22
NEW YORK, August 28, 1781

It was a beautiful August day.¹ The wind was light, and the sun burned down from a cloudless sky. If there was a faint uneasiness at British headquarters on Broadway because the purpose of Washington’s latest movements was unclear, there was no sense of the crisis that would soon face the staff officers. “A signal early this morning,” Frederick Mackenzie was to note cheerfully in his journal, “for a fleet of men of war”—the sails had been sighted from Staten Island of Rear Admiral Sir Samuel Hood’s fourteen ships of the line from the West Indies. In the harbor, the battle squadron of Rear Admiral Sir Thomas Graves,² who had now taken over the flag from Arbuthnot, lay at anchor.

That afternoon the wind freshened from the south, and by evening Hood’s men-of-war were swinging on their cables at Sandy Hook and the admiral was on his way by boat for a meeting with Clinton and Graves on Long Island.

“If chance has really any influence over the affairs of men Clinton was to ruminate in his retirement, “the tide of fortune with respect to the British interests in America was now very evidently beginning to turn against us.” It was not too evident that day. The news from the South, of course, was bad—the Spanish had taken the small British post in West Florida, and all that remained under British control in Georgia and the Carolinas were the two ports of Charleston and Savannah—but the overall picture was encouraging.

In July Washington’s army had crossed the Hudson to West-chester, where it was joined by the 6,000 French troops under Rochambeau that had been based on Rhode Island. It came as no surprise. Four weeks earlier a British patrol had captured a courier on his way to Pennsylvania; in his pouch were letters from Washington to Congress and from Rochambeau to the French legation in Philadelphia. They detailed the plans for a joint attack on New York, but even more important, they contained “an intimation from the Court of France,” as Clinton put it, “that this was the last campaign in which the Americans were to expect assistance of either troops or ships from that nation, “³ which, of course, the ministers in London already assumed.

This suggested to Clinton that the obvious British policy should be to avoid “all risks as much as possible”; as long as they did not suffer any serious defeats during the next few months, “time alone would soon bring about every success we could wish.” To the general, therefore—despite Germain’s urging—there was no point in mounting big offensives, which might fail. The key was a strong defense.

Clearly the assault on New York was to be the last big effort before Versailles abandoned its collaboration with the American rebels. And Clinton was determined that it should fail.

He had some reason for optimism. He was severely outnumbered, of course. The enemy lines that stretched across Westchester from the Hudson to Long Island Sound contained 11,000 French and American Continental troops, and Washington could boost this overnight to nearly double this figure by merely calling in the local New York and New Jersey militia. The British had fewer than 10,000, but Manhattan Island with its heights and surrounding rivers was suited to strategic defense.

Also, its narrow, shallow harbor entrance was easy to hold against approach from the sea—as Howe had demonstrated in the face of D’Estaing’s threat in 1778—for Washington’s army was not the most important factor that Clinton had to assess: In April the large French fleet of twenty-six ships of the line under the Comte de Grasse had arrived in the West Indies.

From a very early stage in its preparation in Brest, the fleet had been watched closely by British spies. Soon after it sailed, Germain assured Clinton that De Grasse had no plans for North America. But Clinton, who had now experienced two summers since the French had entered the war, did not believe him. He expected it on the coast in August, and by June, apart from the indications in captured letters, he had proof: A frigate had left Rhode Island for the West Indies with American pilots. Even by mid-August, Washington had made no serious move to strike at New York, for all the display of troops on Westchester; Clinton assumed he was waiting to combine his operation with the arrival of De Grasse.

The ominous shadow of the French admiral loomed over the whole strategic situation. Even so, it was not overwhelmingly critical. Rodney was in the West Indies with a British fleet watching the French “like a lynx"; if they sailed for America he would be in close pursuit. But unlike the other concentrations of enemy ships and troops on which Clinton’s spies were continually reporting, De Grasse was unpredictable. He could swoop suddenly from the distant south, and Clinton could not be sure what point of America he would strike.

Apart from the uncertain threat of De Grasse, nevertheless, in August, as Clinton surveyed the war theater under his command, he was not too anxious. He believed he could hold New York and was soon to receive reinforcements from Europe. A squadron of French warships under the newly arrived Admiral Louis, Comte de Barras was at Rhode Island, but this was exactly counterbalanced by the British ships, now commanded by Admiral Thomas Graves, who was then cruising off Boston searching for an expected enemy convoy.

On the Chesapeake, Cornwallis’ army of nearly 8,000 men was still being ferried daily to his new station on the York River and was considerably larger than Lafayette’s force now camped on the Pamunkey high up the Williamsburg peninsula.

And so the summer weeks went by with no movement on either side. In fact, Clinton was having more trouble with Germain and his complaining letters than from Washington.

It was not until mid-August that there were signs of enemy movement. A letter from Rodney warned that De Grasse was sailing for America. Sir Samuel Hood would be on his way with a fleet to cover him, making first for the capes at the entrance to the Chesapeake and then scouring the coast up to New York.

