Cornwallis: random facts

Some time ago, I caught a few minutes of a radio show about early U.S. history, and heard them talking about a Cornwallis. The name was, of course, known to me from my ICSE history classes of many years ago. I knew him as a British Governor General of India.

It turns out that he played a significant role in the American Revolutionary War. According to wikipedia he lost an important battle to another famous person :

Between January 2 and January 4, 1777 Cornwallis fought the American Continental Army at Princeton, New Jersey, led by General George Washington. The Americans surprised a detachment of Cornwallis' troops and pressed the attack until encountering the main body of Cornwallis' force. After this first engagement, the American army slipped away in the night before Cornwallis could counter-attack. The Battle of Princeton was seen as an American victory, although it was actually a confused series of skirmishes without a decisive defeat for either force.

In 1780, Cornwallis led British forces in the Carolinas against Nathanael Greene.

After a textbook siege by American and French forces, Cornwallis surrendered to the allied forces, bringing to a close the Battle of Yorktown, on October 19, 1781, and thus ending the war. He was ultimately blamed for losing the war to the colonists.

This story of the migration of a few brits from their american colonies to their south-asian ones, after their defeat in the revolutionary war, was familiar to me from William Dalrymple's White Mughals (a book that I haven't completed despite having borrowed it more than a year ago from my university library). And skimming through it I find the following passage (on p.23):

James Kirkpatrick's counterpart as British Resident in Delhi was the Boston-born Sir David Ochterlony, an old friend of Kirkpatrick's elder brother William....His father was a Highland Scot who had settled in Massachusetts. When the American Revolution broke out, the family fled to Canada, and thence to London where David entered the company's army in 1777. He never returned to the New World, and having made India his home vowed never to leave.

This post was partly inspired by this one.