Alexander Hamilton at Redoubt 10, Yorktown

There are revolutions that are settled by argument and revolutions that are settled by a single quarter-hour in the dark, with the moon down and the muskets unloaded, by a young man who has been waiting six years for the order to go forward. The pamphleteers will arrive afterwards with their explanations. The engineers and the bayonet arrive first.

THE WEST INDIAN AIDE

The man who waited for that order had been waiting, in one form or another, since he was a boy on Nevis. Alexander Hamilton was born in 1755 or 1757 (the registers of Charlestown are not consistent) to a Scottish father of the Hamiltons of Grange in Ayrshire and a mother whose first marriage the Danish court at Christiansted had not dissolved. The father walked off the island. The mother died of fever in the bed beside him when he was thirteen. A hurricane the next year, and a letter he wrote about it to the Royal Danish American Gazette, brought up a subscription from the merchants of St Croix to send him to college on the mainland. He read law and artillery at King's College in New York. He raised a company of guns for the Provincial Congress in 1776 and stood them in line at Trenton and Princeton. From March 1777 he sat at General Washington's right hand as aide-de-camp, drafting in three languages, riding between Morristown and Philadelphia, watching other men get the field commands he had asked for by letter and by request in person and at last, in February 1781, by a quarrel sharp enough to leave the general's family. Four months later Washington gave him a battalion of light infantry. Four months after that, the army stood in the trenches before Yorktown.

THE SECOND PARALLEL

The siege had been opened on the night of the sixth of October. By the eleventh the second parallel was within three hundred yards of the British inner works, and by the fourteenth two redoubts on the south-eastern flank, numbered nine and ten by the engineers, were the only obstructions between the French batteries and the enfilade of Lord Cornwallis's whole line. They had to come down that night. The Comte de Rochambeau gave Redoubt 9 to the French light infantry under Lieutenant Colonel the Baron de Deux-Ponts, four hundred grenadiers and chasseurs of the Gâtinais and the Royal Deux-Ponts. Washington gave Redoubt 10 to the American light infantry, the Marquis de Lafayette in overall command, and the field assault to Hamilton, who had first claimed it as the senior battalion commander in the trenches and then claimed it again, more pointedly, when the duty had at first been offered elsewhere. The orders to the American column were three. The muskets would be unloaded. The bayonet would do the work. The watchword would be Rochambeau, in honour of the French commander, and would sound, in the dark, like rush on, boys.

THE ABATIS AT FIFTEEN MINUTES AFTER SEVEN

The moon was down. The night was clear, the stars sharp, the air across the marsh full of the dry crackle of British picket fire as it had been for a week. The column formed in the second parallel at seven, four hundred men in two files behind the sappers. Major Nicholas Fish, of New York, was at his elbow. Lieutenant Colonel Gimat had the first company; John Laurens of South Carolina was around the redoubt with eighty men to cut off retreat. Six signal shells were to rise from the French batteries on the left, and at the sixth the column would go.

The shells went up at twenty-five past seven. He walked the first eighty yards in front of his men, in silence, by the artilleryman's habit of pacing the range. The ground rose. The British pickets saw them at fifty yards and the firing-step manned and the volleys came down through the abatis, and there was now, in the seconds between the first volley and the parapet, the only space for thought a field commander gets, which is the space inside the order he has already given. If a single musket discharges in this column before the redoubt is taken, he had told them in the trench, the British would man the parapet and they would lose the column on the slope. The sappers were ahead with axes at the timber spikes. The men were going forward without firing because he had said they would, and Fish was beside him because Fish was the man, of all the men he had soldiered with, he would put a corps with, and Gimat had stood under fire in three engagements before this one, and the British had seventy men inside and he had four hundred outside, and the arithmetic of the next ten minutes was, if the order held, not in doubt. He gave no second order. The order had been given an hour before in the trench and was now only being executed. He went up the abatis behind the sappers with his sword drawn. Captain Stephen Olney of the Rhode Island Light Infantry was the first man over the parapet and was bayoneted in the thigh inside the work and went down. By Fish's account afterwards Hamilton was the second man over, having stood, for an instant, on the shoulder of a kneeling soldier to clear the parapet, which is not a thing a lieutenant colonel is supposed to do, and is the thing for which he had asked the command.

THE WORK TAKEN

Inside the redoubt the bayonet did what he had said it would do. Captain Campbell of the Forty-Third Foot surrendered in the inner trench with what remained of his seventy men. Twenty-six of the defenders were killed or wounded. Nine Americans were dead, twenty-five wounded, Olney among the wounded and recovering. The column had crossed the abatis at fifteen minutes after seven and the redoubt was in American hands by ten minutes past eight. To the north, Deux-Ponts and the Gâtinais had Redoubt 9 by the same hour, at heavier cost, the watchword Auvergne sans tache going up through the smoke. Hamilton sent his courier back to Washington in the trench with a line he had written by the light of a captured British lantern, in the careful hand of an aide who had drafted ten thousand dispatches: that the redoubt was taken, that the bayonet had done its work, that the loss had been moderate. He had Fish post sentries on the captured parapet and turn the British embrasures inward toward the Nelson House. The French sap-lines were running off the captured ground before the British could organise a sortie.

THE NELSON HOUSE

Half past eight. In the Nelson House inside the inner works, Lord Cornwallis received the report from his aide-de-camp that both redoubts had fallen and that the allied engineers were already cutting new approaches off the captured earth. He understood at once what the engineer report meant. The new battery positions would enfilade his whole line by morning. His own letter to Sir Henry Clinton in New York, written that night and sent out by a fast cutter that never arrived in time, said as much in the courteous, exhausted prose of a man who has done his sums: that he could not, with the troops remaining to him, hold the inner works under the fire that would open at first light, and that the post must be considered no longer tenable. He asked for terms on the seventeenth. The articles were signed on the nineteenth at two in the afternoon, on the field, by Brigadier General Charles O'Hara for the surrendering army and by Major General Benjamin Lincoln for the allies, and rather more than seven thousand British and German soldiers marched out between the French and American lines while the bands played, by tradition, The World Turned Upside Down.

THE RETURN

He went back to New York. He was admitted to the bar in 1782; sat in the Continental Congress; wrote, with James Madison and John Jay, the eighty-five papers of The Federalist in 1787 and 1788 under the signature Publius; was appointed by President Washington the first Secretary of the Treasury of the United States in September 1789, and in five years built, on the credit of a country that had none, a national bank, a funded debt, a customs service, a mint, and a coast guard. He was shot by Vice President Aaron Burr at Weehawken on the eleventh of July 1804 and died the next day. The bayonet-only assault on Redoubt 10 remains, by the careful judgment of every tactical study since, the cleanest small-unit action of the American Revolution: a column of four hundred men, ten minutes, the muskets unloaded, the order obeyed. The redoubt itself is a low grass earthwork in the Colonial National Historical Park outside Yorktown, mowed twice a year. A bronze plaque, weathered now to the colour of a wet penny, names Hamilton and Fish and the date.

CODA

The end of an empire on a continent is not, in the books, written by orators. It is written, when it is written cleanly, by a young officer who has already drafted the order in his head and then walks his men the eighty yards to execute it, in silence, with the muskets unloaded, because he has understood that a battalion which has been told what to do and has trusted the man who told them will, in the dark, do it. Everything else, the bank, the mint, the funded debt, the eighty-five papers signed Publius, the duel at Weehawken, the musical of 2015 with its twenty-eight bars on the redoubt and its line immigrants, we get the job done, follows from those ten minutes. The plaque is small. The grass on the parapet is short. The work is still there.