What he did not know was that French ships were on their way to Yorktown, too. Their commander was Admiral Francois Comte de Grasse. De Grasse met some of the British ships that Cornwallis was expecting, and defeated them. The French ships then moved into the Chesapeake Bay, near Yorktown.
The Americans and the French began attacking the British with cannons. Then they fought the British soldiers hand-to-hand. Cornwallis knew he had no chance to win without more troops. He surrendered to George Washington on October seventeenth, seventeen eighty-one.
The war was over. American and French forces had captured or killed half of the British troops in America. The surviving troops left Yorktown playing a popular British song called "The World Turned Upside Down."
(MUSIC: “The World Turned Upside Down”)
How were the Americans able to defeat the most powerful nation in the world? Historians give several reasons:
The Americans were fighting at home, while the British had to bring troops and supplies from across the ocean. British officers made mistakes, especially General William Howe. His slowness to take action at the start of the war made it possible for the Americans to survive two difficult winters.
Historian Gordon Wood at Brown University in Rhode Island says the British also thought more colonists would support them.
"When Burgoyne comes down the Hudson Valley he starts out with an army of ten thousand or so, and he has to hack his way through the woods, and he keeps losing troops to small militia. He counted on more loyalist support than there was. And I think the British miscalculated terribly on that point."
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