d'escadre” Barras was his senior officer, which might have caused difficulties; the latter could be tempted, and he was, to conduct a campaign apart, so as to personally reap the glory of possible successes.
“I leave it to thee, my dear Barras,” de Grasse had written him on the 28th of July, “to come and join me or to act on thy own account for the good of the common cause. Do only let me know, so that we do not hamper each other unawares.”
Barras preferred the service of the cause to his own interest; leaving Newport, going far out on the high seas, then dashing south at a great distance from the coast, he escaped the English and reached the Chesapeake, bringing the heavy siege artillery now indispensable for the last operations. The stars had continued incredibly propitious.
The well-known double siege now began—that of Yorktown by Washington and Rochambeau, and that of Gloucester, on the opposite side of the river, which might have afforded a place of retreat to Cornwallis. De Grasse had consented to land, in view of the latter, 800 men under Choisy, whom Lauzun joined with his legion, and both acted in conjunction with the American militia under Weedon.
The two chiefs on the Yorktown side were careful to conduct the operations according to rules, “on account,” says Closen, “of the reputation of Cornwallis and the strength of the garrison.” Such rules were certainly familiar to Rochambeau, whose fifteenth siege this one was.
The surrender
From day to day Cornwallis was more narrowly pressed. As late as the 29th of September he was still full of hope. “I have ventured these two days,” he wrote to Clinton, “to look General Washington's whole force in the face in the position on the outside of my works; and I have the pleasure to assure Your Excellency that there was but one wish throughout the whole army, which was that the enemy would advance.”
A dozen days later the tone was very different. “I have only to repeat that nothing but a direct move to York River, which includes a successful naval action, can save me; . . . many of our works are considerably damaged.”
Lord Germain was, in the meantime, writing to Clinton in his happiest mood, on the 12th of October: “It is a great satisfaction to me to find . . . that the plan you had concerted for conducting the military operations in that quarter (the Chesapeake) corresponds with what I had suggested.”
The court, which had no more misgivings than Lord Germain himself, had caused to sail with Digby no less a personage than Prince William, one of the fifteen children of George III, and eventually one of his successors as William IV; but his presence could only prove one more encumbrance.
After the familiar incidents of the siege, in which the American and French armies displayed similar valor and met with about the same losses, the decisive move of the night attack on the enemy's advanced redoubts had to be made—one of the redoubts to be stormed by the Americans with Lafayette and the other by the French under Viomesnil.
