Almost exactly a year before, news of Arnold’s treason had forced the citizens of the United States to realize that the Revolutionary War was theirs to lose; three months later it had been Arnold’s appearance in Virginia that had moved Washington to send Lafayette, as well as the French naval squadron under Destouches, to the Chesapeake—a movement of ships and soldiers that had anticipated what was now about to unfold. Perhaps inevitably, given his seeming ubiquity throughout this pivotal year, Arnold was once again the great motivator as the soldiers under the French marquis’s overall command prepared to storm redoubt number 10. According to Lafayette, “We had promised ourselves to avenge the New London affair.”
At about eight p.m., the heavens above Yorktown brightened with the nearly simultaneous burst of six shells. “The words ‘Up, up!’ were then reiterated through the detachment,” Martin remembered. “We immediately moved silently on toward the redoubt. . . . Just as we arrived at the abatis, the enemy discovered us and directly opened a sharp fire.” They had reached the area where two days of shelling had created a series of holes “sufficient,” according to Martin, “to bury an ox in.” Unfortunately, the intense darkness of the night made these chasms impossible to see. Suddenly the men in front of Martin dropped out of sight. “I thought the British were killing us off at a great rate,” he remembered. Soon Martin was tumbling into the same hole that had just swallowed his compatriots, and he “found out the mystery of the huge slaughter.”
The plan had been for the Sappers and Miners to first clear away the abatis before Hamilton and his men charged into the redoubt. But, as Stephen Olney remembered, “This seemed tedious work in the dark within three rods [about fifty feet] of the enemy.” Rather than wait, the soldiers of the First Rhode Island decided to scramble over and through the maze of sharpened tree branches. Leading the way was Alexander Hamilton, who used the back of one of his men to vault himself onto the parapet.
Right there with Hamilton was Olney, who instead of a musket carried an espontoon, a long pole with a sharp blade at the end. As soon as he appeared at the edge of the redoubt, six or eight enemy soldiers lunged at him with their bayonets. “I parried as well as I could,” he remembered, “but they broke off the blade [of my espontoon], and their bayonets slid down the handle . . . and scaled my fingers; one bayonet pierced my thigh; another stabbed me in the abdomen, just above the hipbone. One fellow fired at me, and I thought the ball took effect in my arm.” By then, two of Olney’s men had loaded their muskets and begun firing on the enemy, some of whom surrendered, some of whom did their best to escape. “In the heat of the action,” Martin remembered, “I saw a British soldier jump over the walls of the fort next the river and go down the bank, which was almost perpendicular and twenty or thirty feet high. When he came to the beach he made off for the town, and if he did not make good use of his legs I never saw a man that did.”
Hamilton made sure that none of his men stooped to the level of Arnold’s soldiers at Fort Griswold. “Incapable of imitating examples of barbarity and forgetting recent provocations,” he wrote in his report to Lafayette, “the soldiery spared every man who ceased to resist.”
When they had been planning this assault earlier in the day, Lafayette’s French counterpart Baron de Vioménil had dared to propose that given the danger of the operation, perhaps it was best if more-experienced French troops attacked both redoubts. Lafayette had, of course, been outraged by the suggestion that the men he commanded were in any way inferior to the French. Now, as he stood atop the freshly taken redoubt, he sent his aide on a mission to inform the baron that “he was in his redoubt and to ask . . . where he was.” As it turned out, the French soldiers, following the usual protocol, were still waiting for their sappers to clear away the abatis when Lafayette’s aide arrived with his general’s impertinent message. “Tell the marquis I am not in mine,” de Vioménil angrily responded, “but will be in five minutes.”
The French were true to their leader’s word and soon took the redoubt. Watching the night’s action from a nearby battery with his artillery chief Henry Knox at his side, Washington was heard to say, “The work is done, and well done,” before he mounted his horse and returned to headquarters.
