The Campaign That Won America: The Story of Yorktown, by Burke Davis
The Dial Press, 1970
289 pages, plus chapter notes, index and 16 pages of b&w photos
Library: 973.337 D261
Description
The story of the campaign that won American Independence is fully told for the first time in this splendidly dramatic book. Though it moves swiftly and easily, with the vitality and suspense of good fiction, the narrative is based upon hunfreds of eye-witness accounts-diaries, letters, journals and memoirs-as well as official records.
It is the story of how the ragged Continental Army, in despair after almost six years of hunger and defeat, joined with its new French allies in a lightning stroke that brought victory within two months.
We witness: Washington's cunning as he slips away from the British in fortified New York, and his march 500 miles southward with Rochambeau and the combined army to trap Cornwallis at Yorktown, Va; Lafayette, together with a brilliant if undisciplined complement of American backwoods militia, holding Cornwallis at bay; and the coming of a huge Frencg fleet to take command of the sea, drive off the English fleet in a remarkable battle, and make American triumph inevitable.
The narrative is richly detailed, alive with vivid personalities: Washington as the French and his own troops saw him in moments of candor-now despairing, now raging, playing ball with his officers, danving with joy at good news from the French fleet, pardoning prisoners but hanging deserters after his victory; Papa Rochambeau, the gracious veteran where Washington was concerned, but to his officers an irritable and officious bear; the incredible Lafayette, a Major GEneral at 23, unsure of his own capacities, but mature beyond his years, a key factor in the victory; the neurotic, hesitant, bumbling Sir HEnry Clinton, busy with his pretty mistress in New York, blind to the corruption of his staff, squabbling with Cornwallis while the Colonies are frittered away; and the proud, stubborn, short-sighted Cornwallis, politically powerful, dealing directly with London headquarters rather than with Clinton.
By turns humourous and tragic, always gripping, this brilliant account captures the spirit and sensations of the decisive months of our violent birth as a nation.
Table of Contents
1. The Vanishing Army
2. A Perplexed Onlooker
3. The Great Ships Gather
4. The Long March
5. War in the Backwoods
6. The Boy GEneral
7. Into the Trap
8. Decision at Sea
9. "Every Door is Shut"
10. "The Liberties of America...Are in Our Hands"
11. The Last Cannonade
12. Thirteen Councils of War
13. Surrender
Epilogue
Photos
-Cornwallis, by Gainesborough
-The Marquise de Lafayette, by CW Peale
-Henry Knox, by CW Peale
-Washington firing the first American gun at Yorktown
-General Comte de Rochambeau and staff before Yorktown
-General von Steuben, by CW Peale
-Alexander Hamilton, by CW Peale
-Generals at Yorktown: Washington flanked by Lafayette and Rochameau and other, unidentified officers
-The Storming of REdoubt No. 10, by Eugene Lami
--Admiral de Grasse, by A. Rosenthal
Banastre Tarlerton, by Joshua REynolds
-The Surrender of Yorktown, by John Trumbull. Charles O'Hara and Benjamin Lincoln
-The Thomas Nelson House, Yorktown, a few years after the siege
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