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Battle of Yorktown. LE ROUGE, G. L./ BERTHIER, C.-L. & L.-A. [Paris, December 1781] Plan de l’Armee de Cornwallis attaquee et faitte Prisoniere dans York Town… 12 3/8 x 15 ½ inches. Copperplate engraving. Troop positions & other details in original color; patch contemporary with publication as explained below; horizontal crease in lower margin from old fold, else a fine example with untrimmed, deckled edges. A superb example of one of the earliest, rarest and most accurate printed plans of the climactic battle of the American Revolution; we have found only two other examples on the market over the last several decades. Based on a survey done in the field just after the battle, the plan was published within two months of Cornwallis’ surrender and was the first of the battle published in France and the second overall. It was the earliest printed record of the battle to show the actual surrender. Of all the contemporaneous plans of the Battle of Yorktown, this is arguably the most complete in military detail. No other one exhibits as vividly the tightening of the noose around British forces that would culminate in Cornwallis’ surrender. It was based on a manuscript map drafted in the field by engineers under the command Jean-Baptiste Donatien de Vimeur, comte de Rochambeau--the Berthier brothers, Charles-Louis and Louis-Alexandre. The latter would one day attain fame as one of Napoleon’s marshals. The source manuscript, on which is inscribed, here in translation, “drawn freehand by the Berthier brothers in haste,” is today preserved in the Bibliothéque du Ministiére des Armées (Terre) in Paris. The positions of the British, French and American forces are respectively identified in pink, yellow, and green colors. As the enemy approached, Cornwallis decided to withdraw from the outskirts of the town, marked on the maps as the “Premiere Position des Anglois.” As indicated by the letters A and B on the map, the legends note how during the night of 14 October, 1781, the French and Americans each seized one of the redoubts guarding the landward approach to the town. Point C notes how the French artillery drove the English vessels from their initial positions to a further location down the river to point D, while at point E the HMS Charron was set ablaze by a French cannonade. Point F shows another British redoubt taken as Franco-American forces moved in on the town, and point G marks the last lines of British defenses that were being heavily shelled by the allies. As the action depicted on the map unfolded, Cornwallis’s force of 7,500 troops, assisted by twenty ships, was vastly outnumbered by the combined Franco-American force of 19,300 troops backed by twenty-four ships. British forces under the infamous Banastre Tarleton helplessly watched the spectacle from Gloucester across the water. Cornwallis eventually realized that his position was hopeless and surrendered to Washington on October 19th. Moore’s house (“Morehouse”), where the surrender was signed, is shown at lower right and identified as such. This crushing defeat caused the fall of the government of British Prime minister, Lord North, and Britain decided that their cause in America was effectively lost. Hostilities wound down, and the British recognized the independence of the United States at the Treaty of Paris in September of 1783. By early 1781, the long war had devolved into something of a stalemate. While the Americans controlled most of the colonies, the British maintained virtually impregnable strongholds in New York, Charleston and Savannah. However, Washington was aware that the superior naval power of the British meant that they could strike a devastating blow to the American cause at virtually any time. Thus, Washington knew that bold action would have to be taken by the Americans and their French allies if they were to finally win the war. The original objective was New York City, and Washington and Rochambeau’s armies decamped just north of city but were deterred by the complexities of an invasion of Manhattan. Washington’s great opportunity came in July when the Marquis de Lafayette informed him that the main British southern force under Lord Cornwallis had moved into Virginia. Both armies then began their march toward Yorktown. While Cornwallis had previously met with some tactical success in his march through the Carolinas, he failed to hold the territory he had traversed and had headed to Yorktown in the hope of being re-supplied there by the Royal Navy. To his misfortune, this lifeline was severed when French naval forces under the Comte de Grasse defeated the British fleet under Admiral Thomas Graves in the Chesapeake Bay at the Battle of the Capes on August 21st. Cornwallis’s force of 7,500 troops was thus effectively trapped. It should be noted that there is a rectangular patch filling a small excised area in the upper left of the map; this was evidently contemporary with the production of the map. The copies of the map in the Library of Congress and the Boston Public Library also have patches in the same location; we have yet to see an example without it. The removed area contained a dedication to François-Eugène de Vault (1717-1790), Director of the Depot de la Guerre from 1763 to 1788. Regarding this dedication, see the Nebenzahl Bibliography, no. 187, noting that on the LOC example of this map, the patch covers the dedication that still can be detected; in our example, the dedication has been excised and that area covered by the patch. No other engraved surface is affected by the patch in our example, and it is in every respect a magnificent example of a vital, contemporaneous depiction of the birth throes of the United States. Library of Congress, Quarterly Journal 30 (1973), p. 248; Nebenzahl, Atlas of the American Revolution, map 47; Nebenzahl, A Bibliography of Printed Battle Plans of the American Revolution, 187; Cf. Rice & Brown, The American Campaigns of Rochambeau’s Army II, pp. 157–159 & figs. 87–89 (referring to the Berthiers’s original manuscript). (id:81966)
Price: $95,000.00