Victory at Yorktown

by Richard M. Ketchum

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  IN THEIR OFF-DUTY hours soldiers wrote to their wives or other family members, giving them the news, beseeching them for letters from home, and many kept journals as well, recording the day’s events as best they could. One of the best journals was kept by Tucker, who decided to keep a record of the siege since “the Close of the present Campaign will probably be more important than any other since the commencement of the American war.”

  St. George Tucker, twenty-nine years old, was a native of Bermuda who had come to Virginia to study at the College of William and Mary, and eventually made his home in Williamsburg, where he established a law practice and, through friendship with the Nelson family of Yorktown, gained a firsthand knowledge of the town and its environs, which gave his meticulous journal an accuracy few others had.

  On a dark rainy night all the miners and sappers were out laying laths of pine end to end in the trenches when they were told to remain where they were without moving. A few moments later a man wearing a surtout appeared and asked if they had seen the engineers. He asked what troops they were, chatted with them for a few minutes, and then, after telling them if they were captured to disclose nothing about their outfit to the enemy, disappeared in the darkness. The men knew better than to reveal that information, of course, knowing that sappers and miners were entitled to no quarter by the laws of warfare. Sometime later the engineers returned in company with the stranger, whom they addressed as “Your Excellency.” That was the first inkling the sappers had that their visitor had been the commander in chief.

  At another time Washington was reconnoitering not far from the British lines and drew the fire of one cannon. The ball buried itself in the earth, and some sand was sprinkled over the head of Chaplain Evans, who took off his hat, looked at it, and said, “See here, general!” To which the commander in chief replied, “Mr. Evans, you had better carry that [ball] home and show it to your wife and children.”

  Alexander Hamilton was familiar with Vauban’s protocol for a siege, and he was a stickler for following the rules. On October 7 James Duncan of the Pennsylvania line wrote that the trenches were to be “enlivened” with colors flying and drums beating, and his division of light infantry was assigned to carry out this order. Colonel Hamilton gave instructions on exactly how it must be done. First the colors were planted on the parapet accompanied by a motto: Manus haec inimica tyrannis. Then, Duncan said, they executed an extraordinary maneuver: mounting the bank and confronting the enemy, they went through the entire manual of arms. What the British may have thought of this is not recorded, but they ceased firing, probably—Duncan thought—because of their astonishment at the American conduct. He esteemed Colonel Hamilton as one of the first officers in the army, but “must beg leave in this instance to think he wantonly exposed the lives of his men.”

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  ON AUGUST 1 A twenty-two-year-old German youth named Stephen Popp had arrived in Yorktown with other hired troops who joined the British. A day later Popp wrote, “there are reports that we are in a very bad situation.” He kept a diary and began to fill its pages with distressing notes to the effect that they were working day and night strengthening the lines and had little time to eat the food that was becoming scarcer all the time. As late as the morning of October 9 he kept wondering why the enemies—the French and Americans—did not fire back at the cannonading by the British.

  The reason, of course, was that the allies were holding back until all their guns were in place; if they fired from each battery once it was completed, the enemy would concentrate on that one and destroy it. According to Joseph Plumb Martin, who was in the trenches, “All were upon the tiptoe of expectation and impatience to see the signal given to open the whole line of batteries, which was to be the hoisting of the American flag in the ten-gun battery. About noon the much-wished-for signal went up,” and Martin felt a secret pride swell in his heart when he saw the Continental flag run up over the battery on the American right, and the white fleur-de-lis of the French hoisted over their batteries. To Martin, “It appeared like an omen of success to our enterprise and so it proved in reality.”

  An American officer exclaimed, “Happy day!” when “Forty-one mouths of fire were suddenly unmasked.” Colonel Philip van Cortlandt of the 2nd New York regiment recalled that when the first gun was fired he could distinctly hear the cannonball pass through the town: “I could hear the ball strike from house to house, and I was afterward informed that it went through the one where many of the officers were at dinner, and over the tables, discomposing the dishes, and either killed or wounded the one at the head of the table.”

