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Charles Cornwallis, 1st Marquess Cornwallis, KG, PC (31 December 1738 – 5 October 1805) was a British Army officer, Whig politician and colonial administrator. In the United States and the United Kingdom, he is best known as one of the leading British general officers in the American War of Independence .
This Cornwallis chose to do at Yorktown, where he was compelled to surrender after a brief siege in October 1781. [25] Portrait of Lord Cornwallis by Thomas Gainsborough, 1783. Lafayette, in his dispatches and reports throughout the later stages of the Virginia campaign, painted Cornwallis's movements to Williamsburg and Portsmouth as a retreat.
The battle was strategically decisive, [1] in that it prevented the Royal Navy from reinforcing or evacuating the besieged forces of Lieutenant General Lord Cornwallis at Yorktown, Virginia. The French were able to achieve control of the sea lanes against the British and provided the Franco-American army with siege artillery and French ...
Lord Germain was dismissed in early 1782, and the North administration fell shortly afterward. [154] Peace negotiations followed, and the war was formally ended with the signing of the Treaty of Paris on September 3, 1783. [150] General Cornwallis, despite being the commander who surrendered, was not blamed for the defeat.
When the North ministry rose to power in 1770, Cornwallis adopted a less active voice in politics, and avoided seeking political appointments. [6] In 1768 he married Jemima Tullekin Jones, the daughter of a regimental colonel. [7] They had two children, a boy and a girl, before Jemima died in 1779, and were by all accounts a happy, devoted ...
During the early part of 1781, Lord Cornwallis marched his sizable army through the boundaries of Goochland. They occupied and thoroughly destroyed Elkhill , a small estate of Thomas Jefferson , slaughtering the livestock for food, burning barns and fences, and finally burning down the house.
Patrick Henry's speech on the Virginia Resolves. The history of Virginia in the American Revolution begins with the role the Colony of Virginia played in early dissent against the British government and culminates with the defeat of General Cornwallis by the allied forces at the Siege of Yorktown in 1781, an event that signaled the effective military end to the conflict.
[g] American history books recount the legend that the British band played "The World Turn'd Upside Down", but the story may be apocryphal. [69] [70] Surrender of Cornwallis. At Yorktown, VA, Oct. 1781, Nathaniel Currier. D'Amour Museum of Fine Arts. Cornwallis refused to attend the surrender ceremony, claiming that he had an illness.