At Yorktown during the night of October 6, workmen began digging the first Allied parallel facing the enemy. Stretching from the American quarters to the French, the Allied forces were supported by four redoubts, two in each camp, and a battery of guns aimed to “sweep with fire” enemy vessels coming up the river. The defenders’ fire on the work party was desultory, causing two minor casualties.
On October 9, the first American guns at Yorktown opened fire on the British defense works. For the past three days, engineers had been directing artillerymen in the construction of the batteries while night workmen were employed in digging the parallels. Work continued during the day by men from Saint-Simon’s troops, who constructed zigzag communicating trenches to the batteries and built abatis to fortify them. These were palisades of sharpened stakes pounded into the earth, with points up, to prevent attackers from climbing over the parapets. Casualties during the work were slight: one killed and seven wounded, but the toll increased, of officers as well as workmen, as the labor continued.
According to custom, the ceremonial opening of the first parallel of a siege called for troops to occupy the trench, flying flags with fife and drums. The honor was given to a detachment under Colonel Alexander Hamilton, whose appetite for public notice led him to order a useless and wanton display of his troop performing the Manual of Arms on the parapet. So astonished was the enemy by this act of bravado that they thought either it had some ulterior and menacing motive or that the Colonel was mad—and did not fire, sparing Hamilton a deserved lesson. Fifty guns from the Allied lines were now firing. Most were Saint-Simon’s, which de Grasse’s ships had brought down from Baltimore; the others were fieldpieces pulled by manpower down from White Plains under command of General Knox. When urged to wait until he could send them by ship, Washington, remembering how Knox’s guns dragged overland from Ticonderoga had delivered Boston, insisted that they accompany the march. The difficulty of bringing them over rutted roads and unbridged streams slowed the pace, increasing the anxiety that Cornwallis might escape or so strengthen his defenses as to make them impassable. The guns were in place before he did either.
Europeans, from repeated practice, had developed a science and a formal ritual of siege warfare of which Americans on their wide-open continent and in their wooden cities were ignorant. They were soon instructed, in the guttural accents and cheerful profanity of their drill-master and military teacher, Baron von Steuben, the authenticity of whose title—or lack of it—bore no relation to the affection in which he was held. All day convalescents and workers off duty from the regiments fashioned mysterious artifacts called gabions and fascines—earth-filled wicker baskets and bundles of dry sticks used to thicken the earthworks. Trees chopped down throughout the town to clear the field of fire supplied the material. By this time the response of British guns was diminishing, for Cornwallis, recognizing that he was under a real siege, had ordered the conserving of ammunition.
After Cornwallis sustained the opening barrage of gunfire from the Allied batteries in the first parallel, he informed Clinton on October 11 that “nothing but a direct move to York River which includes a successful naval action can save me.” The cannonading that began on October 11 delivered by 16-inch mortars was so “horrendous,” as described by Lieutenant Bartholomew James of the Royal Navy, another diarist, “that it seemed as though the heavens should split.” The noise and thundering of the bombardment grew “almost unendurable.” Lieutenant James saw “men lying nearly everywhere who were mortally wounded, whose heads, arms and legs had been shot off. The distressing cries of the wounded and the lamentable suffering of the inhabitants whose dwellings were chiefly in flames” intensified the carnage.
As the ring of siege drew closer, a last sharp thrust showing no sign of paralysis took place on October 3 on the Gloucester side, engaging the two bellicose cavalry leaders, Tarleton and the Duc de Lauzun. To blockade Gloucester as a possible land exit for Cornwallis, Washington had placed there a unit of 1,500 Virginia militia, who usually ran when confronted by the dragoons, plus Lauzun’s legion of 600 as well as 800 armed marines. In British command of the Gloucester camp, Tarleton had led his Cavalry Legion out for foraging and was returning with wagons loaded with Indian corn when he was met in a narrow lane by Lauzun’s legion armed with lances. When a horse wounded by a lance thrust collided with Tarleton’s, he was thrown; his dragoons scrambled to his rescue, enabling him to seize another horse to remount and escape under the protective rifle fire of his infantry. Outnumbered, they were ordered by Tarleton to retreat, while Lauzun’s men charged in pursuit, protected in their turn by the steady fire of the Virginia militia. Tarleton’s dragoons made good their retreat into Gloucester, which was thereafter invested by the French commander, the Marquis de Choisy. The clash of the two heroes terminated without changing the fortunes of the war except for a new respect for the firm stand of the Virginia militia.
