In the Hurricane's Eye

by Nathaniel Philbrick

  Over the course of the next four days, as the Americans and French labored to complete the first parallel and its batteries, the British kept up a steady fire. To provide the workers with some warning of an incoming cannonball or explosive shell, a man was kept on watch on the ramparts. As soon as he saw one of the enemy gunners place a burning match to a cannon’s vent, he shouted out a word of warning and the soldiers would, Daniel Trabue remembered, “fall down in the ditch, and you could hear the ball go by. Sometimes it would skip along on the ground and bury the men in the ditch, but in general they would not be hurt.”

  By October 10, just four days after the completion of the first parallel, forty-one cannons, mortars, and howitzers had been placed inside the allied batteries. Only after the American flag had been hoisted above the Grand Battery, containing half a dozen large pieces of artillery near the York River, was the firing to begin. “All were upon the tiptoe of expectation and impatience,” Martin remembered. “About noon the much-wished-for signal went up. I confess I felt a secret pride swell my heart when I saw the star-spangled banner waving majestically in the very faces of our implacable adversaries; it appeared like an omen of success to our enterprise.”

  As the army’s commander in chief, Washington was given the distinction of firing the first shot, aimed at a cluster of houses that included the home of sixty-five-year-old Thomas Nelson, granduncle of the Virginia governor of the same name. In the days to come, Nelson, who would be granted a parole by the British, described how Washington’s 18-pound cannonball scored a direct hit, crashing through several houses before it killed the British commissary general as he sat at the dinner table with his wife and a group of officers that included Lord Cornwallis.

  There were more than six thousand British and German soldiers, along with hundreds if not thousands of escaped slaves, cooped up in a space just 500 yards wide and 1200 yards long. With the beach at their backs and a steep bluff between them and the front of their fortifications, there were few places to hide as the allied cannonballs and bombshells rained down on them over the course of the afternoon and evening. A cannonball could do more than its share of damage as it ricocheted through the town and, in some cases, skipped across the water before crashing into the sides of the ships anchored off the beach. But it was the bombshells—huge, openmouthed orbs of iron filled with gunpowder and other combustibles and fired from the mortars in high, lazy arcs—that wreaked the most havoc.

  “I followed with my eye, in its parabolic path, the slow and destructive bomb,” a French chaplain recounted, “sometimes burying itself in the roofs of the houses, sometimes when it burst, raising clouds of dust and rubbish from the ruins of the buildings, at other times blowing the unfortunate wretches that happened to be within its reach, more than twenty feet high in the air, and letting them fall at a considerable distance most pitiably torn.” Johann Doehla, a German soldier, was standing on the beach when several bombs plunged into the water beside him. A full five minutes passed before the bombs began to explode. “[I]t felt like the shocks of an earthquake,” he remembered. In addition to showering the beach with sand and mud, “the fragments and pieces of these bombs flew back . . . and fell on the houses and buildings of the city . . . where they . . . robbed many a brave soldier of his life or struck off his arm and leg. I had myself a piece of an exploded bomb in my hands which weighed more than thirty pounds and was over three inches thick.”

  Their homes rendered uninhabitable by the incessant fire, the citizens of Yorktown, along with a considerable number of British soldiers, fled in desperation to the beach, where they began to burrow into the sandy cliffs. “But there also they did not stay undamaged,” Doehla remembered, “for many were badly injured and mortally wounded by the fragments of bombs which exploded partly in the air and partly on the ground, their arms and legs severed or themselves struck dead.”

  A few days before, Cornwallis had decided to rid the army of its horses. Unable to feed the animals and unwilling to give them up to the enemy, he ordered them slaughtered and dragged into the river. Initially, the hundreds of carcasses had washed out with the tide, but now they were back. “Several days after their death these poor animals came back in heaps,” the jaeger captain Johann Ewald recounted. “It seemed as if they wanted to cry out against their murder after their death.”

  By far the worst fate had been reserved for the army’s former slaves, who had worked day and night building and repairing the British fortifications in anticipation of winning their freedom. Their rations reduced to virtually nothing and without shelter from the enemy’s fire, many had died in what the Virginia militia officer St. George Tucker described as “the most miserable manner.” The surviving African Americans’ only consolation was that they still had the British fortifications between them and a return to slavery. But as they were about to discover, now that Cornwallis’s army was running out of provisions, freedom was no longer an option.

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  • • •

  TO PREVENT A POSSIBLE AMPHIBIOUS ASSAULT, the British had sunk a large number of captured sailing vessels in the shallows beside the beach, their masts canted at haphazard angles amid the billows of smoke and dust that kept rolling off the shore. On the morning of October 9, a double-ended open boat with fourteen oars, four swivel guns, two lateen sails, and sixteen British sailors was seen making its way through this reef of sunken vessels toward the beach. The French occupied the Chesapeake, but that did not prevent the British from maintaining a steady flow of “express boats” between Yorktown and New York capable of completing the five-hundred-mile passage in as little as four days.

