Patriots (77 page)

Admiral de Grasse stood six feet two inches, and until his waist thickened with the years he had been considered one of his navy’s most handsome officers. His men were proud of his arrogance and temper. They boasted that during battle he grew another four inches. Now he moved his fleet far enough out of the bay to give him sea room for the coming engagement. But the British had the advantage of coming with the wind in compact formation while de Grasse was still struggling to get his fleet out of the harbor.

With the delay Admiral Graves might have picked off the French ships one by one as they struggled out toward the open sea. But de Grasse had put his fastest ships in front, and before
Graves grasped his advantage the French had pulled into a ragged fighting formation. When de Grasse saw a gap at the center of his own line, Admiral Graves surprised him—and infuriated his fellow British officers—by dropping his sails and waiting for de Grasse to shore up his ships. Graves had legitimate reasons for the delay. He was having problems with some of the ships Admiral Hood had brought up from the West Indies. The
Terrible
had been crippled long before it reached the Chesapeake; five pumps were barely keeping her afloat, and she lagged behind Graves’s fighting line.

It was past
4 P.M.
before the two admirals decided that they were in a position to fight. And then Admiral Graves mixed up his signal flags and ran up the pennant that told his fleet to bear down and engage with the enemy before he had taken down the previous signal. The error puzzled Admiral Hood at the rear, and he was late in bringing up his ship. When the firing began, the lines were still not perfectly matched despite all the delay. But the aim from both sides was deadly, and each crew suffered more than two hundred casualties. The British ships were the worse damaged. After ninety minutes of cannon fire, three of them, in addition to the
Terrible
, were leaking from shots through their hulls. As night fell, the enemy fleets rolled on the waves across from each other while men patched up the day’s wounds.

At a council of war the next morning, Admiral Graves and Admiral Hood quarreled over the previous day’s perplexing signals. For the next forty-eight hours the fleets drifted seven or eight miles apart, until they were nearly a hundred miles from the mouth of the Chesapeake. Admiral Graves was unaware that Lord Cornwallis was bottled up at Yorktown. He knew only that de Grasse was avoiding another engagement at sea, and he would do the same. On September 9, though he had the wind with him, Graves didn’t strike.

Each side began to worry that the other might sail back to the mainland and take command of Chesapeake Bay, and on the night of September 9 de Grasse made that decisive move. Admiral Hood watched in alarm as French sails billowed up and the ships sailed off. Hood grew angrier when he learned that Admiral Graves had no idea where the French fleet was heading. Graves waited until September 11, trying to salvage the
Terrible
, before
he ordered her evacuated and set on fire. Then he too set off for Chesapeake Bay. What met him there was the worst possible development: Admiral de Barras had sailed eight ships down the Atlantic coast from Newport to North Carolina, then doubled back, slipped past the British patrols and entered the bay. When de Grasse’s ships joined those of de Barras, Chesapeake Bay became impenetrable to the British.

Admiral Graves sought the advice of his second in command. Admiral Hood wrote back: “
Sir Samuel would be very glad to send an opinion, but he really knows not what to say in the truly lamentable state we have brought ourselves.”

Graves had no course left except to sail back to New York. He would repair his ships, return to the Chesapeake and try again. And Lord Cornwallis would have to defend Yorktown alone for another month.

—

While Admiral Graves was hesitating outside the bay, George Washington had ridden sixty miles to prepare Mount Vernon for a visit by his French allies. He hadn’t returned to his estate in more than six years, and he found that the roads around the plantation had been badly neglected. Even though it was dusk when Washington arrived, he dictated a letter directing the Fairfax militia to begin work on repairs. At the plantation, Washington was greeted by his stepson, Jack Custis. Washington agreed with Custis’ former schoolmaster who had said the young man was remarkably spoiled even by the standards of the Virginia gentry, so exceedingly indolent and surprisingly voluptuous that nature must have intended him to be an Asiatic prince. Custis, now twenty-eight and father of four children, wanted to go to Yorktown for a taste of the war, and Washington took him on as a civilian aide.

