Siege of Yorktown

Cornwallis surrendered some 8,000 men at Yorktown on 19 October 1781 and the war in America was effectively over. He had gone into Virginia after Guilford Courthouse against the strategy his own commander in New York preferred, and had been ordered to establish a naval base on the Chesapeake. He fortified Yorktown, a small tobacco port on a peninsula, and waited for the Royal Navy. What arrived was the French fleet. The campaign that produced it was a piece of coordination unusual in the age of sail. Washington and Rochambeau marched some 7,000 men from New York to Virginia, deceiving Clinton into expecting an attack on Manhattan; de Grasse brought twenty-eight ships of the line from the West Indies, having raised money in Havana in a day to pay for it; and the two arrived within days of each other. The Battle of the Chesapeake on 5 September drove the British fleet back to New York, which sealed the peninsula. The siege then followed the textbook: parallels dug, batteries advanced, two redoubts stormed at night on 14 October, one of them by Hamilton. Cornwallis attempted to evacuate across the river and was stopped by a storm. The surrender was made by a subordinate on grounds of illness, and the British band is said to have played a tune about a world turned upside down. North's reaction on hearing the news was that it was all over. The fighting continued elsewhere for two more years — in the Caribbean, at Gibraltar, off India — and the peace was settled by those theatres as much as by this one. What Yorktown destroyed was the British government's willingness to go on, which fell four months later.

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