Dunmore’s New World

1. Privy Council Minutes, 27, 28 January 1794, George III, Later Correspondence, 2:154, 157, 166.

2. George Washington to Joseph Reed, 15 December 1775, George Washington to Richard Henry Lee, 26 December 1775, PGWR, 2:553, 611.

3. For the case against Dunmore, see [Wylly], Short Account. The quotation is from an unnamed source in Craton, History of the Bahamas, 174.

5. Quoted in Mark Lawrence McPhail, “Dunmore’s Proclamation (November 7, 1775),” in Blanco, ed., American Revolution, 1:490. For demonization of Dunmore, see Holton, Forced Founders, 158; McDonnell, Politics of War, 135.

6. Freneau, “Lord Dunmore’s Petition to the Legislature of Virginia,” in Freneau, Poems, 199–200.

7. Lendrum, Concise and Impartial History, 2:64–67. According to David Ramsay, another early chronicler of the Revolution, Dunmore’s “headstrong passions” led him into all sorts of “follies”: History of the American Revolution, 1:319.

10. Caley, “Dunmore,” ch. 30. John Selby’s bicentennial pamphlet on Dunmore in Virginia, entitled Dunmore, is one of the few treatments that reflects Caley’s influence.

11. Andrew O’Shaughnessy sets out to address this problem in his forthcoming book, The Men Who Lost the War. I am grateful to Andrew for lending me portions of this work while in progress. Some recent biographies of the founding generation include Joseph J. Ellis, Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation (New York: Knopf, 2000); David McCullough, John Adams (New York: Touchstone, 2001); Walter Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2003); Ron Chernow, Alexander Hamilton (New York: Penguin, 2004); Joseph J. Ellis, His Excellency: George Washington (New York: Knopf, 2004).

12. For example, see Philip D. Morgan and Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy, “Arming Slaves in the American Revolution,” in Brown and Morgan, eds., Arming Slaves, 180–207; Brown, Moral Capital; Holton, Forced Founders; Craton and Saunders, Islanders; Frey, Water from the Rock, 114, 186. More balanced treatments are Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles; McDonnell, Politics of War; Pybus, Epic Journeys of Freedom.

13. Williams, History of the Negro Troops, 16–21; Quarles, “Lord Dunmore as Liberator”; Quarles, Negro in the American Revolution. Eager to underscore blacks’ contributions to the revolutionary cause, Luther Porter Jackson, another pioneering black historian, underestimates the importance of Dunmore’s proclamation: “Virginia Negro Soldiers and Seamen,” 249.

16. For examples in the same period, see Countryman, People in Revolution, 47–48, 81.

17. Stephen Conway argues that this imperial paternalism, which in some ways began with the introduction of foreigners and new Indian nations into the empire after the Seven Years’ War, was based more on authority than liberty: British Isles, 334.

19. This conclusion runs counter to a group of studies that emphasizes affective bonds between colonial subjects and the monarch, even on the eve of the American Revolution: McConville, King’s Three Faces; Price, Nursing Fathers; Bushman, King and People.

20. John Brewer has noted the need for further inquiry into political consent: “Eighteenth-Century British State,” in Stone, ed., Imperial State, 68.

21. Egerton, Death or Liberty, 84; Morgan and O’Shaughnessy, “Arming Slaves,” 184; Brown, Moral Capital, 309; Holton, Forced Founders, 152–61; Frey, “Between Slavery and Freedom,” 387–88; Frey, Water from the Rock, 63, 78–79, 114, 141, 326. Frey notes how unusual it was for Dunmore to use slaves in combat: “Between Slavery and Freedom,” 388.

23. Williamson to Dundas, 13 September 1794, quoted in Buckley, Slaves in Red Coats, 16; see also 143 for views of blacks among British officials.

24. Privy Council Minutes, 27, 28 January 1794, George III, Later Correspondence, 2:163–65; “Marriages,” Gentleman’s Magazine 64 (1794): 87–88; Gillen, Royal Duke, 76.

28. Prince of Wales to Prince Augustus Frederick, 4 September 1799, George, Prince of Wales, Correspondence, 4:74.

ONE. Family Politics, 1745–1770

1. On the Rebellion of 1745, see Plank, Rebellion and Savagery; Duffy, The ’45 (troop estimate on 193); Black, Culloden; Lenman, Jacobite Risings.

3. “Contract of Marriage betwixt William Murray and Catherine Nairn,” 17 April 1729, DFP, RH4/195/1, item 90; Paul Hopkins, “Nairne [formerly Murray], William, Styled Second Lord Nairne and Jacobite First Earl of Nairne (1664–1726),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Online, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/19729.

5. [Duke of Atholl, aka William, Marquis of Tullibardine (hereafter Tullibardine)], “Circular Letter—To the Laird of Asshentilly and Other Gentlemen in Atholl,” 22 August 1745, Jacobite Correspondence, 1–2.

6. Tullibardine, “Circular Letter from the Duke of Atholl,” 31 August 1745, Jacobite Correspondence, 2.

7. William Murray of Taymount to Tullibardine, 2 September 1745, Jacobite Correspondence, 5.

9. George Murray to (his brother) James Murray, Duke of Atholl, 3 September 1745, quoted in Duke, Lord George Murray, 72 (see 282–83 for a useful genealogical table).

13. “Grant of Apartments in the Palace of Holyrood House to Charles Murray by Queen Anne,” DFP, NRAS3253/Bundle 29, 353A.

17. The material on William’s and John’s joining the Jacobites is from HDB, 509, 695, and “Chronicles of the Dunmore Branch of the Atholl and Tullibardine Families,” DFP, RH4/103/1. (N.B.: This section begins immediately following Bundle 6 on the microfilm reel but is unmarked; its contents, when compared to the calendar of papers at the NRS, suggest that it is Bundle 28. The pagination in this section is irregular, so it is best to navigate by the year in the top left corner of each page.) On Holyrood Palace, see The Palace of Holyroodhouse: Official Guidebook (London: Royal Collection Enterprises, 2005), 15–16, 46–49.

18. Duffy, The ’45, 175, 578. A draft family history has Thomas heading the 46th Regiment at Prestonpans: DFP, RH4/103/1, item 9.

19. On the details of the battle, see Black, Culloden, 165–201; Duffy, The ’45, 510–26.

20. For Charles’s post-Culloden ordeal, see McLynn, Charles Edward Stuart, 265–307.

21. Plank, Rebellion and Savagery, 3, 48, 50–51; Duffy, The ’45, 527–39; Black, Culloden, 177–78, 186–87, 92–95.

23. See, e.g., George Murray to Tullibardine, 2 October 1745, Jacobite Correspondence, 47–49.

24. George Murray to Tullibardine, 7 September 1745, reproduced in Duke, Lord George Murray, 77.

25. George Murray to Tullibardine, 3 October 1745, Tullibardine to George Murray, 7 October 1745, Jacobite Correspondence, 51, 67. This person was not the John Murray who served as the prince’s secretary, but it could have been the John Murray who was Tullibardine’s master of horse, for whom see Atholl to Robert Graham of Fintry, 25 January 1746, Jacobite Correspondence, 157.

26. All of these quotations are from a July 1746 letter to the ministry copied in DFP, RH4/103/1, item 3–4.

27. Newcastle to 2nd Earl of Dunmore, 22 July 1746, copied in DFP, RH4/103/1, 8.

28. Privy Council Journal, 15 December 1746, 2nd Earl of Dunmore to Newcastle, 25 November 1746, both copied in DFP, RH4/103/1, item 15, 16–18; Newcastle to William Murray, 30 November 1747, Dunmore Papers, Earl Gregg Swem Library, College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, Va., box 2, folder 71.

29. Fox to 2nd Earl of Dunmore, 15/26 March 1747/48, Dunmore Papers (Swem), box 2, folder 73.

31. For lieutenant, see HDB, 710. For captain, see Lowe, “Parliamentary Career,” 5.

32. Cathcart to [Dunmore], 20 January 1758, DFP, RH4/195/3, item 7. See also H. M. Scott, “Cathcart, Charles Schaw, Ninth Lord Cathcart (1721–1776),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Online, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/4885.

34. Duke of Richmond to [George Lennox], 21 January 1758, Historical Manuscripts Commission, Report on the Manuscripts, 76:658. See also Lowe, “Parliamentary Career,” 5.

36. On Lady Dunmore’s charm, see Sarah Lennox to Susan Fox Strangways, 20 December 1761, Lennox, Life and Letters, 1:118. Many years after meeting the couple, Philip Mazzei, an Italian proponent of American independence who thought Dunmore “had a head as weak as his heart,” observed that Lady Dunmore “deserved a better husband”: Mazzei, “Memoirs,” 171, 166. Prince Augustus told his brother, the Prince of Wales, “I love and respect Lady Dunmore exceedingly; she has one of the most noble and honest hearts I ever saw”: 2 March 1793, George, Prince of Wales, Correspondence, 2:340. For admiration of the Dunmore family, see Charles Stueart to James Parker, 5 December 1773, Parker Family Papers, PAR 9–52; Foy to Ralph Wormeley, Jr., [1775?], Papers of Ralph Wormeley, Jr. On Dunmore’s children, see Paul, ed., Scots Peerage, 3:383–96, which lists a daughter named “Anne” who does not appear in any other records and may have died in infancy before 1770.

39. Furgusson, Sixteen Peers; McCahill, “Scottish Peerage”; Lowe, “Bishops and Scottish Representative Peers,” 97–106.

41. The money that this lifestyle demanded was part of what drove so many Scots into imperial service: Eric Richards, “Scotland and the Uses of the Atlantic Empire,” in Bailyn and Morgan, eds., Strangers within the Realm, 101–2.

43. He also owned lands in Argyle: Lowe, “Parliamentary Career,” 17–18; Wrike, “Chronology,” 18.

44. McCahill, “Peers, Patronage, and the Industrial Revolution,” 91n24; Lowe, “Parliamentary Career,” 21. See also Campbell, Carron Company.

45. Beauman, Pineapple, 115–18. For more on the Dunmore Pineapple, contact the Landmark Trust of Scotland (www.landmarktrust.org.uk), which currently maintains the site as a vacation retreat. For this paragraph, I consulted two pieces of literature that the Trust distributes to visitors. The Trust also provides guests with an unpublished volume produced in 1992 entitled The Pineapple History Album, which summarizes all research to date on the structure. See also Woods and Warren, Glass Houses, 61–62.

46. Duke of Atholl to John Mackenzie of Delvine, 11 June 1766, quoted in Lowe, “Parliamentary Career,” 20.

48. William C. Lowe, “Gower, Granville Leveson-, First Marquess of Stafford (1721–1803),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Online, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/16541.

49. Simmons and Thomas, eds., Proceedings and Debates, 3:166. See also Lowe, “Parliamentary Career,” 14–15, 24–25, 28.

50. Lowe, “Parliamentary Career,” 7. Walpole is quoted in E. H. Chalus, “Gower, Susanna Leveson-[née Lady Susan Stewart], Marchioness of Stafford (1742/3–1805),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Online, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/68366.

53. Countryman, People in Revolution, 75; Becker, History of Political Parties, 34; Joseph S. Tiedemann, “Moore, Sir Henry, First Baronet (1713–1769),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Online, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/19116.

54. Dunmore’s good fortune did not go unnoticed in Parliament. When, during debate in the House of Lords in December 1770, Gower noted the injustice of Lord Amherst’s receiving a governorship without supporting the court, the Duke of Richmond observed that “Lord Gower’s own brother-in-law, Lord Dunmore, had just had two governments given to him”: Simmons and Thomas, eds., Proceedings and Debates, 3:356.

58. Freneau, “Lord Dunmore’s Petition to the Legislature of Virginia,” in Freneau, Poems, 200. Virginian Edmund Pendleton observed that Dunmore did not even “pretend” to “external accomplishment,” and “his manners and sentiments did not surpass substantial barbarism”: Hood, Governor’s Palace, 151–52.

60. For Boodle’s, see London Metropolitan Archives, Boodle’s Manuscripts, Club Book 1:1762–64. Dunmore paid the club subscription of two guineas for 1762 and 1763 but not 1764. I am grateful to David Hancock for this information and the citation. Of another dinner companion during this period, Boswell wrote, “I was disgusted by Cooper’s coarse manners and unlettered conversation”: Boswell, Boswell, 118–19, 236.

61. Reese, “Books in the Palace,” 28–31; PGWC, 9:356n4; Ragsdale, Planters’ Republic, 146.

62. For Dunmore’s “great affability,” see Andrew Snape Hamond, “An Account of the Progress and Proceedings of His Majesty’s Frigate Arethusa, between the 17 June 1771 and the 28th Nov.r 1773,” HNP, vol. 3. The quotations are from Cadwallader Colden and an unidentified friend, both in Caley, “Dunmore,” 91–92.

63. James Rivington to William Johnson, 22 October 1770, PWJ, 7:945. Prevost is quoted in Wainwright, “Turmoil at Pittsburgh,” 142–43.

64. Freneau, “Lord Dunmore’s Petition to the Legislature of Virginia,” in Freneau, Poems, 199–200.

65. “Colden’s Observations on the Bill Brought against Him in Chancery, 1770,” LPCC, 9:226. See also New-York Gazette; or, The Weekly Post-Boy, 12 February 1770, 2.

67. Dunmore never owned the portrait, which was probably painted on speculation. It may have adorned Reynolds’s shop before falling into private hands. See Mark Hallett’s essay in Postle, ed., Joshua Reynolds, 118. It is now owned by the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh. Dunmore met with Reynolds two or three times, on 12 and 15 April 1765, and possibly on 24 December 1766: Mannings and Postle, Sir Joshua Reynolds. See also Graves and Cronin, History, 268; Schama, Rough Crossings, 70.

TWO. The Absence of Empire, 1770–1773

1. For the baggage, see New-York Gazette; or, The Weekly Post-Boy, 4 June 1770, 3 (hereafter New-York Gazette). On the wreck, see “For Sale by Auction,” New-York Gazette; and The Weekly Mercury, 18 June 1770, 3; Dunmore to Hillsborough, 25 May 1773, DC, 186, or C.O. 5/1351/48–54 (DC contains typescript copies of Dunmore-related documents, mainly held at the British National Archives in Kew, England; wherever possible, I have also included citation information for the original); John Bradstreet to William Johnson, 8 June 1770, PWJ, 7:718. On the statue, see Pennsylvania Gazette, 23 August 1770, 2; Stokes, Iconography, 1:356; Marks, “Statue of King George III”; McConville, King’s Three Faces, 309.

2. On monarchy in colonial political culture, see McConville, King’s Three Faces, esp. part III; Price, Nursing Fathers; Bushman, King and People.

3. Beeman, “Deference, Republicanism, and the Emergence of Popular Politics,” 428; Bailyn, Origins of American Politics, 71–83.

5. The role of deference in early American society has been the source of much debate. For works positing a deferential colonial America, see Pocock, “Classical Theory of Deference,” which lays out the classical, spontaneous ideal; Sydnor, Gentlemen Freeholders, in which consensual hierarchy emerges from an unspontaneous process of negotiation; the work of Jack P. Greene, “‘Virtus et Libertas’: Political Culture, Social Change, and the Origins of the American Revolution, 1763–1766,” in Crow and Tise, eds., Southern Experience, 55–108; Wood, Radicalism of the American Revolution, part I. For the opposing view, see Gilsdorf and Gilsdorf, “Elites and Electorates”; Beeman, “Deference, Republicanism, and the Emergence of Popular Politics”; Michael Zuckerman, “Tocqueville, Turner, and Turds: Four Stories of Manners in Early America,” Journal of American History 85 (1998): 13–42. The last essay is part of a roundtable entitled “Deference or Defiance in Eighteenth-Century America?” in which forces are marshaled on either side of the title question.

6. Beeman, “Deference, Republicanism, and the Emergence of Popular Politics,” 409–12.

7. See Becker, History of Political Parties, 95; Jensen, Founding of a Nation; Kammen, Colonial New York, 362; Champagne, Alexander McDougal, 41, 44–45. For a brief acknowledgment of this oversight, see Greene, Peripheries and Center, 125–26.

8. On Paine’s impact, see Foner, Tom Paine, 71–87. See also George Washington’s comment in David McCullough, 1776 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2005), 112. The king did serve as an important constitutional model for executive authority in revolutionary America, one on which the Continental Congresses drew with considerable success: Marston, King and Congress.

9. For an announcement of Dunmore’s appointment, see Essex Gazette, 27 February–6 March 1770, 126. Secretary of State Hillsborough assured Lieutenant Governor Cadwallader Colden that Dunmore would set out “as early in the Spring as he can find a safe conveyence”: Hillsborough to Colden, 9 December 1769, LPCC, 9:218.

11. On the Tweed, see the memorial of George Collier to Lord Dartmouth, 20 September 1774, Dartmouth Papers, reel 2, 1019. On Dunmore’s illness, see Pennsylvania Gazette, 20 September 1770, 2.

12. Labaree, Royal Government, 98–107, 339–41. On the preparation and distribution of royal instructions, see Labaree, Royal Instructions, 1:viii.

15. New York sensitized Dunmore to the importance of religious toleration, which he defended against an antidissenter majority in the Virginia House of Burgesses. He dissolved that body in 1772 rather than allow the passage of laws restricting slave participation in religious services as well as the right to worship at night and out of doors: Levy, First Emancipator, 69–70.

18. Labaree, Royal Instructions, 2:465–67, 465–66 (quote), 710–11. The literature on Indian-white relations in New York is extensive. Points of departure include Graymont, Iroquois in the American Revolution; Jennings, Ambiguous Iroquois Empire; Richter, Ordeal of the Longhouse; Preston, Texture of Contact.

