To plunge into passionate dispute over the trivialities of so-called honor is a queer but not uncommon gambit of men who have just come from putting their lives at stake in serious combat. These were men who had been fighting for empire in one case and for national independence in the other. Did they think they were altering the verdict of the battlefield?
A more substantive issue next arose in the British demand that British and German troops as prisoners be returned to their countries of origin under parole not to re-engage. The same provision granted at Burgoyne’s surrender had permitted the prisoners to fill the places of other troops at home, who could then be sent to America. This time it was disallowed. The most obstinate issue concerned treatment of the Loyalists who had fought for Britain and whose protection Laurens said he had no power to grant and which he was sure Washington would not permit. While the army waiting outside the parley stirred in restlessness at the delay, the arguments dragged on, until the terms were finally concluded at midnight.
When copied and delivered to Washington, he promised to reply to the modifications early in the morning, with another two hours granted for Cornwallis’ signature, expected at 11 a.m., to be followed by surrender of the garrison at two o’clock, failing which, hostilities would resume. The signed papers were duly delivered in the given time. Promptly at 2 p.m. on October 19, 1781, the first steps took place in the ceremony so often described, inaugurating the existence of a new nation.
Lined up on one side of the road to Williamsburg were ten French regiments in their white uniforms, with white silk flags bearing the royal fleur-de-lis in gold. On the other side stood the Americans, with the Continentals drawn up in front and the less disciplined and shabbier militia, some with toes poking through broken boots, behind. The British, with polished black boots and gaiters whitened, and wearing fresh uniforms issued by their commissary so that they should not be included in the surrender of property, marched out between the lines with colors tightly cased, no flags flying to wave them along. As required, they marched to the music of their own nation—according to one of history’s most memorable invented legends, a ballad, as everyone supposes, called “The World Turned Upside Down.” In fact, no such song or melody by that name existed.*
In the surrender march, the Germans, stiff and correct, followed soberly in step, but the British, having emptied their last stores of rum and brandy, “appeared much in liquor” and exhibited morgue (bitterness) and insolence and, above everything else “contempt for the Americans,” as remarked by the French Quartermaster, Claude Blanchard. Contempt of the defeated for the victor, seemingly a perverse response, is a loser’s sentiment—denying admission of its own fault or failure and believing itself robbed of victory by some malign mischance, as in sports when a gust of wind might divert the throw of a ball, giving victory to the opponent. The British kept their eyes on the French, refusing to look at their late subjects, until Lafayette called for the playing of “Yankee Doodle,” which brought all British heads around in a single turn toward the Americans.
The ceremony of surrender was too much for the soldierly heroism of Lord Cornwallis, who on the grounds of illness did not attend, sending his second in command, Brigadier General Charles O’Hara, to act for him. Admiral de Grasse, too, though an author of the victory, was kept absent by an attack of asthma and was represented by Admiral de Barras.
Washington, statuesque on horseback in his familiar buff and blue, was stationed at the head of the American line. When O’Hara approached as Cornwallis’ deputy, he advanced toward Rochambeau, evidently intending to surrender his sword to the French rather than the Americans. Rochambeau with a smile shook his head and pointed to General Washington across the road. Washington, not willing as Commander-in-Chief to complete the ritual with the British second in command, pointed to his own deputy, General Lincoln, who had been the American commander at the surrender of Charleston. Whether Lincoln accepted the sword from O’Hara for Washington has been a disputed point. He did indicate to O’Hara the spot in the field called the Pigeon Quarter where the British should lay down their arms. Inebriated or not, the redcoats slammed the guns down with spiteful vigor in the hope of breaking the locks, until O’Hara, watching, ordered them to stop this petty revenge.
THE WORLD TURNED UPSIDE DOWN
The tune “Derry Down,” more plaintive than jaunty, is not particularly suitable for marching, but on the way to surrender jauntiness might not be wanted.
Taking place at a seaport of the Bay where a British Admiral had declared the French to be “absolute masters of its navigation,” the surrender at Yorktown marked an overturn of naval sovereignty that added gall to the occasion. Within a year Rodney would prove the overturn ephemeral, but at Yorktown it had marked a further fall for the British.
