The Beginning of the Siege that Ended the American Transformation
By Bonnie K. Goodman, BA, MLIS
On today in background, September 28, 1781, the American Transformation entered its last act. For 6 long years, the war had dragged throughout the continent, from Boston to the Carolinas, leaving Washington’s army often depressed however never ruined. Triumphes at Trenton and Saratoga had shown the reason was not hopeless, yet by 1781 uncertainty still hung over the Transformation. Britain stayed powerful, and several asked yourself if the experiment in independence would certainly collapse under the stress.
That autumn the battle changed to Virginia. General Charles Cornwallis entrenched his troops at Yorktown, relying on British sea power to keep him provided and to guarantee an escape if required. George Washington saw his opportunity. With the French military under Rochambeau and the French fleet under Admiral de Grasse, he relocated south. The wager was substantial, yet if it functioned, it could end the war. On September 28, the allied armies marched out of Williamsburg and occupied their placements around Yorktown. The siege had started, and with it the last, definitive chapter of the Revolution.
The Road to Yorktown
To recognize why September 28 was essential, one must map the months and weeks preceding.
By summertime 1781, British Lieutenant General Charles Cornwallis had developed his pressure in the Yorktown area, strengthening the peninsula in hopes of keeping a deep-water port, resupplying, and awaiting alleviation by sea. Meanwhile, George Washington and his French ally, the Comte de Rochambeau, resolved to apply approach instead of attrition. Washington abandoned prior prepare for assaulting New York and directed the Franco-American army southern toward Virginia.
A key transforming point was maritime. The French fleet under the Comte de Grasse came to the Chesapeake Bay, and in the occurring Battle of the Capes, the British navy was warded off from reinforcing Cornwallis. That naval defeat secured Cornwallis’s destiny: he would be trapped by land and sea. With marine assistance ensured, Washington and Rochambeau moved in earnest toward Yorktown.
As the militaries marched, Washington preserved privacy and used diversionary dispatches to deceive the British high command as to his real intents. On September 26– 27, the allied militaries made final method activities. On the early morning of September 28, they left Williamsburg and became part of siege posture around Cornwallis’s defenses.
It was on that day– September 28– that the allied pressures started the encirclement, excavating in, reconnoitering, and preparing the siege functions. The British, for their part, had a chain of redoubts, batteries, and earthworks. Cornwallis understood that he faced a severe risk: as he himself would later on contact Lord Clinton, “Every thing was to be anticipated from the spirit of the soldiers, but every disadvantage attended their work … our supply of intrenching tools … was currently much diminished.”
The Siege Starts: October and the Assaults
Although the official siege lasted up until October 19, the work began in earnest instantly after the arrival of allied forces on September 28 On September 29, Washington relocated the allied lines more detailed, and the British opened fire. Cornwallis additionally drew back from a lot of his outer defenses, consolidating into fewer jobs. As the outer British redoubts were abandoned, the allied engineers occupied and improved them, and started to release their batteries.
By very early October, the allied artillery was brought forward, the trenches prolonged, and barrage started. On October 6 forward, the allies dug their very first parallel trenches, and by October 9, the guns opened fire. The French started the bombardment, and then the Americans complied with. Tale holds that Washington himself fired the initial American shot– although whether that shot ruined a British officers’ dinner table is likely apocryphal– but it dramatized the moment.
The fiercest episodes happened on October 14, when two external redoubts– Numbers 9 and 10– were assaulted and caught by Franco-American forces. The French column (consisting of soldiers from the German-French routine of Deux-Ponts) confiscated Redoubt 9, and the American pressure, led by Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Hamilton, stormed and took Redoubt 10 In a letter to Lafayette, Hamilton later on reported the casualties and the personality of the combating:
“The eliminated and wounded of the enemy did not surpass eight.”
Washington regarded these attacks crucial. In a report to Thomas McKean, he explained exactly how “the Engineers having deemed both Redoubts … sufficiently injured by our shot and shells … it was determined to carry them by assault … Nothing could exceed the firmness and fearlessness of the Soldiers. They advanced under the fire of the Adversary without returning a shot, and effected business with the Bayonet just.”
Those captures enabled the allied batteries to enfilade the British line, alarming the heart of Cornwallis’s protection. Then, Cornwallis’s placement came to be illogical.
The surrender and consequences
By October 17, Cornwallis acknowledged that additional resistance was helpless. A drummer defeated a parley; an officer swung a white flag. Negotiations adhered to. The terms of capitulation were drawn, and on October 19 the formal surrender took place.
An eyewitness account explains exactly how the beat British soldiers marched into the allied lines:
“Every eye was prepared to look on Lord Cornwallis, … yet he disappointed our distressed expectations; making believe indisposition, he made General O’Hara his substitute … the conquered troops in a slow and solemn action … shades cased, and drums beating a British march.”
Cornwallis himself did not attend the event, pointing out ailment. Instead, his 2nd, General Charles O’Hara, provided the sword– at first to Rochambeau (that declined) and then to Washington (that accepted General Benjamin Lincoln). The British soldiers put down arms between the American and French lines, flags furled, firearms carried, according to the abandonment terms.
The terms of capitulation consisted of distribution of arms, artillery, military shops, and the prisoners of battle themselves. British naval pressures were to surrender their ships, and medical facility and medical supplies were attended to the ill and wounded.
The surrender of Yorktown is globally concerned by historians as the definitive act that ended significant combating on the North American mainland. The British, grievously deteriorated and beat, soon entered into peace negotiations; by 1783 the Treaty of Paris would formally recognize American freedom.
