Battle of Yorktown 1781: The 20-Day Siege That Ended the American Revolution

George Washington spent most of the summer of 1781 pretending to attack New York.

That was the feint. The real target was 400 miles south, in Virginia, where Lord Cornwallis had planted his army on a narrow peninsula between the York and James rivers. Washington had spent six years losing more battles than he won, and he knew this might be his only chance to trap a British army whole. So he lied to everyone, including most of his own officers, marched his army south through New Jersey and Pennsylvania in the August heat, and linked up with the French at Williamsburg in September. By the time British commander Henry Clinton in New York figured out where Washington had actually gone, the trap was already shut.

The trap had three jaws, and all three were French. Rochambeau's army marched beside Washington's Continentals. The Marquis de Lafayette's Virginians had been shadowing Cornwallis for months, keeping him pinned on the peninsula. And Admiral de Grasse's fleet, 29 warships strong, had sailed up from the Caribbean and beaten the British navy off the Virginia Capes on September 5. That naval battle gets forgotten, but it was the hinge of the whole campaign. Without de Grasse, Cornwallis gets reinforced or evacuated by sea. With him, Yorktown became a cage with the door welded shut.

Why Cornwallis was stuck at Yorktown in the first place

To understand the siege, you have to understand the mistake. Cornwallis had spent 1781 rampaging through the Carolinas and Virginia, winning battles and losing the war. He beat the Americans at Guilford Courthouse in March, but the victory cost him a quarter of his army. Then he marched into Virginia against his own better judgment, on vague orders from Clinton, and fortified Yorktown and Gloucester Point because the Royal Navy promised it could supply and, if needed, evacuate him by sea.

It was a reasonable plan that depended on one thing: British control of the Chesapeake. When de Grasse's fleet arrived and Graves's British squadron failed to dislodge it, that one thing vanished. Cornwallis had roughly 8,000 to 9,000 men, including German auxiliaries from Hesse-Kassel and Ansbach-Bayreuth, dug in behind earthworks. Outside those works sat an allied army more than twice his size. Behind him sat the French fleet. There was nowhere to go, and Cornwallis knew it within days.

The siege, day by day

Eighteenth-century siege warfare was engineering as much as fighting, and Yorktown was a masterclass. The allies didn't storm the works. They strangled them.

September 28: Washington and Rochambeau march down from Williamsburg and invest Yorktown, ringing Cornwallis's defenses. The British are now cut off by land.

October 6: Under cover of darkness, allied troops dig the first parallel, a trench 2,000 yards long, just 800 yards from the British lines. Digging at night, in silence, with the enemy a musket shot away, was standard siege craft, and it worked.

October 9: The allied artillery opens up. Dozens of French and American guns, including massive 24-pounders, begin a bombardment that never really stops. British guns are dismounted one by one. Ships in the harbor are set ablaze. Cornwallis is driven from his headquarters into a cave.

October 11: The second parallel is dug, just 400 yards from the British works, close enough that the remaining British redoubts, Number 9 and Number 10, stick out like splinters.

October 14, night: The famous assault. In a coordinated attack, French troops under the Baron de Deux-Ponts storm Redoubt 9 while Alexander Hamilton leads 400 American light infantry against Redoubt 10, with fixed bayonets and unloaded muskets. Both redoubts fall in under half an hour. Hamilton's charge is the single most remembered American feat of the siege, and it put allied guns within point-blank range of the British lines.

October 16: Cornwallis tries two desperate moves. A night sortie spikes a few allied guns but changes nothing. Then he attempts to ferry his army across the York River to Gloucester Point and break out north, but a violent storm scatters his boats. The escape dies in the wind.

October 17: A British drummer appears on the parapet, followed by an officer waving a white handkerchief. The guns fall silent. Negotiations begin at the Moore House, with John Laurens representing the Americans and the Marquis de Noailles the French.

Twenty days, start to finish. That is how long it took the largest allied army of the war to reduce a fortified British position to surrender.

By the numbers

The figures below are the widely cited ranges, and they tell the story of a siege, not a battle: lopsided forces, modest bloodshed, and a staggering haul of prisoners.

Look at the killed column. Fewer than 100 allied dead across three weeks. That is what a successful siege looks like: the engineers and the artillery do the killing, and the infantry's job is to dig. The British casualty list is heavier, but the real number is the prisoners. More than 7,400 men stacked their arms in a single afternoon, nearly a quarter of every British soldier in America.

The surrender: October 19, 1781

At two in the afternoon, the British marched out between two long lines of allied soldiers, French on one side in their white uniforms, Americans on the other in a patchwork of Continental blue and militia brown. Their flags were furled. Their bands played, by the traditional account, an old English tune called 'The World Turned Upside Down.' Whether the band actually played it is one of those details historians argue about, but the image stuck because it was true in every way that mattered.