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ACCORDING TO THE HESSIAN JAEGER captain Johann Ewald, the taking of the two redoubts came as a distressing surprise to Cornwallis’s officers. “Now people make long faces and say, ‘Who would have thought of this stroke.’” Earlier that day, Cornwallis had decided that, despite having promised the former slaves their freedom, the dwindling supply of provisions required that he jettison them from his fortress. “On the same day of the enemy assault,” Ewald recorded, “we drove back to the enemy all of our black friends. . . . We had used them to good advantage and set them free, and now, with fear and trembling, they had to face the reward of their cruel masters.” By this act of betrayal, Cornwallis proved that he had no more concern for the African Americans in his camp than he had for the horses, whose bodies still littered the Yorktown shore.
That night Ewald went out on what he called “a sneak patrol.” Just beyond the fortifications of Yorktown he discovered “a great number of these unfortunates. In their hunger, these unhappy people would have soon devoured what [food] I had. And since they lay between two fires, they had to be driven on by force.” Caught in the no-man’s-land between the British and the allies (who would undoubtedly return them to slavery), the African Americans had nowhere left to go.
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THE TWO NEWLY ACQUIRED redoubts were quickly incorporated into the allies’ second parallel, allowing a whole new array of cannons, howitzers, and mortars to begin firing just three hundred yards from the already battered British line. The French were recognized as the greatest artillerists in the world: not only was the quality of their weaponry first-rate, but their officers and men were superbly trained. The Americans, on the other hand, had to rely on an inferior hodgepodge of artillery pieces. Nonetheless, thanks to the Herculean efforts of thirty-one-year-old Henry Knox, they managed to inflict more than their share of damage on the British defenses. “The [American] artillery was always very well served,” General Chastellux wrote; “the general incessantly directed it and often himself pointing the mortars; seldom did he leave the batteries. The English marveled at the exact fire and terrible execution of the French artillery; and we marveled no less at the extraordinary progress of the American artillery.” Chastellux praised Knox as being of a “buoyant disposition, ingenious and true; it is impossible to know him without esteeming and loving him.” But even the normally cheerful Knox had his limits.
Knox was standing in redoubt number 10 with Alexander Hamilton. Washington had recently instituted an order requiring the men in the trenches to shout out a warning when they saw an enemy shell headed in their direction. Hamilton, the excitable romantic, felt the order was “unsoldierly.” Knox, the more even-tempered pragmatist, thought it made sense. Suddenly two British shells, their fuses fizzing furiously, landed in the redoubt as the soldiers around them shouted, “A shell!” Despite their differing views of Washington’s order, both officers saw fit to run as quickly as possible for cover, with Hamilton making sure to put the much larger Knox between him and the explosives. Not taking kindly to being used as what he called “a breastwork,” Knox grabbed Hamilton and threw him toward the shell. “All this was done rapidly,” a man named Aeneas Monson, who witnessed the struggle, recounted, “for in two minutes the shells burst and threw their deadly missiles in all directions. It was now safe and soldierlike to standout.” Brushing the dirt from his uniform, Knox turned to his companion and smiled. “Now, what do you think, Mr. Hamilton, about crying ‘shell’?”
In contrast to his young subordinates, Washington had long since established a reputation for almost unbelievable equanimity in the face of enemy fire. “He was incapable of fear,” Thomas Jefferson later wrote, “mee
ting personal danger with the calmest unconcern.” At one point during the siege, a cannonball landed so close to Washington and the chaplain who happened to be standing next to him that their hats were covered with sand and dirt. “Being much agitated,” the chaplain took off his hat and said, “See here, General.” Evidently amused by his companion’s alarm, Washington advised the chaplain to take the hat back home with him to New Hampshire and “show it to your wife and children.”
