Why did the war move to the Southern colonies
After nearly three years of fighting, British generals decided that their best chance to defeat the Americans lay in the South, where many Loyalists lived. Because of intense hatreds between Loyalists and Patriots, and between frontier settlers and the colonial elite, fighting in the Carolinas proved the most brutal of the entire war. In the war's final major battle, at Yorktown, Virginia in 1781, Washington's army and French troops surrounded Gen. Charles Cornwallis' army of 6,000 men and forced their surrender. Two years later, the Treaty of Paris formally settled the war and ended Britain's claim over the American colonies.