In the early fall of 1774, Abigail Adams informed John that a Boston “conspiracy of the Negroes” had failed. This was not the usual conspiracy of revolt. Adams was referring to the presentation of two petitions by Boston’s black leaders to General Thomas Gage, the British commander-in-chief in America, “telling him that they would fight for him provided he would arm them and engage to liberate them if he conquered” (Adams Family 1:161).
This was not news that a reader could find in the Boston newspapers. Although the colonial press had not been adverse to printing stories that engaged colonial fear of slave uprising, such stories and others related to slave agency became less common as the Revolution approached. James Madison, writing to his best friend, William Bradford Jr. of Philadelphia, about a 1774 incident in which a group of Virginia slaves had met to select a leader in readiness for British liberation, cautioned, “It is prudent such things should be concealed as well as suppressed” (Madison 1:130)—clearly not a casual warning to Bradford as son of the Pennsylvania Journal’s publisher. John Dunlap of the Pennsylvania Packet, introducing a letter from Williamsburg, noted: “The letter goes on farther, and relates a great deal about the Negroes in South Carolina; but we think it prudent to suppress the account. It may be necessary, however, to mention to our readers, that we have entirely overcome that body, in the aforesaid quarter, and reduced them to their former submission” (PP 12/25/75). Both by formal action in colonial legislatures and by informal self-censorship in the colonial press, patriots sought to mute the news of slave insurrection lest the contagion of liberty be misinterpreted by bondsmen and women as having something to do with them. The Georgia Gazette did provide an account of the St. Andrew Parish Revolt, but likely only because it could relate that its leader and a compatriot had been captured and executed, both burned alive (GG 12/7/74).
But by 1775, even the ongoing use of the metaphor of slavery did not seem able to quell the dangers of its reality. If there was an official silence on the subject, it only could have been an effort to avoid attention to the nightmare of the American Revolution—that American slaves would take up arms against white colonists. A Georgia delegate to the Continental Congress had no rosy view that the slaves would stand by their owners if the British made an offer of freedom. He predicted to John Adams that it would take just two weeks for the British to take Georgia and South Carolina once slaves began to flock to the British standard (Works 2:458). Madison shared the view: “It is imagined our Governor has been tampering with the Slaves & that he has it in contemplation to make great Use of them in case of a civil war in this province. To say the truth, that is the only part in which this Colony is vulnerable; & if we should be subdued, we shall fall like Achilles by the hand of one that knows that secret” (Madison 1:153).
In 1775, in the House of Commons, Edmund Burke proposed a general emancipation of American slaves. The proposal failed, but it only forwarded the long-held colonial attitude, as represented by Captain Wilson’s comment the previous decade in Boston, that the British would unleash American slaves on their masters in case of rebellion. It was clearly an innuendo that the British found useful and periodically invoked. General Gage panicked South Carolina into virtual military rule when South Carolinians interpreted a casual remark (at least, an ostensibly casual remark) as a veiled threat that the British intended to enlist black slaves (J. R. Alden).
In the face of patriot preference for suppressed accounts of slave revolts, rumor flourished. In April of 1775, word swept into the Connecticut town of Killingly that former slaves were actually on the march, leading residents to post sentinels and boil kettles of water in preparation for battle (Sibley’s 11:438). More typical were the responses of Edenton and New Bern, North Carolina, where new committees were authorized to “patrol and search the Negroes Houses” for arms and ammunition (Frey, Water 59). South Carolina could call on its already established Patrol Act, in existence since 1737, stiffened in 1740 in the wake of the Stono uprising, with further calls for stronger enforcement in 1766 and 1773 (G. Wood 276–77). Meantime, the discovery of slave plots challenged white hegemony as never before. An insurrectionary plot in the heavily slave-populated Wilmington, North Carolina, was crushed by patrols whose members arrested, shot, whipped, and cut suspected conspirators. In Charleston, after the discovery of a plot thought to be connected to the arrival of the British, South Carolinian Henry Laurens, president of the First Provincial Congress, ordered patrols of the city and established a special committee to investigate slave insurrections. Under the authority of the Provincial Congress, the alleged Charleston leader, a free black man, Thomas Jeremiah, was convicted of “intended sedition,” hanged and burned to death in Charleston. The execution did not deter a later group of South Carolina slaves, including several black preachers who included two women, to mount a countywide plan of death to whites. George, one of its leaders, was hunted down and hanged. In Wilmington, North Carolina, a slave uprising was discovered hours before it was to go into effect over three counties (Frey, Water 56–62). Compared to earlier years when the Boston Evening-Post and other newspapers had published accounts of such events, the patriot newspapers were more silent than not.
By 1775, the question of slavery was becoming less a metaphor for the treatment of American colonists at British hands than a military problem with the American Revolution in the balance. The British, who for years had been cautious about openly calling on the support of the slaves without offending the considerable number of their own supporters who were slave owners, were pressing their campaign of innuendo. Increasingly, southerners saw the British “tampering” in slave unrest. Local political differences were shunted aside in a cooperative white response to the “instigated Insurrections,” the code phrase for British involvement.
The final turn on the wheel came when the British governor of Virginia, Lord Dunmore, ignoring British hesitancy, issued a proclamation that promised freedom to all slaves who would fight for the British cause. Long awaiting such a call, hundreds of Virginia slaves threaded their way through the Virginia patrols to join Dunmore’s fleet (Frey, “Between” 378). The British caution turned out to be well founded; perhaps no other single event could have driven Virginians so quickly and so absolutely into patriot arms. Edward Rutledge reported to the Continental Congress that the Dunmore proclamation had done more “to work an eternal separation between Great Britain and the colonies than any other expedient which could possibly have been thought of” (D. Robinson 103).
