‘If you cannot relieve me prepare to hear the worst'

On 12 May 1780, the British Army entered Charleston, South Carolina. The Continental Army was forced to surrender. More than 3,000 Ameri­can soldiers became British prisoners of war.

The southern strategy of Lieutenant-General Sir Henry Clinton, Com­mander in Chief of British forces in North America, assumed that battle­field accomplishments would drive southern provinces to give up the fight and seek separate peace deals with the homeland. In 1779 Clinton mapped this campaign from his headquarters in New York. He personally com­manded the attack on Charleston before returning to lower Manhattan. British forces required signal accomplishments, given the dismal course which suppression of the rebellion had taken. As of 1781 British forces occupied only two major urban centres: Charleston and lower Manhattan Island. British occupations of Boston and Philadelphia were, at that point, ancient history.¹

The international picture likewise proved challenging for British war planners. Great Britain declared war against France (17 March 1778) after France allied its fortunes with the United States. Benjamin Franklin negoti­ated this alliance (6 February 1778) after the American victory at the Battle of Saratoga (17 September 1777). Spain joined the alliance on 21 June 1779. On 10 July 1780, French forces arrived in Rhode Island to reinforce the Continental Army.

The Expedition Particuliere commanded by Marshal Jean-Baptiste Donatien de Vimeur, Comte de Rochambeau fortified its position in Rhode Island, less than 200 miles from New York City. At the same time, Clinton's subordinate Lieutenant-General Charles Cornwallis occupied Charleston. This disposition left Clinton’s principal armed force more than 750 miles removed from New York. During the summer months British strategy had degenerated into small-scale actions and skirmishing with American forces in Virginia. Marquis de Lafayette commanded what - in British eyes - appeared to be significant armed resistance in that state. To weaken Virginians’ will to fight, Colonel Banastre Tarleton marched his loyalist troops to Charlot­tesville, Virginia, the temporary seat of state government. Although Tarleton snagged a handful of Virginia state legislators, he failed to catch the greater prize, Virginia’s Governor Thomas Jefferson. Instead of the elusive Jefferson, Tarleton’s raid on Jefferson’s nearby Monticello netted a few bottles of wine for booty.

Tarleton’s ride to Charlottesville illustrated the British predicament. The War Office lacked a strategy worth fighting for. Not a single province had sued for a separate peace. If military operations based on seizing seaports were going to induce the rebellion to collapse, seven summers of warfare after Lexington and Concord (19 April 1775) should have brought at least one or two provinces to heel by the summer of 1781. If years of campaign­ing up and down the eastern seaboard had not suppressed the will to fight in a single province, it was unlikely that another decade would accomplish this purpose. What was needed, British war planners calculated, was a victory of spectacular proportions. The summer of 1781, to the contrary, found Brit­ish forces in the unusual position of planning defensive operations.

Discovering Rochambeau in striking distance of Clinton’s base in Manhat­tan, Clinton ordered the commander of British forces in Virginia to retreat to a deep-water port on the shore of Chesapeake Bay. Royal Navy transport to New York, Lieutenant-General Charles Cornwallis was assured, would soon arrive in Chesapeake Bay.

From this point the British military situation deteriorated rapidly. Lafay­ette impeded Cornwallis’ movements and blocked any escape from the Yor­ktown peninsula. While Cornwallis waited for transport to New York, the French fleet - commanded by Adm. de Grasse - won a tactical victory over the British fleet at the Battle of the Capes (5 September). British commander Adm. Graves, his fleet badly mauled and outnumbered, returned to New York for repairs and refitting. In the meantime a second French fleet, com­manded by Adm. de Barras, entered Chesapeake Bay and offloaded siege equipment and additional French ground troops (10 September) in support of the French and American forces then surrounding Cornwallis at York­town. The allies - George Washington’s Continental Army and Rocham- beau’s Expedition Particuliere - joined forces with Lafayette’s troops on 18 September and commenced siege operations.

Allied commanders deceived Clinton as to their intentions. In so doing the French and American leaders embarked on a very risky course of action. Gathering their forces at Dobbs Ferry, a 20-mile march from lower

‘The eternal rules of justice and reason’ 53 Manhattan, the site of Clinton’s headquarters, the allies’ apparent intention to assault lower New York confirmed Clinton’s resolve to recall Cornwal­lis. The allies, however, planned to march to Virginia and trap Cornwallis before he could return to New York. By leaving a force outside Manhattan, the Americans screened the British from discovering the deception.

In the meantime, the allies quick-marched their two armies to Virginia. These combined forces besieged the unfortunate Cornwallis and his army, who had prepared for evacuation by the Royal Navy to save Clinton from the same fate. In disregarding Tarleton’s sound advice not to concentrate his army at Yorktown, Cornwallis found his army besieged in Virginia, trapped by forces commanded by Rochambeau, Lafayette and Washington on land and cut off from relief by the manoeuvres of de Grasse and de Bar- ras at sea.

When Cornwallis discovered the main allied force in siege positions, he dispatched Clinton his last appeal. Cornwallis’ message of 28 Septem­ber was brief. ‘This place is in no state of defence’, he warned Clinton, as 12,000 American and French troops went to work shortening the allied lines and preparing the final bombardment before their all-out assault on Cornwallis’ much smaller force. ‘If you cannot relieve me very soon’, Corn­wallis appealed to Clinton, one soldier to another, ‘you must prepare to hear the worst’.² When Graves brought his fleet and 5,000 additional troops into Chesapeake Bay to break the siege, British deserters from Cornwallis’ army informed Graves that Cornwallis had already surrendered Yorktown and marched his army into prisoner of war camps.

The allies’ plans relied upon the ‘cooperation between Washington, Rochambeau, de Grasse, de Barras, Lafayette and Virginia’s [militias and civilian leaders] in a difficult and complex undertaking which was virtually unparalleled in their history of eighteenth century warfare’.³ The success­ful clockwork was a risky but ‘logical outcome’ of the allies’ operational planning.

The allies’ strategy was based upon certain calculated risks such as the ability of de Barras to escape from Newport [his base in Rhode Island], the unwillingness of Clinton to strike at the greatly reduced American forces outside New York, and the hazards of de Grasse’s leaving the French West Indies unprotected.⁴