The Battle of Great Bridge: Virginia's Bunker Hill

In the autumn of seventeen seventy-five, the royal governor of Virginia made a decision that would seal the colony's break from Britain. Lord Dunmore, John Murray, the Fourth Earl of Dunmore, had been forced to flee the governor's palace in Williamsburg and take refuge on a British warship in the Chesapeake. From there he issued a proclamation in November offering freedom to enslaved people held by Patriots who joined the British military effort. Hundreds answered. They became the Ethiopian Regiment, fighting under a banner that read Liberty to Slaves.

By early December, Dunmore held a small wooden fort at Great Bridge, south of Norfolk, commanding the only road into the town from the Carolina side. On December ninth, seventeen seventy-five, Captain Charles Fordyce led a British assault across the causeway toward the Patriot earthworks. Colonel William Woodford's Virginia regulars waited behind their breastworks and let them come.

It was a disaster for the British. Captain Fordyce was killed crossing the bridge. British casualties in the assault ranged from sixty to over one hundred killed or wounded. Patriot losses: exactly one man wounded. Colonel Woodford, writing after the battle, called it a second Bunker's Hill affair, in miniature. The difference was that this time the Patriots held the ground.

Dunmore evacuated Norfolk within days, retreating with his ships into the harbor. The Battle of Great Bridge effectively ended British authority over Virginia. The colony would not see a royal governor again. The road to independence ran through a wooden bridge over a Virginia ditch, on a cold December morning in seventeen seventy-five.