By the time Hood arrived at Sandy Hook on the evening of the twenty-eighth, his frigates had probed the Chesapeake and Delaware Bay. But there had been no sign of De Grasse, he assured Clinton and Graves at their Long Island meeting. This was good news. For the two commanders had been waiting only for Hood’s arrival before launching a quick raid on Rhode Island to destroy De Barras’ ships. All day, in fact, the troops had been going aboard the transports. But by ten o’clock that night, Clinton abruptly canceled the plan. A messenger had ridden in from East Hampton high up the Long Island coast to say that three nights before, on the twenty-fifth, De Barras and his squadron had sailed from Rhode Island.

The question facing the three men was where was he sailing? It was not the only query. For some days Clinton had been puzzled by Washington’s movements.

On the twentieth the rebel troops camped in Westchester had started crossing the Hudson. By the twenty-seventh, the day before Hood had arrived at Sandy Hook, Clinton had written to Cornwallis that the rebels had taken a position at Chatham in New Jersey “that seemed to threaten Staten Island.”

“I cannot well understand Mr. Washington’s real intentions. . . ,” he told the earl. “It is possible he means for the present to suspend his offensive operations against this post and to take a defensive position at the old post of Morristown, from which he may detach to the southward.”

Three days later he was still trying to fathom the rebel plans. “Mr. Washington’s force still remains in the neighbourhood of Chatham,” he wrote. But in fact by then it was on the move to the south, as Clinton was to learn in a very few hours. A tiny scrap of paper had come into British HQ, concealed in a button, with the brief message: “The Chesapeake is the object—all in motion-August 29th—Squibb.”

Several spies had suggested rebel intentions to the southward, which was probably why Clinton had speculated on the possibility of detachments; but “Squibb” was the cover name for a trusted British agent, and the shock element in his note was the word “all.” It was not a detachment; the whole army was on the march.

Immediately it put De Barras’ departure from Rhode Island in a new context. The Chesapeake must be his destination, too, and that obviously was where De Grasse would be heading—if he had not already arrived.

That night Graves’ squadron passed the bar to join Hood’s vessels at Sandy Hook. As senior admiral, Graves on board the London assumed command and the combined fleet of nineteen ships of the line sailed for the Chesapeake.

Even then, there was no sense of truly serious crisis either in New York or in the flagship. Hood, who had been shadowing the French in the West Indies, was convinced that the combined British naval force was equal to any fleet the enemy could muster when De Barras joined De Grasse. Besides, he and Rodney had assumed that the French must leave some ships on the West Indies station. But Hood and Rodney were wrong. It was to be some time before the British commanders realized quite how wrong, but by the time the British fleet had started sailing south, Cornwallis at least had some suspicions about the naval strength of the French.

YORKTOWN, August 31

A British naval lieutenant from the frigate Charon was the first to discover the truth, for the entrance to the Chesapeake could not be seen from Yorktown. He was transporting some dragoons to Old Point Comfort near Portsmouth to act as an escort, though to whom is not recorded, when by Cape Henry he saw the French fleet, dominated by De Grasse’s massive 104-gun flagship Ville de Paris.

Cornwallis’ urgent message to Clinton in cipher was brief: “There are between thirty and forty sail within the capes, mostly ships of war and some of them very large.”

By that night, as Cornwallis reported to New York, a French ship of the line and two frigates lay anchored at the mouth of the York River. He was under blockade.

The earl was not ready for the crisis. Just over a week before he had written to Clinton that although “the works at Gloucester” were ready for defense against “sudden attack,” he was only just about to start fortifying Yorktown across the river. Owing to the “difficulty of constructing works in this warm season,” he would need at least “six weeks to put the intended works into a tolerable state of defense.”

Now he would not have that much time. Only two days after De Grasse had arrived in the Chesapeake, he reported, “Forty boats with troops went up the James River.” These were French soldiers under General Claude, Marquis de St. Simon that De Grasse had brought with him, and as Cornwallis soon learned from Tarleton’s patrols, they were stationed on James Island to check any British attempt at a breakthrough to North Carolina.⁴ At the same time Lafayette had moved to Williamsburg in line with James Island, 12 miles north of Yorktown.

It is doubtful if the French and rebel troops could have stopped a British escape at this stage. Cornwallis, as Clinton later noted bitterly, “could have marched out 5,500 as good troops as any in the world.” Both Lafayette and St. Simon “had not altogether 5,000⁵ exclusive of militia.”

But it was early for drastic measures. Unless he could “annihilate” Lafayette and the French, Cornwallis would only be able to get his combat troops away, leaving the remainder in a weak post to be taken prisoner. On the other hand, if he were defeated in the battle, it would mean the “immediate loss” of Yorktown, and, as he said later, he would have been “exposed to public execration” for not waiting for relief from New York.

As was so often the case in British affairs in America, it was a matter of critical timing. He had provisions, he had men by the thousand for fighting and for fortifying, so the British dug in. Under pressure, the enormous working parties labored long hours to strengthen the defenses of the town, and the army set up a strong position in front, with a chain of redoubts.

