1775 (84 page)

He wrote on October 5 to advise Lord Dartmouth that the Americans were mounting captured cannon on field carriages in Williamsburg and that three of his flotilla’s tenders had been sent to look for inbound rebel
ammunition ships.
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Over the next three weeks, small forces of 100 to 250 redcoats and Loyalist troops went out to capture or destroy Patriot cannon, muskets, and gunpowder. Dunmore himself accompanied at least one of the expeditions. Their commander, Captain Leslie of the Fourteenth Infantry Regiment, estimated that his men seized or destroyed at least 77 pieces of ordnance.
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The
Otter
also captured one member of a well-known Virginia shipowning clan, the Goodriches, smuggling in gunpowder, and Dunmore used this leverage to compel the family to shift its loyalty to the Crown. After these measures, Loyalist morale had “risen considerably.”
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Stung by the governor’s munitions seizures, the Committee of Safety decided to escalate. On October 23, it ordered Colonel William Woodford of Virginia’s Second Regiment to ready that unit and five companies of Culpeper minutemen, many of them sharpshooters, for an advance on “Norfolk or Portsmouth.”
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Patriot leaders were also looking for a Virginia equivalent to the catalyst six months earlier at Lexington. On October 25, they sent a company of Culpeper riflemen under Colonel Woodford to help the town of Hampton defend itself against a small British naval force—a large schooner, two sloops, and two pilot boats—commanded by the detested Matthew Squire. At high water on the morning of October 26, the five vessels drew abreast of the town and began firing their small cannon and swivel guns. But to their surprise, the individually aimed shots of the Culpeper sharpshooters forced the British sailors to abandon not only their cannon but their helms and any activity aloft. One British vessel went aground, and the others sailed off. The
Virginia Gazette,
exulting that one rifleman had killed from a distance of 400 yards, warned, “Take care, ministerial troops.”
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Overall, November favored Dunmore—and marked his personal and military zenith. Thousands of hitherto undecided residents and some fainthearted rebels in Norfolk and nearby Princess Anne County took a loyalty oath offered by the governor. Three hundred black slaves enlisted in “Lord Dunmore’s Ethiopian Regiment,” and somewhat fewer white Loyalists joined the Queen’s Loyal Virginia Regiment, headed by planter Jacob Ellegood, former commander of the Princess Anne militia. Dunmore began fortifying Norfolk against eventual attack. And on November 14, he led a force of 109 redcoats and some local militia against a reported 300 to 400 rebels at Kemp’s Landing, eight miles south of Norfolk. On seeing the redcoats, many of the American militia ran away. As in Ohio a year earlier, Dunmore fancied himself a conqueror. Accordingly, he raised the king’s standard—figuratively, because he did not actually have one—and read a proclamation that declared martial law. He then added: “I do further declare all indentured 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.”

What had been uttered privately in the spring had now been officially declared. If Richard Henry Lee exaggerated in saying that Dunmore’s actions had united all of Virginia save the Scots in opposition, his impolitic November proclamation quickly aided the American cause. “All over Virginia,” explains one historian, “observers noted that the governor’s freedom offer turned neutrals and even loyalists into patriots.”
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Two members of Dunmore’s Executive Council, Robert Carter and William Byrd III, shifted to the rebel camp. Byrd, who had commanded a regiment during the French and Indian War, volunteered his services.
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Nor was Dunmore’s gamble limited to freeing and arming slaves. November was also the month when his scheme to bring the Great Lakes Indians down on Virginia was publicly exposed after the capture in Maryland of John Connolly, his principal lieutenant.

December brought the Patriots’ breakthrough. Militia and regulars from Virginia’s First and Second regiments now began to move in larger numbers through the colony’s southeast—the Norfolk-Jamestown-Williamsburg region—even as Dunmore pulled back and set to work fortifying Norfolk itself. On December 2, Colonel William Woodford of the Second Regiment, with about 350 men, reached Great Bridge, on the southern branch of the Elizabeth River. The town, though only a bridge and a small cluster of homes, was twelve miles south of Norfolk on the principal road to North Carolina. It now held a small stockade—Fort Murray—and some outposts. By December 9, these were expanded and manned by 150 British regulars from the Fourteenth Regiment, some navy gunners, 60 Tory volunteers, and 300 or so ex-slaves now in Dunmore’s Ethiopian Regiment, for a total of almost 700.
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The Americans, some 800 to 900 strong, included men from Woodford’s regiment, some militia, and sharpshooting Culpeper minutemen. They erected breastworks and entrenched to the south of the bridge. The British regulars, Loyalists, and ex-slaves held Fort Murray to its north, in the direction of Norfolk. Under orders presumed to have come from Dunmore, on the morning of December 9 the British formed up and advanced down the causeway, wheeling cannon to the bridge. In front came an
advance guard, followed by the grenadier company of the Fourteenth, seven feet tall with their bearskin hats. They crossed the bridge, and behind them trailed 300 Tories and blacks ready to support the expected breakthrough.