During the night of October 11—12, the Allies moved closer to start work on a second parallel, 300 yards from the Hornwork, largest of the British redoubts and central piece of the defenses. The new parallel was within assault distance of the two most obstructive British redoubts, numbers Nine and Ten. Until these were eliminated, it was clear that, under the fire of their batteries, the parallels could make no further advance; a major assault upon the two redoubts was necessary. It was ordered for October 14, to be carried out by bayonet attack. In expectation of hand-to-hand combat, tremendous tension rose as the companies were selected and orders given. Tension was heightened when Washington addressed to the soldiers a brief speech of exhortation, which was not usual for him. He said that success depended on both redoubts being taken, for if the British recaptured either, they could add to it extra strength of men and guns, making impossible any further advance of the Allies’ parallels and delaying the siege, with the attendant danger of giving time for British naval relief. Brought to a peak of fervor, French and Americans under the overall command of Lafayette plunged into battle. The French of the Royal Deux-Ponts had a fiercer fight in storming number Nine than the Americans of the Rhode Island Light Infantry, under Hamilton and Captain Stephen Olney, at number Ten, because the abatis at Nine had not been as thoroughly smashed by the siege guns as those at Ten. Bayonet thrusts and musket volleys at arm’s length dealt death and wounds as the attackers were thrown back in their desperate climb over the stakes. So fierce was their assault that Lieutenant James thought the enemy had “stormed from right to left with 17,000 men.” Under strong impressions, the veracity of eyewitness diaries is sometimes reduced. With losses of 15 French and 9 Americans killed, both the redoubts were taken by 10 p.m. To the surprise of the attackers, who expected a last-ditch defense, they found 73 prisoners in their hands, among them the commander of number Nine, a Major McPherson, who was said by his captors to have retreated from his post with thirty men when the firing began, virtually yielding the redoubt. Whether this was a sign of defeatism in Cornwallis’ army or the tragic failing of one individual can never be known. As soon as the redoubts were taken, men of the Pennsylvania line who had been held in reserve dropped their guns to take up picks and shovels and go back to digging the second parallel further forward. Under a British battery still firing, the cost in the French sector was 136 wounded.
Capture of Redoubts Nine and Ten as posts for Allied artillery gave Washington command of the enemy’s communication to Gloucester, the remaining possible point of exit. Cornwallis thought the same, for after this loss, in his own mind he gave up. He addressed to Clinton an extraordinary letter. Coming from a general commanding a vital position at a critical moment in a war of great import for his country and, whether or not he realized it, for history, it may be unique in military annals. Honest, and without evasion, taking no refuge in ambiguity, he wrote, “My situation now becomes very critical. We dare not shew a gun to their old batteries and I expect that their new ones will open to-morrow morning; experience has shewn that our fresh earthen works do not resist their powerfu
l artillery, so that we shall soon be exposed to an assault, in ruined works, in a bad position and with weakened numbers. The safety of the place is therefore so precarious that I cannot recommend that the fleet and army should run great risque in endeavouring to save us.” He looks finality in the eye, lays no blame, makes no excuses.
Yet he was too much of a soldier just to sit there and die. Custom in sieges required at least one effort to break out before yielding. Within 24 hours of the loss of Redoubts Nine and Ten, Cornwallis ordered 350 picked men to assault the Allies’ second parallel, with the object of spiking their guns by jamming bayonets down their barrels. Just before dawn of October 16, in the quietest hour of the night, he launched an attack that succeeded in silencing seven cannon but in the process excited a sharp counterattack by the French grenadiers under the Vicomte de Noailles and the Allied engineers. In a parental fury to protect their cubs, they drove the enemy out and, while bullets whizzed over their heads, removed the spikes. By daybreak their batteries were again in action.
With Yorktown shaking under Allied fire, his casualties mounting and men falling sick with fever, Cornwallis decided upon a last effort to escape Yorktown. For the night of October 16, he planned to ferry his army in three trips across the York River to the Gloucester side, either to meet the relief ships at sea that Clinton had said were coming or, if he had to, somehow to make his way north by land. The night of the 16th was protectively black as the operation began. It was not Allied guns that aborted it. No spy or deserter or renegade Loyalist had alerted Washington. Nature, so often a careless arbiter of the addled affairs of men, did the job. A heavy storm at midnight and a cloudburst of pelting rain soaked the men in flight to a shivering chill and tossed their boats in confusion against the rocky shore, making a landing impossible. Before morning light, most returned to their starting point under the rifle fire of the now alerted Allies. A goodly number were blown by the storm out into the Bay.
At daylight on October 17, Allied batteries on the captured redoubts opened a thunderous bombardment on British positions, knocking out British batteries still able to fire. With the hope of escape terminated, capitulation was the only course open to a Council of War convened by Cornwallis in the Hornwork.
At ten o’clock on the morning of October 17, a faint tattoo of drums, barely making itself heard over the pounding of the guns, was located coming from a small red-coated drummer boy standing on the parapet of the Hornwork. The taller figure of an officer waving a handkerchief in lieu of a white flag emerged from the Hornwork and walked toward the American lines with the drummer boy alongside, still furiously beating his drum. Upon this apparition, now both audible and visible, Allied guns ceased their fire. The silence that fell over the shattered town was a more eloquent sound than any heard in the last six and a half years. Its significance could hardly be believed. Still holding his white handkerchief, the British officer was escorted to American quarters, and the note he carried from Cornwallis was delivered at a run to Washington’s tent. The note read:
Sir,
I propose a cessation of hostilities for twenty four hours and that two officers may be appointed by each side to meet at Mr. Moore’s house to settle terms for the surrender of the posts at York and Gloucester.
