In 1781, after joining General Washington’s army north of New York City, the allied American and French armies moved south toward Virginia and passed through Delaware on September 1-8 by way of Philadelphia, Wilmington, Christiana, Elkton, and Baltimore. French light cavalry from Lauzun’s Legion went ahead escorting cartographers mapping the route and quartermasters buying food for 4,000 French soldiers and pasturage for 1,000 horses and oxen. Continental Army units followed, and then the French army, equal in number to Wilmington’s population, took two days to pass, with marching troops and wagons pulled by oxen. The Old Baltimore Pike was the only road in the nation to witness the passage of the entire allied army on its southward march in September 1781. General Rochambeau, interested in the Battle of Cooch’s Bridge, led his officers on an instructional horseback tour of that battlefield. U.S. cannon and ammunition traveled down the Delaware River to the Christiana River, then overland by the Old Baltimore Pike, and then down the Elk River to the Chesapeake Bay, while U.S. troops and most of Lauzun’s Legion embarked from Elkton, Maryland, by boat and the rest marched south. On October 19, 1781, the British army at Yorktown, Virginia, surrendered to the allies, effectively ending hostilities in the United States. As the allied troops returned north, the Continentals in November 1781 and the French in August 1782, they were greeted with rejoicing and praise in Delaware and elsewhere. Rochambeau, born at Vendome on July 1, 1725, had been educated for the Church before entering the army at age 17 and serving with distinction in the War of the Austrian Succession and the Seven Years War. As commander of the French forces sent to America, he landed at Newport, Rhode Island, in July 1780 with about 5,000 troops, was delayed there by a British blockade, then conferred with Washington in spring 1781 and agreed to strike Charles Cornwallis in Virginia rather than Henry Clinton at New York. After joining the Americans at White Plains in June, Rochambeau’s forces marched to Williamsburg, where they met the Marquis de Lafayette’s army in September, and, reinforced by 4,000 troops brought by Admiral De Grasse from Haiti, joined Washington in besieging Cornwallis at Yorktown on October 2 while De Grasse’s fleet blocked British relief. Cornwallis surrendered on October 19. Rochambeau spent the winter in Virginia, returned to Rhode Island in 1782, and went back to France in 1783. During the French revolutionary period he commanded the Army of the North, became a marshal of France in 1791, resigned the following year, was arrested for treason but escaped execution, received from Napoleon the rank of grand officer of the Legion of Honor in 1804, published his memoirs in 1809 after his death at Thore on May 10, 1807, and was remembered in America for placing himself under Washington’s orders and helping secure the Franco-American cooperation that defeated the British in the American Revolution.