American Revolution · September–October 1781

The Siege of Yorktown: How the Revolutionary War Was Won

By the Aurelius editorial team · 3 min read · Updated 15 October 2026

Last time: Steuben drilled the Continental Army through the Valley Forge winter, and France entered the war. Three years later the decisive campaign was fought in Virginia.

On the morning of 17 October 1781, a British drummer climbed onto the earthworks at Yorktown, Virginia, and beat the call for a parley. An officer followed him, holding up a white handkerchief. In the allied trenches, after days of bombardment, the guns fell silent.

The war moves south

After Saratoga, Britain turned south, hoping Loyalists there would help restore royal government. At first it worked. The British took Savannah in 1778, and in May 1780 Charleston surrendered with more than 5,000 American troops, the worst American defeat of the war. At Camden that August, Horatio Gates, the victor of Saratoga, was routed.

Then Nathanael Greene took command in the South and wore the British down with a war of movement. “We fight get beat rise and fight again,” he wrote. After a costly victory at Guilford Courthouse in March 1781, General Charles Cornwallis marched his tired army into Virginia.

A port on the York River

In Virginia, Cornwallis's cavalry raided plantations and nearly captured Governor Thomas Jefferson. Then, ordered by his commander in New York, Sir Henry Clinton, to secure a deep-water base for the navy, Cornwallis dug in at Yorktown, a tobacco port near Chesapeake Bay. As long as the Royal Navy held the sea, he could be supplied or taken off.

Shadowing him was the Marquis de Lafayette, the French volunteer commanding American troops in Virginia. One of Lafayette's best sources was James Armistead, an enslaved man who entered Cornwallis's camp posing as a runaway and sent information back. Thousands of other enslaved Virginians fled to the British, hoping for freedom; during the siege, short of food, the British drove many of them out, some sick with smallpox.

The French fleet

Washington wanted to attack New York. Then, in August, he learned that the French admiral the Comte de Grasse was sailing from the Caribbean to Chesapeake Bay with 28 warships and some 3,000 soldiers, but could stay only until mid-October. Washington and the French general the Comte de Rochambeau left a screen of troops before New York and marched their armies hundreds of miles south, hoping Clinton would realise too late.

On 5 September, off the Virginia Capes, de Grasse fought a British fleet under Admiral Thomas Graves. The battle was indecisive, but Graves withdrew to New York to refit, and a second French squadron slipped in with siege guns. Cornwallis was trapped.

The siege

By late September some 16,000 American and French troops faced about 8,000 British and German soldiers. Engineers, mostly French, dug trenches ever closer to the British lines, and from 9 October allied guns pounded the town day and night.

On the night of 14 October, two assault parties stormed the last two British redoubts with bayonets: Redoubt 10 by Americans under Alexander Hamilton, Redoubt 9 by French troops. A storm wrecked Cornwallis's attempt to ferry his army across the river to escape. On 17 October he asked for terms.

Surrender, and a long road to peace

On 19 October the British marched out between lines of French and American soldiers. Cornwallis stayed away, pleading illness. His deputy, Charles O'Hara, tried to surrender to Rochambeau, who pointed him to Washington; Washington directed him to his own deputy, Benjamin Lincoln, who had surrendered at Charleston. The story that British bands played “The World Turned Upside Down” was first written down decades later.

Lord North, the prime minister, reportedly cried “Oh God! It is all over!” and resigned in March 1782. But fighting continued at sea and in India until the Treaty of Paris recognised American independence in September 1783. When the British left New York that November, they took about 3,000 Black Loyalists with them, refusing to hand them back to their former owners.

In their own words

“I have the Honor to inform Congress, that a Reduction of the British Army under the Command of Lord Cornwallis, is most happily effected. The unremitting Ardor which actuated every Officer & Soldier in the combined Army on this Occasion, has principally led to this Important Event, at an earlier period than my most sanguine Hopes had induced me to expect.”

George Washington, Letter to Thomas McKean, President of Congress, 19 October 1781

Carried to Philadelphia by Washington's aide Tench Tilghman. Capitalisation as in the Papers of George Washington.

Why it happened

• Britain's southern strategy brought Cornwallis's army north into Virginia.
• Clinton ordered Cornwallis to hold a port that depended on the Royal Navy.
• The French fleet won temporary control of Chesapeake Bay as the allied armies marched south.

What happened next

• Lord North's government fell, and Britain opened peace talks that ended with the Treaty of Paris in 1783.
• Thousands of Black Loyalists left with the British, many for Nova Scotia and later Sierra Leone.
• France's war debts deepened the crisis that led to revolution in 1789.
• With peace came a new problem: an unpaid army and a weak national government. Read the story →

Why it still matters

Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone, was founded in 1792 by about 1,200 Black Loyalists who had fought for Britain, been evacuated to Nova Scotia and then sailed to West Africa. Their descendants are part of the city's Krio community today: one of the war's outcomes that most American accounts leave out.

Connected stories

• Saratoga and the French Alliance: The French alliance that followed Saratoga supplied the fleet and half the army at Yorktown.
• Valley Forge: The Army Remade: The drill learned at Valley Forge, and Greene's southern campaign, set up the final victory.

Sources

• Nathaniel Philbrick, In the Hurricane's Eye: The Genius of George Washington and the Victory at Yorktown (2018)
• Alan Taylor, American Revolutions: A Continental History, 1750–1804 (2016)
• Cassandra Pybus, Epic Journeys of Freedom: Runaway Slaves of the American Revolution and Their Global Quest for Liberty (2006)
• George Washington, George Washington to Thomas McKean, 19 October 1781 (The Papers of George Washington, via Founders Online)

Images are credited under each picture. Paintings and photographs come from public collections via Wikimedia Commons; scenes with no surviving image are marked as illustrations.