19. For differing accounts of popular participation in the political life of prerevolutionary New York, see Bonomi, Factious People; Countryman, People in Revolution; Beeman, “Deference, Republicanism, and the Emergence of Popular Politics,” 422–23 n47. For relations between landlords and tenants on the colony’s baronial estates, see Kim, Landlord and Tenant; Tully, Forming American Politics.

20. On New York politics in the 1760s, see Beeman, Varieties of Political Experience, 103-11; Bonomi, Factious People, 257–67; Champagne, “Family Politics versus Constitutional Principles,” 58–59; Champagne, Alexander McDougal, 15–24; Friedman, “New York Assembly Elections”; Jensen, Founding of a Nation, chs. 10, 15.

21. Benjamin Roberts to William Johnson, 19 February 1770, James Rivington to William Johnson, 19 February 1770, Hugh Wallace to William Johnson, 3 June 1770, PWJ, 7:400, 403, 711.

23. New-York Gazette, 22 October 1770, 3. See also the antipartisan sentiments in the Presbyterian clergymen’s welcome address: New-York Journal; or, The General Advertiser, 1 November 1770, 183 (hereafter New-York Journal).

24. William Johnson to John Watts, 27 May 1770, John Watts to William Johnson, 5 June 1770, PWJ, 7:696–97, 713.

26. Colden to Hillsborough, 18 August 1770, Documents Relative, 8:245; New-York Gazette, 22 October 1770, 3 (quotes). See also, especially for the church service, New-York Journal, 25 October 1770, 179.

27. Dunmore to Hillsborough, 24 October 1770, Documents Relative, 8:249. In a typical show of regard for new governors, a township west of the Connecticut River was named in Dunmore’s honor: New-York Gazette; and The Weekly Mercury, 17 December 1770, 4.

28. For the secular organizations, see New-York Gazette, 5 November 1770, 1; New-York Journal, 1 November 1770, 183; New-York Gazette, 12 November 1770, 1. For New York City churches, see New-York Gazette; and The Weekly Mercury, 29 October 1770, 1; New-York Journal, 1 November 1770, 183–84, 183 (quote); New-York Gazette, 5 November 1770, 1. For messages from churches in Albany, see New-York Journal, 13 December 1770, 221.

33. McAnear, Income of the Colonial Governors, 10–53; Labaree, Royal Government, 112, 112–13n42; Naylor, “Royal Prerogative,” 227. Land and securities were often given in lieu of cash fees: Smith to Dunmore, Bill of Equity, 15 November 1770, Colden, Letter Books, 2:244–45.

34. Hillsborough to Dunmore, 16 July 1770, Documents Relative, 8:223. See also David Colden to Cadwallader Colden, 24 March 1771, James Duane Papers.

36. Hillsborough to Dunmore, 16 July 1770, Documents Relative, 8:223. See also “Lord Dunmore’s Petition to Governor Tryon,” [1771?], LPCC, 7:174–75.

37. On Colden, see Keys, Cadwallader Colden; Hoermann, Cadwallader Colden; Bonomi, Factious People, 152–54, 154 (quote).

38. It was during the resulting legal battle that the printer John Peter Zenger, whose New-York Journal served as the organ of the opposition to Cosby, was tried for sedition and, in a landmark decision in the history of free speech, acquitted: Lepore, New York Burning, 70–78.

39. Colden, “History of Governor William Cosby’s Administration and of Lieutenant-Governor George Clarke’s Administration through 1737,” LPCC, 9:283–355, esp. 289–303, 302–3 (quotes). See also Smith and Hershkowitz, “Courts of Equity.”

40. Colden to Hillsborough, 10 November 1770, Colden, Letter Books, 2:233. If an executive who had already been sworn into office had to leave the colony, Colden later acknowledged, his replacement retained only half of what he earned before the governor’s return. But, he argued, this was not the case when someone rose to the office by virtue of a governor’s death: Colden to Samuel Johnson, 12 November 1770, Colden, Letter Books, 2:237.

41. For the bill, which was filed by William Smith, Jr., on 15 November 1770, see Colden, Letter Books, 2:240–47. A draft of Colden’s demurrer is in Colden, Letter Books, 2:256–73. Dunmore to Hillsborough, 5 December 1770, Documents Relative, 8:256.

42. Colden to Samuel Johnson, 12 November 1770, Colden, Letter Books, 2:239; Colden to James Duane, 26 November 1770, Colden, Letter Books, 2:250.

43. Dunmore to Hillsborough, 5 December 1770, Documents Relative, 8:256; Beeman, Varieties of Political Experience, 265–66. On the destruction of Colden’s property, see also Becker, History of Political Parties, 31; Colden to Hillsborough, 10 November 1770, Colden, Letter Books, 2:233.

44. Colden to Hillsborough, 6 December 1770, Colden to Hillsborough, 10 November 1770, Documents Relative, 8:257–58, 249–50; “Colden’s Observations on the Bill Brought against Him in Chancery, 1770,” LPCC, 9:228. The quotation attributed to Hillsborough comes from David Colden to Cadwallader Colden, 24 March 1771, James Duane Papers. Colden to Samuel Johnson, 2 April 1771, Colden, Letter Books, 2:320.

45. Colden to James Duane, 26 November 1770, Colden, Letter Books, 2:248–50, 250 (quote).

47. Colden to Arthur Mairs, 17 January 1771, Colden to Samuel Johnson, 2 April 1771, Colden, Letter Books, 2:277–78, 319. See also Smith, Historical Memoirs, 99.

49. Colden to Arthur Mairs, 8 May 1771, David Colden to Unknown, 8 June [1771], Colden, Letter Books, 2:323, 324.

50. They also agreed with the defense that even if King William’s declaration applied, it reserved only half the salary and no part of the perquisites and emoluments to the crown: Colden to Hillsborough, 15 June 1771, Colden, Letter Books, 2:326–27.

52. Colden to Samuel Johnson, 2 April 1771, Colden, Letter Books, 2:320; [Livingston], Soliloquy, 3.

54. Smith, Historical Memoirs, 86, 91, 94, 98, 100. Caley concludes that New Yorkers generally admired Dunmore: “Dunmore,” 55. For evidence supporting this view, see William Johnson to Lord Adam Gordon, 18 February 1771, PWJ, 12:893.

58. Robert R. Livingston to Robert Livingston (father), 7 January 1771, Robert R. Livingston to Margaret Beekman Livingston (wife), 11 January 1771 (quote), Robert R. Livingston to Robert Livingston, 11 January 1771, Robert R. Livingston Papers.

60. Thomas’s Massachusetts Spy, 28 January–1 February 1771, 2; Providence Gazette, 9–16 March 1771, 42; Massachusetts Gazette, 18 March 1771, 3.

65. Bonomi, Factious People, ch. 6; Labaree, Royal Instructions, 2:578. See also Countryman, People in Revolution, 81; Jones, Vermont in the Making, 93.

66. Dunmore to Dartmouth, 24 December 1774, DC, 420–57, or C.O. 5/1353/7–39. The grant is described in Caley, “Dunmore,” 35–37. John Jay invited Dunmore to take part in a similar scheme in June 1771 (though the grant never materialized): Petition of “John Jay and Associates for 25000 Acres of Land” to Dunmore in Council, 12 June 1771, James Duane Papers.

67. For background on the border dispute, see Delegates of the New Hampshire Convention to the Continental Congress, 15 January 1777, Papers of the Continental Congress, reel 47, vol. 1; Raymond, “Benning Wentworth’s Claims”; Jones, Vermont in the Making, esp. 76–88, 224–54; Labaree, Royal Instructions, 2:607.

68. Dunmore to Gower, 9 March 1771, draft, Dunmore Papers (Swem), box 3, folder 40.

72. Dunmore to Hillsborough, 4 June 1771, 2 July 1771, DC, 64–65, 69, or C.O. 5/ 154/ 11–12, 20.

73. Smith, Historical Memoirs, 105. The newspaper account of the arrival leaves a more dignified impression than Smith’s: New-York Gazette; and The Weekly Mercury, 15 July 1771, 3.

75. Tryon to [Hillsborough?], 31 August 1771, Tryon, Correspondence, 2:831–32.

78. Richard Bland to Thomas Adams, 1 August 1771, William and Mary Quarterly, 1st ser., 5 (1897): 149–56, 156 (quotes). Bland continued, “The next day the Chief Justice applied to Government for redress, and a proclamation issued by advice of the Council, offering a reward of £200 for a discovery of the Principal in this violent act. We have not heard whether the Governor demanded the Reward.” The episode is mentioned without reference to Dunmore’s possible involvement in Lepore, New York Burning, 223.

81. Initially planned in April, the tour was supposed to have taken plan in June: Caley, “Dunmore,” 89. In expectation of the governor’s arrival, Schenectady militiamen had been “Rubing up our old rusty Guns and geting our Regimentals ready”: Daniel Campbell to William Johnson, 8 June 1771, PWJ, 8:138. For notice of Dunmore’s dogs, see Carter, Diary, 2:618.

82. Dunmore to Commissioners on Losses of American Loyalists, 25 February 1784, DC, 815–23, or A.O. 13/28/D. For the purposes of this claim, he valued the land at £11,475. In a summary of his wartime losses later that year, he noted that these lands, “Now claimed by Vermonters,” were “Confiscated by law passed 22 October 1779”: Dunmore Testimony, 9 July 1784, DC, 832, or A.O. 12/54/59–62.

84. Hood, Governor’s Palace, 12–23; William Aitchison to Charles Steuart, 17 October 1770, James Parker to Charles Steuart, 19 April 1771, Charles Steuart Papers.

85. VG (Purdie and Dixon), 26 September 1771, 2–3. For a similar, though independent, account of the arrival, see New-Hampshire Gazette, 25 October 1771, 2. One scholar views the reception as uncommonly cool: Morrow, Cock and Bull, 21–22.

86. Dunmore to Hillsborough, 1 November 1771, DC, 80, or C.O. 5/1349/195–96; Hillsborough to Dunmore, 11 January 1772, DC, 92, or C.O. 5/1350/1–2.

87. Hillman, ed., Executive Journals, 6:393–95; Kennedy, ed., Journals of the House of Burgesses, 1770–1772, 263. For the importance of diversification to those who supported a tariff, see Ragsdale, Planter’s Republic, 111–36. For colonial opposition to a tariff (from merchants and smallholders), see Holton, Forced Founders, 66–73.

89. General Assembly to George III, 1 April 1772, RV 1:87. On the increasing prominence of slavery in British political culture during the era of the American Revolution, see Brown, Moral Capital (139 has a brief discussion of the debate over taxes on slave imports).

90. Labaree, Royal Instructions, 2:673–74, 679 (quote); Karras, Sojourners in the Sun.

91. Smith, Historical Memoirs, 106; Dunmore to the Commissioners on Losses of American Loyalists, 25 February 1784, DC, 816, or A.O. 13/28/550. For Dunmore’s clothing order, see James Minzies to John Norton, 12 June 1773, Norton, John Norton & Sons, 328–331, or DC, 193. Scattered information about Dunmore’s slaves can also be found in Hodges, ed., Black Loyalist Directory, 167, 170; James Mercer to George Washington, 20 February 1792, Washington, Papers of George Washington, Presidential Series, 1:577–79. See also “Enslaving Virginia: Becoming Americans, Our Struggle to Be Both Free and Equal, 1999” ([Williamsburg, Va.]: Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, 1998), 356–59. I am grateful to Patricia Gibbs for providing access to this booklet.

92. Dunmore to Hillsborough, 1 May 1772, Hillsborough to Dunmore, 1 July 1772, DC, 116, 133–34, or C.O. 5/1350/46–47, 72–73.

93. See Hood, Governor’s Palace, esp. 80–97; Isaac, Transformation of Virginia; Upton, “New Views of the Virginia Landscape.” Hood overstates the deferential character of Virginia society: Wells, “Interior Designs,” 100–106.

94. VG (Purdie and Dixon), 28 January 1773, 3. The bills are described in a Treasury Office statement, dated 8 February 1773, in VG (Rind), 11 February 1773, 2.

96. Scott, “Counterfeiting in Colonial Virginia” (Nicholas quoted on 20); Kennedy, ed., Journals of the House of Burgesses of Virginia, 1773–1776, 7–36 (Dunmore quoted on 7); RV, 2:3–8.

98. Caley, “Dunmore,” 138; McCusker and Menard, Economy, 337–41; Scott, Counterfeiting, 104; Scott, “Counterfeiting in Colonial Virginia,” 10, 30.

99. Scott, Counterfeiting, 6–7, 124, 125, 157; Scott, “Counterfeiting in Colonial Virginia,” 21; VG (Purdie and Dixon), 25 February 1773, 3.

100. Dunmore, “A PROCLAMATION,” VG (Rind), 11 February 1773, 2; Dunmore to Dartmouth, 31 March 1773, Kennedy, ed., Journals of the House of Burgesses of Virginia, 1773–1776, ix–xi; Scott, “Counterfeiting in Colonial Virginia,” 21–24.

101. Scott, Counterfeiting, 10; Brooke, Refiner’s Fire, 119–20. For “social banditry,” see Hobsbawm, Bandits. On counterfeiting in the early national period, see Mihm, Nation of Counterfeiters. Hillman, ed., Executive Journals, 6:519; Dunmore, “A PROCLAMATION,” VG (Rind), 8 April 1773, 3.

103. Dunmore to Dartmouth, 31 March 1773, Dartmouth to Dunmore, 5 July 1773, DC, 168–73, 198–99, or C.O. 5/1351/26–30, 38–39. A number of ironies surround the burgesses’ reaction to the counterfeiting controversy. For example, the speaker of the house had recommended the very conduct for which Dunmore was being criticized. In addition, when Patrick Henry, a radical burgess and member of the Committee of Correspondence, became governor of Virginia in 1776, he grew frustrated in his own attempts to prosecute counterfeiters and, in 1778, requested the authority to try them in the county of his choosing. After 1773, suspects had begun insisting on their right to be tried by a jury of their peers, only to escape from local prisons while awaiting trial. In acknowledgment of this phenomenon, the House of Delegates granted Henry’s request: Scott, “Counterfeiting in Colonial Virginia,” 32.

104. VG (Purdie and Dixon), 4 March 1773, 3; Robert Lawson, “It Is with Concern,” VG (Purdie and Dixon), 8 April 1773, 3 (quote); Hillman, ed., Executive Journals, 6:518–19; Scott, “Counterfeiting in Colonial Virginia,” 12.

105. VG (Purdie and Dixon), 22 April 1773, 3; Scott, “Counterfeiting in Colonial Virginia,” 27–31.

107. The quotes are from James Parker to Charles Steuart, 25 May 1772, 12 June 1772, Charles Steuart Papers. Morrow, Cock and Bull, 23, 36–37; Dewey, “Thomas Jefferson and a Williamsburg Scandal.”

111. Tarter, “Some Thoughts.” For the acceptance of adultery among the British aristocracy, see Stone, Family, Sex and Marriage, 529–34.

112. Dunmore to Dartmouth, 16 November 1772, Dartmouth to Dunmore, 3 February 1773, DC, 147–53, 161–63, or C.O. 5/1351/i-7, 14–17.

114. Morris is quoted from an undated letter to an unknown correspondent in Caley, “Dunmore,” 214.

118. Ibid. Another poem published on Lady Dunmore’s arrival idealizes the governor’s new family life: “By a LADY,” VG (Rind), 3 March 1774, 3.

120. McConville, King’s Three Faces, 306, 309, 311. Liddle describes the break with the king as “a fit of furious disillusionment”: “ ‘A Patriot King, or None,’ ” 952. See also Jordan, “Familial Politics”; Keith Mason, “The American Loyalist Problem of Identity in the Revolutionary Atlantic World,” in Bannister and Riordan, eds., Loyal Atlantic, 47–48. For “precocious acts,” see Marks, “Statue of King George III,” 66.

THREE. Promised Land, 1773–1774

2. Dartmouth to Dunmore, 8 September 1774 (2 letters), 5 October 1774, DC, 408–9, 410–13, 415, or C.O. 5/1352/114–15, 116–20, 145–46. Later in life, Dunmore told the British government that he had observed a rapid increase in North American land values and attempted “to establish a future Provision for his numerous Family” through their purchase and improvement: DC, 815–23, 815 (quote), or A.O. 12/54/118–20.

4. Hening, ed., Statutes at Large, 7:663–69. On the proclamation, see Hinderaker and Mancall, At the Edge of Empire, ch. 5, esp. 132; Anderson, Crucible of War, 565–69; Hinderaker, Elusive Empires, 165; Sosin, Whitehall and the Wilderness, ch. 3, 166; Humphreys, “Lord Shelburne and the Proclamation of 1763.”

5. Historian Peter Silver has argued that fear of Indian raids helped to crystallize the concept of “the white people” among ethnically diverse communities on the frontiers of the middle colonies: Our Savage Neighbors, xix–xx, xxiv. As Silver briefly acknowledges, this process was very uneven. In the Pennsylvania-Virginia boundary dispute, in fact, the threat of Indian violence never overrode, or even temporarily eclipsed, divisions among whites.

6. Two recent examples of the conspiracy thesis are Anderson, War That Made America, 256–60; Griffin, American Leviathan, ch. 4, esp. 115. While charting the shift from empire to nation along with the transition to modern conceptions of sovereignty, land, and race, Griffin is careful to note that these developments “were not only imposed from above, at the center, but also achieved from below, on the margins” (16). Yet, Dunmore’s War is an entirely top-down affair in Griffin’s telling, with Dunmore achieving favorable outcomes for land speculators by exploiting settlers’ anxieties about Indians.

