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Author | History Buff | Proud American | Constitutionalist
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November 1780. Henry “Light Horse Harry” Lee, fath

November 1780. Henry “Light Horse Harry” Lee, father of Robert E. Lee, was promoted to lieutenant colonel of dragoons.
He took command of the 2nd Partisan Corps—better known as Lee’s Legion—an elite unit of light cavalry that specialized in swift, hard-hitting raids. It became one of the most effective mounted forces in the Continental Army.
Riding with him was a 16-year-old lieutenant named Peter Johnston, the father of Joseph E. Johnston. Both men earned reputations as daring cavalry officers.
After the war they settled in different parts of Virginia and never crossed paths again. Yet their names would echo far beyond their own lifetimes.
Curiously, their sons—Robert E. Lee and Joseph E. Johnston—became classmates at West Point, graduated together, and later served side by side in the Mexican War and the Civil War, riding into history just as their fathers had done.
#LightHorseHarryLee #LeesLegion #AmericanRevolution #RobertELee #JosephEJohnston

October 20, 1774. The American Revolution did not

October 20, 1774. The American Revolution did not begin with a gunshot. It began, in a real sense, with a boycott that quietly turned thirteen separate colonies into something that could act as one nation—long before anyone dared say the word independence out loud.
After the Boston Tea Party, Britain had punished Massachusetts with the Intolerable Acts, meant to crush resistance and make an example of Boston. Instead the measures backfired. Colonies that had long bickered with one another suddenly saw a common threat. Delegates gathered in Philadelphia at the First Continental Congress to decide how to respond together.
What they produced was the Continental Association. On its surface it was an economic weapon: a coordinated agreement to stop importing, consuming, and eventually exporting British goods until the hated laws were repealed. Earlier boycotts had been piecemeal and easy to break. This time the colonies bound themselves to it as a union.
The truly revolutionary part was enforcement. The Association called for committees to be elected in every county, town, and city to inspect, watch, and publicly name anyone who violated the boycott. Those committees sprang up everywhere. Ordinary Americans, chosen by their neighbors, began enforcing American rules and sidelining royal authority. Power was shifting, town by town, into the hands of elected local bodies. The colonists were no longer only protesting—they were beginning to govern themselves.
The Association also worked as a unifier. For the first time the colonies committed to a common cause with common enforcement. When the shooting started at Lexington and Concord six months later, they were not thirteen strangers scrambling to cooperate. They had already learned how to stand together.
No one fired a shot on this day. No army marched. But the Continental Association was one of the true beginnings of the United States—the moment the colonies started acting as a single people with a will of their own.
#ContinentalAssociation #FirstContinentalCongress #AmericanRevolution #1774 #History

October 19, 1781. Yorktown, Virginia. The British

October 19, 1781. Yorktown, Virginia.
The British army under Lord Cornwallis marched out and laid down its arms. The long campaign in the South—and effectively the Revolutionary War—came to an end.
For weeks the combined American and French forces had tightened the noose. Allied artillery had pounded the town day and night. The outer redoubts had fallen. A last desperate attempt to escape across the York River had been wrecked by a sudden storm. With no relief in sight and his position collapsing, Cornwallis asked for terms.
The formal surrender took place in an open field. British and Hessian soldiers filed out between lines of American and French troops. Their bands played a tune the Americans later remembered as “The World Turned Upside Down.” Cornwallis himself claimed illness and did not attend; his second-in-command offered the sword to Washington. Washington directed him to surrender it to General Benjamin Lincoln, the American officer who had been forced to surrender Charleston the year before.
More than 7,000 British and German troops became prisoners. The victory was complete.
News of Yorktown spread slowly across the Atlantic, but when it reached London it broke the will to continue the war. Negotiations followed. Two years later the Treaty of Paris recognized the independence of the United States.
On this day the fighting that had begun at Lexington and Concord six and a half years earlier was, for all practical purposes, over. The cause that had once seemed impossible had prevailed.
#Yorktown #Cornwallis #AmericanRevolution #1781 #GeorgeWashington

Polish military engineer Tadeusz Kościuszko formal

Polish military engineer Tadeusz Kościuszko formally submitted a memorandum to the Continental Congress offering his help in the Revolution.
The skilled young officer from Poland had come to America ready to put his engineering talent in the service of the Patriot cause. Congress accepted. Kościuszko would go on to design critical fortifications—most famously at West Point—and become one of the most valued foreign officers of the war.
A quiet offer of service that helped shape the defense of a new nation.
#TadeuszKosciuszko #AmericanRevolution #WestPoint #ForeignOfficers #History

