In the Hurricane's Eye by Nathaniel Philbrick

Author:Nathaniel Philbrick
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2018-10-15T16:00:00+00:00

* * *

• • •

ACCORDING TO THE HESSIAN JAEGER captain Johann Ewald, the taking of the two redoubts came as a distressing surprise to Cornwallis’s officers. “Now people make long faces and say, ‘Who would have thought of this stroke.’” Earlier that day, Cornwallis had decided that, despite having promised the former slaves their freedom, the dwindling supply of provisions required that he jettison them from his fortress. “On the same day of the enemy assault,” Ewald recorded, “we drove back to the enemy all of our black friends. . . . We had used them to good advantage and set them free, and now, with fear and trembling, they had to face the reward of their cruel masters.” By this act of betrayal, Cornwallis proved that he had no more concern for the African Americans in his camp than he had for the horses, whose bodies still littered the Yorktown shore.

That night Ewald went out on what he called “a sneak patrol.” Just beyond the fortifications of Yorktown he discovered “a great number of these unfortunates. In their hunger, these unhappy people would have soon devoured what [food] I had. And since they lay between two fires, they had to be driven on by force.” Caught in the no-man’s-land between the British and the allies (who would undoubtedly return them to slavery), the African Americans had nowhere left to go.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.