Although silence had been the press code of the day for many of the previous slave insurrections, the scope of the Dunmore Proclamation not only made it impossible to ignore but presented to the radicals a grand opportunity to promote united opposition to Great Britain by giving example to the metaphor of slavery. News of the event, coming from the mouths of the aggrieved Virginians, conveyed Virginians’ views of betrayal. In the resulting call to race solidarity, colonial newspapers played a pivotal role by extending the Virginian view of the episode across the colonies. The Dunmore chapter, climaxing the suspicions set in place by the Somerset decision and the antislavery discourse, seemed proof of the various warnings implicit in the patriot metaphor of slavery. Here was evidence that the British would break any compact—including, in the Virginians’ view, the sacred one between master and slave. Could any further evidence be needed, for any colony, that Great Britain was not to be trusted?
From the beginning, Virginia Whigs should have viewed the last royal governor of Virginia with some suspicion. John Murray, earl of Dunmore, was a Scottish peer at a time when Scots in America were perceived as pro-Tory. Dunmore was not only Scottish but a descendant of the House of Stuart. His father, William Murray, participated in the 1745 rebellion that led to the ignominious defeat at the Battle of Culloden and retained his title only after an official pardon. Dunmore was raised in Scotland in the years after the defeat and, suffused in this atmosphere of a cause permanently lost, became one of the sixteen representative peers of Scotland to sit in the British Parliament as part of efforts to unify the nation.
In his role as a Scottish representative, Dunmore spent the nine years before his appointment to the American colonies in London, mixing with the eminent men of the day. His life in London, any more than his Scottish background, gave him little in common with the New Yorkers, then Virginians, whom he was appointed to govern. His own history was a minority history, a history of a lost cause. He was a man who saw that position was not necessarily ordained, and it is not surprising that he did not take as sacred the Virginian view that their society was immutable and unchanging (Caley; Selby 15).
The event that challenged the Virginian view of the world occurred in November of 1775 when Dunmore issued a proclamation offering freedom to slaves who would leave their patriot masters and join the British forces. The cries of anguish, disbelief, and anger spilled immediately onto the pages of the three Virginia newspapers (all called the Virginia Gazette, making identification by publisher important). In the thousands of words that sprang from the pages of the Virginia press, Dunmore was accused of hypocrisy, political machinations, indeed, the abandonment of all principles. Slaves were ominously warned to return to their “homes”—that is, the plantations—or suffer assured death upon capture.
The common wellspring for this flood of emotion was the challenge posed to Virginians’ sense of themselves as not only kind, but, most important, necessary masters of their slaves. The Dunmore Proclamation forced Virginians to face the possibility that the only necessity that called them to be masters was not the needs of the slave but their own need of definition. Unlike the Georgia delegate’s assessment to John Adams, the Virginians seemed genuinely surprised at the flight of their slaves, giving some indication of the depths of the society’s paternalism. The slaves who escaped to join Dunmore were, as in the advertisements, “runaways,” still ungrateful for the kind care of their masters, who told them to return “home” if they knew what was best for them. The Virginians viewed the slaves as having been “carried off,” men and women unable to act on their own behalf. The real anger, however, was reserved for Dunmore, the man who had broken faith with the loyalty of white to white. Dunmore, the representative of the British crown, was the traitor, the “Lord Kidnapper” of John Leacock’s propaganda play.
The sense of betrayal that marked so much of the Virginian attack on Dunmore may be in part explained by Dunmore’s original popularity and the trust Virginians placed in him. Dunmore arrived in the American colonies in 1770 as governor of New York. In an episode redolent of the events that led to the Peter Zenger decision, Dunmore, like William Cosby, alienated colonial leadership by demanding full salary for the period before he had actually taken up his colonial gubernatorial duties. But the New York unpleasantness was behind him when, vigorous and under forty, Dunmore took on the governorship of the southern colony. His popularity was increased when he named his fifth child Virginia; his own name was given to the new counties of Dunmore and Fincastle; and his physical bravery was demonstrated in his personal leadership of the campaign against the Shawnee Indians in 1774—Lord Dunmore’s War (Caley).
It has been suggested that Dunmore’s attack on the Indians was not so much to please the Virginian thirst for new lands as to satisfy his own land hunger, already demonstrated when he purchased fifty thousand acres in New York. The campaign against the Shawnees promised additional holdings for land speculation and was conducted despite a British policy that discouraged further internal developments. By the time of his proclamation, Dunmore had shown himself to be a man who had little sense of allegiance either to the American colonies or to the policies of the British government. Dunmore’s popularity at the time of Lord Dunmore’s War had come about more by accident than design. He was not the man to nurture the considerable Virginia loyalism that continued even in face of British policies that kept Virginians in debt to British merchants and held back Virginian hopes of expansion. Indeed, some of Dunmore’s actions seem aimed at the destruction of British loyalism. After receiving months of support from Norfolk merchants, for example, he decided to fire on Norfolk’s patriot-controlled warehouses that had been used to ambush British ships. In retaliation, patriots had an excuse to set fire to the town that had served as Dunmore’s loyalist stronghold. Norfolk’s resulting decimation was blamed entirely on Dunmore, despite the patriot torch, and became another rallying cry for separation from Great Britain (Harrell 13–15; Selby 81–84).
The Virginians’ honeymoon with their new governor was intense but relatively short. In 1773 Dunmore dissolved the House of Burgesses for proposing a committee of correspondence on colonial grievances. The following year he dissolved the House again when the burgesses set aside a day for fasting and mourning in connection with the Boston Port Bill. But Virginian resentment came to the boiling point when the governor, noting the extent of the enlargement of the Virginia militia, ordered the removal of the gunpowder from the public magazine in Williamsburg and had it transported to a ship on the James River. Dunmore agreed to pay for the powder after an armed party under the leadership of Patrick Henry demanded restitution. However, the removal of the gunpowder produced months of controversy and gave Dunmore time to return his family to England and take up residence himself on a British man-of-war on the York River. Joined by other ships, some of them carrying Virginians who defined themselves as loyalists, Dunmore’s fleet provisioned itself by conducting a guerrilla war on the plantations that lined the Virginia shores.