In 1824, the last surviving general of the Revolut

In 1824, the last surviving general of the Revolution came back to America—and the entire country stopped for a year to thank him.
The Marquis de Lafayette was 67 years old. Nearly half a century earlier he had crossed an ocean to fight for American independence, bled for it, and poured his own fortune into it.
Now President Monroe and Congress invited him back as “the Nation’s Guest.”
He planned to visit the original 13 states and stay a few months. Instead he stayed 13 months, traveled more than 6,000 miles, and visited all 24 states then in the Union.
Everywhere he went, America turned out in droves. When he landed in New York, 80,000 people—two-thirds of the city—came to greet him. In Boston, crowds estimated in the hundreds of thousands lined the streets. Towns built triumphal arches. Church bells rang. Artillery roared. Parents named children, towns, and streets after him. The young country was swept up in “Lafayette Mania.”
When he finally left in September 1825, he said goodbye at the White House:
“God bless the American people, each of their states, and the federal government. Accept this patriotic farewell of an overflowing heart; such will be its last throb when it ceases to beat.”
He had crossed an ocean as a boy to fight for a country that wasn’t his. He left it an old man, beloved by every corner of it.
#Lafayette #AmericanRevolution #1824 #NationsGuest #History

October 16, 1781. Yorktown, Virginia. Cornwallis’s

October 16, 1781. Yorktown, Virginia.
Cornwallis’s last chance: a desperate plan to sneak his whole army across a river in the dark—and a storm that wrecked it.
By now Yorktown was being pounded around the clock. The outer redoubts had fallen two nights earlier. A surprise raid that morning to spike the allied cannon had failed. Fortifications were collapsing, ammunition was low, and sickness was spreading. Cornwallis had already written Clinton that the situation was critical.
One door remained. Across the York River, about a mile away, the British still held Gloucester Point. Only a smaller force of French troops and Virginia militia blocked it. If he could get his army over in the dark, he might break through, seize horses, and race north toward New York. It was a long shot. It was all he had.
That night he began. Around sixteen small boats were collected. The first wave—guards and light infantry—loaded and rowed across successfully. The boats returned for the second wave.
Then the weather turned. Around midnight a violent squall roared up the river. Wind and rain whipped the water into chaos. Boats were scattered and blown downstream. Some could not get back at all. The crossing stopped dead, with Cornwallis’s army split on opposite sides of the river.
By morning the storm had passed, but it was daylight and the allied guns could see everything. The troops who had crossed had to be brought back to Yorktown under fire. The plan was finished.
Some British officers later believed that if the weather had held, a large part of the army might have escaped. Others thought it never would have worked. Either way, it never got the chance.
The next morning, October 17, a British drummer climbed onto the parapet and beat for a parley. An officer followed, waving a white handkerchief.
Cornwallis had lost to Washington, the French, and in the end, the weather.
#Yorktown #Cornwallis #AmericanRevolution #1781 #SiegeOfYorktown

George Washington had no son of his own. For two y

George Washington had no son of his own. For two years he raised Lafayette’s—while serving as President of the United States.
In April 1795, while the Marquis de Lafayette was locked in an Austrian fortress at Olmütz, his fifteen-year-old son, Georges Washington de Lafayette, was sent to America. James Monroe, the American minister in Paris, helped arrange a passport.
Washington wanted the boy under his own roof. Politics made it delicate. France and the United States were quarreling, and a president housing the son of a jailed French revolutionary risked being accused of taking sides. So Georges waited out of sight. He landed in Boston in August 1795 under the name Motier, then stayed in New Jersey and New York, where Alexander Hamilton looked after him and advised Washington not to rush.
In February 1796 the way was clear. Georges moved in with the Washingtons in Philadelphia and later at Mount Vernon. Washington paid for a portrait of the boy. Georges also studied at Harvard.
Washington kept him until his father was freed in September 1797. Georges sailed home the following year.
A quiet act of loyalty and care between two men bound by the Revolution—one without a son, the other far from his.
#GeorgeWashington #Lafayette #AmericanHistory #MountVernon #Friendship

