Victory at Yorktown (34 page)

Faithfully continuing his journal, Johann Doehla made a meticulous list of the officers and soldiers surrendered, the artillery, munitions, and ships captured, and the names of officers who went into captivity with their men as well as those who went on parole to New York. Among the latter was “Second Lieutenant Popp, who was named an officer from a Corporal in Yorktown on October 16.” Clearly, Popp had done something worthy of a battlefield promotion.

When the losses of troops were tallied, the siege had cost the British a total of between 8,000 and 9,000: 556 of them killed or wounded, plus 5,051 prisoners at Yorktown and Gloucester, and more than 2,000 sick. (To that number, Doehla added 85 deserters, most of them Hessians.) The total also included 1,228 seamen and officers from the navy. The French had lost 389, of which 98 soldiers and officers had been killed, the rest wounded. Americans had the fewest casualties: 10 officers and 289 soldiers killed or wounded. The British total did not include Tories, many of whom remained in the town and would need protection from angry patriots. Fortunately for them, Cornwallis had come up with an imaginative solution to save them from vindictive Americans.

Writing to Washington on the 18th, the earl said he wanted the sloop of war
Bonetta
to be left entirely at his disposal, from the moment the capitulation document was signed, to receive one of his aides-de-camp who would carry dispatches to Sir Henry Clinton. Other passengers were to include as many soldiers as he saw fit to send, and fifty members of the sloop's crew. The ship was to be permitted “to sail without examination, when my dispatches are ready,” with the understanding that she would be brought back and delivered to Washington, that she would not carry any officer without the American commander's consent, and that “no person may be punished or molested for having joined the British troops.” The phrase “without examination” was an escape hatch for Tories, as Washington probably realized, but he could afford to look the other way, for they were subject not to military authority but to civilian and if there was anything the General did not need just then it was another problem. As for the indefinite number of soldiers to be taken, this hid any American deserters the British might have who would, if captured in enemy service, have to be hanged.

The terms of the surrender were long and rather complicated, but they were neatly summarized by Surgeon James Thacher, who, like so many of the Continentals, had been part of this war ever since 1775, serving most recently in the elite corps of Colonel Alexander Scammell. “The captive troops are to march out with shouldered arms, colors cased and drums beating a British or German march, and to ground their arms at a place assigned for the purpose.” Officers were allowed to keep their sidearms and personal property; the generals and other high-ranking officers could go on parole to England or New York; marines and seamen of the king's ships were to be prisoners of war to the French navy, land forces to the United States. All military and artillery stores were to be delivered up unimpaired. “The royal prisoners to be sent into the interior of Virginia, Maryland and Pennsylvania in regiments, to have rations allowed them equal to the American soldiers (which must have been cold comfort to the prisoners), and to have their officers near them.”

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ON OCTOBER
19, 1781, the day “when the pride of Britain was to be humbled in a greater Degree than it had ever been before, unless at the Surrender of Burgoyne,” in St. George Tucker's words, the allied armies marched out about noon and lined up, two ranks deep, on both sides of the Hampton road from Yorktown—Americans on the right side, French on the left. It was a glorious, warm autumn day, sunny and bright, with the leaves on the trees just beginning to turn. These double ranks of uniformed men stretched for more than a mile, and at the end farthest from Yorktown were the commanders of the two forces and their ranking officers, all on horseback. The French troops were brilliantly turned out, their white uniforms trim and spotless, their legs encased in clean white gaiters. Facing them from across the road the men of the United States Army were mostly in dun-colored hunting shirts or grimy white uniforms, looking for all the world like irregulars, not professional soldiers like the French.

