On October 9, 1781, General George Washington ceremonially touched off the first American cannon at the Siege of Yorktown. The French artillery had opened the Allied bombardment at about 3 p.m.; Washington fired the first American gun roughly two hours later, marking the full entry of the Continental Army’s batteries into the attack. A popular legend says Washington’s opening shot crashed into a house where British officers were sitting down to dinner. That dramatic story should be treated cautiously: accounts differ over which Allied gun struck the house, and some descriptions attribute the devastating dinner-table shot to an early French round rather than Washington’s cannon.
The opening salvo began a sustained Franco-American bombardment of Lord Cornwallis’s defenses. Allied guns battered British positions, disrupted repair work, and intensified the pressure on the trapped garrison. Washington’s visible role in igniting the gun also gave the moment considerable ceremonial and symbolic force for the Continental Army.
The bombardment helped set the conditions for the decisive Allied victory at Yorktown. Cornwallis surrendered on October 19, ten days after the first guns opened fire. Yorktown did not formally end the Revolutionary War, but it effectively ended major land operations and set the United States on the path to recognition of its independence.