Virginians complained, and perhaps with some justice, that Dunmore had taken to the man-of-war precipitously. Yet his action is consistent in terms of his family’s nationalism. By choosing to live outside Virginian society, Dunmore was replaying his Scottish history. He became the rebel again, leading a marine force and choosing confrontation at his will. The Virginian Whigs were stripped of the romantic lead and were instead forced into the role of the lumbering defenders of the status quo. If the Virginia response to Lord Dunmore has never taken hold of the American popular imagination in the same way as the Battle of Bunker Hill or the Boston Tea Party, it is because Dunmore reserved for himself the role of challenger of authority, as if he were once again playing out the rebellion of 1745 on the inlet coastal ways of Virginia instead of on the heather and hills of the Scottish highlands.
On November 17, 1775, Dunmore, still on shipboard, climaxed the months of controversy by declaring martial law in a proclamation that offered freedom to the slaves and indentured servants “appertaining to rebels” who would “repair to his Majesty’s standard” (Force 4:1103–4). The announcement was not a surprise. Eight months before he had threatened such a proclamation when Virginians opposed the confiscation of the gunpowder. He had been building his army of black conscripts as part of his raids on the Virginia plantations.
By the time of the announcement, Virginians had established a precautionary network of slave patrols. Slaves were allowed to move about the countryside only when vitally necessary and then only with passes. Despite such surveillance, perhaps as many as a thousand slaves escaped the dragnet to join Dunmore (Frey, “Between” 378). Virginians insisted the slaves had been “seduced” or kidnapped (Force 4:1385). Impressment was certainly a British tradition, but given the insurrectionary climate of the period, it seems probable that the majority of Dunmore’s black regiment was composed of men who voluntarily joined him. Dunmore certainly reported the ex-slaves were “flocking to him” and Virginians expressed fear that indeed they were (VG-Purdie 1/26/76).
Dunmore assembled a regiment of former slaves on the basis of the rumored announcement. Dunmore issued the proclamation shortly after his force had been prevented from burning Hampton by the sharpshooting skills of Virginia riflemen, who simply picked off the British sailors as the ships tried to get close to shore. He chose to publish the proclamation a week later following a small military success when his force had routed a detachment of colonial militia at Kemp’s Landing near the Elizabeth River (Selby 64).
It was a particularly humiliating defeat for the Virginians, all of whom fled before the first shot even though it was Dunmore’s regiment that was taken by surprise (Harrell 39). One of the militia commanders, Colonel Joseph Hutchings, was among those fleeing into the surrounding woods. He was followed by a member of the regiment who, in, what must have been a dramatic moment, took his former master into British custody (Force 4:292; Caley 647).
The Virginians avenged their honor a month later at a fort at Great Bridge, near Norfolk, which the Virginians occupied and surrounded in wait for Dunmore and his troops to appear. For several days the Virginians remained concealed around the causeway that led to the fort. Finally, the British, apparently misinformed about strength of the militia, chose to attack. In the dawn of December 9, a detachment of British soldiers, including members of the black regiment, crossed the causeway with bayonets fixed. But exposed to the unerring Virginia fire and trapped by the narrow causeway, the British lost sixty-one men, including their captain. One Virginian was slightly wounded. Dunmore hurriedly retreated to Norfolk and thence to his ships and never faced the Virginians on land again (Selby 70–73).
In the end, however, it was the ravages of smallpox that most defeated Dunmore and his ambitions for the black regiment. The close quarters of the ships and the lack of inoculation among his black troops encouraged the spread of the disease. In June 1776, the flotilla landed and occupied Gwynn’s Island in the Chesapeake in an effort to restore health to the troops by quarantining the ill. But soon attacked by Virginia fire and left with only a handful of black and white troops, Dunmore finally abandoned his dead on the island, burned ships he could no longer man, and dispersed in various directions the much-dwindled “pestilential fleet.”
Dunmore rejoined his wife and children in England but returned to the colonies in 1781 when he expected to resume his governorship in the wake of Cornwallis’s victories. After the surrender at Yorktown, Dunmore turned his attention to arming loyalist blacks for the purpose of seizing New Orleans and West Florida as a haven for all British loyalists—Dunmore again putting himself in the role of the rebel leader. The plan never materialized, but it has been speculated that Dunmore accepted the post of the governor of the Bahamas in 1787 as a power base to continue his plan to establish a loyalist colony on the North American continent, again utilizing black troops. He was, however, abruptly recalled from his Bahamian post in 1796, a result of both his turbulent stewardship and the secret marriage of his daughter to the king’s son, which the king quickly had annulled (Wright 379).
Dunmore died at age seventy-seven, in sedate retirement at the English seaside resort of Ramsgate. Patriot predictions of ministerial punishments because of his actions in Virginia never came about. But neither was Dunmore ever to fulfill his ambitions for glorious leadership by sparking in the British a coordinated plan that would have provided American slaves a stake in maintaining British America.
Modern historians conclude that the British government’s attitudes toward slavery were not any different from those held by the American colonists (Quarles, Negro 156–57; D. Davis 278; Selby 67). Dunmore’s actions are explained in terms of a rash and impulsive personality, because the proclamation excluded slaves owned by loyalists and Dunmore himself was a slave owner. While Dunmore and the British command considered emancipation of the rebel slaves in military rather than in humanitarian terms, the emphasis of historians has been on the failure of the British to live up to the liberal promise of the proclamation, rather than taking into account that Dunmore armed the escaped slaves, provided them with uniforms, and allowed them the prestige and history of a regiment with the opportunity to face their Virginia oppressors as equals.
