Background
European colonial powers often used enslaved Black soldiers in the New World to combat enemies. In the late 1600s and early 1700s, for example, Spain freed, trained, and armed fugitive enslaved persons from Georgia and the Carolinas. Britain was an exception. Apart from a failed 1741 effort to conquer the Spanish city of Cartagena when enslaved Jamaicans were pressed into service, the British typically refused to arm those held in bondage.
No census was made in late colonial Virginia, but scholars today estimate that about 220,000 of the roughly 538,000 residents were enslaved. In 1772, Virginia governor Dunmore recognized that enslaved Africans posed a security threat to white Virginians. “The people with great reason trembled at the facility that an enemy would find in procuring Such a body of men,” he noted to the earl of Hillsborough, the secretary of state, as those in bondage were “attached by no tye to their Masters or to the Country.” Consequently, enslaved persons were ripe “to revenge themselves, by which means a Conquest of this Country would inevitably be effected in a very Short time.” At the time, he was thinking of Spanish or French invaders.
In April 1775, Dunmore ordered British marines to seize gunpowder kegs stored in the magazine that stood in the heart of Williamsburg, the colonial capital, to keep it from falling into the hands of restive Patriots. After an angry armed mob gathered outside the Governor’s Palace, Dunmore declared that if he, his family, or any of his officers were harmed, “he would declare Freedom to the Slaves & reduce the City of Williamsburg to Ashes.”
When more than a thousand Patriot militia gathered in Fredericksburg in late April to march on Williamsburg to retaliate, the governor armed enslaved members of his staff and reiterated his willingness to emancipate those in bondage to protect his family and supporters. Fearing a bloodbath, Peyton Randolph, the president of the Continental Congress, who lived near the palace, convinced the militia to call off the march.
Dunmore’s threat proved effective, but it provoked outrage among whites throughout the colonies while giving enslaved Americans hope of liberation. He was subsequently reported to have turned away several people in bondage who offered their services, and he refrained from any further public mention of the controversial proposal. On May 1, however, he informed British officials in Boston and London that he intended to “raise such force from among Indians, negroes, and other persons, as would reduce the refractory people of this colony to obedience.” He specifically planned “to arm all my own Negroes and receive all others that will come to me whom I shall declare free.”
Lord Dunmore’s Ethiopian Regiment
On June 8, 1775, Lord Dunmore fled Williamsburg under cover of darkness and took up residence on the HMS Fowey warship off Yorktown. The following morning, the sloop HMS Otter arrived from Boston under the command of Captain Matthew Squire.
On July 13, Pinkey’s Virginia Gazette reported that some Black people had found refuge aboard the Fowey. “Negro slaves, now on board the Fowey, were under the governor’s protection,” wrote one Virginia Patriot, adding that they were therefore “in actual rebellion, and punishable as such.” The writer then suggested that the Patriots counter this “bloody plan by arming our trusty slaves ourselves,” an idea that failed to gain traction. When the Fowey was later redeployed to Nova Scotia, Squire agreed to take these fugitives on board the Otter.
On July 17, Dunmore moved his base to the shipyard at Gosport, upstream from Norfolk on the southern branch of the Elizabeth River. Enslaved Virginians immediately began to flee their Patriot enslavers and provide military intelligence as well as piloting skills to the British. Squire soon took on board his ship “a number of slaves belonging to private gentlemen” from the Norfolk area. By protecting fugitives, the naval officers proved themselves of a “most unfriendly disposition to the liberties of this continent,” warned the Norfolk Intelligencer. The publication called for residents to “have no connections or dealings with Lord Dunmore or Capt. Squire, and the other officers of the Otter sloop of war.” Under pressure from city leaders, the captain ultimately agreed to turn over the refugees.
An increase in advertisements for enslaved runaways in the Virginia Gazette in subsequent months suggests that enslaved people nevertheless continued to flee to British lines. Aaron and Johnny, two enslaved Hampton men owned by Patriot Wilson-Miles Cary, for example, found their way to the shipyard that summer. Others climbed aboard British ships sent to seize provisions from plantations. Dunmore used some of the escapees as ships’ crew, messengers, and spies.
By September, a Patriot source estimated that the governor had “about one hundred Negroes, and from twenty to thirty Tory volunteers” at Gosport to fight alongside two hundred or so Redcoats and marines. Black pilots and sailors were part of the British naval force that attacked Hampton in October, the first battle of the Revolution south of New England.