  The following morning, with the express boat about to leave that evening, Cornwallis began a letter to Sir Henry Clinton: “I have only to repeat what I said in my letter of the third, that nothing but a direct move to York River, which includes a successful naval action, can save me. The enemy made their first parallel on the night of the sixth at the distance of 600 yards, and have perfected it, and constructed places of arms and batteries with great regularity and caution. On the evening of the ninth, their batteries opened and have since continued firing without intermission. . . . We have lost about seventy men and many of our works are considerably damaged; with such works on disadvantageous ground against so powerful an attack we cannot hope to make a very long resistance.”

  Several hours later, Cornwallis, who had retired to what was described as a “grotto” in the cliffs behind Nelson’s house, added a postscript: “Since my letter was written we have lost thirty men.”

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  • • •

  SOME OF THE MOST EFFECTIVE British fire came not from the batteries built into the defenses surrounding Yorktown but from the frigate Charon, anchored so it could, in the words of Jonathan Trumbull, “greatly . . . annoy” the battery on the extreme left of the French line. Adding to the allies’ irritation was the knowledge that just a single French man-of-war might have long since silenced this and the other enemy vessels. Early on the evening of October 10, the French gunners decided it was time for the firing from the Charon to stop.

  The way to destroy a wooden ship was with hotshot—cannonballs heated in a furnace until they were literally red-hot. Once the ball had been removed with tongs, it was deposited into the cannon’s muzzle, which had been prepared with a wadding of water-soaked hay. Soon the cannons of the leftmost French battery were hurling several of these hotshots in the frigate’s direction.

  Bartholomew James was a proud lieutenant on the Charon, who, along with most of his fellow officers, was stationed at the batteries in front of Yorktown. James watched in horror as fire erupted aboard his ship “in three different places, and in a few minutes [was] in flames from the hold to the mastheads.” Soon the burning frigate had broken free from its mooring and was spreading fire throughout the tightly packed anchorage. “From the bank of the river I had a fine view of this conflagration,” the American surgeon James Thache
r recalled. “The ships were enwrapped in a torrent of fire . . . while all around was thunder and lightning from our numerous cannon and mortars and in the darkness of night presented one of the most sublime and magnificent spectacles which can be imagined.”

  Over the course of the previous two days, Lieutenant James had found himself in the midst of “a dreadful slaughter” as the French and American guns pounded his battery “with a degree of warmth seldom equaled and not to be described.” He had seen more than his share of death, but it was the loss of the Charon that threatened to move him to tears. “I shall say no more on this head,” he wrote in his journal, “than that we saw with infinite concern one of the finest ships in the navy of her rate totally destroyed on this day.”

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  ON THE NIGHT OF OCTOBER 11, allied soldiers began work on the second parallel, just three hundred yards from the British fortifications. Over the course of the previous few days, the number of French and American cannons, howitzers, and mortars trained on the enemy had nearly doubled, to seventy-six pieces. Lieutenant James estimated that “upwards of a thousand shells” were thrown into the British works that night. “The noise and thundering of the cannon,” he wrote, “the distressing cries of the wounded, and the lamentable sufferings of the inhabitants, whose dwellings were chiefly in flames, added to the restless fatigues of duty, must inevitably fill every mind with pity and compassion.”

  Despite the carnage and misery, Cornwallis was able to imbue his soldiers with a sense of optimism. General Clinton had promised him, he assured his soldiers, that the British navy was about to come to their rescue. “[A]midst all this dire destruction no murmuring was heard,” James insisted, “no wish to give up the town while the most distant hope was in view of being relieved. On the contrary, this very distinguished little army, taking example from their chief, went through the business of the siege with a perfect undaunted resolution, and hourly discovered proofs of their attachment to the general, who had so often led them to the field with success.”

  The appearance of the second parallel on the morning of October 12 within virtual musket shot of their own fortifications was a clear setback to the British, but all was not yet lost. Two formidable British redoubts, referred to as numbers 9 and 10, blocked the enemy from extending their parallel all the way to the bluffs on the York River. As long as those redoubts held, there was still a modicum of hope.

  Many of Washington’s officers were getting impatient with the pace of the siege and wanted to burst out of the trenches and take the British fortifications with a bloody coup de main. “The troops of both nations chafe at the slowness of the approach works and ask permission to shorten the time by taking this point or that with drawn swords,” Lafayette wrote to French minister Luzerne, “but the general, who knows his success is assured, is determined to conserve the blood of his troops.” Or as Rochambeau was overheard to say after inspecting the defenses surrounding British redoubts 9 and 10 in anticipation of a possible attack, “We shall see tomorrow whether the pear is ripe.”

  On October 14, after two days of unremitting fire on the surrounding defenses, Washington decided the time had come to take the two redoubts by storm. The infantry finally had a chance to do something more than just dig. The American forces under Lafayette were to attack the smaller of the two fortifications on the far right; the French, under Baron de Vioménil, would take the one on its immediate left. Much to the frustration of Alexander Hamilton, Lafayette chose Lieutenant Colonel Jean-Joseph Sourbader de Gimat, his trusted subordinate throughout the Virginia campaign (and fellow Frenchman), to lead the attack. Hamilton (who outranked de Gimat) was not about to let this chance for glory slip through his fingers. Even though he considered Lafayette a friend, he decided to appeal directly to Washington.

