Dunmore’s Proclamation

The year was 1775, and Virginia stood at the edge of a storm. In the calm before revolution turned to full war, one British governor, an imperious Scotsman named John Murray, Fourth Earl of Dunmore, issued a decree that would send shockwaves through the colonies and echo across centuries. From the deck of a British warship anchored off Norfolk, Lord Dunmore declared martial law in the colony of Virginia. More explosively, he promised freedom to “all indentured servants, Negroes, or others, appertaining to Rebels,” who would bear arms for the King. It was November 7, 1775, and in one stroke of the pen, Dunmore transformed the struggle for American liberty into a crisis of freedom itself.

Dunmore’s Proclamation was not an act of moral awakening, but of political desperation. It was meant to terrify the Virginians into submission, to destabilize the rebellion by weaponizing its most fragile foundation—slavery. Yet in trying to suppress rebellion, Dunmore unleashed something that neither he nor his royal masters could control. Enslaved men and women took him at his word. They fled plantations and seized the chance, however perilous, to fight for a freedom the Revolution’s white leaders only preached. Dunmore’s words, intended as a stratagem, lit a fire that burned deep into the conscience of a nation still claiming to fight for liberty.

John Murray, the Fourth Earl of Dunmore, had arrived in Virginia in 1771, a typical aristocrat of his age: proud, cunning, and not particularly beloved. He governed with a mixture of hauteur and pragmatism, but his reputation was already tarnished by his ruthless tenure as governor of New York. Virginia, with its wealth and vast plantations, was both prize and powder keg. Dunmore ruled over a population of about 538,000 souls, of whom roughly 220,000 were enslaved. The colony’s prosperity rested squarely on human bondage. Slavery was its engine, its lifeblood, and its deepest fear. Every planter knew that the wealth of the Tidewater depended upon the obedience of the enslaved—and that obedience was brittle.

Dunmore understood that fragility. In 1772, he warned that the enslaved were “attached by no tye to their Masters” and might, given the chance, “revenge themselves.” His words were prophetic. Beneath the genteel veneer of tobacco fields and Georgian mansions, Virginia lived under the shadow of revolt. It was a society built on fear, and Dunmore—whether cynically or shrewdly—knew how to turn that fear into a weapon.

The legal winds in Britain had already begun to shift. The Somerset v. Stewart decision in 1772 had declared that slavery could not exist under English common law within the British Isles. Although the ruling technically applied only to Britain, it rattled colonial slaveholders. If liberty was the birthright of every man in England, what did that mean for the millions held in bondage in her colonies? Patriots in Virginia and the Carolinas whispered that the Crown might abolish slavery entirely. That suspicion hardened into paranoia once rebellion flared.

In April 1775, as musket smoke curled over Lexington and Concord, Dunmore’s own colony teetered toward violence. Fearing insurrection among white Patriots, Dunmore ordered British marines to seize gunpowder from the public magazine in Williamsburg. The action, seen as a tyrannical provocation, enraged Virginians. An armed mob demanded the powder’s return. Dunmore stood his ground, brandishing threats rather than muskets: if any harm came to him or his family, he warned, he would “declare Freedom to the Slaves.” The remark was pure menace to the ears of Virginia’s ruling class, and they heard it loud and clear.

By May, the threat was evolving into a plan. In private correspondence, Dunmore told British officials that he would “arm all my own Negroes, and receive all others that will come to me whom I shall declare free.” It was a strategy born of necessity. The Patriots were mobilizing; Loyalists were timid; and British troops were scarce. If he could not rely on white Loyalists to defend royal authority, perhaps he could turn the enslaved against their masters.

The situation deteriorated through the summer. By June 8, Dunmore had fled Williamsburg entirely, taking refuge aboard the British sloop HMS Fowey in the Chesapeake Bay. Even before the proclamation, enslaved people were acting on his earlier threats. They escaped plantations and found passage to Dunmore’s fleet, offering vital intelligence and guiding British ships through treacherous coastal waters. By October, some had taken up arms in skirmishes near Hampton, proving themselves capable and courageous under fire.

Then came the moment that would define Dunmore’s place in history. On November 7, 1775, from his makeshift floating headquarters off Norfolk, he declared martial law throughout Virginia. Every able-bodied man was commanded to take up arms for the King, or be deemed a traitor. More dramatically, he proclaimed freedom for “all indentured Servants, Negroes, or others (appertaining to Rebels,) free that are able and willing to bear Arms.” In effect, it was a promise of freedom through loyalty to the Crown.

The decree’s language was clear in its limits. It freed only those enslaved by “rebels,” and only if they would “bear arms” for His Majesty. Loyalist masters could keep their human property. The measure was never meant to strike a moral blow against slavery; it was meant to strike a military one against rebellion. Still, whatever Dunmore’s motives, his words electrified the enslaved.

The proclamation was also a piece of information warfare. Dunmore knew the power of rumor and fear. Virginia’s economy and psychology both rested on slavery. By offering freedom to those who fled their masters, Dunmore deprived the rebels of labor, sowed panic among the planters, and stirred doubts about who could be trusted in their own homes. The proclamation was less a call to arms than a whisper into every slave cabin and tavern: the King is your friend, your master is your enemy.

For white Virginians, it was nothing short of apocalyptic. Newspapers howled that Dunmore had “incited the Negroes to massacre their masters.” Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, and Patrick Henry, all slaveholders, saw in the proclamation both a moral humiliation and a mortal threat. The revolutionaries who had been arguing that the King enslaved them now faced the bitter irony of enslaved people fighting for the King’s freedom.