January 17, 1781. The Battle of Cowpens. By then B

January 17, 1781. The Battle of Cowpens.
By then Banastre Tarleton had a reputation for giving no quarter. When he cornered the Americans in the South Carolina backcountry, he expected another easy slaughter.
Daniel Morgan had other plans.
Morgan knew his militia would struggle against British regulars, so he used that to his advantage. He placed them in front and instructed them to fire two solid volleys—aiming for the officers—then fall back behind the Continentals waiting in the rear.
Tarleton saw them pull back, thought the line was breaking, and threw his entire force forward in a headlong charge.
Then the Americans turned. At close range the Continentals delivered one crushing volley and charged with bayonets. William Washington’s cavalry slammed into one flank while the re-formed militia closed on the other. Tarleton’s army was surrounded in minutes.
It was over fast. The British lost more than 800 men, most of them captured. Morgan lost around 150. Tarleton escaped with only a handful of horsemen.
A brilliant, crushing American victory—and one of the worst defeats of Tarleton’s career.
#Cowpens #DanielMorgan #BanastreTarleton #AmericanRevolution #1781

October 12, 1776. Frog’s Point (Throg’s Neck), New

October 12, 1776. Frog’s Point (Throg’s Neck), New York.
British General William Howe landed thousands of troops in a bold attempt to trap George Washington’s army.
After taking New York City, Howe wanted to avoid a costly frontal assault on the strong American positions at Harlem Heights. Instead he loaded roughly 4,000 men onto dozens of boats, sailed them up the East River through the dangerous waters of Hell Gate, and put them ashore on the narrow peninsula known as Frog’s Point.
The plan was simple and dangerous for the Americans: march inland, seize the crossings toward King’s Bridge, and cut off Washington’s only escape route north. The Continental Army would be pinned against the Hudson with British forces on three sides.
But Frog’s Point was nearly an island at high tide. The only ways off were a narrow causeway and bridge—and a ford. A small detachment of Pennsylvania riflemen under Colonel Edward Hand held those crossings and stopped the British cold. Reinforcements soon swelled the American defense. Howe’s troops found themselves bottled up on the peninsula.
The delay bought Washington precious time. While the British sat frustrated at Frog’s Point, the Continental Army began slipping north toward White Plains. Days later Howe would try again farther up the coast at Pell’s Point, but the chance for a quick encirclement had slipped away.
A foggy morning landing that was supposed to end the campaign instead became one more narrow escape for Washington’s army.
#FrogsPoint #ThrogsNeck #AmericanRevolution #1776 #GeorgeWashington

October 6, 1780. London. Henry Laurens, former pre

October 6, 1780. London.
Henry Laurens, former president of the Continental Congress, was marched into the Tower of London on suspicion of high treason. He remains the only American ever held prisoner there.
One of the richest men in South Carolina, Laurens had led Congress through the Valley Forge winter. In 1780 Congress sent him to the Netherlands to seek a loan and a treaty. Off Newfoundland a British warship intercepted his vessel.
Laurens threw his secret papers overboard in a weighted bag. It did not sink fast enough. Sailors recovered a draft of a possible treaty with Amsterdam. Those soggy papers helped push Britain into declaring war on the Netherlands that December.
Laurens was locked in the Tower—the ancient fortress where English kings had imprisoned traitors for centuries. In his mid-fifties and suffering from gout, he was kept under close guard, often denied visitors, newspapers, or even pen and paper. He had to pay the costs of his own imprisonment.
The British pressed him to abandon the cause. He refused.
He remained in the Tower for more than a year. After the war turned, he was released on bail and eventually exchanged for Lord Cornwallis. Laurens then joined Franklin, Adams, and Jay in Paris and signed the preliminary peace treaty in November 1782.
He never shared the victory with his son. John Laurens, one of Washington’s aides and Hamilton’s close friend, was killed in a minor skirmish in South Carolina in August 1782—one of the last American officers to die in the war.
When Henry Laurens died in 1792, he ordered his body cremated, almost unheard of in America at the time. He was reportedly terrified of being buried alive.
#HenryLaurens #TowerOfLondon #AmericanRevolution #1780 #History

October 12. Columbus Day. On this date in 1492, af

October 12. Columbus Day.
On this date in 1492, after weeks at sea, Christopher Columbus and his three ships—the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa María—sighted land in the Bahamas. He believed he had reached the outer edges of Asia. He had instead opened the way between Europe and the Americas.
The landing marked the beginning of sustained contact between the Old World and the New. It launched an age of exploration and exchange that reshaped the globe—bringing new crops, animals, knowledge, and peoples across the oceans and setting in motion the long chain of events that would lead to the nation we know today.
In the United States the day has long been observed as a federal holiday, originally intended to honor the spirit of exploration and the contributions of Italian-Americans. It remains a moment to remember the courage it took to sail into the unknown and the enduring consequences of that voyage.
A turning point in history, still marked more than five centuries later.
#ColumbusDay #October12 #1492 #Exploration #AmericanHistory

