Impenitent fortune at this moment had a new blow in store for the Allies. During the generals’ absence on the visit to de Grasse, a report had circulated that a British naval reinforcement under Rear Admiral Digby of the home fleet was coming to support Admiral Graves. The news made de Grasse nervous no less than Washington. It “alarmed and disquieted these excitable gentlemen of the Navy,” wrote von Closen, who had carried the Digby report to de Grasse and found his reaction disquieting indeed. Trained in the French doctrine of avoiding a battle that threatened loss of ships, de Grasse had no desire to wait around to encounter the approaching Admiral Digby. Baron von Closen returned from his interview at first glance with appalling news. At the moment when the components of victory—the French fleet and the land army—had joined, fulfilling the plan for the “decisive stroke” and bringing it near enough to touch, de Grasse declared himself prepared to hoist sail and move away from his blockade of the York. In the Allies’ extreme hour of high hope, the blow seemed like a grenade tossed at a wedding; after the first horrified reaction, it was made clear that de Grasse did not intend total departure nor abandonment of the blockade. In a dispatch to Washington, he explained that “the enemy are beginning to be almost equal to us, and it would be imprudent of me to put myself in a position where I could not engage them” effectively. He would leave two ships (two!) at the mouth of the York, and sail with the rest to “hold out in the offing so that if the fleet come to force the entrance [to the Bay] I can engage them in a less disadvantageous position. I shall set sail as soon as the wind permits me.” Stunned by the words to “hoist sail,” Washington and Rochambeau hardly noticed, or else put little reliance on, de Grasse’s declared intention to “hold out in the offing” where he could still engage the enemy effectively if they attempted to enter the Bay. His proposed move still appeared as desertion. Washington wrote back a letter as frantic as his temperament ever allowed, speaking of the “painful anxiety” which he had suffered since being informed of de Grasse’s intention of renouncing, as he thought, an enterprise … “after the most expensive preparations and uncommon exertions and fatigues” and “entreating” the Admiral to consider that “if you shd withdraw your maritime force from the position agreed upon, that no future day can restore to us a similar occasion for striking a decisive blow.” He added that it could hardly be Digby’s intention to “engage in a general action with a fleet whose force will be superior.” Appalled by their ally’s seeming desertion, Washington and Rochambeau agreed that the only man who might persuade de Grasse to reconsider was Lafayette, just recovering from the agues and fevers of a bout with malaria. Bearing Washington’s letter, he was sent by frigate, still shaking from his illness, on the desperate errand to Lynnhaven Bay off Cape Henry. To his horror, he found the anchorage empty, not a mast nor a sail to be seen. The frigate-master assured him that the Admiral could not have sailed away or he would have been notified. After a twelve-hour search of the Bay, de Grasse was discovered anchored where he blocked the mouth of the York, though leaving the entrance of the Bay on the ocean side still open to British intrusion. De Grasse’s own flag captains, as it proved, unhappy at the proposal to leave, which they said in a conference with the Admiral “did not appear to fulfil the aims we had in view,” had refused, or showed an intention to refuse, to hoist sail. Admiral de Grasse now agreed to remain, and confirmed his change of mind in a letter to Washington and Rochambeau on September 25 in which he agreed to maintain his anchorage at the foot of Cape Henry, blocking the entrance to the Bay, and also to blockade the mouth of the York. The letter was received on September 27.
On arriving at Yorktown on September 28, Washington, after re-connoitering the position, spent his first night in the open under a spreading mulberry tree. The next morning he began the deployment of his forces for the siege. The French and their batteries were placed on the left to command the ground between the York River and the town, while the American infantry and artillery took up position on the right. Additional French batteries were mounted above the town on the same side. Lauzun’s legion and the Virginia militia held an inland strip across Gloucester Point, blocking movement by the British stationed at the point’s tip protruding from the York riverbanks opposite Yorktown. Cornwallis was lodged at the rear of the town, while Washington’s and Rochambeau’s respective headquarters faced the town directly. In front of their headquarters two parallels, or trenches to receive the besiegers, were to be dug 200 and 300 yards apart. Cornwallis’ only reaction until now had been entirely defensive. After learning of the Allied approach to Virginia and knowing the outcome of the Battle of the Bay, he set about industriously fortifying his perimeter by the construction of redoubts.
