The enlisted men began to believe that it might be possible to defeat Cornwallis’s army of some six thousand men, which appeared bottled up, and take the fabled British general and all of his men prisoners. True, the British still had other armies in the U.S., in New York, Charleston, Savannah, and Wilmington, North Carolina. But the capture of Cornwallis’s brigades would cripple British forces and their surrender would be perceived as a tremendous public relations coup throughout America, in England where sentiment against the war had grown over the last two years, and the world. It just might be the final blow necessary to force the Crown to quit the war.
American hopes were high in Williamsburg, indeed so optimistic that some soldiers began pools, similar to contemporary sports betting pools, with each participant choosing the date upon which Lord Cornwallis would surrender. Men who frequented the capital’s taverns, such as Christiana Campbell’s, wagered money, silk stockings, coats, and beaver hats on the date. Lafayette predicted September 22. Others chose dates ranging from September 23 to October 14.4
At dawn on September 28, in a grand spectacle, Washington and Rochambeau led their joint army out of Williamsburg—down the pretty, wide, tree-lined Duke of Gloucester Street with its many taverns, gardens, yards, stores, and hitching posts, and headed northeast toward Yorktown. Lt. Wild counted just over sixteen thousand men, along with hundreds of cannon and wagons.
The young lieutenant was impressed. “About sunrise the army began their march [in one column] toward York. The light infantry, with some cavalry and one regiment of riflemen, formed the vanguard. In this order, we proceeded about seven miles, where the roads parted; the Americans taking the right and the French the left, we proceeded within about two miles of York, where the French army encamped on a plain with a large morass in their front. The American army proceeded further toward the river.”
Cornwallis had decided to defend the town against a siege and had built numerous wide ditches, a lone line of earthen walls, and two large redoubts of wood and earth to serve as ramparts to hold soldiers and cannon. These defenses were guarded with newly built abatis (tree branches sharpened like spears stuck into the earth to stop rushing hordes of troops). The well-defended redoubts and protective walls at times curved and at times zigzagged so that the British could fire at attackers approaching from any angle.
For one of the few times during the war, the American forces— ninety-five hundred Americans and eighty-eight hundred crack French regulars—substantially outnumbered the British force of about six thousand men. Most of the British were in Yorktown and a few hundred were in the village of Gloucester directly across the river. Cornwallis made up for his lack of men with his seemingly impregnable defensive walls.
When Rochambeau and Washington first discussed an attack on Yorktown, Washington worried that the only way to defeat the British would be to mount a series of frontal assaults that would cost the lives of many men. Could these assaults be carried out by the time de Grasse had to leave? Would de Grasse be attacked by the British navy? He worried, too, that Cornwallis would sneak away in the night, just as he would do. The Redcoats certainly had the opportunity. De Grasse had blocked the entrances to both the York and James Rivers, but he refused to sail up the York to moor directly opposite Yorktown. He was afraid British guns in the town would sink his ships. With the river behind him clear, Cornwallis might try to cross it to the village of Gloucester, quietly march his troops northwest, and escape.
