Sword in Hand: The Siege of Yorktown, 1781

The Road from Saratoga

The surrender of John Burgoyne's army at Saratoga in October 1777 brought France into the war. The treaty of alliance signed in February 1778 gave the United States what it could not build on its own: a professional army, trained siege engineers, and a navy able to contest the Royal Navy at sea.

By 1781 the center of the war had moved south. Cornwallis had campaigned through the Carolinas before marching into Virginia that spring. Directed by Sir Henry Clinton, the British commander-in-chief in New York, to secure a deep-water port for the fleet, he chose Yorktown, a tobacco port on the south bank of the York River. In August his army began fortifying the town and Gloucester Point on the opposite shore.

The position was strong against the only allied force then in Virginia, a small American army under the Marquis de Lafayette. It depended entirely on the Royal Navy holding the Chesapeake.

The Trap Closes

In late August, a French fleet under the Comte de Grasse arrived in the Chesapeake from the West Indies, carrying some 3,000 French troops under the Marquis de Saint-Simon. On September 5, off the Virginia Capes, de Grasse met a British fleet under Rear Admiral Thomas Graves. The engagement was tactically indecisive, but Graves withdrew to New York to refit. A second French squadron under the Comte de Barras arrived from Newport with the allied siege artillery. The bay was closed.

Washington and Rochambeau had already started south. Leaving a force to hold the Hudson Highlands, and maneuvering to suggest an attack on New York, the combined armies crossed New Jersey and continued to the head of the Chesapeake. From there some went down the bay by water and others by road. By late September they had assembled at Williamsburg.

On September 28, the allied army marched from Williamsburg and invested Yorktown. The next night, Cornwallis, told by Clinton that relief was on its way, withdrew from several outer redoubts into the main works around the town. The allies occupied the abandoned positions the following morning.

The Parallels

What followed was a formal European siege, conducted by methods the French engineer Vauban had refined in the previous century. The object was to bring the guns close enough to break the defenses. The means were trenches, called parallels, dug across the approach to the town and joined by zigzag saps.

On the night of October 6, allied soldiers opened the first parallel. Working in darkness along a line the engineers had marked out in advance, they dug a trench within range of the British guns before daylight could expose them. Batteries were built along it over the next several days. On October 9, the French and American guns opened fire.

The bombardment reached the river. On the night of October 10, a French battery on the allied left fired heated shot into the British vessels anchored off the town. The 44-gun HMS Charon caught fire and burned, along with several transports. The ships that remained withdrew out of range.

On the night of October 11, the allies began a second parallel, roughly half the distance from the British works. Its path to the river was blocked by two British redoubts, known to the allies as Redoubts 9 and 10. The trench could not be finished until they were taken.

Sword in Hand: The Night of October 14

Washington assigned one redoubt to each army. The French took Redoubt 9, the larger of the two, with a column of about 400 grenadiers and chasseurs from the Gâtinais and Royal Deux-Ponts regiments under Lieutenant Colonel Guillaume de Deux-Ponts. The Americans took Redoubt 10, near the river bluff, with a column of light infantry of about the same size under Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Hamilton.

The attacks went in after dark on a signal fired from the allied batteries. The columns advanced with bayonets fixed. Pioneers went ahead with axes to cut through the abatis, the sharpened timber laid in front of each work, while the defenders fired down on them. Hamilton's men carried Redoubt 10 in a matter of minutes. The French met a longer fight at the abatis before Redoubt 9 fell.

The legend of the map records both actions in the language of the period. Redoubt A was prise l'Épée à la Main par les Français la Nuit du 14, taken sword in hand by the French on the night of the 14th. Redoubt B was prise par les Américains l'Épée à la Main la Nuit du 14. "Sword in hand" was the French expression for a work carried by direct assault, not by bombardment or terms.

Before morning the allies had extended the second parallel through the captured redoubts to the river. Their guns could now fire into Yorktown from close range.

