Washington [291]
The next day Cornwallis made a courtesy call on Washington, and the two established a rapport based on mutual respect. They toured the Yorktown defenses on horseback to oversee the demolition of defenses that had been erected with meticulous care. The Yorktown victory netted more than eight thousand prisoners, who would be ordinary prisoners of war; their officers would be allowed to return to Europe or New York or any other port that Britain controlled. Washington dealt leniently with Tory sympathizers who had found sanctuary with Cornwallis and faced patriotic reprisals. He didn’t want to give them a formal reprieve, but neither did he wish to condone vigilante actions against them. He solved the dilemma with a subtle compromise: he allowed the British to send a ship to New York, which the Tories could clamber aboard as an escape route.
Yorktown struck a stirring blow for American liberty with one exception: those slaves who had flocked to the British side to win their freedom were now restored to the thrall of their owners. Washington retrieved two young house slaves—twenty-year-old Lucy and eighteen-year-old Esther—who had been among the seventeen who had escaped aboard the British sloop Savage six months earlier, thinking their freedom assured. He was determined to recover the remaining fifteen slaves he had lost.
In retrospect, the Yorktown victory dealt a mortal blow to British aspirations in America. When Lord North, the portly prime minister, digested the news at 10 Downing Street, he went wild with despair. “O God!” he repeated, pacing the floor. “It is all over!”64 The unreconstructed King George III refused to accept this reality and wanted to throw even more resources into prosecuting a hopeless conflict. The victory encouraged a skeptical world to believe in American independence, and the Dutch would grant diplomatic recognition in the spring. It isn’t clear whether Washington grasped the full import of the victory. He praised the battle as “an interesting event that may be productive of much good if properly improved, but if it should be the means of relaxation and sink us into supineness and [false] security, it had better not have happened.”65 As reports drifted back from London that the British had conceded the war was hopeless, Washington remained cautious, since the enemy’s presence in North America was still formidable. Throughout the conflict he had resisted wishful thinking, and now dreaded that the Yorktown victory might waylay people into premature complacency. Along with Lafayette, he went out to the Ville de Paris to see if he could parlay the great triumph into joint action against Charleston, South Carolina, or Wilmington, North Carolina, but de Grasse declined any follow-up operation.
Washington was sufficiently vexed by the Frenchman’s fitful cooperation that he decided to send Lafayette to France to agitate for a more durable naval presence. “A constant naval superiority would terminate the war speedily,” Washington told Lafayette in mid-November. “Without it, I do not know that it will ever be terminated honorably.”66 Washington also hoped for more French generosity in the form of a large loan or grant. “Adieu, my dear general,” Lafayette wrote from Boston before his departure. “I know your heart so well that I am sure that no distance can alter your attachment to me. With the same candor, I assure you that my love, my respect, my gratitude for you are above expression.”67
A coda to the Yorktown campaign must have mortified Lord Cornwallis. On October 17, the day of the surrender, General Clinton and his fleet of six thousand troops began their departure from New York, hoping to rescue him. When they arrived off Chesapeake Bay a week later, they encountered