The World Turned Upside Down: Yorktown

Last updated on: October 19, 2015 at 10:50 am by John Mark N. Reynolds

The World Turned Upside Down: Yorktown 2015-10-15T17:38:35-04:00 John Mark N. Reynolds

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The next time someone tells you war doesn’t solve any problems, point out that winning the Battle of Yorktown (this date in 1781) gave the United States independence. For those who say that without the War we would have become a bigger Canada, the nation that gave us William Shatner, point out that Canada got to be Canada because of the lessons the USA taught the British at Yorktown.

It was up to Lord Cornwallis to be there at the beginning of the end.

‘Poor Lord Cornwallis was one of those decent men who have the misfortune of paying the price of other people’s misrule. He appears to have been a fairly competent commander in a situation that he had not created. The infamy of the defeat at Yorktown, the last major battle of the War of Independence, fell on him even if the orders came from his superior. Cornwallis went on to serve his nation competently in other areas, but in the USA, he will always be the man to lose the War.

And we should be glad he did.

Why?

The British were on their way to becoming the largest Empire the world has ever known. The sun would soon be unable to set on British territory. The British stopped the tyrant Napoleon and freed from the power of the North American slave culture abolition of the slave trade and slavery become possible. Losing the War of Independence taught the British how far they could push a colony and Australia, New Zealand, and Canada benefited. Colonialism is not good, but British rule was the best of a bad lot and losing the War may have contributed to a certain modesty.

We also got the birth of the American Republic.

This was a mixed blessing, like all human things, but has been good for the humankind of the whole. We set up a Republic and showed that a big nation could maintain that form of government. We began as a slave power, but within one human lifetime (about eighty years) a great civil war ended with every slave freed. When the mother country needed us, particularly in World War II, we had become a robust power with different DNA ready to help. Our differences mattered because Britain and the United States had competing strengthens and weaknesses. The monarchy protected Britain from certain political demagogues, nobody but the monarch could be head of state, but our federalism was a laboratory for different civic ideas. Wisconsin might pioneer labor laws while California tried out the ballot initiative.

Lord Cornwallis was a sore loser and refused to surrender to Washington, sending out his second in command. His band played a song that summed up the feelings of the British ruling class: “The World Turned Upside Down.”* It wasn’t that (as I was taught in school) that a group of ragtag farmers had beaten a great Empire . . . Washington was no ragtag farmer and the British opposition party hated the War. The old elite instead had to recognize a new elite, a republican elite in men like Washington . . . men they had created. The bottom rail was not on the top: the British freed more slaves than did the patriots.

Instead, the song was a prophecy about the world the new republicans would create. The song originally was an attack on Puritan regicide who killed a king (Charles I) and began to interfere with Christmas. We are told:

Our Lords and Knights, and Gentry too, doe mean old fashions to forgoe:They set a porter at the gate, that none must enter in thereat.They count it a sin, when poor people come in.Hospitality it selfe is drown’d.Yet let’s be content, and the times lament, you see the world turn’d upside down.

The old rebellion had ended in regicide and tyranny where “the world was turned upside down.” Gentility would vanish and bloodshed would result. This w’s exactly what did happen in the French Revolution and almost every other uprising. Blessedly, it did not happen in the American Revolution. As we plunged into the chaos men like Cornwallis anticipated with the strongman that would almost surely follow (Cromwell in the English Civil War), Cornwallis must have felt smug. Soon, like any tyranny, we would be banning popular pleasures (Christmas, tobacco, card playing) as hospitality dies in the turmoil. New fashions would replace old to our harm.

Washington and the Constitutional Convention of 1789 worked a near miracle and we avoided that fate.

Yorktown tilted the world, but the work of Philadelphia righted it.

Cornwallis was wrong . . . again.

————-

*Fellow history geeks: I know this is disputed.

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