Yorktown, Where the Revolution Ended

The last major land campaign of the American Revolution ended in a Virginia tobacco town on the York River. On the nineteenth of October, seventeen eighty-one, eight thousand British and Hessian soldiers marched out of their earthworks at Yorktown and surrendered to a combined American and French force under George Washington. The British band is said to have played a tune called 'The World Turned Upside Down.' Whether or not that detail is precisely accurate, it captures the mood of the moment. The most powerful empire on earth had lost a colonial war.

The victory was not inevitable. For most of the preceding six years the war had gone badly for the Americans, a series of retreats and near-collapses saved repeatedly by Washington's stubborn refusal to let the Continental Army dissolve. What made Yorktown possible was the arrival of a French fleet under Admiral de Grasse in the Chesapeake in late August of seventeen eighty-one. When de Grasse defeated a British relief fleet at the Battle of the Capes on the fifth of September, he sealed Cornwallis inside his Yorktown fortifications. Cut off by sea, unable to retreat, Cornwallis had no option but surrender.

Virginia had already paid an enormous price by the time it was over. British forces under the traitor Benedict Arnold had raided Richmond and burned much of it in early seventeen eighty-one. The cavalry commander Banastre Tarleton had ridden as far as Charlottesville, nearly capturing Jefferson himself. The war touched Virginia late but hard.

The battlefield at Yorktown is preserved today as part of Colonial National Historical Park, the siege lines and redoubts still readable in the landscape, the York River still visible from the high bluff where the British cannons once pointed out to sea.