Norfolk

Norfolk, Virginia: The Town That Burned at the Revolution's Edge

Long before the Declaration of Independence was signed in Philadelphia, the Revolution had already torn Norfolk, Virginia, apart. By the time the delegates in that Pennsylvania statehouse committed treason with their pens in July 1776, Norfolk—once the most prosperous port in the largest American colony—had been reduced to smoldering rubble, its population scattered, its wharves destroyed, and its very name made synonymous with the brutal choices the Revolution forced upon ordinary people. No town in British North America suffered so complete a destruction so early in the war, and few places illustrate so vividly how the Revolution was not merely a war between armies but a civil conflict that shattered communities, upended the institution of slavery, and left scars that took generations to heal. Thomas Jefferson himself referred to the calamity in the Declaration of Independence, charging that George III had "burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people."

No American city before or since has suffered such complete destruction.

To understand what happened in Norfolk, one must first understand what Norfolk was. By the early 1770s, the town was Virginia's primary commercial hub, a bustling port of roughly six thousand residents whose economy revolved around trade with Britain, the West Indies, and the other colonies. Colonial Norfolk was built along a fifty-acre oblong peninsula on the north side of the Elizabeth River, moored to the mainland by a slender isthmus and pierced with swampy creeks, where elegant brick townhomes and rickety wooden tenements shared narrow streets with grimy taverns, while smoky factories, teeming shanty-towns, and tony new suburbs spilled north of the downtown. Its merchants—men like Andrew Sprowle, who operated one of the largest shipyards in North America at Gosport, just across the Elizabeth River—were deeply enmeshed in the imperial trading networks that connected Virginia's tobacco, naval stores, and grain to markets across the Atlantic. Sprowle was a Scottish-born merchant, naval agent, landowner, shipyard owner, slaveholder and slave trader in Portsmouth, Virginia, best remembered today for establishing the Gosport Ship Yard, now known as Norfolk Naval Shipyard.

He was well respected in the mercantile community, serving for thirty-six years as President of the Court of Virginia Merchants.

The Gosport Shipyard, founded on November 1, 1767, on the western shore of the Elizabeth River, became a prosperous naval and merchant facility for the British Crown — its new yard included a large five-story warehouse which was then one of the largest buildings in North America. This commercial orientation gave Norfolk a character distinct from the plantation-dominated Tidewater surrounding it. The town's merchant class had strong ties to British partners and British capital. Many of them were Scots-born or Scots-descended, and their livelihoods depended on the very imperial system that Patriot leaders in Williamsburg and Philadelphia were increasingly challenging. Virginia at this time had an enslaved Black population of roughly 220,000 compared to a white population of approximately 538,000—making the colony 41 percent Black , and the planter gentry who dominated Virginia politics viewed Norfolk's Loyalist merchant class with deep suspicion. Norfolk, in short, was a Loyalist stronghold in a colony that was rapidly turning revolutionary—a combustible situation that Lord Dunmore, the royal governor of Virginia, would attempt to exploit with devastating consequences for everyone involved.

John Murray, Fourth Earl of Dunmore, had served as Virginia's royal governor since 1771, and by the spring of 1775 he found himself in an increasingly untenable position. During his tenure, he had worked proactively to extend Virginia's western borders past the Appalachian Mountains, and had notably defeated the Shawnee nation in Dunmore's War, gaining land south of the Ohio River. But as revolutionary sentiment grew, his position became untenable. After he seized the colony's gunpowder stores from the magazine in Williamsburg in April 1775—an act that enraged Patriot militias across Virginia—Dunmore abandoned the Governor's Palace in June and took refuge aboard the HMS Fowey in the York River. From there, he eventually made his way to Norfolk, where he believed the town's Loyalist sympathies and its strategic position on the Chesapeake Bay would give him a base from which to reassert royal authority. He established what amounted to a floating government, conducting the business of the colonial administration from ships anchored in Norfolk's harbor and at Andrew Sprowle's Gosport shipyard. This arrangement resulted in Gosport being "virtually the Royal capital of Virginia." Sprowle, whose wealth and infrastructure made him the most important Loyalist in the area, provided critical support: he supplied the British troops with barracks and kept open house for all officers of the fleet and army.

