Then, seeking to secure the Carolinas further and cut them off from external sources of aid, British General Charles Cornwallis took his force of seventy-two hundred men northward, heading toward Virginia and ending up in Yorktown, a small port city strategically located near the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay. They would be safe and secure from siege there, he believed, since the Americans lacked a serious navy to challenge him by water and sufficient troops in the area to threaten him by land. Both those assumptions proved to be dead wrong, and the assistance of the French Navy was the main
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