Washington's Revolution: The Making of America's First Leader (45 page)

Rochambeau and his staff felt confident in their knowledge, but most of the senior French officers were not blinded by their own brilliance and recognized that the ragged and apparently undisciplined Americans could fight. The previous six years attested to that. And then there was George Washington, for whom most of the French had developed high regard; he may not have known the intricacies of siege warfare, but he understood war, and he embodied along with that understanding the constituents of greatness. Going into battle with him was for many of the French more than an opportunity to inflict revenge on an old enemy—it was an honor.

To attack Cornwallis’s army, Washington had first to move his Franco-American force into position—close quarters with the enemy—from which an assault could be launched. He had expected that once the move to Virginia was completed, there would ensue a short siege followed by an all-out assault by virtually all his infantry. He did not expect the enemy to give up without a great battle.

The final march to Yorktown began at 4:00
A.M
. on September 28, what would be a warm, sunny day. The French marched at the head of the columns and the Americans followed—both formations on foot, as was the custom. What was different was Washington’s decision to place cannon in several places in the column. Ordinarily, horses pulled it along at the rear. There was little chance of the British bringing off a surprise if infantry and artillery were arranged in this fashion.
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The column proceeded unmolested and, after a march that saw more than a few men fall out from the oppressive sun, arrived at positions abut two miles from where the British were still digging trenches, redoubts, and emplacements. Cornwallis had not driven his men hard, with the result that his lines were not complete. He half-expected Clinton to reinforce him by bringing much of the army in New York to Virginia on ships; or, if that expectation failed, he nursed a belief that escape beckoned across the river at Gloucester Point, where he had placed Colonel Thomas Dundas’s brigade.
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Yorktown did not look worth defending. It was a small town—no more than sixty privately occupied houses and several public buildings—located about twelve miles from the mouth of the York
River. The river was a half-mile wide there. Yorktown was on the south side; Gloucester sat across from it. The builders of Yorktown had located the town on a low bluff, and the immediate surface around it was open. The town drew its military importance from its location; though it faced the river, it was vulnerable all the way around, from the land as well as from the water.
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Because the ground was not covered by woods or other obstacles, it could not be crossed by infantry without severe losses. A siege, however, could protect men on foot, provided that they advanced through trenches dug in parallels zigzagging toward the enemy. The British were in the process of finishing two lines of trenches and redoubts when the siege began. Their artillery was placed along these fortifications—the farthest about twelve hundred yards from the town. Several hundred yards farther out from the town, the allies—the French on the left, Americans on the right—swung their parallel, soon a semicircle, pressing on their enemy.

The evening after, September 29, Cornwallis received a dispatch by packet boat from Clinton, reporting that by October 5 he would send a force of five thousand men to come to Cornwallis’s aid. That information helped Cornwallis to decide to consolidate his forces in order to preserve them for a joint attack with the reinforcing army apparently promised by Clinton. He therefore ordered the outer line abandoned and the troops to pull back closer to the town. Only two heavily fortified positions on the outer line would be held: two redoubts near its east end and the so-called Fusiliers’ Redoubt on the west.
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For Washington, the beginning of the move to Yorktown on September 28 must have seemed like just another day. Before the march stepped out, he wrote letters and undoubtedly read even more that he had received. The most important of those he wrote was to the Board of War, in Philadelphia, in which he enclosed an appeal from Dr. James Craik for blankets to cover wounded soldiers in the army’s hospital. Washington’s sympathy for these men is evident—“poor fellows,” he called them, and added that if the blankets were not provided, “their lives will be Sported with in the most Distressing Manner.”
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He slept under a tree that night, several hundred yards from the British, and the next day, after meeting with Rochambeau, he issued orders for organizing a large working party to construct a fortified
line for the Americans. The French handled their part in establishing fortifications for themselves, but in a fashion agreeable to American colleagues.

