Yorktown: Where the Revolution Ended

Yorktown is where the American Revolution effectively ended. From September twenty-eighth to October nineteenth, seventeen eighty-one, General George Washington and French General the Comte de Rochambeau marched a combined Franco-American army of well over fifteen thousand soldiers down from New York to trap British General Charles Cornwallis and his army of eight to nine thousand men on this peninsula. Admiral de Grasse's French fleet had already fought and beaten the British navy at the Battle of the Chesapeake Capes, sealing off any escape by sea.

Washington's siege lines closed tighter each day. On the night of October fourteenth, Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Hamilton led a bayonet charge that seized Redoubt Number Ten, cracking the outer British defenses. Five days later, Cornwallis surrendered.

He sent an aide in his place, claiming illness. The news reached London and the British government fell. Peace negotiations began, ending in the seventeen eighty-three Treaty of Paris, which formally recognized American independence.

Before all of this, Yorktown had been a busy colonial tobacco port, its brick customshouse still standing above the York River today.