Being George Washington (21 page)

Suddenly there was a violent
CRACK!
from an exploding cannonball that had dropped out of the sky far too close to their position. Rochambeau had winced in pain as the explosion thumped against his chest
and burst in his ears, leaving him to feel like he’d been hit by a hammer upside the head. The percussion thundered along the trench, sliding dirt and sand over the edges and into the hole. Instinctively he had ducked below the trench, as dirt and muck rained down like a summer storm, coating Washington and all of his men with black rain.

A nearby chaplain took his hat off to examine it, his eyes wide in fear at having survived the exploding ball. He stared at the dirty, black-singed hat as if it were something otherworldly, something that carried far more significance than a piece of gear to cover his head.

Washington, however, had never diverted his eyes from his study of the British fortifications. It was as if the cannonball had never exploded, as if the force of the blast had not almost knocked him over, as if the sky had not just rained down a hundred pounds of dirt.

Finally the general turned to see the chaplain and the astonished look of fear upon his face. “Mr. Evans,” he smiled as he pointed toward the dirty hat, “you had better take that home to show your wife and children.”

Thinking on it, Rochambeau smiled, too. Then he adjusted his weight on the barrel to lean back against a rough pine post that held up one corner of the tent. In a moment of indulgence, he dropped his head and closed his eyes. If he slept, he didn’t know it, but eventually he felt a gentle nudge on his shoulder. Looking up, Washington was standing there. “One more survey of our progress before we lose the light,” he said.

Minutes later, the two men were standing near one of the earthen barricades piled up on the American side of the trench nearest the British armaments. Below them, dozens of trees had been felled, their branches sharpened to deadly sticks and braced at the bottom of the barricade to protect against a British assault. Glancing at the branches, Rochambeau knew they would never be used. Cornwallis was in a defensive posture only, clearly in no position to attack. Sensing movement beside him, he turned and watched in horror as Washington pulled his way up to the top of the barricade, exposing himself to the deadly fire. Overhead the eerie sound of cannons flew while occasional musket balls impacted the dirt around them. Rochambeau knew they were so close the British could easily make out Washington’s uniform. He imagined the
commotion along the British walls.
“Look there! Is that General Washington! Quick, men, gather fire!”

A nearby colonel rushed forward, pulling himself up the steep embankment. “Your Excellency!” he almost screamed, “Beg you sir, you must come down from this position.” He reached up to pull on Washington’s jacket, partly to pull the general down, partly to brace himself against falling back along the steep grade of dirt.

But Washington didn’t move.

The colonel pulled again, begging him to retreat. Washington turned and looked at him. “Colonel Cobb, if you are afraid, you have the liberty to step back,” he replied. Continuing his watch from his exposed position, Washington used the remaining light to survey the enemy’s position.

Knowing Washington would not retreat until he had seen what he had come to see, Rochambeau climbed up the earthen embankment and stood beside his friend, praying the sun had fallen enough to make it difficult for the enemy to target them directly—but knowing in his gut that it had not.

Washington pointed toward two stone barricades on his right. “We paid a heavy price for what we gained here,” he said.

Rochambeau nodded toward the redoubts that were now under their control. Two days before, Washington had sent his engineers to dig a second trench, this one a mere two hundred yards from the walls of Yorktown. The engineers had been torn to pieces by a brutal hail of fire from two British redoubts near the York River. Knowing he had to have the final trench, Washington ordered two divisions to take the fortifications. Before he had sent them out, he called his men together and gave them a rare battlefield speech in which he reminded them of their responsibility for bravery and the absolute necessity of taking the British strongholds.

Four hundred French troops had assailed the redoubt on the left. Four hundred Continentals, led by brazen Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Hamilton, had gone after the fortification on the right. Attacking on the night of October 14, the forces had charged the parapets with their bayonets at the ready. The hand-to-hand combat was brutal and frightening, but in the end, the allies captured the walls that Washington now surveyed.

“The battle is winding down now,” Washington said without turning. “A few more days, and it will end.”

Rochambeau didn’t answer. He wasn’t so sure.

“We’ve been showering the British with a fearsome and constant rain of cannonballs and fire. At the same time, General Cornwallis has spared no ball in his defenses. But he does not have a cache of unlimited ammunition. He must be getting desperate.”

“It would seem,” Rochambeau answered.

Washington waited, but Rochambeau did not say any more.

As they stood there, two men against the dying light, the British cannonballs and artillery seemed to fall silent. Rochambeau became more nervous. He knew the gunners were adjusting their aim toward them and he reached out to his friend. “Come, sir, we must climb down now,” he said.

To his great surprise, Washington actually listened.

Two nights later, in sheer desperation, Cornwallis attempted to lead an evacuation across the York River in whatever small boats he could muster. Apparently, God did not intend to let them go so easily, as a violent storm appeared out of nowhere. In a rush of ferocious wind and rain, the small British boats were swept downstream.

The next morning, the allies continued raining down an unending hail of bombs and cannonballs. Relentless. Without mercy. It was noise and fear and death from every angle. The British soldiers cowered in any place of refuge they could find: along their decimated stone walls, in every trench, under any log or tree. There was nothing they could do to stop the allied forces. Most of the British troops had only one hope left: that somehow they might live.

Sometime later that morning, Cornwallis shot the last of his ammunition. An eerie quiet settled over the British lines. You could almost hear men breathing—at least the ones who were still able to do so.

