It is January 20th. Welcome to Episode 20 of History in a Year. Today, the trap snaps shut. General Cornwallis retreats to the Virginia coast, waiting for the Royal Navy to save him. Instead, he sees the white sails of the French fleet. We witness the “Great Wager” as Washington marches his army 500 miles in secret, the night assault led by a young Alexander Hamilton with unloaded muskets, and the moment a British band played a nursery rhyme as the most powerful empire on earth surrendered to a group of farmers.
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STEPHEN:
Welcome to History in a Year: America’s First 250 Years.
LEAH:
Join us every single day as we journey from the Revolution of 1776 to the 250th anniversary of the United States.
STEPHEN:
You can find every episode and join the discussion at PointedWords.com. I’m Stephen.
LEAH:
And I’m Leah.
STEPHEN:
It is January 20th. Welcome to Episode 20. Yesterday, we left Lord Cornwallis marching his exhausted, battered army to the small tobacco port of Yorktown, Virginia. He had been bled dry at Guilford Courthouse. He needed to rest.
LEAH:
Cornwallis wasn’t worried. In the 18th century, the British Army and the Royal Navy were like peanut butter and jelly. If the Army got into trouble near the coast, the Navy would just sail in and pick them up. It was their “Get Out of Jail Free” card.
STEPHEN:
So, Cornwallis dug in. He built some earthworks. He wrote letters to his boss, Sir Henry Clinton, in New York, saying, essentially, “Send the fleet when you get a chance.” He thought he had plenty of time.
LEAH:
But 500 miles to the north, George Washington was reading a letter that changed everything.
STEPHEN:
Washington was outside New York City. He was obsessed with recapturing New York. It was where he had lost his army back in 1776. It was his white whale. He was planning a massive attack on the city with his French ally, the Comte de Rochambeau.
LEAH:
But on August 14, 1781, a message arrived from the French Admiral de Grasse, who was stationed in the Caribbean. The message was blunt. It said: “I am sailing for the Chesapeake Bay with 29 warships and 3,000 troops. I will stay there until October 15th. Do what you will.”
STEPHEN:
This was the thunderbolt. Washington realized instantly that if De Grasse blocked the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay, Cornwallis couldn’t escape by sea. If Washington could get his army to Virginia in time, he could block Cornwallis by land.
LEAH:
Cornwallis would be in a bottle. And De Grasse would be the cork.
STEPHEN:
But there were huge risks. First, Washington had to abandon his dream of attacking New York. Second, he had to march his army 500 miles south in the middle of summer. And third—and this is the tricky part—he had to do it without the British in New York realizing he was leaving.
LEAH:
If General Clinton realized Washington was moving, he would sail out and attack him on the road. So, Washington had to become an actor.
STEPHEN:
He launched a massive deception campaign. He had his men build huge brick ovens in New Jersey, as if they were preparing to bake bread for a long siege of New York. He gathered boats openly. He even wrote fake plans detailing an attack on Manhattan and let them fall into the hands of British spies.
LEAH:
It worked perfectly. Clinton sat in New York, terrified of an attack that was never coming. Meanwhile, the American and French armies were slipping away, marching south through New Jersey and Pennsylvania.
STEPHEN:
But the march wasn’t a parade. The American soldiers were on the verge of mutiny. They hadn’t been paid in years. They were refusing to march south unless they got some hard cash.
LEAH:
Washington didn’t have any cash. So, in a moment of humility, he turned to the French General Rochambeau and asked for a loan. Rochambeau opened his war chest and gave Washington 20,000 gold coins.
STEPHEN:
When the American soldiers saw real gold, they were stunned. They cheered. And they marched.
LEAH:
But all of this—the ovens, the march, the gold—would be useless if the French Navy didn’t win the battle at sea.
STEPHEN:
On September 5, 1781, the British rescue fleet arrived at the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay. They expected to find open water. Instead, they saw a forest of masts. The French fleet was waiting for them.
LEAH:
This is called the “Battle of the Capes.” It is probably the most important naval battle in American history, even though no Americans were involved.
STEPHEN:
The French and British ships lined up and blasted away at each other for hours. It wasn’t a decisive tactical victory—no ships were sunk—but the British fleet took heavy damage. They decided to return to New York to repair.
LEAH:
That decision sealed Cornwallis’s fate. When the smoke cleared, the French were still there. The door was locked.
STEPHEN:
By late September, Washington arrived in Williamsburg. He hugged Admiral de Grasse like a giddy teenager. The trap was set. The Allies had 19,000 men. Cornwallis had about 7,000.
LEAH:
The Siege of Yorktown began on September 28th. This wasn’t a chaotic battle in the woods. This was scientific warfare.
STEPHEN:
The French engineers directed the digging of “parallels”—long trenches that ran parallel to the British lines. Every night, they would dig closer. Every day, they would drag the heavy cannons forward.
LEAH:
On October 9th, the bombardment began. Washington himself fired the first American gun.
STEPHEN:
It was relentless. Day and night, the cannons pounded the British earthworks. The town of Yorktown was being pulverized.
