Читать книгу The British Are Coming - Rick Atkinson - Страница 19

NORFOLK, VIRGINIA, DECEMBER 1775

John Murray, the fourth Earl of Dunmore and the royal governor of Virginia, had few rivals as the most detested British official in North America. Now forty-five, he was a short, pugnacious Scot whose father had been arrested for treason in the 1745 Jacobite rising. Young John subsequently chose to serve the English Crown as a soldier and was permitted to inherit the title after his father’s death in 1756. His estates in Perthshire provided £3,000 annually, but the fourth earl had accumulated both eleven children and expensive tastes. He hired the eminent artist Joshua Reynolds to paint his portrait, in tam-o’-shanter and highland tartans; he also built a summer house with an enormous stone cupola shaped like a pineapple, later derided as “the most bizarre building in Scotland.” Finding himself in financial straits, Dunmore sought to enlarge his fortune abroad. Appointed governor of New York in 1770, he had no sooner arrived than London reassigned him to Virginia, a disappointment that sent him stumbling through Manhattan streets in a drunken rage, roaring, “Damn Virginia … I’d asked for New York.” One loyalist reflected, “Was there ever such a blockhead?”

Virginians later caricatured Dunmore as an inebriated, arrogant philanderer, but he brought to Williamsburg one of America’s largest libraries, an art collection, and assorted musical instruments as evidence of his refinement. He also brought an unquenchable appetite for land, claiming vast tracts between Lake Champlain and what would become Indiana. His popularity surged briefly in 1774 after he launched a punitive military expedition against Shawnee Indians inconvenient to white Virginians who also coveted western acreage. But revolutionary upheaval soon unhorsed him.

Ever since John Rolfe, husband of a young Indian woman named Pocahontas—renamed Rebecca after her conversion to Christianity—learned to cure native tobacco in the early seventeenth century, the crop had dominated Virginia’s economy. The thirty-five thousand tons exported annually from the colony by the early 1770s had brought wealth but also more than £1 million in debt, nearly equal to that of the other colonies combined and often incurred by Tidewater planters living beyond their means. Agents for Glasgow and London merchant houses now controlled most of the tobacco yield. Resentment against British imperial constrictions combined with other colonial grievances, and was compounded by anxiety over the loss of local autonomy. Rebel leaders persuaded Virginians that rebellion “would enhance their opportunities and status,” the historian Alan Taylor later wrote, while also safeguarding political liberties threatened by an overbearing mother country. Planter aristocrats—like the Washingtons, Lees, and Randolphs—helped lead the uprising, but only by common consent. Moreover, evangelical churches, notably the Baptists and Methodists, were promised elevated standing “by disestablishing the elitist Anglican Church” favored by Crown loyalists.

When, in May 1774, Dunmore dissolved the fractious Virginia assembly, the House of Burgesses, delegates simply moved down the street from the capitol to reconvene in the Apollo Room of the Raleigh Tavern, subsequently forming the Virginia Convention to oversee colonial affairs. Anger deepened; resistance grew general. The colony became a leader in boycotting British goods and in summoning the Continental Congress to Philadelphia. Courts closed. Militia companies drilled. The Virginia Gazette published the names of loyalists considered hostile to liberty; some were ordered into western exile or to face the confiscation of their estates. “Lower-class men who did not own property saw the break from Britain as a chance to gain land and become slaveholders,” the historian Michael Kranish would write.

Baffled by Virginians’ “blind and unreasoning fury,” Dunmore brooded in his palace. He peppered London with complaints and with unreliable appraisals of colonial politics, receiving little guidance in return. In April 1775, even before learning of events in Lexington and Concord, he ordered a marine detachment to confiscate gunpowder from the public magazine in Williamsburg on grounds that “the Negroes might have seized upon it.” Rebel drums beat and militia “shirtmen”—so named for their distinctive hunting garb—threatened “to seize upon or massacre me,” he told Whitehall. After reimbursing the rebels £330 for the powder he had impounded, in early June he fled with his family in the dark of night for refuge first aboard the Magdalen, then on the Fowey, and eventually on the Eilbeck, an unrigged merchant tub he renamed for himself. With his wife and children dispatched to Britain, Dunmore’s dominion was reduced to a gaggle of loyalist merchants, clerks, and scrofulous sailors. Still, with just a few hundred more troops, he wrote London in August, “I could reduce the colony to submission.”

