Enslaved Mount Vernon Workers Respond to Dunmore's Proclamation

# Enslaved Mount Vernon Workers Respond to Dunmore's Proclamation

In November 1775, as the American colonies lurched toward full-scale war with Great Britain, John Murray, the Earl of Dunmore and royal governor of Virginia, issued one of the most provocative documents of the Revolutionary era. Dunmore's Proclamation declared martial law across Virginia and, in its most explosive provision, offered freedom to any enslaved person owned by a Patriot who was willing to escape and bear arms for the British Crown. The proclamation was a calculated military strategy designed to destabilize the colonial economy and sow fear among Virginia's slaveholding planter class, but for the hundreds of thousands of enslaved men and women living across the colony, it represented something far more immediate and personal — a possible path to liberty. Nowhere was the tension surrounding Dunmore's offer felt more acutely than at Mount Vernon, the sprawling plantation estate of George Washington, who by that time had already assumed his role as Commander-in-Chief of the Continental Army and was stationed far from home in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Washington was not present to manage the crisis himself. Instead, the daily operations of Mount Vernon fell to his distant cousin Lund Washington, who served as the estate's manager, and to Martha Washington, who oversaw the domestic life of the household before departing to join her husband at his military headquarters during the winter months. Lund Washington became George Washington's eyes and ears on the ground, and the letters exchanged between the two men during the winter of 1775–1776 reveal a deep and persistent anxiety about the proclamation's potential impact. Washington, who enslaved more than two hundred people across his various landholdings, understood that Dunmore's offer struck at the economic and social foundations upon which his wealth and status rested. He recognized, too, that the promise of freedom was a powerful inducement that could lead to significant losses of the labor force that sustained Mount Vernon's agricultural operations.

Lund Washington's reports from the estate kept the general apprised of the mood and movements of the enslaved community. The correspondence suggests that Washington feared not only individual escapes but also the possibility of coordinated departures, particularly among enslaved men who might see military service with the British as their best chance at emancipation. These fears were not unfounded. Across Virginia, hundreds of enslaved people responded to Dunmore's Proclamation by fleeing to British lines, and many joined what became known as the Ethiopian Regiment, a military unit composed of formerly enslaved men who wore uniforms emblazoned with the words "Liberty to Slaves." While the historical record does not indicate a mass escape from Mount Vernon during this specific period, the anxiety expressed in Washington's letters makes clear that the possibility was ever-present and deeply unsettling to the plantation's leadership.

The episode matters enormously in the broader story of the American Revolution because it exposes one of the conflict's deepest contradictions. George Washington and his fellow Patriot leaders spoke eloquently of liberty, natural rights, and the tyranny of British rule, yet they built their lives on the forced labor of enslaved people. Dunmore's Proclamation forced that contradiction into the open by demonstrating that the language of freedom resonated most powerfully with those who had the least of it. The British did not issue the proclamation out of genuine humanitarian concern — it applied only to the enslaved workers of rebels, not Loyalists — but its effect was nonetheless revolutionary. It made the question of slavery an inescapable part of the war and reminded Americans that the struggle over who deserved liberty would not be settled simply by defeating the British.

For the enslaved men and women at Mount Vernon, the proclamation represented a moment of heightened possibility and heightened danger. Attempting escape carried enormous risks, including capture, punishment, and separation from family. Yet the very fact that Washington and Lund devoted so much anxious correspondence to the subject testifies to the agency of the enslaved community, whose awareness of the broader conflict and willingness to act on the promise of freedom shaped the course of events at one of the most famous plantations in American history. Their responses to Dunmore's Proclamation remind us that the Revolution was not a single story of colonial resistance but a web of overlapping struggles, and that the people who had the most to gain from the promise of liberty were often those whom the nation's founders refused to include in it.