Background
In the summer of 1775, tensions simmered between military forces loyal to Lord Dunmore and the citizens of the Tidewater. Dunmore had fled Williamsburg in June following the Gunpowder Incident and had taken refuge on the warship HMS Fowey in the York River. The Fowey was joined by the fourteen-gun sloop HMS Otter under the command of Matthew Squire, who was soon to become the senior British naval officer in the colony. With locals prohibited from selling provisions to British ships, landing parties from small warships known as tenders had been raiding settlements along the shoreline, confiscating supplies and livestock and enabling enslaved people to abscond and join Dunmore’s forces. On July 13, Pinkney’s Virginia Gazette reported that a tender from the Fowey or Otter had landed near Gloucester, disgorging several armed men “who stole 14 sheep and a cow.” On July 15, Dunmore relocated his flotilla to Norfolk, where it continued to operate throughout the waterways of Hampton Roads, intensifying tender raids on suspected rebel strongholds. By early September, the flotilla included the Otter, the HMS Mercury, which replaced the Fowey, and three commercial vessels that Dunmore’s supporters outfitted as warships, all of them supported by tenders.
On September 2, Squire was aboard the Otter’s tender, Liberty, when it was driven ashore by a hurricane and grounded in the mudflats of the Back River, an inlet of the Chesapeake Bay near Hampton. Squire and the Liberty’s pilot, Joseph Harris, a formerly enslaved man, escaped to the shore, where Harris procured a canoe and rowed himself and Squire back to the Otter. Thirteen other crew members, including formerly enslaved people at risk of reenslavement or death, were not so lucky. Elizabeth City County militia forces seized the crewmen as well as weapons—including six swivel guns, muskets, and cutlasses—ammunition, and naval stores. Then they set fire to the Liberty in what the Virginia Gazette described as payback for Squire’s “harbouring gentlemen’s negroes, and suffering his sailors to steal poultry, hogs, &c.”
The white crewmen were eventually freed, but the Black crewmen were reenslaved, and Squire demanded the return of the weapons and supplies and what was left of the Liberty. Failure to comply, he wrote in a letter printed in the local newspapers, meant that “the people of Hampton, who committed the outrage, must be answerable for the consequence.” A war of words followed, with local officials arguing that the weapons and stores had been abandoned and refusing to give up the Liberty’s gear unless Squire returned Harris and the other enslaved people who had sheltered with Dunmore. When the editor of the Virginia Gazette and Norfolk Inquirer attacked Dunmore’s father for his role in the Jacobite Rebellion and implied that Squire had been “too free with people sheep and hoggs” during the recent seizure of a vessel, the infuriated Dunmore seized the Gazette’s press and moved it to his ship, where he printed his own newspaper to counter the Patriot narrative.
With neither side backing down, Squire began planning an attack on Hampton as retribution. Aware of his intent, local authorities fouled the channel of the Hampton River with sunken vessels to prevent British ships from entering the small harbor. Local militia were defending Hampton, but they lacked the numbers, training, weapons, and leadership to deflect a serious attack. On September 12, 100 volunteers from the Williamsburg militia guard joined the local forces; when those volunteers returned to Williamsburg, they were replaced by 100 volunteers under the command of Major Francis Epps of the 1st Virginia Regiment. Following a series of raids by Dunmore’s forces in the Norfolk area, the Virginia Committee of Safety replaced the volunteer units with Captain George Nicholas’s company of the 2nd Virginia Regiment and Captain George Lyne’s company from the Gloucester District Minute Battalion.
On the night of October 25, Squire led a raid by four tenders on homes at Mill Creek, just outside the entrance to Hampton River. The next day, he attempted to enter the river but found the entrance blocked by the sunken vessels. He also encountered opposition from thirty of Lyne’s men deployed on one side of the channel and twenty-five of Nicholas’s men on the other, as well as from local militia. It is unclear which side fired first, but the Patriots discharged their muskets, and the tenders—located only about 300 yards offshore—returned fire with four-pound cannon loaded with ball and grapeshot. After about an hour, Squire’s forces withdrew.
Later on October 26, an express rider from Hampton delivered a message to the Virginia Committee of Safety in Williamsburg requesting immediate reinforcements to counter the British attempt to enter the harbor. Colonel William Woodford left Williamsburg at 9:00 that evening with fifty volunteer riflemen from the Culpeper District Minute Battalion, led by Captain Abraham Buford, supported by wagons and horses provided by the citizens of Williamsburg. They traveled the thirty miles to Hampton in a heavy rainstorm, arriving about 7:30 the following morning.
By 8:00, the British tenders had cleared the channel. Squire sent the four tenders into the harbor while he kept the larger Otter outside the entrance. Hearing gunfire, Woodford directed his riflemen, carrying weapons accurate to 300 yards or more, to the second story of houses near the harbor and to breastworks along the wharf. A steady exchange of fire ensued. The riflemen killed or wounded several crew on the tenders, forcing them to stand off. One of the tenders, the Hawke, was captured when it got too close to shore. After an hour, Squire withdrew his forces, abandoning plans to destroy Hampton, which escaped the battle largely unscathed. The first fighting of the Revolution south of Massachusetts was over.
The Royal Navy and auxiliary Loyalist forces suffered their first casualties at Hampton, with estimates varying from a couple to many. Lieutenant John Wright, the commander of the Hawke, was injured but jumped overboard and escaped with the aid of Joseph Harris. Two members of the Hawke’s crew were killed, as was one additional man; two other men were injured and captured but recovered. One white woman was also captured. The Patriot force of more than 200 men suffered no casualties despite experiencing sustained cannon fire well within range.
Thomas Jefferson said that the Battle of Hampton threw white Virginians into “a perfect phrensy,” further hardening the colonists’ animosity toward the British government. The Patriots’ military success emboldened Virginia’s political leadership and highlighted the importance of information as a tool in warfare as well as the value of the rifle. The victory also demonstrated that even in the absence of a navy, determined Patriot defenders under the proper circumstances could repel British amphibious landings and inflict casualties on the landing force.
