Twenty-four hours! No! "No more fighting for two hours," says Washington.
Held in an iron grasp both by land and by sea, the British commander knows that all is lost. He can do nothing but surrender.
At two o'clock on the afternoon of October 19, in a field not far from Washington's headquarters, the formal surrender takes place. This ceremony, so joyful to the one side, so painful to the other, is carried out in stately form. The officers on both sides wear their best uniforms and military equipments. Washington rides his favorite charger, Nelson. The stars and stripes of America, and the white flag and lilies of France, wave in triumph. While the band plays a quaint old English melody, "The World Turned Upside Down," the British troops, over seven thousand in number, slowly march between the columns of the combined armies and lay down their arms.
Cornwallis was not there. Saying that he was sick, he sent O'Hara, one of his generals, to deliver up his sword, while Washington, with his usual high regard for official dignity, sent General Lincoln.
As perhaps you may remember, when General Lincoln was forced to surrender to Cornwallis, at Charleston in 1780, the haughty British general turned him over to an inferior officer, as if to treat his surrender with contempt.
Lafayette said, in after years, that the captive redcoats, while they gazed at the French soldiers with their showy trappings, "did not as much as look at my darling light infantry, the apple of my eye and the pride of my heart." Whereupon the lively young French general ordered his fife and drum corps to strike up "Yankee Doodle." "Then," he said, "they did look at us, but were not very well pleased."
After the surrender, both the Americans and the British hastened away. Scores of brave men, whom thus far the bullets had spared, were the victims of camp fever and smallpox. Fourteen days afterwards, Yorktown became again a sleepy little hamlet of sixty houses.
On the same day that Cornwallis found "the world turned upside down," Clinton sailed from New York, with thirty-five ships and over seven thousand of his best troops. Had this great force reached the scene ten days earlier, the story of Yorktown might have been different.
"Cornwallis is taken!" How quickly the news spread! Men, women, and children pour in from the country, and wait along the road leading to Philadelphia, for the long-expected news.