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—— ON THIS DAY ——
OCTOBER 19, 1781
Yorktown, Virginia, USA
245 years ago
The Siege of Yorktown, which ended on October 19, 1781, with the surrender of a British army of more than seven thousand men to the combined American and French forces under George Washington and the Comte de Rochambeau.
At about two in the afternoon on October 19, 1781, the British garrison of Yorktown marched out of its battered fortifications along a road lined on one side by French troops in white uniforms and on the other by Americans, many of them in rags. The British came with their colors cased and, according to a long tradition, their bands playing a tune called 'The World Turned Upside Down.' In a field at the end of the road, more than seven thousand soldiers laid down their muskets.
Their commander, Lieutenant General Charles, Earl Cornwallis, was not among them. Pleading illness, he sent his deputy, Brigadier General Charles O'Hara, who attempted to surrender his sword to the French commander Rochambeau. Rochambeau pointed him toward George Washington. Washington, unwilling to accept a sword from a subordinate, directed him in turn to his own second in command, Major General Benjamin Lincoln. It was a small exchange of snubs that settled who had won.
—— MARQUEE EVENT ——
Charles Cornwallis, the British general whose decision to fortify a position on the Virginia coast and wait for the Royal Navy led to the decisive defeat of the war.
The campaign was a feat of coordination in an age when messages crossed the ocean in weeks. After an exhausting campaign in the Carolinas, Cornwallis had marched into Virginia and, in August 1781, dug in at the tobacco port of Yorktown, where the navy could supply or evacuate him. Washington, camped outside New York with Rochambeau's French army, learned that the French admiral de Grasse was sailing from the Caribbean to the Chesapeake Bay with a powerful fleet and would stay only until mid-October. Washington abandoned his plans to attack New York and marched both armies more than four hundred miles south, disguising the move for as long as possible.
The battle that decided the matter was fought at sea. On September 5, off the mouth of the Chesapeake, de Grasse fought a British fleet to a draw that was in effect a victory, since the British sailed back to New York and left Cornwallis cut off. By the end of September about seventeen thousand American and French troops had him surrounded. Siege guns, many of them French, pounded the town day and night. On the night of October 14, French and American assault parties stormed two key outlying redoubts with bayonets; the American column was led by Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Hamilton. With allied guns now firing at close range and an attempted escape across the York River foiled by a storm, Cornwallis asked for terms on October 17.
When the news reached London in late November, the prime minister, Lord North, is said to have taken it like a bullet to the chest. Britain still held New York, Charleston, and Savannah, and had more troops in America than Washington did. What it no longer had was the political will to continue. Parliament voted in early 1782 to end offensive operations, North's government fell, and peace negotiations opened in Paris. The treaty signed there in September 1783 recognized the independence of the United States. The French monarchy, which had spent itself nearly into bankruptcy to achieve this result, had six years left.
—— WHY THIS MATTERS ——
Yorktown effectively ended the American War of Independence. It was the last major engagement of the war. The loss of a second entire army, after Saratoga in 1777, broke support for the war in Parliament and led directly to British recognition of American independence.
The victory belonged as much to France as to America. French ships sealed the bay, French engineers directed the siege, and French soldiers made up nearly half the allied army. American independence was won by a coalition, a fact worth remembering in this 250th anniversary year of its declaration.
It demonstrated the decisive role of sea power. Cornwallis was not beaten until the Royal Navy briefly lost control of the waters behind him. The lesson, that armies on a coast live or die by the fleet, was studied by naval strategists for generations.
—— THE TAKEAWAY ——
On October 19, 1781, a British army marched out of Yorktown and stacked its weapons between lines of French and American troops. Cornwallis stayed in his tent. The fighting sputtered on for a while, but everyone understood what had happened, and two years later Britain signed away thirteen colonies.
—— QUOTE OF THE DAY ——
“Oh God, it is all over.”
— Lord North, British Prime Minister, on receiving news of the surrender, November 1781
—— OUR QUIZ OF THE DAY ——
How much do you know about the Siege of Yorktown, the role of the French fleet and army, Alexander Hamilton's assault on Redoubt 10, and the surrender that ended the Revolutionary War?
