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George Washington letter accepting British surrender goes on display in London
A letter signed by George Washington in 1781 accepting the British surrender at Yorktown will be shown publicly for the first time at The National Archives in London starting Wednesday. The document is part of an exhibition on the American Revolutionary War running through November.
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A letter signed by George Washington accepting the British surrender at Yorktown will go on display for the first time in London on Wednesday. The document, written in October 1781, shows Washington’s faded cursive handwriting. It was dictated and signed by Washington and given to the British commander in Yorktown, Virginia, after the British requested terms to end hostilities.
America’s Independence Story, 1763–1783” exhibition at The National Archives. The exhibition also includes the Treaty of Paris from 1783 and a rare original “Dunlap broadside” of the Declaration of Independence printed in Philadelphia on July 4, 1776.
After the war, the letter remained in the British commander’s family archive in Essex before being presented to the Public Record Office, a predecessor of The National Archives, in 1880.
Historical context The letter agreed to the ceasefire that ended major fighting and set in motion negotiations leading to the Treaty of Paris, in which Britain formally recognized the independence of the United States. “For such a short, succinct, and to the point message, this note had tremendous consequences for generations to come,” a historian and curator of the exhibition said in a statement.
The exhibition runs through the end of November.