October 7, 1780. Kings Mountain. Patriot militia f

October 7, 1780. Kings Mountain.
Patriot militia from the southern backcountry and the settlements west of the Appalachians surrounded and destroyed a Loyalist force on a rocky ridge near the border of South and North Carolina.
Major Patrick Ferguson, commanding roughly 1,125 Loyalist troops, had threatened the “Overmountain Men” and camped on the height, believing its slopes would protect him. Instead, about 910 riflemen under leaders such as William Campbell, Isaac Shelby, and John Sevier approached quietly and attacked from several sides at once. The fight lasted little more than an hour.
Ferguson was shot from his horse while trying to break out. His men, caught in a crossfire with little cover, soon surrendered.
The battle was unusual in that it was fought almost entirely between Americans—frontier Patriots against Americans who had taken the king’s side. Patriot losses were 28 killed and 62 wounded. The Loyalists suffered far more heavily: 157 killed, 163 wounded, and 698 captured. After the surrender some prisoners were killed in reprisal for earlier Loyalist executions, a grim reminder of the bitter civil character the war had taken in the South.
Ferguson’s command, meant to rally Loyalist support and screen the British advance, ceased to exist. Cornwallis lost a valuable auxiliary force and found local recruitment harder to sustain. The victory restored confidence among Patriot militia and formed one link in the chain of events that led, a year later, to Yorktown.
For the backcountry fighters who had marched over the mountains to meet the threat, the day proved that irregular riflemen, acting on their own initiative, could decide a battle of strategic consequence.
#KingsMountain #OvermountainMen #AmericanRevolution #1780 #PatrickFerguson

October 9, 1779. Savannah, Georgia. The bloodiest

October 9, 1779. Savannah, Georgia.
The bloodiest single hour for American and French troops in the entire Revolution.
The British had taken Savannah in December 1778 and were using it as their base in the South. In September a large French fleet under Admiral d’Estaing arrived, landed around 4,000 troops, and joined General Benjamin Lincoln’s Americans. Together they outnumbered the British nearly two to one.
Then they wasted the advantage. D’Estaing gave the British 24 hours to consider surrender. The British used the time to reinforce and dig. When a formal siege finally began, the bombardment did more damage to houses than to defenses.
Running out of time, d’Estaing ordered a storming of the lines on the morning of October 9. The target was the Spring Hill Redoubt. The British almost certainly knew it was coming.
Columns got lost in the swamp and fog, arrived late in daylight, and piled into a killing ground of grapeshot, musket fire, and ships’ guns. French and American troops charged again and again. Sergeant William Jasper reached the walls with his regiment’s colors and was shot down planting them. D’Estaing was wounded twice. Count Casimir Pulaski, leading a cavalry charge, was cut down by grapeshot.
In about an hour the allies lost roughly 800 men. The British lost around 150.
Among the French forces was a unit of more than 500 free men of color from Saint-Domingue. Tradition says one of them was a young Henri Christophe, later king of Haiti.
A week later d’Estaing re-embarked and sailed away. Savannah stayed British until 1782.
#SiegeOfSavannah #AmericanRevolution #1779 #CasimirPulaski #WilliamJasper

October 9, 1781. Yorktown, Virginia. After three d

October 9, 1781. Yorktown, Virginia.
After three days of digging, the American and French batteries opened fire—and Cornwallis’s army started getting pounded to pieces.
The first parallel, the long siege trench dug on the night of October 6, had put the allied guns in range. Soldiers spent the next three days hauling heavy siege cannon and mortars into position.
The French batteries on the left opened first that afternoon. Around 5:00 the American battery was ready. By most accounts Washington himself put the match to the first American gun. Soldiers later said that first shot crashed into a house in town where British officers were sitting down to dinner.
From then on the shelling barely stopped. Day and night, dozens of cannon and mortars hammered the British lines. Shells arced overhead. Cannonballs smashed through houses and earthworks. British guns were knocked out one after another.
A famous story is tied to the bombardment. Thomas Nelson Jr., a signer of the Declaration and now governor of Virginia, was commanding Virginia militia. Yorktown was his hometown. When gunners asked where to aim, Nelson is said to have pointed at a fine brick house where he figured British officers were staying—his own family’s. He supposedly offered a reward to the first man who hit it. The story cannot be proved exactly, but the Nelson House still stands in Yorktown with cannonballs lodged in its walls.
The next night, red-hot shot from a French battery set the British warship HMS Charon on fire in the river. It burned and drifted, setting other ships ablaze.
Inside the town the British dug holes in the riverbank to hide from the shells. Dead horses floated in the water because they could not be fed. Smallpox and fever spread through the camp.
Cornwallis wrote to Clinton that same week that he could not hold out much longer. He was right. Ten days after the guns opened, he surrendered.
#Yorktown #SiegeOfYorktown #GeorgeWashington #AmericanRevolution #1781

