George Washington Letter Signed.

April 10, 1781. In 1780, French nobleman Jean-Baptiste Donatien de Vimeur, comte de Rochambeau was appointed commander of land forces as part of the project code named Expedition Particuliere. He was given the rank of Lieutenant General in command of some 7,000 French troops and sent to join the Continental Army under George Washington during the American Revolutionary War. He landed at Newport, Rhode Island on 10 July but was held there inactive for a year due to his reluctance to abandon the French fleet blockaded by the British in Narragansett Bay. The College in the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations (now known as Brown University) served as an encampment site for some of Rochambeau's troops, and the College Edifice was converted into a military hospital, now known as University Hall.[3] In July 1781, the force left Rhode Island and marched across Connecticut to join Washington on the Hudson River in Mount Kisco, New York. Washington and Rochambeau then marched their combined forces to the siege of Yorktown and the Battle of the Chesapeake. On 22 September, they combined with the Marquis de Lafayette's troops and forced heavily outnumbered and trapped Lord Cornwallis to surrender on 19 October. The siege of Yorktown was a decisive victory for the American Continental Army and proved to be the last major land battle of the American Revolutionary War in the North American region, as the surrender by Cornwallis, and the capture of both him and his army, prompted the British government to negotiate an end to the conflict and ultimately resulted in the Treaty of Paris of 1783.