9

“BROADSWORDS AND KING GEORGE!” SOUTHERN COLONIES, APRIL 1775-FEBRUARY 1776

To sign, or not to sign? That is the question, Whether ‘twere better for an honest man To sign, and so be safe; or to … fly … And, by that flight, t’ escape Feathers and tar …

—” The Pausing American Loyalist”¹

Royal governors in Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina had been urging the mobilizing and arming of Loyalists since the first hints of rebellion. The governors believed that the path to victory coursed through the southern colonies, where there were enough friends of the king to help the British Army quickly put down the revolt. Ultimately twenty-nine Loyalist military units, mostly of regimental size, would fight the Continental Army or Rebel militias in the southern colonies.²

North Carolina governor Josiah Martin, a former lieutenant colonel in the British Army, envisioned a Loyalist army of twenty thousand men, enlisted around a core of three thousand Highlanders, along with tough backcountry settlers known as the Regulators. The Regulators had protested a corrupt system by attacking dishonest tax collectors and judges and rebelling against the royal rule of William Tryon, Martin’s predecessor.

In May 1771 Tryon, also a former lieutenant colonel, had led a royal militia army against the Regulators in a battle near today’s Alamance, killing about twenty, hanging seven without trial, and laying waste their farms.³ The Regulators, who had seen their comrades’ bodies ripped by royal grapeshot at Alamance, were unusual candidates for a Loyalist force. But their allegiance to the king transcended all else, and many of them joined Loyalist regiments.

As for the Highlanders, Governor Martin counted on their loyalty to the king—and his expectation that they would barter their warrior skills for generous land grants. Martin had been providing those grants to men who had only to swear “their readiness to lay down their lives in the defence of his Majesty’s government.”⁴ Allan MacDonald and Flora bestowed their prestige on Martin’s plan for a Loyalist force. Allan would be second in command; the commanding officer would be Donald MacDonald, a veteran of Culloden who had been commissioned a brigadier general by Martin.

Martin was working on his plan when Janet Schaw, a sharp-eyed woman from Scotland, appeared and became an unexpected witness to the stirring of rebellion in North Carolina. After a stormy crossing in a small ship, she and her younger brother Alexander arrived at a plantation, near Wilmington, which was owned by their older brother Robert. He, like all North Carolinians, was in the midst of choosing sides. He had served in the militia when it was royal and had fought under Governor Tryon in the Battle of Alamance. When the militia came under control of the Rebels, he remained an officer and was commissioned a colonel. But revolutionary events were moving so swiftly that, coincidental with his sister’s arrival, he had to decide to support Governor Martin or go with the Rebels.

Janet Schaw almost immediately discovered the complexity of the choice her brother Robert faced, for the Rebel—Loyalist fissure reached deep into southern society. A neighboring hostess was warned by the Rebels’ local Committee of Safety that she had to cancel a forthcoming ball because of a congressional edict against “Balls and Dancing.”

Then, surprisingly, the committee relented, Janet got her invitation and, “dressed out in all my British airs with a high head and a hoop,” she trudged to the ball “thro the unpaved streets in embroidered shoes by the light of a lanthorn carried by a black wench half naked.”⁵

The Committee of Safety may have changed its mind because of the influence of a visitor to the plantation, Robert Howe. He “has the worst character you ever heard thro the whole province,” Schaw wrote. “He is however very like a Gentleman.” A prominent Patriot related to Robert Schaw by marriage, Howe, too, had served under Tryon.⁶ While he was chatting and flirting with Janet Schaw, he had something else on his mind: a plot to kidnap Governor Martin.⁷

Howe was with Janet Schaw one day when, by her account, he stopped a Rebel mob from tarring and feathering a hapless Tory. She, Howe, and others were watching a mustering of Rebel militiamen—”2000 men in their shirts and trousers,” she wrote, “preceded by a very ill beat-drum and a fiddler, who was also in his shirt with a long sword and a cue at his hair, who played with all his might. They made indeed a most unmartial appearance.” But, she shrewdly observed, “the worst figure there can shoot from behind a bush and kill even a General Wolfe.”⁸*

