Role: Formerly Enslaved Persons

# Dunmore's Floating Government on the Chesapeake By the spring of 1775, John Murray, the Fourth Earl of Dunmore and Royal Governor of Virginia, found himself in an increasingly untenable position. Tensions between the Crown and Virginia's colonial leadership had been escalating for months. Dunmore had already provoked outrage in April by ordering the secret removal of gunpowder from the public magazine in Williamsburg, an act that nearly triggered an armed confrontation with local militia forces. As the political situation deteriorated and threats against his safety mounted, Dunmore made the fateful decision to abandon the Governor's Palace in Williamsburg on June 8, 1775, fleeing with his family to the safety of the HMS Fowey, a British warship anchored in the York River. It was a dramatic act of retreat that signaled just how thoroughly royal authority in Virginia had collapsed on land. What followed was one of the most unusual episodes of governance in American colonial history. Rather than surrender his commission or sail for England, Dunmore chose to continue exercising his authority as royal governor from the decks of British warships anchored in the Chesapeake Bay, using the harbor at Norfolk as his primary base of operations. Historians have come to call this arrangement Dunmore's "floating government," and for more than a year it represented the last vestige of Crown rule in one of Britain's oldest and most important colonies. Dunmore transferred his operations from the Fowey to a vessel that came to bear his own name, the HMS Dunmore, and from these ships he issued proclamations, corresponded with British officials, and attempted to maintain the machinery of royal administration entirely at sea. Norfolk served as a natural base for Dunmore's operations because the town was home to a significant loyalist merchant community. These merchants supplied his ships with provisions, shared intelligence about Patriot movements, and maintained a vital link between Dunmore's floating administration and those Virginians who still wished to remain loyal to the Crown. From this precarious position, Dunmore launched coastal raids against Patriot positions, seeking to disrupt the revolutionary movement and demonstrate that royal power still had teeth. Dunmore's most consequential act from his floating government came on November 15, 1775, when he issued what became known as Lord Dunmore's Proclamation. This extraordinary document declared martial law in Virginia and offered freedom to any enslaved persons belonging to rebel owners who were willing and able to bear arms in service to the Crown. The proclamation was a calculated military strategy designed to weaken the Patriot cause by striking at the economic foundation of Virginia's planter class and bolstering Dunmore's own thin military forces. Hundreds of enslaved people risked their lives to reach Dunmore's ships and answer the call, forming what became known as the Ethiopian Regiment. For these formerly enslaved men and women, the proclamation represented a desperate chance at liberty, even as it was born of Dunmore's military pragmatism rather than any genuine antislavery conviction. The proclamation sent shockwaves through the Southern colonies and hardened many previously uncertain Virginians against the Crown, as slaveholders feared the social upheaval Dunmore's offer threatened to unleash. Dunmore's military fortunes, however, proved short-lived. In December 1775, a force of Patriot soldiers decisively defeated Dunmore's mixed force of British regulars, loyalist volunteers, and members of the Ethiopian Regiment at the Battle of Great Bridge, south of Norfolk. The defeat effectively ended Dunmore's ability to project power ashore. In retaliation and frustration, British naval forces bombarded Norfolk on January 1, 1776, and subsequent fires — set by both sides — left much of the town in ruins. Dunmore lingered in the Chesapeake for months afterward, conducting sporadic raids and struggling to feed and shelter the growing number of refugees aboard his overcrowded ships. Disease, particularly smallpox, ravaged the loyalists and formerly enslaved people who had sought his protection. By the summer of 1776, Dunmore's position had become hopeless. He finally departed Virginia's waters in August 1776, sailing for New York and effectively ending royal governance in the colony. His floating government stands as a remarkable symbol of the Revolution's early dynamics: a royal governor reduced to ruling from warships, sustained only by a dwindling band of loyalists and freedom-seeking refugees, while the colony he nominally governed built a new political order on shore. Dunmore's experience demonstrated, months before the Declaration of Independence was signed, that British authority in Virginia had already been swept away by the revolutionary tide.

