First Salute - Barbara Wertheim Tuchman [159]
On the day that Washington heard the report about de Grasse, the same news was delivered in Philadelphia when a courier entered the hall where Minister Luzerne was entertaining Comissary Blanchard and eighty guests. All the guests fell silent as the messenger’s document was taken to Luzerne, who, after hasty scanning, and in excitement almost equal to Washington’s, read aloud the announcement that Admiral de Grasse with a reported 36 ships (an exaggerated count) was in the Bay, with 3,000 troops being disembarked to join Lafayette. The company was transported, and the courier overwhelmed as the guests crowded around him. In the city when the news was made public by Luzerne, the population raised cries of “Long live Louis Sixteenth!” and mounted scaffolds and platforms to deliver funeral orations for Cornwallis and lamentations for the Tories.
As if to allow the joy and relief at Chester no unalloyed hour, Washington and Rochambeau, as they rode southward, heard a distant rumble of gunfire from the Bay. It carried a somber message: that the fleets of de Grasse and the British had met and opened combat. Stricken in suspense, the generals looked at each other, not daring to speak aloud their question. Which fleet had prevailed?
The outcome was, in fact, to be the turning point of the war and, it might be said, of the 18th century, for it proved to be the enabling factor of the rebels’ Yorktown campaign.
In the Bay both fleets had made their entrance at the foot of the Capes. De Grasse, arriving on August 30, had anchored his main fleet in Lynnhaven Bay, off Cape Henry. Graves, entering on September 5, had come in at the foot of Cape Charles where the mouths of the York and the James rivers flowing down past Yorktown open onto the Bay.
Aghast upon entering the Chesapeake, Graves saw, instead of the twelve to fourteen ships he had expected de Grasse to bring, the great array of de Grasse’s fleet of 28 ships of the line plus some frigates and gunboats. Against this superior force, Graves had, however, the superior position in that he was sailing in regular procession with the wind behind him, while de Grasse, after the knotty business of landing his troops to join Lafayette, was trying to maneuver his ships out of the harbor into the open sea where he would have room to form a battle line. In seeking combat, his purpose was to deny the Bay to the British and prevent the entrance of a force to aid or rescue Cornwallis. Graves’s purpose was, of course, the reverse: to keep the sea-lanes open to Cornwallis. His opportunity to overwhelm the French was, according to naval critics, ideal. He was running down before the wind in good order, while the enemy in straggling succession was laboring to negotiate the uneasy passage around Cape Henry to the open sea. If he had attacked the disconnected French van one by one, he could have destroyed them. But that was not the tactical formula of Fighting Instructions, and Graves was a conformist to the code, and a product of the Royal Navy’s greatest self-inflicted wound, the lost initiative left by the execution of Admiral Byng and the court-martial of Admiral Mathews. He knew that his duty under Fighting Instructions was to form line ahead in a battle line parallel to that of the enemy. Because the enemy had no line, Graves was at a loss. From one o’clock to 3:30 p.m., with the wind in rapid changes of direction, first in favor of the French and then of the English, Graves struggled to fulfill the formula, and by the time he raised the signal to engage, he had lost his advantage. While hoisting the blue-and-white-checkered flag that signaled “bear down,” meaning