She, Robert Schaw, and others on the plantation were invited by Martin and his wife to go to the governor’s palace in New Bern on June 4 to celebrate the king’s birthday. But they learned that “the Govr’s house had been attacked, himself obliged to get down to the man of war, and send off his wife, sister and children in a little vessel, with directions to land them in the first safe port. What renders these circumstances the more affecting is that poor Mrs. Martin is big with child, and naturally of a very delicate constitution.”⁹

Martin escaped the kidnappers, who had been managed by Howe, and reached a fort on Cape Fear. His family sailed to New York and then journeyed to Martin’s father-in-law’s Long Island home, where Martin’s daughter Augusta was born. When Rebels were about to take and burn the fort, Martin fled to the HMS Cruizer, a British warship anchored in the Cape Fear River. Among the people who accompanied him were Janet and Alexander Schaw. While they were aboard the Cruizer, Martin asked Alexander to sail to England with dispatches that would inform Lord Dartmouth about the rebellion in North Carolina.

Janet Schaw’s journal contains an emotional description of the Rebel martial law that pertained over much of North Carolina in the wake of Martin’s flight:

An officer or committeeman enters a plantation with his posse. The Alternative is proposed, Agree to join us, and your persons and properties are safe; you have a shilling sterling a day; your duty is no more than once a month appearing under Arms at Wilmingtown, which will prove only a merry-making, where you will have as much grog as you can drink. But if you refuse, we are directly to cut up your corn, shoot your pigs, burn your houses, seize your Negroes and perhaps tar and feather yourself.¹⁰

When Robert Schaw refused to take an oath supporting the Rebels, his punishment was exile and the confiscation of his land.¹¹ But Thomas Macknight, an extremely wealthy Scottish merchant in North Carolina, suffered the kind of punishments described in Janet Schaw’s journal. Although Rebels had once labeled him “always friendly to the cause of American liberty,” when he showed a tolerance for Tory friends in New Bern, he was deemed “inimical.” Rebels plundered his house, his merchandise, and his crops, abducted his slaves, and even tried to kill him, according to his recollections. In 1776 he exiled himself to England.¹²

Janet cut short her stay and boarded a ship that was returning to Britain after bringing more Scot immigrants to North Carolina.¹³ She bade a bitter farewell to an “unhappy land, for which my heart bleeds in pity. Little does it signify to you, who are the conquered or who the victorious; you are devoted to ruin, whoever succeeds.”¹⁴

• • •

Among the documents that Alexander carried to England was a letter that Martin had written Lord Dartmouth on June 30, boasting that he could “reduce to order and obedience every colony to the southward of Pennsylvania.” All he needed were ten thousand muskets and ammunition, along with some artillery “and a supply of money as might be necessary for the support of such a force.”¹⁵

Dartmouth had been getting similarly optimistic reports from Crown officials in other colonies, especially from Dunmore in Virginia. Focusing on Martin’s proposal, Dartmouth saw the possibility of a combined offensive that would stamp out the rebellion in North Carolina and so terrify the Rebels in the other southern colonies that they would surrender. Dartmouth’s successor, Lord George Germain, enthusiastically endorsed the use of Loyalist soldiers allied with a British Army expeditionary force that would land at Wilmington, a port about fifteen miles up the Cape Fear River. The conquest of Wilmington, Dartmouth believed, would quickly lead to the surrender of the bigger port of Charleston, South Carolina, some 170 miles south. Thus began Britain’s first venture into a strategy aimed at severing the southern colonies from those in the north.