On September 10, General Washington received his staff for dinner. Seeing their commander at home for the first time, the Americans were impressed by his opulent hospitality. That evening General Rochambeau and his entourage arrived at Mount Vernon, and the next day Washington resumed his ride south, hoping to find that Admiral de Barras had succeeded in joining de Grasse. In the first report, Washington was told about the battle at sea but nothing about its outcome. The suspense persisted when
he reached Williamsburg two days later. A fervent Lafayette threw open his arms and kissed Washington from ear to ear, but Lafayette also had been without news for the past eight days. Then, early on the morning of September 15, Washington got a letter from de Grasse announcing that he was again in possession of Chesapeake Bay and that Barras’s squadron had arrived from Newport without a loss. Two days later, de Grasse sent a cutter for Washington and Rochambeau, who sailed through the muggy September heat to see the thirty-two French ships massed in the bay. Afterward Washington’s aides told how de Grasse had pulled himself to his full height, kissed Washington on both cheeks and cried,
“My dear little General!”

But the admiral’s embrace was genuine, and Washington was given the assurance he had come for. Even though de Grasse’s orders were to depart Chesapeake Bay on October 15, he took it upon himself to guarantee that the fleet would stay until the end of October. Near sunset Washington left the
Ville-de-Paris
amid a salute of guns from the flagship while thousands of French sailors crowded the decks for a glimpse of America’s most famous man.

On his return aboard the cutter, squalls kept Washington at sea for four days. Finally he became so impatient to get back to headquarters that he climbed into a small open boat and was rowed thirty miles up the James River. The delay hardly mattered, because at Yorktown Lord Cornwallis was only continuing to dig in. Washington assumed from the British preparations that Cornwallis was preparing to defend his position to the end. Washington himself had a despairing moment when Admiral de Grasse sent a message that because British ships were reportedly on their way he was going to leave the bay after all. Washington wrote a heated protest—“Your leaving the Bay ruins the cause to all intents and purposes”—and the admiral answered cheerfully that, although his plan to leave had been brilliant, his officers had overruled him. The French fleet would stay on to keep Cornwallis trapped at Yorktown.

At 5
A.M.
on Friday, September 28, 1781, the drums in General Washington’s camp at Williamsburg struck the tattoo to march. The American officers wanted their men to begin this crucial campaign as freshly groomed as their French allies and ordered them to be well shaved. One brigade commander issued each regiment
twelve pounds of flour so that his troops could powder their hair. American riflemen and cavalry, interspersed with cannon, moved along the sandy road that would take them through a dozen miles of pine and black cedar to Yorktown. General Rochambeau’s French troops followed them, also with their artillery mixed into the column and not dragged along at the rear. They passed the spot across the river where the Indian princess Pocahontas was said to have saved the life of Captain John Smith nearly a hundred and seventy-five years before.

After the first five miles, the troops reached a fork in the road. The Americans swung left, the French took the more direct path on the right. General Washington rode near the front of the American line on a new light sorrel horse with a white face, named Nelson. By evening the two columns had come within sight of the battlements at Yorktown.

Because the headquarters tents had not arrived, General Washington spent the first night under a mulberry tree. When a few of Cornwallis’ dragoons were spotted scouting around the American camp, two companies of American grenadiers easily chased them back to their lines. Cornwallis had built his inner ring of defenses—with seven redoubts for guns—on a rise overlooking a sandy plain. Washington pitched camp there, amid cactus and dried grass and out of range of the British artillery. He was waiting for his own heavy guns, which the French were supplying and bringing up from the banks of the James River six miles away.

—

On the morning of September 30, Washington discovered that overnight the British had evacuated three of their forward works. It gave the Americans such a critical advantage Washington had to wonder what Cornwallis was thinking. He immediately moved French and American troops into those defenses and turned them toward Yorktown rather than away. Both sides were firing only sporadically, and, though his aides tried to discourage him, Washington made his own reconnaissance just three hundred yards from the British advance posts. He assumed that Cornwallis intended to round up boats along the York River one night and rely on his artillery to hold off the French fleet while he evacuated his men. To frustrate that escape, Washington asked de Grasse to
send up several frigates and block the river. The admiral replied that the risk to his ships would be too great. Besides, de Grasse assured Washington, Cornwallis would never try anything so foolish.

