Last week a friend from Ohio came to visit for a few days. He is an ardent history buff, who never had been to Yorktown, hence we headed out to fill in that gap in his historical perspective. He is by no means a dilettante or an amateur, but rather a dedicated scholar, particularly of early American history.
Given the looming semiquincentennial of the American Revolution, the Virginia sites are growing in popularity. At Yorktown, we began by standing under the George P. Coleman Memorial Bridge, which crosses the York River in the exact location of the Comte de Grasse’s bottling up on the British fleet. De Grasse was in command of the French fleet, which he moved in from the Chesapeake Bay to build the blockade at Gloucester Point.
Once his fleet was confined and unable to disembark the troops on board, the Marquess Cornwallis had no choice but to surrender, thereby ending the American War of Independence. The surrender took place in the aptly named Surrender Field outside of the town.
Standing on the pavilion overlooking the field, my friend opened a book and gave a reading of the correspondence between General Washington and Lord Cornwallis. Their letters are memorably polite and civilized.
Cornwallis did not attend the surrender, sending a deputy in his stead. Washington refused to accept the sword of surrender from an underling and designated General Benjamin Lincoln to accept it for him. Several other visitors enjoyed listening to the eloquent recitation. Fortunately, the Surrender Field remains as Washington saw it on October 19, 1781.
Whenever I visit Yorktown, I reflect that a son of the Northern Neck, born on the banks of Popes Creek, commanded the erudition to write such eloquent correspondence, equal to that of a British peer of the realm.
Cornwallis’ defeat at Yorktown did not end his career, as he went on to other ventures that proved his ability as a soldier and as a diplomat. At the time of the surrender, Cornwallis was a lieutenant general in the British Army, but in 1793, he was raised to the rank of general and he later served as Lord Lieutenant of Ireland.
In 1802 he headed the British delegation to the Peace of Amiens in France, which produced a short-lived cessation of hostilities between Britain and Napoleonic France. He went on to serve in India, where he died in 1805 at Ghazipur. He is buried there in a neoclassical columned tomb overlooking the Ganges River, reminiscent of that of General U. S. Grant in New York City, which is the largest tomb in the United States.
Upon his death, the marquisate was inherited by his son, Charles, and having five daughters, but no son of his own, upon his death in 1823, it became extinct. The British appreciated Cornwallis’ service and erected a large, imposing marble monument to him at the entrance of Saint Paul’s Cathedral in London.
On the Riverwalk at Yorktown, a commemorative statue of the four victors stands near the French bottleneck. In it, General Washington is speaking to the Comte de Grasse, with the Marquis de Lafayette and the Comte de Rochambeau, the commanders of the French land forces, standing behind them. The Comte de Grasse died in 1788, the year before the storming of the Bastille, thus missing the onset of the French Revolution. Rochambeau died in 1807 and Lafayette in 1834.
In his lifetime, Washington’s highest rank was lieutenant general, but with the establishment of higher military ranks since his death in 1799, each new rank has been conferred on him posthumously, thus today his rank is General of the Armies of the United States, denoted by six stars, a rank he shares only with General John J. Pershing (1860-1947), who held it in his lifetime.
