Clinton ordered him to take post at Old Point Comfort,—­where Fort Monroe is.  But the engineer officers reported that they could not protect the fleet there against the French; and, to the delight of Lafayette and of all good angels, Cornwallis selected Yorktown for his summer position.  Our neighborhood to it at Fort Monroe has made the position again familiar.

When Lafayette heard that the troops had sailed up the Chesapeake,—­instead of to New York, which he had very correctly supposed to be their destination,—­he thought Cornwallis was going to strike at Baltimore, and that he must “cut across” to Fredericksburg.  That way he marched with his light infantry.  His amazement hardly concealed itself when he found the enemy stopped at Yorktown.  Back he came to Williamsburg, and wrote to Washington,—­“If a fleet should arrive at this moment, our affairs will take a very fortunate turn.”  This was on the 6th of August.  On the 1st of September he could write,—­“From the bottom of my heart, my dear General, I felicitate you on the arrival of the French fleet....  Thanks to you, my dear General, I am in a charming situation, and I find myself at the head of a superb corps.”  The Marquis of St. Simon joined him with three thousand French infantry from the fleet,—­and at Williamsburg they effectually kept Cornwallis from escape by land, as the French fleet did by sea.

The only proposal which Cornwallis made to save his corps after this was carefully considered, and, it is said, at one time determined on; but it was finally rejected, in expectation of relief from Clinton.  Just now that we are beginning “solid operations in Virginia,” and may have occasion to move a hundred thousand men, more or less, up the long neck of land between York and James Rivers, the passage is an interesting one.  Washington had not yet arrived.  The English plan was to attack and beat Lafayette and St. Simon before Washington joined them.  The English columns were to move from Yorktown so as to attack Williamsburg before daybreak.  “That time was deemed eligible,” says Tarleton, “because the ground near and in Williamsburg is cut by several ravines, and because the British column, in advancing in the long and straight road through the town, would not be so much exposed to the enemy’s cannon under cover of the night as during the day.”  Let the reader remember these defiles, as he traces the march of another column from Fort Monroe through Yorktown to Williamsburg, with some General Magruder falling back before it, watching his chances to strike.  Cornwallis gave up the plan, however, and waited for the help from Clinton, which never came.  On the 15th of September Washington and Rochambeau joined Lafayette; on the 18th of October Cornwallis capitulated, and for eighty years the Virginian campaigns were over.

There is not one subdivision of them but is touched by the movements of to-day.  Everything is changed, indeed, except Virginia.  But Raccoon Ford and Bottom’s Bridge are where they were then.  The division which marches on Gordonsville may send a party down the “Marquis’s Road,” as the people still call the wood-road which Lafayette opened; and all the battles of the next month,[A] in short, will be fought on the ground familiar to the soldiers of eighty years ago.