The fleet,
however, did not sail until the 19th of October. A speaker in
Congress at the time said that the British Admiral should
certainly hang for this delay.
On the 5th of October, for some reason unexplained, Cornwallis
abandoned the outer parallel and withdrew behind the inner one.
This left him in Yorktown a space so narrow that nearly every
part of it could be swept by enemy artillery. By the 11th of
October shells were dropping incessantly from a distance of only
three hundred yards, and before this powerful fire the earthworks
crumbled. On the fourteenth the French and Americans carried by
storm two redoubts on the second parallel. The redoubtable
Tarleton was in Yorktown, and he says that day and night there
was acute danger to any one showing himself and that every gun
was dismounted as soon as seen. He was for evacuating the place
and marching away, whither he hardly knew. Cornwallis still held
Gloucester, on the opposite side of the York River, and he now
planned to cross to that place with his best troops, leaving
behind his sick and wounded. He would try to reach Philadelphia
by the route over which Washington had just ridden. The feat was
not impossible. Washington would have had a stern chase in
following Cornwallis, who might have been able to live off the
country.
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