The Virginians’ response to Dunmore’s actions was the first time the Virginian view of slavery had been expressed in the public prints. Despite the private dilemmas experienced by many Virginia leaders (Morgan, American), only Arthur Lee had publicly denounced slavery, seven years before in Rind’s Virginia Gazette, although in ways that hardly promoted abolition: “They [slaves] depend on their tyrants for what they are pleased to grant them, property, or life, or honors, to which they aspire not by virtue, but by cunning, servility and wickedness, from which they soon become habitually vicious, weak and insensitive” (VG-Rind 3/3/68). The young Lee, like Benjamin Rush, fresh from his studies in Edinburgh, was not permitted the opportunity of completing the essay, and his considerable writing skills were spent as the representative of the American cause in Great Britain without further reference to slavery (Riggs).
In this, then, the first widespread, public representation of the Virginian view, the theme that spread from the Virginia hub across the colonies thanks to the system of exchange newspapers was betrayal, specifically the betrayal of Dunmore as a representative of Great Britain to white colonists. The theme dovetailed easily with what the patriot propagandists had been promulgating as Great Britain’s view toward the colonies. As Lord Dunmore had betrayed the men and women under his charge, the British were betraying the colonies as a whole.
Virginian newspapers were unsurprisingly similar in their response to the crisis. In examining seventy-three separate items taken from the three Virginia Gazettes in connection with the episode, several themes emerge. However, almost half of the items deal with betrayal. Dunmore and other whites sympathetic with his cause were categorized as evil, traitorous, hypocritical, and themselves deserving the status of slaves. A second group of responses (25 percent) described blacks and slaves in relatively neutral terms but a third group (15 percent) characterized blacks and slaves as a threat to whites and portrayed them as thieves, potters, and murderers. A small but intense group of items (10 percent) gives some indication of the conflicted nature of the Virginian attitudes. Here slaves and blacks were characterized as being threats to themselves, easily taken advantage of, misguided, gullible, and fearful. Slaves were viewed as basically loyal to Virginian masters if outsiders would simply leave them alone. Just two percent of the items described blacks and slaves in positive terms.
Betrayal was clearly sounded with the response to the Proclamation, as prefaced by Purdue’s Virginia Gazette: “Here you have a proclamation that will at once show the baseness of lord Dunmore’s heart, his malice and treachery against the people, who were once under this government and his officious violation of all law, justice and humanity; not to mention his arrogating to himself a power which neither he can assume, nor any power upon earth intend, etc. Not in the legions of horrid hell, can a devil more damned that D......E” (VG-Purdie 12/24/75).
The final three lines are Macduff’s lines in Act IV, Scene III of Macbeth, in which Dunmore’s initials replace the name of Macbeth—an interesting literary comparison.
The criticism of Dunmore often took the form of angry sarcasm, as in the report of the seizure of three slaves captured on their way to join the Dunmore fleet. The anger appears directed not so much at the escaping slaves as at Dunmore for accepting such “shoe blacks” into his service. “It is to be hoped, however, that General Lee, so soon as he finds it convenient, will take care to provide our governor with a more suitable household, agreeable to his high-birth, and distinguished merit” (VG-Purdie 2/17/75). Dunmore was not sole representative of British betrayal. The depredations along the Virginia coast by a Captain Squires of the British sloop Otter in late summer produced the sarcastic outburst: “A very pretty occupation for the captain of one of his majesty’s ships of war!” (VG-Purdie 9/15/75). Squires came in for a more underlined sarcasm a few days later. The movement of the sloop suggested Squires was up to “old trade” —“negro-catching, pillaging farms and plantations of their sock, and other illustrious actions highly becoming a squire in the king’s navy” (VG-Purdie 9/22/75).
Concomitant with these expressions of outrage was the idea that such betrayal was tantamount to the surrender of white class standing to the status of the blacks. Dunmore was quickly characterized as “king of the blacks, alias pirates” (VG-Pickney 11//9/75). In one account British prisoners were grouped as “Jack Dunmore’s hopeful gang, consisting of soldiers, sailors and negroes” (VG-Pickney 1/6/75). Members of a British raiding party were reported to have had their faces “blacked like Negroes, whose dear companions they are” (VG-Pickney 11/30/75). This concern with loss of status was most clearly represented in accounts of the battle of Great Neck, published as “extracts of letters” in the three newspapers. “We have taken up some of the worst of the tories and coupled them to a negro with handcuffs,” according to one letter (VG-Pickney 12/16/75). Readers of the Virginia press were not left in doubt that this coupling of black and white prisoners was a symbolic gesture meant to insult the British. In a letter published in Purdie’s newspaper, Colonel William Woodford, the commander of the Virginia troops, informed Edmund Pendleton, president of the General Convention, “I ordered him coupled to one of his black brother soldiers, with a pair of handcuffs, which is the resolution I have taken shall be the fate of all those cattle, till I am farther instructed by your Honorable House” (VG-Purdie 12/15/75). In another letter sounding the same theme, Woodford referred to the British troops as the “black and white slaves” (VG-Purdie 12/15/75).
While the Virginians condemned Lord Dunmore and the British ministry for jeopardizing the status of whites by permitting blacks to serve the king, the published reports of the battle at Great Neck indicated that not all the British were tarred with the same brush. Woodford ordered the leader of the British forces, killed early in the battle, to be buried “with all the honors due him” (VG-Dixon and Hunter 12/6/75). Generous in victory, Virginians treated white prisoners, especially officers, with humanity, as if Virginians were showing by example the benefits of the white brotherhood.
