Meanwhile Washington had raised an army in Connecticut and marched down with it to his old position at Whiteplains, where he was joined by a French force of 6000 men which had occupied Rhode Island since June of the previous year. For more than a month Washington kept Clinton in perpetual fear of an attack, until at last he received intelligence that the expected French fleet under the Comte de Grasse was on its way to the Chesapeake. Then he suddenly marched with the whole army, French and American, to Philadelphia, and thence down the Elk River to the Chesapeake. De Grasse had been there with 24 ships and 3500 troops since the 30th, and had managed to keep his position against the British fleet of 19 ships under Admiral Graves. This brief command of the sea by the French virtually decided the war. [Sidenote: 1782.] Yorktown was invested on the 28th September, and on the 19th October Cornwallis was compelled to surrender. From that moment the war was practically over, though it was not until the 16th April 1783 that Washington received, from the hand of Captain Stapleton of the Seventeenth, the despatch that announced to him the final cessation of hostilities. So ended the first war service of the 17th Light Dragoons. It will have been remarked that since 1779 little has been said of the headquarters of the regiment stationed at New York. The answer is that there is little or nothing to say, no operations of any importance having been undertaken in the North after the capture of Charleston. Yet it is certain that the duties of foraging, patrolling, and reconnaissance must have kept the men in New York perpetually engaged in trifling skirmishes and petty actions, whereof all record has naturally perished. A single anecdote of one such little affair has survived, and is worth insertion, as exemplifying from early days a distinctive trait of the regiment, viz. the decided ability of its non-commissioned officers when left in independent command. We shall find instances thereof all through the regiment’s history. Our present business is with Sergeant Thomas Tucker, who, when out patrolling one day with twelve men, came upon a small American post, promptly attacked it, and made the garrison, which, though not large, was larger than his own party, his prisoners. Tucker had accompanied the regiment from England as a volunteer; he went back with it to England as a cornet. Incidents of this kind must have been frequent round New York; and as seventeen men of the Seventeenth, exclusive of those taken at Yorktown, were prisoners in the hands of the Americans at the close of the war, there can be no doubt that the garrison duty in that city was not mere ordinary routine.