First of Men

by Ferling, John;

  The French listened to Washington’s arguments, and they agreed to pursue his recommendations. At the close of the meeting Rochambeau pledged to move out to join Washington within a few weeks. At last, almost a year after the French army had arrived, it was about to be linked to the Continental army for a joint operation. And for the first time since that day at Monmouth three years before, a chance existed for a general engagement.16

  Throughout June 1781, Washington waited impatiently for the French to arrive, alternately urging them to hasten their march, then cautioning them not to move too far, too fast, in the summer heat. Washington clearly was on pins and needles. The commander had begun to sense a chance for success for the first time since 1778. If everything worked just right, both Cornwallis and Clinton might be defeated. Yet that eventuality depended on the arrival of de Grasse’s fleet. If it did not come, or if it arrived at the wrong time, nothing would be accomplished; moreover, if Washington sat immobile, fearing to move before that phantom flotilla arrived, he might let a golden opportunity slip through his fingers. Until the end of the month he seemed uncertain of what he might attempt, but then intelligence reports flooded headquarters with word that Clinton had sent a large foraging party into New Jersey. The redcoats’ garrison was reduced by about 20 percent. Seizing upon this “most favorable opportunity,” Washington drew up plans for a strike.17

  The operation he planned resembled his tactics at Germantown, and it was easily as complicated. He envisioned a three-pronged attack, one American wing crossing the Hudson and assailing the British forts near Spuyten Duyvil, the main army falling straight down the Hudson to Kingsbridge, and the French attacking from the east. His object was to seize Britain’s perimeter forts, enabling the allies to launch siege operations against New York’s inner defenses. Washington hurriedly put his plan into motion in the dead of night on July 2. The scheme was sound, but the mission quickly fizzled nonetheless. Clinton’s men were vigilant and learned of their opponents’ moves almost as soon as they began, causing the planned assault to be aborted after only a handful of the attackers had swung into action. One reason, in fact, for the British command’s wariness was that it had captured still more of Washington’s correspondence, letters which indiscreetly discussed the Weathersfield agreement to someday attack New York.18

  For a siege to have any chance of success the French navy had to be present in force. As there was no guarantee when—or if—that would occur, the Franco-American armies simply sat outside New York throughout July, engaged in little more than harassing and reconnoitering activities. Officially, Washington remained committed to that strategy, but there were signs that he had begun to waver. De Grasse’s arrival was problematical; then, too, he might prove as reluctant as had d’Estaing to utilize his fleet in the waters about New York. But if de Grasse sailed into the Chesapeake instead, Cornwallis might be bagged. In mid-June the commander hinted that such a course might be “more practicable [than a siege of New York] and equally advisable,” and a month later he broached the idea directly to de Grasse, although he indicated clearly that it still was his second choice.19

  All the while Washington kept a close watch on events in the South. Indeed, he now had another reason for following events in that theater. That summer one increasingly heard talk of an armistice based on the notion of uti possidetis, that is, that each nation would possess what its armies held at the moment of the truce. In such an event, America’s claim to the transmontane West would be tenuous. Even worse, with a British army in Virginia at that very moment, the fate of his own province would be uncertain.20

  Already Washington had experienced a scare over Mount Vernon. In April a small British fleet had ascended the Potomac to Mount Vernon. Although Washington lost a twenty-four-foot river craft and eighteen of his slaves to the little flotilla, his estate had been unscathed, perhaps because his cousin Lund had boarded the English flagship and almost pleaded with its commander to prevent any further plundering. Washington rebuked his farm manager for his conduct, but his estate was intact—for the moment. Subsequent British actions, he had to know, could imperil his access to his very home.21

  Soon, however, the situation in Virginia improved. For all his haste to get into the state, Cornwallis had done little other than launch an occasional raid on his adversary’s magazines. By July these forays were at an end, for Clinton had ordered him to take coastal Portsmouth, from which raids could be carried out to interdict American supply lines. Late in June Cornwallis withdrew his army to Williamsburg, then to Yorktown. Washington was delighted, for he was certain that Cornwallis’s withdrawal to the coast signaled the first step in Britain’s abandonment of Virginia. Surely, he thought, Cornwallis had been summoned to New York to augment Clinton’s army, and he even speculated that the recall had resulted from the information Clinton had gleaned from captured American correspondence. But decisions were not made quite so simply in Britain’s high command.22

