by Jack Kelly
At the same time, the French marveled that these men, “unpaid and rather poorly fed, can march so well and withstand fire so steadfastly.” Washington himself seemed to embody a unique spirit. A French chaplain judged that “he never has more resources than when he seems to have no more.”17
To regain New York had been Washington’s dream since his humiliating defeat there in 1776. But the problem had not changed since Charles Lee had first defined it: who commanded the sea commanded the town. Washington needed the French fleet in order to crack open the heavily fortified city. Even then, the chance of success was dubious. Clinton and his fourteen thousand soldiers were so solidly entrenched that the combined French and American army of about ten thousand had scant hope of dislodging them.
The moment of decision came in mid-August. Washington received word that the Comte de Grasse, a battle-tested French admiral, was proceeding from the West Indies not to New York but to Chesapeake Bay. The development offered the possibility of an important victory over Cornwallis’s army. But the prospect was a long shot. The French had, again and again, proven themselves unreliable allies. If the operation were to work, it meant marching two armies four hundred miles in summer heat. It meant coordinating that move with the French navy. Two French navies—Admiral Barras, currently in Newport, would need to sail south and rendezvous with de Grasse, bringing with him the French army’s siege guns and much of Henry Knox’s heavy artillery. It meant that Cornwallis would have to remain motionless at Yorktown rather than brush aside Lafayette’s inferior force and depart. It meant that an alerted British fleet would not beat de Grasse to the Chesapeake to reinforce Cornwallis or draw his men off. It meant that Clinton would continue to slumber and not sally out to strike Washington’s rear or take possession of the vital Hudson Highlands.
Washington strongly suspected that once his army marched south, it could not return without a victory. The troops had gone unpaid for too long. They were too destitute, too mutinous. Congress was bankrupt, popular sentiment cool. The dissolution of the army that he had warned of during the Valley Forge winter appeared closer than ever.
Was it worth the risk? Through almost the entire war, Washington had bridled under a strategy of retreat and defense. Play it safe, never venture your whole force, make certain the army survived. Now, he decided, it was time to take a chance, time to risk everything. Old Hoss was going south.
* * *
War is always dynamic, time its great mediator. Marching at twenty miles a day, it would take the allied armies at least three weeks to reach Yorktown. Would Cornwallis still be there? It was impossible to know. Speed was essential. On August 27, Washington wrote Lafayette, telling him to do all he could to hold Cornwallis’s army in place. He asked Virginia governor Thomas Nelson, who had replaced Jefferson, to call out every militiaman armed “with a gun of any sort.”
Just crossing the Hudson River at King’s Ferry took six days. Leaving behind three thousand men to guard the Highlands, Washington directed the rest of his troops to the area of New Jersey opposite Staten Island. He was at his theatrical best in giving a nervous General Clinton the impression that he intended to attack New York City. He ordered the French troops to build ovens, as if preparing for a long siege; he assembled boats to feign an amphibious attack; he spread rumors of an imminent assault on the city. All the while, he kept his own troops and most of his officers in the dark about the army’s actual destination.
At the end of August, the troops turned south. Now they guessed where they were headed, and they didn’t like it. By the time they reached Philadelphia, they were grumbling so loudly that Washington borrowed $20,000 from Rochambeau so that his paymaster could hand out a month’s wages in half-crown coins. For many of the men, it was their first pay in specie. “Hard money,” Washington figured, would “put them in a proper temper.”18
Along the way, crowds strained to catch a glimpse of the commander in chief, who had attained the stature of a demigod among the people. Their adulation did nothing to calm Washington’s mind. He was gripped with nervous agitation as at no other time during the war. “I am distressed beyond expression to know what has become of the Count De Grasse,” he wrote to Lafayette. “I am almost all impatience and anxiety.”19
Rochambeau and his staff chose to proceed down the Delaware River by boat; Washington traveled on horseback. When the French entourage approached the dock in Chester, where they were to disembark, they saw a man on shore waving his hat and handkerchief, shouting at the top of his lungs, practically dancing. It was George Washington. He seemed as if his whole deportment was changed in an instant, a French officer wrote. “I never saw a man so thoroughly and openly delighted.”20
A dispatch rider from the south had brought word that de Grasse had arrived at the Chesapeake. His fleet included twenty-nine ships of the line, each carrying seventy-four guns on three decks. He had brought additional warships and transports carrying 3,500 men. His troops had already disembarked and were helping Lafayette contain Cornwallis. This time, things might work out.