7. On the Ohio Valley in this period, see Griffin, American Leviathan, chs. 2, 4; Hinderaker and Mancall, At the Edge of Empire, ch. 5; Hinderaker, Elusive Empires; McConnell, Country Between; White, Middle Ground, ch. 8. While all of these works observe the weakness of the imperial state in the West, they do not attempt to explain the causes or consequences of it.

9. Abernathy, Western Lands, 9–10; “Notices of the Settlement,” 435–37.

10. Hinderaker and Mancall, At the Edge of Empire, 146–48; Sosin, Whitehall and the Wilderness, ch. 7; Cappon et al., Atlas of Early American History, 2:15.

11. On the Indian politics surrounding Fort Stanwix, see Schutt, People of the River Valleys, 137–41; Hinderaker and Mancall, At the Edge of Empire, 146–48; Jones, License for Empire, 100–119. Most scholars view the Covenant Chain as a useful myth for both the British and Iroquois: Jennings, Ambiguous Iroquois Empire; Hinderaker, Elusive Empires, 137–44, 163–70.

12. McConnell, Country Between, 246–54; O’Toole, White Savage, 273–79; Sosin, Whitehall and the Wilderness, 174–80; White, Middle Ground, 353; Hinderaker, Elusive Empires, 163–69.

13. Jones, License for Empire, 110–14; Cappon et al., Atlas of Early American History, 2:15, 92.

14. Hillman, ed., Executive Journals, 6:433 (quotes), 447, 462–64; Hillsborough to Dunmore, 6 June 1772, DC, 127, or C.O. 5/1350/44–45.

15. On the homestead ethic, see Aron, “Pioneers and Profiteers”; Griffin, American Leviathan, 58–59. On the importance of land grants for governors, see Murdoch, “Land Policy”; Walker, “Lord Dunmore in Virginia,” 5.

16. Dunmore to Hillsborough, [20] March 1772, DC, 101–5, or C.O. 5/1350/19–22. The Cherokees no doubt had other motives for the sale as well. Attakullakulla may have hoped to profit in some small measure from lands to which his tribe had a contested claim. He may also have seen white settlement as inevitable and hoped to divert it from the core of Cherokee country. On the Donelson line, see De Vorsey, Indian Boundary, 79–92.

17. Dunmore to Hillsborough, [20] March 1772, DC, 101–5, or C.O. 5/1350/19–22; De Vorsey, Indian Boundary, 79–92; Jones, License for Empire, 114–15; Sosin, Whitehall and the Wilderness, 192–93.

18. Dunmore to Hillsborough, [20] March 1772, DC, 101–5, or C.O. 5/1350/19–22; Abernathy, Western Lands, 84, 88.

20. The request would ultimately be rejected as inconsistent with a new imperial policy for land distribution: Dartmouth et al. to the Committee of the Privy Council for Plantation Affairs, 20 June 1774, DC, 386–87, or C.O. 5/1369/183–84.

21. Dunmore to Hillsborough, 9 November 1771, DC, 82, or C.O. 5/1350/3–4; Dunmore to Dartmouth, 16 November 1772, DC, 147–53, 150 (quote), or C.O. 5/1351/1–7; Dartmouth to Dunmore, 3 February 1773, DC, 161–63, or C.O. 5/1351/14–17. On Dunmore’s efforts to expand his appointment powers, see also Caley, “Dunmore,” 125–32. On the erosion of executive power in the colonies, see Bailyn, Origins of American Politics, 72–83.

23. Dunmore to Washington, 3 July 1773, Washington to Dunmore, 12 September 1773, PGWC, 8:258, 322–24. Washington was supposed to accompany Dunmore on this trip but was prevented by the death of his stepdaughter, Patsy: Anderson, War That Made America, 255.

24. Dunmore to Dartmouth, 18 March 1774, DC, 293–97, or C.O. 5/1352/16–20; Abernathy, Western Lands, 9–10, 19, 91; “Notices of the Settlement,” 435–37; Griffin, American Leviathan, 42.

25. Dunmore to Dartmouth, 18 March 1774, DC, 293–97, or C.O. 5/1352/16–20; Jones, Journal of Two Visits, 20; Griffin, American Leviathan, 42; Caley, “Life Adventures,” 38.

26. Caley, “Dunmore and the Pennsylvania-Virginia Boundary Dispute.” After making inquiries regarding the strength of surrounding Indian settlements, Dunmore estimated that they included some nine thousand warriors: “Report of the Earl of Dunmore 18th March 1774,” Henry Strachey Papers, 261.

27. Caley, “Life Adventures,” 10–49, 19 (Washington quote); Doug MacGregor, “Ordeal of John Connolly: The Pursuit of Wealth through Loyalism,” in Tiedemann, Fingerhut, and Venables, eds., Other Loyalists, 161–78, 163; Cresswell, Journal, 65.

29. Crumrine, “Boundary Controversy,” 513; Nobles, “Breaking into the Backcountry,” 669; MacGregor, “Ordeal of John Connolly,” 163.

30. Washington to Dunmore, 12 September 1773, Dunmore to Washington, 24 [September] 1773, Washington to William Crawford, 25 September 1773, PGWC, 9:322–23, 327–28 (quote), 331–32 (see also 251n6); Washington to John Armstrong, 28 September 1773, The Papers of George Washington Newsletter 10 (2008): 5–6.

31. For the revocation of Bullitt’s commission, see Hillman, ed., Executive Journals, 6:543–44. Dunmore claimed that he had first learned of Bullitt’s expedition in Pittsburgh: Dunmore to Washington, 24 [September] 1773, PGWC, 9:327–38. Bullitt, however, had duly acquired a surveyor’s license from the College of William and Mary and announced his trip in the VG (Purdie and Dixon) on 3 December 1772 (2). For negative reactions to Bullitt among Indian hunters, see Croghan to Dunmore, [May 1774], Wainwright, “Turmoil at Pittsburgh,” 151.

32. Washington to Armstrong, 28 September 1773, Papers of George Washington Newsletter, 5–6.

33. Hillman, ed., Executive Journals, 6:549. See also Downes, Council Fires, 156–57.

34. Dunmore to P. B. Martin, 27 August 1773, Lord Dunmore Letters. Dunmore’s land holdings are detailed in his petition to the Loyalist Claims Commission, 25 February 1784, DC, 816, or A.O. 12/28/D.

35. For the Pittsburgh petitions and related documents, see enclosures in Dunmore to Dartmouth, 18 March 1774, DC, 297–302, or C.O. 5/1352/16–20; Hillman, ed., Executive Journals, 6:554.

37. William Preston to Washington, 7 March 1774, PGWC, 9:511; Durrett, Centenary of Louisville, 134–35.

39. Connolly to Washington, 1 February 1774, PGWC, 9:465. On the Forks of the Ohio, see also Caley, “Dunmore and the Pennsylvania-Virginia Boundary Dispute,” 87; Crumrine, “Boundary Controversy,” 507–12; Hinderaker, Elusive Empires, 136–37. In addition to their dispute over Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and Virginia were also engaged at this time in boundary conflicts with Connecticut and North Carolina, respectively.

40. On the Ohio Company of Virginia, see James, Ohio Company, 1–110; Dunmore to James Tilghman and Andrew Allen, 24 May 1774, AA, 1:456–57; Dunmore to Dartmouth, 2 May 1774, DC, 327–30, or C.O. 5/1352/53–57.

41. St. Clair to Penn, 2 February 1774, AA, 1:266–68. See also Caley, “Life Adventures,” 29, 31–32. Another observer thought the inhabitants “would be equally averse to the regular administration of justice under the Colony of Virginia, as they are to that under the Province of Pennsylvania”: William Crawford to Penn, 8 April 1774, AA, 1:262.

42. For class-inflected denunciations of the Virginians, see Mackay to Penn, 4 April 1774, 9 April 1774, Devereux Smith to Penn, 9 April 1774, Thomas Shippen, 7 April 1774, AA, 1:269–71, 270 (quote), 264, 264–65, 271–73.

43. Report dated 25 June 1774, AA, 1:485; Caley, “Life Adventures,” 40; [Devereux] Smith to Dr. Smith, 12 June 1774, AA, 1:469. Another defector, by the name of Kincade, had been a Pennsylvania magistrate: St. Clair to Penn, 16 June 1774, AA, 1:472.

44. Connolly’s speech is quoted in Caley, “Life Adventures,” 34–35. See also the deposition of George Wilson, dated 1774, in Hazard, ed., Pennsylvania Archives, 4:492–93.

45. McFarlane to Penn, 9 April 1774, Dunmore to Daniel Smith, 26 April 1774, Mackay to Penn, 5 May 1774, Hazard, ed., Pennsylvania Archives, 4:487–88, 493, 494–95. For Dunmore’s criticism of Connolly, see Hillman, ed., Executive Journals, 6:558 (quote); Caley, “Life Adventures,” 36.

46. Tilghman to St. Clair, 20 June 1774, Arthur St. Clair Papers, box 1, folder 2. See also AA, 1:277–80, 454–61.

47. For the proclamation of 25 April 1774, see Hillman, ed., Executive Journals, 6:656; Dartmouth to Dunmore, 1 June 1774, 6 July 1774, DC, 350, 397, or C.O. 5/1352/47–48, 88–91.

49. The warrants to survey were approved in response to a petition from Washington: Hillman, ed., Executive Journals, 6:549; Dartmouth to Dunmore, 6 April 1774, Dunmore to Dartmouth, 9 June 1774, DC, 325, 371–73 (quotes), or C.O. 5/1352/1–2, 121–23.

50. Dunmore also argued that a western colony would attract “an infinite number of the lower Class of inhabitants,” due in part to “the desire of novelty alone,” making it impossible for New York landlords to pay quitrents: Dunmore to Hillsborough, 12 November 1770, Documents Relative, 8:252. For further evidence of Dunmore’s awareness of the Walpole proposal, see Dunmore to Dartmouth, 16 November 1772, DC, 147–48, or C.O. 5/1351/1-7.

51. On the history of the Grand Ohio Company and Vandalia, see Benjamin Franklin and Samuel Wharton to Congress, 26 February 1780, Papers of the Continental Congress, reel 89, item 77, 167–201; Marshall, “Lord Hillsborough”; Hillman, ed., Executive Journals, 6:370, 375; Cappon et al., Atlas of Early American History, 2:16; Wainwright, George Croghan, 280.

52. Dunmore to Dartmouth, 16 May 1774, DC, 343, or C.O. 5/1352/71–75. The original purchase of the Illinois Company extended southward for one hundred miles from the junction of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers. On the Illinois Company, see Sosin, Whitehall and the Wilderness, 229–35; Livermore, Early American Land Companies, 106–11; Abernathy, Western Lands, ch. 8; Walker, “Lord Dunmore in Virginia,” 83–86.

53. Dartmouth to Dunmore, 8 September 1774, DC, 411, or 5/1352/116–20. On the Illinois-Wabash Company, see Livermore, Early American Land Companies, 108–11; Memorial of the Illinois and Wabash Land Company, esp. 6; Report of the Committee.

55. For the White Eyes meeting, see Connolly, “Journal of My Proceedings … [14 April–28 May 1774],” 20 April 1774, Chalmers Papers, reel 3 (hereafter Connolly Journal). For the Shawnees’ attempts at confederacy, see Dowd, Spirited Resistance, 40–46; Holton, “Ohio Indians,” 462–63, 471; Jones, License for Empire, 102–4; Dunmore to Dartmouth, 2 April 1774, DC, 319–21, or C.O. 5/1352/49–51.

56. On Shawnee diplomatic isolation, see McConnell, Country Between, 255–58; Dowd, Spirited Resistance, 45; Schutt, People of the River Valley, 148. For geographical distance as a source of imperial weakness, see Hinderaker, Elusive Empires, xiii–xiv; Dunmore to Dartmouth, 24 December 1774, DC, 422, or C.O. 5/1353/7–39; Dartmouth to Dunmore, 3 March 1775, DC, 476–77, or C.O. 5/1352/84–86; Jane Merritt, “Metaphor, Meaning, and Misunderstanding on the Pennsylvania Frontier,” in Clayton and Teute, eds., Contact Points, 77–81; Schutt, People of the River Valleys, 142–43; extract of a letter from David Zeisburger, 24 May 1774, AA, 1:284–85.

57. Neither of Connolly’s messages has survived, but various references to them have. Connolly’s descriptions of their contents are quoted here, for which see Connolly Journal. See also [Devereux] Smith to Dr. Smith, 10 June 1774, AA, 1:468, which supports Connolly’s account.

58. A month after the fact, Cresap alleged that Connolly’s letter had indicated unequivocally “that the Shawana Indians were determined to come to an open Rupture.” Connolly responded, “I cannot … help expressing my Astonishment at the maner in which you convey your Sentiments to us upon what has already happened; and alltho I shall not at this time attempt to Exculpate myself as the Supposed Original cause of all this uproar, yet you may be fully satisfied that I can do so at any time”: Cresap and Innes, 20 May 1774, Connolly to Cresap and Innes, 21 May 1774, copied in Connolly Journal. Many years later, Clark recalled it stating that “war was inevitable” and ordering Cresap “to cover the country by scouts until the inhabitants could fortify themselves”: Clark to Samuel Brown, 17 June 1798, Clark, George Rogers Clark Papers, 8:5–7, 7 (quote). On Cresap, see Jacob, Biographical Sketch; Mullin, “Cresap, Michael,” in Garraty and Carnes, eds., American National Biography, 16:724–25; Parkinson, “From Indian Killer to Worthy Citizen.”

59. [Devereux] Smith to Dr. Smith, 10 June 1774, AA, 1:468; Journal of Alexander McKee, PWJ, 12:1090, 1096; Connolly Journal, 26 April 1774; Unknown, “Extracts from My Journal from the 1st May 1774 Containing Indian Transactions,” 26 [April 1774], Chalmers Papers, reel 3; Otis K. Rice, “Introduction,” in Jacob, Biographical Sketch, 3–6. One of the white traders in Butler’s canoe testified on 1 May 1774 about these events and identified 26 April as the date of the first murders, though some sources suggest other dates. Throughout, I have done my best to correctly identify dates, but some uncertainty is inevitable.

60. On the Mingoes (or Seneca-Cayugas), see Trigger, ed., Handbook of North American Indians, 15:537–53; Rice, “Introduction,” in Jacob, Biographical Sketch, 6.

61. William Crawford and John Neville encountered the perpetrators of Yellow Creek among a group of refugees days after these events and related what they heard to Pittsburgh authorities on 3 May. Their account is in McKee’s journal, PWJ, 12:1097–98, 1098 (quote). See also Connolly Journal, 3 May 1774; DHDW, 9–19. My account also draws on Rice, “Introduction,” in Jacob, Biographical Sketch, 6–7; White, Middle Ground, 358, 358n85; Downes, Council Fires, 163. The date of the massacre has often been reported as 30 April or 3 May, but I believe a stronger case can be made for 28 April.

62. For references to the coat, see DHDW, 15–17, 16 (quote). On scalping as an act of war among the Shawnees, see McConnell, Country Between, 245; White, Middle Ground, 359. On its history and significance in general, see Axtell, Natives and Newcomers, ch. 11, esp. 260, 262–64; Axtell and Sturtevant, “Unkindest Cut”; Calloway, New Worlds, 103–4.

63. Valentine Crawford to Washington, 7 May 1774, PGWC, 10:52; St. Clair to Penn, 12 June 1774, AA, 1:467. On the forts, see DHDW, xvi. On Logan’s raids, see [Devereux] Smith to Dr. Smith, 10 June 1774, AA, 1:469; White, Middle Ground, 361–62n92.

66. Extract of a Journal of Indian Transactions, AA, 1:476. On generational conflict among the Shawnees, see Griffin, American Leviathan, 126. For thoughtful analysis of diplomatic discourse in the middle ground, see Merritt, “Metaphor, Meaning.” I use the term “discourse” to describe a specialized way of thinking and speaking—a set of symbols, essentially.

70. Dunmore to Dartmouth, 24 December 1774, DC, 433, or C.O. 5/1353/7–39. Dunmore enclosed a copy of a letter in which he reprimanded Major General Frederick Haldimand for sending Whitehall erroneous intelligence that named Cresap, rather than Greathouse, as the initiator of hostilities. Dunmore knew Cresap’s father, Thomas, who wrote Dunmore a letter alleging that Pennsylvanians had “represented me and my son in very dark Coulours to the Board of Trade”: Thomas Cresap to [Dunmore], n.d., Chalmers Papers. Michael Cresap received a captain’s commission from Dunmore and went on to fight in Angus McDonald’s subsequent expedition against the upper Shawnee towns: Jacob, Biographical Sketch, 68–70. On Greathouse’s death, see Recollections of George Eddington, 1845, DHDW, 17.

71. David Zeisberger to Unknown, extract, 24 May 1774, AA, 1:283–85; Zeisberger, Moravian Mission Diaries, 189–99; United Brethren Journal, 20 May 1774, AA, 1:284 (quotes).

72. Cresap and Innes to Connolly and McKee, 20 May 1774, Connolly Journal; Jacob, Biographical Sketch, 67–68.

73. Connolly and McKee to Cresap and Innes, 21 May 1774 (quote), and entries for 20–24 May 1774, Connolly Journal.

74. Shawnee address to Connolly et al., 5 May 1774, AA, 1:479–80; Connolly Journal, 25 May 1774; Extract of a Journal of Indian Transactions, AA, 1:480–81; Trigger, ed., Handbook of North American Indians, 15:623, 631.

75. Shawnee address to Pennsylvanians, 5 May 1774, AA, 1:480. For suspicions of Pennsylvania traders, see Caley, “Life Adventures,” 86; Thomas Cresap to [Dunmore], n.d., Chalmers Papers, reel 3; “Extract of a Letter from Redstone,” AA, 1:722–23.

