* Choisy outranked Lauzun and Weedon and was directly responsible to Rochambeau. No love was lost between him and Lauzun, who said Choisy was “a good and brave man, ridiculously violent, constantly in a passion, making scenes with everybody, and always without reason.”
* Yorktown was the first and only siege conducted by the Continental Army during the entire war. It was also the last of its kind in history.
* The term bullet was used as early as the fifteenth century.
* Literally, without a blemish, or stain.
† They kept their word, and so did Rochambeau. Two years later a royal ordinance was read to the regiment, stating that “This regiment … known by the name of Gâtinais, has resumed that of Auvergne by Ordinance of 11 July 1782.”
* Cochrane, as a lark, asked to fire a gun from behind the parapet in the horn work and, Captain Samuel Graham wrote, was “anxious to see its effect, looked over to observe it, when his head was carried off by a cannon ball.”
* Alexander Anderson, a naval surgeon aboard one of the ships in the fleet, wrote to his wife, “… it is everyones Oppinion here, that America is lost to Great Brittain and must Obtain its Independance.”
* “The Count de Barras in my own name and that of the Count de Grasse.” The latter, unfortunately, was sick and unable to attend the signing, so Barras substituted for him.
* He was said to have had seven hundred slaves before and now had eighty or one hundred.
* The paintings remain today at the same locations; Louis XVI’s set is at the former royal palace in Versailles, Rochambeau’s at the Château de Rochambeau.
* One of the attentive young swains she identified only as “Marshall.” His first name was John, and twenty-one years later he became chief justice of the United States Supreme Court.
* Gates’s aide Major John Armstrong is generally believed to have written the “Newburgh Addresses.”
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