On October 17, the day when Cornwallis, heralded by his little drummer boy, asked for terms, his would-be rescuers in New York, Graves and Clinton, setting a record for belated action in military history, finally fixed a time to leave on the mission that had been waiting ever since Clinton had acknowledged on September 2 that Cornwallis would have to be “saved.” An army of 7,000 was boarded, sails were hoisted, Graves’s fleet with Clinton on board moved slowly down the Hudson. They crossed the Hook on October 19, on the same day when, in Yorktown, Washington and Cornwallis signed and accepted the terms of surrender. Five days later, October 24, they were off Cape Charles without encountering the feared interference from de Grasse, who had no reason to risk battle for a cause already won. While small craft scuttled through the bay seeking news, a boat came out from the York to tell the tale. Time had not waited; the door was closed. All the expense and armed force exerted for nearly six years had gone for nothing. No victory, no glory, no restored rulership. As a war, it was the historic rebuke to complacency.
The two masters of lethargy, Admiral and General, with their 35 ships and 7,000 men turned around and sailed back uselessly to New York.
Officially the war was not over, nor American sovereignty recognized, nor would it be until the long-drawn-out process of negotiating a peace treaty, which was to last two years, was concluded in 1783. No shots heard round the world were fired to announce the surrender. The event spoke for itself, verifying the independent statehood of America saluted nearly six years before by the guns of St. Eustatius. At that time, American independence was not a fact but only a newborn Declaration. When de Graaff’s guns spoke, hardly six months had passed since, as the second President, John Adams, was to say, “The greatest question was decided which ever was debated in America, and a greater never was or will be decided among men.” The purport of those words hung over the capitulation at Yorktown, notifying the Old World that the hour of change to a democratic age had come.
*The words occur in one of many versions sung to the popular tune “Derry Down.” Best known of these was the ballad “The King Enjoys His Own Again,” an old Jacobite serenade to Bonnie Prince Charlie, anything but appropriate to this occasion. Another version, entitled “The Old Woman Taught Wisdom” or “When the World Turned Upside Down,” contained these lines of notably uninspired poetry:
If buttercups buzz’d after the bee
If boats were on land, churches on sea
If ponies rode men and if grass ate the cows
And cats should be chased into holes by the mouse
If the mamas sold their babies
To the Gypsies for half a crown
If summer were spring
And the other way ’round
Then all the world would be upside down!
The statement that “The World Turned Upside Down” was the tune played by the capitulators has been traced to John Laurens, who is supposed to have told it to William Jackson, his close associate during Laurens’ trip to France and also the recorder of Laurens’ conference on surrender terms with Cornwallis’ aides. Jackson, later assistant to a Secretary of War, is said to have communicated what Laurens told him to Alexander Garden, author of Anecdotes of the
American Revolution, published in Charleston in 1828. It has been suggested that what Laurens said was something to the effect that the capitulators marched in a slow and dispirited manner, as if they felt the “world had been turned upside down,” and that Jackson presumed he was referring to the ballad containing those words. Variants as to date and origin of the ballad, as to whether it was or was not a marching tune—e.g., “The rhythm in 6/8 time is not adapted to marching” (Frank Luther, Americans and Their Songs), and, alternatively, “The music makes an excellent march” (Kenneth Roberts, Northwest Passage)— have led students through a maze of contradictory references, leaving us with only one certainty: that the tune played by the capitulators at Yorktown, like what song the sirens sang, is historically obscure.
