The men around me shook their muskets and raised their voices, bellowing for themselves and for each other, and I wondered how many times General Paterson had been in such a position, how many times he’d marshaled his troops and looked into the eyes of boys who would not live to see another day . . . or even another hour. And I wondered how many of the men around me had regularly cheated death and come back again, knowing full well that it kept score. And as at Tarrytown, I was greatly humbled.
The night was so dark we walked with our hands to the shoulder of the man in front of us for almost a mile, creeping to the appointed spot where we worked in silence, doing our best to tunnel the earth without a sound.
We retreated before daylight and heard the moment the British saw our progress as a constant firing commenced, but we were well away. Shells from the opposing lines crossed each other in the sky, falling and winnowing out the earth. What damage they did in the town, I did not know, but I’d seen a horse be blown in half, his head and tail rising into the sky before his blood sprayed the trenches for fifty feet in all directions, peppering the ground like a sudden hail. A captain from the Seventh Massachusetts Regiment was tossed into the air as well, mercifully dead before he came back down.
At dark, our columns were formed. A colonel named Alexander Hamilton led the charge, and we attacked in waves, told to use only our bayonets to avoid making a sound. I could no more fight in my condition than fly, and I simply ran forward when instructed, expecting to be hewn down with every step.
Instead, the British fell back after the second wave, abandoning their positions and fleeing under the assault. Our lines closed, connecting the redoubts, and our cannons and mortars launched attack. I had sustained a hole through my hat, and the lapel of my coat hung by a thread, caught by the tip of a random bayonet, but I was still standing, my bayonet unbloodied, and the redoubt had been captured with very little loss of life.
My ears rang for days afterward and my stomach rejected its contents from my extreme fatigue, but somehow I’d survived again.
October 19, 1781
Dear Elizabeth,
I have seen two armies made up of thousands of men clash on the field of battle. We use the words “glorious” to describe victory and “terrible” to describe defeat, but such words are wholly insufficient to capture what I witnessed. The world shook, tossed about in a relentless squall, and I have still not gotten my sea legs. I saw it all, heard it all, and felt it all, yet I lack the skill to fully relay the experience.
After the capture of the two redoubts and two days of devastating bombardment, Lord Cornwallis sent out a flag and requested a cessation of hostilities. Hours later he surrendered, though he sent his surrogate, General O’Hara, to the ceremony in his stead, pleading illness. I thought that cowardly. Seven thousand British soldiers, as ragged as we, marched out to the cadence of drums and ceded their weapons, piling them high with lowered heads, before they were ushered away in slow and solemn step. They did not get to send someone in their place. Nor did the men from either side who fell on the battlefield.
General Washington was straight and fine on his pale horse, but it was General Benjamin Lincoln, second-in-command, who rode forward and accepted the articles of capitulation. The French officers stood to one side, the Americans to the other. General Paterson was among them, dashing in his gold epaulets and sash, and you would have been proud.
Many in my company wept as we watched the procession, but I could find no strength for tears. I am too spent and too dazed, caught in a dream state from which I haven’t yet awakened. War is terrible, and if I survive to the end, I will bear witness to the sheer, incomprehensible waste of it all. But it is not the horror that has stricken me. It is awe that I am still here.
Virginians, both bond and free, came by the wagonload to see the departure of the British Army from Yorktown. Virginia’s population consists of five hundred thousand African slaves, three times the number of whites in the colony. It does not escape me that we fight for our own emancipation while such a condition exists. It did not escape many. Colonel Kosciuszko, when we were gathered in prayer before we stormed the redoubts, said to the reverend offering the invocation:
“Here we are, contending for the rights of men with our lives while not addressing the contradiction in our own practices. It weakens our cause and our case.”
The poor reverend was so distracted by the denunciation, he stood a little too close to the line and his hat was blown off by a stray shot.
“Consider that a warning, Reverend Evans,” Colonel Kosciuszko said, laughing. “A warning to you of the sin of slavery and our need to address it as soon as this war is won. Add that to your prayers so the softening can begin.”