Cornwallis wasn't there. Pleading illness, he sent his second-in-command, Brigadier General Charles O'Hara, to surrender the sword. O'Hara first offered it to Rochambeau, who pointed him toward Washington. Washington, in a delicious piece of protocol, pointed him toward Benjamin Lincoln, his own second-in-command. Lincoln had been forced to surrender Charleston to the British the year before, and Washington was settling accounts. O'Hara gave up the sword to Lincoln.

Washington refused Cornwallis the honors of war, the ceremonial terms Burgoyne had gotten at Saratoga. Instead he imposed the same harsh conditions the British had imposed on Lincoln at Charleston. The British army was taken into custody, not paroled. Cornwallis himself was later exchanged for Henry Laurens, the former president of the Continental Congress. Even in defeat, the British played the prisoner-exchange game at the highest level.

Why Yorktown ended the war

Here is the thing people get wrong about Yorktown: it didn't end the fighting by itself. The war technically dragged on for two more years. What Yorktown ended was Britain's willingness to keep paying for it.

When news of the surrender reached London, Lord North, the prime minister who had run the war for a decade, reportedly cried out, 'Oh God, it is all over!' He wasn't wrong. Parliament turned against the war, North's ministry collapsed in March 1782, and the new government opened peace talks. The Treaty of Paris, signed September 3, 1783, recognized the independence of the United States and set its borders at the Mississippi. A siege in Virginia redrew the map of North America.

And Washington? Yorktown made him. Six years of retreats, mutinies, and frozen winters at Valley Forge were suddenly the prelude to the triumph, not the story itself. The legend of Washington the invincible commander, which is at least half myth, was born on the surrender field at Yorktown.

Myths and misconceptions

Was Cornwallis really too sick to surrender? Maybe, maybe not. He claimed illness, and he may well have been unwell after weeks under bombardment. But plenty of contemporaries, on both sides, read it as a face-saving dodge by a proud aristocrat who couldn't bear to hand over his own sword. Washington's icy protocol, routing O'Hara to Lincoln, suggests he read it the same way.

Did the band really play 'The World Turned Upside Down'? Probably, but nobody can prove it. The earliest accounts mention British bands playing as the troops marched out, and the tune name appears in later retellings. It might be true, it might be embroidery. Either way, it captures something real: everyone present understood the world had just tilted.

Was Yorktown really more decisive than Saratoga? Honest answer: it depends what you mean. Saratoga in 1777 convinced France to enter the war, without which Yorktown is impossible. Yorktown convinced Britain to leave it. Saratoga made American victory possible; Yorktown made it actual. You need both, but only one of them ended with 7,000 redcoats stacking their muskets.

Could Clinton have saved Cornwallis? He tried, sort of. Clinton sailed from New York with 7,000 reinforcements and reached the Chesapeake on October 27, eight days after the surrender. Even if he'd arrived in time, de Grasse's fleet stood between him and Yorktown. The rescue was a fantasy. Clinton went home, and was recalled to England the next year.

Frequently asked questions

When was the Battle of Yorktown?

The siege ran from September 28 to October 19, 1781. Cornwallis surrendered his army on October 19, 1781, at Yorktown, Virginia, the last major land battle of the American Revolutionary War.

Who won the Battle of Yorktown?

The Franco-American alliance won decisively. Generals George Washington and the Comte de Rochambeau, with Admiral de Grasse's French fleet blockading the sea, forced Lord Cornwallis to surrender his entire army of roughly 8,000 men.

How many troops fought at Yorktown?

About 19,800 Franco-American troops (8,000 to 9,000 Americans, including 5,900 Continentals, plus 10,800 French regulars and 29 French warships) faced roughly 8,000 to 9,000 British and German troops under Cornwallis, per widely cited figures.

What were the casualties at Yorktown?

Allied losses were 88 killed and 301 wounded. British losses were 142 to 309 killed and 326 to 595 wounded, with 7,416 to 7,685 taken prisoner, per widely cited figures. Nearly a quarter of Britain's forces in America were captured in a single day.

Why was Yorktown the decisive battle of the Revolution?

It destroyed Britain's last field army in America and collapsed political support for the war in London. Lord North's ministry fell in March 1782, and the Treaty of Paris, signed September 3, 1783, recognized American independence.

Did the British really play 'The World Turned Upside Down' at the surrender?

That is the traditional account: British bands played the tune as their troops marched out to stack arms on October 19, 1781. Historians debate whether it actually happened, but the story has stuck for 240 years because it fits the moment so perfectly.

Where is the Yorktown battlefield today?

The battlefield is preserved by the National Park Service as part of Colonial National Historical Park in Yorktown, Virginia. Visitors can walk the siege lines, the reconstructed redoubts, and the surrender field.

Yorktown is where the American Revolution stopped being a rebellion and started being a country. Two hundred and fifty years on, in this anniversary era, the siege lines are still there in Virginia, and the lesson is still the same one Washington learned in the summer of 1781: the boldest move is usually the one your enemy never sees coming.