Late in the afternoon of the fifth, the soldiers in Yorktown, sweating over their shovels in the summer heat, heard the distant thuds of the salvos at sea.

OFF CAPE CHARLES, VIRGINIA, September 5

The fleet was running for the capes under a following sea, the waves building behind them at times as the wind blew up suddenly for a few minutes in short squalls. On the starboard beam was the coast of Delaware—territory Clinton had planned to take a few months ago and which now might have been under British control if Cornwallis had not followed his own plans and marched to Virginia.

At ten o’clock from HMS Barfleur, Hood, who commanded the van, saw the signal flags shake out from the masthead of the scouting frigate, standing far ahead of the fleet. Its captain had sighted a fleet.

The Chesapeake was still some distance away, dark contours in the distance; there was plenty of time and Graves was not hurried. Another half hour passed before “Prepare for action” was flying from the masthead of the London, precipitating the same spate of activity on every ship in the fleet: the opening of the ports; the running out of the cannon; the assembling of the starting ammunition on the gundecks.

“We cleared” was the brief comment in the log of the Shrewsbury ,then stationed in the rear of the fleet but soon to be fighting a crucial part of the action. “Clearing for battle” was a literal phrase; the sides of the ship were opened as fully as possible so that the enemy shot could pass right through, since anything the cannonballs struck would be shattered. The overriding principle was not to provide cover for the crews but to preserve as much of the ship as possible from the massive destruction of a broadside.

At eleven o’clock the London was signaling “line of battle,” and the eighteen line ships slowly took up station behind each other, heading for the southern end of the 10-mile gap between the capes. This was where the main channel led into Chesapeake Bay, limited by Middle Ground shoal 3 miles north of Cape Henry.

Guessing that the French would sail out of the bay, Graves was forming his line so that he would be running parallel to the windward of them as they ran out to meet him. They were still “at anchor about Cape Henry,” as Hood recorded, but “their topsail yards [were] hoisted aloft as a signal for getting under sail.”

In fact, to save the time-wasting process of weighing anchor the French slipped their cables and “came out in line of battle ahead but by no means regular and connected.”

As he watched them from the Barfleur, Hood, who had been so sure of British naval equality, must have been disturbed, for there were twenty-four ships of the line tacking out of the bay, bending under the northeast wind—five more than the British were taking into battle against them, more than 300 extra guns. And still Hood did not know the full extent of his mistake.

Advancing as they were on a superior enemy, the British would need the initiative of wind advantage. But the French often fought defensively, even relinquishing the wind sometimes when they could take it: For, with the wind pressure heeling them away from the enemy, they could open their lowest ports without fear of taking in water. And this was where the biggest caliber guns were mounted.⁶

The two fleets ran on toward each other. By the end of the morning the van ships were nearly in line some three miles apart. Graves’ plan was to keep on his present course until the center ships were opposite each other and then to turn into the attack. But the squally weather with its changing wind pressures was not ideal for an action. As he watched the enemy ships streaming out of the Chesapeake, the admiral was sending signals all the time to his ships to get on station, and high up in their rigging their crews were reefing sails if they were coming on too fast or opening up more canvas if they were dropping back.

By two o’clock, as the two fleets ran on opposite courses, the center ships were still not in line. But Graves knew he would have to “wear” his ships soon, for his lead vessel was approaching the shallow water of the Middle Ground shoal, as the French well knew. Their line, formed in such a hurry, was still very ragged, and their van ships were too far ahead of their main fleet and, thus, vulnerable to attack. Realizing this, they leaned eastward to increase their distance from the British and, as Graves reported, “to enable their center to support them or they would have been cut up.”

And they should have been cut up, according to Hood watching impatiently from the Barfleur in the van. The admiral waited for the London to signal the rear ships to fall down, running fast before the wind as they would be onto the exposed French vessels, but all he saw at the London’s masthead were the flags warning the whole fleet: “Prepare to veer.”

“It was a glorious opportunity,” he wrote later, “but it was not embraced.” Graves was older than Hood and more rigid in his thinking. He seemed to like to use his fleet as a single fighting machine, uncomplicated by detachments. Also, as Hood was to demonstrate later, he did not have the same flair.

At two fifteen because of the shoal ahead, the fleet went about. Each ship turned heavily, her sails loosening, heeling to starboard as once more they scooped the wind, and headed east—until Graves halted the whole line to allow the French to catch up.

But De Grasse was not waiting to challenge the British. His ships kept on running out to sea. Graves tried to maneuver his fleet to close.

Under these conditions, with the squally weather and the French van leading away, it was a complex operation. Now that the British had turned, their rear ships were in the lead. The Shrewsbury, with its seventy-four guns, headed the line and, under the orders flying from London’s mast, was on a collision course with the front French ship. The two lines of ships, therefore, formed an angle, the points of which were closing all the time—but not very fast. Nearly two hours were to pass from the time the fleet went about before the battle started, two hours during which the London was flying repeated signals to the Shrewsbury to lead farther to starboard and to other ships to keep station.

