Dunmore's Victory and the Proclamation That Changed the War

On November fifteenth, seventeen seventy-five, a small skirmish in what is now Virginia Beach set off one of the most consequential documents of the American Revolution.

John Murray, the fourth Earl of Dunmore, was Virginia's last royal governor, and by the autumn of seventeen seventy-five he had been driven off his official residence by Patriot pressure and was living aboard a British warship in the Chesapeake. He was not finished. Dunmore assembled a force that included British regulars, Loyalist volunteers, and, controversially, enslaved men who had escaped Patriot households and accepted his offer of arms and freedom.

At Kemp's Landing, near the village of Kempsville, Dunmore's troops encountered a company of Princess Anne County militia that had set an ambush. The Patriot plan went wrong when inexperienced militiamen opened fire too early. Dunmore's disciplined regulars returned fire and flushed them from the woods, capturing their commander and others in the process. It was Virginia's first land battle of the Revolutionary War, and the British won it.

Emboldened by the victory, Dunmore made public a proclamation he had signed days earlier. In it he declared martial law throughout Virginia and offered freedom to any enslaved person held by a Patriot who escaped and joined British forces. Many hundreds responded. Dunmore's Ethiopian Regiment, made up largely of escaped slaves, soon numbered around three hundred soldiers and fought under a banner reading Liberty to Slaves.

The proclamation had a double effect. It frightened Patriot slave owners so severely that many Virginia Loyalists switched sides, deciding their enslaved workforce was more valuable than their loyalty to the Crown. And it forced a conversation at the heart of the Revolution about what the words all men are created equal might actually mean.