There, upon the peninsula which he deemed his safest coign of vantage, he was trapped and taken. At last the French were at hand. The Comte de Grasse, with twenty-eight ships of the line, six frigates, and twenty thousand men, was in the West Indies. Washington had begged him to come at once either to New York or to the Chesapeake. In August he sent word that he would come to the Chesapeake. Thereupon Washington once again moved with the sudden directness he had shown at Trenton and Princeton. Rochambeau was free now to lend him aid. With four thousand Frenchmen and two thousand of his own continentals, Washington marched all the long four hundred miles straightway to the York River, in Virginia. There he found Cornwallis, as he had hoped and expected, already penned between Grasse’s fleet in the bay and Lafayette’s trenches across the peninsula. His six thousand men, added to Lafayette’s five thousand and the three thousand put ashore from the fleet, made short work enough of the siege, drawn closer and closer about the British; and by the 19th of October (1781) they accepted the inevitable and surrendered. The gallant Cornwallis himself could not withhold an expression of his admiration for the quick, consummate execution of the plans which had undone him, and avowed it with manly frankness to Washington. “But, after all,” he cried, “your Excellency’s achievements in New Jersey were such that nothing could surpass them.” He liked the mastery by which he had been outplayed and taken. Here our general _authorities_ are the same as for the period covered by the last chapter. But to these we now add Edward J. Lowell’s _The United States of America, 1775-1782_, in the seventh volume of Winsor’s _Narrative and Critical History of America_; John Jay’s _Peace Negotiations, 1782-1783_, in the same volume of Winsor; G. W. Greene’s _Historical View of the American Revolution_; the second volume of W. B. Weeden’s _Economic and Social History of New England_; P. O. Hutchinson’s _Life and Letters of Thomas Revolution_; Lorenzo Sabine’s _Biographical Sketches of Adherents to the British Crown_; George E. Ellis’s _The Loyalists and their Fortunes_, in the seventh volume of Winsor; Edward E. Hale’s _Franklin in France_; George Ticknor Curtis’s _Constitutional History of the United States_; and William H. Trescot’s _Diplomacy of the American Revolution_. Abundant references to authorities on the several campaigns of the revolutionary war may be found in Albert B. Hart and Edward Channing’s _Guide to American History_, an invaluable manual.