For the conditions in which Graves was operating, his commanding seems to have been far too inflexible for so crucial an action. As long as the “line of battle” signal flew, no vessel could deviate from its course behind the lead ship. Later Hood claimed that the signal was never struck, thus causing misunderstandings when Graves ordered close action, and even the London’s log shows that it was hoisted several times during the battle. Certainly, because of the wide angle of approach, the rear division never came close enough to the enemy to engage.⁷ The lead ships, however, were soon involved in a very fiercely fought action.

Just before four o’clock, Graves ordered his fleet to “close to one cable,” and a few minutes later the red flag at the fore-topgallant signaled “engage the enemy.”

The London, according to her log, “filled the main top sails and bore down” on the French. More than forty starboard guns crashed out a massive explosion of smoke and flame.

At the head of the line the Shrewsbury was “within musket shot” of the French lead ship. As Captain Mark Robinson saw the London fire her opening broadside at long range, he was closing “with our opposite to pistol shot” distance. At four thirty his starboard guns were firing, and his enemy ship was answering with great effect. Cannonballs and grape raked his rigging. Only a quarter of an hour after the battle had started, “our fore topsail came down.” With the guns crashing out repeated salvos, seamen fought to clear the sails and masts from a deck clouded with smoke. Then “the main and mizzen top sail yards came down also.”

Behind the Shrewsbury in the line, the Intrepid, the Montagu, the Princesa all were furiously engaged, their guns firing constantly. Farther back the Terrible was in trouble. She had been leaking badly for a couple of days, and all her pumps had been in operation before she went into action. Now she was taking in water fast, and her sails were slashed by shot. Near her, the Ajax had lost her top gallant, and her crew was hoisting another under blasts of grape, while below them the gunners were fighting the ship, salvo after salvo shaking the masts.

In the center there was chaos. As the London bore down on the enemy, she overran the two ships ahead of her in the line. Now they could not fire their guns for fear of hitting the flagship. In an attempt to create order, Graves flew the signal for “line of battle.”

By five o’clock the Shrewsbury at the head of the line was taking terrible punishment. She had lost much of her top rigging, and now her “lower masts were much damaged.” Soon afterward the captain lost his leg and the first lieutenant was killed. The captain of the Intrepid hailed her and “desired us to cease firing so that he might . . . take our place. At this time, we had not a brace bowling or hardly a fore main shroud standing.”

The Intrepid had already forced the ship she was fighting “to turn her stern.” Now she put on sail, passing the stricken Shrewsbury, “keeping her fire well up and closing with the enemy’s van.”

At last the French bore away, and soon after six, Graves ordered the cease-fire so that he could assess the condition of his ships. The action had lasted only an hour and a half—and truly achieved nothing—but some of his vessels were badly damaged. Just how badly he did not fully discover until darkness, when he sent frigates up and down the line. The reports were not encouraging: His three lead ships were so battered they were unable to keep the line. Two others were leaking dangerously. Yet a third—the Princesa, which carried the flag of Rear Admiral Francis Drake— was “in momentous apprehension of the main top mast going over the side.”

Fortunately the weather the next day was calm, and the French stayed well away, engaged like the British repairing their damage. Graves summoned his two junior admirals to a conference on the London. He had sent two frigates into the Chesapeake to recon-noiter; in the bay they had sighted five enemy vessels, four of which were big enough to be ships of the line.

Hood was in no doubt what they should do. He urged his senior admiral to take the whole fleet into the Chesapeake to the “succour of Lord Cornwallis.”

But Graves was worried by the danger of being blocked in and anxious about his crippled ships—with some reason. Two nights later, when the weather blew up, the Terrible made a distress signal and had to be attended by frigates, and the Intrepid sent a warning message that her main topmast had gone and she expected her foreyard to go at any moment.

For eight days, to Hood’s growing anger, the British admiral took no decision at all. The fleet just drifted. Sometimes the French were in sight and sometimes not. For two days, De Grasse had the wind, but he did not take his opportunity to attack; indeed, he had little to gain by it. Repeatedly, at conferences, and at one stage by letter, Hood pleaded with Graves that the fleet “should get off the Chesapeake before him [De Grasse]. It appeared to me a measure of the utmost importance to keep the French out.”

Graves, however, decided against it. The next day the enemy fleet was no longer in sight. Eventually, on the thirteenth, Graves sent a message to Hood that the scouting frigate Medea had signaled that De Grasse was back in the Chesapeake. What action did he now suggest? “Sir Samuel,” Hood replied tautly, “would like to send an opinion but he really knows not what to say in the truly lamentable state we have brought ourselves.”

There seemed no point in staying inactive where they were. Several of the ships were so damaged that they needed dockyard attention; the Terrible had deteriorated to the point that the admiral had ordered her destruction.

So the fleet, its mission failed completely, headed north for New York.

NEW YORK, September 13

It was raining as the Pegasus frigate, heeling under the northeast wind, ran in to Sandy Hook and let go her anchor. Four days had passed since she had left the semicrippled fleet, waiting uncertainly off the Chesapeake while the admiral tried to make up his mind what to do.