—

Behind his barricades at Yorktown, Lord Cornwallis appeared unperturbed by the mounting crisis. His insouciance did not calm his officers but only spurred them to try to puncture it. Cornwallis was doling out provisions sparingly and seemed convinced they would outlast the siege. Hessians in the camp found the meat putrid and the biscuits wormy, but their complaints didn’t reach Cornwallis. He seemed to be relying on his threat to Henry Clinton that he must send aid or “
be prepared to hear the worst.” Clinton had promised that Admiral Graves’s ships would be repaired quickly and would leave New York no later than October 5. But Cornwallis was unaware of the shortage of lumber that was delaying Graves or that Prince William, King George’s third son, had arrived in New York. Parades and parties in the sixteen-year-old prince’s honor had set back work two days. Even without knowing that, Banastre Tarleton warned Cornwallis not to depend on Clinton’s assurances. As soon as the French and the Americans first arrived, Colonel Tarleton had wanted Cornwallis to attack them before they could get their guns in place. Cornwallis had paid as little heed to that advice as Horatio Gates had given to Benedict Arnold at Saratoga. In one argument, Tarleton’s brother showed Cornwallis how inadequate his earthworks were by nimbly leaping over one of them. Cornwallis was not shaken. “
In that case,” he said, “the blame will fall on Clinton, and not on me.”

—

General Washington had hoped for a dark night for his men to begin digging a trench opposite Cornwallis’ main defenses where they would station the French and American cannon. But it was still early autumn—the Virginians called the season Indian Summer—and the moon was barely starting to wane. Washington had to send workmen out with only an occasional cloud to protect them. As the digging continued, the weather turned and the nights were rainy. Washington and the French engineers worked to position
their cannon as the mire spread across the plain. He walked out on the line with a cloak disguising his rank, and those watching him stand exposed wished they had the nerve to scold him and pull him back to safety. On the night of October 6, Washington returned to the line with a pickax and struck a few ritual blows to indicate that the siege of Yorktown would soon begin. While the trench was being dug, British guns kept up a steady fire against the Americans. At one point, a cannonball landed close to Washington’s party and sprayed sand over the hat of his chaplain, Israel Evans. The clergyman took off his hat to brush it, but Washington stopped him. “
Mr. Evans, you had better carry that home and show it to your wife and children.”

By the dawn of October 7, the Americans had moved their trenches close enough that they could see the British flag fluttering over Yorktown.

Two days later, when the French completed their batteries, the American line was secure on its extreme right, and General Washington was ready to launch his siege. At three o’clock on an afternoon of brilliant sunshine, Washington told the French that they would have the honor of beginning the bombardment. Two hours later, American soldiers ran their flag, which they called the Star-Spangled Banner, up its pole, and Washington came forward to fire the first shot from the American lines. He was led to a newly developed French gun with fitted ammunition and a precision greater than anything he had ever seen. A French adviser pointed to a target on the British walls, and Washington fired and hit that spot. Henry Knox, the bookseller who had made himself an artillery expert, repeated a British deserter’s story that Cornwallis, trying to raise his men’s morale, had assured them that neither the French nor the Americans had brought any heavy artillery.

After those first shells, the British troops knew better. Over the next twenty-four hours, Yorktown and its harbor took more than thirty-six hundred shots. Shells flew across the night sky in bright arcs, trailing long streams of fire, and the Americans thought the display was the most brilliant they had ever seen. Across the barricades, a Hessian soldier watched the shells hurtle toward him and said they shook the ground like earthquakes.

Cornwallis wrote despondently to Henry Clinton at midnight
on October 11, 1781, that the enemy batteries had been firing without pause for two days, and he estimated that the barrage was coming from forty pieces of cannon and sixteen mortars of eight to sixteen inches. Cornwallis had already lost seventy men. He concluded, “
Against so powerful an attack, we cannot hope to make a very long resistance.”