What happened at the Battle of the Chesapeake?
On 5 September 1781 a French fleet under the Comte de Grasse fought a British fleet under Rear Admiral Thomas Graves off the capes at the mouth of Chesapeake Bay. The action lasted about two hours and no ship was taken. But the British sailed back to New York, the French kept the bay, and Cornwallis's army at Yorktown was cut off from help by sea and surrendered on 19 October.1
No American ship fought in it, few men died in it, and not a single vessel struck its colors. Yet the two hours of cannon fire off the Virginia capes on the afternoon of 5 September 1781 did more than any battle on land to decide the American War of Independence. When the smoke cleared, a French fleet held the mouth of Chesapeake Bay, and a British army of some 7,000 men on the York River had lost its only way home.2
Background: an army waiting for the navy
In the spring of 1781 Lord Cornwallis, commander of the British army in the South, gave up the Carolinas after a string of costly battles and marched into Virginia. He chose Yorktown, on the York River, as a fortified base where the navy could anchor, and by August he had about 7,000 men there. There he waited for the Royal Navy to supply him, reinforce him or, if need be, take him off.3 › Battle of Guilford Courthouse, 1781
The waters off the capes had already seen one fight that year. In January 1781 the turncoat general Benedict Arnold landed in Virginia with British troops and began raiding along the James River. At Washington's request the small French squadron at Newport sailed to the Chesapeake, and on 16 March it fought an indecisive action with a British squadron off Cape Henry. The French went back to Newport, and the British kept control of the entrance to the bay. It was a lesson in how much depended on who held those few miles of water.4
George Washington had long believed that French sea power was the key to winning the war. When the French admiral François Joseph Paul, Comte de Grasse, reached the West Indies in April 1781, he had orders to work with Washington. Washington would have liked the fleet at New York, but his French colleague, General Rochambeau, urged de Grasse to come to the Chesapeake, and at the end of July the admiral sent word that he would sail for the bay.5 › George Washington
On 5 August, by the National Park Service's date (3 August in the Gale encyclopedia), de Grasse sailed north from Saint-Domingue with 28 ships of the line, carrying some 3,000 French troops and money raised in the Caribbean. He took a little-used route the British did not detect. As soon as Washington heard that the French were bound for the bay, he and Rochambeau turned their armies south from New York toward Virginia, where Lafayette was already watching Cornwallis.6 › Marquis de Lafayette
Armies and commanders
The British sent Rear Admiral Samuel Hood north from the West Indies with 14 ships of the line, five days behind de Grasse. Faster and on a more direct course, he reached the mouth of the Chesapeake on 25 August, found it empty and sailed on to New York. There Rear Admiral Thomas Graves, the senior officer, took command of the combined force. News came that a second French squadron of eight ships of the line under the Comte de Barras had left Newport, Rhode Island, and on 31 August Graves sailed south with 19 ships of the line to intercept it.7
The two British admirals did not work well together. Wade Dudley, who revised the Gale encyclopedia's account, describes strained relations between them and a fleet in poor repair, with the Terrible already leaking before she sailed; the New York Gazette, after the battle, reported two leaky ships of the West Indies squadron, one of them needing all her pumps.8
De Grasse, meanwhile, had entered the bay on 30 August and anchored inside Cape Henry. He landed his troops to join Lafayette. When the British appeared he had about 24 ships of the line at hand, but many of his officers and men were ashore or away unloading supplies.9
The battle in phases
Mutual surprise. The British fleet reached the mouth of the bay at about nine in the morning of 5 September, and its scouts reported a forest of masts inside Cape Henry. Neither admiral had expected the other. De Grasse hurried his ships to sea, and they came out of the bay one after another in a long column, short of men and in no order.10
A chance let slip. This was the moment to strike, with the wind behind the British and the French emerging piecemeal. Graves did not take it. He formed his own line and waited for the enemy to form theirs, as the Royal Navy's fighting instructions prescribed, so that by the afternoon he faced 24 French ships of the line with 19. For hours the two fleets stood out to sea on roughly parallel courses.11
Four in the afternoon. The first shots came late in the day. The American Battlefield Trust says that at 4:00 p.m. HMS Intrepid, second in the British line, fired on the Marseillois; the Gale encyclopedia has the Intrepid opening fire at 4:05, while the National Park Service and the New York Gazette of the time give 4:15. Only the leading squadrons of the two fleets came to close quarters.12
The rear that never fired. The vans and parts of the centers fought hard, but the rear half of the British line, under Hood, never closed with the enemy. The National Park Service blames Graves's confusing signals together with the wind, which shifted around five o'clock to the British disadvantage. The British newspaper account, for its part, complained that the French kept their distance from the British center. Firing stopped at sunset, about half past six.13
Turning point: the days after
The losses were modest. The British had 90 killed and 246 wounded, 336 in all (the New York Gazette counted one lieutenant and 90 men killed), and six of their ships were damaged. The French lost no ships, and two were damaged. Their reported losses were a little over 200, 209 according to the National Park Service and 210 according to the American Battlefield Trust, though the Gale encyclopedia notes estimates as high as 400.14
The battle was decided in the days that followed. For several days the fleets drifted south within sight of each other without fighting again. On 10 September the waterlogged Terrible was abandoned and destroyed by her own crew. On the night of 9 September de Grasse slipped away and sailed back to the Chesapeake, where he found that Barras had arrived with his squadron. With that reinforcement the French decisively outnumbered the British, and on 13 September Graves, judging his damaged fleet unable to fight so many, turned back to New York.15
Aftermath: Yorktown
With the bay in French hands, Cornwallis could neither be relieved nor escape by sea. Under the protection of de Grasse's fleet, Washington's troops were carried down the Chesapeake to join Lafayette near Williamsburg, and on 28 September the allied armies closed around Yorktown.16
In New York the repairs to Graves's fleet went slowly, and the repaired and reinforced fleet left only on 19 October, the very day Cornwallis surrendered. The fight off the capes had decided the campaign without a single ship being taken in battle.17 › Siege of Yorktown, 1781
Legacy and memory
Historians have been generous to the battle's importance and harsh on the British performance. Britannica quotes the British naval historian Sir William M. James, who called it the decisive battle of the war. The National Park Service judges that without French control of the bay the victory at Yorktown would have been impossible. Dudley, in the Gale encyclopedia, lays much of the blame on Admiral Sir George Rodney, whose dispersal of his ships in the Caribbean let de Grasse reach the bay unopposed, and argues that Hood's caution off the capes was defensible, since renewed attacks would only have worn down the outnumbered British.18
De Grasse did not long enjoy his triumph. Back in the West Indies, on 12 April 1782, Rodney crushed his fleet at the Battle of the Saintes, and his flagship, the Ville de Paris, struck to Hood's Barfleur. De Grasse was taken prisoner.19
Visiting today
The fleets fought just offshore from the sand dunes of Cape Henry, at the southern side of the bay's mouth, now part of Virginia Beach. At the Cape Henry Memorial, a unit of Colonial National Historical Park inside the Fort Story military base, National Park Service markers tell the story of the Battle of the Capes; they stand by the memorial's parking lot at Atlantic Avenue and New Guinea Road.20
