Yorktown

Yorktown: The Ground Where American Independence Was Won

On the morning of October 19, 1781, a long column of British and Hessian soldiers marched out of their battered earthworks at Yorktown, Virginia, filing between two lines of allied troops — American Continentals on one side, French regulars on the other — to the sound of fifes and drums reportedly playing a tune called "The World Turned Upside Down." Whether or not that particular melody actually accompanied the moment, the sentiment was apt. At Yorktown, on a bluff overlooking the York River in tidewater Virginia, the military struggle for American independence reached its decisive conclusion. No other place on the American landscape can claim the same distinction. The siege and surrender at Yorktown did not technically end the Revolutionary War — the Treaty of Paris would not be signed until September 1783 — but it shattered British political will to continue the conflict and made the recognition of American sovereignty all but inevitable. When news of the surrender reached London on November 25, Prime Minister Lord North reportedly declared, "Oh God. It is all over. It is all over." By March 5, 1782, Parliament had passed a bill authorizing the government to make peace with America, and North resigned fifteen days later. Understanding what happened at Yorktown, and why it happened there, is essential to understanding how the United States came into being.

Yorktown itself was no accidental stage for this drama. The area around Yorktown was settled in 1630, but the town developed after 1691, when a port was authorized by Virginia's General Assembly. Yorktown became a busy shipping center, and its Colonial Custom House (1706; restored) is regarded as the cradle of the American tariff system. By 1750, however, its commercial role had declined together with the Tidewater Virginia tobacco trade.

The town reached the height of its development around 1750, when it had 250 to 300 buildings and a population of almost 2,000 people.

Yorktown village was established by the Virginia Port Act on land originally part of the Captain Nicholas Martiau tract. The 50-acre village was laid out in 85 half-acre lots on the bluffs above the York River. The original street and lot lines remain to this day. Land was left between the town lots and the river for development of wharves, stores and lodgings. Among Yorktown's most prominent citizens was Thomas Nelson Jr., a Founding Father, general in the Revolutionary War, member of the Continental Congress, and a Virginia planter who signed the Declaration of Independence in 1776. Fellow Virginia legislators elected him to serve as the commonwealth's governor in 1781, the same year he fought as a brigadier general in the siege of Yorktown, the final major battle of the war.

According to family tradition, during the siege he told General Washington to shell his own mansion when he learned it was a British headquarters.

To appreciate the significance of the Yorktown campaign, one must first understand the strategic situation in the summer of 1781. The war had dragged on for six grinding years. George Washington's Continental Army, encamped in the Hudson Highlands of New York, was short on money, supplies, and patience. Mutinies had already broken out among Pennsylvania and New Jersey troops earlier that year. The French alliance, formalized in 1778, had yet to produce a truly decisive joint operation. Washington had long fixated on recapturing New York City from the British, but the Comte de Rochambeau, the seasoned French lieutenant general commanding the Expéditionary Particulière of some 5,000 troops stationed at Newport, Rhode Island, gently steered his American counterpart toward a different target. Rochambeau knew something Washington did not yet fully appreciate: Admiral François Joseph Paul, Comte de Grasse, was sailing north from the West Indies with a powerful French fleet and more than 3,000 additional troops, and he was heading not for New York but for the Chesapeake Bay. On the other side of the Atlantic, Britain was also waging a global war with France and Spain , stretching its resources thin. The last battle in this global conflict known in the United States as the American Revolution was not fought on the fields of Virginia in 1781: it occurred two years later at Cuddalore, India.

The reason the Chesapeake mattered was Charles Cornwallis. The aggressive British lieutenant general had spent the previous year campaigning across the Carolinas, winning tactically costly victories at places like Guilford Courthouse while failing to pacify the Southern states. By the summer of 1781, Cornwallis had marched his army into Virginia, where he conducted raids and skirmished with a small American force under the Marquis de Lafayette. Under orders from his superior, Sir Henry Clinton in New York, Cornwallis moved to the small tobacco port of Yorktown in August 1781, where he began fortifying a position along the bluffs and establishing a naval base that could maintain communication with Clinton by sea. Clinton directly countered his previous orders and ordered Cornwallis to fortify either Yorktown or Williamsburg to fulfill a request by the Royal Navy to secure a southern deep-water port, noting limitations of New York harbor. Cornwallis chose Yorktown because it offered a deep-water harbor on the York River capable of accommodating the largest warships of the era — precisely the kind of anchorage the Royal Navy needed. Cornwallis pointed out that due to the geography of the Chesapeake Bay region, any naval base would always be open to an attack. Nevertheless, he complied, and his army spent the latter part of the summer fortifying Yorktown and Gloucester Point across the river.

Once Washington learned that de Grasse was bound for the Chesapeake rather than New York, he pivoted with a boldness that defined his generalship. Washington changed his strategy: he would fool Clinton into thinking the Continentals were planning to attack New York while instead sneaking away to the south to attack Cornwallis. Washington ordered the construction of large camps with huge brick bread ovens where Clinton could see them to create the illusion that the Continental Army was preparing for a long stay. Washington also prepared false papers discussing attack plans on Clinton, and let these papers fall into British hands.

The Allied armies then marched hundreds of miles from their headquarters north of New York City to Yorktown, making theirs the largest troop movement of the American Revolution.

The keystone of the entire campaign was control of the sea. On September 5, the Royal Navy force made it to the