American patriotism has liked to dwell on this last great march of Washington.To him this was familiar country; it was here that he had harassed Clinton on the march from Philadelphia to New York three long years before.The French marched on the right at the rate of about fifteen miles a day.The country was beautiful and the roads were good.Autumn had come and the air was bracing.
The peaches hung ripe on the trees.The Dutch farmers who, four years earlier, had been plaintive about the pillage by the Hessians, now seemed prosperous enough and brought abundance of provisions to the army.They had just gathered their harvest.The armies passed through Princeton, with its fine college, numbering as many as fifty students; then on to Trenton, and across the Delaware to Philadelphia, which the vanguard reached on the 3d of September.
There were gala scenes in Philadelphia.Twenty thousand people witnessed a review of the French army.To one of the French officers the city seemed "immense" with its seventy-two streets all "in a straight line." The shops appeared to be equal to those of Paris and there were pretty women well dressed in the French fashion.The Quaker city forgot its old suspicion of the French and their Catholic religion.Luzerne, the French Minister, gave a great banquet on the evening of the 5th of September.Eighty guests took their places at table and as they sat down good news arrived.As yet few knew the destination of the army but now Luzerne read momentous tidings and the secret was out:
twenty-eight French ships of the line had arrived in Chesapeake Bay; an army of three thousand men had already disembarked and was in touch with the army of La Fayette; Washington and Rochambeau were bound for Yorktown to attack Cornwallis.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.Washington had asked the people of influence in the neighborhood to help him to gather transports but few of them responded.A deadly apathy in regard to the war seems to have fallen upon many parts of the country.
The Bay now in control of the French fleet was quite safe for unarmed ships.Half the Americans and some of the French embarked and the rest continued on foot.There was need of haste, and the troops marched on to Baltimore and beyond at the rate of twenty miles a day, over roads often bad and across rivers sometimes unbridged.At Baltimore some further regiments were taken on board transports and most of them made the final stages of the journey by water.Some there were, however, and among them the Vicomte de Noailles, brother-in-law of La Fayette, who tramped on foot the whole seven hundred and fifty-six miles from Newport to Yorktown.Washington himself left the army at Elkton and rode on with Rochambeau, making about sixty miles a day.Mount Vernon lay on the way and here Washington paused for two or three days.It was the first time he had seen it since he set out on May 4, 1775, to attend the Continental Congress at Philadelphia, little dreaming then of himself as chief leader in a long war.Now he pressed on to join La Fayette.By the end of the month an army of sixteen thousand men, of whom about one-half were French, was besieging Cornwallis with seven thousand men in Yorktown.
Heart-stirring events had happened while the armies were marching to the South.The Comte de Grasse, with his great fleet, arrived at the entrance to the Chesapeake on the 30th of August while the British fleet under Admiral Graves still lay at New York.Grasse, now the pivot upon which everything turned, was the French admiral in the West Indies.Taking advantage of a lull in operations he had slipped away with his whole fleet, to make his stroke and be back again before his absence had caused great loss.It was a risky enterprise, but a wise leader takes risks.
He intended to be back in the West Indies before the end of October.
It was not easy for the British to realize that they could be outmatched on the sea.Rodney had sent word from the West Indies that ten ships were the limit of Grasse's numbers and that even fourteen British ships would be adequate to meet him.A British fleet, numbering nineteen ships of the line, commanded by Admiral Graves, left New York on the 31st of August and five days later stood off the entrance to Chesapeake Bay.On the mainland across the Bay lay Yorktown, the one point now held by the British on that great stretch of coast.When Graves arrived he had an unpleasant surprise.The strength of the French had been well concealed.There to confront him lay twenty-four enemy ships.The situation was even worse, for the French fleet from Newport was on its way to join Grasse.
