A standard siege inched forward in a slow, creeping motion, with each trench nearer the enemy. On October 12 a second trench was begun only three hundred yards from enemy lines, and once again miners and sappers worked diligently through the night, astounding the British the next morning with their overnight progress and doubtless inducing a claustrophobic feeling. Day and night the cannon fire was deadly, cacophonous, and incessant. Cornwallis issued a cri de coeur to Sir Henry Clinton, asking him to send a fleet and asserting that “nothing but a direct move to York River—which includes a successful naval action—can save me.” He concluded bleakly that “we cannot hope to make a long resistance.”41
As the second parallel neared completion, the next priority became seizing two outlying British defenses, redoubts nine and ten, which blocked any further advance. In a spirit of Franco-American harmony, Washington assigned one redoubt to the French, the other to Americans under Lafayette. Since the siege had been the handiwork of gunners and engineers, affording little opportunity for swashbuckling heroism, a spirited competition arose to lead the charges. At first Lafayette drafted his personal aide, the Chevalier de Gimat, but this seemed unsporting to American soldiers, especially the determined Alexander Hamilton. After wearing down Washington with petitions for a field position, he had been rewarded with command of a New York light infantry battalion. Now Hamilton, claiming seniority over Gimat, applied his persuasive powers to win the assignment of leading four hundred men against redoubt ten. That Washington acceded to his wishes shows not only his respect for Hamilton’s ability but his willingness to rise above personal pettiness to patch up a quarrel.
John Adams later insisted that Hamilton had blackmailed Washington into granting him the assignment. “You inquire what passed between Washington and Hamilton at Yorktown?” wrote Adams (who wasn’t there) to Benjamin Rush. “Washington had ordered . . . another officer to take the command of the attack upon the redoubt. Hamilton flew into a violent passion and demanded the command of the party for himself and declared if he had it not, he would expose General Washington’s conduct in a pamphlet.”42 The idea that Washington would have been cowed by a crude threat shows little understanding of the man. Such patent blackmail would have cost Hamilton his relationship with Washington forever.
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 That same day the firing of shells from both sides reached such a feverish pitch of intensity that they sketched patterns of hideous beauty in the sky. “They are clearly visible in the form of a black ball in the day,” wrote James Thacher, “but in the night, they appear like fiery meteors with blazing tails, most beautifully brilliant.”51
More than one hundred allied cannon terrorized the town with punishing consistency. One Hessian wrote that “the bombs and cannonballs hit many inhabitants and negroes of the city and marines, sailors, and soldiers.”52 In desperation Cornwallis took former slaves who had defected to British lines and contracted smallpox and pushed them toward the allied lines in a version of germ warfare. One American soldier reported “herds of Negroes” who had been “turned adrift” by Cornwallis for this grisly purpose.53 Jacky Custis, scanning the defecting blacks for runaway slaves from Mount Vernon, found none. “I have seen numbers [of blacks] lying dead in the woods,” he informed his mother, “and many so exhausted they cannot walk.”54
On the night of October 16 the allies crept so close to the British line that Cornwallis made a frantic effort to evacuate his army across the river to Gloucester. Banastre Tarleton, who was stationed there, sent over sixteen craft for the crossing. The first boat didn’t depart from Yorktown until almost eleven P.M., but a substantial number of men made it across the river. Cornwallis scribbled a note to Washington, asking for mercy toward the sick and wounded left behind. Then shortly before midnight a violent storm drove the boats downriver, terminating the operation and forcing Cornwallis to recall his men from Gloucester the next morning. He had exhausted his last option. Surrender was now the only course left open to him.