Authors: Barbara W. Tuchman
As if to allow the joy and relief at Chester no unalloyed hour, Washington and Rochambeau, as they rode southward, heard a distant rumble of gunfire from the Bay. It carried a somber message: that the fleets of de Grasse and the British had met and opened combat. Stricken in suspense, the generals looked at each other, not daring to speak aloud their question. Which fleet had prevailed?
The outcome was, in fact, to be the turning point of the war and, it might be said, of the 18th century, for it proved to be the enabling factor of the rebels’ Yorktown campaign.
In the Bay both fleets had made their entrance at the foot of the Capes. De Grasse, arriving on August 30, had anchored his main fleet in Lynnhaven Bay, off Cape Henry. Graves, entering on September 5, had come in at the foot of Cape Charles where the mouths of the York
and the James rivers flowing down past Yorktown open onto the Bay.
Aghast upon entering the Chesapeake, Graves saw, instead of the twelve to fourteen ships he had expected de Grasse to bring, the great array of de Grasse’s fleet of 28 ships of the line plus some frigates and gunboats. Against this superior force, Graves had, however, the superior position in that he was sailing in regular procession with the wind behind him, while de Grasse, after the knotty business of landing his troops to join Lafayette, was trying to maneuver his ships out of the harbor into the open sea where he would have room to form a battle line. In seeking combat, his purpose was to deny the Bay to the British and prevent the entrance of a force to aid or rescue Cornwallis. Graves’s purpose was, of course, the reverse: to keep the sea-lanes open to Cornwallis. His opportunity to overwhelm the French was, according to naval critics, ideal. He was running down before the wind in good order, while the enemy in straggling succession was laboring to negotiate the uneasy passage around Cape Henry to the open sea. If he had attacked the disconnected French van one by one, he could have destroyed them. But that was not the tactical formula of
Fighting Instructions
, and Graves was a conformist to the code, and a product of the Royal Navy’s greatest self-inflicted wound, the lost initiative left by the execution of Admiral Byng and the court-martial of Admiral Mathews. He knew that his duty under
Fighting Instructions
was to form line ahead in a battle line parallel to that of the enemy. Because the enemy had no line, Graves was at a loss. From one o’clock to 3:30 p.m., with the wind in rapid changes of direction, first in favor of the French and then of the English, Graves struggled to fulfill the formula, and by the time he raised the signal to engage, he had lost his advantage. While hoisting the blue-and-white-checkered flag that signaled “bear down,” meaning that every captain should turn toward the enemy and attack the nearest individually, he kept the line ahead signal, which supersedes all others, still flying from his mizzenmast. “Bear down” would mean there would be no line, while the superior signal said to stay with it. The puzzled captains obeyed the superior signal. Keeping their line, they were brought up against the French at an angle instead of parallel, with the result that only their lead ships—part of Graves’s force, instead of the whole—could engage. Cannon boomed and French gunnery told. Four of Graves’s ships were so badly damaged as to be useless to him for renewing action next morning. For the next two days, September 6 and 7, while carpenters and riggers made what repairs they could at sea, the
two fleets watched each other without engaging. They broke contact next day with no clear-cut victory or defeat discernible, yet with import that would place the Battle of the Bay among the decisive sea combats of history. Graves’s fleet was damaged and dispersed; de Grasse’s fleet held command of the Bay. The old culprit, “misunderstood” signals—the word was Graves’s in his subsequent explanation to Parliament—had mangled yet another naval battle, although in fact the signals had been understood only too well.
On September 9, de Grasse precipitated a resolution by sailing his fleet back into the Bay to make it his domain. At the same time, de Barras, the critical addition to the contest, slipped in from Newport with his siege guns and his beef and his eight fresh ships.
Again at a loss, Graves, as senior naval officer, asked for a Council of War, which gave its opinion that, under the circumstances of his damaged ships and the enemy’s increased numbers, he could not give “
effectual succour” to the garrison at Yorktown. Admiral Hood, as Graves’s junior, rashly advised that Graves should re-enter the Bay himself to contest the French dominion, although his persuasion was not eloquent or forceful enough to take effect.