General Rochambeau had told Washington earlier, before they met with de Grasse, that the only way to defeat Cornwallis was to lay siege to Yorktown, using short, fat mortars that could fire cannonballs in high arcs to fly over the defensive redoubts and come down in the town. He himself had been involved in fourteen sieges and his engineers were experts at designing and constructing trenches for a long siege. On the same day the army arrived in the plain in front of Yorktown, work began on the lengthy trenches, designed in a semi-circular arc around the community one half mile away, and out of artillery range, or so Rochambeau said.5
The men building the trenches certainly disagreed. They became instant targets as they worked with pickaxes and shovels. “The enemy have kept a constant fire on our working parties all day,” wrote Wild, who toiled on the trenches with his soldiers. “Several of our men were killed or wounded in the night by shot and shells which the enemy fired very briskly.” Another soldier complained, “The firing from the enemy’s works was continued during the whole night at the distance of fifteen or twenty minutes between every shot . . . [in] morning, the firing has been much more frequent, the intermissions seldom exceeding five minutes and often not more than one or two minutes.”6
The siege began on October 9 when Rochambeau asked Washington to do the honor of firing the first cannon. It was followed by dozens of others barking away, over and over. Pennsylvania lieutenant William Feltman wrote that “this whole day we cannonaded the enemy, and sent them a number of shells and drove their artillery from the embrasure and they had not the spirit to return one shot.”7 The hundreds of cannonballs, especially the mortars, found their mark and there was considerable damage to the British fortifications and a significant loss of life. Dr. Thacher, watching the bombardment, wrote that “I have more than once witnessed fragments of mangled bodies and limbs of British soldiers thrown into the air by the bursting of our shells.”8
By the end of the second day, the French found by sheer chance that cannonballs that overshot Yorktown were hitting the British ships below the bluffs, tearing huge holes in their sides and decks and setting the rigging of many on fire.9 Several ships sank so deeply into the river that only their masts could be seen. It was nonstop bombardment, too. Lt. Wild wrote that “a very brisk fire, both of shot and shells, are kept from them on the enemy, who returns theirs with equal spirit.”
One thing that worried the enlisted men was the continued persistence of George Washington to expose himself to enemy fire. He had done so in just about every major battle of the war. Wild remembered him riding back and forth directly in front of him across the plains of Monmouth to rally the men as the British fired away with muskets and cannon. Others remembered him, atop his magnificent horses, leading attacks in other places. Now, at Yorktown, he was again oblivious to danger, again vulnerable to a sniper’s musket ball.
On the first day that the commander was shown the plain in front of Yorktown, and told to stay off of it because it was within the range of British guns, he stood at the edge of the meadow to talk to a local minister. The British saw them and an artillery battery opened fire. An explosion tore up the earth a few yards from the two men, sending soil and rocks flying into the air. The minister, Rev. Evans, was startled when dirt flew up, hit him, and landed in his hat. “See here, General!” he exclaimed, flustered. Washington, nonplussed, told Evans to take his hat home “and show it to your wife and children.”10 At another juncture, one of Washington’s aides thought he was standing too close to the artillery bombardment and might be hit. He asked the commander to “step back a little.” Washington dryly told him, “Colonel Cobb, if you are afraid, you have liberty to step back.”11
The American and French guns fired from the first set of trenches had been effective, but Washington wanted to move them even closer, to within a few hundred yards of the town. An artillery pounding from that close would inflict so much damage that he believed Cornwallis would give up. The problem was how to get that close. The answer, Rochambeau said, was a second line of trenches.
Those trenches could not be dug, however, because the British maintained two well-defended fortified redoubts, Numbers 9 and 10 on their maps, that ran parallel to the town and guarded the plain close to it. The only way those redoubts could be taken, Washington decided, was by a direct assault. That attack was dangerous because the men would come under artillery and musket fire from British wellentrenched on the fortifications. So he decided to launch another of his famous nighttime surprise attacks. Soldiers would move quietly, using bayonets. They were f
orbidden to fire their guns. He chose his chief of staff, Alexander Hamilton, to lead the American soldiers, giving Hamilton his long-sought battlefield command, and Colonel Guillaume, Comte de Deux-Ponts, to lead the French.
Washington gave a short speech to the men as they lined up in the darkness for the attacks on the two redoubts, urging them to be fearless, but the soldiers were scared. Captain Olney was assigned to the attack on Number 10, in the battalion led by Colonel Jean Joseph Gimat, Lafayette’s top aide. Olney’s knees shook as he listened to Washington. He wrote that the column marched toward the British positions forlornly. The men were certain that many of them would be killed, especially since they were under orders not to fire their muskets.