Coincidentally, while Governor Martin was making his plans, Lt. Col. Donald MacDonald and Capt. Donald McLeod of the Royal Highland Emigrants Regiment arrived in New Bern. They had been dispatched as recruiters by General Gage. When picked up for questioning by the Rebels’ Committee of Safety, they said they were former British officers who had been wounded at Bunker Hill and had come to North Carolina with the idea of possibly settling there. The committee released the officers with a warning to refrain from aiding the Tories.¹⁶

Martin issued a proclamation calling on all loyal North Carolinians to support the king. And he asked several prominent North Carolina Loyalists—many of them Scots—to raise a Loyalist force called the North Carolina Provincials. Between twelve and fourteen hundred volunteered. In Martin’s vision local Highlanders and Regulators would be his principal warriors.¹⁷ Martin also expected to mobilize Loyalist volunteers from other backcountry immigrants: the Scotch-

Irish. But unlike the Highlanders, the Scotch-Irish were not dependably loyal, and most of them had, at least, Patriot leanings.

The Scotch-Irish were descendants of transplanted Scots who in the early 1600s had been sent to Northern Ireland by King James I. He had tried to solve his problems with the Irish and the Scots by handing over to the Scots a vast Irish territory that came to be known as the Ulster Plantation. King James specifically barred Highlanders from Ulster because his plan was to introduce the ways of the British to the Irish. They, in his view, needed civilizing.¹⁸

Early in the eighteenth century the people of Ulster began sailing to America in a flight from what a Pennsylvania newspaper called “Poverty, Wretchedness, Misery and Want.”¹⁹ By the 1750s the immigrants were being called the Scotch-Irish, a shorthand acknowledgment of Scotch descent and Northern Ireland origin. The newcomers usually called themselves Scotch, avoiding any suggestion that they were partially Irish.²⁰

Between 1717 and 1775, in America’s first great surge of immigration, more than two hundred thousand Scotch-Irish arrived in the colonies.²¹ How many others were lost at sea in the long perilous voyages will never be known. The ships were built to carry cargo, not passengers. Immigrants were stowed in the dank hold by shipowners who saw them as profitable ballast. On one ship starving survivors ate the bodies of the dead.²² In another “about 100 of them dyed,” said a Pennsylvania newspaper in 1728, reporting on the explosive growth and frequent tragedies of immigration. “Children from 1 to 7 years rarely survive the voyage,” a survivor wrote. “I witnessed misery in no less than 32 children in our ship, all of whom were thrown into the sea. The parents grieve all the more since their children find no resting-place in the earth, but are devoured by the monsters of the sea.”²³

Most of the early Scotch-Irish immigrants landed at Philadelphia and found land along Pennsylvania’s western frontier.²⁴ Descendants of the first settlers and new waves of immigrants moved westwardalong the Great Wagon Road, which had evolved from a network of old Indian trading trails stretching from Pennsylvania to Georgia east of the Appalachians. The road took newcomers, their livestock, and their wagons to the backwoods of Virginia and the Carolinas. In North Carolina the immigrants settled along the piedmont, which extended from the fall lines of seaboard rivers westward to the foot of the Appalachians. Besides being far from the riches and power of the seacoast, the people of the piedmont were also outside the economic sphere of the coastal ruling class.²⁵

The immigrants built their dirt-floor log cabins near springs or streams. There were no village greens because the settlers had no time to form villages. They had to clear the land and then plant their first crops. They raised corn, wheat, flax, and cotton as well as sheep on farms whose average size was about 175 acres.²⁶ Most clothing was made from cotton cloth woven at home.

The Scotch-Irish were usually Presbyterians, but among them there were also evangelical Baptists. The Anglican Church, rebuffed by the toiling class back in Ulster, had not attracted the Scotch-Irish in America. To bring them the Anglican faith in the new land, missionaries were sent from Britain to the Carolina backcountry. Among the missionaries was the Reverend Charles Woodmason, a British-born Anglican clergyman who traveled the region in the 1760s.

