Stephenson M. Patriot Battles. How the War of Independence Was Fought
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“handsomely in a pudding bag” 349
September he could confidently report to Clinton, “I am now working
hard at the redoubts of the place. The army is not very sickly. Provisions
for six weeks.”
15
The Virginian Brigadier General George Weedon
saw it differently: “We have got him handsomely in a pudding bag.”
16
Cornwallis would last exactly one day short of six weeks.
If the British were in a dark hole in the early months of 1781, the
Americans were not much better off. January was not an auspicious open
-
ing of the year. On New Year’s Day the Pennsylvania Line (“reduced”
says Dr. Thacher, “almost to despair”)
17
camped near Morristown, muti-
nied, killed two officers, and set out for Philadelphia to seek redress
from Congress, only to be headed off at Trenton by a delegation from
Congress who conceded their demands. On 20 January the New Jersey
Line at Pompton followed suit but were treated much more harshly (two
were executed). In the same month Washington announced, “There is
not a single farthing in the military chest.” It was, he said, “an awful cri-
sis.”
18
To the French it looked as though their wager might not pay off.
The patriot nag on whom they had placed their bet was emaciated and
seemed to be running in the wrong direction.
Washington, however, for all his anxiety, saw the strategic
situation clearly and hopefully. The pieces were all poised to fall into
place, if only the timing could be orchestrated. He wrote to de Grasse
from Williamsburg on 25 September, begging him to stay on in the
Chesapeake Bay: “The enterprise against York under the protection of
your Ships is as certain as any military operation can be rendered by a
decisive superiority of strength and means; that it is a fact reducible to
calculation.”
19
He was entitled to his optimism. The Franco-American
army stood at close to 17,000; Cornwallis had about 8,000 men.
20
Cornwallis was beginning to sweat. On 23 September Clinton
received two letters from him (both written on the sixteenth). The first
calmly rejected the risk of a “desperate” breakout for the following
reason: “Admiral Digby is hourly expected and promise[s] every
exertion to help me.”
21
The other, written in the fuller knowledge of de
Grasse’s and de Barras’s juncture, threw him into despair: “This place
is in no state of defense. If you cannot relieve me very soon, you must
be prepared for the worst.”
22
Clinton replied that a rescue mission was
patriot battles 350
being assembled in New York and that “there is every hope [it] shall
start from hence the 5th of October.”
23
On 28 September French and American forces moved down from
Williamsburg, effectively sealing Cornwallis off. The siege had begun.
Two days later Cornwallis abandoned his outer defenses, for which he
was much criticized both at the time (Clinton thought it extraordinary
that “such works in such a position” should have been given up “without
a conflict”) and subsequently. Actually, given the odds against him, it
was sensible, not to say inevitable, that Cornwallis should contract to a
smaller perimeter.
Yorktown
28 September–19 October 1781
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“handsomely in a pudding bag” 351
It was as Washington had predicted to de Grasse. Without naval
support Cornwallis was doomed. The rigorous timetable of the siege
ground on relentlessly. The French, particularly, were expert at siege
warfare; after all it had been a Frenchman, Sébastien Le Prestre de
Vauban (1633–1707), who had codified the science in the latter part of
the seventeenth century. On 6 October the allies opened the first parallel
(trench) at the prescribed distance of 600–800 yards (beyond the reach of
small arms). On the eighth the heavy-caliber siege guns opened up, and
the ability of the British to respond was suppressed by overwhelming
fire; two days later the second parallel was begun.
The night of the fourteenth saw a synchronized attack against two
key British redoubts, No. 9 and No. 10, on the southern front. The comte
de Deux-Ponts led 400 men of the Deux-Ponts and Gâtinais regiments
24
against redoubt No. 9. The fighting was vicious, and after the French
had taken the strongpoint over one-quarter of their men were dead
or wounded.
25
Colonel Alexander Hamilton led the American attack
on redoubt No. 10; because he employed ax-wielding pioneers to hack
through the abatis, the infantrymen were able to get into the defenses
much more quickly and without the high casualties suffered by the
French.
With the two redoubts now incorporated into the second parallel,
the artillery cordon tightened and the Anglo-German army in Yorktown
had to absorb a fearful hammering: “We dare not show a gun to their
old batteries,” wrote Cornwallis to Clinton. “Experience has shown that
our fresh earthen works do not resist their powerful artillery, so that we
shall soon be exposed to an assault in ruined works, in a bad position,
and with weakened numbers. The safety of the place is, therefore, so
precarious that I cannot recommend that the fleet and the army should
run great risque in endeavouring to save us.”
