This November marks the 249th anniversary of Lord Dunmore’s Proclamation, the effort by Virginia’s last royal governor John Murray, fourth earl of Dunmore, to arm enslaved Black people to fight the mounting Patriot rebellion.
The idea of enlisting enslaved men to fight for the Crown had been brewing for some time, partly to play on fears of slave rebellion that regularly coursed through a colony where just over 40 percent of the population was held in bondage. In 1774, James Madison, who would shortly join the Orange County Committee of Safety to enforce the boycott of British goods and to raise a militia, warned that should “America & Britain come to a hostile rupture,” an “Insurrection among the slaves may & will be promoted.”
But, as Douglas Egerton shows in our new entry on Lord Dunmore’s Proclamation, it wasn’t just the Crown or anxious Patriots who looked to the enslaved population to change the balance of power in Virginia. It was enslaved people themselves who promoted their cause. When tensions in the colony ratcheted up after Dunmore had the gunpowder removed from Williamsburg’s Powder Magazine, he tried to cow Patriot enslavers by swearing “he would declare freedom to the slaves” if resistance did not end. But even Dunmore was surprised when a delegation of enslaved men showed up at the Governor’s Palace offering to take up arms for the Crown.
Dunmore rebuffed the offer, but the wheels had been set in motion. When British ships arrived in the Chesapeake Bay in the summer of 1775, enslaved people flocked to them as “a policy of Black freedom in the name of military exigency was coalescing at the highest levels of the British government,” Egerton notes.
By the fall, fighting had broken out in the colony. On November 7, Dunmore drafted a proclamation of martial law that offered freedom to enslaved people and indentured servants owned by Patriots who would fight for the Crown. But he was already organizing and arming the enslaved people who had reached British lines into an army he dubbed the Ethiopian Regiment. After the regiment’s victory at the Battle of Kemp’s Landing, an emboldened Dunmore released the proclamation on November 15.
Soon the Ethiopian Regiment would march to the Battle of Great Bridge reportedly wearing sashes emblazoned with the words “Liberty to Slaves,” having taken freedom into their own hands.
The proclamation reverberated through the colonies. Some wavering Loyalist enslavers, especially in the Norfolk area where hundreds of enslaved laborers had deserted plantations, now threw their lot in with the Patriot cause, while enslaved men from as far away as New Jersey set out to join Dunmore’s forces.