Within weeks, the promise became reality. Hundreds of enslaved men, and some women, made their way to British lines. They were organized into what Dunmore proudly called his “Ethiopian Regiment.” The name, drawn from ancient Greek and biblical usage, was not chosen carelessly. “Ethiopian” was a word associated with noble antiquity, a recognition of African origin as something ancient and dignified. The soldiers were issued uniforms emblazoned with the motto “Liberty to Slaves.” For many of them, it was the first time they had ever held a weapon for their own cause.

By late November, Dunmore’s mixed force of Loyalists, sailors, and Black volunteers numbered several hundred. On November 15, they fought their first engagement at Kemp’s Landing, defeating Patriot militia and capturing their leader, Colonel Joseph Hutchings. In a moment heavy with symbolism, Hutchings was seized by one of his former slaves now fighting for Dunmore, a living embodiment of the proclamation’s inversion of power.

The regiment continued to serve with distinction. At Great Bridge in December, they held the line against advancing Patriot forces. Though the British attack on December 9 ended in disaster, it marked the first open battle between Black and white soldiers in North American history. Those captured from the Ethiopian Regiment faced no mercy. Patriots viewed them not as prisoners of war but as insurrectionists, subject to imprisonment or execution. Many were forced into labor in the mines of western Virginia, digging the very lead that would become musket balls fired by their former masters.

The campaign reached its grim climax in January 1776 when Norfolk burned. Dunmore ordered his troops to set fire to warehouses sheltering rebel supplies, but the Patriots torched the rest of the town. Black and white soldiers alike perished or fled into the cold waters of the Chesapeake.

Disease soon did what the Patriots could not. The fleet became a floating pesthouse. Typhus, dysentery, and smallpox ravaged the crowded decks, and the Black soldiers suffered the most. At Gwynn’s Island, where Dunmore sought refuge, smallpox spread like wildfire. Hundreds of Ethiopian Regiment members died. Those who survived were evacuated to New York in mid-1776, where the remnants of the regiment were absorbed into other British units such as the Black Pioneers.

In human terms, the experiment was a tragedy. Out of roughly one thousand who had joined Dunmore, perhaps half were dead within a year. Yet in moral terms, something irreversible had begun.

The white southern reaction was volcanic. The Virginia Convention denounced Dunmore’s proclamation as “an encouragement to a general insurrection.” It declared that any slave who joined him would be executed, but those who returned would be pardoned. The statement revealed both the hypocrisy and the fear at the heart of the Revolution. Virginians had been crying tyranny against the King, yet they offered death to those who took liberty at his invitation.

Historians often note that Dunmore’s Proclamation may have done more than any single act to drive the South fully into rebellion. Patriot leaders used it as proof that the Crown intended to destroy them socially and economically. The flames of Norfolk burned in their memories as vividly as any battlefield. The Revolution was now not just a war of independence, it was a war to preserve their way of life, which meant, in practice, to preserve slavery.

Dunmore, however, had set in motion a precedent that Britain would quietly continue. His successors, including General Henry Clinton, would later issue similar proclamations, offering sanctuary to enslaved people who escaped Patriot masters. Thousands fled to British lines over the next eight years, and many served as soldiers, laborers, and scouts. In the end, some 20,000 Black Americans fought or worked for the British cause.

When the war ended, their fate was mixed. Many of the Black Loyalists who had served the Crown were evacuated alongside British troops, rather than be returned to bondage. In 1783, several hundred were resettled in Nova Scotia. There, they carved out difficult lives amid the cold and hostility of white settlers. Some of them, weary of broken promises, later joined the new colony of Sierra Leone in West Africa, carrying with them the memory of a freedom first promised by a desperate Scottish governor decades before.

Back in the United States, Dunmore’s legacy lived on in the contradictions of the young Republic. The same Virginians who denounced his “diabolical” act went on to write a Declaration proclaiming that “all men are created equal.” Jefferson’s list of grievances against the King included one line, “He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us,” that historians widely interpret as a reference to Dunmore’s Proclamation. The revolutionaries spoke the language of liberty, but they drew the color line sharply when it threatened their own order.

In Britain, meanwhile, the moral echo of the proclamation grew louder. The courage of the fugitives who had joined Dunmore and later the British army became part of the conversation that led to abolitionist movements in the late eighteenth century. Men and women who had seized their liberty on the Virginia coast helped shift British conscience toward ending the slave trade altogether by 1807.

In the end, Dunmore’s Proclamation was both failure and foundation. It failed as a military tactic. It did not save the Crown’s authority in Virginia or halt the march of rebellion. Yet it succeeded in planting a seed of liberty in the hearts of those whom history had silenced. It redefined freedom from the bottom up. While Dunmore intended only to frighten rebels, he instead offered enslaved people their first tangible promise of agency.

The irony of the American Revolution is that one of the earliest declarations of freedom on this continent came not from a Patriot assembly or a Continental Congress, but from a British lord acting out of expediency. History has a cruel sense of humor. Dunmore, who ended his days in relative obscurity, could not have imagined that his desperate decree would become one of the Revolution’s most enduring documents.

The proclamation forced Americans to confront a question they still struggle with today: whose freedom are we fighting for? When the rhetoric of liberty clashed with the reality of bondage, the words of a Tory governor suddenly made the Patriots look like hypocrites. The enslaved who took up arms for the King may not have won their war, but they changed the terms of everyone else’s.

On that November day in 1775, from the deck of his warship, Lord Dunmore wrote words meant to terrify a colony. Instead, they inspired a movement. Out of strategy came salvation, out of tyranny came the first steps toward freedom. His proclamation, born of desperation, became the unwitting spark of a revolution within the Revolution—a promise of liberty that no power, not even empire or rebellion, could entirely contain.