26
Death in the British enclave was profligate and gruesome. Major
Charles Cochrane, who had arrived as a messenger from New York
on 10 October, asked to be allowed to fire a gun and, “anxious to see
its effect, looked over to observe it, when his head was carried off by
a cannon ball.” Hundreds of dead horses lay on the beach and washed
around in the shallows of the bay. Johann Conrad Döhla, a private in the
patriot battles 352
Ansbach-Bayreuth regiment, described in his diary how “the bombs and
cannon balls hit many inhabitants and negroes of the city, and marines,
sailors, and soldiers. One saw men lying nearly everywhere who were
mortally wounded and whose heads, arms, and legs had been shot off.”
By the night of the sixteenth the American and French batteries were
so close to the British line they “could have thrown a stone into it,”
recorded Döhla.
27
There was a valiant but forlorn-hope counterattack on 16 October
into the second parallel by about 350 Guards under Lieutenant Colonel
Robert Abercrombie. A few guns were spiked but were soon back in
action. That night Cornwallis tried to ferry his army over the channel
to Gloucester Point, from where he thought he might make a breakout
north back up into Maryland, maybe all the way back to Pennsylvania
or even New York where he could link up with Clinton. It would have
been a desperate undertaking even if all the cards fell his way. But a
terrific storm came down that night, and Cornwallis was left with a
busted flush. Those troops that did get across, for some reason not easy
to understand, were recalled. Perhaps it was a matter of honor. As
Cornwallis explained to John Simcoe, “the whole of the army” would
“share one fate.”
28
In any event, it was highly unlikely that an escape
could have been effected through Gloucester. Döhla recorded that
when the English light infantry returned from Gloucester they “said it
was impossible to break out there, because all the surrounding country
was strongly occupied and fortified by the enemy. Also a cordon had
been drawn around the entire region by several squadrons of French
Hussars, so that not the least thing could enter or leave.”
29
On the morning of the seventeenth Cornwallis went to the most
forward point in the center of the line. After observing the enemy
positions he made up his mind immediately. That afternoon a British
drummer boy and an officer emerged from the British lines beating
for parley. By the nineteenth surrender terms had been agreed on, and
General O’Hara, substituting for the sick Cornwallis, performed the
lugubrious duty of offering Cornwallis’s sword. The grand occasion
was fumbled, even slightly farcical. By some accounts
30
O’Hara tried
to offer the sword to Rochambeau and was sent on to Washington,
“handsomely in a pudding bag” 353
who, in turn, sent him on like a penitent schoolboy to General Lincoln,
who, as Washington’s second-in-command, was O’Hara’s counterpart
in rank. Of course, Washington, always punctilious about these things,
was following military etiquette, but Lincoln, who had been humiliated
at the fall of Charleston in May 1780 by being denied the honors of
war (to march out with colors unfurled, playing a march from the
victor’s repertoire), must have taken some satisfaction in seeing those
same ignominies laid on Cornwallis. The British came out with colors
unfurled, the fifes and drums playing “a slow march.” (If it was “The
World Turned Upside Down,” as legend has it, there is no hard
evidence.)
The defeated marched between the ranks of French and American
troops to a “great heath,” where they grounded their weapons. Captain
Samuel Graham of the hard-fighting 71st Foot described how “some
cursed, some went so far as to shed tears, while one man, a corporal,
who stood near me, embraced his forelock and then threw it to the
ground, exclaiming, ‘May you never get so good a master again!’”
31
The day the British and German soldiery trudged into captivity
(the officers enjoyed the privilege of their class—parole), the now
utterly redundant “rescue” fleet put out from Sandy Point, and two
men sat down to write letters. Cornwallis’s, to Clinton, began, “I have
the mortification to inform your Excellency . . .” Washington’s, to
Congress, began, “Sir, I have the Honor to inform Congress . . .”
