In 1781, Washington, a French admiral, and 19,000 allied troops cornered Cornwallis in a Virginia port town and ended the Revolutionary War.
By late 1781, British General Cornwallis had marched his army into Yorktown, Virginia, expecting to be resupplied and reinforced by sea. It was a fatal miscalculation. French Admiral de Grasse's fleet was already sailing to seal him in.
On September 5, the French navy defeated the British fleet at the Battle of the Chesapeake, cutting off any possibility of British relief or escape by sea. Cornwallis was trapped with 8,000 soldiers and nowhere to go.
Washington and French General Rochambeau assembled nearly 20,000 allied troops and began a classic siege, digging parallel trenches that crept closer to the British fortifications each night. On October 9, the combined artillery opened a thunderous bombardment.
On the night of October 14, Alexander Hamilton led an assault that seized the last two major British defensive positions — Redoubts 9 and 10 — in under ten minutes. The French and Americans had breached Cornwallis's final line.
On October 17, a lone British drummer boy appeared on the parapet beating a request for negotiations. On October 19, nearly 8,000 British soldiers marched out to surrender — the largest British army defeat of the war. Cornwallis claimed illness and sent a subordinate in his place.
Washington denied the British army the 'honors of war' they had previously refused to American forces at Charleston — a deliberate humiliation. The surrender effectively ended major combat in America, leading directly to the Treaty of Paris and American independence.