On November 7, with few white Loyalists at his side and little hope for major British reinforcements, Dunmore wrote an emancipation proclamation freeing “all indentured Servants, Negroes, or others” under control of rebels who were “able and willing to bear Arms.” However, he did not issue the proclamation at that time.
Just over a week later, on November 15, Dunmore led a force of Redcoats and white and Black Loyalists, including enslaved Africans, on a mission to seize Patriot arms and ammunition at Kemp’s Landing in what is now Virginia Beach. A Patriot militia ambushed the column just outside of the small town, but Dunmore quickly rallied his men. As the Patriots fled, one enslaved African fought, injured, and captured the militia leader, Colonel Joseph Hutchings, who also was the man’s former enslaver. In the wake of that success, Dunmore published his proclamation, which was distributed widely in the colonies.
Decades later, a white woman who was residing near Kemp’s Landing soon after the battle claimed that “an ugly looking negro man, dressed up in a full suit of British regimentals, and armed with a gun” had entered the home where she was staying to search for Patriot militia. If her memory was correct, the governor had established a uniformed Black fighting force even before publishing the decree.
Soon thereafter, Dunmore wrote to London, “I am now endeavouring to raise two Regiments, one of White People (Called the Queens own Loyal Virginia Regiment) the other of Negroes (Called Lord Dunmores Ethiopian Regiment).” The former comprised 500 local white men divided into ten companies, while the latter initially consisted of between 200 and 300 Black volunteers.
The inclusion of the governor’s name in the title of the Black unit sent a powerful message, as did the use of “Ethiopian,” which was a rare term of respect accorded to Africans by Europeans. “Ethiopian” referred to the East African Christian kingdom and stems from an Amharic term that ancient Greeks translated to mean “burnt faces” or “born under the sun’s path.” Homer praised the Ethiopian king in the Iliad, a fact that would have been known to the well-read governor. Europeans, according to noted Black intellectual W. E. B. Du Bois, came to “refer to the ancient Ethiopians in exalted terms, and consider them the oldest, wisest and most just of men.”
Dunmore assigned white officers and noncommissioned officers to oversee the Black soldiers, who likely were organized similarly to the white troops. Twenty-four-year-old Captain Thomas Taylor Byrd, a son of William Byrd III and an officer in the British Army’s Fourteenth Regiment, commanded both new regiments with the rank of major, although it was not made official. No roster of soldiers or officers is known to survive, but the regiment drew enslaved men from Virginia and beyond. “Letters mention that slaves flock to [Dunmore] in abundance,” wrote Patriot leader Edmund Pendleton on November 27, “but I hope it is magnified.”
Recruits traveled to Norfolk from as far away as New Jersey. The day after the proclamation was published, six-foot-tall Titus Cornelius, age twenty-one, escaped from his notoriously cruel New Jersey Quaker owner. After learning of Dunmore’s proclamation, Cornelius headed south, evading patrols for hundreds of miles to reach Gosport. He later returned to New Jersey and became “one of the war’s most feared Loyalists, white or black,” known throughout the colonies as Colonel Tye. He led a Loyalist brigade that harassed Washington’s forces until Patriots fatally wounded him in battle in 1780.
With limited muskets, some Loyalists likely had to make do with swords, lances, pikes, and other weapons. At least a few Ethiopian Regiment members were issued surplus Fourteenth Regiment coats, though most would have made do with coarse white linen or whatever clothes they could obtain. A December 2 Virginia Gazette article reported that the Black soldiers sported the motto “Liberty to Slaves” on their coats. If this claim is accurate, the slogan may have been a rebuke to Patrick Henry’s followers, who wore his famous phrase “Liberty or Death” on their uniforms.
The regiment’s next action was around Great Bridge, a dozen miles south of Norfolk on the southern branch of the Elizabeth River. To halt the Patriot march, Dunmore had ordered a fort built at the eastern side of this strategic crossing along the land route from Williamsburg to Norfolk. Colonel William Woodford, who commanded the Patriots’ 1st Virginia Regiment, arrived on the western bank of the river on December 2 and estimated that the “Numbers in the Fort are said to be 250, Chiefly Blacks,” though this figure likely was inflated.
