Conceived in Liberty (262 page)

Finally, in March 1781, the Virginia assembly unofficially drew up a blistering “Remonstrance” protesting their plight, and sent it privately to the state’s delegates in Congress. This remonstrance pointed out that Virginia had gladly supplied Boston and the North when they were at stake; but now, after exhausting its resources, and with the South almost completely lost, the North sent no aid in return. Yet, despite these pleas and the intense shortage of lead and powder, no munitions aid was to be received from the North until September.

Washington had decided to try to pen Arnold in at Portsmouth, Virginia, and had Lafayette set sail for Annapolis in early March 1781 with 1,200 of Washington’s troops; at the same time, the French fleet and 1,200 soldiers embarked from their base at Newport also to sail against Portsmouth. But on March 16 Admiral Arbuthnot overtook the French at the mouth of the Chesapeake; the British defeated the French task force and forced it to return to Newport. At the same time, Arnold was superseded by Gen. William Phillips, who arrived at Portsmouth with 2,600 men. Then, in mid- and late April, the two raided Petersburg, Virginia, and burned a large amount of tobacco; they did the same at Manchester and Warwick, and burned and sank a host of ships that the Americans had been preparing at Osborne’s below Richmond.

When Cornwallis began his march north from Wilmington on April 25, the situation in Virginia was clearly auspicious for the British. Cornwallis’ and Phillips’ armies joined at Petersburg on May 20. Now, with reinforcements sent by Clinton, Cornwallis had a large force of 7,200 under his command at Petersburg; he was ready to roll.

By this time, however, relations between Clinton and Cornwallis had deteriorated even further. Properly worried about the French fleet, Clinton abandoned his plans for a Chesapeake offensive temporarily, and withdrew the bulk of Cornwallis’ forces to New York. From this base an attack on Philadelphia could again be launched, after which Clinton would return to the Chesapeake. The rest of Cornwallis’ force was to take up its base on the Chesapeake. But Cornwallis was determined on a Virginia offensive, and he ignored Clinton’s request. He saw the weaknesses of Clinton’s plan, which overlooked the immediate danger of attack by the French fleet on the Chesapeake, as well as the long-range folly of relying upon Tories. But Cornwallis had no real plan either; once he was in Virginia, with the public against him, what could he do with it?

Facing him at Petersburg was an army of 3,000 militia and Continentals at Richmond under Lafayette, with 500 new Continental recruits under Steuben on the upper James River at Point of Fork. After dispatching a force to reoccupy Portsmouth, Cornwallis moved north against Lafayette. With his inferior force, Lafayette realized that the best he could do was to imitate Greene’s guerrilla tactics in avoiding and harrying Cornwallis. But when Cornwallis advanced northward, Lafayette quickly retreated to the northwest; meanwhile, Cornwallis sent a unit against Point of Fork and Tarleton northwest against Charlottesville, to which Governor Jefferson and the Virginia legislature had retreated. They just managed to elude Tarleton and flee to the mountains, while Steuben fled southwest to the Staunton River. After some blundering, Cornwallis fell back toward Williamsburg near the coast. Meanwhile, to the north near Fredericksburg and then further south, Lafayette had received welcome reinforcements:
over 900 Continentals under Anthony Wayne, 600 mounted riflemen under Col. William Campbell, veteran of King’s Mountain, and Steuben’s force of 500, who had managed to elude the British. Swollen to 5,000 by mid-June, Lafayette’s force was able to pressure Cornwallis toward Williamsburg and harass him as he went, Cornwallis finally arriving there on June 25.

Harried by Lafayette’s excellent strategy and maneuvering (his military abilities had clearly matured over the course of the war), Cornwallis’ high hopes for the Virginia campaign had taken but a month to sour. At Williamsburg began the tangled and hopeless quarrel about strategy between Clinton and Cornwallis. The outcome of Clinton’s flurry of confused and contradictory directives was that Cornwallis should take up a defensive spot on the Chesapeake as a base for a future Chesapeake campaign, and Cornwallis moved his troops from Williamsburg to Portsmouth. During this march, Lafayette’s tactics slipped and both he and Wayne were drawn into a sharp but minor engagement at Green Spring on July 6. In spite of this defeat for the Americans, the disgruntled Cornwallis failed to follow up his advantage to try to destroy Lafayette’s army. Finally, pursuant to Clinton’s orders about the Chesapeake, he transferred his army at the end of July by sea from Portsmouth to Yorktown, at the mouth of the York River. There he sat, on the defensive, his bold Virginia campaign a shambles around him. He was obviously a sitting duck for a properly organized American force.

