Generals are typically remembered for their victories, but Lord Cornwallis is recognized first for his defeat at Yorktown in 1781. Unlike John Burgoyne, who surrendered at Saratoga exactly four years before, Cornwallis survived the kind of episode that usually ends careers to become a respected soldier-statesman. The story of his life, as Richard Middleton tells it in Cornwallis: Soldier and Statesman in a Revolutionary World, sheds light on Georgian Britain while capturing the man behind Cornwallis’s impressive accomplishments.
Far from the types of study, now popular, criticizing Britain for an unacceptable colonial past, Cornwallis makes an effective case for its subject as a reformer. A sense of purpose runs through Cornwallis’s life. The heir to an earldom, he nonetheless rose in public life mostly by merit and earned respect from leading men along with the officers and troops he led. Middleton notes how a critical, even accusatory, view has replaced the triumphal history of empire. He deftly navigates those tricky currents. His biography, only the second full study of Cornwallis, and the first in more than forty years, neglects few details of the subject’s life in a fresh view of an important figure at the heart of key events.
Born at his family’s townhouse in London on the last day of 1738, Cornwallis enjoyed privilege and connections from the start, though these were no guarantee of a successful career. His maternal grandfather, Lord Townshend, was a secretary of state, and two