Woodmason was shocked by the people’s “low, lazy, sluttish, heathenish, hellish Life.” He had difficulty averting his eyes from the “Young Women,” who had “a most uncommon Practice, which I cannot break them of. They draw their Shift as tight as possible to the Body, and pin it close, to shew the roundness of their Breasts, and slender Waists (for they are generally fairly shaped) and draw their Petticoat close to their Hips to shew the fineness of their Limbs.” When he performed a church service, he wrote, most of the congregation “went to Revelling Drinking Singing Dancing and Whoring—and most of the Company were drunk before I quitted the Spot.”²⁷

Woodmason was seeing a new American breed: people who had migrated not from England but from Ulster, people to whom Scotland was but a folk memory, a place few of them had even seen. And, as Presbyterians, they had turned away from the hierarchical structure of the Anglican Church in favor of the democracy of the meetinghouse. As a North Carolina minister—and Patriot—explained Presbyterian beliefs: God “had long ago implanted into man’s nature a capacity for civic responsibility. God had taught men to consider themselves His stewards, had given them talents and opportunities, and expected them to make the most of those endowments.”²⁸

Many Loyalists believed that the Revolution itself had emerged from a conflict between Presbyterians and Anglicans: “Presbyterianism is really at the Bottom of this whole Conspiracy, has supplied it with Vigour, and will never rest till something is decided upon it,” a representative of Lord Dartmouth wrote in 1776.²⁹ A disinterested witness in the form of a Hessian captain had noted this in a letter home: “Call this war, dearest friend, by whatever name you may, only call it not an American Rebellion; it is nothing more nor less than Irish-Scotch Presbyterian Rebellion.”³⁰

When word of Governor Martin’s Loyalist plan reached Patriot leaders, they sent pro-Patriot propagandists, including five Highlanders, into the Scotch-Irish backwoods to meet with “the gentlemen who have lately arrived from the highlands in Scotland” and “to advise and urge them to unite with the other Inhabitants of America in defence of those rights which they derive from God and the Constitution.”³¹ The delegation did not attempt to recruit militiamen but chose only to gain sympathy for the Rebel cause.³²

Governor Martin, meanwhile, received word that British strategists had enhanced his plan. Already at sea was a convoy bringing seven Redcoat regiments from the British Isles under the command of Lord Charles Cornwallis. Another large force was coming from Boston under Maj. Gen. Sir Henry Clinton, who said his mission was “to support Loyalists and restore the authority of the King’s government in the four southern provinces.”³³

The Loyalists were to march to the coast down the southwestern side of the Cape Fear River and at Wilmington rendezvous with the British troops coming by sea. Joined up, the combined force would then begin a campaign to fight the Rebels for control of North Carolina. That triumph was to be the inspiration for a general rising of the Loyalists and the return of the southern colonies to the Crown.

Highlanders, expecting that the seaborne British would soon arrive, began assembling at the hub of their power, Cross Creek (now Fayetteville), about eighty miles north of Wilmington. They hoped to raise as many as five thousand men, including a large complement of Regulators. But Regulators were scarce on February 15, 1776, when about fourteen hundred men gathered at Cross Creek. And only 520 of them carried muskets. Leaders canvassed people in the area and found muskets to arm about 130 more. Raiders also took powder that had been stored by Patriots and got additional powder, along with provisions, from Loyalist merchants.³⁴ About sixty people slipped out of the Cross Creek area to an encampment seven miles away, where some eleven hundred Patriot militiamen had mobilized. The Cross Creek refugees warned Col. James Moore, the Patriot commander, that the Loyalist troops were ready to march.

On February 19, Donald MacDonald—promoted to brigadier general by Martin—sent a messenger to Moore under a flag of truce. The message warned Moore that if he and his men did not accept the authority of the king by noon the next day, they would be attacked as enemies. Moore replied that he would continue “the defense of the liberties of mankind.” Dozens of men unexpectedly turned away from battle as MacDonald led his troops, most of them Highlanders, not toward Moore but toward the coast.³⁵

Moore sent some men to block one likely route and then marched off, hoping to pursue the Loyalists and force a battle. MacDonald continued at a slow pace, scouting for possible ambushes and strengthening bridges for his wagon train. Detachments of Patriots maneuvered along the Cape Fear River, seeking to close on MacDonald.

Finally, on February 26, MacDonald learned that about one thousand Patriots were ahead, at a bridge crossing swampy Moore’s Creek, which flowed into a tributary’s confluence with the Cape Fear River. MacDonald, an ailing old soldier, sensed disaster, calleda council of war, and urged caution. The younger, bolder Donald McLeod, who was second in command, ordered an attack at dawn. Capt. John Campbell was to lead about eighty men brandishing the Highlanders’ storied weapon, the broadsword.

