The 1781 March to Yorktown Through Northern Maryland: A Battlefield Grant

A French map of the Franco-American march to Yorktown, Virginia, in summer 1781; the yellow line traces the route from Providence, Rhode Island, to Annapolis, Maryland. Library of Congress.

The grant

The Maryland Historical Trust will identify sites linked to the march of American and French soldiers through northern Maryland on the way to Yorktown, using historical research, geophysical surveys and archeological testing — to understand better how Maryland communities helped one of the most important troop movements of the Revolutionary War.

"At the end of our tether"

After six years of war, General George Washington wrote that his Continental Army was "at the end of [their] tether." Morale was low, supplies were running out, and two mutinies had already failed that year; the army in New England was drifting toward disaster. Washington believed only a decisive victory over the British in North America could lift his men's spirits and make independence real.

The march

• In June 1781, British troops under General Lord Cornwallis fell back to Yorktown, Virginia.
• Told that a French fleet would be off the Chesapeake Bay, Washington gambled that if he could also bring a combined French and American army to Yorktown, he could strike the largest British army in the South.
• The Franco-American army marched 680 miles from Rhode Island to Yorktown, passing through northern Maryland in early September — helped along the way by sympathetic civilians.

Maryland's part. People in Cecil and Harford Counties supplied the army from their mills, taverns and farms. Black Marylanders, free and enslaved, were pivotal: they hauled supplies and ran the ferry crossings over the Chesapeake and its tributaries — vital because Washington's army lacked the skilled watermen and logistics to do it quickly. Well supplied, the army reached Yorktown with its French allies in time to lay siege alongside the French fleet, ending in the British surrender on October 19, 1781.

About the program

Preservation Planning Grants are the American Battlefield Protection Program's broadest grants, supporting stewardship of battlefields and sites of armed conflict on American soil. The program also offers Battlefield Land Acquisition, Battlefield Restoration and Battlefield Interpretation grants — support for community-driven stewardship at the state, tribal and local levels.

Sources

Based on "The End of our Tether: Northern Maryland and the 1781 March to Yorktown," American Battlefield Protection Program, National Park Service; a work of the United States government in the public domain. The source dates the start of the march to April 1781, before the June retreat to Yorktown that it says prompted it; this page gives no start month.