Lafayette joyfully wrote the news from Yorktown to Paris, concluding that “The play is over; the fifth act has just come to an end.” And when the news of Cornwallis’ surrender reached England, Lord North was said to have thrown up his hands and exclaimed: “My God! It is all over.”
But it was not quite as simple as that. Although the British had lost about one quarter of their North American army, they still had on American soil forces several times as large as the Continental Army – there were 13,000 in New York, 3,300 in Charleston, 5,000 in Canada, 3,500 in Halifax, and another 500 at Penobscot. There was nothing to keep the British ministry from sending in more troops. And, at the very moment of surrender, the great armada which was said to have sailed from New York to save Yorktown was probably on the ocean and could be expected any day.
Although de Grasse had never given Washington the least hope that there would be time for another siege, Washington did his best to sell the French admiral on an attack on Charleston. But de Grasse declared that his timetable forced him to sail directly to the West Indies. And when the British fleet arrived and, finding Yorktown had already fallen, returned to New York, it ended all speculation. De Grasse with his flotilla and his military detachments vanished from the North American scene.
De Grasse’s departure closed the 1781 campaign. Rochambeau, “from the exhausted state of his stores and other considerations,” decided that his army would winter in Virginia. Washington ordered his Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania troops to join Greene in South Carolina, still trying to regain Charleston, while the northern regiments returned to the old encampments in New Jersey and on the Hudson.
Yet events were moving toward a definite end. They came so slowly, so inconclusively that they passed little noted. There was no one blazing moment to celebrate, to set the nation whooping and roaring in exultation. The curtain was falling almost imperceptible on this American drama
Washington must have gotten some grim satisfaction when he learned in the spring of 1782 that he had now outlasted three British commanders-in-chief; Sir Henry Clinton had been recalled. He was replaced by the long-time commander of Canada, Sir Guy Carleton. Carleton brought no significant reinforcements, but neither did he show any signs of giving up New York. To Washington, New York was still the key; if he hoped to end the war, New York would have to be recaptured.
But whatever hopes and prospects he might have had flew out the window when it was learned that de Grasse’s fleet had been decisively defeated by Admiral Rodney off Guadeloupe, and that de Grasse himself had been captured. And a smaller French squadron, which had taken refuge in Boston harbor, had been instantly pinned there by a large British fleet under Admiral Hood.
Despite such victories, however, the British ambitions in America, feeble at best, had all but evaporated. In the spring of 1782, the British command in New York notified Washington “by authority, that negotiations for a general peace have already commenced at Paris,” and that “His Majesty, in order to remove all obstacles to that peace, which he so ardently wishes to restore,” had ordered his ministers not only to accept, but to propose “the independency of the thirteen provinces.”