"Charles Cornwallis (1738-1805), the second earl of Cornwallis, was a peer of the realm, a friend of King George III, and a major general in the king's army. He felt so outraged by the insurrection of the American colonists that he volunteered to go to America to defeat the rebellion and restore the king's rule. King George promptly accepted his offer and sent him to America with Cornwallis's old regiment, the 33rd Foot." "George Washington (1732-1789) was a Virginia planter and a colonel in the Virginia militia. He was so moved by the outrages of the British government against the American colonies that, attending the Continental Congress in his militia uniform, he left his fellow patriots know he stood ready to serve in an army that would make war to establish his country's independence. The Congress appointed him commander in chief of America's armies." "Thus Washington and Cornwallis, from two different worlds and for opposing reasons, came to the battlefields of the Revolutionary War, where they and their armies would fight a desperate duel up and down the Eastern seaboard from 1775 to 1781." "As the narrative follows them into combat, the reader becomes an eyewitness to every critical event of the Revolutionary War: the siege of Boston; the Battle of Long Island; the fall of New York; the raid on Trenton; the American victories at Princeton and Saratoga; the Battle of Monmouth Courthouse; the British capture of Philadelphia; the ordeal of Valley Forge; the plot to depose Washington; the treason of Benedict Arnold; the fall of Charleston; the disgrace of Camden; Cornwallis's rampage through the Carolinas; the atrocities of a Cornwallis favorite, the brutal Banastre Tarleton; the battles of King's Mountain, Cowpens, and Guilford Courthouse; and, finally, Washington's entrapment of Cornwallis's army at Yorktown, Virginia." "There, in a climactic confrontation between the two armies, Cornwallis, the stuffy aristocrat and professional soldier, was forced to surrender to Washington, the colonial planter, amateur soldier, and heroic leader of America's scruffy, patchwork army. The duel was over. On that day - Friday, October 19, 1781 - with the help from France, the thirteen British colonies in America won by force of arms the independence they had so boldly declared in writing in Philadelphia on July 4, 1776."--BOOK JACKET.