Epilogue
NEWS of the great event was carried northward by Tench Tilghman, Washington’s aide, who galloped from Yorktown to Philadelphia, spreading word of the surrender through village and farm like Paul Revere in reverse. The ride took four days, bringing him into Philadelphia at 2:30 in the morning of October 24. Pounding through the silent streets with clatter of hoofbeats that sounded to frightened residents like the noise of an invasion, he rode up to the house of Thomas McKean, President of the Congress, and banged loudly on the door. Seized by the night watch, he was saved from arrest by McKean, who, aroused from bed by the turmoil below, came down to vouch for his visitor. In the darkness Tilghman told his marvelous news to a gratifying response. McKean ordered bells to peal from the belfry of Independence Hall. The night watchman, a German-speaking veteran, carrying his lantern, started at once on his rounds, crying, “Basht dree o’glock und Gornvallis ist gedaken!” Windows flew open, excited residents thrust forth their heads to hear the words, then rushed into the streets to share the news and embrace each other; artillery salutes boomed; fireworks blazed, the city was illuminated; thanksgiving services were held in the churches; newspapers published extras; prominent citizens made speeches and gave balls; in distant Newburgh, New York, the populace enthusiastically burned Benedict Arnold in effigy.
The bells that pealed from Independence Hall spoke for more than military victory. They rang for the promise of a new world, for redemption from tyranny and oppression, for the hopes and dreams of America held not only by Americans who fought for the Revolution, but also by the French who had volunteered to share in the fight, by Dutch dissenters, by the Opposition Whigs in England, by spirits everywhere nurtured in the Age of Enlightenment and imbued by its optimism for the perfectibility of man. The triumph of the Revolution signaled the start of progress toward the guarantee of liberty offered by the American Declaration of Independence. It was for this, the “meliorating influence on all mankind,” as Washington said in his Last Circular to the States of 1783, that bonfires burned and citizens embraced—for the great hope that was America. It was for this that Lafayette carried home with him a quantity of American soil sufficient for a grave, and was buried in it when he died in 1834.
After disposal of the prisoners of Yorktown in guarded camps and garrisons, Washington wanted to carry the crest of victory forward to a combined attack on Wilmington and Charleston, but the departure of the French fleet made that impossible. Under orders to return to the West Indies by early November, de Grasse sailed for the Caribbean on November 4 with a mission to attack and take whatever British islands whose defense might be weakened after the hurricanes. On the general assumption that Jamaica, Britain’s richest island, was his objective, the Admiralty called on Rodney, who, though barely out of surgery, could be counted on to make a determined fight for the defense of the island. Other candidates for naval command inspired no great confidence. One, Admiral Kempenfelt, who had been sent to intercept the French fleet, had avoided a fight on the ground that he had twelve ships of the line to the enemy’s nineteen. The French grasp fell first on St. Eustatius, which Rodney thought he had left impregnable, but it was not proof against trickery. When the French landed an English-speaking regiment of de Bouillé’s troops wearing British red coats “exactly like the English with red jackets and yellow lapels,” who were composed partly of native Englishmen and partly of Irishmen in French pay as soldiers of fortune, the defense was thrown into hopeless confusion. The golden rock was retaken in November, 1781, administering another wound to British pride so soon after the fall of Yorktown. In 1784 the French restored Dutch sovereignty, whose flag has flown over the rock of remembered renown until the present. Johannes de Graaff returned to the scene of his former governorship as a private citizen in 1779. St. Eustatius had not been razed to a “desert,” as Rodney had wrathfully threatened, but was busily engaged in its normal occupation, the accumulation of wealth. De GraafFs property and influence enabled him to pursue the accumulation successfully. He lived on for thirty-five years and died a very rich man in 1813.
After the loss of St. Eustatius, two minor properties of the Leewards followed into the French bag while de Grasse, in partnership with the troops of the aggressive Marquis de Bouillé, moved on to capture St. Kitts and threaten Ste. Lucie, causing what was worse than hurt pride, a reduction of the sugar revenue on which England’s budget depended. With these blows, the wrath of the country fell on Sandwich for allowing Kempenfelt to sail like Byng with an inadequate force while “six of the line were lying in English ports.” According to the Opposition leader, Lord Rockingham, “It is no secret that we have now ten ships of the line with scarce a man to put on them.” A vote of censure upon Sandwich as responsible for this feeble maritime condition was defeated by the government with its majority of over twenty-one still intact, before the still feebler performance of Admiral Graves and the loss of America were yet known. Sandwich remained in office.