The War of the Revolution was now entering its final phase. The last phase of a revolutionary guerrilla war—which the American war had been in its victorious campaigns (in the New York and southern campaigns, if not in Washington’s series of disastrous pitched battles)—is always the most difficult. In this final phase, even though the war is going well, a final
coup de grâce
must be given to the cornered and dangerous enemy. Burgoyne’s worn-down army in its final phase had been neatly surrounded in the woods and trapped by a rising and gathering local militia. That was easy. But if the enemy is in a city—especially if that city is near the sea and can be defended by naval forces—the guerrilla army must, to execute its final coup, become a conventional force and fight in frontal attack. And that is not so easy. New York City, for example, was never to be recaptured by the American forces. It was true that Cornwallis, obliged to hold the Chesapeake, did not have the advantage of being in a city; but he
was
in a port. The key to besieging and surrounding him, therefore, lay in control of the sea, or rather the lower Chesapeake Bay outside Yorktown.

Washington had never given up his reckless dream of a frontal assault on New York City. On May 21, Washington arranged a conference at Wethersfield, Connecticut, with the Comte de Rochambeau, the head of the formidable French force that had occupied Newport since mid-1780.
Washington managed to persuade him to join him in an attack on New York. Accordingly, the French marched westward and joined Washington at White Plains, north of New York, in early July. But it soon became clear even to Washington that the French fleet was required for the attack. Admiral de Grasse wrote that he was bringing the French fleet and 3,000 French troops from the West Indies. He would be sailing on August 13, but to the Chesapeake and not to New York. De Grasse had been slowly influenced by Rochambeau’s reluctance about the New York scheme. It was now clear to everyone that Cornwallis at Yorktown should be the target of all the allied efforts, and Washington finally prepared to march the bulk of his force to Virginia.

There were only two ways Clinton could prevent the surrounding and finish of Cornwallis: he could follow Washington down and reinforce his colleague, or he could intercept and repulse de Grasse with the British fleet. De Grasse, with a firm grasp of the importance of the occasion, boldly decided to send his entire fleet to America, and to abandon the expected huge convoy from the West Indies to France. In contrast, the British admiral Rodney not only remained for months to plunder St. Eustatius at his leisure and so lost the precious opportunity to engage and cripple the French fleet, but also took several of his largest ships home to England. Instead of intercepting de Grasse, then, the British fleet was depleted, and sailed late to America.

As for Clinton, Washington fooled him until the very last moment; preparing to march with 5,000 of Rochambeau’s men and 2,000 of his own to Virginia, he made it look as if his forces were basing themselves at Chatham, New Jersey, for an attack on Staten Island. Maneuvering in this way all during the last week of August, Washington struck swiftly southward on August 29, leaving only 2,500 men to guard the Hudson. Clinton’s only hope of stopping Washington had been to race out and smash him in New Jersey, but he was completely duped and lost his last chance to save the day. In the meantime, de Grasse arrived at the mouth of the Chesapeake on August 30, landed his troops, and blockaded the mouths of the York and James rivers. The blockade of Yorktown had begun.

The British West Indies fleet had been left to Rear Adm. Sir Samuel Hood, but his depleted force could not now defeat de Grasse. The British still might have intercepted de Grasse, however, if Rear Adm. Thomas Graves, commanding the fleet at New York, had rushed south to join Hood and check the French. Instead, he had wandered ineffectually off Boston and waited passively for Hood to arrive at New York. Finally united, Hood and Graves came upon de Grasse at the entrance to the Chesapeake on September 5. The depleted British fleet had nineteen ships against de Grasse’s twenty-four. The British desperately needed a smashing
naval victory, but the French needed only a draw to maintain control of Chesapeake Bay. Graves missed several signals and passed up two good opportunities for a quick victory, and the French got their draw. Hood urged a further attack on the Chesapeake, and had Graves agreed, Cornwallis might have been saved. It was still possible for French Admiral Barras to have been prevented from joining de Grasse out of Newport with his siege equipment and eleven ships. The British fleet might have helped Cornwallis to break out of the siege by land. Even more important than these considerations, however, was the possibility that the British ships, blockaded in the Chesapeake, might be surrounded and captured themselves. And
that
would have meant, not just the loss of the war against the Americans, but the loss of the broader war against the French as well. The British, after all, had a worldwide empire to protect. In light of this, Graves’ decision to give up and return to New York was probably the prudent one, even though it doomed Cornwallis and the entire British effort in America.
*