Next to this theme of betrayal was the use of items in which slaves are described in relatively neutral terms, although, obviously, such a classification does not mean that the accounts were intended as neutral or read as neutral. The Virginian practice of breaking down all black and white encounters into numerical accounting by race suggests the overriding concern of race in the culture. The Virginia press, therefore, included many items that used race as an organizing principle. “Our people took a small tender with five men, a woman, and two slaves, six swivels, seven muskets, some small arms, a sword, pistols, and other things” (VG-Purdie 10/17/75). When the Virginians regained Gwynn’s Island, they found “a large number of cannon, swivels, thirty black prisoners, and three tenders” (VG-Dixon and Hunter 7/13/76). One item, ostensibly neutral, undoubtedly raised different feelings in many Virginia breasts. In a captured letter from Dunmore to the British command, Virginia readers learned, in Dunmore’s own words, of his plans for the black regiment. “You may observe by my proclamation that I offer freedom to the slaves of all rebels that join me, in consequence of which there are between 2 and 300 already come in; and those I form into a corps as fast as they come in, giving them white officers, and non-commissioned officers in proportion” (VG-Purdie 1/26/76).
Making “examples of” escaped slaves played a prominent role in the Virginia response. Several of the items are concerned with the consequences to blacks who were seized on their way to join the British as in an account of nine blacks, including two women, who were fired upon as they put ashore near Norfolk. “Two of the fellows are wounded, and it is expected the rest will soon be made example of” (VG-Dixon and Hunter 12/2/75). To be made an “example of” probably meant execution, as was made clear in another item in which slaves on their way to join Dunmore had been captured: “Two of the Negroes who mistook one of our armed vessels at Jamestown for a tender, and expressed their inclination to serve Lord Dunmore, are under sentence of death, and will be executed in a few days, as an example to others” (VG-Dixon and Hunter 4/13/76). Items in this category also include those that almost routinely reflect on slaves as thieves and “banditti.” One item that originated in Philadelphia (and reprinted only in Purdie) suggested that all blacks, slave and free, were only waiting for the opportunity to join the British: “Late last night, a gentlewoman, going along second Street, was insulted by a negro, near Christ Church; and upon her reprimanding him for his rude behavior, the fellow replied, ‘Stay your d-----d white bitch till lord Dunmore and his black regiment come, and then we will see who is to take the wall’” (VG-Purdie 12/29/75).
A sarcastic item in which blacks aboard the fleet were predicted to perform military exercises to the “martial tune of ‘Hungry Niger, parch’d Corn!’ and which from henceforward is to be styled by way of eminence, the BLACKBIRD MARCH” (VG-Purdie 3/22/76) indicated an uglier tone, coming at a time between the success of the battle of Great Neck and Dunmore’s continued depredations along the coast.
The fourth category in order of use identified slaves as gullible and needing Virginia masters to survive. Although few items appeared in this category, they included two essays written at the time of the proclamation. The first called upon slaves “not to be seduced from their duty to their masters by the treacherous and cruel tools of administration.” Dunmore and the British were not sincere in their offer, readers were told, for the British had insisted on a continuance of the slave trade in order to reap profits from the sale of tobacco. Moreover, if the British were to win they would immediately sell the blacks to the West Indies for profit; if blacks did enlist, they would be hanged if seized, and ran the risk of having their wives and children murdered, “cut off by our riflemen from the back country, who never wish to see a negro, and who will pour out their vengeance upon them whenever it is desired.” If masters had told their slaves these things “they would be contented with their situation, and expect a better condition in the next world” (VG-Purdie 11/17/75).
In a second essay the author similarly doubted Dunmore’s motives, suggesting Dunmore would either return the slaves to their owners, or, repeating a familiar theme, sell them in the West Indies. “Can it then be supposed that the Negroes will be better used by the English, who have always encouraged, and upheld this slavery, than by their present masters, who pity their condition, who, in general, to make it as easy and comfortable as possible, and would willingly, were it in their power, or were they permitted not only prevent any more Negroes from losing their freedom, but restore it to such as have already lost it” (VG-Dixon and Hunter 11/25/75). Five days later, the view that the slaves had been taken advantage of by false promises was expressed in Pickney’s Virginia Gazette. “Lord Dunmore’s cruel policy begins at length to be discovered by the blacks,” the piece began, contending that Dunmore was holding the former slaves in a new bondage. “But such is the barbarous policy of this cruel man, he keeps these unhappy creatures not only against their will, but intends to place them in the front of battle, to prevent them flying in case of engagement, which, from their utter ignorance of firearms, he knows they will do” (VG-Pickney 11/30/75).
Blacks as fearful was a characterization that appeared in an account of Great Bridge. “Captain Leslie, being unable to rally the Negroes, who could not stand the severe fire from hundreds of marksmen, retreated into the fort, and that night abandoned it” (VG-Pickney 12/30/75). Blacks as unsuspecting victims at the hands of Lord Dunmore was a theme sounded at the conclusion of the episode when the Virginia troops took over Gwynn’s Island, at which time “many poor Negroes were found on the island dying of the putrid fever. Dunmore’s neglect of those poor creatures, suffering numbers of them to perish for want to common necessaries and the least assistance, one would think enough to discourage others from joining him” (VG-Dixon and Hunter 7/20/76).
The final grouping, in which blacks were defined in only positive ways, contains just two items: one in which a black pilot, simply defined as “a valuable Negro man” without any qualifications, was reported shot in an engagement with a British vessel (VG-Purdie 5/3/76). The second item was the characterization of Joseph Harris, a slave who had escaped from his Virginia owner to serve the British as a pilot. This appeared in a letter by a British sea captain who said that Harris was “too valuable” in his knowledge of the rivers not to be used by the British and, additionally, was “a very useful person.” As in the captured Dunmore letter, it should be noted that the publication of this was not to present the former slave in a generous light as much as it was to indicate that the British would stoop to the enlistment of a slave. The paragraph introducing the letter pointed out, with ironic emphasis, that the British considered Harris as “a proper person” to be employed in the king’s service (VG-Purdie 9/15/75).
