The final act of what Rochambeau had promised would be a calculated operation to compel the British to surrender occurred during the second week of October. Two final British redoubtsâ??Number 9 and Number 10â??had to be taken to complete the second parallel. The French were given responsibility for seizing Number 9, the Americans the other. Washington put twenty-four-year-old Colonel Alexander Hamilton, who had been with the Continental army for six years, mostly pulling duty at a desk, in charge of taking Number 10. Hamilton had begged for the assignment. He knew this was likely to be the last great act of the war and his final chance of gaining lasting fame and glory. He led four hundred men against forty-five British defenders. Despite the odds, the ten-minute fight was bloody and feral, hand-to-hand combat waged with the expectation that the losers would not survive the engagement. Hamiltonâ??s force carried the objective. Ten percent of his men were lost in the assault.
Cornwallis knew there was little hope. Perhaps a hurricaneâ??as at Newport in 1778â??might strike the Chesapeake and destroy de Grasseâ??s fleet. Maybe an epidemic would sweep through the allied ranks. Possibly Clinton would cobble together another fleet and send it south to take on de Grasse yet again. Cornwallis made his army endure a bit longer, hoping against hope for a miracle. By October 17, he was out of hope. Under a white flag, he indicated that he was ready to negotiate a settlement.
Rochambeau and Washington were willing to parley, though unwilling to let the negotiations drag on. Given time, things could go wrong, as Cornwallis prayed might be the case. The settlement was reached in less than twenty-four hours. The guns fell silent. Under a cerulean fall sky on October 19, Cornwallis, in the shambles that remained of Yorktown, signed the Articles of Capitulation. A few minutes later, Washington, Rochambeau, and de Grasse, who had come ashore for this grand moment, signed the document while standing on the blood-soaked soil in one of the recently captured redoubts. That afternoon, six and one half years to the day since the first shot of the war had been fired in Lexington, Massachusetts, the armies gathered for the surrender ceremony on an open plain about two thousand yards north of the tents where Rochambeau and Washington had lived for the past few weeks.
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