Yorktown in October 1781 and How a French Fleet Helped Trap Cornwallis

Every American schoolchild learns that Washington won at Yorktown. Ask the same child what the French navy did that autumn and watch the room go quiet. The quiet is the problem, because without the French navy there is no Yorktown, and without Yorktown the Revolution might have gone on for years more or ended in a negotiated half-measure that left the colonies still tied to the Crown.

So let me tell you how the last big battle of the Revolution was won: by three things, none of them a charge across an open field. It was won by a march, a naval battle and a siege. Each one depended on the others, and each depended on a partner who had every reason to quit and did not.

Where the War Stood in 1781

By 1781 the war was in its sixth year, and everybody was tired. The Continental Army had survived Valley Forge and Monmouth, as I tell in Valley Forge Was a Winter of Hunger That Turned Farmers Into an Army, but the money was gone, the currency was worthless and there had been mutinies in the ranks. The British had shifted their effort to the South. They had taken Charleston in 1780 and fought through the Carolinas, and Lord Cornwallis, commanding the army there, had marched into Virginia.

In the summer Cornwallis settled his army of several thousand men at Yorktown, on the York River near the mouth of Chesapeake Bay. His reasoning was sound. Yorktown had a deepwater port, and the Royal Navy ruled the sea, so he expected supplies and, if need be, evacuation by ship. He began to fortify the position, in the confident manner of a man who has never read a story about an army that waited for a rescue boat. The young Marquis de Lafayette, with a smaller American force, shadowed him in Virginia and kept him from roaming.

Meanwhile the main American army sat near New York with Washington, together with a French army under the Comte de Rochambeau. That force had landed at Newport, Rhode Island, in July 1780. For a year it had done little but wait. Washington wanted to attack New York. Rochambeau, who had better information about French naval plans, nudged him toward Virginia.

The Decision

In the summer of 1781 word reached Washington that the French admiral, François Joseph Paul, Comte de Grasse, was bringing a large fleet from the West Indies to the American coast, and could stay only a limited time before he had to return to the Caribbean. That news forced a choice. New York was heavily fortified. Cornwallis in Virginia, cut off from the British fleet, might be trapped, but only if three things came together at once: the armies, the French fleet and the timing.

Washington made the call. He redirected his army south in August 1781, and he took pains to deceive the British commander in New York, Sir Henry Clinton, into thinking an attack on New York was still coming. Part of the ruse was a set of false dispatches suggesting that an attack on New York was still planned. It worked well enough that Clinton delayed sending help to Cornwallis.

The March

The march that followed is one of the great logistical feats of the war, and a worthy topic for readers who think of the Revolution only in terms of battles. The combined Franco-American army moved from the Hudson, through New Jersey, past Philadelphia, to the head of the Chesapeake, a distance of hundreds of miles, and then partly by water down the bay. They did it in about a month and a half, in summer heat, over ordinary roads, with wagons, cannon and thousands of men. Rochambeau's troops, in their white uniforms, drew crowds all along the route.

There was money trouble even then. Washington's soldiers were owed pay and were restless about it. Rochambeau supplied hard coin from the French army's own funds to pay American troops. This is a detail that does not make it into the paintings. The army that won the decisive victory of the Revolution had to be paid out of a French chest.

The Battle Most Americans Never Heard Of

At the same moment, de Grasse's fleet, with twenty-eight ships of the line, arrived in the Chesapeake at the end of August. It cut off Yorktown from the sea. A British fleet under Admiral Thomas Graves, sailing from New York to relieve Cornwallis, met the French off the mouth of the Chesapeake on September 5, 1781. That is the Battle of the Capes.

It was an indecisive-looking fight in which both sides were battered, and its result was decisive anyway. The French held the entrance to the bay. Graves, unable to break through and with damaged ships, eventually returned to New York. A smaller French squadron from Newport under Admiral de Barras slipped into the Chesapeake too.

Think about what that means. For the first time in the war, the Royal Navy had lost control of the water where it mattered. Cornwallis's escape hatch had been shut by a foreign fleet. An army that expects rescue from the sea, with no rescue coming, is a besieged army.

The Battle of the Capes is the best argument I know against the notion that the Revolution was won by American farmers alone. It was won by Americans and by their allies, and the allies were not doing it for charity. That is a point I will return to.

The Siege, by the Book

The allied armies, somewhere between 17,000 and 20,000 men in total by the usual counts, with the French making up a large share of them, closed around Yorktown in late September. The siege began in earnest on September 28. It followed the rules of siege warfare of the day, which both sides understood. The besiegers dug a first line of trenches, called a parallel, out of range of the town's guns, and moved their artillery up behind it. On the night of October 6 the allies opened the first parallel, and when the guns were in position the bombardment began on October 9. Then they dug a second parallel, much closer.

The second parallel was blocked by two British strongpoints, Redoubts 9 and 10, which had to be taken before the trench could be completed. On the night of October 14 the allies stormed both. The French took Redoubt 9. The Americans took Redoubt 10, in an assault led by Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Hamilton, who had asked to lead the attack and had been given it. The men went in with unloaded muskets and fixed bayonets, so that no one would stop to fire and lose momentum in the dark. The redoubt fell in a matter of minutes, which is roughly the time it takes a modern agency to schedule a meeting about scheduling a meeting. With both redoubts in allied hands, the second parallel was completed and the guns moved forward.

