American Revolution | The Sacred Fire of Liberty

In the summer of 1781, an enslaved double agent named James Armistead stood in the tent of British General Lord Charles Cornwallis in Portsmouth, Virginia. Posing as a runaway slave, Armistead had already gained Cornwallis’s trust and was serving as his personal servant. Then Cornwallis gave him an unexpected order: run away to the American camps, pretend to be a fugitive, and spy on the Patriots. Armistead kept his face neutral, but inside he was elated. Cornwallis had just handed him the perfect cover to return to the Americans with the British army’s most vital secret—that Cornwallis planned to move 9,000 troops to Yorktown, Virginia. That intelligence would set the stage for the final major battle of the Revolutionary War.

The War on the Brink

By the spring of 1781, both sides were exhausted. Britain controlled only a handful of coastal cities—New York, Charleston, Savannah, Newport—but was also fighting a global war against France, Spain, and the Netherlands. Military spending had sent British debt soaring, and opposition to the war was growing in Parliament. One member declared that the nation had received “nothing but a series of ineffective victories or severe defeats.”