About This Book

After the Humiliating Defeat at Yorktown in 1781, George III Vowed to Keep Fighting the Rebels and Their Allies Around the World, Holding a New Nation in the Balance

Although most people think the American Revolution ended with the British surrender at Yorktown, Virginia, on October 19, 1781, it did not. The war spread around the world, and exhausted men kept fighting—from the Arctic to Arkansas, from India and Ceylon to Schenectady and South America—while others labored to achieve a final diplomatic resolution.

After Cornwallis’s unexpected loss, George III vowed revenge, while Washington planned his next campaign. Spain, which France had lured into the war, insisted there would be no peace without seizing British-held Gibraltar. Yet the war had spun out of control long before Yorktown. Native Americans and Loyalists continued joint operations against land-hungry rebel settlers from New York to the Mississippi Valley. African American slaves sought freedom with the British. Soon, Britain seized the initiative again with a decisive naval victory in the Caribbean against the Comte de Grasse, the French hero of Yorktown.

In After Yorktown: The Final Struggle for American Independence, Don Glickstein tells the engrossing story of this uncertain and violent time, from the remarkable American and French success in Virginia to the conclusion of the fighting—in India—and then to the last British soldiers leaving America more than two years after Yorktown. Readers will learn about the people—their humor, frustration, fatigue, incredulity, worries; their shock at the savage terrorism each side inflicted; and their surprise at unexpected grace and generosity. Based on an extraordinary range of primary sources, the story encompasses a fascinating cast of characters: a French captain who destroyed a British trading post, but left supplies for Indians to help them through a harsh winter, an American Loyalist releasing a captured Spanish woman in hopes that his act of kindness will result in a prisoner exchange, a Native American leader caught “between two hells” of a fickle ally and a greedy enemy, and the only general to surrender to both George Washington and Napoleon Bonaparte. Finally, the author asks the question we face today: How do you end a war that doesn’t want to end?

Don Glickstein is an award-winning journalist who has written for the Delaware State News, the Buffalo Courier-Express, New Bedford Standard-Times, and Seattle Post-Intelligencer. His history writing has appeared in the Journal of the American Revolution, Columbia, Washington Magazine, and historylink.org.

Praise for After Yorktown:

“Glickstein distinguishes his book from the plethora of Revolutionary War volumes published each year through well supported historical interpretations which dispel several myths, through a thorough command of relevant primary sources and by making interesting, little known connections among people, places and events. . . . After Yorktown is highly recommended for those who want to understand how tenuous American independence was after Yorktown and the impact of the wider global conflict on the war’s outcome.”—Journal of the American Revolution

“A highly readable book. . . . The author is to be particularly commended for painting a grand canvas in which he portrays the war both in the various theaters at home but also globally in India, the Caribbean, and Europe.” —Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy, author of The Men Who Lost America

“After Yorktown is an important corrective to the myopic view that the war was fought only on American soil and had a tidy, storybook climax.”—Ray Raphael, author of A People’s History of the American Revolution

“Glickstein relies on an impressive array of primary sources, which he assiduously mines for the back-and-forth of important battles, the interesting biographical details of the major personalities driving the war, and the tragic costs of the war.”—Publishers Weekly