That night Clinton read Graves’ gloomy letter and called a council of war for the morning to decide on action. “The enemy have so great a naval force on the Chesapeake,” Graves had written, “that they are absolute masters of its navigation. . . . In this ticklish state of things Your Excellency will see the little probability of anything getting into York River but by night and of the infinite risk to any supplies sent by water.”

The failure of the navy to open the Chesapeake was an enormous setback, but there was still time for new plans. From the returns of Cornwallis’ commissaries it was clear that he had fairly ample provisions. “The post of York,” the minutes of the next day’s war council recorded, “may be defended with its present garrison against 20,000 assailants for at least three weeks.” This gave some scope either for another naval strike or for a movement by land to cooperate with a breakout.

Despite the report from Graves, the best hope still lay with a seaborne relief effort. For three more ships of the line, bringing Admiral Robert Digby from England to take over naval command from Graves, were expected in New York at any moment. The Terrible had been sunk, but the new arrivals would reduce the French superiority to only three major fighting vessels—or so Clinton, like Graves and his admirals, thought, for all the commanders were assuming that the fleet that had fought them on the fifth included De Barras’ squadron from Rhode Island. But in fact by the day of the battle the ships from Rhode Island had not reached the Chesapeake.

When the council of war met in British headquarters on the tenth, there were 5,000 assault troops already embarked waiting on transports in the harbor. But it seemed wise to wait until Digby arrived with his extra men-of-war.

Three days later a letter arrived from Cornwallis by an armed galley—“built like a whaleboat . . . quite open”⁸ with fourteen oars and two sails—that had slipped under the guns of the French guard ships. His dispatch, written on the eighth, seemed to confirm that the war council’s decision had been sound.

The earl appeared confident. “I am now working hard at the redoubts of the place. The army is not very sickly. Provisions for six weeks. I will be very careful of it.”

On the nineteenth the flags on the mast at Staten Island signaled the sighting of Graves’ fleet, limping home for repairs, but when he anchored at Sandy Hook two days later, he was no consolation to Clinton. “The injuries received by the Fleet in the action. . . ,” he wrote, “makes it quite uncertain how soon the Fleet can be got to sea.”

During the impotent days that followed, Clinton must have cursed the bar at Sandy Hook, even though it had probably saved New York from D’Estaing in 1778, for it took the best part of a week to get the ships up into the harbor and the biggest of them still had to wait for the spring tides. By then the crisis had soared to a new peak, and the commander in chief knew that unless he could pressure the navy into hurrying, there would be a disaster at Yorktown even greater than at Saratoga.

On the twenty-third two letters came in from Cornwallis. One was calm; he did not propose “so desperate” an expedient as a breakout since “as you say Admiral Digby is hourly expected and promise every exertion to help me.” But the other, written a few hours later when he had received new information, was taut with alarm. Now that De Barras had joined De Grasse, he reported, there were no less than thirty-six French ships of the line in the Chesapeake—most of them anchored abreast across the entrance to the channel.

De Grasse had taken an enormous gamble. Both Rodney and Hood had assumed that he would send a squadron to America,⁹ but he had left the West Indies without protection and taken his whole fleet. As Cornwallis was fully aware, even if Digby did arrive in time the French superiority could still be as much as fourteen line of battle ships—possibly 1,000 guns more than that the British could deploy. “This place is in no state of defense,” he wrote. “If you cannot relieve me very soon, you must be prepared to hear the worst.”

Clinton reacted to the news by demanding an immediate conference with the naval chiefs. The next day, the twenty-fourth, Graves stepped ashore onto the New York quay as the guns of the battery boomed in formal salute.

Tensely when Clinton emphasized “that Lord Cornwallis’ situation” required “the most speedy assistance,” the admirals agreed to his relief plan: The fleet, with 5,000 troops under Clinton’s personal command, would blast its way through the French line at the entrance to the Chesapeake and form a defensive ring at the entrance of the York and James rivers.

This was not as wild a plan as it seemed. When the tide was running, the sea gushed through the Chesapeake Channel very fast, building up a “great swell.” It ran too strongly, according to the naval advisers, for the French ships to swing around on their cables to “bear” with their broadsides on “ships approaching them.”

If the British got through the line, the fleet could anchor in the restricted, calmer waters nearer Yorktown that were “better calculated for its smaller number and . . . our ships could resist the attack of the enemy by having free use of their springs.” Meanwhile, they could land the troops on either river and put them into action wherever they could be most effective.

That night Clinton wrote to Cornwallis that “there is every reason to hope we shall start from hence the 5th of October”—in ten days’ time. Meanwhile, his staff was working on the plan. More letters went off by fast open boat: Would Cornwallis send someone to both capes around October 7 so that the fleet could have up-to-date information about the enemy positions before it went into action? At the sound of gunfire the earl was asked to make “three separate smokes” if all was well “and, if you possess the post of Gloucester, four.”

