On September 17 the Count de Grasse sent a boat to convey Washington, Rochambeau, and their aides to his flagship, the Ville de Paris, riding at anchor off Cape Henry. Not since his Barbados trip as a teenager had Washington spent so much time afloat. It was noon the next day before the generals reached the French armada and gazed at the grand spectacle of thirty-two giant ships spanning the horizon. Reputed to be the world’s biggest warship, the towering Ville de Paris— a gift from the city of Paris to the king—bristled with 110 guns and 1,300 men. Varnished to a high gloss, it was given an extra coat of French glamour by flowers and plants festooning the quarterdeck. Admiral de Grasse turned out to be a good-looking man of imposing height and girth. “The admiral is a remarkable man for size, appearance, and plainness of address,” noted Jonathan Trumbull, Jr.27 A scion of an aristocratic family, de Grasse had naval experience dating back to the War of Jenkins’ Ear in 1740, when he had fought against Lawrence Washington. At six foot two, de Grasse was slightly taller than Washington, whom he embraced with gusto, kissing him on both cheeks and exclaiming, “Mon cher petit général!”28 Never comfortable with physical affection, Washington was less amused than Knox and his officers, who roared with unrestricted laughter.
Despite the formal dinner and other marks of courtesy that de Grasse had arranged, the talks did not go smoothly. He set a deadline of no later than November 1 for his time in Virginia, and Washington hoped the Yorktown siege would fit into this abbreviated timetable. He gave de Grasse a mixed grade, calling him a “gallant officer” while also bemoaning his “impetuosity.”29 Mostly Washington felt powerless in dealing with the arrogant admiral. When their talks ended, de Grasse devised an elaborate sunset send-off for Washington, with crewmen on all the ships scrambling up into the riggings and firing muskets in the sequence known as a feu de joie.
For three days Washington’s departing boat was buffeted by gusts, and he didn’t return to Williamsburg until September 22. By then, the last remnants of the Continental Army had tramped in from their marathon journey. No sooner was Washington back than he received an unpleasant surprise. Admiral Graves had returned with his fleet to New York, where he hoped to be reinforced; to avert this, de Grasse contemplated a move north to cut off any British movements by sea. Writing to de Grasse, Washington communicated his “painful anxiety” at any action that might compromise the Yorktown siege. “The enterprise against York[town] under the protection of your ships is as certain as any military operation can be rendered by a decisive superiority of strength and means,” he pleaded.30 Washington by now had gotten religion about the Yorktown mission, and de Grasse decided to cancel the voyage to New York. Nevertheless, in a mildly irritated tone, he told Washington, “Your Excellency may be very sure that I have, so to speak, more at heart than yourself that the expedition to York may terminate agreeably to our desires.”31
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 form earthworks in front of it, enabling them to work while shielded from British fire. Washington toured the nocturnal site, wrapped in a cloak, without revealing his identity. During the clear, unseasonably mild autumn days, the British raked the allied lines with almost continuous fire, making it risky to move about. They threw everything imaginable at the allies: a thick hail of musket fire, cannonballs, grapeshot, shells, and bombs. Washington again showed preternatural calm in braving shots and never deviated from his fearless stand. It was futile for people to insist that he protect himself. One day a cannonball landed near him, tossing a huge cloud of sand in the sky, which filtered down on Chaplain Israel Evans. He removed his hat, examined it, and said to Washington, “See here, general!” “Mr. Evans,” Washington replied, “you had better carry that [ball] home and show it to your wife and children.”37 Washington bore the stress gracefully, and Jacky Custis wrote home that “the general, tho[ugh] in constant fatigue, looks very well.”38
When the first parallel was completed on October 9, the French, in a gesture of respect, allowed Washington to ignite the first gun aimed at the British, which scored a memorable shot. “I could hear the ball strike from house to house,” recalled Philip Van Cortlandt of New York, “and I was afterwards informed that it went through the one where many of the officers were at dinner, and over the tables, discomposing the dishes and either killed or wounded the one at the head of the table.”39 While American gunners lacked pinpoint accuracy, they wreaked terrible devastation on the enemy. “One could not avoid the horribly many cannonballs, either inside or outside the city,” said one of Cornwallis’s soldiers. “. . . Many men were badly injured and mortally wounded by the fragments of bombs . . . [so that] their arms and legs [were] severed or themselves struck dead.”40