The First American Army (52 page)

T
he journey of the First Massachusetts and its newly promoted lieutenant, Ebenezer Wild, to York, Virginia, or Yorktown, as it was also called, began in earnest on April 21, 1781, when the regiment crossed the Potomac River from Maryland into Virginia. The regiment was now attached to the combined French-American forces led by the Marquis de Lafayette. A month later, on the evening of May 21, the First Massachusetts was met by two regiments of Virginia militia on the northern bank of the James River, just outside of Richmond, where they had camped overnight. The next day, the First Massachusetts, with the others, crossed the James.

Wild’s confidence in the army was given a jolt a few days later when a sudden thunderstorm broke over the Virginia countryside following a day of excessive heat. The storm hit while the army was marching down a roadway. The thunder was so loud and so quick that the local militia troops that had just joined the column thought the noise was enemy cannon and fled into the woods for protection. It took the officers ninety minutes to bring the frightened militia back to the road.

Wild, who had been in the service for six years, had just been promoted and he seemed delighted to be an officer. He wrote that he was pleased to have been invited to Colonel Vose’s tent for a dinner of his officers just outside of Richmond and seemed to enjoy spending time with his fellow officers, among them a new acquaintance, Captain Stephen Olney. Now he would receive more pay, live in a better tent in summer, and larger hut in winter. He was also satisfied that since he was an officer he could be a member of courts martial boards. Ebenezer Wild was now a man to be respected.

Throughout the march, supplies the men had been clamoring for since winter arrived. On June 3, the angry enlisted men were quieted when a man who had ridden all the way from Boston trotted into camp on a horse with large bags of hard money consisting of gold and silver to distribute to the enlisted men in salary. A week later, on June 10, a wagon train loaded with twelve hundred shirts for the soldiers pulled up to the column as the men marched. For some, these were the first new shirts they had been given in a year.

Sometimes everything seemed to go wrong, though. Wild and his company were about to capture a herd of horses but the steeds ran off at the last moment. A doctor and two privates drowned while bathing in a river. Somehow, many of the tents of the First Massachusetts were lost during the march and the men had to sleep in the open meadows. Directions were poor and once the men marched all day to wind up at a local meetinghouse where they had started that morning. A surprise attack on a British force General Anthony Wayne had spotted at Green Springs backfired and the First Massachusetts and the Pennsylvanians had to retreat. Promised food shipments were late. The crossings of rivers took all day because there were not enough boats.

On September 1, Wild heard the news that his “tiny army,” as he called it, would not only join forces with George Washington’s main army, but that the French fleet, with twenty-eight ships carrying four thousand troops, had arrived in Chesapeake Bay, blocking the entrance to the York and James rivers. By September 6, various elements of the plan to surround the British were falling into place. Wild’s regiment had been sent to Williamsburg, twelve miles southwest of Yorktown. The French army, under the Marquis de St. Simon, had arrived five days before. The next day, Lieutenant Wild heard that more ships had arrived and the French now had thirty-seven vessels anchored in the bay. The day after that two regiments from Maryland trudged into Williamsburg as the American and French forces camped in the Virginia capital began to swell. And finally, on Sunday, September 14, George Washington arrived and took command. He asked to greet as many officers as he could that day, and at 2 p.m. he met Ebenezer Wild (oddly, Wild wrote nothing about the encounter). “The arrival . . . of General Washington gave new hopes and spirits to the army,” noted Lt. Col. St. George Tucker of Rawson’s Brigade, a Virginia militia group, who also met Washington that day.
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The commander in chief had lots of good news. He had just returned from a meeting with Admiral de Grasse, head of the French fleet, on board his flagship, the
Ville de Paris,
said to be the largest warship in the world. De Grasse informed him that his ships would remain in the Chesapeake Bay until the end of October, giving the combined American and French forces plenty of time to defeat Cornwallis. Washington’s army and the French force had arrived practically intact, with very few desertions and a small number of sick men. The cannon he brought with him over the great distance from the New York area were in good order and few had suffered any damage on the lengthy journey. His spies assured him that British supplies in Yorktown were low. The French had given him just about everything—in men, cannon, and supplies—that they had been promising for more than two years.
²

Yorktown was situated on land originally owned by an ancestor of George Washington’s, Nicholas Martiau, who acquired it in 1691. Over the years, its location on the York River close to the Chesapeake and in the heart of tobacco country had turned it into a busy port. Its zenith as a trading town was reached in the 1740s, when British visitors remarked that the homes of merchants in the community of three thousand people were as large and as fine as those in the best neighborhoods in London. An explosion in the tobacco trade in other areas of the Chesapeake area near ports, such as Norfolk and Baltimore, soon undercut the importance of Yorktown. The war and British blockades also hurt Yorktown’s business, and by 1781 it turned into a small, depressed community.

Yorktown still possessed the remnants of its former importance. There were three hundreds homes, three churches, and an ornate red brick courthouse located on its one main street and four cross streets. The town sat on a wide, high bluff that overlooked the river. The small wharf that had been built beneath the bluff still had ships that anchored there on trading excursions and was now home to Cornwallis’s warship, the
Charon,
and several supply ships. Merchants, farmers, and workers from nearby plantations conducted business in some of its stores and frequented a local tavern.

The townspeople had embraced the Revolution. In 1774, local men raided British ships in action similar to the “tea party” in Boston. The community elected its leading patriot, Thomas Nelson, to the Continental Congress. Throughout the war, Yorktown was home to a three-hundredman militia company

The community looked like a ghost town by the time Cornwallis made it his headquarters. The militia had fled, along with dozens of area shopkeepers, plantation owners, and local residents. Many had moved to the interior when the British invaded the state. Some homes, stores, and stables were empty and uncut grass overran walkways and streets.
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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.