76. St. Clair to Penn, 22, 26 June 1774, AA, 1:474, 483. On 6 July 1774, Benjamin Franklin’s Pennsylvania Gazette made the point explicitly, calling the Virginians a “gang of worse Savages.”

77. Connolly to St. Clair, 19 July 1774, AA, 1:678; Mackay to Penn, 14 June 1774, AA, 1:471; Dunmore to Gage, 11 June 1774, DC, 378; St. Clair to Penn, 16 June 1774, AA, 1:472; James Nourse Journal, 1 May 1775, in Eslinger, ed., Running Mad, 94. See also Caley, “Life Adventures,” 83–85; White, Middle Ground, 361–62, 362nn93–94.

78. Dunmore to Connolly, 20 June 1774, AA, 1:473 (quote); Trigger, ed., Handbook of North American Indians, 15:631.

80. St. Clair to Penn, 8 August 1774, and “Extract of a Letter from Redstone,” both in AA, 1:683, 722–23, 723 (quote); McDonald to Connolly, 9 August 1774, and Intelligence from Simon Girty, 11 August 1774, both enclosed in Walpole to Dartmouth, 29 October 1774, Dartmouth Papers, reel 2, 1056.

85. Caley, “Life Adventures,” 90; Dunmore to Andrew Lewis, 12 July 1774, 24 July 1774, DC, 399–400, 401–2. The soldier’s verse is in DHDW, 361–62. See also circular letter from Preston, 20 July 1774, Dunmore to Dartmouth, 14 August 1774, DHDW, 91–93, 149–50.

86. On McDonald and the Wakatomika expedition, see DHDW, 149–56; Jacob, Biographical Sketch, 61.

87. Wainwright, “Turmoil at Pittsburgh,” 127–29 (quotes); Mackay to St. Clair, 4 September 1774, Arthur St. Clair Papers.

89. The records of this meeting are in AA, 1:872–74. The printed version is in VG (Pinkney), 13 October 1774, supplement.

91. Pinkney’s supplement indicated that Dunmore answered the offer on the afternoon it was made, but other evidence suggests that the Indians had to wait several days for his reply: Wainwright, George Croghan, ch. 13, esp. 281, 286–87.

92. Croghan helped St. Clair raise one hundred “rangers” in an effort to protect Pennsylvania partisans and forestall evacuation in the event of an Indian war: St. Clair to Penn, 29 May 1774, Croghan to St. Clair, 4 June 1774, AA, 1:463, 465–66. In Wainwright, “Turmoil at Pittsburgh,” see correspondence between Connolly and Croghan, 2–3 June 1774, 155–57; Croghan to Dunmore, 15 [September] 1774, 159–61; as well as Prevost’s diary, 136, 139.

93. Wainwright, “Turmoil at Pittsburgh,” 142; AA, 1:872–74; DHDW, 302n15.

95. DHDW, 285n3, 302n15, 361–62 (verse). See also Abernathy, Western Lands, 112.

96. On the composition of the Indian force, see Dowd, Spirited Resistance, 45. The white men under Cornstalk were George Collett, John Ward, and Tavenor Ross: Calloway, “Neither White nor Red,” 51, 55. The assumption of Shawnee cowardice is in Jones, Journal of Two Visits, 72. On the battle of Point Pleasant, see DHDW, xix–xxi, 253–81 (quotes in Christian to Preston, 15 October 1774, 262, 266; Floyd to Preston, 16 October 1774, 268; Isaac Shelby to John Shelby, 16 October 1774, 276). For casualty numbers, see Turk McClesky, “Dunmore’s War,” in Blanco, ed., American Revolution, 1:496.

97. DHDW, xxi–xxiv; Christian to Preston, 8 November 1774, DHDW, 302; Lewis to [?] Campbell, 25 April 1840, Draper Manuscripts, 2ZZ.

98. On the Mingo expedition, see Christian to Preston, 8 November 1774, DHDW, 303–4; Crawford to Washington, 14 November 1774, PGWC, 10:182, 183–84n1. On the Mingoes in early 1775, see Connolly to Washington, 9 February 1775, and an unattributed newspaper piece, both in AA, 1:1222, 1226.

99. The English diarist Nicholas Cresswell saw the hostages on their way to Williamsburg and described them at length:

They are tall, manly, well-shaped men, of a Copper colour with black hair, quick piercing eyes, and good features. They have rings of silver in their nose and bobs to them which hang over their upper lip. Their ears are cut from the tips two thirds of the way round and the piece extended with brass wire till it touches their shoulders, in this part they hang a thin silver plate, wrought in flourishes about three inches diameter, with plates of silver round their arms and in the hair, which is all cut off except a long lock on the top of the head. They are in white men’s dress, except breeches which they refuse to wear, instead of which they have a girdle round them with a piece of cloth drawn through their legs and turned over the girdle, and appears like a short apron before and behind. All the hair is pulled from their eyebrows and eyelashes and their faces painted in different parts with Vermilion. They walk remarkably straight and cut a grotesque appearance in this mixed dress.

Cresswell, Journal, 49–50. On the hostages, see also Crawford to Washington, 14 November 1774, PGWC, 10:182, 183–84n1.

100. For the treaty terms, see Dunmore to Dartmouth, 24 December 1774, DC, 439–40, or C.O. 5/1353/7–39; [Dunmore], “Deluded Brethren,” n.d., Chalmers Papers, reel 3; Dunmore, “A Proclamation,” 23 January 1775, AA, 1:1169. There was an apparently baseless rumor in London that Dunmore immediately divided and sold the land ceded at Camp Charlotte: Simmons and Thomas, eds., Proceedings and Debates, 5:519. Following the September negotiations, Connolly planned to go to England with White Eyes and other Delaware chiefs to solicit a confirmation of their right to the land they resided on from the king, all with Dunmore’s wholehearted support. The outbreak of the Revolution disrupted these plans: James Wood Journal, 10 July 1775, RV, 2:275–80, 279nl.

101. For a critique of the settlement, see Daniel K. Richter, “Native Peoples of North America and the Eighteenth-Century British Empire,” in Marshall, ed., Oxford History, 2:366.

102. Gage to Guy Johnson, 28 November 1774, PWJ, 13:699; Address of the Council, n.d., St. Clair to Penn, 4 December 1774, AA, 1:1043–44, 1013.

103. “Meeting of Officers under Earl of Dunmore,” 5 November 1774, AA, 1:962–63. The Fort Gower resolutions caught the attention of the Whig opposition in Parliament. Charles Watson-Wentworth, 2nd Marquess of Rockingham, criticized Dunmore for failing “to take the least notice of the association and declaration entered into by the army under his command early in the preceding November”: Simmons and Thomas, eds., Proceedings and Debates, 5:538 (quote), 554. For more on the resolutions, see Smith, Ohio in the American Revolution, esp. 21–30.

105. The study referred to is Griffin, American Leviathan, ch. 4. See also Holton, Forced Founders, 33–35. For less critical accounts of Dunmore’s role in the war, see Dodderidge, Notes, 171–80; Reuben Gold Thwaites, “Introduction,” DHDW, esp. xxiv. The most even-handed appraisals are Curry, “Lord Dunmore”; Rice, “Introduction,” in Jacob, Biographical Sketch. For the quote, see Schama, Rough Crossings, 71.

106. Dunmore to Dartmouth, 24 December 1774, DC, 422, or C.O. 5/1353/7–39; Dartmouth to Dunmore, 3 March 1775, 476–77, or C.O. 5/1352/84–86.

FOUR. A Refugee’s Revolution, 1775–1781

1. Magdalen Journal, 8 June 1775, Peyton Randolph to Mann Page, Jr., et al., 27 April 1775, NDAR, 1:635, 234; RV, 3:57n2; Municipal Common Hall to Dunmore, 21 April 1775, Dunmore to Municipal Common Hall, 21 April 1775, George Montague to Thomas Nelson, 4 May 1775, Comments of the Caroline County Committee, 19 May 1775, RV 3:54, 55, 90–91, 150; Hillman, ed., Executive Journal, 6:582; VG (Purdie), 6 May 1775, supplement, 2. The best modern accounts of the gunpowder controversy are McDonnell, Politics of War, 49–74; Selby, Revolution in Virginia, 1–6. For details on the Fowey, see NDAR, 1:47.

2. Dunmore to Dartmouth, 15 May 1775, DC, 541, or C.O. 5/1353/141–44. For the rage militaire that gripped the colony after the gunpowder incident and the western orientation of resistance, see Isaac, “Dramatizing the Ideology of Revolution,” 380–82.

3. RV, 3:17 (quotes); Dunmore to Dartmouth, 25 June 1775, DC, 561–62, or C.O. 5/ 1353/ 160–72.

5. Statistics for the floating town are inevitably approximate. Peter Wrike has identified some 180 vessels that were attached to the town at one point or another: Governor’s Island, 115–19. Population statistics are even more uncertain. No more than 1,500 slaves reached Dunmore: Pybus, “Jefferson’s Faulty Math,” 250. The civilian population contained “several Hundred Families” or about one thousand individuals: Moomaw, ed., “Autobiography”; “[James] Cunningham’s Examination, 18th July 1776,” NDAR, 6:1135. Added to this were 160 members of the 14th Regiment as well as miscellaneous seamen and volunteers. For the term “Floating Town,” see Hamond to Vice Admiral Molyneux Shuldham, 28 November 1776, NDAR, 7:319.

6. On the Magdalen’s departure and the subsequent controversy, see VG (Purdie), 7 July 1775, 2; Dunmore to George Montague, 16 June 1775, Samuel Graves to Admiral Philip Stephens, 16 July 1775, Montague to Dunmore, 9 August 1775, Lords of the Admiralty to Dartmouth, 26 August 1775, Stephens to Graves, 6 September 1775, all in NDAR, 1:697, 697n2, 897, 1104, 2:690, 705; Dartmouth to Governors in America, 5 September 1775, DC, 619, or C.O. 5/242/92–93; Virginia Convention to Dunmore, 26 August 1775, RV, 3:501 (quote).

8. “Report of the Earl of Dunmore 18th March 1774,” Henry Strachey Papers, 253.

9. Connolly, Narrative, 11–12, 26, 28. On the peace negotiations and Connolly’s trip east, see Doug MacGregor, “The Ordeal of John Connolly: The Pursuit of Wealth through Loyalism,” in Tiedemann, Fingerhut, and Venables, eds., Other Loyalists, 167–68.

10. Pennsylvania Evening Post, 19 September 1775, 426; Connolly to Gage, [9 September 1775], RV 4:82–83. One account of Detroit in the spring of 1776 stated that the French there wanted to remain neutral and that the Indians were wavering and divided among themselves: “Information Regarding Detroit,” 2 April 1776, Thwaites and Kellogg, eds., Revolution, 147–51. The British did employ French Indian agents during the early part of the war at places like Michilimackinac and Detroit: White, Middle Ground, 402.

11. “Miscellaneous Correspondence, 1776–1782,” Clinton Papers, box 245, item 96. Not long after Connolly and Dunmore launched their plan, John Shuttleworth told the ministry that control of the Chesapeake could cut off communication between the North and South: Shuttleworth to Germain, [“Plan for the Reduction of Maryland,” late 1775], Germain Papers, 4:5–6. Captain John Dalrymple of the 20th Regiment made the same observation in his “Advantages of Lord Corwallis’s Expedition Going Rather to Chesapeake Bay Than to the Carolinas,” [1775?], Germain Papers, vol. 4. See also Mackesy, War for America, 39, 43. On the southern colonies and West Indies, see Stephen Conway, “Britain and the Revolutionary Crisis,” in Marshall, ed., Oxford History, 2:341.

12. Gage to Dunmore, 10 September 1775, Gage Papers, American Series, 134; Gage to Dartmouth, 20 September 1775, Gage, Correspondence, 1:414–17. See also Gage’s letter to the Treasury in support of Connolly’s loyalist claim: 30 October 1782, A.O. 12/28/139. For the involvement of the “Canadians” and independent companies, see Connolly, Narrative, 36.

14. Smyth, Tour, 2:156; Allen Cameron to Duncan Cameron, 11 November 1775, Papers of the Continental Congress, reel 65, 1:378.

15. Connolly, Narrative, 46; Smyth, Tour, 2:158–59. The letters to Hugh Lord and Richard Lernoult are in Papers of the Continental Congress, reel 93, 5:1, 13–14, 17–18.

17. On the 14th Regiment, see Gage to Dartmouth, 15 May 1775, Gage, Correspondence, 1:399–400; Gage to Patrick Tonyn (governor of East Florida), 15 May 1775, Dunmore to Gage, 1 May 1775, Gage Papers, American Series, 128, 129. On the runaways, see Norfolk Committee of Safety to Randolph, 21 July 1775, NDAR, 1:947; Selby, Revolution, 55, 58; John McCartney to Paul Loyall (mayor of Norfolk), 12 August 1775, Wilson Miles Cary to Purdie, 4 September 1775, RV, 3:431–32, 4:69–70; VG (Purdie), 8 September 1775, 2–3; Elizabeth County Committee of Safety and the Town of Hampton to Squire, 16 September 1775, NDAR, 2:125 (quote). The estimate of fugitives comes from Virginia Committee of Safety to Virginia Delegates in Congress, 11 November 1775, RV, 4:380. For preproclamation runaways, see also Quarles, Negro in the American Revolution, 22–23, 23n12.

19. Tarter, “‘Very Standard,’” 60–63. For characterizations of Dunmore as a pirate, see VG (Purdie), 6 October 1775, supplement, 2; Pendleton to Jefferson, 16 November 1775, Jefferson, Papers, 1:261. Runaways were often implicated in the theft of other slaves; see the example of Benjamin Wells, a white Virginian who was abused by twelve of Dunmore’s men, “mostly Negroes,” and relieved of “two Negro women” in late November: VG (Dixon and Hunter), 2 December 1775, 3.

20. Dunmore to the Town of the Borough of Norfolk, [30 September 1775], NDAR, 2:259 (quote). Other relevant passages from Holt’s paper are quoted in Tarter, “‘Very Standard’”; Alfred J. Mapp, Jr., “The ‘Pirate’ Peer: Lord Dunmore’s Operations in the Chesapeake Bay,” in Eller, ed., Chesapeake Bay, 71–73. The issue containing the references to William Murray is no longer extant but is mentioned in James Parker to Charles Steuart, 2 October 1775, Charles Steuart Papers; see also RV, 4:155–56n2. In an open letter to Dunmore in Pinkney’s Virginia Gazette, an anonymous observer stated that he had been at a loss to discover what had angered the governor so, “until I looked into the Norfolk gazette of the preceding week, and there I find your genealogy described, which I confess reflects but little honour on your family”: quoted in Mapp, “ ‘Pirate’ Peer,” 75. This was not the last time that Dunmore was publicly criticized for his Jacobite heritage: “Extract of a Letter from Philadelphia, Dec. 6,” Morning Chronicle and London Advertiser, 20 January 1776, NDAR, 2:1307.

21. On the seizure, see Dunmore to Dartmouth, 5 October 1775, DC, 645, or C.O. 5/1353/300–302; Captain Beesley Edgar Joel to Joseph Wright, 25 October 1775, RV, 4:278; “Monthly Intelligence,” Pennsylvania Magazine; or, American Monthly Museum, October 1775, 485; Richard Henry Lee to Washington, 22[-23] October 1775, PGWR, 2:66 (quotes). For extracts of Dunmore’s Virginia Gazette, see VG (Purdie), 23 February 1776, 1; AA, 4:540–41. For its reception among patriots, see Archibald Campbell to St. George Tucker, 10 October 1775, James Gilchrist to Tucker, 26 October 1775, Thomas Ludwell Lee to Richard Henry Lee, 9 December 1775, NDAR, 2:396, 614, 3:27. Cameron’s subsequent request, dated 28 July 1788, is enclosed in Dunmore to Sydney, 8 August 1788, C.O. 23/28/43. Dunmore is quoted in Tarter, “‘Very Standard,’” 67.

22. Selby, Revolution, 62–63; Katherine Leslie Hunter to Miss Katherine Hunter (daughter), 29 October 1775, RV, 4:303–5. On Gosport, see RV, 4:10.

23. RV, 4:7; Sprowle to George Brown, 1 November 1775, RV, 4:313–14 (quote). See also Pendleton to Richard Henry Lee, 15 October 1775, NDAR, 2:465; Robert Shedden to John Shedden, 9 November 1775, Hector MacAlester to John Matteux, 13 November 1775, RV, 4:353 (quote), 393. For more on Shedden, see Curtis, “Goodrich Family.”

25. At Kemp’s Landing, there were approximately 120 regulars and 30 or 40 loyalists on the British side against between 200 and 400 militiamen: RV, 4:10–11; William Calderhead to John Rodger, 16 November 1775, RV, 4:413–14; John Page to Virginia delegates in Congress, 17 November 1775, NDAR, 2:1061–62; Selby, Revolution, 64–66; Hast, Loyalism, 52.

26. Dunmore to Dartmouth, 6 December 1775, DC, 672, or C.O. 5/1353/321–34. For the Dunmore caricature, see, e.g., Schama, Rough Crossings, 70–83.

27. Dunmore Proclamation, 7 November 1775, NDAR, 2:920–22. For the standard in Norfolk, see Neil Jamieson to Glassfor, Gordon, Monteath, and Company, 17 November 1775, John Brown to William Brown, 21 November 1775, RV, 4:423, 446. For the strips of cloth, see Hast, Loyalism, 52, 74. The oath these loyalists signed is in RV 4:395.