  Washington himself had put the match to the gun that fired the first shot, and as the firing continued into the night the shells from the works of both armies passed high in the air and descended in a curve, each with a long train of fire. It was a spectacular sight, but not many of the American or French soldiers had a chance to watch it since they were busy digging.

  Early the next morning the French Grand Battery opened with eighteen- and twenty-four-pounders and mortars, and Stephen Popp said the defenders could find no refuge in or out of the town. Residents fled to the waterfront and hid in hastily built shelters on the sand cliffs, but some eighty of them were killed and others wounded—many with arms or legs severed—while their houses were destroyed. In all that day some thirty-six hundred shots were fired by the cannon, inflicting heavy damage on ships in the harbor, killing a great many sailors as well as soldiers, after which a number of others deserted. A British officer reported that the allied cannonade was so intense that his men could scarcely fire a gun of their own since “fascines, stockade platforms, and earth, with guns and gun-carriages [were] all pounded together in a mass.”

  During the day the Nelson house on the edge of town was severely damaged, and when Cornwallis decided to move to safer haven, he told old Thomas Nelson, formerly secretary of the Virginia council and the uncle of the state’s governor, that he could leave town under a flag of truce if he chose to do so. Nelson did and the next day talked with St. George Tucker, the young Virginian, noting that the allied “bombardment produced great effects in annoying the enemy and destroying their works.” On the first night of the artillery barrage two officers were killed and another wounded, Lord Chewton’s cane was knocked out of his hand by a cannonball, and Cornwallis was said to have had a sort of grotto built for him at the foot of a garden “where he lives underground.” It was Thomas Nelson’s opinion, Tucker said, that “the British are a good deal dispirited, although he says they affect to say they have no apprehension of the garrison’s falling.” Finally, the allies had fifty-two big guns firing in what one man called “aweful music.”

  Huge Henry Knox had acquired his knowledge of artillery from what he read in his Boston bookstore before the war, and this extraordinary display of firepower must have reminded him of his first triumph, six years earlier, when he journeyed to Fort Ticonderoga, collected the cannons there, and brought them by oxen across the mountains—“from which we might almost have seen all the Kingdoms of the earth”—to Dorchester Heights overlooking Boston. Once Knox’s guns commanded the British fleet anchorage, the ship channels, and Boston itself, General Sir William Howe’s only option was to evacuate the city, giving the first great victory of the war to the Americans.

  What Knox had done in the Yorktown campaign was appreciated by Chastellux, who wrote, “One cannot too much admire the intelligence and activity with which [Knox] collected from all quarters, transported, disembarked and conveyed to the batteries the train destined for the siege, and which consisted of more than thirty pieces of cannon and mortars of a large bore: this artillery was extremely well served, General Knox … scarcely ever quitted the batteries.…”

  By October 11 the parallel directed at Cornwallis’s works was within 360 yards of the most advanced enemy post, and at dusk Steuben’s men entered the zigzag trench and began digging the second parallel. The entire night, a man said, “was an immen
se roar of bursting shell,” and they were glad of the chance to burrow into the soft earth, knowing that the opening of this new parallel was the most hazardous moment of a siege since it was almost certain to draw the enemy out to prevent it. Throughout the night guards stood watch, muskets at the ready, with orders not to sit or lie down, and they were at risk not only from the enemy but from their own gunners in the first parallel, who often cut their fuses too short. Morning dawned, and not a man had been killed.

  But that was on the allied side. Johann Doehla wrote that “… the bombs and canon balls hit many inhabitants and negroes of the city, and marines, sailors, and soldiers. One saw men lying nearly everywhere who were mortally wounded and whose heads, arms, and legs had been shot off.” Someone counted more than 3,600 shots from the cannons during a twenty-four-hour period, some of them landing across the river in Gloucester, wounding soldiers on the beach. Marines and sailors from a number of ships were ordered to serve in the trenches, where they may actually have been safer, since the night’s bombardment cost the British several vessels in the harbor—the forty-four-gun Charon was hit by a red-hot shell and caught fire, and two or three smaller vessels were consumed by flames that roared through the rigging and presented what Surgeon James Thacher described as “one of the most sublime and magnificent spectacles which can be imagined.”

