ambition, had shut his God in heaven, and besieged him there.

While the fortifications defending it amazed me, the village of Yorktown
disappointed me. I marvelled that so paltry a settlement should have
been twice made historic. Here, in the year 1783, Lord Cornwallis
surrendered his starving command to the American colonists and their
French allies. But the entrenchments of that earlier day had been
almost obliterated by these recent labors. The field, where the Earl
delivered up his sword, was trodden bare, and dotted with ditches and
ramparts; while a small monument, that marked the event, had been hacked
to fragments by the Southerners, and carried away piecemeal. Yet,
strange to say, relics of the first bombardment had just been
discovered, and, among them, a gold-hilted sword.

I visited, in the evening, the late quarters of General Hill, a small
white house with green shutters, and also the famous "Nelson House," a
roomy mansion where, of old, Cornwallis slept, and where, a few days
past, Jefferson Davis and General Lee had held with Magruder, and his
associates, a council of war. It had been also used for hospital
purposes, but some negroes were now the only occupants.

The Confederates left behind them seventy spiked and shattered cannon,
some powder, and a few splintered wagons; but in all material respects,
their evacuation was thorough and creditable. Some deserters took the
first tidings of the retreat to the astonished Federals, and they raised
the national flag within the fortifications, in the gray of the morning
of the 4th of May. Many negroes also escaped the vigilance of their
taskmasters, and remained to welcome the victors. The fine works of
Yorktown are monuments to negro labor, for _they_ were the hewers and
the diggers. Every slave-owner in Eastern Virginia was obliged to send
one half of his male servants between the ages of sixteen and fifty to
the Confederate camps, and they were organized into gangs and set to
work. In some cases they were put to military service and made excellent
sharpshooters. The last gun discharged from the town was said to have
been fired by a negro.

I slept on board a barge at the wharf that evening, and my dreams ran
upon a thousand themes. To every American this was hallowed ground. It
had been celebrated by the pencil of Trumbull, the pen of Franklin, and
the eloquence of Jefferson. Scarce eighty years had elapsed since those
great minds established a fraterna