Now the ebullient commander in chief even allowed himself a brief side trip to Mount Vernon, the first time he had visited his home in more than six years, the first time he had seen his four step-grandchildren. He entertained Rochambeau and his aides for a few days, showing off his estate on the Potomac. As they were leaving, he learned that de Grasse had gathered his fleet and sailed out of Chesapeake Bay. The French ships had all disappeared over the horizon. The American commander became “much agitated” on hearing this discouraging news.
* * *
George Washington arrived at Williamsburg, Virginia, on September 22. Lafayette “caught the General round his body, hugged him as close as was possible, and absolutely kissed him from ear to ear.”21 Cornwallis remained at Yorktown, ten miles further down the peninsula, the marquis told the commander in chief. “We have got him handsomely in a pudding bag,” was how Virginia militia general George Weeden put it.22
The most important news was that de Grasse had sailed out of the bay in response to an immediate threat. A British fleet under Admiral Samuel Graves had caught him unprepared, with many French sailors and officers assigned to supply duties on land. De Grasse had had no time to recall them. He had hurried his fleet out of the bay to give battle.
Graves had made the inexplicable error of allowing the French ships to assemble in the ocean rather than attack them as they passed between the Chesapeake capes. Two hours of point-blank battering with heavy cannon left both fleets damaged and hundreds of men torn apart. While both admirals jockeyed for position and repaired their vessels, they drifted to the south, allowing Barras’s smaller Newport fleet to slip into the bay and deliver the precious siege guns.
“Sentiments upon the Truly Unfortunate Day,” was how one of Graves’s officers had titled his report of the engagement. Soon Graves had to admit the “impracticability of giving any effectual succour to General Earl Cornwallis.”23 The British fleet would sail back to New York.
Washington and his entourage went out to de Grasse’s flagship, the Ville de Paris, the largest armed vessel in the world. They met the admiral and thanked him for his crucial effort. De Grasse, “a remarkable man for size, appearance, and plainness of address,” taller even than Washington, embraced the American commander jokingly as “mon cher petit general.”24 Henry Knox laughed.
Not so amusing was de Grasse’s insistence that he would be leaving at the end of October. The possibility of a hurricane and the danger of a British raid on France’s valuable and unprotected possessions in the West Indies would not allow him to tarry. The news gave the coming siege of Yorktown a high urgency. “We had holed him,” a soldier remarked about Cornwallis, “and nothing remained but to dig him out.”25 They only had six weeks to do it.
* * *
Digging an enemy out of a fortified position was an exercise as old as warfare itself. Rochambeau, wh
o had participated in fourteen sieges, assured Washington that it was “reducible to calculation.” A siege was a trying and often terrifying slow-motion battle requiring constant vigilance over days and weeks. Boredom alternated with terror as each side sought an advantage in a raid, a sally, an assault, a skirmish, or a stratagem. Time was the key factor. How fast could the attacker dig trenches and bring up guns? How long could the defender hold out? Would reinforcements show up to relieve the besieged force?
The allied army, in full battle array, marched from Williamsburg to the vicinity of Yorktown on September 25. Washington was surprised that Cornwallis made no effort to oppose him along the road. The enemy’s few skirmishers quickly pulled back within their lines, allowing the allies to set up their camp in front of Yorktown, the Americans on the right, the French on the left. Two days later, British soldiers mysteriously abandoned their outer fortifications, tightening their perimeter but allowing the allied armies to begin their operations that much closer.
