Siege of Yorktown

In September and October 1781 an allied American and French army under George Washington and the Comte de Rochambeau trapped a British army under Lieutenant General Charles Cornwallis at the small port of Yorktown, Virginia, while a French fleet sealed it off from the sea. Cornwallis surrendered on 19 October 1781. It was the last major land battle of the American Revolution, and it persuaded Britain to seek peace, leading to American independence in 1783.

By 1781 the war, which had begun six years earlier at Lexington and Concord, had shifted south. After a costly campaign in the Carolinas, Cornwallis marched into Virginia in May without approval from his superior, Sir Henry Clinton in New York, believing the colony would be easier to subdue. American troops under the Marquis de Lafayette shadowed him. After a series of confusing orders from Clinton, Cornwallis was told to fortify a deep-water port, and he chose Yorktown, on the York River near Chesapeake Bay.

France had been an American ally since 1778, and a French army under Rochambeau had arrived in Rhode Island in 1780. In the summer of 1781 it joined Washington's army north of New York City. Washington favoured an attack on New York, but in August news came that the French admiral the Comte de Grasse was sailing from the West Indies to the Chesapeake with 28 warships and some 3,200 soldiers, though he could stay only until mid-October. Washington switched plans. While false dispatches convinced Clinton that New York was the target, the allied armies marched south, passing through Philadelphia in early September.

De Grasse arrived at the end of August, and on 5 September his fleet fought a British squadron under Admiral Thomas Graves at the Battle of the Chesapeake. Graves was forced back to New York, leaving Cornwallis cut off by sea. By late September Washington commanded some 19,000 men, about 7,800 of them French and the rest American, against Cornwallis's 8,000 to 9,000, about a third of them German auxiliaries. The allies surrounded Yorktown on 28 September, and Cornwallis, promised relief from New York, pulled back from most of his outer works.

On the night of 6 October allied troops began digging the first trench line, or parallel, and from 9 October French and American guns pounded the town day and night. British fire weakened and ships in the river were burned or scuttled. On 14 October, after dark, two columns of about 400 men each stormed the last outlying British strongpoints: French troops took Redoubt No. 9 and Americans under Alexander Hamilton took Redoubt No. 10. Allied guns could now fire on the town from three sides. A British sortie on 15 October spiked a few cannon, which were quickly repaired, and an attempt on 16 October to ferry the army across the river to Gloucester Point was wrecked by a storm. Many British soldiers were also sick with malaria.

On 17 October a British drummer and an officer with a white handkerchief asked for terms. The capitulation was signed on 19 October, and that afternoon the garrison marched out between the French and American lines with flags furled. Cornwallis stayed away, claiming illness; his deputy, Charles O'Hara, tried to hand his sword to Rochambeau and then to Washington, both of whom directed him to Washington's second-in-command, Benjamin Lincoln. More than 7,000 men were taken prisoner. Allied losses were 88 killed and 301 wounded. A British relief fleet arrived five days too late.

News of the defeat brought down Lord North's government in March 1782, after the House of Commons voted against continuing offensive war in America. No further major campaign was fought on the mainland, and the Treaty of Paris, signed on 3 September 1783, recognised the independence of the United States.

Our 1783 map shows North America in the year the war formally ended, with the new United States alongside the remaining territories of the British Empire.