October 8, 1777. Saratoga, New York. The British b

October 8, 1777. Saratoga, New York.
The British buried one of their best generals at sunset while American cannonballs landed around the grave. Then the Americans figured out what they were shooting at.
The day before, at Bemis Heights, Brigadier General Simon Fraser had been shot through the stomach while rallying his men. He was carried to a small farmhouse behind the British lines—the same house where Baroness Frederika von Riedesel, wife of the German commander, was staying with her three little girls. She had been setting the table for a dinner party. Fraser was supposed to be one of the guests. Instead they laid him on the dinner table.
She sat up with him through the night. She later wrote that she could hear him in the next room, repeating, “Oh, fatal ambition! Poor General Burgoyne!” and asking about his wife.
He died the next morning. He had asked to be buried at six in the evening in the Great Redoubt, a fortification on a hill overlooking the Hudson.
Burgoyne honored the request even as his army was falling apart. That evening a small party of officers carried Fraser’s body up the hill, the chaplain leading the service, Burgoyne and the other generals walking behind.
The Americans saw a group of British officers moving across an exposed hillside and opened fire with artillery. Cannonballs kicked dirt over the mourners. The chaplain kept reading. The baroness, watching from below, wrote that she could see shots landing right around them.
Then the American gunners realized it was a funeral. They stopped. According to Burgoyne, a single American gun began firing at regular intervals—a minute gun, the old military salute to a fallen officer. The enemy was honoring their dead general.
Burgoyne later described the scene in Parliament as one of the most moving things he had ever witnessed.
That same night, in pouring rain, the British army began its retreat north, leaving behind about 500 sick and wounded with a note asking Gates to care for them. It was too late to escape. Nine days later Burgoyne surrendered.
#Saratoga #SimonFraser #AmericanRevolution #1777 #Burgoyne

Robert E. Lee. Edgar Allan Poe. Walt Whitman. Lafa

Robert E. Lee. Edgar Allan Poe. Walt Whitman. Lafayette’s farewell tour collected a unique set of names.
In Alexandria on October 16, 1824, about 2,000 militia marched Lafayette down King Street. Seventeen-year-old Robert E. Lee was in that column. He already had his West Point appointment.
In Richmond, 15-year-old Edgar Allan Poe turned out as a lieutenant in the Junior Morgan Riflemen, the honor guard chosen for the visit. For the occasion the boys were allowed to draw arms from the state armory. A month later Poe co-signed a letter to the governor asking to keep them—his first surviving letter.
In Baltimore, Lafayette personally asked for Poe’s grandfather, David Poe Sr. During the Revolution the elder Poe had given Lafayette $500 to help the troops, and his wife had cut 500 pairs of pantaloons for them. Lafayette never forgot. Told that David had died, he visited the widow the next day.
On July 4, 1825, at a library groundbreaking in Brooklyn, Lafayette picked up a six-year-old boy, carried him, and kissed him on the cheek. The boy was Walt Whitman. He never forgot it.
Lafayette also sat with Adams, Jefferson, and Madison. Jefferson wept when they embraced.
He went to Washington’s tomb at Mount Vernon. He descended into the vault alone and came out in tears. Then he took his son Georges and his secretary in with him.
Forty years earlier Washington had written that he did not expect to see him again. He was right.
#Lafayette #FarewellTour #AmericanHistory #1824 #Revolution

