Rough Crossings Read online

  To be fair, there was much to tremble about. Even with his new black recruits (for whom clothes and weapons had to be found), and 134 soldiers shipped in from St Augustine in eastern Florida, Dunmore’s force was only in the hundreds, whereas, the Virginia “shirtmen” militia numbered, by October 1775, between two thousand and three thousand. The British fleet had itself grown with the addition of two more sloops, the Otter and the Mercury, and a ship, the William, to which Dunmore transferred his command. But the raiding tenders regularly put out in the Hampton Roads were coming under increasing fire when they got anywhere near villages and towns. On the 27th of October a raid on Hampton had badly misfired when shirtmen militia, emerging from their sniping positions in houses facing the creek, had rushed a pilot boat, killed two sailors from the Otter and taken seven prisoner—losses the British could ill afford.

  Watching the odds against him mount, still hearing nothing from London and with scant hope of any further reinforcements, Dunmore arrived at a moment of truth. From the deck of the William on the 7th of November he issued, in the name of the king, and “to defeat such treasonable purposes and that all such Traitors and their Abettors might be brought to justice and that the Peace and Good Order of this Colony may again be restored, which the ordinary Course of the Civil Law is unable to effect,” a famous proclamation. It was, for good or ill, the deed for which he has ever since been remembered:

  By His Excellency the Right Honourable

  JOHN EARL OF DUNMORE,

  His Majesty’s Lieutenant and Governor General of the Colony and Dominion of virginia and Vice Admiral of the same

  A PROCLAMATION

  Martial law was declared. And for the swift restoration of good order

  I do require every Person capable of bearing Arms to resort to His Majesty’s standard or be looked upon as Traitors to his Majesty’s Crown and Government and therefore be liable to the Penalty the Law inflicts upon such offences, such as forfeiture of life, confiscation of lands &c &c. And I do hereby further declare all indented Servants, Negroes or others (appertaining to Rebels) free that are able and willing to bear Arms, they joining His Majesty’s Troops as soon as may be, for the more speedily reducing this Colony to a proper sense of their Duty to His Majesty’s Crown and Dignity.26

  There was the word, there in black and white, for black and white: “free” was now proclaimed, published, indelible. This was the word that no American in any authority or office had ever dared print. Never mind the exigency of the occasion; never mind the unworthiness of the utterer or the transparent opportunism of his motives; no free or slave Patriot militiamen (currently being weeded out from the Continental army) could match what Dunmore had done. And the shock it gave the American side can be measured in the sudden furious venting of their hatred: Dunmore was anathematized as “arch traitor to humanity.” For the blacks, though, the prophecy of the sacred book was true. The young king did indeed mean to alter the world.

  Hundreds now, not scores, made their way towards the British ships. A thirty-foot boat, captured near Surry, came down the James River packed with blacks. Seven broke out of jail in Northampton and took a pettiauger off towards the fleet. “Numbers of Negroes and Cowardly Scoundrels flock to his Standard,” wrote John Page, a rattled member of the Virginia Committee of Safety, to Jefferson.27 In anticipation of ships and troops arriving up and down the coast, slaves began disappearing from plantations in the Carolinas and Georgia, even in Maryland and New York. This was the moment when the leaders of the revolution, in Charleston, Williamsburg, Wilmington and Philadelphia, saw their own blacks take off from the plantations of the Rutledges, the Middletons and the Harrisons, the moment when Henry Washington deserted General George for King George. A Pennsylvania forge-owner from Berkshire County, Mark Bird, who advertised for the capture of his runaway slave Cuffe Dix (“a most excellent hammerman”), put in his notice what was general knowledge: “As Negroes in general think that Lord Dunmore is contending for their liberty it is not improbable that said Negroe is on his march to join his Lordship’s own black regiment, but it is to be hoped he will be prevented by some honest Whig from effecting it.”28