  British strategy seemed as muddled as it had been for the fateful campaign of 1777. Clinton’s letters to Cornwallis during the summer of 1781 read like those of a man who had lost touch with reality. He started out well enough by ordering to New York a large portion of the British army in Virginia, but in July, with the men already loaded aboard transports, Clinton changed his mind and directed Cornwallis to keep his entire army on Williamsburg Neck. What is so damning about Clinton’s thinking was that from intercepted French messages he could be fairly certain that de Grasse would be coming north within a few weeks. Weak and indecisive, Clinton in the end apparently decided to leave Cornwallis where he was because he knew that Germain favored British action in the Chesapeake. Thus in midsummer of the seventh year at war, Clinton remained in the grip of paralysis in New York, leaving to molder in Virginia the reinforcements that might have given him some leverage against his foes. Britain’s strategy had sunk to the point of merely trying to outlast the rebels, of holding on until America collapsed from its myriad difficulties, then of picking up some of what was left at a peace conference.23

  But if British planning had stagnated, Washington’s thoughts were aswirl. Since early in July he had been wavering in his determination to besiege New York. Under optimum conditions the odds against success in such a complicated operation were astronomical; besides, it had not been his good fortune to experience optimum conditions very often in this war. By the first week of August, moreover, some new dimensions had been added to the puzzle. Clinton had been reinforced by another batch of German mercenaries, as well as by redcoats fleeing from Pensacola, a garrison recently seized by the Spanish; altogether, Clinton’s army had swelled by about 2000–2500 men, not enough to permit the British commander to contemplate an offensive, but perhaps sufficient numbers to permit him to repulse the contemplated joint attack on New York. Indeed, on July 27 Washington had received Duportail’s plan for the siege of New York, a gloomy document that suggested that success was possible, but only if the allies had twice as many men as were under arms at that moment.24

  As late as the first week in August Washington still expected Cornwallis to rejoin Clinton, but he also knew that those British troops in Virginia had not yet been withdrawn. With its back pinioned against the Chesapeake, that redcoat army increasingly looked like an inviting target. A smashing victory over either Clinton or Cornwallis might break Britain’s will to persist, and, at the very least, the subjugation of Britain’s army in Virginia would doom Whitehall’s hopes of holding that state—and probably North Carolina as well—if the war ended with a negotiated settlement. In July, pending a decision of whether to fight in the North or in the South, Washington terminated shipments of artillery pieces from Philadelphia to New York. On August 1 he confessed to his diary—which he recently had begun to keep once again after a lapse of six years—that he had begun to lean more toward making a foray against Cornwallis. Two weeks later his choice was made for him.25

  On August 14 word reached headquarters at Dobb’s Ferry that de Grasse was sailing
for the Chesapeake. He was bringing twenty-eight warships and three thousand troops, and he would remain off the coast of Virginia until mid-October. Through the spring both Washington and Rochambeau had made it clear that they hoped the fleet would sail to New York, but, luckily, Chevalier la Luzerne, the French minister to the United States, had made it equally clear to de Grasse that Virginia constituted the more pressing problem—and the most promising site for scoring a great victory. Once he discovered that de Grasse was coming, Washington wasted little time. Five days after he learned of the destination of the Gallic fleet, he too was on his way to Virginia, his first trip to his home state since that suffocatingly hot day in May 1775 when his carriage had pulled away from Mount Vernon for Philadelphia. He brought with him twenty-five hundred American troops and virtually every French soldier in America.26

