"Divine service shall be performed in the different brigades and divisions. The Commander-in-Chief recommends that all the troops that are not upon duty, to assist at it with a serious deportment, and that sensibility of heart which the recollection of the surprising and particular interposition of Providence in our favor claims." The intelligence of the surrender, as it spread over the country, gave general satisfaction and filled every American heart with joy. Congress went in procession to the Dutch Lutheran Church to return thanks to Almighty God for the victory, and a day was set apart for general thanksgiving and prayer; the thanks of the same body were voted to the forces, both of America and France; and in the plenitude of its good-feeling it "resolved" to do that which it has not yet commenced to perform--to erect a marble column at York, in commemoration of the event.[29] But a greater and more enduring monument than any which the Congress has ever "resolved" to erect, commemorates the capture of Cornwallis: the fall of British dominion in the thirteen colonies on the Atlantic seaboard, the disinterested self-sacrifices of General Washington and the very few who enjoyed his confidence and regard, and the triumph of "the true principles of government." A country which, from small things, has become prosperous, powerful, and happy; a people, whose intelligence and enterprise and independence have astonished the old nations and their rulers; and the homage of admiring millions, freely and voluntarily offered, in every quarter of the globe--these form a monument which will commemorate the fall of Cornwallis, and the patriotism of Washington and Greene, of Wayne and Hamilton, of the honest yeomanry and the devoted "regulars" of that day, long after the resolutions of the Congress--if not the Congress itself--shall have sunk into obscurity and been entirely forgotten. LORD CORNWALLIS I have the mortification to inform your Excellency that I have been forced to give up the posts of York and Gloucester, and to surrender the troops under my command, by capitulation, on the 19th instant, as prisoners of war to the combined forces of America and France.