Independence - It Is All Over

Yorktown did not end the American Revolution. It ended the will to fight it — and that will broke not in Virginia but in London, and then in a rented room in Paris. This is the story of how the war was really won and then made real: Prime Minister Lord North taking the news “as he would have taken a ball in his breast” and crying “Oh God, it is all over”; a King who wanted the war more than any of his ministers and drafted his own abdication rather than give up America; and the votes, one by one, that finally stripped the war from the Crown’s hands and shifted power visibly from the King to the Commons. Then to Paris, where Franklin, Adams, and John Jay quietly broke their own government’s orders and negotiated behind France’s back to win the whole continent east of the Mississippi — a peace so generous it was designed to win America back as a customer. It is the story of the great Loyalist exodus that founded English Canada, and of a hard, plain truth: independence was won. Whether it could be kept was another question entirely.