Certainly, many of the themes that have come to be associated with paternalism were represented in the Lord Dunmore coverage, including the belief that the Virginia masters knew what was best for their bondspeople as well as the notion that slaves were basically loyal if their perceived gullibility was not taken advantage of. This view of essential attachment could seem to support the concept of black and white Virginians as composing a single family of shared traditions, work patterns, and family ties (Sobel), if family is defined to include many subordinate members. The Virginian response is in terms of family, if we consider family in a traditional patriarchal structure characterized by ownership and domination of family members. Virginians clearly expressed the view that masters had to be willing to use force to support the system.
Most of the published accounts of the Dunmore period fall into the first grouping that cluster around the theme of white male self-definition and the threat posed to that definition in the face of desertion by others of similar or upper classes. The large number of these stories compared to the other groups suggests that what Virginians feared most was the breaking of ranks among whites. Paternalism could not succeed as a mode of domination, the items indicate, if the dominant whites did not agree upon its principles.
The concern in maintaining the system already in place was so overriding that the Virginians allowed themselves no flexibility to bargain. Only one item suggested anything like a promise of freedom to the slave, an item in which the writer indicated that while the British had opposed the ending of the slave trade, the Virginians had worked to bring it to a close “and would restore freedom to those that had lost it” (VG-Dixon and Hunter 11/25/75). Otherwise, slaves were told to “return to their duty” and to “return home” or risk death. With the single exception of the item cited, Virginians refused to make any concessions, at least in the public prints. There was only the prediction that the escaped slave could expect worse treatment at the hands of the British than their former Virginia masters, not the promise of eventual emancipation; indeed, not even earned emancipation by serving the patriot side was promised. Even in the face of Dunmore’s offer, Virginians refused to consider any change in slave status. Trapped in a closed society, Virginians seemed unable to allow a change in status for the slave without challenging their own view of themselves.
It was a view that was to be promulgated throughout the American colonies by a press that relied almost exclusively on the Virginia newspapers for its news of the event. The propaganda press only had to use what was at hand to promote its agenda. The less ardent patriots had little choice but to use what was at hand. Inevitably, the Virginia reaction became the historical account of the event.
With twenty-eight uses each, the Pennsylvania Evening Post and the Pennsylvania Gazette had the highest utilization of the Virginia press items. The South-Carolina Gazette, whose curtain of silence had been long lowered on issues to do with slavery, used just one item. The Boston Gazette used twelve items, about the middle of the rankings. (Other newspaper use as follows: CJ 21; NYJ 21; PJ 20; CJ 13; PP 10; CC 9; PG 9; MG 9; EJ 8; PL 7; NM 7; CG 4; EG 4; NYG 3; GG 2.)
The range in the usage must be qualified by external factors. The first has to do with the unreliability of the colonial mail, particularly to and from the southern colonies. The Georgia Gazette, for example, did not receive the Virginia newspapers as promised: “A Gentleman immediately from Virginia, who brought the publick papers with him but left them in the country.” The gentleman from Virginia had a good memory for he supplied the Georgia paper with an accurate summary of the proclamation but without the invective that accompanied the Virginia publication (GG 1/3/76). The relative high percentage of use represented by the Philadelphia press has some obvious explanations, the most important one being that Philadelphia was the seat of the provisional government and the papers represented the wide sphere of interests of the convention. Nor can competition be ignored. Benjamin Towne’s attractive and well-printed Pennsylvania Evening Post was published three times a week, carried relatively light advertising, and thus had more space available than many other newspapers. In fact, the Post may have established a rather rigorous news standard for its competitors, as many of the Dunmore items that appeared in the Philadelphia papers had been published the day before in the Post. Moreover Towne’s paper carried a wider spectrum of news than its competitors, including the related news of Burke’s address to the House of Commons and the execution of Thomas Jeremiah in Charleston (PEP 7/27; 8/20/75).
The use of the Virginia press items by the Philadelphia papers does not appear related to a particular political pattern. In classic rendering, Towne is always drawn as a Tory sympathizer—“a clever printer without any apparent principles” (Mott 88), hardly the appropriate carrier for Virginia Whiggism. Nor was Franklin’s old paper, the Pennsylvania Gazette, now under the unhindered stewardship of David Hall, a propaganda organ. But William Bradford, proprietor of the Pennsylvania Journal (twenty items) was a Son of Liberty and a Presbyterian who, as mentioned, had little patience with antislavery. Holt’s New-York Journal (twenty-one items) was clearly part of the core patriot press. Holt was undoubtedly a Virginia sympathizer as a former Virginian, mayor of Williamsburg from 1750 to 1753. He was also a slave owner, and in a later period blamed his slave for the theft of a batch of lottery tickets that he likely stole himself (Walker 48). In Norfolk, a radical newspaper run by his adopted son, John Hunter Holt, was closed down by Dunmore, who called the closure a “public service” (Palsits 490).
The most frequently reprinted item, with twelve uses, was Dixon and Hunter’s December 2, 1775, item that had to do with the enlistment of blacks who were to wear “this inscription on their breasts—‘liberty to slaves’” and concludes, “As the rivers will henceforth be strictly watched, and every possible precaution taken, it is hoped others will be effectually prevented from joining those his Lordship has already collected.” The mention of slaves was incidental in an item used eleven times that was an account of the taking of a British tender (VG-Purdie 10/17/75). Also reprinted eleven times was the account of the battle of Great Bridge in which Edmund Pendleton is assured that “none of the blacks, etc., in the rear with Capt. Leslie, advanced farther than the bridge” (VG-Purdie 12/15/75).