The Gazette would accuse him of “crimes that would even have disgraced the noted pirate Blackbeard.” Most of his felonies involved what were derided as “chicken-stealing expeditions” against coastal plantations, although he also impounded a Norfolk printing press from a seditious publisher who dared suggest that Catholic blood ran through Dunmore’s veins.

But then the earl decided to become an emancipator.

Roughly five hundred thousand Americans were black, some 20 percent of the population, and nine in ten of those blacks were slaves. In southern colonies, the proportion of blacks to whites was much higher: 40 percent of Virginia’s half million people were of African descent—often from cultures with military traditions—and white fear of slave revolts was a prominent reason for keeping colonial militias in fighting trim. Many white masters were reluctant to allow missionaries to convert their chattel for fear that radical Christian notions would make them even less docile. Political turmoil in America gave some slaves hope, and for months runaway blacks had sought protection from the regulars in a belief that British views on slavery differed markedly from those of southern planters.

In truth, although slavery had begun to disappear in England and Wales, Britain’s colonial economy was built on a scaffold of bondage. Among many examples, the almost two hundred thousand slaves in Jamaica outnumbered whites fifteen to one, and an uprising in 1760 had been suppressed by shooting several hundred blacks. The slave trade, carried largely in British ships, had never been more prosperous than in the years just before the American rebellion, and Britain would remain the world’s foremost slave-trading nation into the nineteenth century.

Dunmore’s initial muttering to London in the early summer about emancipation was largely a bluff. He recognized that bound labor was critical to the white commonwealth he governed. The king’s government was unenthusiastic about wrecking colonial economies or encouraging slave revolts that might infect the West Indies. But by mid-fall Dunmore was desperate to regain the initiative in Virginia. Reinforced with a few dozen 14th Foot soldiers who’d arrived from St. Augustine, he launched several aggressive Tidewater raids, capturing or destroying seventy-seven rebel guns “without the smallest opposition,” as a British captain wrote General Howe on November 1, “which is proof that it would not require a very large force to subdue this colony.” Raising the king’s standard—unable to find British national colors, Dunmore settled for a regimental banner—he administered loyalty oaths to those who pinned on strips of red cloth as a badge of “true allegiance to his sacred Majesty George III.” The price of red fabric rose in Norfolk stores, reflecting demand.

On November 7, using his confiscated printing press, Dunmore declared martial law and issued a proclamation: “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.” Liberation applied only to the able-bodied slaves of his foes. There would be no deliverance for his own fifty-seven slaves—abandoned in Williamsburg when he fled and for whom he would claim compensation from the government—nor would loyalists’ chattel be freed. The governor intended to crush a rebellion, not reconfigure the social order.

Still, eager blacks found their way into his ranks. Fitted by the British with linen or sail-canvas shirts, often with the motto “LIBERTY TO SLAVES” across their chests, runaways with names like Sampson, Pompey, and Glasgow were formed into an “Ethiopian Regiment,” under white officers. Maryland patriots tried to bar correspondence with Virginia in a futile effort to prevent news of Dunmore’s gambit from spreading north. A Philadelphian wrote, “The flame runs like wild fire through the slaves.” British sailors in cutters raided riverside plantations in “Negro-catching” forays. On November 14, Dunmore personally led a detachment of Ethiopians, regulars, marines, and twenty Scottish clerks in a rout of Virginia shirtmen at Kemp’s Landing, southeast of Norfolk. The Americans loosed a volley or two before fleeing, their leaders reportedly “whipping up their horses” except for those too drunk to ride.

The small victory was good for recruiting both white loyalists—Dunmore boasted that three thousand men had joined him—and black runaways, who, he reported, “are flocking in.” The governor triumphantly marched into Norfolk on November 23. Many Tidewater loyalists publicly revealed their sympathies, and some avowed patriots retreated to the safer ground of neutrality. “This pink-cheeked time-server,” as the historian Simon Schama called Dunmore, “had become the patriarch of a great black exodus.” Thomas Jefferson would later claim that from Virginia alone tens of thousands of slaves escaped servitude during the war, a number likely inflated but suggestive of white anxiety.

“With our little corps I think we have done wonders,” Dunmore wrote Howe on November 30. “Had I but a few more men here, I would immediately march to Williamsburg … by which I should soon compel the whole colony to submit.” Norfolk possessed a fine harbor that “could supply your army and navy with every necessary of life,” if properly protected. His senior naval officer added in a dispatch from the Otter on December 2 that the Americans, “from their being such cowards and cold weather coming on,” were expected to remain quiet through the winter.