During September, engineers drove the work force—including several thousand Negro slaves who had deserted to the British in the hope of gaining their freedom—in constant hard labor on the redoubts.
On September 30, the Allies felt that Yorktown was “completely invested” and that the two main objects of a siege—to prevent the defenders from receiving aid or from making their escape—had been accomplished. No passage was left open except upriver leading into the heart of the country, and Cornwallis was not expected to attempt escape by that path. Yet a lurking fear remained that he just might try, in the hope of leading his army in a sortie or breakout through the besieging lines, to make his way in a raid through the farming country of Maryland and Pennsylvania back to Britain’s base in New York. Washington continued to worry about this stretch of the upper river, which he had tried and failed to persuade de Grasse to occupy with his warships. That escape by Cornwallis would vitiate the whole campaign which Washington had brought to this stage, was a gnawing anxiety, and exerted on him a compelling pressure to let loose a barrage of all the firepower he could throw. Because he knew that until he could employ really heavy artillery to be followed by a well-prepared assault by troops, anything less might fail, he restrained his fierce desire.
On the day de Grasse entered Chesapeake Bay to complete the envelopment of Cornwallis, William Smith, Clinton’s intelligence officer in New York, asserted, “A week will decide perhaps the ruin or salvation of the British Empire.” Within that week, the Battle of the Capes indeed brought a decision—neither ruin nor salvation, but room for the power that would ultimately take Britain’s place in world affairs. Clinton did not have Smith’s prophetic bones. “You have little to apprehend from the French,” he had assured Cornwallis in his letter of September 2. Despite the information he had by now received, he could not conceive of losing control of Chesapeake Bay to the French. He, no more than anyone, had expected de Grasse to strip the Antilles and his convoy duties for the sake of America. In fact, the battle did not arouse much concern or convey its significance until Graves himself wrote, a few days later, the terrible words that no British ear ever expected to hear about a sea area under British sovereignty: “The enemy have so great a naval force in the Chesapeake that they are absolute masters of its navigation.” All the dooms predicted by the Whigs could be contained in the two words “absolute masters,” and even if they did not go beyond Clinton’s desk, the sense they carried may explain why the energy went out of the mission to save Cornwallis.
Much of it had already faded. On September 13, the day before Graves’s grim letter was received, another Council of War of general officers in New York was summoned. In frustration at the failure to launch a rescue, Councils were being held every few days. William Smith privately thought the staff officers “servile … not a man of business or enterprise among them.” At the Council on September 13, a forceful plea for action was made by Major General James Robertson, military governor of New York, who was considered an administrative officer rather than a man of war. He was a sport among the servile insofar as he took seriously the subject they were met to consider. For the sake of making haste and for the greater chance of bringing the relief force through the enemy lines, he proposed that the expedition sail without transports, but instead that all
the 5,000 men be crammed aboard the Robust, the only ship of the line available in New York.
Thoroughly shocked at the thought of a procedure so unorthodox and even dangerous, Clinton and the Council vetoed the idea. Robertson nevertheless put it in writing for the next day. Inaction leading to the loss of Cornwallis, he claimed, could bring down the whole cause in America. The reinforcements, if brought to bear, would enable Cornwallis to attack the enemy with his whole force. Dangers were probabilities, whereas doing nothing was certain death.
He did not carry the day. Instead, Clinton convened another Council, on September 14, at which the letter from Graves was read, and put to it a leading question with the answer built-in: whether the relief should be hazarded during “our present naval inferiority,” or, given that the enemy has mastery of the Chesapeake and that officers recently returned from Yorktown when questioned have asserted that Cornwallis could hold out until the end of October and could feed 10,000 on full allowance for that time—indeed, it was their opinion he could defend the post “against twenty thousand assailants,” Clinton claimed—whether it would be better to wait until receipt of “more favourable accounts” from Admiral Graves or until he had made a junction with Admiral Digby. The Council, taking its indicated cue, declared in favor of waiting.