About one a.m. the next day, scouts on the western side of the creek reached the bridge, a span of about fifty feet, and saw that the Patriots had removed its planks and greased the horizontal log supports, called stringers, with what smelled like tallow and soap. Entrenched on the eastern side, the Patriots guarded the road the Loyalists needed to take to Wilmington. Undaunted by the scouts’ report, McLeod readied the charge.

The steady beating of drums and keening of war pipes broke the silence of the cool dawn. Then came three cheers from all the men, the signal for the charge. Shouting a rallying cry—” King George and Broadswords!”—the eighty bravest Highlanders, led by McLeod on one stringer and Campbell on the other, began slowly crossing the slippery logs, using their broadswords like spiked canes.³⁶

The Patriots held the fire of their muskets and two cannons until McLeod and Campbell reached the eastern side of the creek. Suddenly cannons and muskets fired. The cannons were loaded with swan shot—a canvas bag that burst on firing, spewing twenty or more lead pellets.³⁷ Riddled by bullets and swan shot, McLeod and Campbell fell, both mortally wounded. McLeod, waving his broadsword, tried to rise, then died in another burst of bullets. One by one, two by two, other Highlanders fell, some to die by bullets, others by drowning. On the other side of the creek, Highlanders returned fire. Regulators and other Loyalists fled.

Sharp Patriot fire killed at least thirty Loyalists; the exact toll is not known because the bodies of some who died in the creek were not recovered. Two Patriots were wounded, and one died of his wounds. General MacDonald and about 850 others were taken prisoner, among them Flora MacDonald’s husband, Allan.

Many of the escaping Loyalists went into hiding, some of them for the rest of the war. At least one managed to reach Florida and join another Loyalist military organization, the East Florida Rangers.³⁸

An unknown number of Loyalists who were bystanders quietly disappeared, later sailing to safety in Nova Scotia and New York City.³⁹ The most significant effect of the victory came after exuberant Patriots reported it to their delegates at the Continental Congress and urged that the colonies sever ties with Britain. Thus North Carolina became the first colony to vote for independence.⁴⁰

General Clinton had sailed out of Boston on January 10, expecting to rendezvous with Martin’s men and the Cornwallis fleet in mid-February. But, because of bureaucratic delays and the usual mishaps of eighteenth-century ocean voyages, Clinton and his two hundred infantrymen did not arrive off North Carolina until March 12. Cornwallis was not there. His fleet would not begin to appear off Cape Fear until April 18.⁴¹ Deciding that he might as well put his men to good use, Clinton broke camp, reloaded the troops aboard his ships, and sailed south to seize Charleston (then called Charles Town).

When Clinton set sail, three royal governors were trying to run their colonies from cramped quarters aboard Royal Navy warships bobbing at anchor off rebellious shores: Martin on the HMS Cruizer in the Cape Fear River, Dunmore from HMS Fowey on the James River in Virginia, and Lord William Campbell, on HMS Tamar off Charleston, in South Carolina.

Unlike the royal governors in New England, Dunmore and Martin reacted to rebellion in their colonies by mobilizing their Loyalists and using them as troops in a civil war aimed at regaining royal control. Campbell did not mobilize, but he had frequently urged British officials to invade his colony and link up with South Carolina’s multitude of Loyalists. “Charles Town,” Campbell wrote Lord Dartmouth, “is the fountainhead from which all the violence flows. Stop that and the rebellion in this part of the continent will, I trust, soon be at an end.”⁴²

Beyond the fountainhead of rebellion, both Patriots and Tories sought to win over the backcountry. In July 1775 the Patriots’ Council of Safety in Charleston sent spokesmen into the “interior parts” ofthe colony to urge people to join the Patriots’ cause “in order to preserve themselves and their children from slavery,” taking no apparent notice that they were in a colony full of slaves. The spokesmen were dispatched to counteract “the arts, frauds, and misrepresentations”⁴³ of Moses Kirkland, a prominent South Carolina landowner who had switched sides to become a peripatetic Tory operative. He had helped Dunmore in Virginia, would serve with the British Army in Savannah, and would recruit Indians to fight Patriots in Florida.⁴⁴