On November 7, 1775, with a Patriot force marching toward Norfolk, Dunmore took one of the most consequential and incendiary steps of the entire Revolution. He issued a proclamation that declared martial law in the colony and promised freedom for "all indented servants, negroes, or others" who joined the British Army.

Dunmore's proclamation was made public on November 15, following the victory of his Ethiopian Regiment of Black soldiers in the Battle of Kemp's Landing.

The Ethiopian Regiment was the first Black fighting force in British North America, provided with military training and arms by the royal governor.

The American historian Gary B. Nash argued that the proclamation "reverberated throughout the colonies and became a major factor in convincing white colonists that reconciliation with the mother country was impossible." Estimates of the number of enslaved people that reached Dunmore vary but generally range between 800 and 2,000.

The proclamation pushed some wavering Virginians toward the Patriot cause. Richard Henry Lee wrote, "Lord Dunmore's unparalleled conduct in Virginia has, a few Scotch excepted, united every Man in that large Colony."

While Dunmore's Proclamation was aimed only at men capable of bearing arms, many enslaved people outside of that description flocked to his banner—it was not uncommon for family units to run away together. Over the remainder of 1775 into 1776, Dunmore's flotilla swelled with runaway enslaved people, and providing for all of these people proved incredibly difficult, as disease began running rampant, especially among the enslaved, who were often forced into cramped and overcrowded quarters on ships.

One British officer dubbed the flotilla a "floating town."

By early December, the military confrontation that had been building for months came to a head at Great Bridge, about nine miles south of Norfolk. The Battle of Great Bridge, fought on the morning of December 9, 1775, was the first major battle of the American Revolution in Virginia and a significant victory for early Patriot military mobilization.

The primary approach to Norfolk was over Great Bridge, which spanned the Elizabeth River, surrounded on both sides by the Great Dismal Swamp and accessible only by narrow causeways on both the north and south sides. Dunmore ordered the construction of a stockade known as Fort Murray on the north side of the bridge.

Fearing reinforcements from North Carolina, Dunmore instructed his forces to attack the entrenched Patriot forces on the south end of the causeway. Forced to attack six men abreast on the narrow bridge, the British 14th Regiment took devastating fire from the front and flank, and the attack collapsed.

Among those present in the Patriot ranks were Major Thomas Marshall and his son, Lieutenant John Marshall—the future Chief Justice of the United States—serving with the Culpeper Minutemen.

Casualty estimates ranged from Dunmore's official report of 62 killed or wounded to an escaped patriot's report that British losses totaled 102; the only claimed rebel casualty was one man with a slight wound to the thumb.

Colonel William Woodford, reporting on the battle, wrote that it was "a second Bunker's Hill affair, in miniature; with this difference, that we kept our post, and had only one man wounded in the hand."

Following the defeat, on December 14, with the Patriot ranks swelled by further militia arrivals to about 1,200, Colonel Robert Howe and Woodford moved into Norfolk. Since Howe held a senior Continental Army commission, he outranked Woodford and assumed command of the occupying forces. He adopted a hard line in dealings with Dunmore and the Royal Navy captains, denying the delivery of supplies to the overcrowded ships and insisting on parity in the exchange of prisoners.

On December 21, the twenty-eight-gun frigate HMS Liverpool arrived under Captain Henry Bellew, carrying 400 Royal Marines and escorting the storeship Maria.

Dunmore positioned four ships—the Dunmore, the Liverpool, the Otter, and the Kingfisher—in a threatening line along the town's waterfront, setting off an exodus of people and possessions from the town.

Bellew issued an ultimatum on Christmas Eve, saying he preferred to purchase desperately