Cornwallis surrenders at Yorktown; he sends a stand-in rather than face Washington
For three weeks, Continental and French guns had pounded a British army trapped on a Virginia peninsula with no way out by sea. On October 19, 1781, Lord Cornwallis surrendered his force at Yorktown, ending the siege that began September 28. Claiming illness, Cornwallis stayed in his quarters and sent Brigadier General Charles O'Hara to hand over his sword; Washington had his own deputy, Benjamin Lincoln, accept it instead. Roughly 8,000 British and German troops marched out and stacked their weapons.
Yorktown was the battlefield proof Americans had been fighting seven years for: a British field army, surrendered whole, on American soil, to an American commander. It did not end the war on paper, but it ended British will to fight one, and it made Washington the indispensable man of the new nation's founding memory.
QWhat did O'Hara get wrong before he ever reached Benjamin Lincoln?
Charles O'Hara first walked his sword toward General William Heath, mistaking him for the officer meant to accept Cornwallis's surrender. Heath was an American general present at the ceremony but not Washington's designated second. Only after that misstep was O'Hara redirected to Benjamin Lincoln, the man Washington had actually assigned to receive the sword. O'Hara was shuffled between officers before the exchange was finally completed in front of the assembled armies.
QHow many ships did Cornwallis hand over along with his army?
Fourteen ships of the line went down with the surrender, alongside the roughly 8,000 troops who stacked their muskets. Cornwallis had marched to Yorktown specifically to secure a port for the Royal Navy, so losing fourteen warships alongside the army was a heavy blow on top of the surrender itself. The vast stores of supplies and equipment surrendered alongside them meant Britain lost men, ships, and materiel in one stroke.
QWhere did the surrender ceremony actually take place?
The formal exchange happened in the yard outside the Moore House, a private residence just beyond the Yorktown lines rather than inside any military fort or headquarters. The house had already served as the site where terms of surrender were negotiated in the days before the ceremony itself. Choosing a civilian homestead's yard for the handover of an army of thousands gave the moment an oddly domestic backdrop: soldiers and generals gathered on someone's lawn to formally end the fighting, rather than in any purpose-built setting.
