92 A HISTORY OF AMERICA IN 100 MAPS
The rebellion around Boston shown on the previous
page quickly turned into a civil war, and ultimately
became a struggle for national liberation. Today,
we assume that the colonists uniformly rejected
British control, but before the war about a third of
them remained loyal to the Crown, while another
third hoped for reconciliation. Even as the war
galvanized more supporters for independence, the
great military question was how the poorly trained
and ill-funded rebels could defeat one of the world’s
strongest armies. In part it was the persistence
of colonial soldiers and civilians that forced the
British to abandon the war. Equally important was
the intervention of the French, who allied with the
Americans and critically aided them at the Battle of
Yorktown in October 1781.
For much of this six-year war the outcome was in
doubt. With a stalemate prevailing in the northern
colonies by 1778, the British turned south to
capitalize on that region’s strong loyalist sentiment.
After conquering Savannah and Charleston, Lord
Cornwallis, commander of the British forces in the
South, moved up the coast in 1781 to attack American
supply and training bases in Virginia.
The commander of the Continental Army—
George Washington—sought to fight the British in
New York. But French forces under the Comte de
Rochambeau stressed the importance of striking in
the Chesapeake, by both land and sea. Washington
accordingly sent men under the leadership of
the Marquis de Lafayette to confront the British
in Virginia. From April to August, Lafayette drove
Cornwallis back, forcing him to retreat to Yorktown
and await support from the British Navy.
Cornwallis chose Yorktown for its strategic
location on a narrow spot along the York River. Across
the river, Gloucester Point offered a potential escape
route for the British soldiers. But ultimately that
geography worked against Cornwallis by trapping
the British against the river, in a twenty-day siege
that became the climax of the Revolutionary War.
The map at right recounts the critical moments of
that campaign.
In August 1781, Cornwallis built enclosed
fortifications—known as redoubts—that ringed the
WHERE THE BRITISH LAID DOWN THEIR ARMS
Sebastian Bauman, plan of the
investment of York and
Gloucester, 1781
southern edge of Yorktown. The British and Hessian
forces in those fortifications are marked in pink.
Within a month, however, 8,300 American and French
troops had arrived at Yorktown, and an additional
17,500 were camped nearby at Williamsburg. With
these numbers, the allies far outnumbered the
British and Hessian forces at Yorktown and across the
river at the tip of Gloucester Point. Absent from this
early copy of the map is the French fleet on the York
River, which supplied crucial aid to the Americans by
blockading the British in a way that prevented both
reinforcements and evacuation.
To the left in yellow are Rochambeau’s French
forces, while the American military under General
Washington is shown at right in blue. The turning
point was on October 11, when the Americans and the
French advanced toward Yorktown to build a
series of trenches and earthworks (marked as blue
and yellow lines to the south of the town) that
surrounded British defenses. With the blockade on
the river in force, the British were left largely stranded,
without necessary supplies and reinforcements.
Over the next few days, the British fired against
the allies from their positions at Redoubts 9 and 10,
the southeastern corner of the British fortifications
shown near the river. On October 14, Commander
Alexander Hamilton and his men stormed Redoubt 10,
a move that many considered terribly risky but which
ultimately moved the allies closer to the British, where
they intensified their bombardment.
In response, the British attempted to retreat across
the river, though a sudden windstorm prevented either
a successful crossing to Gloucester Point or a safe
return to Yorktown. The allies closed in even tighter,
shown on the second line of trenches, and within three
days Cornwallis signaled his willingness to surrender.
By this time, the Continental Army had taken over
7,000 British prisoners of war.
The Battle of Yorktown forced the British to
abandon the war effort and to begin negotiating
for peace. This spare and elegantly colored map
captured that turning point. It was drawn by Sebastian
Bauman, a forty-two-year-old major in the Second
Continental Artillery Regiment who had been trained
as an engineer in the Austrian Imperial Army. He
drew the map just after the British surrendered, and
it became the blueprint for all subsequent renderings
of the battle. In the foreground are the quarters of
Rochambeau and Washington, near “The Field where
the British laid down their Arms.” Those words were
truer than Bauman realized, for this was the last
major land battle of the war.