Faced with the question often met by commanders in a tight spot, whether discretion is not the better part of valor, Graves concluded that it was, and decided that his proper course was to take his fleet back to New York for repairs to fit it for return to Yorktown. This he did, leaving the French by sea and land holding closed the gateways for either aid or exit to Cornwallis.
Cornwallis’ reaction to the enemy landing at his doorstep was no less static than Clinton’s at the Hudson. The same absence of combative response, almost of laziness, marked both occasions. When de Grasse first arrived in the Bay, his initial act, before the naval battle with Graves, had been to ferry his 3,000 land troops up the river to be disembarked to join and reinforce Lafayette’s force facing the British stationed on Gloucester Point, across the river from Yorktown. Cornwallis had seen in the Bay the size of the fleet sent against him, which he overestimated at thirty to forty ships. As they detached one by one to come upriver to disembark their troops, and the French were caught in the scramble of landing when it would have been difficult for them to defend themselves, Cornwallis, whether in lassitude or absurd overconfidence, did not attack. “
It was a pleasant surprise for our troops on landing,” recalled Karl Gustaf Tornquist, the Swedish lieutenant serving with de Grasse,
in his memoir, “that Cornwallis did not move in the least to hinder them, since indeed a single cannon could have caused much damage in the narrow and in many places winding river. Instead he was content to draw nearer to York, destroying everything which lay in his way, not sparing defenceless women and children.” Even when the newcomers were combined with Lafayette’s force of 5,000, Cornwallis’ 7,800 men approximately equaled them. His inactivity at this point was due to his expectation of relief from New York, assured in Clinton’s letters, though his failure to attack the hampered foe seems strangely unenterprising.
Without an observer stationed on the Capes with a prearranged signal, the outcome of the Battle of the Capes (as the combat in the Bay is sometimes called) remained unknown to Washington and Rochambeau for four silent days until scouts reported that the French fleet was still afloat in the Bay and the English had vanished over the horizon. Even then the generals could not rid their minds of a possible British return, which might cancel the rising hope that if pressed on land, Cornwallis’ surrender was now a realistic possibility, bringing American victory with all its Allied objectives.
The army, still slowly trudging along its rough thoroughfare, would take another week before the vanguard could reach Williamsburg and complete the last ten miles to stand before Yorktown.
During these crucial days, Cornwallis, too, had caught the strange contagion of passivity so foreign to him that lately had afflicted his colleagues. After learning of the outcome of the Battle of the Bay he had the time, which he did not use, during the slow approach of the enemy to open a land retreat for his about-to-be beleaguered army. The least reconnaissance of Lafayette’s little army standing opposite to him at Gloucester would have shown that it was not overpowering.
A hard-hitting offensive could have broken through. He did not attempt it. As William Smith, Clinton’s intelligence officer in New York, perceived, a spark had gone out. What quenched it is hard to say, unless it was a developing sense that America was slipping from the British grip and would not be arrested. Cornwallis’ surprising inaction may be charged to Clinton’s repeated assurance of reinforcements coming to his aid, for it was military tradition that a commander did not enter combat before an awaited reinforcement should arrive to add to his strength. After learning of Washington’s passage through Philadelphia, Clinton corrected his first mistaken assumption that Washington was headed
for Staten Island to attack New York. He wrote again to Cornwallis, on September 2, to say it was now clear that the army was marching southward with attack on Yorktown in mind. “
You may be assured,” Clinton wrote, that if Yorktown were attacked, “I shall either endeavor to reinforce the army under your command
by all the means within the compass of my power
or make every possible diversion in your Lordship’s favor.” An even more specific promise, dated September 6, came by express boat. “
I think the best way to relieve you is to join you as soon as possible with all the Force that can be spared from hence which is about 4,000 men.” These were the reinforcements he had put aboard Graves’s ships when in August he had received the boatload of 2,400 Hessian mercenaries, which relaxed his obsessions about the defense of New York and allowed him the startling generosity of offering to let go 4,000 of his own men. “
They are already embarked,” he wrote, without mentioning that they were still in port. He added an assurance that anyone might have been justified in taking as definite from any commander other than the hesitant Clinton. They would sail “with large reinforcements on October 5” … the instant he was notified by Graves that “we may venture.”
