvania rifle—speaking little, missing nothing, eyes penetrating, handshake firm—Billy calling him Eli—Eli Stroud, who had lately lost his wife—the odd feeling that Billy and Matthew had known Eli for a long time.
To the east, the sky was rapidly coming to a deep red, making a silhouette of the bare branches of the thick forest of trees. The first arc of the sun transformed the hoarfrost crystals into tiny prisms of red and gold and blue, and for a few minutes the gray, wintry world sparkled. Then the frost was melted, turning the bare ground of the camp slick and clammy. The morning wind arose, sweeping down the river to the Chesapeake, dissipating the wispy ground-mist.
Caleb took a deep breath, threw back his blanket, and came to his feet with the fluid, rolling move of a natural athlete. He rose to full height, just under six feet, and shrugged into his coat. The grunted, terse grumblings of those around him were beginning as he shook out his blanket, folded it, and laid it at the foot of his pine-bough bed, then carefully laid out his rifle, powder horn, and bullet pouch ready for inspection. The Deckhard rifle had been given to him by the small band of fierce freedom fighters in South Carolina commanded by Francis Marion—the Swamp Fox—before the battle at King’s Mountain. Caleb preferred it to the standard musket, with its shorter range and lack of accuracy. Loading the Deckhard, which required pouring powder from the powder horn down the barrel, seating the ball on a greased linen patch, punching it into the muzzle with a starter, then driving it home with a hickory ramrod, was slower than loading a musket, but the deadly accuracy up to four hundred yards more than compensated for the time lost.
He found a place at the small, running brook that served his New York company, then knelt and caught his breath as he splashed freezing water onto his face, head, and neck. He dipped water into his mouth and spat it onto the forest floor as he rose to stand, water dripping from his dark brown, six-week growth of beard onto his coat and shirt. He backed away from the stream to give way for the next man while he wiped at his face with his coat sleeve. He untied the leather thong at the back of his head, smoothed his long brown hair as best he could, caught it together and retied it. For a moment he stood still, peering, searching upstream fifty yards to the place where the Black company shared the stream.
Primus, average height, average build, large eyes showing white in his round, black face, was there with the others in his company, taking his rotation at the creek. He and Caleb exchanged glances, but nothing more, before each went to his own pack to get his wooden plate and spoon and cup, and walk to the fire. The two men stood hunched in their separate breakfast lines, shivering while vapors rose from their breath, then holding out their bowls and cups to receive a large spoon load of steaming mush, two strips of fried sowbelly, and a smoking cup of bitter, colored water generously called coffee.
With half a dozen other men, Caleb sat in silence on a log near the cooking fire and dipped his spoon into the mush, blew on it for a moment, then gingerly touched it with his tongue. It was still too hot when he took the first mouthful, and he sucked air. He looked to the east where the sun was making filigree of the bare tree branches, and studied the rows of stacked crates, eight feet wide, six feet high, and a quarter mile long, and then looked at the cleared, flat place where the cannon were held. Beyond were the wagons and skids and sleds used to haul the freight down to the docks, and beyond them were holdings of the hundreds of horses and oxen that pulled them.
How many rows of captured stores remained? One hundred fifty? How many more tons? Six hundred? How many heavy guns? One hundred? And across the river at Yorktown, what? Sixty more cannon? Another five hundred tons of stores? How many horses? Three hundred? Oxen? One hundred?
He shook his head at the remembrance of the bewildering time following the surrender of the British on October nineteenth. French Admiral de Grasse was under orders to return with his fleet to the West Indies to wreak havoc among the British ships and territories there. His leaving forced a pivotal decision. When he sailed out into the Atlantic, would the land forces remaining at Yorktown and Gloucester wait for the British navy to return with warships to rescue Cornwallis? If the Americans remained, British General Clinton could and would bring down his fleet and his army and guns from New York, and with his superiority in numbers and cannon win in a pitched battle. So, should the Americans and French remain at Yorktown, or leave? And if they were to leave, what would they do with the mountain of desperately needed supplies and cannon they had brought, combined with those captured from the British? Should they burn it all and spike the cannon, to be certain the equipment and stores did not fall into British hands? If not, then what was to be done with it?
The answers, and the orders, quickly came down from General Washington:
Move the supplies by ships, out the mouth of the York River into the Chesapeake, then due north to the tiny hamlet called Head of Elk in Maryland, the northernmost settlement on the great Bay. There they would be safe from any British fleet that might return to Yorktown to attempt to rescue Cornwallis and avenge their humiliating defeat. Removed to Head of Elk, the supplies and guns would be easier to protect and more accessible to the American and French troops in the north. To make the haul, the Americans and French would scavenge what few American and French ships they could find.