Most of the regiment’s fighting at Great Bridge occurred during the first week of December at a ferry landing a half dozen miles downstream. British regulars and about three dozen Black soldiers guarded this site. Patriot lieutenant colonel Charles Scott learned of the enemy camp on December 3 and gathered a unit to reconnoiter. “A party of the King’s troops and several Negroes” immediately crossed the river and attacked, “upon which some of our people gave ground,” he reported.
The sight of Black men wielding guns apparently unnerved many Patriot soldiers, who fled. They soon returned with reinforcements, gunning down at least seven of the enemy, including the British officer who had led the initial assault. Survivors retreated to the safety of their breastwork adjacent to the ferry house. This minor clash at a forgotten ford marked the first recorded fight in British North America pitting a unit of Black soldiers against white Americans.
In a later skirmish, the Patriots took Black prisoners, including “Negro Ned,” an enslaved man from Kemp’s Landing who said he had come from Norfolk that day “with twenty-odd Blacks and three whites.” Ned added that “all the Blacks … at the Great Bridge [were] supplied with Muskets Ammunition etc. and ordered to use them.” A second Black captive, George, who was from Suffolk, estimated that there were 400 Black soldiers in Norfolk and 90 at Great Bridge.
In a December 6 fight at the same ford, Patriot militia killed “one white man and three Negroes” and captured three Ethiopian Regiment members, “two of which are wounded (one mortally),” according to Woodford. The Patriots confiscated six muskets and three bayonets. By then, some twenty soldiers from the Ethiopian Regiment were dead, a far higher toll than among the British or Patriots.
When Dunmore received intelligence on December 8 that the Patriots were bringing cannon to destroy the wooden fort at Great Bridge, he ordered an attack on Patriot positions the next morning. Ethiopian troops were to “make a detour and fall in behind the Rebels a little before break of Day,” thereby drawing the Patriots out of their Great Bridge trenches. British members of the Fourteenth Regiment would then “sally out of the fort and attack their breastwork.” For reasons that went unrecorded, the diversionary attack did not take place, and the British frontal assault that morning led to a deadly rout in the Battle of Great Bridge.
The defeated British and Loyalist troops retreated to Norfolk, boarding Royal Navy ships anchored offshore. One Virginia Patriot wrote to Richard Henry Lee in Philadelphia that the “Regiment of Sables … is now Dispersed and the poor deluded wretches are daily brought into our camp in great numbers.” Their fate, he added, “is not yet determined.” Black soldiers captured by the Patriots at Great Bridge were treated as insurrectionists rather than prisoners of war. When Dunmore sought to exchange Ethiopian Regiment members for captured rebels, Patriot officials did not take him seriously. One suggested instead that “he supposed we must sell them.”
Ethiopian Regiment captives were sent to Williamsburg’s notorious jail, where many died of disease, while whites generally were interned elsewhere. However, records list Sergeant Henry Crouch as incarcerated in the jail; the fact that both his given name and surname as well as his rank were listed suggest that he was a white man who served as an officer in the regiment. Many of those who survived the crowded and unhealthy conditions eventually were sent to labor in the Chiswell lead mines in western Virginia, where they were forced to work under harsh conditions to produce bullets for the Patriot cause.
The regiment continued to take part in military actions, including the January 1, 1776, assault ordered by Dunmore to destroy warehouses on Norfolk’s waterfront used by Patriot snipers. Several buildings were burned. The Patriots then set fire to the rest of the port city but blamed the conflagration, which left Norfolk in ruins, on the attack by Dunmore and his troops. Fighting continued through the month. After a January 20 landing by British and Loyalist forces, the Patriots recovered the bodies of “one sailor and two Negroes.”
The crowded Royal Navy flotilla in Norfolk numbered some one hundred vessels carrying as many as three thousand people. The waterborne community had its own court and police system as well as clerics to cater to Anglicans as well as Methodists. One British officer dubbed it the “floating town.” During the winter of 1775–1776, illness took a heavy toll on military and civilian personnel. The March 8, 1776, issue of Williamsburg’s Virginia Gazette noted that the “jail distemper rages with great violence on board Lord Dunmore’s fleet, particularly among the negro forces.” Black residents of the shipboard community likely endured more crowded and squalid conditions than did whites.