Tory and Rebel leaders in the backcountry at first dueled with words and petitions, some changing sides. Finally, the local version of civil war erupted at a trading post called Ninety Six, near today’s Clemson. After Rebels seized and imprisoned a Tory leader, about fifteen hundred of his followers surged into Ninety Six, seeking revenge, surrounding a fort manned by some five hundred Rebel militiamen. In three days of fighting, one man was killed. His was the first blood of a Patriot shed in South Carolina. The battle ended with a truce, but conflict continued elsewhere.⁴⁵

Later in 1775 more than five thousand Patriot militiamen scoured the backcountry of Loyalists and captured their leaders, including one who hid in the hollow of a sycamore. In a swirling storm—ending what became known as the Snow Campaign—the Patriots made Loyalists sign pledges to lay down their arms or have their property confiscated.⁴⁶ Thirty-three who were jailed in Charleston finally promised “to Endeavor to Settle Peace to Your Satisfaction.” But an added note—” there is Different Circumstances Amongst us”—reflected the reality that although peace had seemingly come to the backcountry, conflicts would continue to simmer.⁴⁷

The ferocity of the rebellion in South Carolina appalled Governor Campbell. Thomas Jeremiah, a “free negro” well known as a fisherman and pilot called Jerry, was heard to say that if British warships sailed into Charleston, he would guide them. Patriots arrested him and, in a mockery of a trial, speedily convicted him of plotting insurrection against the Rebels. He was sentenced to be hanged and his body publicly burned. Lord Campbell had the power to intervene—” my blood ran cold when I read on what grounds they had doomed afellow creature to death,” he said in a letter to Dartmouth. But Patriots warned Campbell that if he granted a pardon, “they would hang him at my door.” The sentence was carried out; he was one of several South Carolina slaves executed after conviction on similar charges.⁴⁸

For General Washington, the Revolution shifted southward after he learned of the movement of British warships and troops to Charleston. He sent Maj. Gen. Charles Lee to Charleston as an adviser to local Patriots. Lee, a former British officer who was contemptuous of the Continental Army, examined Charleston’s defenses and called the city’s key defense, the Sullivan’s Island fort, a “slaughter pen.” Lee told the commander, Col. William Moultrie, he should abandon it. Moultrie, backed by his Patriots, politely refused, though Lee seemed to have a point. The fort was made out of palmetto logs and sand, and when Clinton’s fleet appeared off the harbor, the fort was only partially complete.⁴⁹

In late June 1776 the British landed on unfortified Long Island (now the Isle of Palms), east of Sullivan’s Island. Clinton planned to have his men wade across an inlet to Sullivan’s Island at low tide, after the British fleet leveled the palmetto fort with an intense bombardment. But the inlet turned out to be too deep for wading, and the palmetto logs were so spongy that they absorbed cannonballs. The fort did not fall.

Lord Campbell, a Royal Navy veteran, had spent four months of his governorship on a British warship. When the battle began he was aboard the fifty-gun Bristol, the fleet flagship. He volunteered to take command of its gun deck. Patriot fire concentrated on the Bristol, the cannon hits producing arrowlike splinters that caused painful, often lethal wounds. A lucky cannon shot severed the ship’s cable, which controlled its swing at anchor. Accurate Patriot fire raked its hull and rigging fore and aft.

The Bristol‘s captain, John Morris, struck several times, stayed on the quarterdeck until his right arm was shot off. He died in a few days. Campbell was thrown to the deck by the blast of a cannonball. Henever recovered from his injury, and died two years later in England.⁵⁰ The captain of HMS Experiment lost his left arm but survived. Forty men of the Bristol were killed; the Experiment lost twenty-three men. Of the more than 120 who were wounded, most would not survive.⁵¹ Seventeen Americans in the fort were killed and twenty wounded.

