Who commanded the British forces that surrendered at the Siege of Yorktown?

Charles Cornwallis commanded the British forces that surrendered at the Siege of Yorktown.

Yorktown took place in Virginia from September 28 to October 19, 1781. An allied American and French army led by George Washington and the Comte de Rochambeau surrounded Cornwallis’s army while a French fleet blocked British naval relief.

Cornwallis did not personally conduct the final surrender ceremony. He cited illness and sent Brigadier General Charles O’Hara to present his sword, which O’Hara offered first to Washington’s second-in-command, Benjamin Lincoln. The surrender ended major combat in the American Revolutionary War, although the peace treaty came later.

The victory resulted from coordination among land forces, French naval power, artillery, and siege operations. Cornwallis’s surrender is sometimes described as the end of the Revolution, but fighting and negotiations continued until the Treaty of Paris was signed in 1783.