De Grasse, in the meantime, used the French fleet to move most of the Washington-Rochambeau army from the upper Chesapeake to the James River by water, and by late September Washington’s army had joined Lafayette to besiege Yorktown. For his part, Clinton, having missed his chance at New Jersey, lacked the numbers to march to Virginia by land, and was prevented from relieving Cornwallis by the French fleet. Only the reinforced and refitted navy could go, but the navy was bogged down by poor morale and Graves’ sloth and indecision. On October 19, after a month of desperate pleas from Cornwallis, Clinton, the fleet, and 7,000 troops at last began to sail south in an effort to relieve the army at Yorktown.

Admiral Barras joined de Grasse on September 10, and the siege of Yorktown by land and sea began on September 28. The Franco-American forces were enormous. The huge French fleet, nearly 7,800 French troops, and over 8,800 Americans, of whom nearly 3,200 were newly gathered Virginia militia—a force as the Americans had not gathered since the beginning of the war—was pitted against Cornwallis’ army of only a little more than 7,000. Siege guns began their continual fire upon Yorktown on October 9, and the Franco-American forces were able to push Cornwallis inward and to move their own guns forward. Trying desperately to ferry his troops across the river to Gloucester on the night of October 16, Cornwallis was foiled by a storm. Finally his battered troops could take the bombardment no longer; Cornwallis proposed surrender terms on October 17, and surrendered his force two days later as the British band appropriately played “The World Turned Upside Down.” The southern
strategy was irrevocably over, and it became clear to the stunned and discouraged British that they could not hope to defeat the American rebellion.

At the last, it had been the French siege guns and the American artillery, wielded and commanded by Gen. Henry Knox, that had proved to be the decisive tactical stroke in forcing surrender. Failing this bombardment, Cornwallis would have been able to hold on until Clinton’s arrival, and it was at least possible that Clinton’s army and navy could have relieved Cornwallis. As it was, he could only turn back to New York. In the larger sense, however, it is doubtful that even a successful relief of Cornwallis could have accomplished much for British hopes of crushing the rebellion. The southern strategy was finished, and Clinton’s upper Chesapeake scheme was the only thing left to try. When it failed, Britain would have been left, albeit at some time later, as it was then: with only Charleston, Savannah, Wilmington, and New York City as outposts in the United States, and with no hope of advancing from them.

While the war, for all intents and purposes, was over after Yorktown, this was not known at the time, although everyone knew that the surrender was a staggering blow. For one thing, mopping-up operations were still needed in the lower South. After his strategic victory at Eutaw Springs, Greene had pushed the British into Charleston, but he was soon in heavy internal trouble. Encamped at the High Hills of the Santee, his militia departed, his hungry, unclothed, and unpaid Continentals began to threaten mutiny, and even to plot turning Greene over to the British. But with Cornwallis’ capture, American reinforcements could arrive; and Gen. Arthur St. Clair and a force of 2,000 Continentals marched south from Yorktown, driving the British garrison out of Wilmington and into Charleston, and mopped up South Carolina. Bands under William Washington and Harry Lee, meanwhile, incessantly harassed and helped pen the British in at Charleston. Wayne was detached from St. Clair’s force and moved into Georgia, mopping up Tory and Indian bands and penning the British in at Savannah. He continued pressing the British in Savannah while Greene did the same in Charleston, but the return of de Grasse’s fleet to the West Indies meant that the British could not be immediately conquered in either of these two cities.

*
See Donald E. Reynolds, “Ammunition Supply in Revolutionary Virginia,”
Virginia Magazine of History and Biography
(January 1965), pp. 56–77.