  Time and secrecy were crucial to the success of the march. If Clinton intercepted the allied armies in New Jersey or Pennsylvania, he might prevent them from reaching the Chesapeake until after de Grasse had departed. Washington worried and fretted, but ironically the gravest impediment to haste arose from his own planning of the operation. The commander set out to make Clinton believe the army’s destination was the vicinity of Sandy Hook, where it might cooperate with de Grasse against New York; but so secret was Washington that even his quartermaster personnel were taken by surprise. Washington’s plan called for both armies to make an overland trek to Trenton, where boats would be waiting to speed them to the Chesapeake. Yet when Rochambeau reached that little Jersey town there were no vessels to be seen. Improvisation was required. The French army marched to Head of Elk. These problems aside, however, Clinton was kept off guard.27

  The British commander immediately learned that the two armies and the small French naval squadron at Newport had moved out, but despite good intelligence reports he persistently doubted that Washington and de Grasse planned to rendezvous. He seems to have seen these maneuvers as a feint. Besides, he was preoccupied with a scheme of his own. Clinton had begun to chew over the possibility of a strike at Newport, now all but abandoned by Rochambeau. Those ambitious thoughts soon vanished. On August 31 Cornwallis peered from his window at Yorktown to see a ship of the line flying the flag of France; it was de Grasse’s flotilla, the largest armada this war had witnessed since the Howe brothers arrived off Long Island in 1776. Cornwallis immediately wrote Clinton, his letter crossing a belated warning note penned by his commander. The British high command finally had deduced Washington’s plans. But on the day that Clinton unraveled the mystery, the American army was parading through Philadelphia, just hours away from the Chesapeake.28

  While he proceeded south, Washington remained unaware of the progress of de Grasse’s fleet, and he was nagged by the worry that the British navy at New York might reach the Chesapeake before their French counterparts. But this time luck was with him. On September 5 word arrived that de Grasse was off the coast of Virginia; two days later the American army began to board southbound transports. Washington’s happiest moment, however, must have come on the 9th. Early that morning he awakened in Baltimore, and while the first streaks of light pierced the night’s blackness he and his party set out—for Mount Vernon. It was a long day’s ride over familiar terrain, past old landmarks, until late on that warm summer day he finally glimpsed it, his first sight of the estate in more than six years, his first view ever of the additions to the house that had begun to be constructed just before he left for the war.29

  Washington remained at home for seventy-two hours, and after years of commanding out of other peoples’ homes he must have luxuriated in making Mount Vernon his headquarters. Rochambeau and his entourage arrived the next day, a day of relaxation, of feasting on the opulent bounty of this plantation, of sightseeing. On the 11th the reality of the war, almost but never quite forgotten during the past few hours, returned, forcing Washington into conferences and back to his desk to catch up with his correspondence. At sunrise on September 12 he again was on his mount, headed for Williamsburg and, ultimately, Yorktown.

  General Washington reached the Virginia capital late on the 14th. Good news greeted him. From Mount Vernon Washington had written Lafayette of his “hope [that] you will keep Lord Cornwallis safe, without Provisions or Forage untill we arrive.” That much the young Frenchman had done, though Cornwallis’s quandary largely was due to other factors. He had not known of de Grasse’s descent on the Chesapeake until he actually spotted the armada, nor, thanks to Clinton, had he known that Washington and Rochambeau were coming until mid-September, nearly twenty-five days after the Franco-American armies had begun their southward advance. By the time he learned what was happening it was probably too late to fight his way off the peninsula. Had he acted hurriedly in the first moments after he discovered de Grasse’s presence, he might have escaped. But he would have had to move quickly, for within only a few hours of his arrival de Grasse had sent forty small transports containing three thousand French soldiers to join with Lafayette; in fact, two days before Washington put his men on board ships at Head of Elk the allies already outnumbered Cornwallis. All the British commander at Yorktown could do was wait, hoping against hope for reinforcements from New York—which Clinton had promised—and for the timely arrival of a long-anticipated royal naval squadron from London.30

