""The next time you're in a trivia contest and the question comes up, "What was the last battle of the American Revolutionary War?" the judges will probably be looking for the predictable answer of "Yorktown."[1]
That's the neat and tidy answer, but it's not true. After the defeat at Yorktown, King George III brushed it off as a minor stumbling block and decreed that the war in America should continue. He wrote to the prime minister avowing that he would "do what I can to save the Empire."[2] Gen. George Washington, not having read twenty-first century schoolbooks, never knew Yorktown would be considered the end of the war, or famously as the "last battle of the American Revolutionary War." He smartly assumed the British were certainly wounded with Lord Cornwallis' surrender, but that they wouldn't quit. The war would continue. Washington felt it was his absolute duty to keep the Continental Army together until there was a final peace treaty signed and approved.
A preliminary treaty finally came on November 30, 1782, a year after Yorktown… but there was still no formal treaty. Washington remembered what Ben Franklin had said, "The British Nation seems… unable to carry on the War and too proud to make peace."[3] The politicians were all still talking in Paris. Washington instinctively didn't trust the British and knew it could be a mistake to lower his guard of them, even while talks were going on. As late as January 1783, from Newburgh, New York, he wrote to Maj. John Armstrong that he suspected Parliament would still "provide vigorously for the prosecution of the war."…"
Journal of the American Revolution
link
Armand
paints brigs for the British fleet.
