rmy of three thousand men
had already disembarked and was in touch with the army of La Fayette;
Washington and Rochambeau were bound for Yorktown to attack Cornwallis.
Great was the joy; in the streets the soldiers and the people shouted
and sang and humorists, mounted on chairs, delivered in advance mock
funeral orations on Cornwallis.

It was planned that the army should march the fifty miles to Elkton, at
the head of Chesapeake Bay, and there take boat to Yorktown, two hundred
miles to the south at the other end of the Bay. But there were not ships
enough. Washington had asked the people of influence in the neighborhood
to help him to gather transports but few of them responded. A deadly
apathy in regard to the war seems to have fallen upon many parts of the
country. The Bay now in control of the French fleet was quite safe for
unarmed ships. Half the Americans and some of the French embarked and
the rest continued on foot. There was need of haste, and the troops
marched on to Baltimore and beyond at the rate of twenty miles a day,
over roads often bad and across rivers sometimes unbridged. At Baltimore
some further regiments were taken on board transports and most of them
made the final stages of the journey by water. Some there were, however,
and among them the Vicomte de Noailles, brother-in-law of La Fayette,
who tramped on foot the whole seven hundred and fifty-six miles from
Newport to Yorktown. Washington himself left the army at Elkton and rode
on with Rochambeau, making about sixty miles a day. Mount Vernon lay
on the way and here Washington paused for two or three days. It was the
first time he had seen it since he set out on May 4, 1775, to attend the
Continental Congress at Philadelphia, little dreaming then of himself as
chief leader in a long war. Now he pressed on to join La Fayette. By the
end of the month an army of sixteen thousand men, of whom about one-half
were French, was besieging Cornwallis with seven thousand men in
Yorktown.

Heart-stirring events had happened while the armies were marching to
the South. The Comte de Grasse, with his great fleet, arrived at the
entrance to the Chesapeake on the 30th of August while the British fleet
under Admiral Graves still lay at New York. Grasse, now the pivot upon
which everything turned, was the French admiral in the West Indies.
Taking advantage of a lull in operations he had slipped away with his
whole fleet, to make his stroke and be back again bef