The Surrender

Before dawn on October 16, a British sortie of about 350 men under Lieutenant Colonel Robert Abercromby reached the second parallel and spiked several allied guns. The damage was repaired within hours. That night Cornwallis tried to ferry his army across the river to Gloucester Point in small boats and break out on the north shore. The first boats crossed. A storm scattered the rest.

On the morning of October 17, a British drummer mounted the parapet and an officer came forward under a white flag to ask for a parley. It was four years to the day after Burgoyne's surrender at Saratoga.

On October 18, commissioners from both sides met at the house of Augustine Moore, behind the allied lines, to draft terms. The Articles of Capitulation were signed on October 19. That afternoon the garrison of Yorktown, British and German regiments together, marched out between the lines of the French and American armies with colors cased and grounded their arms.

Cornwallis did not attend, citing illness. His second-in-command, Brigadier General Charles O'Hara, offered his sword first to Rochambeau, who declined it, and then to Washington. Washington directed him to his own second, Major General Benjamin Lincoln, who had surrendered Charleston to the British the year before.

More than 7,000 British and German soldiers became prisoners at Yorktown and Gloucester Point.

What the Map Records

The title cartouche in the lower left reads Plan de l'Armée de Cornwallis attaquée et faite Prisonière dans York Town le 19 8bre 1781 par l'Armée Combinée Française et Américaine: Plan of the army of Cornwallis, attacked and made prisoner in York Town on 19 October 1781 by the combined French and American army. Beneath it: Dessiné sur les Lieux par les Ingénieurs de l'Armée, drawn on the ground by the engineers of the army. It was published in Paris by Le Rouge, rue des Grands Augustins, in December 1781, within two months of the surrender. Distances are scaled in toises, the French measure of the period.

The legend assigns a color to each army. Red marks the British works and troops, yellow the French, green the American. Read that way, the siege resolves at a glance: a red perimeter pressed against the York River, and a yellow and green arc closing around it.

Both parallels are traced across the approaches to the town, the first labeled with its date, Première Paralelle du 6 Octobre. Lines of fire fan out from the allied batteries toward the British works. The outer redoubts abandoned at the end of September are marked Redoutes abandonnées par les Anglois, and the first British line appears in red as Première Position des Anglois. Redoubts A and B stand at the river end of the second parallel.

The allied order of battle is written across the ground. French brigades are named in position: Agenois, Soissonnois, Bourbonnois, the regiment of Touraine, and Saint-Simon's volunteers on the far left along the river. Some had marched south from Rhode Island with Rochambeau; others had come from the West Indies with de Grasse. On the American side are the camps of Lincoln, Lafayette, and Steuben, the brigade of the New York general James Clinton, and the headquarters shared by Washington and Rochambeau.

On the river, the letter C marks the first anchorage of the British ships "before battery D fired red-hot shot, and where the Charon was burned." The surviving vessels are shown farther off at E. Across the river, the British works at Gloucester are drawn in red, sealed by a yellow line labeled Troupes Commandées par Mr de Choisy. Near the lower right the map identifies "Morehouse," the Moore House, as the place where the capitulation was signed on October 19.

The map is available as the Yorktown, Virginia – 1781 French Siege Map.

Why Yorktown Mattered

Yorktown did not end the war on the day of the surrender. British garrisons still held New York, Charleston, and Savannah, and fighting went on at sea and on the frontier. What Yorktown ended was the British government's will to continue. On February 27, 1782, the House of Commons voted against further offensive war in America. Lord North's ministry fell the following month, and negotiations opened in Paris. The Treaty of Paris, signed on September 3, 1783, recognized the independence of the United States.

The siege was a model of eighteenth-century siege craft, and it was an allied operation from the first day to the last. French engineers laid out the approaches. French gunners served many of the batteries. A French fleet held the bay. Roughly half the soldiers in the siege lines were French.

This plan was drawn by that alliance and published in Paris while the news was still new. It records the victory as the allied army saw it: the parallels measured, the brigades placed, the redoubts lettered and taken sword in hand. Four years after Saratoga, the alliance that battle made possible finished its work on the York River.

The Yorktown, Virginia – 1781 French Siege Map is reproduced on premium archival paper and available unframed or framed.