  On Sunday the 14th all the American batteries concentrated on the British strongholds in the sector opposite them—notably the Number 9 and Number 10 redoubts that lay behind a moat and a tangle of abatis, and bristled with the angled, sharp-pointed stakes known as fraise work. Early in the evening as the American light infantry prepared to assault Number 10, Joseph Plumb Martin observed that the two brilliant planets, Jupiter and Venus, were close in the western hemisphere, and every time he looked at them he was ready to leap to his feet, thinking they were the signal to attack. At the same time the French under Guillaume, Comte de Deux-Ponts, waited for darkness to fall and the same signal, when he would advance against Number 9 with four hundred of his own men plus the Gâtinais regiment, many of them with long storming pikes. The count said a fond farewell to his brother, the baron, and, when he saw the three shells rise into the air in quick succession, silently advanced.

  After walking about 125 paces, the French were discovered: a Hessian soldier called out, “Werda?” and when they did not reply, the enemy opened fire. The French kept moving up, and when they reached the abatis, about twenty-five paces from the redoubt, they were caught in a hail of bullets* and took a number of casualties because only a few could emerge from the trench at one time. After firing again, the British charged with bayonets leveled, but the French held. Enough of them had reached the redoubt by then that they outnumbered the enemy defenders, who were massed behind a line of barrels on which the French directed an intense fire. Deux-Ponts was about to give the order to charge when the British unexpectedly laid down their arms; he shouted, “Vive le Roi!” which all the troops in the area repeated. The count later commented, “I never saw a sight more beautiful or more majestic. I did not stop to look at it. I had to give attention to the wounded and directions to be observed towards the prisoners.” Baron de Vioménil came to give him orders, warning that it would be important to the enemy to retake this work. “An active enemy would not have failed,” he observed, but no such attempt was made by the British—quite possibly because they thought the allies had three thousand men in this attack.

  The allied pioneers—sappers and miners—were having the devil’s own time in this general assault. Joseph Martin arrived at the trenches a little before sunset and knew they were in for a fight when he saw officers fixing bayonets to the end of long staves. Then he and his mates were handed axes and told to proceed in advance of the troops to cut a passage through the abatis, which were made of the tops of trees with the small branches cut on a slant, making them as sharp as spikes. Then the trees were laid at a short distance from the trench or ditch, pointing outward with the butt fastened to the ground so they couldn’t be moved by those approaching them. As Martin said, “It is almost impossible to get through them,” but “Through these we were to cut a passage before we or the other assailants could enter.”

  On both fronts it had come down to hand-to-hand fighting, with the pioneers ignoring enemy fire and slashing anyone who resisted them with axes in order to open holes in the defenses. In the French lines, where the Deux-Ponts and Gâtinais regiments were engaged, the latter were preparing to attack when General Rochambeau spoke to them. These men were from Auvergne and, having had their own regiment, were not happy about fighting under another name. The general addressed them, saying, “Mes enfants, I hope you have not forgotten that we have served together in that brave regiment of Auvergne Sans tache,* an honorable name that it has deserved ever since its creation.” They answered that if he would restore their name to them, they would fight to the last man; as it turned out, “They kept their word, charged like lions, and lost one-third of their number.”† Evidently the reason the French had far more casualties than the Americans was that when the latter reached the abatis they removed sections of it with their own hands and then leaped over the rest, whereas the French waited, under intense fire, for their pioneers to clear away the obstruction.