Instead, the rout was of the British and Loyalists, further bloody testimony to the shooting abilities of backcountry yeomen who had grown up with firearms. When the grenadiers’ captain fell from fourteen bullets—the same number of riflemen had been told to bring him down—and dozens more redcoats had fallen, the British force retreated. Roughly 100 Culpeper riflemen left their entrenchments and started picking off Tories and blacks on the bridge. With the remaining redcoats returning to the stockade, Woodford decided against a counterattack. That night the senior British officer quietly vacated the fort, loaded his wounded on wagons and carts, and headed back to Norfolk. There the redcoats embarked on naval vessels beyond Dunmore’s authority. Compared to one wounded Virginian, the enemy loss totaled 102 killed and wounded.
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Great Bridge is not a famous name, but its consequences were considerable. Dunmore blamed the officers of the Fourteenth, who had worse to say about the governor’s own temper and strategic incapacity. Things would have been well, insisted Dunmore, had he been able to complete his planned breastworks outside Norfolk. Critics scoffed that his barely begun fortifications would have required 5,000 men to man them.
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Parenthetically, later in the 1780s, when Dunmore was governor of the Bahamas, he again embarked on vast fortifications that cost eight times the planned amount. One historian found a parallel: “the lack of proportion that Dunmore revealed in Norfolk led in Nassau [Bahamas] to a raging controversy over building grandiose fortifications that once again he did not have enough troops to man. That cost virtually bankrupted the colony, and the expenditures generated charges of corruption.”
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Politically, “news of the turn of events at the Great Bridge threw the loyalists into panic,” and “all who were friends to Government took refuge aboard the Ships [in the harbor].”
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What had been 30 or 40 private vessels in Dunmore’s fleet, mostly small, now swelled to about 70. In coming months, it would become less a fleet than a waterborne refugee camp, with many of the refugee families needing British seamen to handle their boats.

Over the next week, Woodford’s Second Regiment, together with 300 men from the First Virginia and various units of Virginia militiamen and minutemen, closed in on Norfolk. Three hundred and fifty North Carolina soldiers arrived on December 13, and command passed to a new ranking
officer, Colonel Robert Howe of the First North Carolina Continentals. Other units were posted at Great Bridge and Kemp’s Landing, where only a month earlier Dunmore had raised the royal standard. By Christmas, there were about 2,500 Patriot soldiers in and around Norfolk.
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However, for all that Americans now controlled the city, a new debate had begun among local army commanders and the political leaders assembled in Williamsburg for Virginia’s Fourth Convention. The issue was simple: Should Norfolk be strongly fortified and heavily garrisoned, or might it be a better option to destroy the city? That way the British could not seize and rebuild it as a bastion and as a potentially Chesapeake-dominating seaport. Thomas Jefferson was prominent among those favoring its destruction. Indeed, although Dunmore and the British began the fires on January 1 through a bombardment, Virginians actively continued the torching and were later deemed responsible for 80 percent of the fire damage, albeit this was not acknowledged at the time.

Harder to fathom is why Dunmore let himself be trapped into delivering an ultimatum that if the British were not allowed to gather food, Norfolk would be burned. When that access to food was not granted, Dunmore’s ships began a cannonade of several hours that set warehouses full of tar, pitch, and molasses ablaze. Many Loyalists on the British ships were appalled, urging that the cannon fire be limited.
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Equally surprising was that Dunmore, who seemed to realize that Patriots had set many of the fires, never seriously tried to turn that culpability into pro-British propaganda.
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The next several months were not kind to the governor. General Clinton, arriving during February en route to North Carolina, later recalled that “we found his Lordship on board a Ship in Hampton Road, driven from the Shore and the whole Country in arms against him…I could not see the Use of his Lordship’s remaining longer there, especially after the failure of his Attack on the Rebel Post at the Great Bridge.”
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February’s arrival of the 44-gun frigate
Roebuck,
commanded by Captain Andrew Hamond, did give Dunmore new firepower, although
Roebuck
was also under orders to patrol Delaware Bay. Between late February and late May, the governor based his unusual flotilla at Tucker’s Point, a promontory in the Elizabeth River some miles west of Norfolk. The once-feisty Scot was relatively inactive, probably because the buildup of Virginia Patriot regiments was ongoing, and both May and June were dominated by the Virginia Convention’s conspicuous preparations for independence. Dunmore’s sun was beginning to set.

By late May, the Patriots were close to unleashing a new weapon against the embattled governor: fireships on the Elizabeth River, which were to be bought downstream, set alight, and steered into Dunmore’s fleet, now numbering some 90 vessels. Captain Hamond, sent for by Dunmore, advised him to withdraw from Tucker’s Point. In addition to departing before any fireships came, Dunmore had to flee before the Virginians could put cannon downstream to bottle up his assemblage. Hamond succeeded in extricating Dunmore through a clever stratagem. Beating both the fireships and the not-yet-emplaced cannon, the Royal Navy captain assembled the seaworthy vessels, guided them out of the river, feinted toward the Chesapeake’s great exit at the Virginia Capes, and then managed to lead the convoy 40 miles north to Gwynn’s Island, where it arrived on May 27.
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Dunmore’s decline was now in its terminal stage. Although Patriot leaders worried that the British high command might try to reinforce the embattled governor, that never happened. Dunmore’s recruitment of Tories on the Eastern Shore for the Queen’s Own Loyal Regiment did no more than offset the loss of existing black and white Loyalists to rampant disease. By early July, the Virginia commander, Brigadier General Andrew Lewis, decided that he could safely concentrate Patriot forces to tackle the assembled British and Loyalist forces on Gwynn’s Island without leaving Williamsburg vulnerable. On July 8, with units from the First and Second regiments, as well as 1,300 militia, Lewis marched for the island.

It was something less than a bristling fortress. By one description, “at the nearest point the island was only 200 yards from the mainland across a channel that could be forded at low tide. Smallpox had left only 150 to 200 effective troops to defend its three or four square miles, and Hamond had to lend some of his sailors to throw up entrenchments.”
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Where the British had a clear advantage was in warships—the frigate
Roebuck
(44 guns), the frigate
Fowey
(20), the sloop
Otter
(14), and the converted merchantman
Dunmore,
although the frigates could not go into shallows. The Virginians, however, had the heavier artillery: two eighteen-pounders, two twelve-pounders, five nine-pounders, three six-pounders, and six field guns. The British artillery battery on the island had nothing larger than six-pounders.
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