General Rochambeau graciously volunteered to remain and take command of the operation, while General Washington would take the bulk of the American forces, with a few French, north to lock and hold British General Clinton on Manhattan Island and the Hudson River. Billy and Eli were among those ordered to move north with General Washington; Caleb and Primus were to remain w
ith General Rochambeau to move the freight up the Chesapeake; Matthew was ordered to sail with de Grasse to assist in navigating the tricky channels and reefs in the countless islands of the West Indies, and to act as a courier for General Washington with a small, swift schooner.
For Caleb and those who were to remain, the unanswered question was what would happen if British admirals Rodney, Graves, or Hood brought gunboats into the Chesapeake while the cargo ships were in full sail? The unarmed American and French transports, and their crews, would be doomed. The nervous Americans anchored two small schooners at the mouth of the Chesapeake, each with one cannon bolted down on the deck, and stationed a man with a telescope in the crow’s nest around the clock. The captains were ordered to fire three, timed cannon shots if a ship were to heave into sight with the dreaded Union Jack snapping in the wind.
With the orders given, General Washington and his army marched out, traveling north, and General Rochambeau took command of the sweaty, tough, monotonous labor of moving more than a thousand tons of military stores, and hundreds of cannon, to the Gloucester and Yorktown docks to be loaded into the holds, and stacked on the decks of the handful of tiny frigates and schooners they had commandeered. Thence up the Bay to unload, and return for the next load.
Thirty-two days had passed since the men first hitched reluctant horses and indifferent, splayfooted oxen to the wagons and skids and sleds, and began moving the freight down to the docks. The small ships, crammed with munitions and supplies, with cannon lashed down on their decks, rode deep and slow in the water, moving out into the Chesapeake and north for the two-day journey to Head of Elk, and they rode high and light and churned a ninety-foot wake on the return trip to Gloucester and Yorktown. Their crews stood silent at the rails, listening for the distant boom of three timed cannon blasts, and watching for sails of warships showing the red, white, and blue bars of the British flag flying from the mainmast.
The distant cannon shots did not come. None of the vaunted British warships appeared to avenge their humiliating losses at Yorktown.
Caleb squinted one eye to swallow the last of his breakfast coffee, stood, wiped at his dripping nose, drew a deep breath, and walked to the stream to wash his utensils. He set them in their place on his blanket for inspection and joined others as they entered the rope enclosures where the horses were held. With their shaggy winter hair growing daily, the horses tossed their heads and snorted, then settled and waited while the men buckled on the halters and led them to the wagons. They backed them up beside the wagon tongues, wheelhorses first, and began the process of mounting the horse collars, then the harnesses, connecting the tugs and traces, and finally snapping them to the singletrees, then to the doubletrees. The drivers climbed into the seats and sorted and threaded the six, long leather strands between their fingers while the crews clambered into the wagon beds and sat down. The drivers clucked and slapped the reins on the rumps of the wheelhorses, and the wagons creaked into motion toward the great rows of crates.
From his place in the jolting wagon, Caleb saw the officers walking rapidly towards a crude, one-room log building used for worship, realized it was Sunday, the Sabbath, and remembered the order issued by General Washington more than three years before, May 2, 1778. On the Sabbath, all officers were to attend religious services at the place most convenient to them, as an example to their troops.
Quietly Caleb shook his bowed head and a cynical smile crossed his face. The Sabbath? Worship who? God? What God? The God that let the British kill Father? The God that was somewhere else for the past five years while tens of thousands of men spilled their blood—crippled, maimed, dead? The God who talks about love and heaven while he lets men filled with hate destroy each other in the purgatory of war? Worship such a being?
He shook his head once more. Let the officers do the worshipping. Moving a thousand tons of freight and cannon will go right on, and it won’t be the officers that do it. For most of us, the Sabbath will be just like yesterday, and tomorrow, and God isn’t going to do a thing to change it. If he’s so almighty why doesn’t he stop the pain? Why? Why?
The drivers came back on the reins and talked the horses to a stop. The crews dropped to the frozen ground with their breath rising in the cold, morning air. They lowered the tailgates of the wagons and positioned the thick, fourteen-foot hickory planks, slanting from the wagon beds to the ground. Hard, callused hands seized the handles of the freight hooks while others reached for forty-foot sections of one-inch hawsers to loop around the three-hundred-pound crates. The men paused for a moment, took a deep breath, and commenced the brutal labor of using the hooks and hawsers to drag the crates up the planks and stack them in the wagon beds for the haul to the docks. Stopping for the midday meal was a tiny island of comfort in their world of sweat and strain, and the obligatory, one-hour daily drill at three o’clock was a blessed relief.
