First Salute - Barbara Wertheim Tuchman [167]
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