That was unlikely. Dunmore had miscalculated: rather than cowing white southerners and pressuring slave owners to remain loyal, he would unify Virginians as never before. An American letter written on December 6 and subsequently published in a London newspaper captured the prevailing sentiment: “Hell itself could not have vomited anything more black than his design of emancipating our slaves.”

The proclamation backfired throughout the South, even though many runaways from Georgia to Mount Vernon eventually made their way to coastal waters wherever British men-of-war appeared. Rumors spread that slaves who murdered their masters would be entitled to their estates. The lawyer Patrick Henry, whose recent demand “Give me liberty or give me death” clearly did not countenance “black banditti,” circulated copies of Dunmore’s announcement in order to inflame white slave owners. For many, a war about political rights now became an existential struggle to prevent the social fabric from unraveling. Even Piedmont yeomen whose slave holdings were limited to renting a field hand or two took offense. Edward Rutledge, a prominent South Carolina politician, wrote in December that arming freed slaves tended “more effectually to work an eternal separation between Great Britain and the colonies than any other expedient which could possibly have been thought of.”

The Virginia Gazette urged slaves to “obey your masters … and expect a better condition in the next world.” Another, more sinister article warned, “Whether we suffer or not, if you desert us, you most certainly will.” A British official in Annapolis wrote, “This measure of emancipating the Negroes has excited a universal ferment, and will, I apprehend, greatly strengthen the general confederacy.” “Devil Dunmore” was vilified as “that ignoramus Negro-thief.” Had the British “searched through the world for a person the best fitted to ruin their cause,” wrote Richard Henry Lee, “they could not have found a more complete agent than Lord Dunmore.”

No slave master was more incensed than General Washington. “That arch traitor to the rights of humanity, Lord Dunmore, should be instantly crushed, if it takes the force of the whole colony to do it,” he wrote. In another outburst from Cambridge, Washington told Lee, “Nothing less than depriving him of life or liberty will secure peace in Virginia.” Otherwise, the governor “will become the most formidable enemy America has.”

A chance to confront the “Negro-thief” soon occurred twelve miles south of Norfolk at Great Bridge, on the rutted road from Carolina. Here two-wheeled carts brought cypress shingles and barreled turpentine from the Great Dismal Swamp, and drovers guided their flocks and herds to Tidewater slaughterhouses. A hamlet of twenty structures dominated by a church stood near the south branch of the Elizabeth River, which was spanned by a trestle bridge forty yards long and approached by long plank causeways through the marshlands. “Nine-tenths of the people are Tories,” one Virginian reported, “who are the poorest, miserable wretches I ever saw.” Just north of this settlement, Dunmore, exhbiting what a later commentator called “his characteristic unwisdom,” had built an earthen fort with two 4-pounders to command the bridge and a wooden stockade to house a garrison of a hundred regulars and Ethiopians. He named the fort for himself, but rebel shirtmen called it the Hog Pen.

By Friday, December 8, more than seven hundred militiamen had gathered a quarter mile south of the Hog Pen. A zigzag breastwork, seven feet high with fire steps and gun loopholes, served as their redoubt. Their numbers included the 2nd Virginia Regiment, commanded by Colonel William Woodford, a French and Indian War veteran. A Culpeper minute company carried a flag displaying a coiled rattlesnake and the motto “DON’T TREAD ON ME”; in their ranks marched a rangy, twenty-year-old lieutenant named John Marshall, who one day would be chief justice of the Supreme Court. The western riflemen typically wore deerskin trousers and leaf-dyed hunting shirts, with a buck’s tail affixed to the hat and a scalping knife sheathed on the belt. Many had “liberty or death” printed in large white script over their hearts, although one young rifleman admitted to preferring “liberty or wounded.”

Skirmishers and raiding parties from both sides had exchanged potshots for a week, burning isolated houses to discourage snipers. Some rebel officers wanted to execute captured slaves but agreed to leave their fate to the convention in Williamsburg. Dunmore, who remained aboard his floating headquarters near Norfolk, may have been duped by an American deserter who claimed that the rebels had fewer than three hundred men; he may also have learned, correctly, that more rebels were en route from Williamsburg and North Carolina. The governor dispatched additional regulars to Great Bridge, along with British sailors and loyalist volunteers, bringing the force there to perhaps four hundred. With more impetuous unwisdom, he also ordered the garrison to leave the secure fort and attack the American fortifications before they could be reinforced.

