To one of the French
officers the city seemed "immense" with its seventy-two streets
all "in a straight line." The shops appeared to be equal to those
of Paris and there were pretty women well dressed in the French
fashion. The Quaker city forgot its old suspicion of the French
and their Catholic religion. Luzerne, the French Minister, gave a
great banquet on the evening of the 5th of September. Eighty
guests took their places at table and as they sat down good news
arrived. As yet few knew the destination of the army but now
Luzerne read momentous tidings and the secret was out:
twenty-eight French ships of the line had arrived in Chesapeake
Bay; an army 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.
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