A surprising number of these Americans had six years of punishing, bloody warfare behind them; six years of hardship and suffering, hunger and tedium, no pay, and unparalleled neglect by their government and fellow Americans, all of whom would be only too glad to share in the benefits of victory if it came, but were too occupied or unconcerned to risk their lives or security for freedom. Some of these men standing in line under the hot Virginia sun were survivors of the fights at Concord and Bunker Hill, had suffered bitter defeat with Arnold and Montgomery before Quebec, had been part of the humiliating loss of New York and the retreat across New Jersey, and endured the killing winters of Morristown and Valley Forge. They had experienced the glorious and all too rare victories of Trenton and Princeton and Saratoga, the disappointments of Germantown and Brandywine, the staggering losses of Charleston and Camden, the triumphs of Kings Mountain, Cowpens, and a hundred little crossroad hamlets from Montreal and Quebec to South Carolina and Georgia. Yet somehow they had endured to participate in and savor this glorious moment. Few, if any, of them could have understood the magnitude of what they had achieved, which was not only to ensure the independence of the United States but, eventually, to change the history of the world.

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NATHANAEL GREENE HAD
described his own situation humorously but accurately in a letter to his friend Henry Knox: “We have been beating the bush and the General has come to catch the bird.” The General had indeed caught the bird, with a lot of help from men like Greene and Moultrie, Marion and Pickens, France's army and navy, the unknown and unnamed militiamen from the thirteen former colonies, and everyone collecting on the fields outside Yorktown—including a prodigious “concourse of spectators” from the surrounding countryside—who wanted to see that bird in the person of the commander of the British army. “Every eye was prepared to gaze on Lord Cornwallis, the object of peculiar interest and solicitude,” Thacher wrote, “but he disappointed our anxious expectations … [and] made General O'Hara his substitute as the leader of his army. This officer was followed by the conquered troops in a slow and solemn step, with shouldered arms, colors cased and drums beating a British march.” (It was a slow, melancholy air, almost certainly “The World Turn'd Upside Down,” which was a popular tune to which innumerable songs and ballads had been set.)

Cornwallis had signed the document affirming his surrender and denying his army the honors of war, but he could not stand the thought of being present at “the humiliating scene” and decided to pretend that he was ill.

One of the waiting French officers was pleased to see the smiles of pride on all the generals' faces, and Surgeon Thacher said, “every countenance beamed with satisfaction and joy.” As well they might. While they waited, the French regimental bands came nearer, playing jubilant music that was accompanied with the timbrel, an ancient percussion instrument similar to a tambourine—“a delightful novelty [which] produced … a most enchanting effect.” For a while they kept playing, the French “magnificently,” the Americans “moderately well.”

At two o'clock, it was possible to hear the distant sound of fifes and drums coming from Yorktown, and the waiting armies that had finally shattered the powerful British force were suddenly silent. As the scarlet ranks came closer, the music was louder and the “strain of melancholy” more pronounced; Ebenezer Denny thought the “drums beat as if they did not care how.”

The scene captured so accurately on canvas in 1785 by Louis-Nicolas van Blarenberghe, whose work was based on eyewitness accounts and sketches (some by Louis-Alexandre Berthier), has the defeated army, colors cased, marching out of Yorktown between the American and French forces, and heading to the field where they lay down their arms. The artist, who was one of several battle painters attached to the French war department, had been working for years on a series of depictions of battles fought during the reign of Louis XV. When he was commissioned to do two paintings of the recent victory in America for Louis XVI's collection in the royal palace at Versailles, he set aside his other project and began work on the
Siege,
showing allied troops marching toward Yorktown, and another painting of
The Surrender.
Later, Rochambeau requested that the artist make copies for him, and they were hung at his château.
*

Leading the approaching ranks of British troops was Charles O'Hara, a red-faced, fast-talking Irishman with gleaming white teeth. He was a natural son of the second Lord Trawley, colonel of the Coldstream Guards, and had entered his father's regiment at the age of sixteen as “lieutenant and captain.” After service in Europe and Africa, he came to America in 1778 and was posted to New York under Clinton, who said later, “I soon found he was the last man I should have sent with a detached corps—plans upon plans for defense; never easy satisfied, or safe; a great, nay plausible, talker.”

Sent south to join Cornwallis, he showed himself to be an aggressive commander in the race to the Dan and performed heroically at Guilford, where he was twice wounded leading the attack that broke through Greene's defenses. Now he had been given the heartbreaking task of surrendering Cornwallis's army, and as he rode toward the waiting French and American officers the first man to greet him was a Frenchman, the Comte Mathieu Dumas, Rochambeau's adjutant general, who had been deputized to direct the garrison troops.