“May your Lordship never endure the pain and torture I have undergone,” Rodney wrote to him. But, ill as he was, in recovery from his surgery, the navy while under attack could now not wait for his services to save Jamaica. In his new position as Vice-Admiral of Great Britain, an honorary rank outside the regular hierarchy, and with the massive Formidable as his flagship, he was, though exhausted by his ordeal, in hearty spirit and ready to serve. At age sixty-four he accepted active sea duty and in January, 1782, set out for Plymouth to take over the fleet that he would shortly bring to an unprecedented feat in the Battle of the Saints, the most significant sea combat prior to Nelson’s victory at Trafalgar. Ending forever the tyranny of line ahead, he was to break the enemy’s line in a historic and celebrated victory over the French. As visible token, the giant Ville de Paris, the largest ship afloat, would be taken by the British and de Grasse made a prisoner.
The feat was accomplished in April, 1782, when Rodney, reinforced by twelve ships of the line plus Hood’s squadron from America, sighted de Grasse’s fleet sailing northward, headed for Jamaica out of Fort Royal in Martinique, where de Grasse had taken up position on returning from America. With added ships, de Grasse had 33 of the line, and the joint British together had 36. Three days passed while the fleets maneuvered for the wind in the passage between Dominica and Guadeloupe called The Saints for the number of islets by that name located there. In passing, the fleets engaged and parted in sporadic gunfire coming within pistol shot at point-blank range, and in one case collision. Casualties were suffered, masts toppled and men killed on both sides. When the wind momentarily dropped as the French were trying to form a line, a gap appeared in their formation. Sir Charles Douglas, Fleet Captain on board the Formidable, perceived that windward gusts would let the Formidable sail through the gap. Hurrying to find Rodney, he cried, “Only break the line, Sir George! The day is yours and I will ensure you victory.” With no previously arranged plan and uncertain whether his captains would follow him, leaving him to be isolated in battle as once before, Rodney refused to order the helm to come about. It would mean defying the rules of Fighting Instructions and might bring him to court-martial or even, like Byng, to a firing squad. Douglas would not bear the responsibility; it must be the Admiral’s alone. On Douglas’ repeated ur
ging, Rodney changed his mind. The great chance in which he had been frustrated once before was now offered again. The dare boiled in his blood. “Well, well, do as you like,” he replied almost casually. He did not make the mistake of leaving his “line ahead” signal aloft but hauled it down, substituting the signal for “close action.” As the bows of the Formidable slowly swung to starboard, midshipmen scurried to warn gunners to be ready to fire from the outer side. While Rodney watched in suspense to the stern, he saw the next five ships in his line follow him cleanly through the gap in the French line. The Formidable’s main topsail was in rags, an accompanying battleship, the Prince George, had lost its foremast, another was taking on water by three feet an hour, two others had spent their gunpowder, but French decks, equally mauled and crowded with troops, were piled with dead. In red turmoil in the water sharks lunged around the ship, viciously snatching at the bodies of dead sailors thrown overboard. With torn rigging and fallen masts, many of the French ships were motionless in the water, allowing other gaps to appear. English captains caught in the excitement of their Admiral’s purpose, seized their chance. They luffed and, with sails flapping, made their way through gaps in three places. Now broken, the French line was rounded and brought under fire from both sides. Catching wisps of wind through the gathering dusk, the French pointed their heads southward to flee, hotly engaged by the English in pursuit. One by one the French struck their colors, abandoning the mighty Ville de Paris, on which de Grasse, throwing towlines to the disabled, was striving to rally his fleet. His giant figure was seen on deck standing alone. Too closely pursued by the English to take time for repairs, the French ships were overtaken. The Ville de Paris, deserted by her consorts, was raked by the British Russell, then hit broadside by a tremendous cannon blast from Hood’s ship, the Barfleur, while the surrounding British concentrated their fire on the huge flagship. Her decks were ablaze; she had lost rigging, sail and rudder. After nine and a half hours of battle since the moment when Rodney had steered his prow to penetrate the line, de Grasse’s flag fluttered down. Simultaneously, the flag of France came down from the ensign staff. English officers rowed over to accept the surrender.