October 1777. After the Battle of Germantown on Oc

October 1777. After the Battle of Germantown on October 4, American soldiers found a stray dog wandering near their lines. It was a small terrier with a collar. They read the name on it.
It belonged to General William Howe—the commander of the British army in America, the man who had just taken Philadelphia and beaten Washington twice in a month.
Some of the soldiers wanted to keep it as a trophy. Washington said no.
On October 6 he sent the dog back across the lines under a flag of truce with a short note:
“General Washington’s compliments to General Howe. He does himself the pleasure to return him a dog, which accidentally fell into his hands, and by the inscription on the Collar appears to belong to General Howe.”
The note was in the handwriting of his aide, Alexander Hamilton.
Think about the moment. Washington had just lost a battle he thought he could win. His army had lost about a thousand men. The British sat in the American capital. And he took the time to make sure his enemy got his dog back.
That was who Washington wanted to be, and who he wanted his army to be seen as—not a mob of rebels, but gentlemen fighting a war by civilized rules.
The original note still survives. Washington loved dogs his whole life and kept dozens of hounds at Mount Vernon. He probably understood exactly what losing one felt like.
#GeorgeWashington #WilliamHowe #Germantown #AmericanRevolution #1777

October 4, 1777. George Washington came within a f

October 4, 1777. George Washington came within a few hours of crushing the British army at Germantown—and fog and a stone house cost him the win.
A week earlier the British had taken Philadelphia. General William Howe camped about 9,000 men at Germantown, just outside the city. Washington planned something bold: four columns marching all night to hit the British camp from different directions at dawn.
It almost worked. The Americans came out of the fog and drove back the British light infantry. Howe rode up and could not believe his men were running.
Then about 120 British soldiers barricaded themselves inside Cliveden, the thick-walled stone mansion of Benjamin Chew. Instead of bypassing it, Henry Knox convinced Washington not to leave a fort in his rear. American cannon could not break the walls. Attack after attack bounced off, and the advance lost precious time.
Fog and gun smoke grew so thick that one American division ran into another and they opened fire on each other. Both fell back. The British counterattacked and the Americans retreated. The general whose division fired into its own side, Adam Stephen, was later found to have been drunk and was thrown out of the army.
Washington lost about 1,000 men to the British 500. But the French were watching. Along with the surrender at Saratoga a few weeks later, Germantown helped convince them the Americans could actually fight. France entered the war.
A couple of days after the battle, Howe’s dog wandered into the American lines. Washington sent it back under a flag of truce with a polite note.
An almost-victory that still helped change the course of the war.
#BattleOfGermantown #GeorgeWashington #AmericanRevolution #1777 #History

A fire tore through New York City, destroying some

A fire tore through New York City, destroying somewhere between 10 and 25 percent of it and sparking mass looting.
Both the British and the Americans blamed one another for starting the blaze.
One Hessian major wrote frankly about the aftermath:
“we are paying ourselves well by plundering houses near by the fire.”
In the chaos of a newly occupied city, the flames only added to the disorder—and the opportunism—of war.
#NewYorkFire #AmericanRevolution #1776 #BritishOccupation #History

October 3, 1781. Gloucester County, Virginia, just

October 3, 1781. Gloucester County, Virginia, just across the York River from Yorktown.
The biggest cavalry fight of the American Revolution—and the last battle of the most feared British cavalryman in America.
Everyone knows the siege of Yorktown. Almost no one remembers the second British position across the river at Gloucester Point. If Cornwallis was ever going to escape, that was his door out: cross the York, break through Gloucester, and run north.
Guarding that door was Lieutenant Colonel Banastre Tarleton. To Americans he was a monster. His British Legion had ridden down Continental troops at the Waxhaws, and “Tarleton’s Quarter” became shorthand for no mercy. He had been crushed by Daniel Morgan at Cowpens, but plenty of people in Virginia still thought he could not be beaten.
Washington sent a mixed force to seal the door: Virginia militia, French marines, and Lauzun’s Legion—French hussars in bright uniforms commanded by the Duc de Lauzun, a celebrity and famous charmer at the court of Versailles.
On the morning of October 3 the British were out foraging. Riding toward them, Lauzun stopped at a farmhouse where a woman told him Tarleton had just been there and said he’d love to shake hands with the French duke. Lauzun told her that was exactly why he’d come.
Minutes later the two legions collided on a sandy road. Tarleton spotted Lauzun, picked him out by his uniform, and charged straight at him. Before they met, Tarleton’s horse went down and threw him. He was nearly captured and had to scramble back to his lines on foot. Lauzun kept the horse as a trophy.
The British cavalry broke. The Virginia militia held steady and poured fire into the counterattack. The British fell back into their earthworks at Gloucester Point and never came out to forage again.
Cornwallis’s back door was shut. Sixteen days later he surrendered.
Tarleton survived the war, went home, and spent decades in Parliament. Lauzun returned to France, sided with the Revolution there, and was guillotined in Paris on the last day of 1793.
#Yorktown #BanastreTarleton #Lauzun #AmericanRevolution #1781

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