The British had reinforced their main line, a system of trenches and parapets in a semicircle around the town, with seven strong points and three enclosed redoubts. Cornwallis led about nine thousand men, including those on two warships floating in the river. His works bristled with sixty-five cannon.
The British also held the point of land at Gloucester, half a mile away on the opposite bank of the river. A small army of French cavalry and Virginia militia was assigned to contain them. On October 3, Banastre Tarleton led an armed expedition out of the British fortifications there to forage for food. French horsemen attacked and drove them back. The “pudding bag” was now completely sealed.
During a week of preparation, troops hewed stakes for abatis and stockades and bundled fascines of twigs for filling ditches. On the night of October 5, Washington himself struck the soil with a pick to break ground for the first trench, known as a parallel. The digging began about a half mile from British lines. The works traced an arc from the river edge halfway around the enemy position on the eastern side. Only three weeks now remained before Admiral de Grasse would sail away.
The possibility that the British could move to rescue or reinforce Cornwallis at any time added to the sense of anxious hurry. The goal of a siege was to demolish the enemy’s fortifications with large cannon. But since that enemy had cannon of his own already in place, the attacking soldiers first had to excavate trenches and prepare protected batteries from which they could fire. The Marquis de Vauban had formalized the system of parallels and zigzag approaches during the 1670s and his doctrine remained military gospel. But calculations on paper translated on the battlefield into blood and mayhem.
Thousands of sappers had to step into the killing field of British artillery fire and brave enemy sharpshooters in order to excavate ditches four feet deep and ten feet wide. They toiled at the dangerous work in silence and under the cover of darkness. They piled the earth to make a rampart and reinforced it with pointed twelve-foot stakes. The allies could not return the enemy’s nerve-rattling cannon fire until their own batteries were in place.
Five and a half years and several lifetimes had passed since the icy days of January 1776, when Henry Knox and his brother William, who also accompanied him to Yorktown, had manhandled their train of Ticonderoga artillery through the hills of Massachusetts. In July, the Bostonian had celebrated his thirty-first birthday. During the entire war, he had been in charge of the most exacting facet of the military effort, managing the massive guns and procuring the ammunition on which fighting depended. When not campaigning, he had trained hundreds of men in the intricate science of gunnery at his improvised military school, the first on the continent. He had invented a gun carriage, ideal for a siege, that let his men fire exploding bombs directly into the British breastworks. All the while, as in the mutiny crisis of January, he had served as Washington’s principal adviser and troubleshooter. Now the heavyset man with the mangled hand would direct the most critical operation of the war.
The guns Knox would be firing at Yorktown were not the manageable field pieces that heaved 3- and 6-pound iron balls. Siege artillery needed the power to wreck enemy fortifications from long range. These would be 18- and 24-pounders, each gun weighing close to three tons. A great effort was needed to drag the tremendous cannon into position along the swampy, sandy peninsula.
By October 8, six large cannon, as well as mortars and howitzers designed to heave bombs over the enemy parapets, were ready in the batteries. The French were allowed to fire first, and their expert gunners began to send bombs and balls into the right side of the British lines. The hoisting of the national flag would be the signal to commence the American barrage. Connecticut soldier Joseph Plumb Martin, now a sergeant, confessed a swelling of pride “when I saw the ‘star-spangled banner’ waving majestically in the very faces of our implacable adversaries.”26
An 18-pounder in the American battery had been prepared and aimed so that Knox could set off the first shot. But seeing the eagerness in Washington’s eyes, Knox afforded his chief the honor. Washington touched the gun with a smoldering linstock; the piece bellowed and heaved, belching flame and smoke. The heavy iron ball tore the air for half a mile before crashing into the town. An American “could hear the ball strike from house to house.” The shot smashed through a building where some British officers were at dinner, knocking their commissary general dead while leaving his horrified wife untouched at his side.