The battered British fleet withdrew to the outer harbor, and after waiting for favorable winds, withdrew in mid-July. It then sailed north to join the British attack on New York.

In Virginia, Dunmore had been much more successful than Martin in leading armed attacks on Rebels. He had made his first move against rebellion on the night of April 20, 1775, a month after Patrick Henry declared, “Give me liberty or give me death!” A party of Royal Marines, carrying out the governor’s order, slipped into the Virginia capital of Williamsburg, entered the powder magazine, disabled muskets that were stored there, and carried off fifteen half barrels of gunpowder to the warship HMS Fowey. The next morning, drums boomed on the streets of Williamsburg, rallying protesters, including members of the House of Burgesses.⁵²

The mayor and other local officials called on Dunmore and told him he had to return the powder to assure residents that the militia would have powder if their slaves rose in insurrection. Dunmore did return the powder, but he raged: “The whole country can easily be made a solitude, and by the living God, if any insult is offered to me, or to those who have obeyed my orders, I will declare freedom to the slaves, and lay the town in ashes.” Dunmore then fled to York, about twelve miles from the capital, and boarded the Fowey. ⁵³

Dunmore made good on part of his threat on November 7, 1775, when he proclaimed freedom for all slaves or indentured servants belonging to Rebels, as long as they “are able and willing to bear arms” and join “His Majesty’s Troops.”⁵⁴

Dunmore’s proclamation stunned Virginia, where there were nearly as many slaves as white persons. Among the Virginians who would lose slaves was Thomas Jefferson. When British forces invadedthe state in 1781, twenty-three of his slaves ran away, or, as one entry in his farm book says, “fled to the enemy.”⁵⁵ Dunmore’s move induced nightmares of armed slaves rising in insurrection against their masters. Fear spread to South Carolina, where there were two slaves for each white.⁵⁶ The proclamation had a profound effect on the war, transforming countless slaveholders into Rebels and drawing thousands of slaves to the Loyalist side.

In reaction to Dunmore’s proclamation, the Continental Army had begun enlisting free blacks, who for a time had been banned from the army. More than one hundred black Americans fought at Bunker (Breed’s) Hill. But, when George Washington arrived to take command, he expelled blacks, accepting a resolution of the Massachusetts Committee of Public Safety, which said, “you are not to enlist … any stroller, negro, or vagabond” into the regiments of the “Massachusetts Bay Forces.”⁵⁷ After Dunmore’s proclamation Washington partially rescinded his order, allowing free blacks, but not slaves, into the army. Rhode Island, offering freedom to slaves who enlisted with the consent of their owners, later raised what became known as the Black Regiment, which included Indians.⁵⁸

Within a month after Dunmore issued his proclamation, more than five hundred slaves left their masters and became black Loyalists. About three hundred joined Dunmore’s Ethiopian Regiment and donned uniforms emblazoned with “Liberty to Slaves” across the chest.⁵⁹ Dunmore gathered a force of British soldiers, members of the Ethiopian Regiment, and white Virginia Loyalists, to launch an attack at Great Bridge, a shipping point for nearby Norfolk. Virginia Patriots, with allies from North Carolina, stopped the invaders with a musket barrage that killed or wounded 102 of Dunmore’s men.⁶⁰ The only Patriot casualty was an officer who suffered a slight hand wound. Thirty-two members of the Ethiopian Regiment were captured and shipped off to be sold in the Caribbean.⁶¹

On January 1, 1776, three ships in Dunmore’s impromptu navy shelled Norfolk, setting the city afire and destroying “a Work of great Value and publick Utility, with a large stock of Rum and Molasses.”⁶² After a short, defiant stand on a Chesapeake Bay island, Dunmore sailed away to New York, taking with him survivors of the Ethiopian Regiment.⁶³

For General Cornwallis, General Howe, and General Washington, the war would now shift to New York, where more Loyalists awaited a call to arms.

* A reference to the slaying of Gen. James Wolfe, commander of the British expedition that took Quebec in 1759, assuring British victory in the French and Indian War.