Sunday passed into Monday, and November blended into December without fanfare or notice. Lacy ice formed on the banks of the Chesapeake. The men carried hatchets to the creek to cut through the ice for camp water. They built small, crude huts for warmth, and the first blizzard of winter came howling in from the Bay before Christmas. By mid-January, temperatures hovered at zero. The Chesapeake was a glare of ice, and the small ships had to break a channel north and keep it open. The great stockpile of crates and supplies and cannon steadily dwindled at Gloucester and Yorktown, while they grew at an equal pace at Head of Elk.
It was the first week of April, with an almost indiscernible feel of spring in the air, when Caleb and his company loaded the last of the oxen onto the three ships remaining at Yorktown. They weighed anchor and sailed out into a blustery wind that sang in the rigging and whipped the bay into endless choppy whitecaps. Midmorning two days later they led the oxen single file down a broad, makeshift gangplank to the tiny dock at Head of Elk, and then unloaded their gear. In the afternoon they cut pine saplings and boughs and fashioned their lean-tos. The sun was touching the western rim when they lined up for evening mess at their new camp. With steaming bowls of mutton stew in hand they sat down on logs to eat.
The great task was finished. Little was said, but from time to time as twilight approached, every man among them glanced at the huge mountain of stores, and cannon, and livestock they had moved over the course of a brutal New England winter. They wiped at their beards with hands that were cracked, and they looked at each other with eyes that shone in silent pride at what they had done.
In approaching twilight, Caleb walked past the orderly rows of French tents, to the place in the woods where the small gathering of black soldiers made their camp. Some stared in stony silence while others, who knew him, nodded an acknowledgment. One pointed to the north, where Primus was kneeling, spreading his blanket on a bedding of pine boughs. He turned as Caleb approached, and the two sat down cross-legged beside each other on the blanket. No words of greeting were necessary between them.
Caleb gestured toward the supply depot. “We’re finished. Decided where you’ll go when the war’s over?”
For a time Primus stared at his hands, clasped in his lap. “North. No cotton fiel’s or indigo or slave masters.”
“Know anybody up there?”
Primus shook his head and remained silent.
“Thought about trying to find your wife and child? Back down south somewhere?” Caleb saw the pain come into the white eyes and the black face.
“They gone. Like cattle. Won’t never find ’em. Gots to start over. New.”
“Might be hard. Not many black people up north. Not like where you were raised.” Caleb saw the longing, the yearning, and it tore his heart when Primus shrugged his answer.
“Don’t matter much. Black is black, north or south.”
Caleb drew his knees up and circled them with his arms. “Maybe I can help. In Boston. If you decide to go there.”
“Maybe New York. Philadelphia. Maybe Boston. Anyplace where bein’ there won’t cause no trouble. Jes’ a place to earn my
way with no hurt.”
“You let me know. Hear?”
Primus turned to look at him. “I hear.”
Caleb came to his feet and walked away without looking back.
The men sought their blankets early and stared thoughtfully into the dark as the drummer rattled the ten o’clock tattoo. One by one the lanterns in the lean-tos and huts and tents winked out, and the quarter-moon rose over a dark, silent camp.
Notes
Following the victory at Yorktown, French Admiral de Grasse remained in the Chesapeake for a short time to protect the bay from British warships while the task of moving the supplies from Yorktown to Head of Elk was begun, then sailed out in compliance with his orders to attack British ships and holdings in the West Indies (Caribbean). French General Rochambeau remained to finish the work in the Yorktown vicinity. General Washington marched north with most of the Continental Army and some French infantry to check British General Clinton at New York (Freeman, Washington, pp. 494–95).
Head of Elk, Maryland
Late April 1782
CHAPTER III
* * *
Daylight on the Chesapeake came in a gray overcast that turned the sun into a dull red ball rising in the east. Sometime in the night the salt breeze from the Atlantic had died, and morning came with an eerie, dead calm, and a damp chill in the air. All nature seemed to be holding its breath. No birds of spring moved in the silent trees. No squirrels darted and scolded. The oxen stood transfixed, facing east, while the horses pranced and whickered, nervous, ears pricked and moving, sensing what was coming. Soldiers and sailors at the Head of Elk encampment walked silent through the breakfast mess lines with narrowed eyes, peering south and east, searching the skyline for the first glimpse of the low, level, ominous purple cloud that would be moving steadily toward landfall.