Washington [286]
On September 28 Washington and his army began the twelve-mile march to Yorktown through scenery he depicted as “beautiful, fertile country.”32 The day was so sultry that at least two men perished from the heat. That night Washington slept safely behind the lines in a wooded glade under “the small spreading branches of a tree,” with a spring running nearby.33 The next day he pitched a couple of tents, including a large dining marquee that would enable him to entertain up to forty guests at a time during the siege.
Cornwallis and his troops were holed up on the bluff of Yorktown village, which was set above the broad, gleaming expanse of the York River, with the town of Gloucester lying directly across the water. This bucolic spot was more salubrious than the low-lying swamps nearby. Most British troops stayed behind the main fortifications, but Cornwallis had expanded the defensive perimeter with ten low earthen redoubts that projected into the sandy battlefield. From the outset it was an uneven contest, for Cornwallis had almost 9,000 troops versus nearly 19,000 French and Americans. Seeing his precarious situation, Cornwallis counted on Sir Henry Clinton to redeem his pledge and relieve him with thousands of fresh troops. “This place is in no state of defense,” Cornwallis warned on September 17. “If you cannot relieve me very soon, you must be prepared to hear the worst.”34 Failing to heed the urgent warning, Clinton procrastinated, in one of the foremost blunders of the war.
As British soldiers peered from behind their earthworks, they could see French troops and artillery to their right and American to their left. The Frenchmen looked almost fashionably garbed compared with their impoverished American counterparts. As Anthony Wayne said of the troops who came with de Grasse, they made “a very fine soldierly appearance, they being all very tall men, their uniform is white coats turned up with blue, their underclothes are white.”35
The Battle of Yorktown proceeded like a textbook European siege. The patriots were poorly tutored in this military science in which the veteran French engineers excelled, relegating Washington again to a secondary position. On October 1 Washington and Rochambeau scouted ground for the first of several parallel trenches that would edge progressively closer to the enemy. Each morning the two men reviewed the progress, but Washington deferred to French expertise about sieges, putting the French general in command. As Rochambeau wrote, “I must render the Americans the justice to say that they conducted themselves with that zeal, courage, and emulation, with which they were never backward,” although they were “totally ignorant of the operations of a siege.”36
The British camp showed early signs of extreme distress. On October 2, while scouring the York River through his spyglass, St. George Tucker noticed dozens of dead horses bobbing in the water. Having run short of forage, the British had shot the animals and dumped them in the river, crowding the water with four hundred carcasses. A fetid and lasting stench hung over the town as dead animals rotted in the tidal flats. Two days later two British deserters drifted into the allied camp and retailed horror stories of widespread disease among Cornwallis’s men—two thousand were already laid up in the hospital.
On the night of October 5, laboring in darkness and secrecy, the allies began to carve out a trench two miles long. By the next morning they had thrown up sufficient dirt to