The Boston Gazette supplemented its coverage of the Great Bridge attack outside of the Virginia press by publishing part of a letter from a Virginia correspondent, one that relayed the common perception of black ineptitude on the field of battle: “Blacks were found rather an encumbrance than a service to his lordship, destroying one another more than the enemy” (BG 1/15/76).
One item that had nine uses was the account, already mentioned, of a British captain’s depredations along the Virginia coast—“a very pretty occupation for the captain of one of his Majesty’s ships of war.” Another item that received a similar number of uses was an account of the widely held view, even to modern times, that Dunmore and the British sold all blacks who came to them. “Lord Dunmore intends shortly for the West Indies with his cargo of slaves, to make the most of them before his departure for England” (VG-Purdie 12/15/75).
All of the above items contain racial messages, as do all the accounts in some degree, even the numerical cordoning of black from white, that had to do with the Dunmore episode. But the use of a Virginia press item that first appeared on November 30, 1775, and reprinted eight times, gave readers outside Virginia a full-fledged example of Virginia paternalism. In this account, the writer asserted blacks were realizing that Lord Dunmore did not have their best interests in mind. The blacks were kept “digging entrenchments in wet ground,” and they could expect to be placed “in the front of battle, to prevent their flying in case of engagement, which, from their utter ignorance of firearms, he knows they will do.” The blacks are characterized as “unhappy creatures,” who are “kept against their will” (implicating, perhaps that they remained with their Virginia masters out of preference), frightened by guns and deluded by false promises (VG-Pickney 11/30/75), almost all the earmarks of the slave “Sambo” personality that was to appear so frequently in the antebellum period.
But the tone of this item is calm and reasonable. What the press outside Virginia did not represent to the same degree as the newspapers inside Virginia was the tone of fury that appeared in some of the Virginia items. For example, the text of the proclamation and the accompanying furious introductory paragraph that condemned Dunmore to the legions of hell were republished in just five newspapers outside Virginia: the Boston Gazette, the New-York Journal the Pennsylvania Journal, the Providence Gazette, and the Pennsylvania Evening Post (BG 12/25; NYJ 12/7; PJ 12/6; PG 12/23; PEP 12/5/75). The account of the landing of British troops on Gwynn’s Island that was celebrated by “a promiscuous ball which was opened we hear, by a certain spruce little gentleman with one of the black ladies” (VG-Purdie 5/31/76) was not used outside Virginia.
Nonetheless, the press outside Virginia generally tended to use the Virginia items in the same proportions as in the Virginia colony, as in the use of items in which the British are seen as betrayers. The exception is in the use of items where slaves and blacks were portrayed as a threat to whites as thieves, plotters, barbarians, and murderers. In the press outside Virginia, these items composed a significantly larger share, almost double, of the Dunmore coverage than they did in the Virginia papers (my count).
Taken together, the published reports suggest that the main concern of the Virginians was the abandonment by the British leadership of the Virginia value system. It is significant that none of the coverage was concerned with the economic loss the slaves represented, obviously less important to the planters, even as debt-ridden as they were, than the threat of a change of status between black and white. Instead, Lord Dunmore’s abandonment left Virginians without British support to carry the standard for their philosophy of enslavement, and much of the coverage was the articulation of values that had been part of Virginian life for more than 150 years.
The sense of the betrayal that Virginians experienced was double-sided. The loss of slaves could be explained on grounds of “gullibility,” but the Virginian sense of betrayal at the British could only be translated into anger at Great Britain, a view that was carried into the rest of the colonial press that had been primed for years by the Boston radicals. Outside Virginia, Dunmore’s action was likely to represent another example of a Mother Country rejecting established responsibilities in favor of privileging a subservient class. An essay first appearing in the Pennsylvania Journal and then in the Boston Gazette expressed the culmination of the Dunmore episode to the colonial sensibility: First, the writer charged, the British had instigated “the Indian savages to ravage our frontiers, and murder, after their inhuman manner, our defenceless wives and children.” Now, the writer asked, “Have not yet Negro slaves been incited to rebel against their masters and arms put into their hands to murder them?” (BG 3/25/76; PJ 2/26/76). Colonial readers, however, no strangers to finding large meaning in homely detail, would have noted the metaphor in another story that appeared during the period. A British soldier’s wife, employed to care for a sick woman, was found dead “with a little tender infant; with all the horrors of death in its face, sucking the dead mother’s breasts” (NYJ 3/2/75).
Even before the Dunmore episode was concluded, its reverberations had become part of the patriot call to arms. Certainly the event was reflected in the Declaration of Independence in the claim that the king “has excited domestic insurrections against us.” Its purpose as propaganda was extended from the colonial press into revolutionary theater and provides an example of how the Virginian view came to dominate revolutionary politics.
The Philadelphia artisan and Son of Liberty, John Leacock, devoted the fourth act in The Fall of British Tyranny; or, American Liberty Triumphant the First Campaign to Dunmore and is used here as an example of the spread of ideas articulated in Virginia press into the revolutionary culture, as well as the incorporation of racist ideas into patriot propaganda.
Published in Philadelphia in 1776, The Fall of British Tyranny is a chronicle play, presenting the early events of the Revolution with sweep and grandeur in what has been recognized as one of the most ambitious of the period (Silverman 310–13). In well-paced scenes, the play moves from the English Parliament to Boston; Lexington, Virginia; and Cambridge. Leacock gave his Tory players names considered telling for their roles. Lord Dunmore is thus “Lord Kidnapper,” Thomas Hutchinson is “Judas,” and the Earl of Bute appears under the title “Lord Paramount,” who opens the play by plotting the return of the Stuart dynasty—that favorite theme of the British Whigs.