At first light on Saturday, December 9, reveille drums woke the American camp only to be answered with a snicker of musketry from the northern causeway approaching the bridge. The firing at first seemed like “our usual sport—an exchange of a few morning guns,” one Virginian wrote. But moments later Colonel Woodford’s adjutant called, “Boys, stand to your arms!” Bullets whistled overhead, and sentries spotted redcoats replacing planks missing from the bridge stringers. British gunners muscled the two 4-pounders from inside the fort and lobbed several rounds toward the American lines. The damp morning thickened with shouts and smoke and the booming cannonade. Lieutenant Edward Travis led an American skirmish line of eighty militiamen to the breastwork, 160 yards below the bridge, while Woodford deployed his main force around the church a quarter mile to the south.

Through smoke and morning haze, grenadiers abruptly appeared on the causeway, six abreast in bearskin caps and red coats with buff facings. With bayonets glinting and two drums beating time, they tramped in parade order across the bridge, shoes clapping the wooden planks. At the head of the column was a tall, homely captain named Charles Fordyce, who had written a friend a week earlier that “a couple of thousand men would settle everything here in the course of this winter.” On this morning, at this place, Captain Fordyce had not a couple thousand but 120 regulars, trailed at a safe distance by a scruffy battalion of marines, sailors, volunteers, and liberty-to-slaves Ethiopians. Within fifty yards of the breastwork, Fordyce waved his hat in a gesture of encouragement and was heard to cry, “The day is our own!”

Those were his last coherent words. On order, Travis’s men rose up from behind their barricade, took aim, and fired. Lead and flame leaped from the top of the parapet to gall the British column. Fordyce fell with a bullet in the knee. Blotting at the wound with a handkerchief pulled from his cuff, he rose, hobbled forward, and fell again, a few paces from the rebel barrier; fourteen bullets would be counted in his corpse. More gunshots came from the American left, where Culpeper riflemen, Lieutenant Marshall among them, had flanked the bridge along a marsh hummock and now enfiladed the enemy column with cross fire. Volley upon volley blistered the grenadier ranks. “For God’s sake,” a voice shrieked, “do not murder us!”

The rear guard turned and pelted for the fort. Gunners spiked their 4-pounders by hammering nails into the touchholes; then they ran, too. Grenadiers dragged wounded comrades across the bridge, glancing over their shoulders; shirtmen were said to favor scalping. “We retreated with much fewer brave fellows than we took out,” a midshipman from the Otter later wrote. Breathless bodies lay scattered before the breastwork like bloody throw rugs. “They fought, bled, and died like Englishmen,” reported Captain Richard Kidder Meade of the 2nd Virginia. “Ten and twelve bullets through many. Limbs broke in two or three places. Brains turning out. Good God, what a sight!” The entire action, from reveille to retreat, had lasted half an hour, “an absurd, ridiculous & unnecessary attack,” a surviving British officer wrote home.

Thirty-three captured loyalists and reenslaved Ethiopians were handcuffed, black to white, for the march to Williamsburg jail cells. Woodford agreed to return the British dead and wounded under a truce flag. A list recorded the casualties by infirmity: “ball lodged in the leg, no fracture,” or “ball lodged in the bowels, judged mortal.” One corporal was reportedly still alive despite seventeen wounds. American losses amounted to one man nicked in the finger.

That night at seven p.m., after loading the wounded into wagons and carts, the British garrison crept from the fort and trudged toward Norfolk, five hours north. On Sunday morning, shirtmen found the Hog Pen empty but for a few axes, twenty-nine spades, eleven pairs of shoes, a pair of snuff boxes, and dead grenadiers, now stiff and stripped of their coats and waistcoats. Dunmore’s report to London would list seventeen killed and forty-nine wounded, but that excluded blacks and loyalists, who brought the total casualties to more than a hundred.

“His Lordship,” one British officer wrote, “has much to answer for.”

Norfolk might be a “dirty little borough,” in Governor Dunmore’s description, but it was Virginia’s major port as well as the colony’s biggest town, with six thousand residents. Fine houses owned by ship captains and tobacco factors faced the waterfront, and brick warehouses crowded the wharves. Waters converged here: the James and Elizabeth Rivers, the Chesapeake Bay, and, beyond Capes Henry and Charles, the briny deep. Before the war strangled much of the colony’s trade, rum, sugar, and European finery—linens, chafing dishes, pewter porringers—were hoisted from the holds of arriving ships, which then were loaded with timber, wheat, salt pork, and countless hogsheads of sweet-scented tobacco. Sailmakers patched canvas shredded in rough crossings, and lighters with bubbling kettles of tar glided through the shallows, carrying carpenters hired to repair leaky merchantmen. An annual fair in Market Square featured bullbaiting and a contest to see who could snatch a gold-laced cap from a greased pole. Fine fiddling might be heard at dances in Masons Hall. The town was despised by many Virginians as a haven for British mercantilists and their Tory collaborators. Yet in better days, Norfolk had flourished.

