The First American Army - Bruce Chadwick [172]
Sometimes everything seemed to go wrong, though. Wild and his company were about to capture a herd of horses but the steeds ran off at the last moment. A doctor and two privates drowned while bathing in a river. Somehow, many of the tents of the First Massachusetts were lost during the march and the men had to sleep in the open meadows. Directions were poor and once the men marched all day to wind up at a local meetinghouse where they had started that morning. A surprise attack on a British force General Anthony Wayne had spotted at Green Springs backfired and the First Massachusetts and the Pennsylvanians had to retreat. Promised food shipments were late. The crossings of rivers took all day because there were not enough boats.
On September 1, Wild heard the news that his “tiny army,” as he called it, would not only join forces with George Washington’s main army, but that the French fleet, with twenty-eight ships carrying four thousand troops, had arrived in Chesapeake Bay, blocking the entrance to the York and James rivers. By September 6, various elements of the plan to surround the British were falling into place. Wild’s regiment had been sent to Williamsburg, twelve miles southwest of Yorktown. The French army, under the Marquis de St. Simon, had arrived five days before. The next day, Lieutenant Wild heard that more ships had arrived and the French now had thirty-seven vessels anchored in the bay. The day after that two regiments from Maryland trudged into Williamsburg as the American and French forces camped in the Virginia capital began to swell. And finally, on Sunday, September 14, George Washington arrived and took command. He asked to greet as many officers as he could that day, and at 2 p.m. he met Ebenezer Wild (oddly, Wild wrote nothing about the encounter). “The arrival . . . of General Washington gave new hopes and spirits to the army,” noted Lt. Col. St. George Tucker of Rawson’s Brigade, a Virginia militia group, who also met Washington that day.1
The commander in chief had lots of good news. He had just returned from a meeting with Admiral de Grasse, head of the French fleet, on board his flagship, the Ville de Paris, said to be the largest warship in the world. De Grasse informed him that his ships would remain in the Chesapeake Bay until the end of October, giving the combined American and French forces plenty of time to defeat Cornwallis. Washington’s army and the French force had arrived practically intact, with very few desertions and a small number of sick men. The cannon he brought with him over the great distance from the New York area were in good order and few had suffered any damage on the lengthy journey. His spies assured him that British supplies in Yorktown were low. The French had given him just about everything—in men, cannon, and supplies—that they had been promising for more than two years.2
Yorktown was situated on land originally owned by an ancestor of George Washington’s, Nicholas Martiau, who acquired it in 1691. Over the years, its location on the York River close to the Chesapeake and in the heart of tobacco country had turned it into a busy port. Its zenith as a trading town was reached in the 1740s, when British visitors remarked that the homes of merchants in the community of three thousand people were as large and as fine as those in the best neighborhoods in London. An explosion in the tobacco trade in other areas of the Chesapeake area near ports, such as Norfolk and Baltimore, soon undercut the importance of Yorktown. The war and British blockades also hurt Yorktown’s business, and by 1781 it turned into a small, depressed community.
Yorktown still possessed the remnants of its former importance. There were three hundreds homes, three churches, and an ornate red brick courthouse located on its one main street and four cross streets. The town sat on a wide, high bluff that overlooked the river. The small wharf that had been built beneath the bluff still had ships