The world of the eighteenth century was quiet. The firing of a single musket struck the ear with a startling report. No sound came close to the heaven-shattering roar of a field gun. The thunder of massed siege cannon was of yet another order. Their detonations made the earth quiver. The sound rolled for scores of miles across the landscape. Soldiers heard the concussions with their entrails rather than their ears. The awful music, which went on well into the night, wore on all nerves. At their peak, the allied guns were firing 3,600 rounds a day, one massive blast piled on another.
To be on the receiving end of the barrage was an unrelenting nightmare. Cannonballs crashed into the defenses, blasting the pointed abatis and weakening the breastworks. They tore over the parapets and through the town with ghostly sighs until they took down a brick wall or splintered a house beam or ripped off a human leg.
British and German soldiers who were not manning the lines against an assault hid in basements. Some joined the civilians who sought shelter below the bluffs that lined the river. No cannonball could reach them there, but shells were a different matter. As these iron spheres descended into enemy territory, a charge of gunpowder inside blew them to pieces. The lacerating shards flew in all directions, striking even those cowering behind the earthen banks.
For those not mangled by the projectiles, the bombardment was a stunning sight. “One of the most sublime and magnificent spectacles which can be imagined,” American army surgeon James Thacher wrote. He watched the bombs crisscross in the air. “In the night they appear like a fiery meteor with a blazing tail, most beautifully brilliant.”27
The French were the world’s best gunners. Yet a French officer marveled at the intelligence and activity of Henry Knox. “The artillery was always well served, the general incessantly directing it and often himself pointing the mortars. Seldom did he leave the batteries.”28
At one point in the bombardment, Knox disputed with Alexander Hamilton whether it was honorable for sentries to shout, “A shell!” when an enemy bomb landed, giving those nearby an instant to dive out of the way before it went off. Hamilton deemed such a warning cowardly. Men should stand fire without flinching as a point of honor. While the discussion was going on, the alarm went up: “A shell! A shell!” Knox dove for a shelter, and Hamilton huddled behind Knox’s bulky body. Knox tossed the future secretary of the treasury off his back. The bomb exploded.
“Now,” Knox reportedly said, “now what do you think, Mr. Hamilton, about crying shell—but let me tell you not to
make a breastwork of me again.”29
The British frigate that floated in the river off Yorktown was called the Charon, after the boatman said to ferry souls to Hades. While standing guard over the hell on shore, the ship was hit and set afire by a French cannonball heated red hot in a furnace. As it burned through the night, Doctor Thacher recounted, the vessel was “enwrapped in a torrent of fire,” the combustible rigging transformed into a flaming outline of the ship.
By October 11, three days after the bombardment began, few British guns could answer the relentless allied barrage. In the town, a German soldier noted that “many men were badly injured and mortally wounded by the fragments of bombs, their arms and legs severed or themselves struck dead.”30 Americans observed hundreds of dead horses floating in the river. British forage had run out.
Cornwallis was grappling with a fate eerily similar to that of Burgoyne at Saratoga, his hopes pinned on a relief force that Sir Henry Clinton had promised to send from New York. Like Burgoyne, he waited. And waited.
Allied sappers began digging a second ditch, this one only a few hundred yards from the enemy fortifications. To complete this line, on the night of October 14, American and French troops launched assaults against two detached redoubts at the outer end of the British works. Washington gave the eager Alexander Hamilton a chance to lead the four hundred veterans who would storm one of the forts. The men vaulted over the walls and used bayonets, spears, and axes in a fierce hand-to-hand struggle with the British defenders. After ten minutes of brawling, they possessed the redoubt.
Knox hauled his guns even closer to the enemy breastworks. Cornwallis realized that he needed to act before his ramparts were completely leveled and his men exposed. Before dawn on October 16, 350 British soldiers rushed out of the lines and attacked the closest French and American batteries. They managed to disable a number of cannon but were driven off. Gunners repaired their pieces in a few hours. The sally had been more a gesture than an earnest attack.