Washington [288]
At dusk on October 14 Washington delivered a pep talk to Hamilton’s men, urging them to “act the part of firm and brave soldiers” in storming the redoubt.43 “I thought then that His Excellency’s knees rather shook,” said Captain Stephen Olney, “but I have since doubted whether it was not mine.”44 The artillery pounded the two redoubts to weaken them for the assault. Then, as night fell, with shells illuminating the sky, Hamilton and his party rose from their trenches and sprinted across the open field. To ensure speed and surprise, they had orders not to shoot their muskets but only to employ fixed bayonets. Standing on elevated ground, Washington watched the dramatic scene with Generals Lincoln and Knox. “Sir, you are too much exposed here,” urged Washington’s aide David Cobb, Jr. “Had you not better step a little back?” “Colonel Cobb,” Washington said coolly, “if you are afraid, you have liberty to step back.”45
When they reached the redoubt, the sappers had to leap a moat and contend with an abatis—felled trees sharpened to lethal points—which they slashed with axes to form an opening. The French operation against redoubt number nine suffered high casualties, while Hamilton’s group sustained minimal losses. Among the heroes of the charge was the largely black First Rhode Island Regiment. “The bravery exhibited by the attacking troops was emulous and praiseworthy,” Washington recorded in his journal. “Few cases have exhibited stronger proofs of intrepidity, coolness, and firmness than were shown upon this occasion.”46 By capturing the two redoubts, the allies could now install short-range howitzers that fired ricochet projectiles, which bounced along the ground toward their target, then killed and maimed with ghoulish efficiency.
The situation looked pretty desperate for Cornwallis. In a portrait painted by Thomas Gainsborough two years later, the highborn earl has a well-fed, sagging face and heavy-lidded eyes; his expression is downcast, as if Yorktown still threw a shadow. Short and stout, he had been educated at Eton and Cambridge, served as aide-de-camp to George III, and compiled a commendable record during the French and Indian War. Mostly amiable, he was also prone to temperamental fits. As a Whig member of Parliament, he had questioned government policy in North America but had fought no less fiercely for all that and proved popular among his men. American generals retained a healthy respect for his fighting spirit. “Lord Cornwallis’s abilities are to me more frightening than his superiority of forces,” Lafayette wrote to Knox that August. “I even have a great opinion of him. Our papers call him a madman, but was ever any advantage taken of him where he commanded in person? To speak plain English, I am devilish afraid of him!”47
Cornwallis’s grave situation was aggravated by intramural squabbling with Clinton. The two men had whined and bickered all year: Cornwallis complained to Clinton that he was being kept “totally in the dark as to the intended operations of the summer.”48 Clinton, in turn, distrusted Cornwallis, believing that he had bypassed his own authority to communicate directly with London. Aggravating matters was Clinton’s insistence that the French and Americans might swoop down on New York and that he couldn’t spare men for Virginia.
As Cornwallis awaited reinforcements from New York, rumors circulated that the trapped commander had “built a kind of grotto . . . where he lives underground.” 49 Scooping out space from a hillside, Cornwallis formed his own private bunker. By October 15 he despaired of any relief from Clinton and sent a message that the situation was so “precarious that I cannot recommend that the fleet and army should run great risk in endeavoring to save us.”50