The First American Army - Bruce Chadwick [173]
The townspeople had embraced the Revolution. In 1774, local men raided British ships in action similar to the “tea party” in Boston. The community elected its leading patriot, Thomas Nelson, to the Continental Congress. Throughout the war, Yorktown was home to a three-hundredman militia company
The community looked like a ghost town by the time Cornwallis made it his headquarters. The militia had fled, along with dozens of area shopkeepers, plantation owners, and local residents. Many had moved to the interior when the British invaded the state. Some homes, stores, and stables were empty and uncut grass overran walkways and streets.3
The enlisted men began to believe that it might be possible to defeat Cornwallis’s army of some six thousand men, which appeared bottled up, and take the fabled British general and all of his men prisoners. True, the British still had other armies in the U.S., in New York, Charleston, Savannah, and Wilmington, North Carolina. But the capture of Cornwallis’s brigades would cripple British forces and their surrender would be perceived as a tremendous public relations coup throughout America, in England where sentiment against the war had grown over the last two years, and the world. It just might be the final blow necessary to force the Crown to quit the war.
American hopes were high in Williamsburg, indeed so optimistic that some soldiers began pools, similar to contemporary sports betting pools, with each participant choosing the date upon which Lord Cornwallis would surrender. Men who frequented the capital’s taverns, such as Christiana Campbell’s, wagered money, silk stockings, coats, and beaver hats on the date. Lafayette predicted September 22. Others chose dates ranging from September 23 to October 14.4
At dawn on September 28, in a grand spectacle, Washington and Rochambeau led their joint army out of Williamsburg—down the pretty, wide, tree-lined Duke of Gloucester Street with its many taverns, gardens, yards, stores, and hitching posts, and headed northeast toward Yorktown. Lt. Wild counted just over sixteen thousand men, along with hundreds of cannon and wagons.
The young lieutenant was impressed. “About sunrise the army began their march [in one column] toward York. The light infantry, with some cavalry and one regiment of riflemen, formed the vanguard. In this order, we proceeded about seven miles, where the roads parted; the Americans taking the right and the French the left, we proceeded within about two miles of York, where the French army encamped on a plain with a large morass in their front. The American army proceeded further toward the river.”
Cornwallis had decided to defend the town against a siege and had built numerous wide ditches, a lone line of earthen walls, and two large redoubts of wood and earth to serve as ramparts to hold soldiers and cannon. These defenses were guarded with newly built abatis (tree branches sharpened like spears stuck into the earth to stop rushing hordes of troops). The well-defended redoubts and protective walls at times curved and at times zigzagged so that the British could fire at attackers approaching from any angle.
For one of the few times during the war, the American forces— ninety-five hundred Americans and eighty-eight hundred crack French regulars—substantially outnumbered the British force of about six thousand men. Most of the British were in Yorktown and a few hundred were in the village of Gloucester directly across the river. Cornwallis made up for his lack of men with his seemingly impregnable defensive walls.
When Rochambeau and Washington first discussed an attack on Yorktown, Washington worried that the only way to defeat the British would be to mount a series of frontal assaults that would cost the lives of many men. Could these assaults be carried out by the time de