Accordingly Lord Cornwallis, an able and active officer, was charged with the invasion of the South. For a time the English carried all before them. They took Savannah and Charleston, and overran all Georgia and South Carolina. Many of the loyal colonists took arms in their favour, and it seemed that England would save at least a part of her ancient inheritance. The American Government was much alarmed, and sent southward all its disposable troops, headed by Gates, the victor of Saratoga. But Cornwallis beat this large army at Camden (August, 1780), and added North Carolina to his previous conquests. But with a mere 10,000 men scattered all over three vast States, he was unable to maintain any very firm hold on the country, and his flanks and rear were harassed by predatory bands of partisans, who slipped round to raise trouble behind him. He treated these guerillas as brigands, and shot some of them when captured, a proceeding which served no end but to exasperate the Americans.
Cornwallis at Yorktown.
Persevering in his ideas of conquest, Cornwallis in 1781 collected his army, and, leaving a very scanty garrison behind him, set out to invade Virginia. He beat the Americans at Guildford Court House (March 15), and chased La Fayette, a young French officer who was commanding the colonists in this quarter, into the interior of Virginia. But finding his army worn out with long marches and incessant fighting, he dropped down on to Yorktown, a seaport on the peninsula of the same name, to recruit himself with food and reinforcements from the English fleet, which had been ordered to meet him there.
De Grasse drives off the English fleet.
This march to Yorktown ended in a fearful disaster. Cornwallis found no ships to welcome him. A French squadron had intercepted Admiral Graves when he set out from New York. Outnumbered by three to two, Graves retired after a slight engagement, and it was the Frenchman De Grasse who now appeared off Yorktown, to blockade instead of to succour the harassed English troops. At the same time Washington, with a powerful American army, reinforced by 6000 French, appeared on the land side, and seized the neck which joins the York peninsula to the Virginian mainland.
Cornwallis capitulates.
Thus Cornwallis was caught in a trap, between Washington's army and the fleet of De Grasse. He made a desperate attempt to escape by breaking through the American lines, but, when it failed, was forced to surrender for want of food and ammunition, with 4500 men, the remnants of the victorious army of the South. With him fell all hopes of the retention of Georgia and Carolina by the British. The feeble garrisons which he had left behind him were swept away, and the fortress of Charleston alone remained of all the conquests which he had made (October, 1781). New York, in a similar way, was now left as the only British post in the North.
Reverses in the Mediterranean and the West and East Indies.
Under this disaster it seemed as if England must succumb, more especially as it was but one of a simultaneous batch of defeats suffered in all corners of the empire. Minorca was captured by the French in the same autumn, after a vigorous defence. All the West India islands, save Jamaica and Barbados, suffered the same fate. In India a French fleet under De Suffren was hovering off the coast of Madras, while at the same time Haider Ali, a famous military adventurer who had made himself ruler of Mysore, invaded the Carnatic from the inland, cut an English army to pieces, and ravaged the country up to the gates of Madras.
The Gordon Riots.