Late in 1774, London authorities attempted to suffocate the flames of rebellion in their fractious North American colonies by instructing their colonial governors to “take the most effectual Measures for arresting, detaining & securing any Gunpowder, or any Sort of Arms or Ammunition, which may be attempted to be imported into the Province.” This fell short of an order to seize existing powder and guns already in colonial storehouses, but it was a small step from confiscating powder from incoming ships to confiscating it from powder magazines.
London’s orders were not secret. They had been published in the Virginia Gazette on January 14, 1775, putting rebellious colonists on notice that existing supplies of gunpowder would be hard to replace. By spring of 1775, a scramble for powder had erupted along the Atlantic coast. On April 18, Massachusetts governor Thomas Gage, who had previously seized gunpowder in Cambridge and other towns, sent soldiers to Concord to procure or destroy the gunpowder there. Forewarned, the rebels hid the powder and fought back in what became known as the Battle of Lexington and Concord.
In Williamsburg, an armorer named Miller first leaked word of the governor’s plans. Dunmore, he said, had ordered the gunlocks taken off most of the firearms in the Powder Magazine and was planning to seize the gunpowder. Citizens patrolled the streets and guarded the magazine at night for about a week but on Thursday night, April 20, 1775, they discharged the guards.
Waiting for just such an opportunity was Lieutenant Henry Collins, captain of the armed schooner HMS Magdalen. Under cover of darkness, he and twenty sailors sneaked up to the magazine and were in the process of loading a wagon with fifteen half-barrels of gunpowder when someone noticed. Before townspeople could stop them, they fled to the safety of their ship on the James River.
Drums beat the alarm. Armed locals responded, ready to storm the palace and force the governor to return the powder, but several leading citizens persuaded them to let their elected officials try a peaceable approach. The next day, Peyton Randolph and others met with Dunmore. They demanded an explanation. The governor responded that rumors of a slave insurrection had prompted him to have the powder loaded onto the twenty-gun man-of-war HMS Fowey, where it was perfectly secure. The deed had been done at night, he said, to shield the population from undue alarm, and they had his word of honor that he would return the powder inside half an hour in the event of an actual uprising.
“This answer gave no satisfaction,” wrote Virginia Gazette editor Alexander Purdie on June 16. “The people could not conceive how disarming them would discourage their negroes from rising, should they be so disposed; nor could they divine how [Dunmore] could procure the powder, upon any emergency, from a vessel whose station for one hour was uncertain.”
In Dunmore’s letter to his superior in London, William Legge, second earl of Dartmouth and secretary of state for the colonies, he reported that rising tensions in Virginia, “made me think it prudent to remove some Gunpowder which was in a Magazine in this place where it lay exposed to any attempt that might be made to seize it, and I have reason to believe the people intended to take that step.”
When the delegation seemed disinclined to accept his explanation, Dunmore threatened to “declare Freedom to the Slaves, and reduce the City of Williamsburg to Ashes” if any British official came to harm. The prospect of a massive emancipation of enslaved people was far more alarming than the loss of a few barrels of gunpowder. Believing that the best policy was to avoid provoking Dunmore, the Williamsburg delegation backed off their demands for the powder’s return.
Alarmed by events in Massachusetts and Williamsburg, however, militia from newly formed companies around Virginia were massing in Fredericksburg and preparing to march on Williamsburg. They were warned off by Peyton Randolph and Robert Carter Nicholas after Dunmore once again threatened to free enslaved people. Word then came that Patrick Henry was leading hundreds of armed men to Williamsburg from Hanover County, some sixty miles to the west, to demand the return of the gunpowder. Randolph wrote a letter on behalf of the city, urging them to stay away while at the same time, a delegation of enslaved men went to the Governor’s Palace and offered their services to Dunmore. After several tense days of dickering, Henry’s militia disbanded, but only when Robert Corbin, the colony’s receiver general, agreed to reimburse the city for the £330 value of the gunpowder.
It was not paranoia that led white Virginians to fear slave revolts. A London pamphlet of the previous year had argued for a general emancipation by royal proclamation and for arming the enslaved against the rebels. The fear of slave insurrection was certainly genuine in all English colonies but especially so in Virginia, where enslaved people made up 40 percent of the population. The decade of the 1760s saw uprisings in Loudoun, Fairfax, Frederick, Stafford, and Hanover counties, most of which involved the death of white overseers or enslavers. While the early 1770s had been relatively quiet, every white colonist knew that violence could erupt without warning. In the week leading up to the gunpowder removal, there were at least six incidents of unrest in Virginia: in Prince Edward County, an enslaved man was charged with conspiracy to commit murder; in Chesterfield County word of a possible insurrection caused slave patrols to be revived; in Northumberland County an enslaved woman set fire to her enslaver’s home; in Norfolk County, two enslaved men were sentenced to death for revolt; and in Williamsburg and Surry County, the white population was on edge due to rumors that proved groundless. Older colonists remembered Governor Robert Dinwiddie’s warning during the Seven Years’ War twenty years earlier: any emergency that divided white colonists could give enslaved people the opportunity to launch rebellions.
In early June, Dunmore fled the palace with his family and continued throughout that month to make efforts to govern the colony from onboard the Fowey. By autumn, he was conducting raids in Hampton and Norfolk with only a few small ships and a handful of men, many of whom had recently fled slavery. Their victory on November 14 at Kemp’s Landing near Norfolk convinced Dunmore that these men could indeed fight well, and he hurried to issue the emancipation proclamation that he had prepared a week earlier.
In the short run, Dunmore had won. The gunpowder remained in government hands. But in the process, he had damaged his standing among the colonial elite past all repair. Benjamin Waller, the influential lawyer and community leader, informed him that he had forfeited “the Confidence of the People not so much for having taken the Powder as for the declaration he made of raising and freeing the Slaves.” In the long run, his actions helped the rebels by turning neutrals and even some Loyalists into Patriots. Dunmore’s proclamation even earned a mention in the Declaration of Independence, where it was the last and longest of Thomas Jefferson’s list of grievances against King George III. The topic was too controversial to be openly discussed, so Congress reduced Jefferson’s 170 words to just 7: “He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us.”
