Yorktown: The Same Terms They Gave Us

Cornwallis marched his army to Yorktown that summer to establish a defensible port on the Chesapeake, expecting British naval support to keep the position supplied. Instead, a French fleet under the Comte de Grasse defeated the Royal Navy at the Battle of the Chesapeake in early September, sealing off any hope of rescue by sea. Washington marched south from New York with a combined American and French army, and by the end of September, roughly 16,000 troops had Cornwallis's 7,000 men trapped against the river. The siege lasted three weeks. When Cornwallis finally asked to negotiate, the correspondence that followed, preserved in full at Founders Online, shows Washington using the terms of an earlier American surrender as his template for what Cornwallis would now receive.

After three weeks of siege and the loss of his outer defenses, Cornwallis sent a flag of truce to Washington's headquarters requesting a pause in the fighting to discuss terms.

Washington's reply the next day rejected the favorable conditions Cornwallis had hoped for. Instead of the honors of war, the ceremonial privileges that let a defeated army march out with flags flying and drums playing its own victorious tunes, Washington specified that Cornwallis's army would receive precisely the treatment the British had given the American garrison that surrendered at Charleston in May 1780, a humiliating capitulation Continental troops had not been permitted to forget.

Washington also refused Cornwallis's request that British and German troops be shipped home to Europe rather than held as prisoners, insisting they be marched instead to American-controlled territory to be interned for the duration of the war. The Articles of Capitulation were signed on October 19.

Cornwallis did not attend the ceremony, citing illness, and sent Brigadier General Charles O'Hara to surrender in his place. Washington's own diary entry for the day, along with the editorial annotations Founders Online attaches to it, preserves several eyewitness accounts of what the two armies watched that afternoon.

A French officer present that day, Baron von Closen, recorded a very different impression of the two allied armies standing on either side of the road as the British marched between them, an observation Founders Online also preserves in its notes on the diary entry.

Closen's journal, cited in Founders Online's annotation, records that the surrendering British troops showed "the greatest scorn for the Americans, who, to tell the truth, were eclipsed by our army in splendor of appearance and dress, for most of these unfortunate persons were clad in small jackets of white cloth, dirty and ragged, and a number of them were almost barefoot." Six years into the war, the army that had just won its decisive victory was still, by a French ally's own account, poorly clothed and poorly equipped standing in the field of its own triumph.

Roughly 7,000 British and German troops surrendered at Yorktown, the second entire army Britain had lost in the war after Saratoga. Fighting continued in smaller engagements and at sea for another two years, but no further major campaign followed. News of the surrender reached London in late November, an episode covered separately in this archive, and set in motion the political collapse that would eventually bring Britain to the negotiating table in Paris.