introduction
1. Christopher Duffy, The Military Experience in the Age of Reason, p. 206.
2. George F. Scheer and Hugh Rankin, Rebels and Redcoats, p. 447.
3. Christopher Ward, The War of the Revolution, p. 92.
4. The similarities, both large and small, are intriguing. First, they were both
monarchs (or, in George W. Bush’s case, monarchical). In fact George III would
have envied President Bush’s power. He would certainly have appreciated the
environment created by the presidential courtiers that so reassuringly insulated the
president from embarrassing contact with hoi polloi. Drifting, for example, in the
regal plush of Air Force One, high above devastated New Orleans in 2005, the
president could affect a jocular detachment of the “let-them-eat-cake” variety: a
sort of Marie Antoinette in flyboy getup, if that can be imagined. Both Georges
held sincere religious conviction. Neither could be accused of intellectualism. They
knew who they were, by God, and were damned well pleased with it. With the
muscular self-confidence of those untroubled by introspection they believed in
sticking to their guns. If they had been admirals they would have gone down with
the ship, standing stiffly to attention and saluting smartly. Yet in some way they
lacked arrogance; both had a childlike egotism that was genuinely confused, hurt
even, by criticism. They were both widely ridiculed (“Farmer George” and Alfred
E. Neuman, respectively) and because of this ridicule, their passionate attachment
to hereditary position and power was underestimated (or “misunderestimated,”
in Bush’s case). They both truly enjoyed being associated with the military and
loved dressing the part, although neither had been anywhere close to a battle. Their
fathers, however, had had distinguished combat records, which may account in
part for the sons’ compensatory aggressiveness when it came to fighting their own
NOTES
notes 356
wars. Finally, they were both happiest when amiably bumbling around on their
estates—an uncomplicated joy in a vexingly complicated world.
5. John Shy, quoted in Piers Macksey, The War for America, p. xxi.
6. R. Arthur Bowler, Logistics and the Failure of the British Army in America, 1775–
1783, p. 239.
7. Charles Royster, A Revolutionary People at War, p. 116.
8. “Lastly, there was always the fear of missile attack. Most infantry knew of the
damage inflicted even to armored men by well-trained slingers, archers, and
javelin throwers. There was no desire to stay still
. . . . Running the last 200 yards of
no-man’s land, as the hoplites at Marathon showed, limited such exposure to attack
until the general cover of the protective melee could be reached.” Victor Davis
Hanson, The Western Way of War: Infantry Battle in Classical Greece, p. 140.
9. Hanson, The Western Way of War, p. 112, citing the nineteenth-century historian H.
Frohlich’s analysis of wounds in the Iliad.
10. Jonathan Gregory Rossie, The Politics of Command in the American Revolution,
p. 80.
1. “a choaky mouthful”: the american soldier
1. C. F. Adams, The Works of John Adams, vol. 3, p. 4.
2. Charles Lesser, The Sinews of Independence, p. xii.
3. Don Higginbotham, The War of American Independence, p. 10.
4. James Kirby Martin and Mark Edward Lender, A Respectable Army, p. 16.
5. John Shy, Toward Lexington, p. 13.
6. Charles Patrick Neimeyer, America Goes to War, p. 11.
7. Don Higginbotham, George Washington and the American Military Tradition, p. 26.
8. Ibid., p. 25.
9. Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution, p. 57.
10. Robert A. Gross, The Minutemen and Their World, p. 71.
11. Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution, p. 118.
12. Jonathan Gregory Rossie, The Politics of Command in the American Revolution, p. 27.
Wolfe to Lord George Sackville, 7 August 1758; quoted in Shy, Toward Lexington,
p. 416.
13. Rossie, The Politics of Command, p. 27.
14. Daniel J. Boorstin, The Americans, p. 366.
15. Charles Knowles Bolton, The Private Soldier Under Washington, p. 131.
16. Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution, p. 27.
17. See Henry Steele Commager and Richard B. Morris, eds., The Spirit of Seventy-Six,
p. 808.
18. Higginbotham, The War of American Independence, p. 7.
19. Rossie, The Politics of Command, p. 63.
notes 357
20. Benjamin Rush to John Adams, 1 October 1777, quoted in Charles Royster, A
Revolutionary People at War, p. 115.
21. Higginbotham, The War of American Indepencence, p. 111.
22. Ibid., p. 21.
23. Commager and Morris, The Spirit of Seventy-Six, p. 482.
24. Piers Macksey, The War for America, 1775–1783, p. 79.
25. Rossie, The Politics of Command, p. 27.
26. Boorstin, The Americans, p. 369.
27. John C. Dann, ed., The Revolution Remembered, p. 218. It may well have been this
experience that led Greene to keep what remained of the North Carolina militia in
reserve during the battle of Hobkirk’s Hill, reversing what had been his preferred
practice of using militia as a first-line buffer, with his Continentals behind them to
stiffen a few backbones.
