The Siege of Yorktown or Battle of Yorktown in 1781 was a decisive victory by a combined assault of American forces led by General George Washington and French forces led by General Comte de Rochambeau over a British Army commanded by General Lord Cornwallis. It proved to be the last major battle of the American Revolutionary War, as the surrender of Cornwallis’s army (the second of the war) prompted the British government to eventually negotiate an end to the conflict.
Battle of Yorktown
Plan of the Battle of Yorktown
Admiral de Grasse sailed his fleet of twenty-eight warships north toward Virginia. Simultaneously, on 21 August 1781, Washington began moving his army south. As they marched south, Admiral De Grasses’s fleet arrived at the Chesapeake Bay. De Grasse defeated Admiral Thomas Graves’s fleet in the Battle of the Chesapeake, also known as the “Battle of the Capes,” and won control of the bay, thereby sealing its entrance and stranding Cornwallis from supply by sea. The defeat in Chesapeake Bay was the only major naval defeat suffered by the Royal Navy of Great Britain in the two hundred years of the 18th and 19th centuries.
In the late summer of 1781 when George Washington and Rochambeau heard of Lord Cornwallis’s encampment in Yorktown, they raced southward from New York to link up with the French fleet under de Grasse in Chesapeake Bay. Washington arrived just in time to bottle-up the British, who were anticipating reinforcements that never came from either General Clinton or the British fleet.
On September 28, 1781, Washington and Rochambeau, along with La Fayette’s troops and 3,000 of de Grasse’s men, arrived at Yorktown. With them was the 2nd Canadian Regiment lead by Brigadier General Moses Hazen. In all, there were nearly 20,000 men converging on the camp established by Cornwallis. With the arrival of these troops, the stranded British forces in Yorktown were outnumbered by a two-to-one margin and were then subjected to heavy fire as work began on a siege line. Offshore, the French fleet effectively blocked aid for Cornwallis while Washington made life unbearable for the British troops with three weeks of shelling. The Allies placed up to 375 guns, mortars and siege weaponry along their lines to bombard Yorktown. The siege guns fired an average 1.2 shells or bombs every minute, or 1,728 per day. By the time the Siege ended, some 36,288 shots were fired into Yorktown. The guns that the British had were of little use, as a shortage of horses and necessary equipment meant that they could not drag their guns into position.
Redoubt No. 10, July 2006
Cornwallis, realizing the scope of his predicament, managed to send a message to Clinton in New York. Clinton promised that a relief expedition carrying 5,000 men would leave by the 5th of October. Meanwhile, the British and Franco-American forces were digging in and improving their respective earthworks. On October 11, the allies started a second siege line only 400 yards (400 m) away from the British forces. Three days later, the French and Americans captured two major British redoubts, the French, under the command of Wilhelm de Forbach, taking redoubt 9 and the Americans, under the command of Alexander Hamilton, taking redoubt 10, completing the second siege line and the close investment of the British garrison.
While the allies were enveloping his position, Cornwallis had found out that the relief force from New York was going to be late. On October 16, a British attack hoping to silence a French battery failed. The allied batteries, from their closer second siege line, were now firing directly into the British defensive works. That night, Cornwallis attempted to pass part of his force across the river to Tarleton's position, but was thwarted by a storm. Had the weather not been so bad, Cornwallis could have passed his entire force across the river, broken through the smaller Allied siege works and marched hard north.
Cornwallis, whose army was running low on food and ammunition and still awaiting help from Clinton, offered to surrender unconditionally on October 17. An interesting aspect to this surrender was that General Cornwallis declined to appear at the surrender ceremony or to surrender his sword (a custom at the time) to General Washington, claiming illness. Washington refused to accept the surrender from Cornwallis's deputy, and so the deputy surrendered to Washington's subordinate: General Benjamin Lincoln. On 19 October, the papers were signed by Cornwallis and Thomas Symonds (the most senior naval officer present), and the pair officially surrendered. About 7,000 British troops became prisoners of the American forces. Five days after the surrender, Clinton's relief arrived. This siege set its self apart from other sieges of the era. Usually, armies besieged a target and then stormed it by infantry assault, such as the Battle of the Alamo, though that engagement was much later on than Yorktown. Yorktown was primarily an artillery duel. The only infantry actions were the storming of two British forward redoubts by 400 French and 400 Americans, a successful British attempt at spiking several guns in the captured redoubts and a failed attempt to silence a French battery. Since the British could not drag their guns into position, most of the time they could not fire back.
References
- Artillery at Yorktown [1]
- Adams, Randolph G. “A View of Cornwallis’s Surrender at Yorktown.” American Historical Review 1931 37(1): 25-49. Issn: 0002-8762 Fulltext: online at Jstor
- Bicheno, H. Rebels and Redcoats, The American Revolutionary War, London 2003
- Clement, R: “The World Turned Upside Down at the Surrender of Yorktown”, Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 92, No. 363 (Jan. - Mar., 1979), pp. 66-67 (available on Jstor)
- Hibbert, C: Rebels and Redcoats: The American Revolution Through British Eyes, London, 2001
- Jerome Greene. Guns of Independence: The Siege of Yorktown, 1781 (2005)
- Higginbotham, Don. The War of American Independence: Military Attitudes, Policies, and Practice, 1763-1789. (1983). ISBN 0-930350-44-8. Online in ACLS History E-book Project
- Richard M. Ketchum. Victory at Yorktown: The Campaign That Won the Revolution (2004)
- Brendan Morrissey and Adam Hook. Yorktown 1781: The World Turned Upside Down (1994) British perspective
- Tuchman, Barbara W. The First Salute 1988, chapter on battle
- Ward, Christopher. The War of the Revolution. 1952, vol 2
- Willcox, W: “The British Road to Yorktown: A Study in Divided Command”, The American Historical Review, Vol. 52, No. 1. (Oct., 1946), pp. 1-35 in JSTOR
- Wood, W. J. Battles of the Revolutionary War, 1775–1781. ISBN 0-306-81329-7 (2003)
- Wright, J: “Notes on the Siege of Yorktown in 1781 with Special Reference to the Conduct of a Siege in the Eighteenth Century,” William and Mary Quarterly, 2nd Ser., Vol. 12, No. 4 (Oct., 1932), pp. 229-249,
- Jean-Baptiste Antoine de Verger’s Account of 14 October 1781 attack on Redoubt 9 at Yorktown.
- Could the British Have Won at Yorktown Page 18
Notes
- ^ http://www.historyofwar.org/articles/battles_yorktown.html
- ^ French: 52 killed, 134 wounded. Americans: 20 killed, 56 wounded.
- ^ Tarleton’s Campaigns gives casualties as: 159 killed, 328 wounded, 70 missing and 7,247 captured. A note on a General Return by Adjutant estimated that 309 were killed during siege and 44 deserters killed as well but does not break these estimates down by units.
See also
External links
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