Clan Hamilton · 1781
Alexander Hamilton at Redoubt 10, Yorktown
On the night of the fourteenth of October 1781, Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Hamilton, twenty-six years old, aide-de-camp to General Washington and former officer of the New York Artillery, led the bayonet assault of the American light infantry on Redoubt 10, the British outer earthwork on the south-eastern flank of the besieged works at Yorktown. The French light infantry under Lieutenant Colonel de Deux-Ponts went in simultaneously against Redoubt 9 four hundred yards to the north. The orders to the American attacking column were that the muskets were to be unloaded, the bayonet alone was to do the work, and the column was to go in silently. They reached the abatis at fifteen minutes after seven and were inside the redoubt by ten minutes past. Nine American dead, twenty-five wounded. The British defenders, Captain Campbell of the Forty-Third Foot and seventy men, surrendered in ten minutes. The fall of the two redoubts placed Cornwallis's inner works under direct allied artillery enfilade. He asked for terms three days later. The British army of the South capitulated on the nineteenth. The American Revolution was, in operational terms, won at Yorktown by the assault on Redoubts 9 and 10 on the night of the fourteenth.
It is twenty minutes past seven on the evening of the fourteenth of October 1781, in the second parallel of the allied siege-works at Yorktown, Virginia, on a clear night with the moon down and the stars out and the air full of the small-arms fire of the British pickets. He is twenty-six years old. He is Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Hamilton of the Continental Army, born in the West Indies of a marriage his mother could not legally make, schooled at King's College in New York, aide-de-camp to General Washington for four years, in field command this evening of the American light-infantry battalion that has been assigned the assault on Redoubt 10. The French light infantry under Deux-Ponts have the same orders against Redoubt 9, four hundred yards up the line.
He has Major Nicholas Fish at his elbow, Colonel Lafayette in support behind him with the second wave, the eight companies of the assault column behind Fish in two parallel files. The orders are clear and have been read out twice in the trenches in the last hour. The muskets are unloaded. The bayonet is to do the work. There is to be no firing until the redoubt is taken; if a man fires before the redoubt is taken he is to be cashiered. The watchword is Rochambeau, in honour of the French commander, and is meant to sound, in the dark, like the English rush on, boys.
He thinks: if a single man's musket discharges before we are over the abatis, the British will man the firing-step and we will lose the column.
He thinks: Fish has the second company. Fish is the man I would put a corps with. The first company has Gimat, who has been shot at in three engagements and stood. The third has Laurens. I have the right men.
He thinks: I have asked for this command for two years. The army has been on this continent for six. If I do not take this redoubt tonight I will be in the column of aides-de-camp again next week.
He thinks: the British have seventy men and a captain. We have four hundred men and a colonel. We will take it in twelve minutes.
He gives the order to advance at twenty-five past seven. The column moves in silence for the first eighty yards through the second parallel. The ground rises slightly toward the abatis. The British pickets see them at fifty yards and open fire. The column does not return fire. Hamilton and Fish go up the abatis with sappers cutting the timber spikes ahead of them. The first man over the parapet is Captain Stephen Olney of the Rhode Island Light Infantry, who is bayoneted in the thigh and goes down inside the redoubt. The second man is Hamilton, by Fish's account written ten years later for John Adams. The American column is inside the redoubt within four minutes of striking the abatis.
Captain Campbell of the Forty-Third surrenders in the inner trench. Twenty-six of his seventy are killed or wounded. Eight Americans die in the assault, twenty-five are wounded, including Olney, who recovers. Hamilton sends back the courier to Washington at twelve minutes past eight: Sir, I have the honour to report that the redoubt is taken.