No hesitations or “maybes” qualified these commitments, and however little confidence Cornwallis had in Clinton as a bold or venturesome commander, he had every reason to expect prompt and effective support. Knowing Clinton’s vacillation, his reliance on the promises may have been ill-judged, but even before he received these assurances, which took two weeks to come down from New York, Cornwallis, strangely for a soldier known for his pugnacity and verve, had not taken or prepared any offensive action against the slow pedestrian approach of the enemy, and none to open a path for an escape route for his own army in the event that siege was in store for him.
When the Allied army marching down from Philadelphia arrived at Head of the Elk in Maryland on September 6, they found only empty wharves, once again. No boats awaited them, only more miles of sore feet. Washington had written ahead to Maryland friends and officials to collect fishing boats and everything else available, but he was told when he came that British cruisers had seized or destroyed every vessel of useful size on the Chesapeake. In bitter conference, the generals agreed to embark on the few boats at hand about 2,000 troops, 1,200 French and 800 Americans, and send the rest of the army on foot down the road to Baltimore 55 miles away. A greater asset than boats was money.
Hard money came from Robert Morris, borrowed from friends and from the French on the pledge of his personal credit and shipped from Boston and Philadelphia. The sight of the money in silver half crowns rolled out of the kegs so that the men could see it won over the mutinous troops, wrote von Closen, “and
raised spirits to the required level.” According to a Major William Popham of a New York regiment, “
this day will be famous in the annals of history for being the first in which the troops of the United States received one month’s pay in specie.” Covering twenty miles a day on this stretch, the men reached Baltimore on September 12. Here at last they found water transport—in ships sent by de Grasse and in some others at Annapolis. Five frigates and nine transports took them down the Bay to be disembarked at Jamestown, on the James River just across from York.
At this point the pressure of the last days and weeks caught up with Washington. In spite of the felt need for haste, lest Cornwallis escape or make the attack on Lafayette that he should have made long since, Washington gave himself a holiday to visit his wife at Mount Vernon, his treasured home and lands sixty miles up the Potomac, which he had not seen, nor his wife, in six and a half years. The pull was one he could not resist, although delay added to his abiding fear that Cornwallis might move out of the trap before it could be sprung. This was Washington’s greatest anxiety. From Mount Vernon he wrote to Lafayette, “
I hope you will keep Lord Cornwallis safe without provisions or forage until we arrive.” Lafayette maintained the barrier, though not against any test by Cornwallis, who made no move to break out at this time when he could have done so or, indeed, as General in command of the position, he should have done so. Washington wanted to show off his fine place to the French and return the hospitality they had given at their tables to the Americans at Newport. To anyone else a hurried ride of sixty miles each way would have seemed too far, but for Washington’s energetic spirit it was feasible. With his personal servant and an aide, accompanied by Rochambeau and his staff, Washington left Head of the Elk on September 8 and galloped most of the way, reaching Baltimore in one day. Rising at dawn the next morning, the General and his two companions reached their destination as twilight dimmed the pillared white house on the hill. Unable to keep up the pace, the French followed behind. After Washington entertained the French company for two days, they rode back, stopping for a night’s rest at Fredericks-burg. On September 14 they reached Williamsburg to meet Lafayette
and Saint-Simon’s regiments and a vanguard of American Continentals encamped there. Here the good news that de Grasse was in command of the Bay and the British fleet gone was confirmed, mixed as always with trouble in the old problem of American shortages. Both food and ammunition for the army had dwindled to thinnest levels. As so often before, the foot soldiers who fought the war for American Independence were going hungry, and the prospect rose of the guns falling silent for lack of ball and powder just when they were needed to sustain a steady fire on the British garrison. Despite a good harvest in Maryland and Virginia, provisions lacked, owing to disorganized transportation and an incompetent quartermaster. Tornquist described the Williamsburg country when he passed through it as “
very fertile, an average crop-yield gives sufficient sustenance for its owner the next year. Except for this advantage these inhabitants could never have withstood a six years’ war; for although 12,000 acres in the neighborhood have been fallow each year for lack of farmers, who at the age of fifteen were sent to camp; yet now during a severe siege they had sufficient provisions to supply an army of 15,000 men and a fleet of 45 sails, in spite of all the ravages a bitter enemy had perpetrated during his march through the country.”