The navy was doing its best to rush the refitting of the damaged ships. In the dockyard the men were working from daylight until ten at night. For once the interservice rivalries were forgotten, and the army offered the navy any materials it wanted.

The day after the war council had met Admiral Digby arrived in New York with his ships of the line, but in view of the crisis, he left the command with Graves.

Despite all the activity, Clinton soon suspected that the fleet would not be ready by the October 5 start date. In council he considered other plans that might be launched more quickly—such as a strike by land through New Jersey at Philadelphia, which would force Washington to divert troops from Yorktown—but the idea was rejected because the preparation might delay the “principal object,” the breakthrough from the sea.

By the thirtieth there was no longer any possibility of the navy’s being ready by the scheduled date. “From the assurances given me this day by Admiral Graves . . . ,” Clinton wrote Cornwallis sadly, “we may pass the bar by the 12th October if the winds permit and no unforeseen accident happens. This, however, is subject to disappointment.’’

Once more he was considering an attack across Jersey which now seemed more attractive: “I shall persist in my idea of a direct move [by sea] even to the middle of November, should it be your Lordship’s opinion that you can hold out so long; but if, when I hear from you, you tell me that you cannot . . . I will immediately make an attempt upon Philadelphia by land. . . . If this should draw any part of Washington’s force from you, it may possibly give you an opportunity of doing something to save your army. . . .”

But even as Clinton was writing to him, the chances of escape had been sharply reduced, for Washington and the French were now stationed around Yorktown in a tight ring.

YORKTOWN, September 28

They came at last, shortly before noon with the sun glinting on their bayonets, along the main road from Williamsburg that reached down the peninsula near the river—the beginning of a seemingly endless column of more than 16,000 men. The first British to see them through the trees in the distance were light infantrymen, manning a forward picket by the road; they dropped back, alerting Tarleton.

The legion dragoons mounted and formed—and watched as the American Continental troops filed off the road toward Wormley Creek, which hooked up around the town from the river below. The white-uniformed French who followed them in the column carrying white silk standards set up their line across the road, extending left to the water above the port. Yorktown was invested.

So was Gloucester by that time. A patrolling troop of huzzars of Simcoe’s Queen’s Rangers saw them approaching—300 French cavalry and a long column of infantry, supported by American militia. Like the picket across the river, they retreated immediately behind the cover of the British lines.

In a way it was a relief to Cornwallis, for he had been expecting the appearance of the soldiers ever since he had heard four days before that the Hudson troops had joined Lafayette. Some of the despair that had marked his last message to Clinton when he knew the true size of the French fleet seemed to have gone. “There was but one wish throughout the whole army,” he wrote to New York the next night, “which was that the enemy would advance.”

Yorktown was a small tobacco port of some seventy houses, set on a low hill near the York River. During the weeks since the French had sailed into the bay, the British had worked hard to prepare it against attack. Earthworks, with redoubts and batteries for sixty-five guns, surrounded all parts of the town that did not overlook the water, where a barrier had been formed with sunken vessels. There two frigates, the Charon and the Guadeloupe, lay anchored to serve as extra armament.

Also, the British had set up a strong outer defense. Two creeks which flowed into the York formed protective arms to both the north and the south of the town. Across the half mile strip of land between the creeks the army had built fortifications of felled trees with batteries in redoubts at the most vulnerable points.

On the night of September 29, the day after Washington had surrounded the town, the galley that seemed able to slip past the French warships in the Chesapeake with an astonishing skill arrived at Yorktown with Clinton’s message that the relief fleet would sail on October 5. Conscious that his outer defense line could be cut off, Cornwallis immediately called the troops back into the town and abandoned the works.

As the days went by, the earl watched from the big house on the fringe of the town that he had chosen as his HQ as Washington prepared his siege—with the same deliberate care that Clinton had displayed at Charleston. His men, who had occupied the position the British had abandoned, were building redoubts and assembling the materials for digging the parallels. So far the enemy guns had hardly fired at all, but it would not be long before they opened up.

At Gloucester there was more activity. Cavalry were not likely to be much use in Yorktown, so Cornwallis had sent Tarleton across the river with his dragoons.

Simcoe, who was ill in bed, suggested an idea to him. The Due de Lauzun, who commanded the French horse there, had seen how few mounted rangers he had at the post but would not know that Tarleton had crossed the river with the Green Dragoons. Why not, he proposed according to his journal, send out the Ranger huzzars as a decoy, which the duke would be bound to attack, and set up the legion cavalry in ambush?

Early the next morning a large foraging force went out of the British lines. Tarleton rode with them but kept his dragoons out of sight in woods.¹⁰ On this side of the river where the country was rougher, the enemy lines were farther aw ay—four miles from Gloucester—and the foragers were not disturbed as they harvested Indian corn. It was not until they were on their way back that the Due de Lauzun and his uhlans charged on them along a lane.

The siege of Yorktown

The History of the Origins of the American War by Charles Stedman, 1794

A legion scouting officer galloped the warning, and the dragoons formed to meet the approaching French cavalry. Tarleton picked me out,” recorded the Due de Lauzun in his memoirs, “and came to me with his pistol raised. We were going to fight between our respective troops.”