Lord Cornwallis, in his headquarters in the Nelson House inside the British inner works, was informed at half past eight by an aide-de-camp that both Redoubt 9 and Redoubt 10 had fallen and that French and American sap-lines were already running new approaches off the captured ground. He wrote to Sir Henry Clinton in New York that night that he could not, with the troops he had, hold the inner works against the new battery positions; the works would be enfilade-fired by morning. He asked for terms on the seventeenth. The articles of capitulation were signed on the nineteenth at 2 p.m. on the field. About 7,000 British and German troops surrendered. The American Revolutionary War, in operational terms, ended at Redoubt 10 on the night of the fourteenth. Hamilton went home to New York, was admitted to the bar in 1782, served in the Continental Congress, co-authored the Federalist Papers with Madison and Jay in 1787–88, and became the first Secretary of the Treasury under the new Constitution in September 1789. He was killed in a duel by Aaron Burr in July 1804. The bayonet-only attack on Redoubt 10 is, by every careful tactical study, the cleanest small-unit assault of the American Revolution. The musical Hamilton of 2015 covers the redoubt in twenty-eight bars and the line immigrants, we get the job done. The redoubt itself is a low earthwork in the Colonial National Historical Park outside Yorktown today; it is mowed twice a year, and a bronze plaque, weathered, names Hamilton and Fish.
More stories of Clan Hamilton
- Patrick Hamilton at St AndrewsPatrick Hamilton, son of Sir Patrick Hamilton of Kincavel and Catherine Stewart (granddaughter of James II), was twenty-three or twenty-four years old when he was condemned for heresy at St Andrews on the twenty-eighth of February 1528, in a court convened by James Beaton, Archbishop of St Andrews. He had been to Paris and to Marburg and had read Luther; he had returned to Scotland in 1526 and had taught the new doctrines openly. The court found him guilty in the morning. He was burnt at the stake at the gate of St Salvator's College that same afternoon. The wood was wet, the wind was off the sea, the executioner had to be sent to the priory for more powder. The fire took six hours to consume him. Knox, writing his History thirty-eight years later, gave the phrase: *the reek of Master Patrick Hamilton has infected as many as it blew upon*. The Scottish Reformation, by the careful judgment of every later historian of it, has its first and longest fuse here.
- Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr at WeehawkenBy the spring of 1804 Aaron Burr, Vice President of the United States, had been politically blocked at every turn by Alexander Hamilton's correspondence and was running for the governorship of New York with no chance of winning. After a public letter quoted Hamilton as having spoken of him with what was glossed as a "more despicable opinion", Burr demanded retraction. Hamilton refused. They met on the duelling-ground at Weehawken on the cliffs above the Hudson on the morning of the eleventh of July 1804. Hamilton, by his published note left with his counsel the night before, had decided to throw away his fire and discharge the pistol harmlessly. Burr, who knew nothing of this, took an aimed shot. The ball entered Hamilton's right side just above the iliac crest, fractured the second lumbar vertebra and lodged in the spine; he died at two o'clock the following afternoon at the home of his friend William Bayard on Greenwich Street, Manhattan. He was forty-seven years old. The duel ended Burr's political career and made Hamilton, in death, the founding figure of the financial system of the United States.
- Ian Hamilton and the Stone of SconeJust before five in the morning of the twenty-fifth of December 1950, four students of the University of Glasgow, Ian Hamilton (24), Gavin Vernon (24), Kay Matheson (22) and Alan Stuart (24), removed the Stone of Destiny, the inauguration stone of the kings of Scots taken to Westminster Abbey by Edward I in 1296, from beneath the Coronation Chair in the abbey. They broke the stone into two pieces in the lifting. They drove the larger piece north in a Ford Anglia by way of Kent, the smaller in a separate car by way of Birmingham. They had it repaired by a Glasgow stonemason, James Robert Gray, of Bath Street, and laid it on the high altar of Arbroath Abbey, where the Declaration of Arbroath had been signed in 1320, on the eleventh of April 1951. The Government of the day, on the advice of the Scottish Office, did not prosecute; the Stone was returned to Westminster, and in 1996 was formally returned to Scotland and is now in the Castle at Edinburgh. Ian Hamilton, who became a leading Scottish QC, said in his old age that he had done it because Scotland needed to know the Stone was not unliftable.