  At Williamsburg, meanwhile, Washington also learned that the advance units of Rochambeau’s army had begun to arrive. But the best tidings came from de Grasse. The French and British fleets had clashed off the Virginia Capes on September 5. It had been a sharp, although not very conclusive engagement. Two days of maneuvering followed as the two navies drifted as far south as Cape Hatteras, then the fleets separated and the outnumbered British squadron returned to New York. When de Grasse returned he discovered that the French flotilla out of Rhode Island had arrived in his absence, an armada laden with siege artillery and provisions. Daily Washington watched as the allied armies swelled with the addition of Frenchmen at last arriving on the bay, together with fresh, raw units of American militia that marched in over the worn, dusty roads of the peninsula. Only time now seemed to be a real enemy. To succeed the operation had to be completed before the French fleet sailed away, and in a September 17 meeting with Washington aboard the flagship Ville de Paris, de Grasse agreed to stay until the end of October, two weeks longer than he had initially planned to linger in these waters. Thereafter, Washington exuded optimism. “What may be in the Womb of Fate is very uncertain,” he admitted, “but we anticipate the Reduction of Ld Cornwallis with his army. . . .”31

  There “are reports that we are in a very bad situation,” a young German mercenary in Yorktown observed in his diary about this time. It was one of the more sagacious observations made within British lines that year. There seemed little doubt of allied success. Six, maybe seven, weeks were left before de Grasse would sail; furthermore, Washington and Rochambeau had more than twice as many troops, ample artillery (more than forty heavy siege cannon, in addition to the customary field pieces), and more than adequate amounts of provender, trenching tools, and a thousand and one other items required by a siege army.32

  At the end of September the two armies advanced from Williamsburg, the Americans taking up posts on the right before the little hamlet of Yorktown, the French on the west. On the last day of the month fighting began for control of the outermost approaches, a struggle waged as much with pick and shovel as with musket and cannon, for the armies had to dig their implacements, redoubts from which the British hoped to stave off the allied advance, parallels from which the attacker’s batteries would endeavor to pound the redcoats into submission.

  By the end of the first week in October the allied soldiers had moved close enough to begin digging their first parallel, a deep trench in which siege guns could be placed only a few hundred yards from the defender’s lines. Laboring under a hot sun (Rochambeau likened Virginia’s climate to that of Algiers), these sappers and miners worked in the open while missiles fired from their comrad
es’ field artillery tore over their heads and smashed into the British redoubts. A part of this corps since 1780, Private Joseph Plumb Martin was one of those assigned to this construction project. On the first night of the excavation a strange officer approached his squad, asked a few questions, made some small talk, and departed. Later Martin learned that the man had been General Washington. After six years of soldiering for him, Private Martin at last had been in his presence and he had not recognized him. But he saw him again the next evening. Washington returned to the same area and struck a couple of ceremonial first blows with a pick.33

  The Siege of Yorktown

  When the parallel was completed and siege guns had been brought forward, Washington was given the honor of firing the first round. The men watched expectantly, straining to see the damage this projectile would cause, listening as the ball whistled across the terrain, gloating, perhaps, as they heard it tear through house after house. Later it was learned that the shell had collapsed the roof of one dwelling, the debris and heavy rafters falling upon a clatch of unsuspecting British officers dining inside; rumor had it that one man had been killed.34

  By the 10th, two additional batteries were operational, the site for one of the installations having been taken in a charge led by Colonel Hamilton, who had pleaded with his chief for this one last opportunity to gain noteriety in battle. With over a hundred allied cannon hurling hot metal upon Yorktown’s defenders, the toll within the redcoat lines was devastating. Cornwallis lost thirty men in the first five hours of shelling, and five hundred additional troops were killed, wounded, or fell ill in the next five days. Fewer and fewer British field pieces remained operational, and food stocks shrank to below the meager level. On the 15th, Cornwallis emerged from the underground bunker that had become his headquarters and launched his own assault, but it was merely a gesture of éclat that the European warriors knew as the baroud d’honneur, a practice by which proud officers endeavored to save face; that a few lives were squandered seemed not to matter. The attack was easily repulsed, of course, in this instance by French soldiers who shouted what their American allies must have found an incongruous cheer—“Vive le Roi.”