Although Washington deferred to Rochambeau’s judgment on the placement of the allies’ lines, he did not relinquish his command or his control. Rather, he acted much as usual, giving orders and forcing the action. The opening week of the siege did not find him ordering his commanders to attack across the front. He made certain, however, that men digging the trenches and throwing up the emplacements were protected. As a result, there were firefights here and there along the lines as both sides patrolled in front of the works that were taking form.
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Washington’s skill in preparation for the battles to come was much in evidence. He issued the “Regulations for the Service of the Siege,” a set of prescriptions for the making of emplacements and trenches, the dimensions of gabions, fascines, and hurdles, the manning of trenches, their relief, including the assignment of officers—and much more.
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The procedure for the relief of units in the trenches required the relieving unit to march in with “Drums beating [and] Colours flying,” an obvious concession to the code of gallantry favored by gentlemen who had not been shot at much. This procedure of relief proved more complicated than the simple instruction implied—it was dangerous because it aroused the interest of British artillerymen only a few hundred yards away. These soldiers fired their cannon at these attractive stretches of the American trenches, and they inflicted casualties on troops, both those being relieved and those assuming their places.
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Several of the Americans seemed not to care about safety. One, a militiaman, climbed onto the parapet, a fortification recently built, and shouted that he would not “dodge for the buggers,” that is, the British gun crews firing at him. He “damned his soul” if he would, and stood and attempted to strike with his spade every cannon ball that came his way. He did not last long in this action, as one of the projectiles hit him and, as an American officer who stood watching said, “put an end to his capers.”
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Such behavior did not discourage others. Alexander Hamilton, a lieutenant colonel now commanding his own brigade, ordered Captain James, a company commander, to take a chance that risked the lives of an entire unit. Captain Duncan described the action in his diary:
His company arrived at the relief point and planted their colors. The next movement, he said, “was rather extraordinary. We were ordered to mount the bank, front the enemy, and there by word of command go through all the ceremony of soldiery, ordering and grounding our arms; and although the enemy had been firing a little before, they did not now give us a single shot.” Captain Duncan, a little astonished himself, remarked that the British silence at this display probably grew from astonishment at the spectacle. Perhaps so, though more likely the British officers watching the American performance did not dismiss it as insanity but admired it, and may even have wished that they had ordered something like it themselves. Duncan was not so kind, but remarked that Hamilton, “one of the first officers in the American army,” in this instance “wantonly exposed the lives of his men.” Perhaps Hamilton, who surely enjoyed this performance, later thought more about the recklessness of what he had ordered. His letters to Elizabeth and others about the campaign do not mention it, for according to the code he and others of his status lived by, telling of such an exploit might sully the glory of it. Rochambeau, who soon learned that the regulation calling for the display of drums and flags when one unit relieved another endangered lives, repudiated the practice—“vainglory,” his aide Baron Ludwig von Closen called it—and ordered that “from now on the trench would be relieved in absolute silence; even the hour was changed.”
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Washington wrote nothing that survives about it, but that he quietly enforced a practice similar to Rochambeau’s is likely. He could not allow such excesses to distract him (and he doubtless realized that he should not have approved the original procedure of relief of working parties). He had other examples of extravagant behavior to deal with in these early days of the campaign, at least one of which involved a court-martial. A Captain Duffy was charged with attempting to stab a fellow officer, Captain Ballard, with a sword. Failing in the attempt, he fired a pistol at him. The pistol, according to the records of the case, belonged not to Duffy but to a third officer, Captain Brewer, who had been asked by Ballard to find an “amicable settlement” to the Duffy-Ballard “quarrel.” Brewer obviously did not succeed, whereupon Duffy “snapped”—that is, pulled the trigger—at him. This time the pistol did not fire, and Duffy was brought to a court-martial (presumably his fate whether the pistol had discharged or not). He was thrown out of the
service for his trouble, with all concerned, we might assume, feeling great satisfaction. There is little chance that Washington attended the legal proceedings, and no doubt that he approved the sentence with ease.
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The main purpose of the siege proceeded without great notice of such conduct. Cornwallis’s army did not really trouble the work of the besiegers, and the full opening of the first parallel occurred on October 6. A week later, on October 11, the second parallel was completed, only three hundred yards from British emplacements. The allied artillery had by this time been fixed in firing positions and was blasting the British and German enemy in theirs. Getting the heavy artillery into firing positions had been slowed by a shortage of horses to move them, but once emplaced, it proved devastating. In a sense the British troops paid with their lives for Cornwallis’s lack of judgment in establishing shallow trenches.
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But the British did strike back, with “a galling Fire,” as Washington described it to Nathanael Greene, and inflicted “a more considerable loss” than expected on the allied army. The British lacked the heavy siege artillery that the Americans used to such effect, and soon lost the
Charon
, a frigate with forty-four guns, just off the town, where it had lurked in the river. The sinking of British ships in the river relieved Washington of a major concern: the possibility that Cornwallis would call on them to ferry his army to Gloucester, from which he might escape to march northward in an attempt to join Clinton. (Presumably Clinton would move at least a part of his New York force down to link up with Cornwallis.) Washington, who thought ahead and in anticipation of what his enemy might do, had for some days attempted to persuade de Grasse to station ships from his fleet close off Yorktown to prevent such a British move. He also explained that a naval bombardment by de Grasse’s ships would help the French troops on land. De Grasse, however, had refused, saying he feared British fireships. His preference for a few days at least was to sail his ships upriver, far from Yorktown, a desire he did not explain to his American allies.
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Washington followed up on the heavy fire on British lines with an order for assaults on two redoubts near the river on the east side of the town. Taking these two fortifications was necessary, as they blocked the full extension of the second parallel. The French in Baron Viomenal’s command, though led by Colonel de Deaux, were assigned
responsibility for the redoubt on the left; the Americans, under the general command of Lafayette and headed by Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Hamilton, had responsibility for the second redoubt, about a quarter-mile to the right, near the river. Each corps, French and American, was composed of about four hundred men, with several hundred others in reserve.

At about 8:00
P.M.
, the two assaults began. The Americans faced a smaller force, about seventy men. Carrying unloaded muskets with fixed bayonets, they smashed through the abatis fronting the redoubt and in about ten minutes captured it. Their losses were light—nine dead, thirty-one wounded—in part because John Laurens, leading a small detachment, slipped around the face of the redoubt and entered it from the rear. The British put up a good fight but surrendered fairly quickly. The French at number 9, as the redoubt was called, ran up against a better-prepared fortification. It had not been as badly damaged as number 10 in the days preceding the attack, and the obstructions covering it at the front seem to have been deeper. The French artificers, however, cleared the tangle of trees, brush, and fascines covering the place, and their troops went over the top in a grand rush. There was more musket fire from both sides, but the defenders surrendered almost as soon as the French infantry entered their works.
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Both assaults had succeeded with light casualties, even considering the fierceness of the fight. Washington expected a response, and Cornwallis delivered it the next day, a raid of his own that was thrown back with little difficulty. The shelling of British positions resumed immediately, and the next night, desperate to escape, Cornwallis began loading boats with his troops for a crossing to Gloucester Point. In darkness he had landed about a thousand men when the weather turned foul, and further crossing proved even more dangerous. Cornwallis was not a fool, and in the rain and wind he ordered the detachment back to Yorktown. The allies continued to batter his lines that day, with a promise of even more death and suffering.
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