When they were close to the British lines near redoubt Number 10, just after 7 p.m., they were spotted and the one hundred twenty British defenders opened up with a musket volley. Olney’s men immediately shouted a loud “huzzah” and heard other cheers along the field. The silence had been broken and there would be no more of it. Gimat ordered Olney’s men and others to use axes to widen gaps between pointed tree branches of the abatis. This decision not only caused the attack to stall, but resulted in many men being shot dead or wounded as they tried to hack their way through the branches. Olney and others, realizing the folly of what they were ordered to do, slipped between the tree branches and scrambled down into the twenty-five-yard-wide ditch behind them and then mounted the parapets of the fortifications. There, in the dark, they encountered a group of defenders, bayonets fixed, who rushed them.
“I had not less than six or eight bayonets pushed at me,” wrote Olney later. “I parried as well as I could with my espontoon [a spear], but they broke off the blade part and their bayonets slid along the handle and scaled my fingers; one bayonet pierced my thigh, another stabbed me in the abdomen just about the hip bone. One fellow fired at me and I thought the ball [hit] my arm.”
Olney fought back in a fury, stabbing one of the Redcoats in the middle of his forehead with his broken espontoon. His men rushed to his side, bayoneting the group of British soldiers who had surrounded and bayoneted their captain. Sergeant Edward Butterick was stabbed in the stomach. Another sergeant was stabbed in the hand. Colonel Gimat was shot and carried off the field. Olney, bleeding badly from his bayonet wounds and the musket ball in his arm, somehow managed to keep leading the men attacking the fort. By then, more than two hundred Americans and Frenchmen were encountering horrific fire as they swarmed through the abatis—the French at Number 9 and the Americans at Number 10.
Private Joseph Martin was one of them. Stumbling through, he wrote that as the soldiers reached it, “the enemy discovered us and . . . opened a sharp fire upon us. We were now at a place where many of our large shells had burst in the ground, making holes sufficient to bury an ox in. The men were . . . falling into these holes. I thought the British were killing us off at a great rate . . . I could not pass at the entrance we had made, it was so crowded. I therefore forged a passage at a place where I saw our shot had cut away some of the abatis. Several others entered at the same place. While passing, a man at my side received a ball in his head and fell under my feet, crying out bitterly. While crossing the trench, the enemy threw hand grenades [small bombs] . . . into it. They were so thick that I at first thought them cartridge papers on fire, but was soon undeceived by their cracking.”12 Martin and others told friends later that there was so much musket fire from both sides that the entire trench and the British fort walls were illuminated by it.
The Redcoats fled. Total French and American losses in the attack were twenty-four killed and one hundred two wounded; the British had eighteen killed and seventy-three wounded.
Captain Olney’s detachment secured the redoubt within a half hour and he was soon carried away with the rest of the wounded to Williamsburg, twelve miles away, and placed alongside other badly injured and bleeding men in a home that had been turned into a hospital. By the next day the upper half of his arm had turned completely black, but it was the bayoneting in his stomach, and the extreme loss of blood, that concerned surgeons. One looked down at the captain with great sadness and told him that he would not live and would die there in the hospital.13
At the same time that Olney was bayoneted, Ebenezer Wild was in the middle of a charge against the second redoubt, Number 10. The lieutenant’s company had been joined by light infantry and ordered to advance through the darkness. Wild’s regiment moved much faster than Olney’s toward their goal because their commanders told them to ignore the abatis branches and simply race between or over them as quickly as possible. Wild did so, writing, “We advanced from the battery on our right in one column to the redoubt on the enemy’s left, which we attacked and carried by storm. A detachment of French Grenadiers carrying the one on our left about the same time (& in the same manner). We had nothing but the enemy’s fire from their main works to hinder our completing our second parallel, which we proceeded to do with all possible expedition.”
The quick victory was satisfying to Wild, who noted in his diary the following morning that the parallels they now held extended all the way to the York River and put their newly arrived cannon just two hundred yards from Yorktown—easy shelling range. Defending the captured redoubt was a dangerous affair, though. The British would still not give it up. Wrote Wild, “We are much troubled with their small shells, which they now throw into our trenches exceeding fast. The fire, both of shot and shells, on both sides, has been exceeding hot all day.”