Cornwallis’ own spirit had gone slack. For an interval of ten days after the Battle of the Bay, when he knew that its outcome had left the French in control of the seacoast with the resulting odds against his own rescue, he made no move to prepare to escape from the pocket he was in before the Washington-Rochambeau troops arrived to close his back door. When the Bay was known to be lost, this was the time when he might still have fought his way out by land—if not all the way to New York, at least through Maryland to the mouth of the Delaware. Unless he could count on Clinton’s promise of relief as a sure thing, the risk of a march through semi-hostile country, with Tarleton to cut a path, was less than the certain disaster to come if he were enclosed. From September 6, when Washington’s army had passed through Chester and Head of the Elk, unless intelligence was nil, Cornwallis must have known they were coming. On what day he learned of their advance we do not know, but it was doubtless at about the same time he learned of the naval outcome which elicited Admiral Graves’s dismaying report on September 9 that the French were “absolute masters of navigation” in the Chesapeake. Recognizing the prospect of siege, Cornwallis wrote Clinton as Commander-in-Chief on September 16-17, “If you cannot relieve me very soon, you must be prepared to hear the worst.” The “worst” was left ambiguous. If the “worst” meant defeat or surrender, it must be inferred that Cornwallis, without a ready source of provisions, had no intention of fighting his way out by land. When that letter was received in New York, on September 23, a War Council was summoned the next day to consider this sudden drawing of the curtain and its purport.
Clinton, to whom ambiguity was second nature, took the worst to mean retreat, which would have relieved his soul, for it would have lifted from him the burden of having to risk breaking through the de Grasse barrier to bring relief to York. As he was to acknowledge in his revealing postwar apologia, he “would not have been greatly displeased to have heard that Lord Cornwallis had made his escape to Carolina with everything he could take with him.” Why, as Commander-in-Chief, he did not at this point order Cornwallis to make his escape was a failure which Cornwallis was later to cite as his excuse for not doing so.
Graves was no more eager to head back to the Chesapeake to challenge de Grasse again. With several of his ships crippled by the engagement in the Bay, he arrived in New York for repairs on September 24, nineteen days after the battle, five days having been consumed in maneuvering across the bar at Sandy Hook. Now it was up to him to put his fleet in shape to confront de Grasse or somehow to slip past him with relief forces for Cornwallis in York. Yet in New York, where ten ships were discovered in need of repair, he obdurately refused to move unless every one of his ships was fully repaired from hull to rigging, every damaged mast replaced and every vessel in seaworthy condition to join the squadron. At first he had appeared full of spirit and pugnacity, informing Clinton that everything would be done to restore his ships as rapidly as possible and that he was prepared to break through the French barrier to land troops at the mouth of the York. He proposed a scheme whereby de Grasse, being located in an area of strong tides, would find it difficult to maneuver to fire his broadsides, whereas he himself could take advantage of the tide to slip by under cover of darkness to anchor in the York River and disembark there. This castle in the air was to remain a phantom. On the basis of reports from the dockyards, Graves said he would be ready to sail by October 5, twelve days hence. This was the first of many creeping deadlines which came and went with no departure. For three weeks troops and crew had been embarked on motionless ships. The delays and postponements gave rise to impatient and puzzled muttering. Generals had not come to join their contingents, nor admirals their ships. Their absence elicited from an astute observer, Captain Frederick MacKenzie of the Adjutant General’s office, a remark that could stand for the whole conduct of the American war: “Our generals and admirals don’t seem to be in earnest about this business.”
Here was the problem as an empire slid from under their feet: the problem of making do with faulty processes and broken parts, of misunderstood signals, of the useless rigidity of Fighting Instructions, of a scurvy-producing diet, of political quarrel among combat officers, of employing worn-out and withered naval commanders, of putting the protection of trade ahead of strategic operations, of poor and too often false intelligence of enemy movements and intentions and, embracing all these, the problem of not knowing or caring to know the nature of the enemy and undertaking to suppress a major rebellion on the assumption that the rebels could be described, in the words of Lord Rawdon, a respected British officer, as “infatuated wretches.”