  Put on the defensive, fearful that their world might go the way of Dutch Surinam where a slave army was still unvanquished, painfully conscious of the drainage of manpower to the militias, the plantocracy of the South did everything in its power to counteract the Dunmore effect. Stories appeared in the press (to be read to servants) that Dunmore’s offer of freedom was a ruse to entrap slaves who would then be sold in the West Indies for his personal benefit. It was pointed out that the vaunted liberty was, in any case, only for adult males who could bear arms, the implication (untrue) being that families would be divided, with women and children left behind in servitude, perhaps to bear the brunt of the wrath of masters. How could Lord Dunmore pose as the Emancipator, when all the world knew he had slaves himself (true) and that they were treated most cruelly (untrue)? The tobacco planter Robert Carter assembled his slaves at Nomini Hall to read them a list of these solemn warnings, and for the moment they heeded his advice. But in 1781, when the British returned in force, no fewer than thirty-two of those slaves ran off.29

  In case, despite all these intelligences, poor black wretches who knew no better were still tempted to succumb to the earl’s blandishments, the Virginia Convention solemnly warned them against taking up arms. There would be a grace period of ten days for runaways to lay down their weapons and return to their masters. Should they persist, they should know that the penalty for rebellion was death without benefit of clergy. Those who were caught escaping (but as yet not in arms) were to be treated differently, depending on whether they belonged to Patriots or loyalists. The former would be imprisoned and then returned for their masters to do with them what they wished; Tory slaves, on the other hand, would be sent to forced labour in lead mines in Fincastle County in the interior or in the saltpetre works in Montgomery County.

  Many were caught. A group of nine slaves, including two women, were taken from an open boat out at sea, by a Virginian maritime patrol. Another pair of escapees celebrated prematurely on sighting what they thought was a British ship before realizing it was American, and paid with their lives on the yard-arm for their mistake. But others did everything they could to outrun the patrols that had now been placed on virtually every major river and creek around the British base of operations. In Northampton County, thirteen escaped slaves lay in wait and took a schooner, and sailed it into the bay before being overtaken by a Patriot whaleboat.

  Whatever the deterrents, however many were taken in the attempt, blacks continued to go to Dunmore, as both the newspapers and private correspondents bitterly complained. Indeed, they arrived much faster than Dunmore and the captains of the Otter (Matthew Squire, with runaway slave pilot Joseph Harris) and the Mercury could accommodate them, much less clothe, feed and arm them. But, together with the regulars from Florida, there were enough for Dunmore, in the weeks after his proclamation, to flirt with a small-scale offensive near Norfolk. When he learned that militiamen from North Carolina were on their way to join the Virginians, time not being on his side, Dunmore felt that he needed to act swiftly. The reinforcements could be stopped at Great Bridge, about twenty miles south of Norfolk, where the long bridge itself spanned the southern arm of the Elizabeth River. On either side of the bridge were fetid swamps buzzing with mosquitoes and biting flies. At each end of the bridge drier ground—in effect islets—connected to the land proper by narrow causeways.

  Some ten miles south of the bridge, at a place known as Kemp’s Landing, a camp of about 300 Virginian shirtmen had been established with the intention of marching on Tory Norfolk. On a night in November, a company of 109 British troops—soldiers from the 14th Light Foot, loyalist volunteers from Norfolk and, not least, around two companies of freshly armed and drilled black soldiers (almost half the entire force)—attacked Kemp’s Landing. For a while it seemed to be going the usual way, the Lexington and Concord wa
y, with the British infantrymen advancing in parade ground formation and stepping over their casualties while being shot at laterally from the woods. But the volunteer loyalists, both black and white, had been sent to outflank the snipers from the rear, and once they had opened fire, the Virginia militia broke and fled into the forest. Five of them were killed and eighteen taken prisoner. Two of these prisoners were officers, and they were taken, probably with extreme satisfaction, by black loyalist soldiers. It was a first.30 But in this campaign it would also turn out to be a last.