28. Dunmore to Dartmouth, 25 June 1775, DC, 567, or C.O. 5/1353/160–72. Some British officers and politicians disapproved of the proclamation, but Dunmore influenced many others, including Henry Clinton, whose Phillipsburg Proclamation (30 June 1779) also offered freedom to rebel-owned slaves: Brown, Moral Capital, 308–9. Two eminent scholars have made the dubious claim that Dunmore’s emancipation provision served to contain slave rebelliousness that might otherwise have produced more meaningful and far-reaching social change: Edmund S. Morgan, “Conflict and Consensus in the American Revolution,” in Kurtz and Hutson, eds., Essays, 293–94; Frey, “Between Slavery and Freedom,” 376; Frey, Water from the Rock, 141. For the influence of the unfree on British war policy, see McDonnell, Politics of War; Egerton, Death or Liberty, esp. 68–69; Carey, “‘Black Rascals.’”

29. VG (Dixon and Hunter), 16 December 1775, 2. The “authoritarian implications” attending any emancipation scheme is noted in Brown, Moral Capital, 212, 254 (quote).

30. Dunmore to Hillsborough, 1 May 1772, DC, 116, or C.O. 5/1350/46–47. On Virginia’s slave population, see Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, 61, 81, 99. For Dunmore’s refusal of the slaves’ offer in April, see “Extraordinary Intelligence,” VG (Pinkney), 4 May 1775, 3. The eighteenth-century historian John Burke, working from first-hand accounts, wrote that “parties of negroes mounted guard every night” at the palace during the controversy: quoted in McDonnell, Politics of War, 65. Dunmore to Dartmouth, 1 May 1775, NDAR, 1:260 (quote). For the 3 May proclamation, see Hillman, ed., Executive Journals, 6:581–83, and the flipside of William Byrd III to Ralph Wormeley, Jr., 4 October 1775, Papers of Ralph Wormeley, Jr.

31. Dunmore to Dartmouth, 1 May 1775, NDAR, 1:260; Dartmouth to Dunmore, 2 August 1775, DC, 603, or C.O. 5/1353/225–26; Selby, Revolution, 74–75; “Extract of a Letter from Philadelphia, Dec. 6,” Morning Chronicle and London Advertiser, 20 January 1776, NDAR, 2:1307. For earlier, less formal examples of slave armament, see Philip D. Morgan and Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy, “Arming Slaves in the American Revolution,” in Brown and Morgan, eds., Arming Slaves, 184; Brown, Moral Capital, 309; Kaplan and Kaplan, Black Presence, 73n.

32. Christopher Brown situates the proclamation outside the struggle for moral capital. Like Frey and Holton, he interprets it as a simple play for manpower: Moral Capital, chs. 3–4, esp. 113. Johnson, Taxation No Tyranny, 89. On Washington, see Wiencek, Imperfect God, 204. For antislavery commentary, see Antibiastes, Observations. On 14 November, the day before the proclamation was released, an anonymous representative of the British Empire proposed a plan of conciliation to Benjamin Franklin whereby most of the Intolerable Acts would be repealed in exchange for the institution of an act guaranteeing slaves the right to trial by jury. All such efforts at compromise failed, of course, but the author’s interest in slavery is noteworthy. “Let the only contention henceforward between Great Britain and America be,” he wrote, “which can exceed the other in Zeal for Establishing the fundamental rights of liberty to all Mankind”: G. B. to Benjamin Franklin, 14 November 1775, Aspinwall Papers, 40, part 2, 761–62.

33. Dunmore to William Howe, 30 November 1775, NDAR, 2:1211. On family groups, see Pybus, Epic Journeys of Freedom, 14, 216–17; Pybus, “Jefferson’s Faulty Math,” 249, 252. For an example of a loyalist-owned slave who served in the Ethiopian Regiment, see the loyalist claim of Penelope D’Endi, A.O. w/54/86–87.

34. For the absence of uniforms, see Dunmore to Dartmouth, 20 February 1776, DC, 708, or C.O. 5/1353/363–64 (“I have used every means in my power to procure Cloathing for the men both black and white that I have raised for His Majesty’s Service in this Colony, to no purpose”). The only evidence for the “Liberty to Slaves” patches is a report in VG (Dixon and Hunter), 2 December 1775, 3. This reference was reprinted at least twelve times in the colonial press: Bradley, Slavery, 147. As a result, the existence of the patches has been almost universally taken for granted (see, e.g., Jill Lepore, “Goodbye, Columbus,” The New Yorker, 8 May 2006, 74–78, and Kaplan, “‘Domestic Insurrections,’” 243–44, 252). To my knowledge, Pybus was the first scholar to express skepticism about the Dixon and Hunter report (Epic Journeys of Freedom, 11). Whether they were actually worn or merely imagined, the patches were probably a reference to the “Liberty or Death” patches that Virginians were wearing at this time: Selby, Revolution, 67.

35. Dunmore to Dartmouth, 6 December 1775, NDAR, 2:1311. The term Ethiopian applied to all people descended from Africa south of Egypt at this time; see entries for “Ethiop” and “Ethiopian” in the Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, vol. 1 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), 312–13. African Americans saw it as a term of dignity; one of the earliest black Baptist churches in America, founded by Andrew Bryan in Savannah in 1788, was called the Ethiopian Church of Jesus Christ: Quarles, Negro in the American Revolution, 192. Ethiopia was also an ancient Christian kingdom, so the term may have had religious significance for runaway slaves. Sylvia Frey suggested this possibility in an unpublished conference paper at Northwestern University in April 2006. For a broader treatment of black military service, see Quarles, Negro in the American Revolution, ch. 8. For Dunmore’s praise of the regiment, see Dunmore to Germain, 30 March 1776, DC, 719, or C.O. 5/1353/377–82.

38. The letter first appeared in VG (Pinkney), 23 November 1775, 2; it was reprinted in VG (Purdie), 24 November 1775, 2–3, and VG (Dixon and Hunter), 25 November 1775, 3. Modern scholars have echoed many of these criticisms of the proclamation, stressing that it was motivated by military exigencies and applied only to rebel slaves capable of bearing arms: Egerton, Death or Liberty, 84; Holton, Forced Founders, 152–61; Frey, Water from the Rock, 63, 78–79, 114; Frey, “Between Slavery and Freedom,” 378. For rumors about the West Indies, see Pendleton to Jefferson, 16 November 1775, Jefferson to Page, 20 August 1776, Jefferson, Papers, 1:260–61, 497–501.

39. Quarles, Negro in the American Revolution, 23–26. For the convention’s pardon, see VG (Dixon and Hunter), 16 December 1775, 2.

40. Woodford to Virginia Convention, 4 December 1775, RV, 5:48–51; Dunmore to Dartmouth, 6 December 1775, continuation dated 13 December, DC, 675–77, or C.O. 5/ 1353/ 321–34.

41. Kingsfisher Journal, 8 December 1775, NDAR, 3:40; Dunmore to Dartmouth, 6 December 1775, continuation dated 13 December, DC, 675–77, or C.O. 5/1353/321–34; enclosures #22 and #23 in Dunmore to Dartmouth, 6 December 1775, DC, 697–99, or C.O. 5/1353/362; Dunmore Testimony before the Loyalist Claims Commission, 9 July 1784, DC, 830, or A.O. 12/54/59–62. Patriots referred to Fort Murray as the “Hog pen”: “Titus Meanwell” to “Mr. QM,” 7 December 1775, RV, 5:75.

42. Woodford to Virginia Convention, 9 December 1775, extract, NDAR, 3:28; VG (Pinkney), 20 December 1775, 2–3; Woodford to Pendleton, 10 December 1775, extract, NDAR, 3:40. For the alleged cowardice of black troops, see “A Letter to the Printer of the Virginia Gazette,” VG (Pinkney), 30 December 1775, 4. See also Selby, Revolution, 69–74.

43. Woodford to Pendleton, 5 December 1775, 30 December 1775, RV, 5:57, 288; Fourth Virginia Convention, 17 January 1776, RV, 5:423.

44. For movement inland, see the case of James Dawson, A.O. 13/28/222; John Johnson to Unknown, 16 November 1775, RV 4:414.

45. Dunmore to Dartmouth, 6 December 1775, continuation dated 13 December, DC, 678, or C.O. 5/1353/321–34. See also Woodford to Virginia Convention, 15 December 1775, NDAR, 3:118.

46. Dunmore to Dartmouth, 12 July 1775, NDAR, 1:873–74 (quote); RV, 3:223; Dunmore Memorial, 25 February 1784, A.O. 13/28/305. For the sale of his property, see VG (Purdie), 21 June 1776, 3; Pybus, “Jefferson’s Faulty Math,” 248–49.

49. [London] Public Advertiser, 13 March 1776, NDAR, 3:621. For the Liverpool’s arrival, see Kingsfisher Journal, 20 December 1775, NDAR, 3:189.

51. Approximately three quarters of the white loyalists who joined the fleet and for whom there is documentation were born in Scotland: Hast, Loyalism, 172. Andrew Sprowle observed that “the Virginians” were “all against the Scots men,” often threatening “to Exterpate them”: Sprowle to George Brown, 1 November 1775, RV, 4:313. For quotes, see Andrew Miller to William Miller, 17 November 1775, RV, 4:428; John Ewing to Thomas Ewing, 20 November, 1775, RV 4:437; James Parker in Caley, “Dunmore,” 429. On Scots in the British Empire, see Rothschild, Inner Life of Empires; Colin Kidd, “North Britishness”; Colley, Britons, ch. 8; Eric Richards, “Scotland and the Uses of the Atlantic Empire,” in Bailyn and Morgan, eds., Strangers within the Realm, 67–114. For Scots in Virginia, see Karras, Sojourners in the Sun; Holton, Forced Founders, ch. 2; Mason, “Loyalist’s Journey,” 145–47.

52. Leacock’s name does not appear in any of the surviving editions of the play, but the case for his authorship is strong: Dallett, “John Leacock”; Shaffer, Performing Patriotism, 9, 211n15. For the first Continental Congress’s ban on “exhibitions of shews, plays, and other expensive diversions,” see Brown, Theatre in America, 6.

53. For synopses of the play, see Silverman, Cultural History, 311–12; Meserve, Emerging Entertainment, 78–81. For the dedication, see [Leacock], Fall of British Tyranny, 285.

54. See Livingston, Papers, 2:430. On the sexualization of Scots by Englishmen (and lowland Scots), see Colley, Britons, 121–22, 395n36.

56. VG (Purdie), 31 May 1776, 2. Shaffer infers that Leacock intended the audience to understand that Dunmore’s “harem” was black, but nothing in the text of the play suggests this: Performing Patriotism, 150.

57. Thomas’s Massachusetts Spy, 24 May 1776, 4. A brief poem concludes the piece: “Hail! doughty Ethiopian chief! / Thou ignominious Negro-Thief! / This BLACK shall prop thy sinking name, / And damn thee, to perpetual Fame.” For other associations of Dunmore with black women, see Holton, Forced Founders, 151–52; Isaac, Landon Carter’s Uneasy Kingdom, 12.

58. [Leacock], Fall of British Tyranny, 328–30. In Restoration English theater, the tyrant was often feminized in terms of sexual decadence: Bonomi, Lord Cornbury, 164–65.

59. Dallett, “John Leacock,” 468n49. Robert Munford’s The Candidates brought a similar character, Ralpho, to life five years earlier, but that play was not published until 1798. For Dunmore as a debaser of whiteness, see Bradley, Slavery, 142.

60. On the expansion of print, see Ong, Rhetoric, ch. 1. On print and nationalism, see Anderson, Imagined Communities, ch. 2.

61. Lund Washington to George Washington, 17 December 1775, PGWR, 2:571; Woodford to Pendleton, 12 December 1775, RV, 4:117; Bradley, Slavery, 142.

62. VG (Pinkney), 13 December 1775, 3. See also Thomas Ludwell Lee to Richard Henry Lee, 9 December 1775, NDAR, 3:27. On naval discipline in this period, see Byrn, Crime and Punishment, ch. 3, 6; Rodger, Wooden World, ch. 6; Dening, Mr Bligh’s Bad Language, 113–56.

63. Otter Journal, 7–10, 26–29 November, 9 December 1775, 4–8 January 1776, NDAR, 2:975, 1194, 3:27, 622, 663, 686. On 12 February, Hamond observed “a Company of Negroes” guarding a line used for carrying water to the ships from Tucker’s Point: Hamond, “Account of A.S. Hamond’s Part in the American Revolution, 1775 through 1777 [written between 1783 and 1785],” HNP, 2, 12 February 1776.

64. Woodford to Pendleton, 30 December 1775, RV, 5:287. Woodford had received a number of petitions from loyalists requesting permission to come ashore, which he granted on the condition that women and children would not be permitted to return to British lines and adult males were to be imprisoned until they could be tried. Not surprisingly, few, if any, accepted these terms.

65. See Liverpool Journal, 25–31 December 1775, Otter Journal, 27–31 December 1775, NDAR, 3:324–25.

67. McDonnell, Politics of War, 166–74. The parliamentary opposition also condemned Dunmore for the burning: Simmons and Thomas, eds., Proceedings and Debates, 5:432, 438.

68. Hamond to Naval Captains, 9 February 1776, NDAR, 3:1188. The complement of sailors may not have been quite this large: “Disposition of Ships,” 3 December 1775, NDAR, 2:1251.

69. Hamond to Hans Stanley, 5 August 1776, HNP, 1:5–6; Hamond, “Account,” HNP, 2:7.

72. “Precis Prepared for the King of the Events Leading up to the Expedition against the Southern Colonies,” [22 October 1775], NDAR, 2:771. See also Alexander Shaw to Dartmouth, 31 October 1775, NDAR, 2:793–95; North to George III, 15 October 1775, George III to North, 16 October 1775, George III, Correspondence, 3:265–68, 270.

74. The number of soldiers with Clinton is not clear. According to one account, there were said to be between three and four hundred from the 4th and 44th Regiments: VG (Purdie), 23 February 1776, 3. A source aboard the William put their number at 150: “Extract of a Private Letter,” 26 February 1776, NDAR, 4:93. Another account, published in the [London] Public Advertiser, refers to them simply as “a small Party of Men”: “Extract of a Letter from a Gentleman on Board the Liverpool, Norfolk Harbour, Virginia, 17 February, 1776,” NDAR, 3:1338.

75. Dunmore to Dartmouth, 6 December 1775, continuation dated 18 February 1776, DC, 672–90, or C.O. 5/1353/321–34.

76. Dunmore to Germain, 30 March 1776, duplicate, DC, 718–19, or C.O. 5/1353/377–82. The choice of Charleston was foreshadowed in “Precis Prepared for the King of Events Leading up to the Expedition against the Southern Colonies,” 31 December 1775, extract, NDAR, 2:465–67, and described in Clinton, American Rebellion, 27–29.

77. Dartmouth to Dunmore, 2 August 1775, DC, 603, or C.O. 5/1353/225–26; Dunmore to Dartmouth, 6 December 1775, continuation dated 4 January 1776, DC, 687, or C.O. 5/1353/321–34.

78. Clinton, American Rebellion, 25. See also “Extract of a Letter from Williamsburg,” 27 February 1776, NDAR, 4:101.

79. Hamond to Dunmore, 8 April 1776, DC, 727; Dunmore to Germain, 30 March 1776, DC 718, or C.O. 5/1353/377; Dunmore to Dartmouth, 6 December 1775, continuation dated 18 February 1776, DC, 672–90, or C.O. 5/1353/321–34.

80. Labaree, Royal Instructions, 1:13, 442. On the “vice admiral” title and its limitations for governors, see Labaree, Royal Government, 109–12.

81. Mercury Journal, 8 September 1775, NDAR, 2:54; Tilley, British Navy, 56–57; Otter Journal, 6 November 1775, NDAR, 2:975; Governor George James Bruere to Germain, 19 April 1777, NDAR, 8:385; Wrike, Governor’s Island, 124; Memorial of James Ingram, A.O. 12/56/244. See also Byrn, Crime and Punishment, 16–18.

82. “Claims and Memorials: Decision on the Claim of George Mills of Virginia,” 3 September 1783, The Online Institute for Advanced Loyalist Studies, www.royalprovincial.com/military/mems/va/clmmills.htm. On Harry Washington, see Pybus, Epic Journeys of Freedom, 218.

84. Diary of Antonio Eduardo, NDAR, 5:1339–51; Wrike, Governor’s Island, 54–56, 59–60, 103. With the dissolution of the town in August, the Spaniards were finally permitted to go on their way but not with the 12,500 pesos, which the British kept. The main purpose of the fleet was to hinder rebel trade, and it was reasonably effective in this regard. Robert Honeyman noted that private merchants had been fitting out ships and that the Committee of Safety had shipped some tobacco “to the foreign W. Indies for the purchase of powder and other military stores; but the Kings vessels are so watchful that they are afraid to venture out; and some of them have been taken”: Honeyman Diary, 22 February 1776.

85. That summer, about fifty healthy black women were crowded aboard a ship called the Danluce: Caley, “Dunmore,” 819. For slaves being “cooped up in small vessels,” see the Memorial of Thomas McCulloch on Behalf of Andrew Sprowle, 25 January 1784, A.O. 13/31/257. Black and white troops may have had separate accommodations. When he joined the fleet in February, Hamond noted that the members of the Queen’s Own Loyal Regiment and two companies of the 14th Regiment were living aboard transports in the Elizabeth River, but he made no mention of the Ethiopian Regiment’s living situation: Hamond, “Account,” HNP, 2, 11 February 1776.

86. In addition to the crew of the Liberty, captured in 1775, there were “three Whites & two Negroes” on board a ship that ran aground in the summer of 1776: Col. Richard Barnes to the Maryland Council of Safety, 13 July 1776, NDAR, 5:1066. On the interaction of seamen across racial lines, see Bolster, Black Jacks.

