October 19th The World Turned Upside Down At 2:00 pm on October 19, 1781, British soldiers filed out of their trenches at Yorktown, Virginia, laid down their arms, and surrendered their flags. At that moment the American Revolution effectively ended. British general Charles Cornwallis had taken his troops to Yorktown, on the Chesapeake Bay, because southern Patriots had worn down his army. He hoped to meet up with the British navy, which might either resupply his exhausted force or carry it away. But American and French troops laid siege to Cornwallis’s lines, pounding them with cannon fire, and a French fleet cut off escape by sea. The British found themselves trapped. Thomas Nelson, governor of Virginia and a signer of the Declaration of Independence, was with the American army at Yorktown. According to tradition, he directed an artilleryman to fire at a stately brick home. “It is my home,” he explained, “the best one in town, and there you will be almost certain to find Lord Cornwallis and the British headquarters.” According to legend, the first cannonball sailed through a window and landed on a table where several British officers had just sat to dine. On October 19, as the redcoats marched forward to surrender, they could not help but notice how poorly dressed and equipped George Washington’s troops were. Few had uniforms. Many wore rags and went barefooted. “Out of this rabble has risen a people who defy kings,” one of King George’s soldiers observed. Bands played as the British troops filed between the French and American soldiers. The Americans played “Yankee Doodle.” The British played a tune called “The World Turned Upside Down.” After Yorktown the British realized there was no point in fighting the upstart colonists any longer. Americans had won their freedom. American History Parade 1774 Colonists in Annapolis, Maryland, stage the Annapolis Tea Party by burning the tea ship Peggy Stewart. 1781 Lord Cornwallis surrenders his British army at Yorktown, Virginia, effectively ending the Revolutionary War. 1829 Baltimore’s monument to George Washington, a 178-foot-high marble column, is completed. 1873 In New York City, representatives of Princeton, Yale, and Rutgers draw up the first set of intercollegiate football rules. 1987 On a day remembered as Black Monday on Wall Street, the Dow Jones Industrial Average drops 508 points, or 22.6 percent. This content is courtesy of The American Patriots Almanac © 2008, 2010 by William J. Bennett and John T.E. Cribb
Posted on: Sun, 19 Oct 2014 15:00:23 +0000
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