The next day Cornwallis sent a force of just over three hundred men to recapture the two redoubts. They convinced some officers that they were French soldiers and were able to capture several cannon, spiking them with bayonets. The ruse did not last long. “The enemy were made to retire to their works with precipitation and considerable loss, both of killed and wounded,” Wild noted.
That night, on land just two hundred yards from the British lines, the American cannon opened up with hundreds of shells in a heavy barrage. “The cannon and bombardment from ours and the French batteries were kept up with little intermission,” wrote St. George Tucker, a Virginia militia leader. “Red hot balls being fired at the shipping from French battery over the creek; the Charon, a forty-four-gun ship, and another ship were set fire to and burnt during the night and a brig in the morning met with the same fate. Our batteries have continued incessant firing during the whole day.”14
The capture of the two fortifications permitted Washington to array cannon in a large semicircle so that the artillery could commence enfilade firing (hitting targets from different angles). Lord Cornwallis was trapped. He tried to move his men out of Yorktown across the York River on the night of October 16, but he had few boats and a sudden rainstorm ended his plans. The next day, the seventeenth, the fourth anniversary of Burgoyne’s surrender at Saratoga, guns in position, Washington ordered yet another bombardment of the British lines at Yorktown, utilizing practically every available cannon.
Ebenezer Wild stood right in the middle of the bombardment that started with the sounds of multiple explosions at dawn. “At daylight,” he wrote, “we found the enemy had stopped up the embrasures of most of their batteries and the fire from their cannon became almost silenced; but they continued to throw small shells very brisk. By this time, the fire from our works became almost incessant as new batteries are opening from almost every part of the line.”
More than one hundred cannon were used in the bombardment and they were close enough to hit individual buildings within the town as well as the ships in the river and the defensive lines. It was a murderous cannon fire. Chaos reigned in Yorktown. A Hessian, Stephen Popp, wrote, “Their heavy fire forced us to throw our tents in the ditches. The enemy threw bombs, one hundred, one hundred fifty, two hundred; their guns were eighteen-, twenty-four-, and forty-eight-pounders. We could find no refuge in or out of the town. The people fled to the waterside and hid in hastily contrived shelters on the banks, but many of them were killed by bursting bombs. More
than eighty were thus lost, besides many wounded, and their homes utterly destroyed.”15
Cornwallis had the combined American and French armies in front of him, the York River behind him, the French fleet down the river, and nowhere to turn. The only British fleet that could rescue him was far away in New York. Explosions ripped through the community; smoke was everywhere. Just before 10 a.m., on October 17, Cornwallis sent an officer with a white handkerchief to Washington to discuss his surrender.16
The British commander asked for twenty-four hours to work out a proposal for surrender; Washington gave him two. The next two days were spent in heated arguments over the exact terms of the surrender. The final document, signed by Washington and Cornwallis, was gracious: although the British soldiers would be taken prisoner, the officers and Cornwallis would be sent back to England and would keep their side arms.
The surrender discussions ended the constant bombardment that had shaken the Virginia town for eight long days. The night of October 17 was one to remember for the enlisted men at Yorktown. St. George Tucker wrote, “A solemn stillness prevailed. The night was remarkably clear and the sky was decorated with ten thousand stars. Numerous meteors gleaming through the atmosphere afforded a pleasing resemblance to the bombs which had exhibited a noble firework the night before, but happily divested of all their horror.”17
Finally, at 3 p.m. on October 19, a scene transpired that few in the world ever expected to take place back in 1775, when the first shots of the war were fired in the village of Lexington, Massachusetts. On that day and hour, the entire British and Hessian army of nearly six thousand men began to march out of Yorktown down Hampton Road to the surrender ground, parading in front of the soldiers in the victorious American and French armies. Reportedly, someone with sense of humor ordered the British military band to play “The World Turned Upside Down.” It seemed an ironic selection on a day that the greatest professional army in the world surrendered to an army of former farmers, blacksmiths, and shopkeepers.
The First American Army Page 38