They never did, for at that instant a French uhlan thrust his lance into the mount of a dragoon next to the British cavalry colonel. The stricken animal plunged sideways, toppling Tarleton’s black horse and pinning him beneath it.

Promptly, the duke leaped from his saddle and ran forward to take him prisoner, but “a company of English dragoons threw itself between us and protected his retreat.”

Tarleton, though badly hurt by his fall, mounted another horse and ordered his men to retire and re-formed them under the cover of his infantry. The French cavalry charged again, but as so often happened, the controlled musket fire checked them.

Now Tarleton ordered his legion dragoons into the attack, but they, too, were stopped by well-formed infantry.

Reluctantly they turned and followed the forage back to Gloucester. There, because of reports that Tarleton had been defeated, the garrison were stood to at their posts, expecting immediate attack by the French. Simcoe, who was so ill he could not walk, had been carried on a stretcher to his horse so that he could command his rangers. But the French did not follow. There was no point, for the focus of the siege was across the river.

On the night of October 6, low clouds hid the moon. The men on duty on the newly constructed walls of Yorktown peered through light rain into the blackness. All night the British guns were firing from one point or another along the ramparts whenever their officers suspected enemy activity.¹¹ On the north by the riverbank, a forward redoubt, manned by the Welch Fusiliers, was attacked by the French, but the British fought it off. It was unlikely they would hold the redoubt for long, for it was one of several forward positions that were clearly vulnerable although valuable for flank firing in the assaults that would surely come.

Just how imminent these were became obvious as the daylight slowly revealed the country outside the town. For in the night the enemy had started work on the first parallel—only 600 yards from the walls. They had made good progress, too. Already the trench was deep enough for musketmen and for the working parties to continue digging by day.

British shells were soon exploding near the parallel, but it meant, as Cornwallis knew only too well, that time was getting very short. “I can see no means of forming a junction with us but by the York River,” he had written to Clinton, “and I do not think that any diversion [such as the suggested attack by land on Philadelphia] would be of any use to us. . . . I see little chance of my being able to send persons to wait for you at the Capes, but I will if possible.”

By the ninth, three days later, the siege batteries had been set up. The attack began slowly. Early in the afternoon the French guns near the river to the north opened up on the town. The cannon were only 12-pounders, though the French also had some howitzers, and did little damage, but they forced the Guadeloupe frigate to shift its station, moving farther off across the river.

Two hours later, the first of the American batteries started firing on the south of the town with 18- and 24-pounders. Shot crashed into the buildings of the port. In one house some British officers were having dinner when the walls caved in; one man died, and three were badly wounded. Cornwallis, too, was forced to evacuate British headquarters because the house was too conspicuous and singled out as a prime target.

That night Major Cochrane arrived from New York to explain Clinton’s relief plan in detail. He did not survive long. Two days later he went onto the walls with Cornwallis and sighted one of the guns. After it fired, he peered over the parapet to see what damage it had done, and his head was shot off.

By then the Charon frigate had been set on fire by hot shot from the French guns, and the British situation was becoming critical. All the enemy batteries along the first parallel were now completed, and forty guns “mostly heavy” and sixteen mortars were firing on the town “without intermission.”

“We have lost about seventy men . . . and many of our works are considerably damaged,” Cornwallis wrote to Clinton at midday on the eleventh. “We cannot hope to make a very long resistance.” By five o’clock in the afternoon, as he added in a postscript, he had lost another thirty. By midnight the enemy had started on their second parallel only 300 yards from the town. “We continue to lose men very fast.”

Helpless, Cornwallis watched as the enemy worked on the second trench, relentlessly closing their grip on him. If only the fleet had sailed on schedule from New York on October 5, it would have arrived by now, and British ships might have been ranged defensively around the mouth of the York and the James. Even if it had left on the twelfth, it could have still just reached him in time. But once the enemy set up the batteries of the big caliber guns on the second parallel and opened up at a range of only 300 yards, it would be over—just as it had been at Charleston, even though the walls of that town were much stronger than the still damp earthworks that were all that protected Yorktown. General Benjamin Lincoln, who had surrendered Charleston, was in a more fortunate position now; he was among the generals commanding the besieging force.

Two nights later, on the fourteenth, the enemy stormed two advanced British redoubts just to the south of the town and incorporated them in their second parallel. The margin of time that still remained for Clinton and the fleet to arrive was now almost nonexistent. The only way Cornwallis could buy a few hours was by taking drastic action to postpone the moment when the guns by the new trench blasted into fire at what would be virtually point-blank range. So he ordered a sortie for the next night.

It was a desperate move. He chose his best troops—350 men selected from the guards, the grenadiers and the light infantry. Not long before dawn, they charged out of the town onto the nearly completed batteries, fighting their way with bayonets into the redoubts that protected the guns. They killed and wounded 100 of the French and spiked eleven cannon.