Cornwallis, running low on supplies and facing the bombardment, tried one last escape. On the night of October 16 he began ferrying troops across the York River to Gloucester Point, hoping to break out. A storm scattered the boats, and the attempt failed. On the morning of October 17 a British drummer appeared on the parapet and a British officer followed with a white handkerchief. The guns stopped. Two days of negotiations followed.

The Surrender

On October 19, 1781, the British army marched out of Yorktown and laid down its arms. More than seven thousand soldiers and sailors surrendered. Cornwallis did not attend. He claimed illness, and his second in command, Brigadier General Charles O'Hara, led the procession. O'Hara reportedly tried to present Cornwallis's sword to the French commander, who deferred to the Americans, and O'Hara ended by handing it to Washington's deputy, General Benjamin Lincoln, who had himself surrendered at Charleston the year before. The tradition has a nice irony, since a general who surrendered an army at Charleston got to accept one at Yorktown, and the details of who offered what to whom are told in several versions. What is certain is the date, the size of the surrender and the fact that the army was gone.

Fighting did not stop everywhere immediately, and the war went on in smaller ways for months. But the British government's will to continue did not survive the news. In London the ministry that had pursued the war fell the next spring, and the new government opened talks.

The Treaty of Paris

The negotiations took two years. American commissioners, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin and John Jay among them, met British representatives in Paris. Preliminary articles were signed in November 1782, and the definitive Treaty of Paris was signed on September 3, 1783. In it Britain acknowledged the independence of the United States, set boundaries that reached to the Mississippi River and gave American fishermen rights off Newfoundland. Congress ratified it on January 14, 1784.

Note what the negotiators did. They dealt with the French as allies and also with their own interest in mind, and they did not hand the French a veto over the final terms. In the final talks John Jay made clear that the Americans would negotiate with the British directly and not through the French or the Spanish, and that got them a better treaty. The outcome was a country with real borders and real sovereignty.

The Strongest Objection

Here is a challenge a thoughtful reader might raise, since the Yorktown story seems to prove that alliances are a good thing, and yet Washington himself, in his Farewell Address of 1796, warned against them.

The objection says: Washington told his countrymen it was their true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world. Yet he won the Revolution with a French alliance. Either he was wrong at Yorktown or he was wrong in 1796.

It is a fair point, and I will answer it in four steps.

1. The two statements are about different things. The 1778 alliance with France was a wartime treaty with a defined aim: American independence and a blow to British power. The Farewell Address warned against permanent entanglements that bind a country to another's quarrels indefinitely. A treaty to win a specific war is a tool. A standing commitment to defend someone else's interests, whatever they turn out to be, is a mortgage.
2. The French had their own clear reasons. France wanted to weaken Britain after losing Canada and other territories in the Seven Years' War. The Americans wanted independence. The aims were different but they overlapped, and everyone knew where. That is why the alliance held through years of disappointment, including a failed joint attempt at Newport in 1778 and a failed assault on Savannah in 1779.
3. Washington's 1796 warning was drawn from the same experience. The Americans learned that an ally serves its own interest first. The treaty of 1778 later became a source of trouble when France, at war with Britain in the 1790s, expected American help, and Washington's policy of neutrality in 1793 stood against that expectation. Thomas Jefferson put the principle in his first inaugural address in 1801: "peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none."
4. The test is whether the aims are clear, limited and in our interest. An alliance that has an end in view, that states what it is for, and that Congress, not a president alone, has weighed, is the Yorktown kind. An open-ended commitment with no stated purpose is the other kind. Today the North Atlantic Treaty's central promise, in Article 5, is that an armed attack on one or more of the members "shall be considered an attack against them all." Whether to keep that promise, and on what terms, is a question for the Senate and the voters, and anyone arguing about it is arguing about the same distinction Washington drew. See Why Washington's Farewell Address called religion and morality indispensable for the broader address.

The conservative lesson is neither "never ally" nor "always ally." It is "know what the alliance is for." Rochambeau and Washington knew, and that is why it worked.

What Else Yorktown Teaches

Preparation beats flash. The victory was the product of staff work: maps, supply, timing, deception. The Revolution is full of famous gambles, such as the one I describe in Crossing the Delaware on Christmas Night and the Ten Days That Saved the Cause, but the war ended with a methodical operation by professionals.

Credit the partners. The Americans in the siege lines included Continental troops and militia, and the French included thousands of soldiers and sailors who died or suffered far from home for a cause that was not theirs. It costs us nothing to say so, and it is true to the spirit of the thing.

A free people's army obeys its government. After Yorktown, the army was still to wait for years for its back pay, and there would be a crisis, which I treat in George Washington Gave Up Power Twice and Changed What Leaders Could Be. The victory belonged to the people's representatives, and the general knew it.

The Case in Brief

1. Yorktown was won by a combined effort: a march of hundreds of miles from New York, a French naval victory at the Battle of the Capes on September 5, 1781, and a methodical siege.
2. Hamilton's night assault on Redoubt 10 on October 14 and the failed escape on October 16 forced the surrender of more than seven thousand British troops on October 19, 1781.
3. The war did not end that day, but Britain's will to continue did, and the Treaty of Paris of September 3, 1783 recognized American independence.
4. The French alliance of 1778 was a wartime treaty with clear, overlapping aims, which is exactly the difference between Yorktown and the permanent entanglements Washington warned against.
5. The lesson is that a free country can accept help and give thanks without giving up its judgment: know what the alliance is for, and let the elected branches decide.

What you can do: read the text of any one treaty your Senate has ratified, starting with the North Atlantic Treaty at Congress.gov, then write your senators a short note asking which stated purpose each commitment serves.