When, at the end of their long march, the last of the Allied army tramped into Williamsburg on September 26, everything for Cornwallis now depended on how soon Clinton would expedite the relief he had so firmly promised. The mood in New York had not been vibrating with urgency, except with regard to the expected arrival of a naval addition coming under Admiral Digby. “Digby, Digby!” was the cry circulating in the army among officers who would have to go with a relief force. As it was known from a message brought by frigate that Digby was coming with a total of three ships, he could not be thought likely to perform a marvel, but it was believed he would add to the Hood-Graves complement of nineteen just enough to give superiority over de Grasse. The vision of two or three extra ships immediately caused the gleam of victory to shine anew. “Should our fleet beat theirs,” wrote Captain MacKenzie, “we have a fair prospect of ending the rebellion.”
With his three ships, Digby duly arrived on September 24, bringing one element to brighten the situation in the person of Prince William Henry, the King’s son and future successor as King William IV. Under some happy ministerial illusion, he had been chosen, according to a rumor picked up in Rochambeau’s camp, to visit America with the intention that he would eventually take office as Governor of “opulent and prosperous” Virginia. A 21-gun salute boomed rather emptily in greeting. How many people it made unhappily conscious that the guns were booming here but not at York, we cannot know. The visit of the Prince showed that New York still had energy, if not to galvanize a relief mission, at least to entertain royalty. Lethargy vanished in a burst of parties, receptions and parades for the visiting Prince. Tours of the city and reviews of German and English regiments, dinners with distinguished citizens and an evening concert by a military band, with General Clinton in attendance, took minds off anxiety about Cornwallis while evoking a nice show of loyalty to the Crown.
While the bands played in New York, Cornwallis watched the horizon in vain for masts to appear. A dispatch from Yorktown told how he was “in daily expectation of the appearance of the British fleet to relieve him, and without them has no great hop
es of withstanding the great force collected against him.” War Councils summoned by Clinton in New York conferred futilely, unable to decide what to do.
Cornwallis waited while the guns pounded for the promised reinforcements, but no sail appeared. While in New York the navy hesitated and councils vacillated, the painful procrastination of the relief force rose from fear of risking the navy, Britain’s wooden walls and defender of empire around the world. In Graves’s spiritless hands after the Battle of the Bay, the navy lost its function like a candle without a flame. While the navy remained static for six empty weeks waiting for the wind and for courage, down on the blue estuary where the York flows into the Chesapeake an empire disappeared.
Councils followed each other like the fall of autumn leaves. At these meetings, participants agreed that the relief expedition must be hazarded and would probably get through, but they questioned how, having lost surprise, would it come safely out? Without a clear answer, the Council agreed again on the oft-repeated sailing date of October 5, of which Cornwallis should be informed. Clinton’s letter to this effect was what decided Cornwallis, in anticipation of the relief, to withdraw on September 29 from his front lines for a consolidation of his forces. Because repairs at the New York dockyards were not complete, Graves’s intended sailing date of October 5 was not met. Departure dates for October 8 and 12 likewise went by, with no ships hoisting sail.
By now the New York chiefs well knew that Cornwallis’ situation was precarious and delay was dangerous. Worried by Graves’s procrastination, William Smith put it to Governor Tryon of New York: “Every hour is precious to Lord Cornwallis.” One ship, the Montague, as noted by Captain MacKenzie, still lacked a mast and if all were ready to sail by October 10, it would take three days to get over the bar and seven before effective help could reach Cornwallis. Captain MacKenzie, in his journal, begins to doubt that the fleet will ever depart, and he wishes some other action could be undertaken elsewhere to “counterbalance our losses.” He slips in an interesting admission when he wonders if such action might make “the enemy’s thirst for peace be equal to our own.” Graves now says they cannot sail until October 12, while the captains talk of not being ready for ten days. “If they cannot,” notes MacKenzie, “they may as well stay for ten months.” Clinton, reporting the Council meeting to Cornwallis, writes that barring an “unforeseen accident” we should pass the bar by October 12,“ but Yorktown is clearly not primary with him, for he comes back to a favorite project of his, if he could not come in time, “I will immediately make an attempt upon Philadelphia” to draw off “part of Washington’s force from you.” That was feeble comfort to a man under the daily pounding of 16-inch mortars. Another sailing date was missed when a storm broke on October 13, crushing one of Graves’s ships against another and causing a smashed bowsprit. The paralysis had become pervasive.