Charles Cornwallis, like the Comte de Rochambeau, was a talented and experienced general. How was he trapped and defeated at Yorktown? He had been ordered to move to and stay at Yorktown by his superiors.
He had been promised that he would be evacuated by sea. And as the French and American armies arrived, he overestimated his ability to hold out against them. George Washington had longed throughout the war for a major battle like that at Yorktown. With Cuban forces no longer blocking civilians from William was the illegitimate son On September 28, , people die in one of the worst maritime disasters of the century when the Estonia, a large car-and-passenger ferry, sinks in the Baltic Sea.
The German-built ship was traveling on an overnight cruise from Tallinn, the capital city of Estonia, to Sir Alexander Fleming was a young bacteriologist when an accidental discovery led to one of the great developments of modern medicine on September 28, Having left a plate of staphylococcus bacteria uncovered, Fleming noticed that a mold that had fallen on the culture had Sign up now to learn about This Day in History straight from your inbox.
During his long career, Pompey the Great displayed exceptional military talents on the battlefield. He fought in Africa and Spain, quelled the slave revolt of Spartacus, He becomes the first player since to hit. It was unrealistic, and perhaps unwise, for the Americans to expect the French to send a large enough force to take New York and equally unlikely to expect the bankrupt Congress to fund a large enough army for General George Washington to do the job.
It now seemed that the decisive arena of the war lay not in North America, or even in the West Indies where the combined Spanish and French fleets outnumbered what ships the British could afford to send, but elsewhere. The decisive point of the war now revolved around the strategic goals of the three major European powers. The victory at Yorktown encouraged France to continue fighting, and neither France nor Spain was ready to make peace since they had not yet achieved their basic aims.
Great Britain, on the other hand, was fighting too many enemies in too many places. The British had been fighting a world war for several years, and the goal of subduing the Americans began to become secondary in importance compared to that of defending the homeland and far-flung interests in the West Indies, India and elsewhere. The four years from October to October had seen two entire British armies lost in the American theater. The costs of continuing the war were rising, and the result was an increasingly heavy tax burden on the middle classes, which controlled the balance of power in the House of Commons.
In the process, Washington's combined Franco-American army transported from Head of Elk to the lines outside Yorktown. Washington arrived at P. With the opening of forty-one Allied guns on October 9, , Cornwallis' position, already tenuous, was made so indefensible that surrender negotiations started less than a week later on October The surrender of over 7, British troops on October 19, did not end the war.
The end came in after Washington moved back to New York City, with the Peace of Paris signed by a British government installed largely as a result of Washington's victory.
Victory at Yorktown, however, brought Washington the increased political clout needed to avert a potential officers' rebellion at Newburgh, conduct the remainder of the war, and after a short retirement to Mount Vernon was the logical choice to oversee the Constitutional Convention and become the first President of the United States.
Notes: 1. Bibliography: Bartholomew, Benjamin.
0コメント