Independence - It Is All Over

American Political History · Jul 5, 2025 · 39m

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…