LEAH:
Cornwallis had to move his headquarters into a cave under the riverbank to escape the shelling. His situation was horrific. He was running out of food. There were smallpox outbreaks.
STEPHEN:
And the most gruesome detail: He was running out of fodder for his horses. To save food, he ordered hundreds of horses to be killed and thrown into the York River. The carcasses floated up and down with the tide, bloating in the sun. The smell was unbearable.
LEAH:
But Cornwallis still held two key defensive forts: Redoubt Number 9 and Redoubt Number 10. These forts blocked the Americans from getting close enough to launch the final assault.
STEPHEN:
Washington decided they had to be taken. On the night of October 14, 1781, he ordered a simultaneous attack. The French would take Redoubt 9. The Americans would take Redoubt 10.
LEAH:
Leading the American attack was a young, ambitious Colonel named Alexander Hamilton.
STEPHEN:
Hamilton had spent most of the war as Washington’s aide—basically a glorious secretary. He hated it. He wanted glory. He had begged Washington for a field command. This was his one chance to be a hero.
LEAH:
The plan was risky. To ensure surprise, Hamilton ordered his men to unload their muskets. No bullets. They were going to take the fort with bayonets only. If a single soldier fired accidentally, the surprise would be blown.
STEPHEN:
In the pitch black, they sprinted across the open ground. They reached the abatis—a barrier of sharpened tree branches. The sappers (the pioneers) hacked through the wood with axes.
LEAH:
Hamilton was the first one over the wall. His men swarmed in behind him. The fighting was hand-to-hand. Vicious. But it was fast.
STEPHEN:
In less than 10 minutes, Redoubt 10 fell. The French took Redoubt 9 a few minutes later.
LEAH:
The password for the night—and I love this detail—was “Rochambeau.” Which, if you shout it quickly, sounds like “Rush on boys!”
STEPHEN:
With those forts in American hands, Washington could drag his heaviest guns within point-blank range of the British camp. It was checkmate.
LEAH:
On the morning of October 17, 1781—exactly four years to the day after the victory at Saratoga—the firing stopped.
STEPHEN:
A British drummer boy climbed up on the parapet. He beat a “parley.” The guns fell silent. A British officer appeared waving a white handkerchief.
LEAH:
Cornwallis was surrendering.
STEPHEN:
The surrender ceremony took place two days later, on October 19th. It was a crisp autumn day. The Allied army lined up in two columns stretching for a mile. The French in their pristine white uniforms on one side, the Americans in their ragged blue and hunting shirts on the other.
LEAH:
Thousands of civilians came out to watch. And the British army marched out between them to lay down their weapons.
STEPHEN:
Legend says that the British band played a specific tune: “The World Turned Upside Down.”
LEAH:
It was an old English nursery rhyme. The lyrics go: “If buttercups buzzed after the bee, / If boats were on land, churches on sea, / If ponies rode men and if grass ate the corn…”
STEPHEN:
It was fitting. The world really had turned upside down. A group of ragtag farmers had defeated the most powerful military machine on the planet.
LEAH:
But there was one final moment of drama. Lord Cornwallis didn’t show up.
STEPHEN:
He claimed he was “sick.” It was a diplomatic illness. He was too humiliated to face Washington. So he sent his second-in-command, General Charles O’Hara.
LEAH:
O’Hara tried to snub Washington. He rode up and tried to hand Cornwallis’s sword to the French general, Rochambeau. He was basically saying, “We only surrender to the French, not to these rebels.”
STEPHEN:
Rochambeau shook his head. He pointed across the road to Washington.
LEAH:
So O’Hara turned to Washington and offered the sword. But Washington wasn’t going to accept a sword from a subordinate. He pointed to his own second-in-command, Benjamin Lincoln.
STEPHEN:
Remember Benjamin Lincoln? He was the general who had been forced to surrender at Charleston the year before. It was sweet poetic justice. Lincoln accepted the sword.
LEAH:
The British marched into a field, stacked their muskets, and surrendered their flags. Many of the British soldiers were crying. Some threw their muskets down so hard they broke them.
STEPHEN:
When the news reached London weeks later, the Prime Minister, Lord North, took it like a physical blow. He paced up and down his room, throwing his arms in the air, crying, “Oh God, it is all over! It is all over!”
LEAH:
And militarily, it was. The fighting stopped.
STEPHEN:
But the danger wasn’t over. In fact, the most dangerous moment for the American Republic was just beginning.
LEAH:
Because now you have an army that has won a war… but hasn’t been paid. They are angry. They are armed. And they are looking for someone to blame.
STEPHEN:
Join us tomorrow for Episode 21. The war is over, but the Revolution faces a military coup. We travel to Newburgh, New York, where George Washington has to face down his own officers. He stops a mutiny not with a gun, but with a pair of reading glasses.
LEAH:
I’m Leah.
STEPHEN:
And I’m Stephen.
STEPHEN:
You can find every episode at PointedWords.com. And this… is our story.