On the 19th, the posts of York Town and Gloucester were surrendered, and the British troops, about 7,000 in number, became prisoners of war to Washington. The ships and naval stores, with 1,500 seamen, were given up to the French. The officers and soldiers retained their baggage, but all visible property was liable to be seized. Washington would not grant any expressly favourable conditions, as Lord Cornwallis wished, on behalf of the loyalists who were under British protection in the town, alleging that theirs were civil offences which did not come under the authority of a military commander. One favour, however, was granted—that Cornwallis should be allowed the use of a ship ostensibly to convey despatches to New York, and which should be allowed to pass unexamined. In this vessel many obnoxious persons escaped.
General Lincoln, who had surrendered his sword to Lord Cornwallis at Charleston, by a sort of poetical justice, was appointed to receive the sword of the British commander on this occasion; and not forgetting what the British had then demanded, the capitulating force was now required to march out of the town with their colours cased.
As regarded the general treatment both of officers and men, nothing, however, could have been nobler. Lord Cornwallis, in his public letter to England, testified to the “kindness and consideration of the enemy.” The kindness and attention shown by the French officers in particular, he says, “have really gone far beyond what I can possibly describe, and will, I hope, make an impression on the breast of every British officer, whenever the fortune of war shall put any of them in our power.”
It is mentioned as a singular circumstance in the events of this surrender that the American commissioner appointed to draw up the terms of capitulation was Colonel Laurens, son of Laurens, late president of congress, who was at that time prisoner in the Tower of London.
On the 24th of October, five days after the fall of York Town, Sir Henry Clinton and the British fleet arrived off the capes of Chesapeake, where they first learned that they had arrived too late, and that Cornwallis had surrendered, on which mortifying intelligence, and unwilling to encounter the superior French fleet, they hastily returned to New York.
Washington would gladly have finished this successful campaign by an attack on Charleston; but the Count de Grasse, fearing to remain on the American coast in the stormy season which was at hand, sailed shortly after for the West Indies. Count Rochambeau cantoned his troops during the winter at Williamsburg. Wayne, with 2,000 Pennsylvanian continentals, marched to reinforce Greene’s army in South Carolina, while the main body of the American army returned to their old positions on the Hudson. The prisoners of Cornwallis’s army were marched over the mountains to Winchester, whence a part of them were sent to Lancaster in Pennsylvania.[[49]]
The surrender of Cornwallis was in effect the end of the war. The British power was now reduced merely to defensive measures, and was confined principally to the cities of New York, Charleston and Savannah. Wilmington was very soon evacuated, thus putting an end to all the hopes of the loyalists of North Carolina; and early in January, Greene approaching Charleston, so distributed his troops as to confine the British to the Neck and the adjoining islands.
The news of the important victory of the allied armies in the South caused a general rejoicing throughout the Union. Nothing could equal the joy and satisfaction caused by the prospect which it afforded. Washington ordained a particular day for the performance of Divine service in the army, recommending that all the troops should engage in it with a serious deportment and that sensibility of heart which the surprising and particular interposition of Providence in their favour claimed.
Congress, on receiving the official intelligence, went in procession to the principal church in Philadelphia, to return thanks to Almighty God for the signal success of the American arms, and appointed the 13th day of December as a day of public thanksgiving and prayer.[[50]]
The official intelligence of the surrender of Lord Cornwallis reached the British cabinet on Sunday, Nov. 25th. The tidings were a blow to the minister, Lord North, who according to Lord George Germaine’s account, received them as he would have done a cannon-ball. He paced up and down the apartment, exclaiming with the deepest emotions of consternation and distress, “Oh God, it is all over!” The king was more calm, perhaps because he was of a more stolid nature. Lord George Germaine communicated the “dismal intelligence” by letter. The king replied that he “particularly lamented the unfortunate result of the operations in Virginia, on account of the consequences connected with it, and the difficulties which it might produce in carrying on the public business, or in repairing the misfortune. It would not, however,” he asserted, “make the slightest alterations in those principles of his conduct which had hitherto directed him, and which would always continue to direct him, in the prosecution of the present contest.”[[51]]