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Updated: June 13, 2025
The French ships sailed to Vir-gin-i-a, and shut up Yorktown on the side of the sea. Washington's men shut it up on the side of the land. They built great banks of earth round it. On these banks of earth they put cannons. The British could not get away. They fought bravely. But the Americans and French came closer and closer. Then the British tried to fight their way out.
A pleasanter intercourse came with the surrender of Yorktown, after which not merely were Cornwallis and his officers saved the mortification of surrendering their swords, but the chief among them were entertained at dinner by Washington.
The objective point was Richmond, seventy-five miles away, and the first obstruction met by the Federal army was at Yorktown. The defense adopted by General Magruder was a series of dams extending along the Warwick River, which stretched across the peninsula from the York to the James River, a distance of thirteen miles.
If we glance at the map of this section, we shall see that, from his headquarters at West Point, Washington could march half way to Yorktown, by way of New Jersey, without arousing suspicions of his real design. Nobody but Rochambeau had the least knowledge of what he intended to do. Bodies of troops were moved toward Long Island. Ovens were built as if to bake bread for a large army.
Also a pamphlet on the "Military and Political Situation of France," by General Dumas, an officer who had served under Rochambeau at Yorktown.
Great was the joy; in the streets the soldiers and the people shouted and sang and humorists, mounted on chairs, delivered in advance mock funeral orations on Cornwallis. It was planned that the army should march the fifty miles to Elkton, at the head of Chesapeake Bay, and there take boat to Yorktown, two hundred miles to the south at the other end of the Bay. But there were not ships enough.
The time of the year was autumn, it was a day or two before Cornwallis's surrender at Yorktown. He now very fortunately met an acquaintance named Captain Daniel Havens. He was an uncle of a boy named John Sawyer, with whom young Hawkins had run away from New York some years before.
"Well, there are times when I think of it, cousin mine. 'Tis rare sport to make others believe that I am that which I am not." "But why did thee do it, Harriet? And to be here alone on the highway!" "I wanted to see Clifford, Peggy. Neither father nor I had heard aught from him since the misfortune at Yorktown, save that he was at Lancaster.
He had been an ensign with Washington in the General Braddock campaign of the fatal 1755; had been colonel under General Washington in the Buff-and-Blue Continental Army, and was General Washington's intimate friend: but Lord Cornwallis, the British general, had surrendered at Yorktown last fall, the War of the Revolution appeared to be almost over, and he had returned home as a veteran.
He was no doubt well skilled in the routine of his profession, but broke down when burdened with the responsibility of conducting the movement of troops in the field. Wagner was a recent graduate of the Military Academy, a genial, modest, intelligent young man of great promise. He fell at the siege of Yorktown in the next year.
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