author of the Declaration of Independence himself, Thomas Jefferson. Yet despite these arrivals, Cornwallis did not have enough manpower to bring the “wrath of God” down on anyone. He commanded about six thousand soldiers, and his resources were fast running out. Cornwallis decided to set up camp on an exposed peninsula near Williamsburg and wait for reinforcements.88 The men labored through the heat to dig fortifications around the new post, called Yorktown. Smallpox and typhus ravaged the camps, afflicting the blacks—most of whom had not been inoculated for smallpox—in especially large numbers. Provisions were so short that almost everyone, including hundreds of loyalist civilians in the British lines, suffered from anemia.89 By late summer, little more than half Cornwallis’s men were fit for duty. Then, on the last day of August 1781, scouts caught sight of a fleet approaching—only to discover that it was not the hoped-for British reinforcements, but the French. The enemy navy closed in on the British by sea. Meanwhile, Washington was racing overland from Pennsylvania to pin the British in by land. Two weeks later, a combined force of sixteen thousand French and American soldiers camped outside Yorktown. The outnumbered British army, and the loyalists in their care, were trapped. “This Place is in no state of defence,” reported a desperate Cornwallis to General Clinton. “If you cannot relieve me very soon you must be prepared to hear the worst.”90
Plan of York Town and Gloucester in Virginia, Showing the Works Constructed . . . by the Rt. Honble: Lieut. General Earl Cornwallis, with the Attacks of the Combined Army of French and Rebels, 1781.
The bombing started in the night of October 9, blowing up the carefully constructed earthworks in cascades of dirt, as the French and Americans advanced methodically toward the British positions. Inside the lines, Yorktown became a lurid scene of fire and blood. Deserters straggled out from the besieged camp reporting that the soldiers within were worn out “with excessive hard duty & that they are very sickly.” Loyalists, black and white, suffered through an ordeal of hunger and sickness as the dead and wounded mounted around them. To spare resources, Cornwallis ordered the slaughter of the horses, expelled smallpox patients from the hospital, and drove away many of the blacks who had run to the British.91 But the food was gone. The ammunition was gone. The reinforcements had not come. It was time to seek terms. On the anniversary of Saratoga—a coincidence not lost on the Continental Army—Cornwallis sent a messenger with a flag of truce to negotiate his surrender.92
At two o’clock in the afternoon on October 19, 1781, Cornwallis and his army marched out of Yorktown to surrender to George Washington and his French allies. They emerged from their blasted hell in neat ranks, with “arms shouldered, colors cased and drums beating a British or German march.”93 Legend holds that the band played a tune called “The World Turned Upside Down.” In retrospect, it seems almost too good to be true, since from some perspectives, the world order really had been inverted. The underdog had triumphed, the mighty empire had faltered. The song would have held special resonance for contemporaries. The ballad had originally appeared in the English Civil War, more than a century earlier, when conflict had divided Britons on the question of royal and parliamentary power.94 The tune could have reminded its listeners of what so many of those who lived through the American Revolution had already experienced. Civil wars often overturn their participants’ worlds—and sometimes those can never be uprighted again.
Despite the brutality that had unfolded at Yorktown, Cornwallis and Washington agreed quickly on mutually acceptable terms for the surrender and the fate of British prisoners of war—often a sticking point in such negotiations. But one group of Yorktown survivors found themselves entirely unprotected. In the draft terms of capitulation he sent to Washington, Cornwallis specified that “Natives or inhabitants of different parts of this country, at present at York[town] and Gloucester, are not to be punished on account of having joined the British army.” In his view, the surviving loyalists who stumbled out of the ravaged encampment had already been punished enough. But Washington bluntly replied that “this article cannot be assented to.”95 It was the only one of Cornwallis’s requests that he rejected outright. Loyalists had chosen the British. Now they would have to cope with the consequences of their choice.
William Faden, A Map of South Carolina and a Part of Georgia, 1780.
Chapter Two
An Unsettling Peace
ACROSS THE ATLANTIC, when news of Cornwallis’s surrender reached the embattled British prime minister Lord North, he took it “as he would have taken a ball in his breast.” “Oh god! It is all over,” he exclaimed, throwing his arms into the air and pacing frantically about the room.1 He was—at one level—right. Yorktown is conventionally understood as the endpoint of the war. It was the last pitched battle between the British and Continental armies, and led directly to the peace negotiations that resulted in British recognition of American independence.
But as even North must have known, it would take more than surrender to end this war. Beyond America, Britain’s global conflict against France and Spain raged on. Yorktown did not pull back the British forces sweating it out in southern India against French-allied Tipu Sultan. It did not relieve the British soldiers defending Gibraltar and Minorca against the Spanish. Crucially, it did not stop the French fleet that had trapped Cornwallis in Virginia from cruising into the Caribbean and threatening Britain’s valuable sugar islands. Within America, too, hostilities continued to an extent not often appreciated in standard histories of the revolution. The war between Lord Cornwallis and George Washington may have ended in the trenches outside Yorktown, but Thomas Brown’s war was not over, nor was Joseph Brant’s. From the outskirts of New York City to the Florida borderlands, partisan fighting nagged and gnawed at American communities. After Britain ceased offensive operations in January 1782, this was more than ever a civil war, waged by loyalists, patriots, and Indians.
Loyalists responded to news of Yorktown very differently from North. At first, some didn’t even believe it. “A Hand Bill from Jersey of the Surrender of Lord Cornwallis . . . shocks the Town,” wrote New York’s loyalist chief justice William Smith in his diary six days after Yorktown. “I give no Credit to it,” he comfortably concluded, “but suspect an Artifice to prevent the Insurrection of the Loyalists or some Operations on our part.”2 The fifty-three-year-old jurist was a skeptic by nature, which was one reason that he, like Beverley Robinson, had delayed taking a public stand until he was summoned before a patriot committee and forced to choose between swearing allegiance to the republic or moving to British-occupied New York City. When push came to shove, Smith moved to New York. Of course, he quickly recognized the awful truth about Yorktown when veterans arrived in New York bearing eyewitness accounts of the battle and the miserable “Fate of the [loyalist] Refugees left there to the Mercy of the Usurpers.” But as Smith and other influential loyalists saw it, there was still no reason to consider the war over or lost. Smith and his friends concocted various strategies to “balance the Southern Disaster” with further British attacks. “There are 40 Thousand Men . . . here, including Canada and [St.] Augustine,” insisted one, and “if we had made a right Use of them all would have been well, and... there is still no Cause to despair.”3 A somewhat different plan for a troop surge was suggested by John Cruden, the commissioner for sequestered estates in Charleston. Raise an army of ten thousand freed slaves, he said, and America could yet “be conquered with its own force.” Cruden sent the proposal to his patron Lord Dunmore, who