  In this firefight the French lost forty-six men killed and sixty-two wounded, including six officers. Among the latter was a captain named de Sireuil, whose leg was shot off and who died a year later. Two weeks earlier another French officer, the Chevalier de La Loge, a charming, witty, twenty-five-year-old poet, had had a leg shot off and died three days later. In those days all wounds tended to be serious, and the serious ones were almost always fatal since medical treatment was so primitive and the chance of infection so great.

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  ON THE MORNING of October 16 a hundred French workmen were employed in repairing the batteries, and in the predawn light around 5 A.M. some 350 British, led by Lieutenant Colonel Robert Abercrombie, made a sortie with the light infantry and guards, and massacred the picket of the Agénois regiment. After taking the captain prisoner, the British broke into a trench where some Soissonnais put up only token resistance before abandoning the post, and Abercrombie’s men took possession of a trench where the allied line was weak. From here they ran on to an undefended battery, spiked the cannon with their bayonets, killed four or five men, and proceeded to the junction between the first and second parallels, where they discovered a battery commanded by Captain Savage of the Americans and halted. “What troops?” they called out, and when Savage replied, “French,” the British commander said, “Push on, my brave boys, and skin the buggers.”

  The Comte de Noailles, who was nearby with a covering party, heard this and ordered his grenadiers to charge with the bayonet, which they did, shouting, “Vive le Roi!” Recounting this story, Colonel Richard Butler of the Pennsylvanians said, “to use the British phrase, [they] skivered eight of the Guards and Infantry and took twelve prisoners and drove them quite off.” The allied loss was trifling, he added, but he admired the way the British had executed the sortie with “secrecy and spirit.”

  It was discovered later that Chastellux had been warned by a deserter the day before that the British were planning a sortie at daybreak and had even been told where the attack would come. But as Verger wrote, “the General had paid no attention to the warning and in consequence had made no dispositions.” Clermont-Crèvecoeur dismissed the whole episode: “it was of no significance, since [the British] could have done better. They were nearly all drunk,” he added, “and by the way they maneuvered they would have had great difficulty surprising a trench where the men were on the alert.” But he had to admit that a lot of damage could have resulted had they “done better”: “We must confess that we hardly dreamed of being attacked that night. The time was propitious, for the night was very dark.” And—what he did not add—the French were very lucky.

  At the same time the Comte de Deux-Ponts’s outfit was engaged, Colonel Alexande
r Hamilton was attacking Number 10, but with quicker success. The Americans, preceded by Martin and the other sappers and miners, led the way, and the infantrymen followed, advancing beyond the trenches and lying down on the ground to wait for the signal to attack. They did not have long to wait. Their watchword was “Rochambeau,” which, when pronounced quickly, sounded to the Americans like “Rush on, boys.” They were ready when the three shells lit up the sky, leaped to their feet, and moved immediately toward the redoubt. Although it was dark, Joseph Martin could make out that a lot of his buddies were falling to the ground and disappearing, and discovered as he neared the abatis that the area was pockmarked with huge holes—big enough to bury an ox in, he said. This was the place where many of their own large shells had landed, and the running men, their eyes fixed on what was ahead, were falling into them. “I thought the British were killing us off at a great rate,” he said, but “At length, one of the holes happening to pick me up, I found out the mystery of our huge slaughter.”

  As quickly as the firing began, the men up ahead cried out, “The fort’s our own! Rush on, boys!” and the pioneers immediately cleared a passage for the infantry, who swarmed over the abatis. The officers ordered the miners not to enter the fort, but there was no stopping them. Martin couldn’t get through the entrance they had made, it was so crowded, but he found a place where cannon fire had blasted away some of the abatis, squeezed through, and as he was doing so a fellow at his side was hit in the head with a musket ball and fell under his feet, crying out piteously. The enemy was also throwing hand grenades; they were so thick, Martin said, that he thought they were burning cartridge paper, but he was soon “undeceived by their cracking.” As he mounted the breastwork he recognized an old friend in the light of the enemy’s musket fire, it was so vivid. “The fort,” he said, “was taken and all quiet in a very short time.”