On 28 September 1781 the American and French armies under George Washington and the Comte de Rochambeau marched out of Williamsburg, Virginia, and began to close in on Lord Cornwallis's British army at Yorktown. Cut off from the sea by the French fleet, Cornwallis was trapped. Three weeks of siege followed, and on 19 October his army surrendered, a defeat that, in the National Park Service's words, gave up one third of all British forces in North America.
The trap
Cornwallis had marched his army of about 9,000 men to Yorktown, on the York River near Chesapeake Bay, to refit and wait for reinforcements by sea. Instead the allied armies marched hundreds of miles south from their camps north of New York City. On 5 September the French fleet under the Comte de Grasse defeated the British fleet at the Battle of the Capes, and the British ships had to abandon Cornwallis to his fate.1
Closing in
On 28 September the allied army left Williamsburg, marched to Yorktown and began to invest the British works. The American Battlefield Trust gives the allied forces engaged as some 19,900, against about 9,000 British. The next day Cornwallis, believing that Sir Henry Clinton's relief was close, abandoned his outer works, and the allies moved into the ground he had given up. Across the river at Gloucester, allied forces drove Banastre Tarleton's cavalry back inside the British lines on 3 October.2
On the night of 6 October the allies began digging their first siege line, which went up in a single night. On 9 October the batteries opened fire, and French hot shot set the frigate HMS Charon ablaze. Two days later Washington ordered a second parallel dug about 400 yards closer to the British lines.3
The redoubts and the surrender
Two British redoubts, numbers 9 and 10, blocked the second line. On the night of 14 October the French stormed Redoubt 9 and the Americans Redoubt 10, and the allied guns moved forward. A British sortie on 16 October failed to put the guns out of action, and that night Cornwallis tried to ferry his army across the river to Gloucester Point, but a violent storm forced him to give up the attempt.4
On 17 October an officer with a flag of truce appeared on the British parapet. Commissioners negotiated the terms at the Moore House on 18 October, and on 19 October the garrison marched out between the American and French armies to lay down its arms at what is now called Surrender Field. The American Battlefield Trust gives 88 Americans killed and 301 wounded during the siege, and on the British side 142 killed, 326 wounded and 7,416 captured. Clinton's relief fleet arrived off Virginia five days later. The full story is told in our article on the siege of Yorktown.5
Also on this day
- 1914: Siege of Antwerp. Early in the First World War, German forces besieged Antwerp, held by Belgian troops and the British Royal Naval Division behind a ring of forts.
