First Salute - Barbara Wertheim Tuchman [150]
*Fleet numbers are often inexact, depending on whether frigates are counted and on liners that may join or leave the main body.
*The number is variously reported at various times by various observers. As near as can be made definite, de Grasse’s fleet numbered 26–28 liners plus some extra frigates and armed merchantmen.
*To be later bestowed, in 1782, at the lowest rung of the peerage, a mere barony, after his victory in the Battle of the Saints.
XII
Last Chance—The Yorktown Campaign
MIRACULOUS is a term often applied to the Yorktown campaign. The opportunity to combine his land forces with French naval power to enclose Cornwallis in the vulnerable position he had chosen at Yorktown would be, Washington realized, his one chance to defeat the enemy and bring a culmination to the long struggle. To conduct his own forces into place to do the job would be a task of extraordinary difficulty and would involve a serious risk of failure—of his own reputation, of his army and of the cause of independence. It required a decision as bold as Hannibal’s to cross the Alps by elephant. Washington took it without visible hesitation. He, not Cornwallis, popularly called the English Hannibal, was the Hannibal of his time. The first necessity was to arrange the meeting of French naval and American land forces on the Virginia coast at a specified time and place. The junction in Virginia had to be coordinated by two different national commands separated across an ocean without benefit of telephone, telegraph or wireless. That this was carried out without a fault seems accountable only by a series of miracles.
Rochambeau’s army from Newport had marched from Rhode Island to join Washington on the Hudson in the first week of July, 1781. Dispersed through the White Plains area, their joint camp was centered at Philipsburg (Philipse Manor) in Yonkers, four miles from White Plains and less than twenty miles from where the British forces occupying New York were quartered in former American barracks on the grounds of King’s College, near Trinity Church, in the Wall Street section.
The offensive planned by the Allied army of French and Americans for a union with de Grasse would require a march from the Hudson of approximately 500 miles, measured over local roads down through New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware and Maryland, to Virginia. The army would be a mixed group of two newly acquainted allies speaking different tongues, with arrangements to be made along the route for food and drink and river transportation. Foraging and bivouacking at night, they would have to rely on come what may. Despite the obstacles and hazards involved in organization of the march, once Washington had taken a decision, it remained firm, not subjected thereafter to second questions.
In the midst of dispiriting frustrations and shortages and the sneers and plots of jealous generals seeking to oust him, and disappointed in having to give up his desire to retake New York, Washington was yet able to respond to a new hope and summon his energy for a new campaign. On August 15, one day after receipt of de Grasse’s letter stating his choice of the Chesapeake, Washington notified the Continentals to make ready to march. On this day he issued general orders to the Continentals: “the army will hold itself in the most perfect readiness to move at the shortest notice.” He followed these by a letter to Rochambeau specifying the route of the first stage of the March to Trenton and a letter to de Grasse requesting him to send all his frigates, transports and other vessels to convey the troops down the Bay. The