Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 12.djvu/242

 Cornwallis predatory expeditions. During 1778 Cornwallis did little but cover the retreat from Philadelphia to New York,and then returned to England on the news of the dangerous illness of his wife. Lady Cornwallis died on 16 Feb. 1779, and after that event Cornwallis again offered his services to the king, and reached New York in the month of August.

Cornwallis was now at last enabled to carry his ideas about the southern states into execution. Clinton agreed to go to South Carolina, and on 12 May 1780 Charleston surrendered to him. In the following month he left the southern states, with a force of four thousand soldiers, to Cornwallis, and retired to New York to leave him to carry out his schemes as best he could. Cornwallis showed his military capacity in his defeat of General Gates at Camden on 16 Aug. 1780, and he managed to keep the southern states in fair order, and to repel the attacks of the various insurgent bands. In 1781 he decided to march northwards into Virginia, and hoped to form a junction with Clinton's army upon the Chesapeake, and from that point to subdue the most important rebel state. Leaving Lord Rawdon to command on the frontiers of South Carolina, and Colonel Balfour at Charleston, he moved northward. The expedition began with disaster. Colonel Tarleton was defeated at Cowpens on 17 Jan. by General Greene, but on the next day Cornwallis formed a junction with a division under Alexander Leslie, and pursued the victorious Americans. He at last came up with them at Guilford Court-house, where he defeated the insurgents, and took Greene's guns on 15 March after a sharp engagement, in which he was himself wounded. His plans after this victory are well shown in a letter to General Phillips, who had been sent to the Chesapeake by Clinton, dated 10 April: 'I have had a most difficult and dangerous campaign, and was obliged to fight a battle two hundred miles from any communication, against an enemy seven times my number. The fate of it was long doubtful. We had not a regiment or corps that did not at some time give way. It ended, however, happily, in our completely routing the enemy and taking their cannon. ... I last night heard of your arrival in the Chesapeake. Now, my dear friend, what is our plan? ... If we mean an offensive war in America, we must abandon New York, and bring our whole force into Virginia; we then have a stake to fight for, and a successful battle may give us America. If our plan is defensive, mixed with desultory expeditions, let us quit the Carolinas (which cannot be held defensively while Virginia can be so easily armed against us), and stick to our salt pork at New York, sending now and then a detachment to steal tobacco, &c.' (Cornwallis Correspondence, i. 87). In May Cornwallis effected a junction with General Phillips's force at Petersburg, though Phillips died before his arrival, and he established himself, by Sir Henry Clinton's express orders, at Yorktown on 2 Aug., though he did not regard his force as sufficiently strong to hold that exposed post (see his despatch of 27 July to Sir Henry Clinton, ib. i. 107-9). Washington soon perceived the mistake, and after he was joined in the beginning of September by the French troops, which the Comte de Grasse had landed at James Town, he decided to move with all his forces against Cornwallis. The result of this movement was never doubtful; Clinton sent no help; the English force was surrounded and outnumbered; on 14 Oct. the advanced redoubts at Yorktown were stormed, and on 19 Oct. Cornwallis was obliged to capitulate. On that very day Sir Henry Clinton sailed from New York for the Chesapeake, and arrived there on the 24th to find that he was too late. The capitulation was signed, and the war of American independence was at an end. Neither the government nor the English people blamed Cornwallis. His schemes had been admirable in a political as well as in a military aspect, and had it not been for the arrival of the French troops they might have succeeded.

As early as May 1782, when Cornwallis was still a prisoner on 'parole,' he was asked to go to India as governor-general and commander-in-chief, but his position and his distrust of the ministry prevented him from accepting the office. His great political friend was still Lord Shelburne, and, to show his dislike of the accession of Pitt to power, he resigned his office of constable of the Tower in January 1784; but in the November of that year he again received the office of constable, though as a military post only. Pitt had, however, set his heart on Cornwallis's accepting the governor-generalship of India. Both Pitt and Dundas thought him the only man capable of restoring the military and civil services of India to an efficient state, and of repairing the bad effect upon English prestige of the defeats experienced in the second Mysore war. Cornwallis, however, positively refused the offer of the double appointment when it was again made to him in February 1785, but at last, after a short mission to Frederick the Great in August and September under the pretext of attending the great Prussian reviews in Silesia, he consented to accept it on 23 Feb. 1786, 'much against his will and with grief of heart' (ib. i. 208).