About the same time as the white flag was being raised in Yorktown, the proud British fleet finally sailed out of the New York harbor, the repairs to their ships from the damage inflicted in the Chesapeake having taken almost two weeks longer than expected.

The fleet arrived at Yorktown a week too late.

October 20, 1781

Yorktown

General Cornwallis knew that this would be one of the most painful days of his esteemed life. Surrendering to the enemy was simply unimaginable. He would not lower himself, his pride, the dignity of his great nation, to lift his own sword and give it to the leader of this scrawny bunch of ill-reputable and illiterate men who called themselves an army!

He would die of shame if he were forced to do it.

So he sent one of his men instead.

The brigadier general selected by Cornwallis attempted to surrender to General Rochambeau, who refused, pointing to General Washington, the supreme commander of the allied forces. General Washington also refused to accept the sword of surrender from the deputy, realizing it was an attempt by Cornwallis to belittle what he and his army had accomplished. He tartly directed the British brigadier general to one of his deputies instead.

Soon after, eight thousand defeated troops marched between parallel lines of allied soldiers to surrender their arms. Many of the British soldiers were openly weeping. Instead of handing over their weapons, some smashed them against the ground and sullied off.

Many of the American soldiers were weeping, too. But they weren’t crying in defeat or fury—it was with joy. They fell into each other’s arms, too overcome to even talk as an uncontrollable rush of laughing, singing and dancing swept through the ranks.

Everything had just changed. While the rebels knew that the war was not over, a victory was far more important for their morale than for anything else. After all, that morale, that innate thirst for freedom that had propelled them into this war in the first place, was the patriot’s greatest weapon—and it would ultimately prove to be the one thing that their enemy could not match.

A
s British troops marched out of their fortifications to surrender to Washington’s army at Yorktown—a moment that was unthinkable only a few months earlier—the English military band began to perform the song “The World Turned Upside Down.”

Listen to me and you shall hear,

news hath not been this thousand year;

Since Herod, Caesar, and many more,

you never heard the like before.

It could not have been a more fitting choice. The world had, in fact, been turned upside down. And nothing would ever be the same again.

Yorktown makes for a dramatic war story, but its real importance is that it proves that David really can beat Goliath. It is, when read in the proper
light, the ultimate motivational story for those of us who feel like we are up against insurmountable odds and that America has been set on an inevitable course toward collapse.

But before we can appreciate the lessons of Yorktown we first have to understand how Washington pulled off the victory.

As with any complex military action, secrecy was of the utmost importance. Washington’s plans had been undermined so many times before by security leaks and British spies that he was determined to stop even the tiniest trickle of information from leaking out.

Washington’s plans were kept so close to the vest that his own troops didn’t know when or where they’d be marching. Bets were made in camp—would they attack Clinton in New York or Cornwallis in Virginia? To confuse things even further, Washington leaked selected bits of intelligence that were either false or of no consequence. Disinformation was key. Surprise, he knew, could be his most effective weapon.

Through a controlled stream of bogus intelligence, Washington had Clinton and his British advisors convinced that the Americans were going to sneak through New Jersey, then come upon New York from the rear. Washington actually prepared a siege camp on Staten Island strictly as a diversionary ploy. Workers patched and smoothed roads while French troops across the way in New Jersey built huge ovens capable of baking bread for thousands of hungry soldiers.

Clinton took the bait. He was frightened into action and had Cornwallis send him two thousand men as reinforcements. The senior British commander was so intently concentrating his attention on Staten Island that Washington and Rochambeau were able to march their troops quietly out of New Jersey without being detected. Three days passed before Clinton even realized they were gone. As a result, Cornwallis received no warning that Washington was coming to Yorktown.

When General Greene heard that Washington’s army was trekking south, he was shocked. “We have been beating the bush,” he exclaimed, “and the General has come to catch the bird.”

Although Yorktown is usually remembered as the pivotal land battle of the revolution, the outcome was decided as much upon the briny waters of the Chesapeake Bay as it was upon the marshlands around the heavily fortified port. Fed by more than 150 rivers and streams, the
Chesapeake is as narrow as three miles in some places and as wide as thirty miles in others. Its currents and tides are hazardous and unpredictable, with shoals, eddies, and sandbars making navigation a real challenge.

Hearing that the French fleet under Admiral de Grasse had left the French Indies, British rear admiral Sir Thomas Graves set sail from New York with nineteen warships to meet them. With the confidence of a man who had rarely been challenged, Graves fully expected to easily handle whatever French forces he might encounter. That cockiness—a disposition that Washington never displayed—might have led directly to Graves’s downfall.

When Graves arrived at the mouth of the Chesapeake, he was surprised to see de Grasse’s fleet already anchored in the bay. He was also surprised to see that it was much larger than he was told to expect. But if his cockiness waned at the site of the French fleet, he certainly didn’t show it.

De Grasse immediately ordered twenty-four of his warships to prepare for battle, maneuvering them into position to engage the British fleet.

The deadly dance of naval warfare had begun.

After each admiral positioned his forces as best as he could, the two sailed toward each other in a long line of warships. For two hours, cannons fired. Smoke and shot filled the air with confusion and death. At one point, two enemy ships were so close that the French considered a boarding action. The winds shifted, putting the British at a sudden disadvantage. They continued to fire, but did so from longer range, afraid to move in for a witheringly close exchange of fire. As the sun set over the Chesapeake Bay, the warring, wounded navies broke off from each other to assess the damage.