I have the honour to be, &c: Cornwallis
What were Washington’s feelings when he read the word “surrender” and when he wrote his reply no diary tells. After years of privations and disappointments and bloodstained footprints in the snow of the men for whom he could not obtain decent footwear, to have now brought the war to this consummation and have the enemy give in could only have stirred profound emotion. Too deep for tears, or words, it was not confided to any person or page. In reply to the notice of surrender, he wrote, “An ardent desire to spare the further effusion of blood will readily incline me to listen to such terms for the surrender of your posts and garrisons of York and Gloucester as are admissible.” He added that Cornwallis’ proposed terms should be sent in writing to the American lines prior to the meeting of the Commissioners. The word “cessation” of hostilities during the time allowed was changed in the American reply to “suspension,” at the suggestion of John Laurens, recently returned from France and acting as adviser to Rochambeau and Washington. Still concerned about leaving too much time open for rescue by sea, Washington allowed a time limit of two hours instead of 24.
Cornwallis’ feelings when he surrendered to rebels and contemptible foes, as he thought them, were equally unrecorded. The need to justify himself is uppermost in an interesting letter he wrote to Clinton on that day. Now that the fight was over, he began to find excuses and suggest blame. As might be expected, he laid the blame politely but unmistakably in Clinton’s lap. At the same time, he seems conscious that his own passivity needed explanation.
Sir,
I have the mortification to inform Your Excellency that I have been forced to give up the posts of York and Gloucester and to surrender the troops under my command by capitulation on the 19th inst. as prisoners of war to the combined forces of America and France.
He goes on to say that he “never saw this post in a favourable light,” and when found he was to be attacked in it by powerful forces—“nothing but the hopes of relief would have induced me to attempt its defence; for I would either have endeavored to escape to New York by rapid marches from the Gloucester side immediately on the arrival of General Washington’s troops at Williamsburg [the opponent appears as “General” here for the first time] or I would have attacked them in the open field, but [here comes the knife] being assured by Your Excellency’s letters that every possible means would be tried by the navy and army to relieve us I could not think myself at liberty to venture on either of those desperate attempts.… ” Why not? Desperate attempts when the worst is in prospect is a general’s business. Cornwallis was a man who could have thrust his hand in a flame if necessary, but not a man to organize the logistics and arrangements of a large campaign with a likely risk of failure. The smooth face in the Gainsborough portrait with no lines of thought or of frowns or of laughter—with no lines at all—tells as much. It is a face composed by a life of comfort and satisfaction without any need of desperate attempts.
As we know, Cornwallis took neither of the two courses he mentions to Clinton. He did nothing at the time of the Allied army’s arrival at Williamsburg on September 26, except three days later to order with-drawal from his front lines to the inner defenses of Yorktown, nor did he make any effort to escape by way of Gloucester until too late, and he certainly did not give any sign of contemplating an attack on them “in the open field.”
The clue to Cornwallis, one might suppose, was his initial opinion that forceful coercion of the Americans was a mistake because it could not succeed. Other men of the army and navy who shared his opinion refused to fight for the mistake. Cornwallis did not refuse; on the contrary, he volunteered, supposedly from a sense of duty while holding the King’s commission. It may be that his ambivalence about the war, from the beginning, lurked in his mind to become the reason for his halfhearted fight. His conduct during the last month is not easily understandable. Like Hamlet, he could say to us, the heart is not to be plucked from my mystery.
Perforce accepting the shortened truce, Cornwallis was able to deliver his proposals within the two hours allowed. His stipulations were more concerned with procedure and protocol than with military conditions, and, as such, they generated hours of controversy between the two parties when they met.
The parley Commissioners were John Laurens and the Vicomte de Noailles, Lafayette’s brother-in-law, representing the Allies, and on the other side two aides, Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Dundas and Major Alexander Ross, for Cornwallis.
Cornwallis’ conditions proved inadmissible. He asked for the honors of war to be granted to his garrison in the ceremony of surrender. Among these were the right to attend the ceremony with flags flying and the right to march to music of their choice. For some Byzantine reason of Euro
pean custom, the right of the capitulators to play the national airs or anthems of the victor was considered to imply that they had put up a good fight. Washington did not think so. In his judgment, in a letter to Governor Sim Lee of Maryland, Cornwallis’ conduct “has hitherto been passive beyond conception.” In Washington’s creed, danger was created to be overcome. Moreover, at the surrender of Charleston, eighteen months before, the British had allowed no honors of war to the defenders and required them to appear with flags cased—that is, furled. Laurens, who had taken part in that occasion, was adamant in refusing to allow the British the honor of marching to the music of their choice with regimental flags flying. When told by Major Ross that this was a “harsh article,” Laurens reminded the Major that after a gallant defense of six weeks in open trenches at Charleston, the same had been refused by the British there. Ross replied that “Lord Cornwallis did not command at Charleston,” and was firmly told by Laurens, “It is not the individual that is here considered. It is the nation. This remains an article or I cease to be a commissioner.” Next, the British wanted honors for the garrison of Gloucester, while Laurens insisted it should be treated as one with the rest. A compromise was finally found, allowing the cavalry to ride with drawn swords and sounding trumpets while the infantry must keep its colors cased.