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IN THE EARLY MORNING HOURS of October 16, soon after the loss of redoubts 9 and 10 but before the French could start firing from two unfinished batteries in the center of the second parallel, Cornwallis ordered one of his colonels to lead four hundred soldiers on a desperate mission. They were to cross behind the enemy lines and “spike” the French cannons by jamming pieces of metal into the vents. By silencing the French artillery before the guns began to fire, the sortie might buy the British army at least a few more days.
At four a.m., the soldiers surprised the French pickets and seized the redoubts only to discover that the nails they’d been given were too large for the job, requiring that they resort to sticking their bayonet points into the vents and breaking them off. For the most part, though, the maneuver was brilliantly executed, and “there was rejoicing,” Ewald reported, as the officers assured themselves that “this stroke will save us.”
At ten o’clock, Ewald was standing near the water when the two new enemy batteries began to fire. All of the risk and derring-do had been for naught because the French had been able to extract the broken bayonet blades with apparent ease. “Within an hour they battered our works so badly in the flank and rear,” Ewald wrote, “that all our batteries were silenced within a few hours.”
With the rescue fleet from New York nowhere in sight, Cornwallis decided there was only one thing left to do. He must attempt an escape. Thanks to de Grasse’s continuing refusal to send any warships up the York, the way was still clear to cross the river. “As soon as night fell,” Ewald recounted, “a number of boats were brought to the shore in which a part of the best men who were still healthy were to be passed over to Gloucester.” Leaving only a small part of his army to keep the enemy occupied for as long as possible from the redoubts of Yorktown, Cornwallis and the majority of his force would cross the river, surprise the small allied army at Gloucester, then fight their way back to New York. It was a desperate ploy, to be sure, but by reducing the number of soldiers at Yorktown, it might prevent the inevitable surrender from being as catastrophic as it would otherwise have been if it included the entire British army. “The whole thing seemed to me like a delusion which misleads people for a moment,” Ewald remembered. Nonetheless, Cornwallis was about to give it a try.
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ADMIRAL THOMAS GRAVES and the British fleet had returned to New York on September 19. It was quickly determined “to attempt by the united efforts of army and navy to relieve Lord Cornwallis in the Chesapeake.” In the days ahead, dockworkers labored from sunrise until “near ten at night” to ready Graves’s damaged ships for a rematch with the French.
On September 25, Admiral Digby arrived from England. His three men-of-war brought the total number of ships of the line to twenty-five, but the real news was that one of Digby’s officers included the sixteen-year-old midshipman Prince William Henry, son of King George III. The British navy and army were in a state of crisis, but that did not prevent its officers and men, as well as the loyalists of New York, from being dazzled by the presence of the prince, the first member of the royal family to visit America. “The graceful appearance and manner of the Prince,” the normally levelheaded Frederick Mackenzie recorded in his diary, “with his liveliness and affability gives universal satisfaction.” After spending the morning of September 27 waving to the crowd assembled outside his window, the prince and Sir Henry Clinton “walked through a part of the town . . . with crowds after him.”
It made for a strangely festive atmosphere just at the moment when their country’s fate hung so perilously in the balance. To no one’s surprise, the repair of Graves’s ships took longer than expected. Instead of departing in early October, as originally hoped, the fleet, along with five thousand soldiers under the command of Clinton himself, might not sail south again until the middle of the month.
Part of the problem was that Graves, who, the loyalist William Smith reported, “considers himself as ruined already,” was highly skeptical about the possibility of rescuing Cornwallis. At a meeting on October 8, he dared to ask “whether it was practicable to relieve Lord Cornwallis in the Chesapeake?” Samuel Hood was outraged. “This astonished me exceedingly,” he wrote, “as it seemed plainly to indicate a design of having difficulties started against attempting what the generals and admirals had most unanimously agreed to.”
Clinton, who rightly blamed Cornwallis for creating this mess in the first place, insisted that it was now all up to the British navy. “He had nothing to do with the difficulties which it was [the admiral’s] business to foresee and provide for,” he told William Smith. Despite the darkness of the present moment, Clinton still clung to the fantasy that should the rescue attempt succeed, he would get “the credit of restoring the tranquility of the empire.”
