Although these four leaders never stood all together as represented here, each rendered critical and significant contributions to the decisive Franco-American victory at Yorktown in October 1781 that led to American independence. Since late April 1781, General Lafayette, with a modest force of Continental soldiers and Virginia militia, had defended Virginia from the worst ravages of a British invasion and closely followed the British into the area around Yorktown. When the French fleet under Comte de Grasse arrived off the Virginia coast in late August bringing French troops as reinforcements to Lafayette's forces, British General Lord Cornwallis and his army found themselves surrounded, but Lafayette needed more soldiers to lay siege to the British fortifications. General George Washington and the Comte de Rochambeau had marched south from New York with a combined French and American army of over 6,000 men to join Lafayette's carefully positioned troops. On September 5, Admiral de Grasse defeated a British naval force off the Chesapeake Bay, blocking any Royal Navy support from reaching Cornwallis. On September 18, Washington and Rochambeau, accompanied by their staff officers, conferred with de Grasse on his flagship the Ville de Paris to discuss plans for the siege. The arrival of the main allied armies in Williamsburg on September 26 closed off Cornwallis' escape route on land. Cornwallis was trapped. That same day Washington sent Lafayette to de Grasse to finalize the French fleet's role in the siege and the positioning of his vessels in the bay to establish the siege ring on water. The final meeting between de Grasse and Washington occurred on October 21, when the general, accompanied by Lafayette, boarded the Ville de Paris to express his gratitude and to make an unsuccessful attempt to persuade de Grasse to engage in naval operations off the coast of the Carolinas. The leadership, foresight, sacrifice, and courage of these four men and the soldiers and sailors under their command led to recognition of the national independence that Americans had so boldly declared in July 1776.