87. On church services aboard ship, see Rodger, Command, 405. Gwatkin was with Dunmore when he escaped from Williamsburg but left with the Magdalen in June 1775. For Agnew, see RV, 6:355–56n10. On “Daddy Moses,” see Pybus, Epic Journeys of Freedom, 219.

89. VG (Purdie), 8 March 1776, 2–3. On the impact of epidemic disease on the floating town, see Fenn, Pox Americana, 57–62.

90. Memorial of Thomas McCulloch on Behalf of Andrew Sprowle, 25 January 1784, A.O. 13/31/257. For Hamond’s return, see Hamond, “Account,” HNP, 2, 16 May 1776, 10 June 1776 (quote); Dunmore to Germain, 26 June 1776, DC, 747, or C.O. 5/1535/385–88. Dunmore was falsely accused of intentionally spreading the disease among patriots on the mainland: Ranlet, “British, Slaves, and Smallpox.”

91. Moomaw, ed., “Autobiography,” 65–67; VG (Dixon and Hunter), 15 June 1776, 4. For the “h[o]spital brig Adonis,” see VG (Dixon and Hunter), 31 August 1776, 3. Inoculation may have increased susceptibility to typhus and typhoid fever: Pybus, Epic Journeys of Freedom, 18; Wrike, “Fire Afloat,” 19–23. For volunteers, see Andrew Lewis to Charles Lee, 12 June 1776, Lee Papers, part 2, 5:65; Wrike, Governor’s Island, 63, 77.

93. VG (Purdie), 19 July 1776, 2–3 (quotes); Hamond, “Account,” HNP, 2, 8–20 July 1776; Honeyman Diary, 17 July 1776. For the burning of the huts, see Gara, “Loyal Subjects,” 39.

95. Hamond to Squire, 13 July 1776, NDAR, 5:1315; Hamond to Hans Stanley, 5 August 1776, HNP, 1, 1–3, 5; Hamond to Montague, HNP, 5, 6 August 1776. See also Hamond to Parker, HNP, 5, 10 June 1776; Hamond, “Account,” HNP, 2, 1 August 1776.

96. “A Letter from a Gentleman on Board the Ship Logan, Potomack River,” 31 July 1776, [London] Public Advertiser, 20 September 1776, NDAR, 5:1316; Hamond to Vice Admiral Molyneux Shuldham, 28 November 1776, NDAR, 7:320; Hamond, “Account,” HNP, 2, 5, 14 August 1776.

97. The names and brief descriptions are taken from the inspection rolls of ships compiled by the British during the 1783 evacuation of New York: Hodges, ed., Black Loyalist Directory, 20, 32 ( Jones quote), 40, 198 (Tucker quotes), 213. A useful online resource for tracking connections between slaves who left New York in 1783 (currently limited to those originating in the Norfolk area) is www.blackloyalist.info, created by Cassandra Pybus, Kit Candlin, and Robin Petterd.

98. On Dunmore’s force upon reaching New York, see Brigadier General Hugh Mercer to George Washington, 10 August 1776, PGWR, 6:80; Gara, “Loyal Subjects,” 40; Quarles, Negro in the American Revolution, 31. On Howe’s army, see Mackesy, War for America, 86; Dunmore to Germain, 4 September 1776, DC, 778, or C.O. 5/1353/401–03 (quotes); Serle, American Journal, 77, 86–87.

99. Caley, “Dunmore,” 876. On the fire, see Van Buskirk, Generous Enemies, 22; Chopra, Unnatural Rebellion, 71–72. For the rumor, see Nathanael Greene to John Hancock, 12 November 1776, Greene, Papers, 1:348. On the departure, see Mackenzie, Diary, 1:102; Serle, American Journal, 138; New-York Gazette, 18 November 1776, NDAR, 7:197; Dunmore Memorial to Commissioners of the Treasury, 6 March 1784, DC 825, or A.O. 13/ 29/ 544–45.

100. Hodges, ed., Black Loyalist Directory, 167, 170; Hodges, Root and Branch, 147–48.

101. Hutchinson quoted in Bailyn, Ordeal, 345; Gazette of the State of South-Carolina, 30 June 1777, NDAR, 9:194.

103. Norton, “John Randolph’s Plan of Accommodations,” 103; Mackesy, War for America, 401, 405; Dunmore to Joyce Dawson, 9 April 1781, A.O. 13/28/215 (quote).

104. Memorial of William Farrer, A.O. 13/28/379; Memorial of James Ingram, A.O. 13/31/128; Memorial of Merchants Trading to Virginia and Maryland to Lord George Germain, 3 August 1781, Davies, ed., Documents, 20:215 (quote).

105. All quotations are from Joyce Dawson to Dunmore, 24 July 1781, A.O. 13/28/220. See also Thomas Robinson to Unknown, 29 June 1781, A.O. 13/28/217 (which gives the date of James’s death and echoes the “broken Heart” sentiment); Joyce Dawson to the Commissioners of the Treasury, n.d., A.O. 13/28/229. For other regrets based on illness, see Coldham, American Migrations, 586, 590.

106. Thomas Montgomery to Dunmore, 28 August 1781, A.O. 13/31/645–46. Some of those who chose not to return had lived in Virginia as agents for companies that they no longer felt capable of serving. John McDowell claimed to be too sick to make the voyage but also explained that “by being so long out of that Country, I coud not be so usefull in collecting the money owing to myself and Partners, as some of our Factors who were there long after me”: McDowell to [Dunmore], 29 August 1781, A.O. 13/31/279.

107. Charles Steaurt to Mrs. Parker, 6 November 1781, Parker Family Papers, PAR 9–54.

108. Freneau, “Lord Dunmore’s Petition to the Legislature of Virginia,” in Freneau, Poems, 199–200. The other poem, which can be found in the same collection, is entitled “A London Dialogue, between My Lords, Dunmore and Germaine.”

109. Katherine Sprowle Douglas told Thomas Jefferson that her son “was also Sollicited by Dunmore to go with him when He went in 1781 on His more than Quixot scheme of Retaking Possession of the govrment of Virginia, which he refus’d”: Douglas to Jefferson, 30 July 1785, Jefferson, Papers, 8:329; Dunmore Memorial to Commissioners of the Treasury, 6 March 1784, DC, 825, or A.O. 13/29/544–45. On Dunmore’s arrival in Charleston, see Robert Livingston to William Livingston, 23 January 1782, Livingston, Papers, 4:370. See also Caley, “Dunmore,” 885. For an example of a return to England, see Dunmore to Commissioners of the Treasury, 11 February 1783, on behalf of John Earnshaw, A.O. 13/28/357–60.

110. Dunmore to Dartmouth, 6 December 1775, continuation dated 4 January 1776, DC, 687, or C.O. 5/1353/321–34.

111. The documents cited above from A.O. 12 and 13 are the most revealing in this regard, but see also Norton, British-Americans, 172, 186, 189, 308n45.

FIVE. Abiding Ambitions, 1781–1796

1. The point of departure for loyalist studies remains Calhoon, Loyalists in Revolutionary America. On loyalist diversity, see Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles, esp. 8–9; Keith Mason, “The American Loyalist Diaspora and the Reconfiguration of the British Atlantic World,” in Gould and Onuf, eds., Empire and Nation, 239–59. Several outstanding biographical studies have promoted a conservative image of the white loyalist: Gipson, Jared Ingersoll; Berkin, Jonathan Sewall; Bailyn, Ordeal; Ferling, Loyalist Mind; Mason, “Loyalist’s Journey,” esp. 162–66. A notable exception is Upton, Loyal Whig, which characterizes William Smith, Jr., as opportunistic but prone to dissent. Studies of southern and western loyalists are relatively few: Piecuch, Three Peoples; Cashin, King’s Ranger; Lindley S. Butler, “David Fanning’s Militia: A Roving Partisan Community,” in Calhoon, Barnes, and Rawlyk, eds., Loyalists and Community, ch. 11; Doug MacGregor, “The Ordeal of John Connolly: The Pursuit of Wealth through Loyalism,” in Tiedemann, Fingerhut, and Venables, eds., Other Loyalists, ch. 6.

2. John Graves Simcoe to Dundas, 30 June 1791, quoted in Taylor, “Late Loyalists,” 5; Cruden, Address, 9. Jasanoff identifies territorial expansion as a key component of “the spirit of 1783,” a set of ideas and practices that “animated the British Empire well into the twentieth century”: Liberty’s Exiles, 11–12.

4. Cruden to Dunmore, 5 January 1782, copy, Chalmers Papers; Wright, Anglo-Spanish Rivalry, 137.

5. On Cruden’s plan, see Philip D. Morgan and Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy, “Arming Slaves in the American Revolution,” in Brown and Morgan, eds., Arming Slaves, 191–92; Frey, Water from the Rock, 125, 139–41; Quarles, Negro in the American Revolution, 138–39.

6. Cruden to Dunmore, 5 January 1782, copy, Chalmers Papers; Dunmore to Clinton, 2 February 1782, quoted in Schama, Rough Crossings, 124.

7. Caley, “Dunmore,” 889, 897–98; Quarles, Negro in the American Revolution, 150. On Clinton’s downfall, see Willcox, Portrait of a General, 460–63; Schama, Rough Crossings, 125.

8. Ross to Dunmore, 3 March 1782 (quotes), 8 March 1782, Dunmore to Thomas Townshend, 24 August 1782, all copies in Chalmers Papers. See also Wright, “Lord Dunmore’s Loyalist Asylum,” 373–74; Holmes, “Robert Ross’ Plan,” 163; Piecuch, Three Peoples, 298–99. On colonial Louisiana, see Usner, Indians; Hall, Africans in Colonial Louisiana. The literature on Andean insurrection is divided over whether the peasant uprisings were reformist or revolutionary: Serulnikov, Subverting Colonial Authority; Robins, Genocide; Stavig, World of Tupac Amaru; Walker, Smoldering Ashes; Stern, ed., Resistance; Godoy, Rebellions. On New Granada, see Fisher, Kuethe, and McFarlane, eds., Reform and Insurrection; Phelen, People and the King.

9. Clinton to Moncrief, 15 April 1782, Historical Manuscripts Commission, Report, 2:453; Piecuch, Three Peoples, 316.

11. Dunmore to Townshend, 24 August 1782, copy, Chalmers Papers; Townshend to Richard Oswald, 26 October 1782, Shelburne Papers, vol. 70.

14. Dunmore letter of support, 14 June 1777, A.O. 13/31/161; evidence attached to the memorial of Isabella Logan, A.O. 13/54/111.

17. A.O. 12/99/354, 12/100/129. See also Norton, “Fate of Some Black Loyalists,” 406.

18. Report on decision, 9 July 1784, A.O. 12/100/349. The £15,000 was paid according to a plan of compensation designed by Pitt, which satisfied 40 percent of legitimate claims pending a more complete examination: Norton, British-Americans, 209–10.

19. Commission report, 6 July 1784, A.O. 12/100/349. Dunmore filed his claim on 25 February 1784 (A.O. 12/54/118–22, A.O. 13/28/D) and submitted the letter requesting a postwar allowance on 6 March 1784 (A.O. 13/29/544–45).

21. G. Farquhar to Atholl, 11 February 1786, extract, DFP, NRAS3253/Bundle 30. Documents can be located in this bundle with reference to the year in the upper left hand corner of the page.

22. Chronicle quoted in Riley, Homeward Bound, 168; Dunmore to [Gower?], 22 November 1785, “Murray, John, 1732–1809,” New York Public Library, box 75.

23. Craton and Saunders, Islanders, 1:179, 421n1; [Wylly], Short Account, 1; Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles, 219; Sydney to Maxwell, [15] June 1786, C.O. 23/25/418–19.

24. Dunmore to Unknown, 3 December 178[7], C.O. 23/28/96. For Dunmore’s departure from England, see Peter Edwards to Evan Nepean (undersecretary of state), 19 July 1787, C.O. 23/15/242; Schoepf, Travels, 259–60; [Wylly], Short Account, 20. On wrecking, see Schoepf, Travels, 272, 282–85.

25. Journal of the [Bahamian] Council, 26 October 1787, C.O. 23/27/73 (oaths); Schoepf, Travels, 285–86, 277 (quotes); Dunmore to Grenville, 15 June 1790, C.O. 23/30/214 (typescript in DFP, NRAS3253/Bundle 15); Dunmore to [Nepean], 4 March 1788, C.O. 23/27/114.

26. Siebert, ed., Loyalists, 1:197; Schoepf, Travels, 266–67 (quote), 264, 262–63; Craton and Saunders, Islanders, 1:194; Dunmore to Sydney, 31 August 1789, C.O. 23/29/167–68. Dunmore decided to rent additional office space and asked to be compensated £100 per year for the expense: Dunmore to Unknown, 3 December 1788, C.O. 23/28/96. He eventually expanded and improved Government House and built a new country home called Hermitage on the east side of New Providence: Craton, History of the Bahamas, 178; Assembly Committee to George Chalmers, 26 May 1796, C.O. 23/31/17–18. An excellent map of Nassau, based on a map of 1788, is in Craton and Saunders, Islanders, 1:201.

27. Dunmore to Sydney, 26 January 1789, C.O. 23/30/63 (typescript in DFP, NRAS3253/Bundle 15). Most of the residents of Nassau were either moderate dissenters of Scottish extraction or black Anabaptists, who had their own ministers: Siebert, ed., Loyalists, 1:197; Craton and Saunders, Islanders, 1:195.

29. Johnson, Race Relations, 16. See also the map in Saunders, Bahamian Loyalists, 8.

30. Dunmore to Nepean, 17 June 1790, C.O. 23/30/225–26; Dundas to Dunmore, 10 March 1792, C.O. 23/31/101–2; Dunmore to Nepean, 9 June 1791, C.O. 23/31/35. On the request for a new boat, see also Dunmore to Sydney, 10 November 1786, C.O. 23/25/452; Dunmore to Sydney, 28 November 1787, C.O. 23/27/76; Sydney to Dunmore, 21 June 1788, C.O. 23/27/124; Dunmore to Grenville, 6 April 1790, C.O. 23/30/198–99; Dunmore to Thomas Steele (secretary to the Lords of Treasury), 16 February 1790, C.O. 23/30/200–201.

31. Sydney to Dunmore, 20 August 1787, C.O. 23/27/59–60; Schoepf, Travels, 282–83; [Wylly], Short Account, 24; Dunmore to [Nepean], 4 March 1788, 23/27/114 (quote).

32. Siebert, ed., Loyalists, 1:192; Dunmore to Sydney, 8 August 1788, C.O. 23/28/41 (quote). On Dumaresq, see Jones, Loyalists of Massachusetts, 123–24; Sabine, Biographical Sketches, 1:397.

34. On the early loyalist period, see Siebert, Legacy, esp. 25; Parrish, “Records of Some Southern Loyalists,” 2:esp. 410; Wallace Brown, “The Loyalists in the West Indies, 1783–1834,” in Wright, ed., Red, White and True Blue, 94; Peters, “American Loyalists in the Bahamas”; Peters, “American Loyalists and the Plantation Period,” ch. 4; Craton, History of the Bahamas, 164–70; Craton and Saunders, Islanders, 1:190–91; Carole Watterson Troxler, “Uses of the Bahamas by Southern Loyalist Exiles,” in Bannister and Riordan, eds., Loyal Atlantic, ch. 7. For the independence scheme, see deposition of William Augustus Bowles, 9 April 1788, C.O. 23/27/158–59; Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles, 235–36, 403n100. The humble loyalists who identified with the old inhabitants may have come from the southern interior of North America, where many valued the British government as a protector: see essays by Jeffrey J. Crow and Emory G. Evans in Hoffman, Tate, and Albert, eds., Uncivil War.

35. The loyalist executives were James Powell and John Brown: [Wylly], Short Account, 14.

36. The petitions are enclosed in Dunmore to Sydney, 29 February 1788, C.O. 23/27/102–11, 105 (quote); Dunmore to Sydney, 21 April 1788, C.O. 23/27/133. They are also reprinted in [Wylly], Short Account, 33–39. Dunmore was finally forced to dissolve the assembly in 1794, when word arrived from London that George Chalmers had managed to push a septennial act through Parliament. The resulting elections gave the loyalists control of the house: Craton, History of the Bahamas, 176.

37. Petition from Inhabitants of Long Island, 2 April 1788, enclosed in Dunmore to Sydney, 21 April 1788, C.O. 23/27/155.

38. Letter from New Providence, 27 March 1788, “American Intelligence,” American Museum, 22 March–1 April 1788, 388.

39. Dunmore to [Nepean], 4 March 1788, C.O. 23/27/112; Dunmore to [Nepean], 21 April 1788, C.O. 23/27/156; Anthony Stokes to Nepean, 3 June 1788, C.O. 23/28/109; Sydney to Dunmore, 21 June 1788, C.O. 23/27/129.

42. Wylly Deposition, 2 April 1788, C.O. 23/27/139; Dunmore to Sydney, 21 April 1788, C.O. 23/27/131. Craton and Saunders state that Dunmore offered Wylly a position on the vice admiralty court (Islanders, 1:202), but Wylly made no mention of this in either his pamphlet or his sworn deposition, which names only the enticement of the captain’s commission, a far more modest post. According to Dunmore, a loyalist named Josiah Tatnall proposed that Wylly replace him on the vice admiralty court, but the governor refused on account of Wylly’s “chiming in upon every occasion with” the opposition: Dunmore to Sydney, 29 June 1789, C.O. 23/29/117–22 (typescript in DFP, NRAS3253/Bundle 15). Dunmore appointed Matson to the seat instead, but this turned out to conflict with his role as chief justice: Sydney to Dunmore, 31 December 1788, C.O. 23/28/60–61.