But apparently they did not have proper spikes, for, as Cornwallis reported, the guns “were soon rendered fit for service again and, before dark, the whole parallel and batteries appeared to be nearly complete.”

That day Cornwallis was facing the ultimate crisis. Even now, before the second parallel batteries opened up, he could not use his guns. His ammunition was almost gone, and every time his gun crews ran forward a cannon anywhere on the walls the intensity of the attacking fire was so heavy it made survival impossible.

The alternatives were a surrender or a breakout, and Cornwallis decided on the latter, planning to go north from Gloucester where the enemy were fewer. He had already written to Clinton urging that, “because the safety of the place is so precarious . . . I cannot recommend that the fleet and army should run great risk in endeavouring to save us.” One boat had taken the warning to New York; others, with copies, had been ordered to wait on the coast near the Chesapeake.

That night at ten o’clock, the boats started ferrying the troops across the mile-wide York River to Gloucester. But Cornwallis’ luck was out. All evening the weather had been calm, but near midnight, when several boatloads of his men had been landed on the far shore, a sudden storm broke. Rain gushed down in torrents. A high wind screamed down the York River, carrying the boats away downstream.

It was the end of the escape attempt. “In this situation, with my little force divided,” wrote Cornwallis, “the enemy’s batteries opened at daybreak.”

During the morning, as the enemy’s guns broke down the Yorktown defenses, Cornwallis’ troops were brought back across the river in the boats that had been recovered. But even after a few hours of the new bombardment, “the walls were in many places assailable. . . . By the continuance of the same fire for a few hours longer, they would be in such a state as to render it desperate with our numbers to attempt to maintain them.”

At last, deciding that “it would have been wanton and inhuman . . . to sacrifice the lives of this small body of gallant soldiers,” Cornwallis ordered a drummer—accompanied by an officer with a flag of truce—to mount the parapet and beat to “parley.”

According to rebel sources, the drumming could not be heard because of the incessant crashing of the guns; but the rebel commanders understood the purpose, and the guns suddenly ceased firing. In the quiet that followed, the boy—beating his drum—and the man—bearing the proposal to suspend hostilities— walked out of the town toward the enemy lines.

Cornwallis, remembering Saratoga, proposed that the army should be permitted to return to England on the condition that they would not take up arms against America or France. Washington, remembering Charleston, insisted that the terms should be the same as those given to General Lincoln at that capitulation.¹²

Simcoe asked Cornwallis permission to escape, since all his rangers were Loyalists and could expect harsh treatment. He planned to cross the Chesapeake in boats and make for Maryland, but the earl insisted that “the whole of the Army must share one fate.”

He tried to obtain a guarantee that Loyalists would “not be punished for having joined the British army,” but Washington refused to agree to this since it was “altogether of civil resort.” All that Cornwallis could obtain in the way of concession was the American commander’s consent that one ship could sail unexamined for New York. It provided an escape for the most “obnoxious” of the Americans in his army.

At two o’clock in the afternoon of the nineteenth the British, with their drums beating, marched out of Yorktown along the road toward Hampton to the south. For nearly a mile they passed between the ranks of the enemy—the Americans to the right and the French to their left.

Because Cornwallis was ill, General Charles O’Hara carried the earl’s sword. But when he approached Washington, the American commander, either because of his rank or because of Charleston, referred him to General Lincoln.

Formally Lincoln accepted the sword—and handed it back. And the British marched on down the road to lay down their arms in a field within a circle of French huzzars. The tune their bands played, according to some accounts, was an old British marching song: “The World Turned Upside Down:”

If ponies rode men and if grass ate the cows,

And cats should be chased into holes by the mouse. . . .

If summer were spring and the other way round,

Then all the world would be upside down.

NEW YORK, October 19

“The fleet were all over the bar this morning,” recorded Mackenzie, “and at 4 this afternoon were under way, stretching to the Eastward “—twenty-five ships of the line and eleven smaller men of war on their way to rescue an army that was at that moment piling its arms under the eyes of a ring of French huzzars.

It had taken more than two days to get the fleet down to Sandy Hook from the harbor, and even Admiral Graves was becoming exasperated by the holdups. “I should have explained to your Excellency,” he wrote in a note to Clinton on the seventeenth, “that all this show of signals and topsails were . . . to push forward the lazy and supine. And I am sorry to find that difficulties go on increasing and that nothing can turn the current but being actually at sea.”

After they had sailed, Cornwallis’ last letter—written just before his escape attempt, urging that there was nothing now that a relief force could do—arrived at New York and was sent after the fleet by a fast sloop. But Clinton and Graves on board the London decided to sail on; there might be some action still open to them. Early in the morning of the twenty-fourth, when the capes at last were in sight, the scope for this seemed very small. An open boat came alongside the flagship; in it were three men, presumably Loyalists, who said that they had left Yorktown on the eighteenth, the day after Cornwallis had sued for surrender.

Clinton and Graves sent boats in to the shore to obtain confirmation. At last, forced to face the fact that they truly were too late, the admiral once more turned his fleet about and headed back to New York.