28. Higginbotham, The War of American Independence, p. 5.
29. Sir John Fortescue, History of the British Army (1899–1930), vol. 4, p. 185, quoted in
Richard Holmes, Redcoat, p. 100.
30. Higginbotham, George Washington and the American Tradition, p. 23.
31. John Rhodehamel, ed., The American Revolution, p. 752.
32. Christopher Ward, The War of the Revolution, p. 50.
33. Richard D. Brown, ed., Major Problems in the Era of the American Revolution, 1760–
1791, p. 196.
34. Martin and Lender, A Respectable Army, p. 46.
35. Bolton, The Private Soldier, p. 232.
36. Rossie, The Politics of Command, p. 19.
37. William Moultrie, Memoirs of the Revolution (1802), quoted in Royster, A
Revolutionary People, p. 322.
38. Rhodehamel, The American Revolution, p. 619.
39. John Buchanan, The Road to Guilford Courthouse, p. 140.
40. Ibid., p. 125.
41. George F. Scheer and Hugh F. Rankin, Rebels and Redcoats, p. 176.
42. Rhodehamel, The American Revolution, p. 223.
43. Scheer and Rankin, Rebels and Redcoats, p. 408.
44. Boorstin, The Americans, p. 369.
45. Ward, The War of the Revolution, p. 756.
46. Scheer and Rankin, Rebels and Redcoats, p. 445.
47. Ibid., p. 447.
48. Bolton, The Private Soldier, p. 43.
49. Rhodehamel, The American Revolution, p. 205.
50. Buchanan, The Road to Guilford Courthouse, p. 123.
51. Ward, The War of the Revolution, p. 383.
52. Neimeyer, America Goes to War, p. 127.
53. Bolton, The Private Soldier
, p. 30.
notes 358
54. George Washington to Joseph Reed, 28 November 1775. Quoted in Erna Risch,
Supplying Washington’s Army, p. 6.
55. Higginbotham, George Washington and the American Military Tradition, p. 89.
56. Walter Edgar, Partisans and Redcoats, p. 43.
57. Joseph Plumb Martin, A Narrative of a Revolutionary Soldier, p. 19.
58. John Adams to Joseph Reed, 7 July 1776; quoted in Neimeyer, America Goes to War,
p. 112.
59. John Shy, “Hearts and Minds: the Case of ‘Long Bill’ Scott,” in Brown, Major
Problems, p. 211.
60. Higginbotham, The War of American Independence, p. 392.
61. Rhodehamel, The American Revolution, p. 173.
62. Higginbotham, The War of American Independence, p. 394.
63. Edgar, Partisans and Redcoats, p. 43.
64. Allen Bowman, The Morale of the American Revolutionary Army, p. 13.
65. Neimeyer, America Goes to War, p. 26.
66. Royster, A Revolutionary People, p. 69.
67. Not without opposition. The county committee of Cumberland County wailed,
“All Apprentices and servants are the Property of their masters and mistresses, and
every mode of depriving such masters and mistresses . . . is a Violation of the rights
of mankind” (Higginbotham, The War of American Independence, p. 394).
68. Ibid., p. 314.
69. Royster, A Revolutionary People, p. 133.
70. Ward, The War of the Revolution, p. 614.
71. Bowman. The Morale of the American Revolutionary Army, p. 20.
72. Elijah Fisher’s Journal, 10 February 1779 (1880 edition), pp. 14–22.
73. This quote and most of the information on wages and cost of living come from
Jackson Turner Main, The Social Structure of Revolutionary America.
74. Neimeyer, America Goes to War, pp. 16, 19, 21.
75. Ibid., pp. 20, 35, 37.
76. Ibid., p. 14.
77. Marion Balderston and David Syrett, eds., The Lost War, p. 33.
78. Neimeyer, America Goes to War, pp. 28, 40.
79. A. Goodwin, ed., The New Cambridge Modern History, vol. 8, The American and
French Revolutions, 1763–93 (1965), p. 514.
80. Neimeyer, America Goes to War, p. 48.
81. For comparison: The population of the United States in 2005 was 296 million,
of whom about 40 million (or 13 percent) were African-American (22 percent in
1775); the population of Britain during the war was about 11 million.
82. Higginbotham, The War of American Independence, p. 389. The British historian
Piers Macksey puts the numbers somewhat higher: “If one supposed that a quarter
of the white population [he assumes the overall white population was 1.9 million]
could bear arms there would be about 450,000 [actually, 475,000]. From this total