  For the moment Dunmore, if not exactly elated, was restored to confidence, especially as the strongly loyalist population of Norfolk had been encouraged by the show of force at Kemp’s Landing to declare itself. Three thousand of its inhabitants swore to uphold their allegiance to the king and forswear the rebels. The governor-commander and vice-admiral now thought of forming a Queen’s Own Loyal Virginia Regiment from its volunteers. And there was, of course, another group for whom the successful skirmish at Kemp’s Landing meant everything. The armed blacks, now numbering more than three hundred, were formed into what (with a touch of exoticism) their chief called Lord Dunmore’s Ethiopian Regiment. On their coats was emblazoned the simple but, to their enemy, devilish device: “liberty to slaves.” The emotions of those who sported the badge can only be imagined. Apart from the Ethiopians, many more blacks in Dunmore’s little force acted as foragers, guides and pilots, spies, diggers and carters. Hundreds of them worked on throwing up, at the northern end of the bridge, in front of Norfolk, “Fort Murray,” an improvised structure built from planks, logs and dirt; known to the Patriots as “the hog pen,” and defensible only against musket shot, it was still a bastion for the badly outnumbered British army. For a few weeks at least, Fort Murray flew the flag and ex-slaves manned the stockade. Whatever the strength or opportunism of Dunmore’s convictions, and however this had come about, a bond had been forged between the British and the liberated blacks.

  The triumph of the slaves over the masters was cruelly brief. On the 9th of December, an action that was supposed to consolidate Dunmore’s position in Virginia and preclude the colony being supplied with either provisions or reinforcements from North Carolina went horribly awry. At the outset Fort Murray still stood, but precariously. At least eight hundred fresh American troops of the 2nd Virginia Regiment and the Culpeper militia were besieging it. Raft attacks were launched daily. Inside his headquarters at Norfolk, Dunmore brooded unhappily over the imminent and inevitable arrival of American artillery that would either flatten the fort or force a passage over the bridge, cutting the fort off from supply by either land or sea. His only defence, he thought (against the advice of his senior officer, Captain Samuel Leslie), was a pre-emptive attack. The Virginians and Carolinans had established themselves at the end of the southern causeway behind daunting breastworks. Dunmore’s strategy was to send two companies of black troops around its flank along the edge of the islet, drawing the American riflemen from the breastworks so that when regular troops, including Grenadiers, attacked from the front its defences would be fatally compromised. Dunmore also believed the intelligence of a spy masquerading as a loyalist, who informed him that the Patriot stronghold was manned by a mere three hundred men.

  Everything that could go wrong did. The black companies sent as decoy were mysteriously dispatched, not to the perimeter flank of the Patriot position, but to an altogether different area that had been probed by an American patrol the previous night. None of the American defenders (a much larger force than Dunmore supposed) had moved from their positions, although many were held in the rear. So it was with recklessly misplaced confidence that Captain Leslie ordered an advance south across the bridge early on the morning of the 9th of December. There were hardly more than 100 grenadiers and other regulars of the 14th Light Foot, together with around 60 white loyalist volunteers, which meant that at least 250 members of this attacking force, carrying the standard of George III, were Ethiopians: an army of free blacks on the march against America and slavery.

  Black and white were slaughtered together beneath that flag in the dim sanguine dawn, as the sun rose from the swamps. The American commander, Colonel Woodford, cool when he needed to be, held fire until the British infantrymen, advancing again in parade step to the beat of two drums, only six abreast for that was all the narrow causeway could take, got within fifty paces. A tearing volley of fire began. In about ten minutes, Great Bridge turned into one of the more spectacularly suicidal epics of British imperial history: pipes, screams, falling scarlet coats. The calamity even featured a gentleman-martyr with a perfect name, Captain Charles Fordyce, the fuzz barely scraped from his cheek—” very genteel,” “a completer Officer never lived,” wrote his American foes awed at his lunatic, futile bravery. Fordyce led his grenadiers relentlessly on, taking a shot in the kneecap, rising as though it had been a mere mosquito bite, waving his hat merrily in the air to laggards behind him and shouting optimistically, “The day is our own!” Fourteen bullets later Fordyce lay dead, twelve slaughtered grenadiers at his back fifteen feet in front of the American breastworks. Behind him, taking the ferocity of massed rifle fire, was the rank and file of Dunmore’s army. Tories from Norfolk, infantrymen and hundreds of black soldiers, seeing the carnage in front of them, paused. The causeway grew choked with soldiers dragging the wounded back towards the bridge, for they had been told by Dunmore that the Americans were partial to scalping. After a one-hundred-strong detachment of Culpeper militia made it, in a rush, to a battery on the eastern side of the peninsula the British took fire from two sides and broke under the attack, as black troops on the bridge were picked off with the ease of a duck shoot. Leslie ordered a retreat north across the bridge to the fort. Two officers, as well as Fordyce, had been mortally hit: Lieutenant Napier, of the family that would give and give to the British Empire in glory and disaster, and Leslie’s own nephew Peter, who sank, bled and died in his uncle’s arms. The two young officers, wrote Dunmore as he struggled to explain the appalling debacle, were “both very deserving young men…really a loss to their corps.”