Voices from the siege
Beyond the broad sweep of method and methods, the human voices from Yorktown bring the siege to life. One such witness was Lieutenant Ebenezer Denny, whose journal is usually priced quote in accounts of the surrender:
“Siege operations went to once commenced; the fighting became very warm on all sides, and the siege works were pushed with wonderful vitality. Easy excavating, light, sandy dirt. A covering from among French mortars established fire to a British frigate; she shed to the water’s side and after that blew up; made the planet shake.”
Denny additionally stated the ritualistic minute:
“Had the pleasure of seeing a drummer mount the opponent’s parapet and beat a parley … an officer … made his appearance … thus was the excellent occasion of the abandonment of Cornwallis completed.”
An additional expressive voice is Cornwallis himself. In his letter to Clinton, he rued his scenario:
“Every thing was to be anticipated from the spirit of the soldiers, but every downside attended their work … our supply of intrenching devices … was now much lessened.”
One sometimes discovers, in additional resources, General Washington’s very own directing ideology echoed. A Military Heritage retelling notes: “Washington recognized that the secret to triumph lay in protecting the Army. … If he can maintain combating long enough, the British would tire of the battle and sue for tranquility.”
Ultimately, when the abandonment was underway, one British policeman mentioned with some poignance on the civility revealed by his captors– yet this motion might not hide the scale of defeat.
Why September 28 matters
The day September 28, 1781 is greater than a schedule footnote: it notes the minute the American and French militaries took the campaign, encircled Cornwallis, and began the physical and mental procedure of siege. On that day, fight lines were attracted– not simply on maps, yet in the minds of leaders and soldiers. The arrival of the allied forces, the uncovering of British redoubts and the beginning of works all indicated that Cornwallis had actually lost the strategic campaign.
From that day forward, the fate of Yorktown was sealed. Each trench dug, each battery emplaced, each recorded redoubt shut the noose. The British position expanded increasingly untenable as evacuation by sea was refuted and relief by land obstructed. When the assault on the redoubts prospered, that was the minute of collapse. The abandonment followed, and with it came the lengthy process of peace.
In the span of those few weeks, the balance of the war shifted irrevocably. No significant land exploration would test the brand-new USA once again; “The Fight of Yorktown proved to be the decisive involvement of the American Change. … The British surrender forecast completion of British guideline in the swarms and the birth of a brand-new country.”
Historian Robert Middlekauff in his book The Remarkable Cause: The American Transformation, 1763– 1789 commemorates the American triumph, writing; “In the long run, however, the intangible played as great a part as organization or system in keeping the army going. The military’s will to survive and to eliminate on short distributions, its desire to suffer, to give up, made the poor ample and rendered the failings of others of little value. The army got rid of the worst by itself and in others. It was resolute.”
However, Temple College Background Teacher Gregory Urwin reminds us that the end of the American Transformation was a lot more conflicted than the victorious narratives commonly suggest: “So usually, we only obtain one story of background. And with this battle, the tale we received was the one that was told at the bicentennial. The American Revolution made this nation possible and, like other development stories, it came to be shrouded in misconception and there are certain ways we prefer to remember it.” Without a doubt, Americans commemorate Yorktown as the mythic moment of nationwide birth, a success that appeared divinely commissioned. Yet, two and a fifty percent centuries later on, we can recognize both the myth and the truth– that the Change was an experiment, stuffed with contradictions, yet inevitably one of one of the most effective experiments in political background. And similar to all fantastic success stories, misconception is not just decoration– it becomes part of the textile of the story itself.
Sources
Cornwallis, Charles. Letter to Sir Henry Clinton, October 20, 1781 Instructing American History. Connect
Denny, Ebenezer. Armed Forces Journal of Major Ebenezer Denny, 1781– 1795
Washington, George. Letter to Thomas McKean, October 16, 1781 Mount Vernon. Connect
Hamilton, Alexander. Letter to Marquis de Lafayette, October 15, 1781 Founders Online. Connect
Account of the British Surrender at Yorktown (1781 Showing American History. Link
Middlekauff, Robert. The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763– 1789 Oxford College Press, 1982
Battlefields.org. The Battle of Yorktown, 1781 Link
Military Heritage and Education And Learning Center. Allow Freedom Ring: The Battle of Yorktown. Link
Britannica. “Battle of Yorktown.” Encyclopaedia Britannica.
History.com Editors. “Fight of Yorktown.” History.com.
Urwin, Gregory J. W. “The Yorktown Tragedy: Washington’s Slave Summary.” Journal of the American Transformation: Annual Quantity 2022 Westholme Publishing, 2022
Bonnie K. Goodman, BACHELOR’S DEGREE, MLIS, is a chronicler, curator, reporter, and artist. She is the writer of On This Day in Background …: Substantial Events in the American Year (2023 and A Continuous Battle: McGill College’s Complicated Background of Antisemitism and Now Anti-Zionism
Goodman holds a BA in Background and Art Background and an MLIS from McGill College. She sought graduate studies in Jewish History at Concordia University (MA in Judaic Research Studies) and Jewish Education at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
She added to History of American Presidential Political Elections, 1789– 2008 (2011, edited by Gil Troy, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., and Fred L. Israel. A former Quality Editor at the Background Information Network, where she launched prominent collection such as Leading Young Chroniclers and Background Doyens, Goodman has likewise functioned as a political reporter at Examiner.com, covering U.S. national politics, colleges, faith, and society.
Her scholarship and journalism span over 2, 000 publications and are commonly readily available on Academia.edu , Medium, and Substack (History Musings: OTD in Background).