The Quaker city forgot its old suspicion of the French and their Catholic religion.

Luzerne, the French Minister, gave a great banquet on the evening of the 5th of September.
Eighty guests took their places at table and as they sat down good news arrived.

As yet few knew the destination of the army but now Luzerne read momentous tidings and the secret was out: twenty-eight French ships of the line had arrived in Chesapeake Bay; an army of three thousand men had already disembarked and was in touch with the army of La Fayette; Washington and Rochambeau were bound for Yorktown to attack Cornwallis.
Great was the joy; in the streets the soldiers and the people shouted and sang and humorists, mounted on chairs, delivered in advance mock funeral orations on Cornwallis.
It was planned that the army should march the fifty miles to Elkton, at the head of Chesapeake Bay, and there take boat to Yorktown, two hundred miles to the south at the other end of the Bay.

But there were not ships enough.

Washington had asked the people of influence in the neighborhood to help him to gather transports but few of them responded.