Cornwallis surrendered his army at Yorktown in October 1781 after an extended campaign through the Southern colonies, marked by disagreements between him and his superior, Sir Henry Clinton.

[citation needed] The family was established at Brome Hall, near Eye, Suffolk, in the 14th century, and its members would represent the county in the House of Commons over the next three hundred years.

With the outbreak of the war in North America, Cornwallis put his previous misgivings aside and sought active service; proposing an expedition to the southern colonies.

[16] On 2 January 1777, as he advanced on Trenton, his forces were engaged in extended skirmishing that delayed the army's arrival at Washington's position on the Assunpink Creek until late in the day.

[17] Cornwallis prepared his troops to continue the assault on Washington's position the next day, but critically failed to send out adequate patrols to monitor the Americans.

[27] Cornwallis returned to America in July 1779, where he was to play a central role as the lead commander of the British "Southern strategy" (which was to invade the south on the assumption that a significantly more Loyalist population would rise up and assist in putting the rebellion down).

[29] After the siege of Charleston and the destruction of Abraham Buford's Virginia regiments at Waxhaw, Clinton returned to New York, leaving Cornwallis in command in the south.

Although these attempts met with limited success, they were continually undermined by Patriot activity, both political and military, and the indifferent abuses of British and Loyalist forces.

[42] The victory added to his reputation, although the rout of the American rebels had as much to do with the failings of Gates (whose rapid departure from the battlefield was widely noted) as it did the skill of Cornwallis.

[49] He then clashed with the rebuilt Continental army under General Nathanael Greene at Guilford Court House in North Carolina, winning a Pyrrhic victory with a bayonet charge against a numerically superior enemy.

[50] In the battle, he controversially ordered grape shot to be fired into a mass of combat that resulted in friendly casualties but helped break the American line.

[52] Greene, whose army was still intact after the loss at Guilford Courthouse, shadowed Cornwallis toward Wilmington, but then crossed into South Carolina, where over the course of several months American forces regained control over most of the state.

[56] In March 1781, in response to the threat posed by Arnold and Phillips, General Washington dispatched the Marquis de Lafayette to defend Virginia.

[59] Cornwallis eventually received firm orders from Clinton to choose a position on the Virginia Peninsula—referred to in contemporary letters as the "Williamsburg Neck"—and construct a fortified naval post to shelter ships of the line.

With the arrival of the French fleet under the Comte de Grasse and General Washington's combined French-American army, Cornwallis found himself cut off.

An attempt failed to exchange him for[65] Henry Laurens, an American diplomat who was released from the Tower of London in anticipation that Cornwallis would be freed from his parole.

[68] Cornwallis also retained the confidence of King George III and the government of the earl of Shelburne, but he was placed in a financially precarious state by his inability to be on active duty.

One consequence of the code was that it instituted a type of racism, placing the British as an elite class on top of the complex status hierarchy of caste and religion that existed in India at the time.

[77] Cornwallis held racist views, in a manner common at the time; of mixed European-Indians, he wrote, "...as on account of their colour & extraction they are considered in this country as inferior to Europeans, I am of opinion that those of them who possess the best abilities could not command that authority and respect which is necessary in the due discharge of the duty of an officer.

Early in his tenure, he abrogated agreements with the Maratha Empire and the Nizam of Hyderabad that he saw as violating the 1784 Treaty of Mangalore that ended the Second Anglo-Mysore War.

Medows successfully occupied the Coimbatore district, but Tipu counterattacked and was able to reduce the British position to a small number of strongly held outposts.

Dwindling provisions, exacerbated by Tipu's slash-and-burn tactics, forced Cornwallis to abandon the idea of besieging Seringapatam that season, so he retreated to Bangalore.

[101] His appointment was greeted unfavourably by the Irish elite, who preferred his predecessor Lord Camden, and suspected he had liberal sympathies with the predominantly Catholic rebels.

[103] The French invaders were defeated and forced to surrender at the Battle of Ballinamuck, after which Cornwallis ordered the execution by lot of a number of Irish rebels.

[105] The process, which essentially required the buying of Parliamentary votes through patronage and the granting of peerages, was one that Cornwallis found quite distasteful: he wrote "My occupation is now of the most unpleasant nature, negotiating and jobbing with the most corrupt people under heaven.

Having five daughters but no sons, the marquessate became extinct on his death, but he was succeeded in his remaining titles by his uncle, the brother of the general, the Right Reverend James Cornwallis.

[citation needed] Cornwallis appears in the 1835 novel Horse-Shoe Robinson by John Pendleton Kennedy, a historical romance set against the background of the Southern campaigns in the American War of Independence, and interacts with the fictional characters in the book.

On his retirement in 1792, and in celebration of his victory over Tipu Sultan, the British residents of Madras (renamed Chennai in 1996) voted in May that year to commission a portrait in oils, and a statue, for their city.

The eight-foot-tall marble with its pedestal base depicts the children of Tipu Sultan being handed over to Cornwallis as part of the treaty to end the war.

The statue was covered by a protective cupola on Elphinstone Circle, before it was damaged in August 1965 and removed to the grounds of the Bhau Daji Lad Museum, Byculla, Bombay.