  It had taken no more than half an hour; but a lot of damage can be done in that short time. In this case Virginia, and perhaps the whole South, was lost to Britain. And the vision of a formidable little army of freed slaves—two thousand strong at least, Dunmore had thought—with perhaps as many again of white loyalists, disappeared into the bloody mire. The word “skirmish” ought never to be used for Great Bridge. It was, wrote Captain Meade, “a vast effusion of blood, so dreadful it beggars description, a scene when the dead and wounded were bro’t off that was too much; I then saw the horrors of war in perfection; worse than can be imagin’d ten and twelve bullets thro many; limbs broke in two or three places; brains turning out. Good God, what a sight!”31

  Dunmore reported a mere seventeen dead and forty-nine gravely wounded, but these were among the regular British troops alone. Another eighty-five, overwhelmingly black, soldiers died or suffered serious wounds. Casualties on the American side were one man with a wounded hand. Shattered by the defeat, Dunmore’s army fell back first to the fort, which, after the two four-pounder cannon had been spiked with nails, was abandoned as the demoralized force withdrew into Norfolk. A week later an American force of two thousand converged on the town. Panic swept the loyalist community, as it became increasingly obvious that Dunmore would re-embark on his fleet, ending the brief dream of a black and white loyalist insurgency in Virginia. Mournful Tories embarked along with the remnant of British troops and the Ethiopians. Dunmore reported to Lord Dartmouth: “I do assure your lordship it is a most melancholy sight to see the numbers of gentlemen of very large property with their ladies and whole families obliged to betake themselves on board of ships at this season of the year, hardly with the common necessities of life and great numbers of poor people, without even these, who must have perished had I not been able to supply them with some flour.”

  Five days later Dunmore’s flotilla, lying
off Norfolk, was reinforced by two more ships and he became more aggressive. With the town now in the hands of the Americans, he had no compunction about cannonading the docks and sending boats to fire the warehouses. What followed was a conflagration that reduced the town to cinders. But whilst that is not in dispute, who was responsible for Norfolk’s destruction is not at all clear. Most American narratives assume that Dunmore, his Tory citadel fallen to the Whigs, petulantly decided to destroy the place. But his dispatches to Dartmouth, in all other details entirely truthful, tell a different story: that the American troops, perhaps as a response to the mass loyalist oath of allegiance, began to burn houses on both sides of the river. “From every transaction they appear to me to have nothing more at heart than the utter destruction of this once most flourishing country.”

  On board his ship, staring gloomily at the ashy remains of royal Virginia, Dunmore penned his lament to the new Secretary of State, Lord George Germain: “I wish to God it had been possible to have spared some troops for this colony” since he was “morally certain” that, had he had just five hundred six weeks before, nothing could have opposed his march through Virginia. As it was, though, it was to be expected that by the spring of 1776 there could well be ten thousand rebels under arms. The last straw was learning, belatedly, from London that Sir Henry Clinton’s army was to be sent not to Virginia but to North Carolina, “a most insignificant province when this, which is the first colony on the continent, both for its riches and power, is totally neglected…To see my government totally neglected, I own is a mortification I was not prepared to meet with after being imprisoned aboard a ship between eight or nine months, and now left without a hope of relief either to myself or the many unhappy friends of government that are now afloat suffering with me; but I have done.”32