43. Documents related to the hearing, including the affidavits Johnston presented, are in C.O. 23/27/134–47. For Dunmore’s disapproval, see Dunmore to Sydney, 18 July 1788, C.O. 23/27/164; Council Minutes, 3 April 1788, C.O. 23/27/146–47. Johnston’s remarks are quoted in Peter Edwards to Dunmore, 18 April 1788, C.O. 23/27/144–45. For Dunmore’s views on Johnston, see Dunmore to [Nepean], 4 March 1788, C.O. 23/27/112. The charge of drunkenness was commonly leveled against judges in the Bahamas. Wylly claimed that “the most beastly drunkenness” had compromised “the Seals of Justice”: Short Account, 20.

44. Council Minutes, 10 April 1788, C.O. 23/27/147; Dunmore to [Nepean], 8 April 1788, C.O. 23/27/122; Bruce Ragsdale, Planters’ Republic, 200–201; Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles, 224; Dunmore to Sydney, 29 June 1789, C.O. 23/29/117–22 (typescript in DFP, NRAS3253/Bundle 15); Memorial of Thomas Atwood to Grenville, 10 December 1789, C.O. 23/15/272. See also minutes from Wylly’s hearing in C.O. 23/27/135–36.

45. Dunmore to [Nepean], 8 April 1788, C.O. 23/27/122. Maxwell had expressed virtually the same view in 1784: Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles, 224. For criticism of the closing of the courts, see [Wylly], Short Account, 9–10, 39–40, 42. See also Craton and Saunders, Islanders, 1:202; Riley, Homeward Bound, 172–73.

46. The statements are in C.O. 23/29/297–307; Sydney to Dunmore, 31 December 1788, C.O. 23/28/59–66.

47. Dunmore to [Nepean], 21 April 1788, 23/27/158; Dunmore to Sydney, 29 June 1789, C.O. 23/29/117–22 (typescript in DFP, NRAS3253/Bundle 15). For Whitehall’s approval, see Grenville to Dunmore, 17 September 1789, C.O. 23/29/162; Nepean to Wylly, 17 September 1789, C.O. 23/29/255; Dunmore to Grenville, 1 March 1790, C.O. 23/30/192.

49. Craton and Saunders, Islanders, 1:179, 192, 195. On cotton production in the Bahamas, see also Gail Saunders, “Slavery and Cotton Culture in the Bahamas,” in Shepherd, ed., Working Slavery, 21–41. A new slave code was passed in 1784, dictating that black-on-white assault be punishable by death, manumission carry fines, all blacks be disarmed, and slaves be able to testify against free blacks in all trials: Brown, “Loyalists in the West Indies,” 83; Siebert, ed., Loyalists, 1:191; Craton, History of the Bahamas, 165.

50. For a list of the free blacks who sailed from New York to the Bahamas in 1783, see Riley, Homeward Bound, 266–69. Their equivocal status is discussed in Michael Craton, “Loyalists Mainly to Themselves: The Black Loyalist Diaspora to the Bahamas Islands,” in Shepherd, ed., Working Slavery, 47–48. There was also a ship carrying about twenty-five blacks, both enslaved and free, that went to Cat Island in November 1783: Hodges, ed., Black Loyalist Directory, book 2. For the East Florida contingent and the reenslavement process, see Johnson, Race Relations, 41–42. See also Craton and Saunders, Islanders, 1:183–85; Brown, “Loyalists in the West Indies,” 83.

51. John Berry to Unknown, 30 June 1786, quoted in Craton and Saunders, Islanders, 1:187.

52. Dunmore to Sydney, 28 November 1787, C.O. 23/27/75; Proclamation, 28 October 1787, and Proclamation, 7 November 1787, both enclosed in Dunmore to Sydney, 28 November 1787, C.O. 23/27/77, 78.

53. On the creation of the court, see Dunmore to Sydney, 28 November 1787, C.O. 23/27/75, 80. For a final version of “The Act for Governing Negroes, Mulattos, Mustees, and Indians,” which established the court, see C.O. 23/29/15–21. “An Act for Explaining and Amending” this law was published on 26 February 1788, C.O. 23/29/268–71.

54. Dunmore even argued that the radicals’ campaign for greater representation in the assembly was motivated by a desire “to pass such acts as would secure to them the property of a great number of the poor Blacks who deserted from their Rebel Masters, and came into the British lines”: Dunmore to [Nepean], 4 March 1788, C.O. 23/27/112.

55. “Memorial of the Planters and Other Inhabitants of the Island of Abaco, Residing at Spencer’s Bight,” 6 May 1788, reprinted in [Wylly], Short Account, 40–41; an original manuscript version is in C.O. 23/29/283–84. See also Riley, Homeward Bound, 175–76.

56. Dunmore to Sydney, 18 July 1788, C.O. 23/27/164–65; “Humble Address of the Undersigned Planters and Other Inhabitants of Spencer’s Bight, on the Island of Abaco,” n.d., reprinted in [Wylly], Short Account, 41. On Dumaresq, see Jones, Loyalists of Massachusetts, 124; Dunmore to Sydney, 4 June 1789, C.O. 23/29/106–7 (typescript in DFP, NRAS3253/Bundle 15).

57. For disapproval of the court, see “Presentments of the Grand Jury, at a Special Court of Oyer and Terminer and General Gaol Delivery for the Bahama Islands,” 28 May 1788, reprinted in [Wylly], Short Account, 41–42 (quote); Dunmore to Sydney, 28 November 1787, C.O. 23/27/75; Jasanoff, “Other Side of Revolution,” 221. For the court legitimizing reenslavement, see Craton and Saunders, Islanders, 1:187; Craton, “Loyalists Mainly to Themselves,” 49.

58. [Wylly], Short Account, 21–23, 21 (quotes). See also Riley, Homeward Bound, 169. Even scholars critical of Dunmore’s motives are dubious of Wylly’s allegation: Craton and Saunders, Islanders, 1:200. There were eleven slave-court emancipations in previous administrations and just seven in subsequent ones: Johnson, Race Relations, 42. For a sampling of decisions, see C.O. 23/29/279–82.

59. The act is enclosed in Dunmore to Sydney, 28 November 1787, C.O. 23/27/80; [Wylly], Short Account, 42, note m. “The Town of Nassau is actually overawed by a considerable body of runaway and other Negroes,” Wylly wrote, “collected and kept together in the neighbourhood of Government House, and about Fort Charlotte, in open and flagrant violation of the Laws of the Colony, and in the face of repeated presentments solemnly made by the Grand Inquest of those Islands”: Short Account, 22.

61. House of Commons, Report … Dated 11th of February 1788, 456, 458 (quotes); Dunmore to Sydney, 30 July 1788, C.O. 23/28/29–30. For Dunmore’s failed Long Island cotton plantation, see Craton and Saunders, Islanders, 1:202. For his purchase of slaves and land in Spencer’s Bight and Little Harbour, Abaco, see Riley, Homeward Bound, 181, 253n5. Historians have characterized Dunmore’s defense of black freedom in the Bahamas as cynical and self-serving, as they have his 1775 proclamation: Craton and Saunders, Islanders, 1:187, 200; Frey, Water from the Rock, 186. For a less critical view, see Johnson, Race Relations.

62. Johnson, Race Relations, 30; Lawlor and Lawlor, Harbour Island, 174; Sydney to Dunmore, 21 June 1788, C.O. 23/27/124 (quote). While Dunmore took the virtues of hierarchy for granted throughout his life, his conceptions of freedom and British subjecthood were not rigidly structured according to racial categories. Jasanoff’s concept of “the spirit of 1783,” which combines commitments to both paternal humanitarianism and the authority of the state, helps to explain his defense of black freedom: Liberty’s Exiles, 12–13, 241.

63. Burns, History, 539–41; Robinson, “Southern Loyalists,” 208; Dunmore to Sydney, 28 November 1787, C.O. 23/27/75, 81–82 (quote); Dunmore to Sydney, 21 December 1787, C.O. 23/27/97–98. The refugee aid was later approved by the ministry: Sydney to Dunmore, 21 June 1788, C.O. 23/27/124.

64. Memorial of Mary Brown, 15 November 1788, C.O. 23/28/141. On the Mosquito Coast, see Weber, Bárbaros, 86–87, 202, 242; Gould, “Entangled Histories,” 772–77; Floyd, Anglo-Spanish Struggle. On Native American slavery in the British Empire, see Gallay, ed., Indian Slavery, esp. 24–26; Bernhard, Slaves and Slaveholders, 55–66, 114; Usner, Indians. I am also indebted to Stephanie Crumbaugh for lending me her undergraduate thesis at the College of William and Mary on this topic.

65. Affidavit of Edmund Rush Wegg, 23 June 1789, enclosed in Dunmore to Sydney, 29 June 1789, C.O. 23/29/117–22 (typescript in DFP, NRAS3253/Bundle 15). For Indian slaves in West Florida, see Usner, Indians, 107, 132.

66. Memorial of Mary Brown, 15 November 1788, C.O. 23/28/141–42. On Polly and her children, see Wegg Affidavit, 23 June 1789, enclosed in Dunmore to Sydney, 29 June 1789, C.O. 23/29/117–22 (typescript in DFP, NRAS3253/Bundle 15).

68. Stokes to Fawkener, 23 February 1788, House of Commons, Report, 454; Armytage, Free Port System, 61.

69. Dunmore to Sydney, 5 September 1789, C.O. 23/29/178–80 (typescript in DFP, NRAS3253/Bundle 15).

70. Dunmore to [Nepean], 20 December 1787, C.O. 23/27/92; Chalmers to Assembly Committee, 1 October 1793, C.O. 23/31/41.

71. “A considerable Military force should be kept here constantly,” Dunmore wrote, “both for the support of Government and the defence of the Islands in case of Attack”: Dunmore to Sydney, 28 November 1787, C.O. 23/27/75. On the 37th Regiment, see Brigadier General McArthur to Sydney, 27 November 1787, C.O. 23/27/74; Sydney to Dunmore, 5 August 1788, C.O. 23/28/40; Dunmore to Sydney, 28 January 1789, C.O. 23/29/66 (typescript in DFP, NRAS3253/Bundle 15); Sydney to McArthur, 4 March 1789, C.O. 23/29/57 (typescript in DFP, NRAS3253/Bundle 15). See also Riley, Homeward Bound, 170.

72. Dunmore to Sydney, 4 June 1789, C.O. 23/29/106–7 (typescript in DFP, NRAS3253/Bundle 15). As common as the arming of slaves was in the British West Indies, particularly after the commencement of war with revolutionary France in 1793, it always generated local opposition: Buckley, Slaves in Red Coats. On this practice in Spanish America, see the work of Jane Landers, including “Transforming Bondsmen into Vassals: Arming the Slaves in Colonial Spanish America,” in Brown and Morgan, eds., Arming Slaves, 120–45; Voelz, Slave and Soldier; Klein, “Colored Militia of Cuba.”

73. Dunmore to Sydney, 5 September 1789, C.O. 23/29/178–80 (typescript in DFP, NRAS3253/Bundle 15); Grenville to Dunmore, 6 May 1790, C.O. 23/30/196–97 (typescript in DFP, NRAS3253/Bundle 15); Dunmore to Grenville, 21 July 1790, 23/30/230.

74. Dunmore to Sydney, 31 August 1789, C.O. 23/29/167–68 (typescript in NRAS3253/Bundle 15). The 47th Regiment did not reside at Fort Nassau, but over 250 of them (including associated women and children) lost their lives while awaiting completion of the new barracks: Dunmore to Grenville, 16 October 1790, C.O. 23/30/322; Dunmore to Grenville, 8 November 1790, C.O. 23/30/325; Dunmore to Nepean, 9 November 1790, C.O. 23/30/332. The casualty numbers for the 37th Regiment are from Craton, History of the Bahamas, 177. The plans for Fort Charlotte were enclosed in Dunmore to [Nepean], 23 December 1788, C.O. 23/29/48–50. The fort is also described in detail in Dunmore to Sydney, 15 December 1788, C.O. 23/29/2. On the symbolic significance of forts, see Griffin, American Leviathan, 183–84.

75. Sydney to Dunmore, 21 June 1788, C.O. 23/27/127–28. Correspondence between London and Nassau was always spotty: Dunmore to Sydney, 28 January 1789, C.O. 23/29/66; Sydney to Dunmore, 4 March 1789, C.O. 23/29/54–56; Dunmore to Sydney, 13 April 1789, C.O. 23/29/90; Dunmore to Grenville, 16 February 1790, C.O. 23/29/187–88. While introducing his plans the previous February, Dunmore assured Sydney that “the most frugal means” in his power would be employed in the construction of Fort Charlotte: Dunmore to Sydney, 29 February 1788, C.O. 23/27/99. Even so, he never implied that the entire project could be completed for £4,000, as stated in Craton, History of the Bahamas, 176; Craton and Saunders, Islanders, 1:203; Johnson, Race Relations, 5. Rather, he told Sydney that he had drawn on the Treasury for that amount already: Dunmore to Sydney, 15 December 1788, C.O. 23/29/1–3.

76. Sydney to Dunmore, 4 March 1789, C.O. 23/29/54–56; Dunmore to Sydney, 4 June 1789, C.O. 23/29/106–7 (typescript in DFP, NRAS3253/Bundle 15); Dunmore to Grenville, 1 September 1790, C.O. 23/30/232.

77. Grenville to Dunmore, 6 November 1790, 26 November 1790, 17 September 1789, C.O. 23/30/314–15, 23/30/317, 23/29/159–61 (typescript in DFP, NRAS3253/Bundle 15). For criticism of past administrations’ use of public funds, see the petition from residents of Abaco, 6 January 1788, in [Wylly], Short Account, 37.

78. Grenville to Dunmore, 8 January 1791, 9 May 1791, C.O. 23/31/1–2, 23/31/10, 13; Dunmore to Grenville, 30 August 1791, C.O. 23/31/44. See also Craton, History of the Bahamas, 177. Dunmore also built a small fort on Barracks Hill, Harbour Island: Craton, History of the Bahamas, 178. For the fort as folly, see, e.g., Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles, 227–28.

79. The combined white population of Spanish Louisiana and West Florida was only about 13,000 in 1785: Usner, Indians, 114–15. On the forts, see Wright, Anglo-Spanish Rivalry, 139–40, 155–56; Daniel K. Richter, “Native Peoples of North America and the Eighteenth-Century British Empire,” in Marshall, ed., Oxford History, 2:368–69; White, Middle Ground, 410. On the southern Indians’ preference for the British, see Cruden, Address, 14, 24–25; Siebert, ed., Loyalists, 1:139.

80. For British ambitions in the region, see Townshend to Richard Oswald, 26 October 1782, Shelburne Papers, vol. 70; Wright, “Lord Dunmore’s Loyalist Asylum,” 376. Governor Monteford Brown had also used the Bahamas to pursue personal interests in the region: Fabel, “Eighteenth Colony.” For a summary of competing interests in the late eighteenth-century Southwest, see Wright, Anglo-Spanish Rivalry, 120–53.

81. On the Indian trade, see Braund, Deerskins and Duffels; Usner, Indians, 120–21, 244–75; Coker and Watson, Indian Traders. For a list of products critical to the trade, see Coker and Watson, Indian Traders, 34–35. On the inability of Spain to compete with British goods, see also Weber, Bárbaros, 203.

82. On McGillivray, see William J. Bauer, Jr.’s introduction to Caughey, McGillivray, xx–xxiii; Cashin, Lachlan McGillivray, 73, 302–7; Saunt, New Order, 67–135, 186–204; Langley, “Tribal Identity of Alexander McGillivray”; Gould, “Entangled Histories,” 778–89. There is a sketch of McGillivray by John Trumbull at Fordham University: Bennett, Florida’s “French” Revolution, 9. See also Michael D. Green, “The Creek Confederacy in the American Revolution: Cautious Participants,” in Coker and Rea, eds., Anglo-Spanish Confrontation, 52–75.

83. McGillivray to Governor Arturo O’Neill, 3 January 1784, in Caughey, McGillivray, 67. For background on Panton, Leslie, and Company and their deal with the Spanish, see Caughey, McGillivray, 22–26; Coker and Watson, Indian Traders, 1–113; Siebert, “Loyalists in West Florida,” 480–81. The company had George III’s permission to do business in Spanish America: Memorial of William Wylly on Behalf of Panton, Leslie, and Company, 19 June 1789, C.O. 23/28/163–64.

85. On the seizure of Panton’s boat, see Parrish, “Records of Some Southern Loyalists,” 2:148–49, 409–10; Coker and Watson, Indian Traders, 115.

86. McGillivray to Zespedes, 6 October 1787, McGillivray to O’Neill, 20 November 1787, McGillivray to Zespedes, 5 January 1788, McGillivray to Miro, 10 January 1788, all in Caughey, McGillivray, 162–66 (see also 34–36); Kinnaird, “Significance,” 160; Wright, Anglo-Spanish Rivalry, 142–44; Wright, William Augustus Bowles, 25–27.

87. Bowles Deposition, 9 April 1788, C.O. 23/27/158–59. Although Wylly questioned this account (Short Account, 24n24), Cruden had expressed interest in establishing an autonomous haven for loyalists in Florida: Bennett, Florida’s “French” Revolution, 8. For more on the alleged plot, see Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles, 403n100.

89. Wright, William Augustus Bowles, 6–13, 24–31. Bowles denied Dunmore’s involvement, but Spanish authorities did not believe him: McGillivray to Leslie, 20 November 1788, Zespedes to McGillivray, 8 October 1788, in Caughey, McGillivray, 205, 203.