Should the rescue attempt fail, however, a far greater disaster potentially awaited them. In addition to losing Cornwallis’s army of seven thousand men, they might lose most of the British fleet in North America and the Caribbean, not to mention Clinton’s five thousand soldiers, turning a momentous defeat into an outright catastrophe capable of toppling the British Empire. One of Graves’s captains went so far as to say that “the loss of two line of battle ships in effecting the relief of [Cornwallis’s] army is of much more consequence than the loss of [that army].” They were caught in a collective nightmare of dread and indecision, powerless to act just when events seemed to demand that something—anything—be done.
Adding to the air of unreality was Cornwallis’s seeming nonchalance. Back on September 20, when his lordship announced that the French fleet had landed three thousand soldiers in Jamestown, he claimed, according to the crew of the express boat that returned with the message, to be “not apprehensive.” As late as October 8, an express arrived with the report that when Cornwallis received Clinton’s assurances “of reinforcement,” he had sent along the verbal message “But don’t hurry too fast.” As a result, Smith wrote, there was “much joy at headquarters.”
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CAPTAIN JOHANN EWALD would never forget the night that Cornwallis decided to transport his men across the York River to Gloucester. “It was as dark as a sack and one could neither see nor hear anything because of the awful downpour and heavy gale. Moreover, there was a most severe thunderstorm, but the violent flashes of lightning benefited us, since we could at least see around us for an instant.”
The weather had seemed fine when they departed at ten p.m. in a fleet of sixteen large rowing vessels. But then it started to blow and rain, capsizing several of the boats and driving others down the river. By two in the morning, Cornwallis was forced to abandon what Ewald called with considerable irony “the whole praiseworthy plan.” By daybreak, the wind had begun to die; by nine in the morning, all the troops were back in Yorktown.
Unaware that the enemy lines had been virtually empty of soldiers during the night, the allied forces spent the morning blasting away at the British fortifications. “The whole peninsula trembles under the incessant thunderings of our infernal machines,” James Thacher recorded in his diary. “We have leveled some of their works in ruins and silenced their guns; they have almost ceased firing. We are so near as to have a distinct view of the dreadful havoc and destruction. . . . But the scene is drawing to a close.”
That morning, October 17, 1781, Cornwallis met with his principal officers. They agreed that in a few more hours, their forti
fications “would be in such a state as to render it desperate. . . . We at that time could not fire a single gun. . . . Our numbers had been diminished by the enemy’s fire, but particularly by sickness, and the strength and spirits of those in the works were much exhausted by the fatigue of constant watching and unremitting duty.” Cornwallis decided it would be “wanton and inhuman to the last degree to sacrifice the lives of this small body of gallant soldiers who had ever behaved with so much fidelity and courage, by exposing them to an assault, which from the numbers and precautions of the enemy could not fail to succeed.”
At ten in the morning, a British drummer boy appeared on the fortifications surrounding Yorktown. No one could hear him, but he was beating the signal for a parley. Beside him stood an officer with a white handkerchief in his hand. Once the French and American guns had stopped firing, an unearthly quiet enveloped the smoking wreck of Yorktown. Lord Cornwallis, they soon learned, had “proposed to capitulate.”
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IT WAS EXACTLY FOUR YEARS to the day since General John Burgoyne’s surrender at Saratoga. The American wilderness was what had overwhelmed Burgoyne, who underestimated the challenge of maintaining a supply line from upstate New York to Canada. Cornwallis had had his own nearly disastrous flirtation with the interior of the North American continent during his pursuit of Nathanael Greene across North Carolina. Finally, however, the British general had been defeated, not by the land or even another army, but by the sea. Never fully appreciating his dependence on the British navy, he had wandered the edges of the Tidewater in careless disregard of the potential dangers lurking beyond the horizon. In coastal America, the navy held ultimate sway.
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