Those days were gone, and the town’s worst days had now arrived. Upon hearing of the defeat at Great Bridge, Dunmore raved incoherently, threatening to hang the boy who brought the news. The bedraggled column of survivors shuffled through Norfolk’s cobblestoned streets in the small hours of Sunday morning, December 10. The wounded pleaded for water, and women with pitchers moved among them as the uninjured regulars and Ethiopians marched to the docks to be rowed out to half a dozen ships; Dunmore believed the town indefensible. Some loyalist families soon followed, clutching a few treasured possessions, but much of the population, foreseeing trouble, fled inland or up Tidewater creeks. Men dashed about trying to hire horses and wagons, or at least drays and wheelbarrows. House slaves piled beds, mahogany tables, chairs, and a bit of salt meat onto each conveyance, and off they went, to Portsmouth, or Suffolk, or even the Carolinas, abandoning those handsome homes on Church and Talbot Streets. To bolster their spirits, some could be heard singing as they hurried down Princess Anne Road.

The rebel force, swollen to almost thirteen hundred, had moved toward Norfolk. Woodford yielded command to Colonel Robert Howe, a more senior officer who had brought reinforcements from North Carolina. By Thursday, December 14, the rebels occupied the town, sniping at British vessels and arresting a hundred suspected loyalists for interrogation in Williamsburg. “We have taken up some of the Tories and coupled them to a Negro with handcuffs,” one officer reported. “The most stupid kind we discharge.”

Dunmore was also reinforced with the arrival, on December 21, of the Liverpool after a miserable fourteen-week passage from Britain that had reduced the twenty-eight-gun frigate to a single cask of fetid water. Scurvy plagued the ship and her companion, the ordnance brig Maria. But when Liverpool’s captain, Henry Bellew, demanded fresh provisions for his crews, rebel riflemen replied with more gunfire. American sentries paraded along the waterfront, yelled taunts from the docks, and seized a brig loaded with salt, the price of which had soared from one shilling per bushel to fifteen. “They have nothing more at heart than the utter destruction of this once most flourishing country,” Dunmore wrote London.

By December 31, both the year and British patience had expired. Captain Bellew sent Colonel Howe an odd ultimatum: that “you will cause your sentinels in the town of Norfolk to avoid being seen.” American gibes persisted—“every mark of insult,” Bellew complained, including insolent sentries walking with “their hats fixed on their bayonets” for sure visibility from his quarterdeck. Bellew moored Kingfisher, Otter, and Liverpool, the three largest men-of-war, with their gun ports broadside to the waterfront. Jack pendants flew from the bowsprits to distinguish these vessels from merchantmen. Dunmore warned civilians loitering in Norfolk to get out.

After a minatory rattle of drums, Liverpool fired the first three cannonballs, at three p.m. on Monday, January 1, demolishing a wharf shack used for a guardhouse. Within moments more than a hundred guns lacerated the town, pummeling the warehouses and dockyards in an effort to chivy snipers from their nests. Dirty smoke draped the anchorage as boatloads of British troops rowed ashore to set more fires. Storerooms of pitch and turpentine blazed up, igniting large houses and humble shanties alike. By ten p.m. a crimson glow hung like a halo over the waterfront. “The wind favored their design,” Colonels Howe and Woodford wrote in a joint dispatch to authorities in Williamsburg, “and we believe the flames will become general.” In a separate note, Howe described “women and children running through a crowd of shot to get out of town.… A few have, I hear, been killed. Does it not call for vengeance, both from God and man?” A British midshipman wrote in the early hours of January 2, “The town is still burning, as it will be for three or four days.”

That was quite true, for vengeful shirtmen had picked up where British incendiaries left off, burning, looting, and filling their canteens with alcohol pinched from grogshops. “Keep up the jig” became a rallying cry for those determined to punish a Tory town and blame it on the enemy. A witness reported militiamen “drinking rum and crying out, ‘Let us make hay while the sun shines.’” Unrestrained by their officers—Howe and Woodford had been disingenuous, if not dishonest, in blaming only the British for the conflagration—they plundered warehouses and residences, selling booty on the streets. A young soldier in Hampton wrote his mother, “At night the fire was so great the clouds above the town appeared as red and bright as they do in an evening at sun setting.”