  For four years these two men had worked side by side, with Hamilton becoming not just an aide but the written voice of his commander. Eight months earlier, that relationship had ended with the angry encounter at Washington’s headquarters on the Hudson. By awarding Hamilton his current position at the head of the light infantry, Washington had proven capable of rising above their past differences. But to request that he overrule Lafayette, who enjoyed a personal relationship with his commander that no officer could match, was, in all likelihood, asking the impossible.

  Already, however, Washington had proven capable of denying Lafayette. When the marquis learned that Benjamin Lincoln was to command the troops at Yorktown, he had suggested that Washington send Lincoln across the river to Gloucester, so that Lafayette could become the second-ranking general in the main theater of the engagement. Washington loved the young French general like a son, but he also recognized that his affection could not be unconditional. As long as he remained commander in chief, he must keep “all men . . . at a proper distance,” for to “grow upon familiarity” was to “in proportion sink in authority.” Lincoln, Washington told Lafayette in no uncertain terms, was staying in Yorktown.

  To Hamilton’s surprise and ultimate delight, Washington decided in his favor. “We have it!” Hamilton gleefully announced to his friend Nicholas Fish on returning to the tent the two officers shared. While Hamilton led the assault on the British redoubt, his other good friend and former aide to Washington, John Laurens, would command a small group of soldiers who worked their way to the back of the fortification to cut off the enemy’s escape. After a year of deferring to the sometimes infuriating demands of the French, Washington had decided it was finally time to give two of his most promising American officers the opportunity they deserved.

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  CAPTAIN STEPHEN OLNEY commanded a company of soldiers in the First Rhode Island Regiment, a significant number of whom were African American. The Rhode Islanders were some of the toughest, best-disciplined soldiers in the Continental army, and a portion of them were selected for the assault on redoubt number 10. Olney remembered that they were “paraded just after daylight in front of our works. General Washington made a short address or harangue, admonishing us to act the part of firm and brave soldiers. . . . I thought then that His Excellency’s knees rather shook, but I have since doubted whether it was not mine.”

  To eliminate the possibility of a soldier spoiling the element of surprise by firing his musket too early, Lafayette had ordered that their guns remain unloaded. They would take the redoubt with only the “cold steel” of the bayonet. “The column marched in silence,” Olney remembered, “many, no doubt, thinking that less than one quarter of a mile would finish the journey of life with them.”

  Also there that night was Sergeant Joseph Plumb Martin, who, as a member of the Sappers and Miners, was at the very front of the column with an axe in hand. Before the light infantry could attack the redoubt, it was the sappers’ job to cut a passage through the abatis, a dense thicket of treetops, their branches cut with what Martin called a “slashing stroke which renders them as sharp as spikes.”

  They marched in silence until ordered to lie down on the war-torn field, where they were to await the signal to advance. Not until six shells were fired in quick succession from the French batteries were they to leap up and charge for the redoubt. “Our watchword was ‘Rochambeau,’” Martin remembered, “a good watchword, for being pronounced ‘Ro-sham-bow,’ it sounded, when pronounced quick, like ‘rush-on-boys.’”

  The Americans lying on the dirt that night were motivated by something more than the usual patriotism. They were angry. At the beginning of the siege, one of their favorite officers, Colonel Alexander Scammell from New Hampshire, had been captured while inspecting the newly abandoned redoubts of the British outer works, only to be brutally shot in the back by one of Tarleton’s cavalrymen. Scammell had since died of his wounds—just one of the many outrages committed by the British. Upon their arrival in Virginia, allied soldiers had discovered the body of a young pregnant woman who had been stabbed to death in her bed. �
�The barbarians had opened both of her breasts,” a French officer recounted, “and written above the bed canopy, ‘Thou shalt never give birth to a rebel.’ In another room was just as horrible a sight, five cut-off heads, arranged on a cupboard in place of plaster-cast figures, which lay broken to pieces on the floor.”

  As the British army made its slow, destructive way across Virginia, Cornwallis had ordered his men to poison the inhabitants’ wells with the corpses of the many escaped slaves who had died of smallpox. As a result, drinkable water was almost impossible to find, and illness was rampant in both the French and American camps. But for many of the Americans, the consummate outrage had been committed not by Cornwallis and Tarleton, but by Benedict Arnold.

  A little more than a month before, the already reviled traitor had dared to return to Connecticut and lead an expedition against the port of New London, just thirteen miles from his birthplace in Norwich. Not only had he burned much of the town, but his redcoats had led a bloody assault on Fort Griswold on the opposite shore of the river, where dozens of American militiamen had been butchered as they attempted to surrender. Entire Connecticut families had been virtually wiped out. According to a former neighbor of Arnold’s, “No instance of conduct in the enemy since the war has raised so general a resentment as that at New London.”