Lord Dunmore appears in Act IV in action that is confined to his ship. The act opens with the arrival of a boatload of escaped slaves. They are greeted without enthusiasm by the ship’s boatswain and a sailor.
Sailor: Damn my eyes, Mr. Boatswain, but here’s a black flag of truce coming aboard.
Boatswain: Sure enough… where are they from?
Sailor: From hell, I suppose… for they’re as black as so many devils.
Boatswain: Very well—no matter—they’re recruits for the Kidnapper.
Sailor: We shall be all of a color by and by—damn me—
The boatswain disappears below deck to inform Dunmore of the volunteers, but he is stopped at Dunmore’s door by a servant because Dunmore is in bed with two women. The boatswain demands entrance, calling the servant a “pimping son of a bitch,” and muttering to himself that the “pimp guard” would be of better use as a ship lookout. Dunmore finally appears, in an amiable mood, laughing pleasantly as he tells the boatswain to bring the recruits on board. In a falsely humble manner, the boatswain suggests, “I think we have gallows-looking dogs enough on board already—the scrapings of Newgate, and the refuse of Tyburn, and when the wind blow aft, damn ’em, they stink like Polecats.” Dunmore laughs again, but the boatswain persists, indicating, in the same humble manner, that Dunmore will sell the slaves to the West Indies when he has used them to cut the throats of their old masters. “And that will be something in your honour’s pocket, d’ye see—sell, ev’ry man to his trade.”
Awaiting Dunmore on deck, the sailors grumble he will appear only when he is finished with his sexual encounters and complain the blacks will consume space and food. By contrast, Dunmore, finally arriving, greets the recruits cordially: “Well, by brave blacks, are you come to ’list.” The spokesman for the group speaks in dialect, both as comic relief and to suggest that Dunmore cannot mean his detailed promises of rank and privilege: “You shall be called major Cudjo Thompson,” Dunmore informs him, “and if you behave well, I’ll soon make you a greater man than your master, and if I find the rest of you behave well, I’ll make you all officers, and after you have served Lord Paramount for a while, you shall have money in your pockets, good cloaths on your backs and be as free as them white men over there.”
Back in the cabin, Dunmore makes it clear to his second-in-command he cares nothing for freedom of the slaves. “I look upon this to be a grand maneuver in politics; this is making dog eat dog—thief catch thief—the servants against his master—rebel against rebel.” The scene and act close as Dunmore’s compatriots josh him about his “brace of whores” to which he responds with yet another pleasant laugh and excuses himself to take a nap. Clearly, manners did not make the man (Philbrick 106–12).
The Dunmore of the play is removed from the realities of either his ship’s stores or the havoc produced by his proclamation. He is infuriatingly indifferent to the troubles he has caused, indulging in his own pleasures while his troops starve. The British boatswain is the hero of the act, righteously angry at Dunmore’s dalliance, which seems to represent his utter lack of interest in anything but his own ends. Leacock, in this brief scene, encapsulated the Virginia sense of outrage at Dunmore’s abandonment.
The Virginia coverage also fit nicely into black stereotype that had already been seen on the colonial stage. Cudjo, the only speaking black, is shown as a man easily swayed by promises and eager to please. While he expresses no anger at his former master, he promises, as if to please, that he would shoot him if necessary. The blacks are represented in terms of speech and facial stereotypes (the sailors ridicule the size of Cudjo’s mouth), a comic tradition to which Leacock gave new virulence. There is no sense among the sailors that the blacks are “brave”; and it is clearly indicated that Dunmore patronizes them for his own ends. As in the Virginia coverage of military engagements, the British common soldier or sailor is not the target of attack—indeed, the British sailors express American attitudes—but it is Dunmore, as representative of the British administration, who is the focus.
The episode quickly slipped into popular song (F. Moore 67), and Philip Freneau included Lord Dunmore in one of his first political poems. Dunmore and his “crew of banditti”—a phrase often used in the newspapers— are recognized in a series of couplets listing all the reasons for disunion from Great Britain (Freneau 149). From popular accounts, the Dunmore of the Virginia press was set into stone by early historians. In his history published in 1789, the account of the battle of Great Bridge, even by the New Divinity antislavery activist, William Gordon, appears drawn totally from the Virginia press accounts (Gordon 1:110). In 1818, thirty years after Gordon’s book, David Ramsay was also influenced by the Virginia press. The slave participation at the battle of Great Bridge was dismissed. “The slaves in this engagement were more prejudicial to their British employers than to the provincials,” he wrote in a sentence that is little changed from what appeared in the Virginia press (Ramsay 2:89). Such early historical accounts promulgated the eighteenth-century Virginian view of the incident into the twentieth century.
Among modern historians, only Benjamin Quarles has examined the newspaper accounts of the episode with any eye to their source, noting the “psychological warfare” of the Virginia newspaper essay that called upon blacks to return to their duty or suffer the consequences (Quarles, “Lord Dunmore” 24). Additionally, if only in a footnote, Quarles refers to another Dunmore item published in the New-York Journal that, in an angry quatrain, noted a black mother had named her child after Dunmore.
Hail! doughty Ethiopian Chief
Though ignominious Negro Thief!
This Black shall prop they stinking name
And damn thee to perpetual fame.
(Quarles, “Lord Dunmore” 24n)
Those lines indicate the undertow of fury that characterized much of the Dunmore coverage. By the use of such items, the patriot press brought into high relief the racial themes that had been building during the revolutionary period. Like another Boston Massacre, the British fired into the colonial world of black and white relationships with little concern for the damage or the disarray that was left behind. That was a theme that had meaning for colonists outside colonial Virginia, a message that was brought to them in all its reverberations thanks to a patriot press that sought to unite by whatever bonds that were at hand with little thought to future consequences.