At length the flames subsided. Colonel Howe reported that Norfolk “is in a very ruinous condition.” But vengeance had not yet run its course. Paraphrasing the Roman war cry that baneful Carthage must be destroyed, Thomas Jefferson had declared, “Delenda est Norfolk.” The Virginia Convention agreed and “ordered the remains of Norfolk to be burnt,” a major told his wife. “We expect to see the blaze soon.” Officers banged on doors, ordering all remaining residents within a mile of the water to evacuate. Shirtmen soon rampaged through the town again, setting blazes to structures still standing on Bermuda, Catherine, and Church Streets.

“The detested town of Norfolk is no more!” a midshipman wrote. The “dirty little borough,” now reduced to ash and skeletal chimneys, had suffered greater damage than would befall any town in America during the Revolution. An investigative commission the following year found that of 1,331 structures destroyed in and near Norfolk, the British had demolished 32 before evacuating the town, then burned 19 more during the January 1 bombardment. Militia troops burned 863 in early January, and another 416 in the subsequent razing ordered by the convention. But that accounting remained secret for sixty years and then was buried in a legislative journal that stayed hidden for another century, as the historian John E. Selby would note. Blaming the redcoats for wanton destruction was convenient, and like ruined Falmouth in Maine or Charlestown in Massachusetts, Norfolk became a vivid emblem of British cruelty.

“Never can true reconcilement grow,” the Virginia Gazette declared, “where wounds of deadly hate have pierced so deep.” The war had become both brutal and continental, from Montreal to southern Virginia, and would grow nastier and spread farther. Dunmore’s actions drew Virginia into the insurrection full-bore: in mid-January the Virginia Convention enlarged the two existing militia regiments and then created seven more, most of them commanded by officers who had served with Washington during the French war. All nine Virginia regiments would be mustered into the new Continental Army, which Washington was forming into a national force outside Boston, as ordered by Congress. The convention, in an act of independence, also declared Virginia ports open for trade to any nation except Britain, Ireland, and the British West Indies.

Virginians got on with hunting their runaways. A notice in the Gazette offered a reward for “a servant boy named Bartholomew Archibald, about 18 years of age, about 5 feet 6 inches high, of a dark complexion, pitted with smallpox, very slim made.… I am apt to think he will pass for a free man.” Captured “renegadoes” who had served Dunmore were publicly flogged, occasionally after having an ear severed. Some were sold to sugar plantations in the West Indies or sent to work the lead mines in Fincastle County, digging ore for rebel bullets. One account reported that some blacks caught bearing arms for the British had their severed heads impaled on poles at crossroads. Owners were compensated for their losses.

By triggering Norfolk’s immolation, Dunmore had ruined his friends and deprived himself of sanctuary. American contempt for the governor only intensified. He was accused in the press of keeping two enslaved girls as “bedmakers,” and it was said that he had “barreled up some dead bodies of the smallpox and sent them on shore” to spread disease. Banished from both Williamsburg and Norfolk, he took refuge with a hodgepodge cluster of ninety vessels at Tucker’s Mill Point, a malarial spit on the west bank of the Elizabeth River. A six-foot breastwork and a ditch three hundred yards long protected a four-acre encampment where several wells were sunk for fresh water.

But rebel riflemen lurked on the perimeter, and jail fever—typhus—spread through both the Royal Navy crews and the refugees trapped in what was derisively called the “King’s Four Acres.” Grave mounds began to sprout on the riverbank, first a few, then a few score, and eventually a few hundred, half of them reportedly belonging to freed slaves. Moreover, Dunmore reported, “there was not a ship in the fleet that did not throw one, two, or three or more dead overboard every night.” Otter became a virtual ghost ship. Dunmore sent armed boats to forage for food along the coast with little success, even as additional runaways slipped into the camp each day. Bread and salt meat supplies began to dwindle, sickness grew epidemic, and soon enough, the governor knew, he would have to lead his wandering tribe elsewhere.

Dunmore poured out his troubles in an endless letter to London. “I wish to God it had been possible to have spared some troops for this colony,” he wrote. “I am now morally certain had I had 500 men here six weeks ago … [the rebels] would not have been able to raise any number that could possibly have opposed my march to any part of the colony.” Instead, the fate befallen the proud royal colony of Virginia “is a mortification.”

“God only knows,” he added, “what I have suffered.”