By early spring, Dunmore had built a secure land base at Tucker’s Mill Point across the Elizabeth River from the ruins of Norfolk and less than a mile downstream. A moat and earthworks, along with naval guns, protected the site from Patriot attack. “We have in this little Fort four Ovens, and pretty good Barracks for our Ethiopian Corps,” the governor wrote to London. While he had trouble attracting white Loyalists to the Queen’s Own Loyal Regiment, his effort to recruit Black soldiers was proceeding “very well.” The goal was to prepare the men for a spring assault on Williamsburg. Yet as the regiment members trained for battle, “a fever crept in amongst them which carried off a great many very fine fellows,” Dunmore noted, suggesting affection and respect for the soldiers.
Despite the high mortality rate, enslaved people continued to join Dunmore’s forces by slipping across the moat at night or after traveling in small boats. Virginia planter Edmund Ruffin complained that four of his human chattel were “in Lord Dunmore’s service,” while Landon Carter reported that “a slim Black fellow by name of Phil” had left his plantation wearing a new waistcoat and breeches, presumably “to increase the black regiment forming in Norfolk harbor.”
By May, however, an outbreak of smallpox forced Dunmore to evacuate Tucker’s Mill Point so that the Black troops could be inoculated against the deadly disease in a safe location. (Inoculation required a long recovery, thus making the base susceptible to a Patriot assault if the soldiers remained at Tucker’s Mill Point.) At the end of the month, the flotilla relocated to Gwynn’s Island, located fifty miles to the north at the mouth of the Piankatank River. Though many regiment members died of disease during the brief journey, they did not succumb to smallpox; according to a British naval captain, the “Negro Troops … got thro’ the disorder with great success.”
Gwynn’s Island was located close to hundreds of tobacco plantations with numerous enslaved people, and many of those in bondage reached the new encampment. New recruits to the regiment were offset, however, by deaths due to virulent diseases such as typhus and malaria. On June 26, Dunmore reported to London that the prevailing fever “has proved a very Malignant one and has carried off an incredible Number of our People, especially the Blacks.” Despite recruiting six or eight men every day, he soon had only “150 effective men” available for duty. The June 14 Virginia Gazette reported, “Lord Dunmore’s whole army is now reduced to 40 regular soldiers, and 200 of the Black Fusiliers.” A long drought that made fresh water scarce combined with dwindling supplies to exacerbate the spread of disease.
On July 9, a Patriot force attacked Gwynn’s Island and the ships lying offshore, forcing Dunmore to evacuate. Many of the sick were left behind, and corpses went unburied. An estimated 500 members of the Ethiopian Regiment perished on the island, along with some 150 whites. The flotilla then headed north into Maryland to seek desperately needed fresh water. During Dunmore’s July 23 foray up the Potomac River for water, Patriot militia wounded at least a half dozen British and Loyalist troops, and one Patriot reported that “three white men and four negroes were found dead on the shore.” By early August, the fleet was anchored off Cape Henry, at the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay, preparing to disperse to New York, Britain, and St. Augustine.
On August 6, three British tenders from the fleet carried Loyalist soldiers to the beach close to where English settlers had paused in 1607 on their way to settle Jamestown. A squadron of sixty rebels rushed to the site, and the two sides exchanged shots before the landing party withdrew. “We took one prisoner who came ashore with two Negroes,” a Patriot soldier noted, “but the Negroes made their escape.” This was the last recorded clash between Ethiopian Regiment members and Virginia Patriots. Dunmore and the remaining Black soldiers then departed for New York.
On August 20, Thomas Jefferson wrote from Philadelphia that Governor Dunmore “had the blacks shipped off to the West Indies,” implying that they had been sold. In fact, Ethiopian Regiment members arrived off Staten Island on August 14 and participated with British troops in the Battle of Long Island, which began twelve days later. The September 14 issue of the Virginia Gazette reported that the earl accompanied Highlanders and Hessians “the whole day” while his Black soldiers took part in various skirmishes. The Patriots claimed to have captured “Major Cudjo, commander of Lord Dunmore’s Black regiment,” though the accuracy of that statement is unclear.
In September, Dunmore’s corps was absorbed into General Henry Clinton’s Black Pioneers, which included women as well as men. Though members of that unit were not issued weapons, they received the same pay as whites, and at least four Black men were promoted to the ranks of corporal and sergeant. With the 1783 British evacuation of New York, dozens of Black Virginians who had served with Dunmore emigrated to Nova Scotia to escape re-enslavement by the victorious Patriots. A few later founded a colony for emancipated enslaved people in Sierra Leone, on the coast of West Africa.
