Trapped between American-French land forces and a French fleet blocking the Chesapeake, Cornwallis had no way out. His troops marched from their lines to surrender their arms while a band reportedly played "The World Turned Upside Down." News of the defeat reached London within weeks and effectively finished Parliament's appetite for continuing the war.
For a week, French and American guns had pounded the British earthworks at Yorktown into rubble. Cornwallis, boxed in on a peninsula with the Royal Navy unable to relieve him after a French fleet won a decisive battle off the Chesapeake in September, decided further resistance was pointless. He claimed illness and sent his deputy, Charles O'Hara, to hand over his sword — a snub that Washington answered by having his own deputy, Benjamin Lincoln, accept it instead.
The formal surrender took place in a field outside the ruined town. Around 8,000 British and German soldiers laid down their arms as French and American troops lined the road on either side, deliberately positioned so the defeated army had no side to look toward without facing its victors. Though the war would drag on formally until the Treaty of Paris in 1783, Yorktown was the last major land battle in North America — the moment the British public and Parliament concluded that the American colonies were lost for good.
Key people: George Washington, Charles Cornwallis, Comte de Rochambeau