First Salute - Barbara Wertheim Tuchman [177]
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