O'Hara asked Dumas where General Rochambeau was and was told, “On our left, at the head of the French line.” As the Englishman spurred his horse forward, Dumas realized that he was going to pre-sent his sword to the French general, and galloped quickly between the two just as Rochambeau signaled, pointing to General Washington.

“You are mistaken,” Dumas told O'Hara. “The commander-in-chief of our army is on the right.”

Understandably flustered, O'Hara turned and rode over to Washington, explained that Earl Cornwallis was indisposed, and offered his sword to the commander in chief, who declined to receive it, indicating that O'Hara should present it to Benjamin Lincoln, his second in command. Lincoln held it for a symbolic moment and, returning it to O'Hara, pointed to the field just beyond them, which was encircled by Lauzun's legion, hussars and lancers with sabers drawn and spears raised. That was where the British and German troops were to lay down their muskets.

As the redcoats passed between the two lines, they were sullen and angry, as Closen observed, showing “the greatest scorn for the Americans, who, to tell the truth, were eclipsed by our army in splendor of appearance and dress, for most of these unfortunate persons were clad in small jackets of white cloth, dirty and ragged, and a number of them were almost barefoot.” Comparing the British with the German troops that were with them, Closen said the former seemed to be more tired and less heroic than the Anspach or Hessian regiments. The latter “made a more military appearance,” a New Jersey officer observed, “and the conduct of their officers was far more becoming men of fortitude,” while “the British officers in general behaved like boys who had been whipped at school. Some bit their lips; some pouted; others cried. Their round, broad-brimmed hats were well-adapted to the occasion, hiding those faces they were ashamed to show.”

Johann Doehla said he and the other Germans were awed by the sight of “the great multitude which had besieged us,” and saw at once that “they could have devoured us, who were only a corporal's guard compared with them.” He was especially impressed by the French, whose bands made splendid music, and whose troops “were good looking, tall, well-washed men.”

As far as their arms and uniforms were concerned, the British troops had a parade-ground look about them, since every soldier had been given a new suit of clothes, but in their line of march onlookers observed disorderly and unsoldierly conduct, their step irregular, and their ranks frequently broken. A Pennsylvania soldier noted, “The British prisoners appeared much in liquor.”

The moment of truth came when the redcoats and Germans reached the field where they were to lay down their arms and could no longer conceal their mortification. Platoon officers could hardly bring themselves to order “Ground arms!” and did so in a very “unofficer-like manner.” A number of soldiers threw down their weapons violently, hoping to make them useless—an irregularity stopped by an order from General Lincoln. After grounding their weapons, the captives were conducted back to Yorktown and guarded by allied troops until they could be sent off on the long march to captivity.

Captain Samuel Graham of the Highland regiment recalled how “the scene made a deep impression at the moment, for the mortification and unfeigned sorrow of the soldiers will never fade from my memory. Some cursed, some went so far as to shed tears, while one man, a corporal, who stood near me, embraced his firelock and then threw it on the ground, exclaiming, ‘May you never get so good a master again!'” Colonel von Seybothen, the commander of an Anspach battalion, shouted the command “Ground muskets!” with tears running down his cheeks, and Lieutenant Colonel Robert Abercrombie of the British light infantry pulled his hat down over his eyes and bit the hilt of his sword in frustration. To do the Americans justice, Graham said, they behaved through all this with delicacy and forbearance, while the French were “profuse in their protestations of sympathy.” He visited the French lines after their parade had been dismissed and was overwhelmed with their civility.

Doehla said the Germans tramped back to Yorktown in silence, and “all spirit and courage which at other times animated the soldiers had slipped from us, especially inasmuch as the Americans greatly jeered at us like conquerors as we marched back through the armies.” The French, on the other hand, conducted themselves very well toward them, and when they were back in their own lines surrounded them to prevent the American militia from stealing and plundering.