90. Coker and Watson, Indian Traders, 118–21; Wright, Anglo-Spanish Rivalry, 145; Wright, William Augustus Bowles, 30–33; Kinnaird, “Significance,” 161–62; Parrish, “Records of Some Southern Loyalists,” 1:150–51.

91. “Enclosure: Minutes of the Creek Council,” [2 March 1789], PGWR, 6:291–94. On American Indians as British subjects, see Richter, “Native Peoples,” in Marshall, ed., Oxford History, 2:358–59; Brown, Moral Capital, 220–28.

92. Wright, William Augustus Bowles, 37–39, 182–83n63. Some scholars have expressed doubts that Bowles had any meaningful mandate from the Creeks: William C. Sturtevant, “Commentary,” in Proctor, ed., Eighteenth-Century Florida, 46.

93. Wylly Petition on Behalf of Panton, Leslie, and Company, 19 June 1789, C.O. 23/29/163–64; Bahama Gazette, 15–22 August 1789, 1; Dunmore to Grenville, 1 March 1790, C.O. 23/30/192; Bowles to “the Printer of the Lucayan Herald,” Lucayan Royal Herald, 19 August 1789, C.O. 23/30/194.

94. Bowles to Floridablanca, 30 August 1789, C.O. 23/15/251. See also Bowles to the Governor of St. Augustine, 21 August 1789, C.O. 23/15/247–48; Bowles to the Governor of Havana, 21 August 1789, C.O. 23/15/244–46.

95. On the politics surrounding the Nootka Sound crisis, see Cook, Flood Tide of Empire, 217–43; Wright, Anglo-Spanish Rivalry, 149–50; Wright, William Augustus Bowles, 39–45. Governor General Dorchester was skeptical of Bowles at Quebec and sent him on his way with £100: Hamer, “British in Canada,” 110.

97. Grenville to Dunmore, 1 April 1791, C.O. 23/31/6–7; letter from Miller enclosed in Dunmore to Grenville, 9 June 1791, C.O. 23/31/29; Dunmore to Grenville, 8 June 1791, C.O. 23/31/26.

98. Dunmore to Grenville, 9 June 1791, C.O. 23/31/29; Grenville to Dunmore, September 1791, C.O. 23/31/41.

99. Coker and Watson, Indian Traders, 142–50; Wright, “Creek-American Treaty of 1790”; Appleton and Ward, “Albert James Pickett.”

100. Bahama Gazette, 2–5 August 1791, quoted in Wright, William Augustus Bowles, 56. For details on the flag, see also McAlister, “William Augustus Bowles,” 323–24n17; Wright, William Augustus Bowles, 57–60; Coker and Watson, Indian Traders, 150; McGillivray to Panton, 28 October 1791, in Caughey, McGillivray, 299.

101. George Wellbank to Alexander McKee, 16 July 1792, in Hamer, “British in Canada,” 115.

102. Material in the two preceding paragraphs is drawn from the statement of Edward Forrester, 28 February 1792, in Kinnaird, “Significance,” 171–76; Wright, William Augustus Bowles, 65–70; Coker and Watson, Indian Traders, 149–56.

103. Statement of William Cunningham, 2 April 1792, in Kinnaird, “Significance,” 184, 185–87.

104. Wellbank to McKee, 16 January 1793, Coweta Indians to McKee, 12 April 1793, in Hamer, “British in Canada,” 116, 120 (quote). See also Wright, Anglo-Spanish Rivalry, 146–48; Wright, William Augustus Bowles, 84.

105. Fincastle (George Murray) to Thomas Jack, 18 March 1796, Dunmore Papers (Swem), box 3, folder 107 (this collection contains copies of some documents in DFP); Wright, William Augustus Bowles, 77–78, 142, 151, 171–72. On Muskogee, see also Jane G. Landers, “Rebellion and Royalism in Spanish Florida: The French Revolution on Spain’s Northern Colonial Frontier,” in Gaspar and Geggus, eds., Turbulent Time, 169; Snyder, Slavery in Indian Country, 220.

106. On Blount, see Melton, First Impeachment; Andrew R. L. Cayton, “‘When Shall We Cease to Have Judases?’: The Blount Conspiracy and the Limits of the ‘Extended Republic,’” in Hoffman and Albert, eds., Launching the Extended Republic, 156–89. For other governors in this tradition, see O’Shaughnessy, Empire Divided, 189–92. On the sale of Louisiana, see Wright, Anglo-Spanish Rivalry, 156; Blackburn, “Haiti, Slavery, and the Age of the Democratic Revolution,” 661. After 1800, Britain was increasingly focused on the control of ports rather than territorial expansion: Duffy, “French Revolution,” 87, 96.

107. [Wylly], Short Account, 15; Rev. Thomas Robertson to the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, 6 October 1791, quoted in Lawlor and Lawlor, Harbour Island, 72; Craton and Saunders, Islanders, 1:199, 203. Relations between the executive and the legislature in the Bahamas were strained across administrations: Johnson, Race Relations, xix, 5. For the same tension in other parts of the empire, see Greene, Quest for Power, vii; O’Shaughnessy, Empire Divided, 192–93.

108. Dunmore to Sydney, 18 July 1788, C.O. 23/27/165; Sydney to Dunmore, 31 December 1788, C.O. 23/28/67; Grenville to Dunmore, 17 September 1789, C.O. 23/29/159–61 (typescript in DFP, NRAS3253/Bundle 15).

109. Lawlor and Lawlor, Harbour Island, 79; Chalmers to the Assembly Committee, 15 July 1798, C.O. 23/31/102.

110. [Wylly], Short Account, 24; Cashin, King’s Ranger, 179. By purchasing properties such as Hog Island, Dunmore eventually acquired approximately ten thousand acres: Bahama Gazette, 20–24 May 1791; Craton, “Loyalists Mainly to Themselves,” 50; Lawlor and Lawlor, Harbour Island, 74. Dunmore had previously denied grants to one of these men, Josiah Tatnall: Dunmore to [Nepean], 4 March 1788, C.O. 23/27/113.

111. Chalmers to the Assembly Committee, 14 January 1793, C.O. 23/31/24. See also Duffy, “French Revolution,” 83; Craton, History of the Bahamas, 175; Craton and Saunders, Islanders, 1:202. On the French Revolutionary War in the Caribbean and Bahamas, see Duffy, Soldiers, Sugar, and Seapower; Craton and Saunders, Islanders, 1:207–8.

112. David Patrick Geggus, “Slavery, War, and Revolution in the Greater Caribbean,” in Gaspar and Geggus, eds., Turbulent Time, 36n43; Dunmore to Dundas, 11 April 1792, C.O. 23/31/109, quoted in Craton and Saunders, Islanders, 1:207; Chalmers to the Assembly Committee, 14 January 1793, C.O. 23/31/24. See also Johnson, Race Relations, 4; Edward L. Cox, “The British Caribbean in the Age of Revolution,” in Gould and Onuf, eds., Empire and Nation, 280–82.

113. Dunmore to Hawkesbury, 2 January 1794, C.O. 23/15/313; Geggus, Slavery; Geggus, “Slavery, War, and Revolution,” 47; Craton and Saunders, Islanders, 1:208.

114. Prince Augustus to Thomas Erskine, 30 July 1798, copy, and letters of engagement, 21 March 1793, “Chronicles of the Dunmore Branch of the Atholl and Tullibardine Families,” DFP, RH4/103/1. (N.B.: This section begins immediately following Bundle 6 on the microfilm reel but is unmarked; its contents, when compared to the calendar of papers at the NRS, suggest that it is Bundle 28. The pagination in this section is irregular, so it is best to navigate by the year in the top left corner of each page.)

115. Prince Augustus to Augusta Murray, 2 August 1793, Prince Augustus to Augusta Murray, [August] 1793, Prince Augustus to Lady Dunmore, 28 February 1794, “Dunmore Papers,” DFP, RH4/103/1, item E5, E6, E17 (hereafter “Dunmore Papers”). For Lady Dunmore’s testimony, see Privy Council Minutes, 27, 28 January 1794, George III, Later Correspondence, 2:155–61, 160 (quote).

116. Privy Council Minutes, 27, 28 January 1794, George III, Later Correspondence, 2:157, 158, 162, 164, 166, 167. Augustus D’Esté wrote the earliest known personal account of multiple sclerosis: K. D. Reynolds, “D’Este, Sir Augustus Frederick (1794–1848),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Online, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/7556. The name D’Esté reflected the House of Hanover’s descent “from Azzo, Marquess of Esté, who married the Guelph heiress in the eleventh century”: George III, Later Correspondence, 2:150n2. There is a 1799 miniature portrait of a boy believed to be Augustus Frederick D’Esté by Richard Cosway now owned by the Victoria and Albert Museum in London: http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O75276/unknown-boy-perhaps-sir-frederick-miniature-cosway-richard-ra/.

117. Royal Wedding; Privy Council Minutes, 27, 28 January 1794, George III, Later Correspondence, 2:159. For the blackmailing, see Lady Dunmore to Augusta Emma D’Esté (granddaughter), 19 November 1817, “Dunmore Papers,” item E49.

118. George III to Dundas, 28 January 1794, Stephen Cottrell to Dundas, 1 March 1794, “Decree of the Arches Court of Canterbury,” 23 July 1794, George III, Later Correspondence, 2:174, 181, 169–73; Gillen, Royal Duke, 77, 87–88.

119. Lady Stafford to George III, 7 February 1794, George III, Later Correspondence, 2:175–76; Lady Stafford to Lord Gower, quoted in Gillen, Royal Duke, 81. For the portrait, see Barbara Luck, “Seeing Double: Colonial Williamsburg’s Two Miniature Portraits of Lord Dunmore,” Interpreter 27 (Spring 2006): 8–10, 10n6.

120. London Gazette, 11–14 February 1797, 145; Riley, Homeward Bound, 188. See also Chalmers to the Assembly Committee, 9 July 1796, C.O. 23/31/73–76.

122. Portland to Dunmore, 8 July 1796, Dunmore Papers (Swem), box 3, folder 10. Portland told Forbes that in order to prevent “enormous and unnecessary” expenditures in the future, the Home Office would be monitoring governors more carefully: “Extract of Letter,” 9 July 1796, State of the Nation, 2:384; Wilkinson, Duke of Portland, viii–ix.

123. Forbes quoted in Craton, History of the Bahamas, 180. For a portrait of Rebecca Dumaresq, see Jones, Loyalists of Massachusetts, plate 18 (opposite 123).

124. Inhabitants of Crooked Island to Dunmore, 10 February 1797, “Disinterested friend” to Dunmore, 24 February 1797, Dunmore Papers (Swem), box 3, folder 110, 111.

125. Dunmore to Pitt, 11 October 1797, 8 September 1797, 26 November 1797, Pitt Papers, 30/8/131/105, 103–4, 107.

126. Portland to Dunmore, 5 August 1797, Dunmore Papers (Swem), box 3, folder 112.

127. Dunmore to Pitt, 25 April 1799, Pitt Papers, 30/8/131/101. Dunmore’s eldest son, George Murray, Viscount Fincastle (the future fifth earl), was also deeply in debt at this time and, he wrote, every day “tormented with applications for payment” from lenders in London: Fincastle to Thomas Jack, 9 February 1796, Dunmore Papers (Swem), box 3, folder 106.

128. Brown, Good Americans, 223–24. For other examples not discussed above, see the cases of Maurice Morgann in Brown, Moral Capital, 216, and Lord Sheffield in Mackesy, War for America, 38.

130. Firth, Case of Augustus D’Esté, 15. Reverend Charles Inglis is quoted in Brown, Good Americans, 224.

Conclusion, 1796–1809

1. Prince Augustus to Lady Augusta, 8 April 1796, “Dunmore Papers,” DFP, RH4/103/1, item E15; A[ugustus] F[rederick] to [Dunmore], 29 September 1799, Dunmore Papers (Swem), box 3, folder 114. The request was for the British certificate, as there was no certification of the Roman wedding: Gillen, Royal Duke, 106–7, 109–10.

2. Wright, William Augustus Bowles, 142, 151, 156; Lady Augusta to Prince of Wales, 9 May 1802, George, Prince of Wales, Correspondence, 4:275–78. Jane Austen is quoted in Hasted, Unsuccessful Ladies, 205. On the rumors of infidelity and the financial tangle, see Gillen, Royal Duke, 130–37.

3. Jack Murray to Unknown, 28 October 1803, quoted in Firth, Case of Augustus D’Esté, 4–5. See also Gillen, Royal Duke, 135–36, 256n326.

4. Lady Augusta to Dunmore, n.d., George, Prince of Wales, Correspondence, 4:278–79n1. See also additional letters from Lady Augusta in 4:35–36n1.

5. Deposition of Sir William Hillary, 15 July 1845, “Dunmore Papers,” item E20; Gillen, Royal Duke, 136–38; Firth, Case of Augustus D’Esté, 3; Reynolds, “D’Este.”

6. Gillen, Royal Duke, 138–42, 202 (quote); Hasted, Unsuccessful Ladies, 208. For descriptions of Ramsgate during this period, see Saville, Balnea, 38–41; Companion to the Watering and Bathing Places of England, 117–20; Hunter, Short Description.

8. For “Pappy,” see the letter from Augusta to her brother Alexander dated 25 October 1803, quoted in Gillen, Royal Duke, 135. Colonial Williamsburg owns both miniatures; see Barbara Luck, “Seeing Double: Colonial Williamsburg’s Two Miniature Portraits of Lord Dunmore,” Interpreter 27 (Spring 2006): 8–10.

A Note on Method

1. This paragraph is informed by Bannister and Riordan, eds., Loyal Atlantic; Greene and Morgan, eds., Atlantic History; Gould, “Entangled Histories”; Canizares-Esguerra and Seeman, eds., Atlantic in Global History; “Beyond the Atlantic” (William and Mary Quarterly forum); Elliott, Empires; Wilson, ed., New Imperial History; Daunton and Halpern, eds., Empire and Others; Canny, “Writing Atlantic History”; John Brewer, “The Eighteenth-Century British State: Contexts and Issues,” and Kathleen Wilson, “Empire of Virtue: The Imperial Project and Hanoverian Culture c. 1720–1785,” both in Stone, ed., Imperial State, chs. 3, 6; Bailyn and Morgan, eds., Strangers within the Realm; and Greene, Peripheries and Center. I am also indebted to Bernard Bailyn and the members of the 2008 International Seminar on the History of the Atlantic World at Harvard University for their perspectives on this topic.

2. Notable examples of biographical imperial history are Rothschild, Inner Life of Empires; Colley, Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh; Fisher, First Indian Author.

4. Lepore, “Historians Who Love Too Much,” 141. When the literary scholar Paula Backscheider observes that the biographer’s job is to get “to the person beneath, the core of the human being,” she has a particularly subject-centric brand of biography in mind: Reflections on Biography, xvi. See also Robert Skidelsky, “Only to Connect: Biography and Truth,” in Homberger and Charmley, eds., Troubled Face, 1–16.

9. Placing an elite figure at the center of a biographical history is potentially problematic, especially at a time when scholars have been so assiduous in reconstructing the lives of the once obscure. The work of Cassandra Pybus, Vincent Caretta, and others has challenged the assumption among Anglophone scholars that the records cannot support biographies of the faintly documented; see, e.g., Pybus, “Billy Blue”; Carretta, Equiano.

Notes

Abbreviations

Introduction

ONE. Family Politics, 1745–1770

TWO. The Absence of Empire, 1770–1773

THREE. Promised Land, 1773–1774

FOUR. A Refugee’s Revolution, 1775–1781

FIVE. Abiding Ambitions, 1781–1796

Conclusion, 1796–1809

A Note on Method

AA	[Peter Force], ed. American Archives. 4th ser., vols. 1, 3, 4. Washington, D.C.: M. St. Clair Clarke and Peter Force, 1837, 1840, 1843
A.O.	Great Britain, Audit Office Papers, Records of the American Loyalist Claims Commission, 1776–1831
C.O.	Great Britain, Colonial Office Papers
DC	“Dunmore Correspondence, 1771–1778,” Special Collections, John D. Rockefeller Jr. Library, Williamsburg, Va.
DFP	Dunmore Family Papers, National Records of Scotland, Edinburgh
DHDW	Reuben Gold Thwaites and Louise Phelps Kellogg, eds. Documentary History of Dunmore’s War, 1774. Madison: Wisconsin Historical Society, 1905
Documents Relative	E. B. O’Callaghan, ed. Documents Relative to the Colonial History of the State of New-York. Vol. 8. Albany: Weed, Parsons, 1857
HNP	Hamond Naval Papers, Accession #680, Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia, Charlottesville
LPCC	Cadwallader Colden. Letters and Papers of Cadwallader Colden, vols. 7, 9. Collections of the New-York Historical Society 56, 68 (1923, 1937)
NDAR	William Bell Clark et al., eds. Naval Documents of the American Revolution. Vols. 1–8. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1964–80
NRAS	National Register of Archives for Scotland
NRS	National Records of Scotland
PGWC	George Washington. The Papers of George Washington, Colonial Series. Vols. 8–10. Edited by W. W. Abbot et al. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993–95
PGWR	George Washington. The Papers of George Washington, Revolutionary War Series. Vols. 1–15. Edited by W. W. Abbot et al. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1985–2006
PWJ	William Johnson. The Papers of Sir William Johnson. Vols. 7, 8, 12, 13. Edited by Milton Hamilton. Albany: University of the State of New York, Division of Archives and History, 1931–62
RV	William J. Van Schreeven and Robert L. Scribner, eds. Revolutionary Virginia: The Road to Independence. Vols. 1–7. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1973–83
VG	Virginia Gazette (with editor information)