Role: Formerly Enslaved Persons

**Lord Dunmore's Proclamation: Freedom as a Weapon of War** By the autumn of 1775, John Murray, the Fourth Earl of Dunmore and Royal Governor of Virginia, found himself in an increasingly desperate position. Once the most powerful representative of the British Crown in one of its wealthiest colonies, Dunmore had watched his authority disintegrate over the preceding months as revolutionary fervor swept through Virginia. Earlier that year, tensions had erupted when Dunmore ordered the removal of gunpowder from the public magazine in Williamsburg, provoking armed confrontation with colonial militias. Fearing for his safety, Dunmore fled the Governor's Palace in June 1775 and took refuge aboard the HMS Fowey in the waters off Norfolk. From the deck of a warship, the governor of Virginia now governed nothing but a small flotilla, a handful of loyalist supporters, and whatever strategy he could devise to reassert royal control over a colony slipping irretrievably from the Crown's grasp. What Dunmore devised would prove to be one of the most consequential and controversial acts of the entire Revolutionary War. On November 7, 1775, he issued a proclamation declaring martial law across Virginia and, in its most explosive provision, offering freedom to any enslaved person owned by rebellious colonists who escaped to British lines and was willing to bear arms in service to the Crown. The language was precise and its intent unmistakably strategic. Dunmore was not motivated by humanitarian concern or any philosophical opposition to the institution of slavery. The proclamation pointedly applied only to enslaved people belonging to patriots — those held by loyalists were excluded entirely. This was a military measure, calculated to accomplish two objectives simultaneously: to augment Dunmore's woefully inadequate forces and to destabilize the plantation economy that formed the backbone of Virginia's revolutionary leadership. By threatening slaveholders' most valuable property and their deepest social anxieties, Dunmore aimed to strike at the rebellion where it was most vulnerable. The response to the proclamation was immediate, dramatic, and deeply polarizing. Enslaved people across Virginia began making perilous attempts to reach Dunmore's ships, navigating hostile terrain, armed patrols, and waterways in bids for freedom. The journey was extraordinarily dangerous. Many were intercepted by slaveholders or patriot militia units who enforced brutal consequences on those caught fleeing. Despite these risks, hundreds managed to reach Dunmore's flotilla. Those who arrived were organized into what became known as the "Ethiopian Regiment," a military unit that bore the inscription "Liberty to Slaves" across their uniforms — a phrase laden with bitter irony given the Revolution's own rhetoric about freedom and natural rights. The Ethiopian Regiment saw its most significant action at the Battle of Great Bridge on December 9, 1775, where Dunmore's combined forces, including the regiment, were decisively defeated by patriot troops. The loss effectively ended Dunmore's ability to project power on land and eventually forced his departure from Virginia altogether. Among Virginia's slaveholding class, the proclamation provoked outrage and, perhaps more significantly, a hardening of patriot resolve. Planters who had been ambivalent about independence now viewed the British as an existential threat to the social order upon which their wealth and power depended. Revolutionary leaders, including figures like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, both Virginia slaveholders, recognized the proclamation's potential to unravel the plantation system and responded with intensified military and political commitment to the patriot cause. Ironically, Dunmore's attempt to weaken the rebellion may have strengthened it by unifying wavering colonists against the Crown. Yet the proclamation's deepest significance lies in what it revealed about the Revolution itself. The formerly enslaved people who risked everything to answer Dunmore's call exposed the profound contradiction at the heart of a rebellion fought in the name of liberty by men who held other human beings in bondage. These refugees were not pawns — they were individuals making calculated decisions about their own survival and freedom, seizing an opportunity within a conflict waged by others. Their actions forced the question of who deserved liberty into the open, a question the Revolution's leaders would largely defer for generations. Lord Dunmore's Proclamation did not end slavery, nor was it intended to, but it demonstrated that enslaved people would exploit every fracture in the system that bound them — and that the language of freedom, once spoken, could never be fully controlled by those who claimed it as their own.

Role: Formerly Enslaved Persons

# Formation of Dunmore's Ethiopian Regiment In November 1775, John Murray, the Fourth Earl of Dunmore and Royal Governor of Virginia, issued one of the most provocative documents of the American Revolution. Dunmore's Proclamation, dated November 7, declared martial law across the colony and offered freedom to any enslaved person belonging to rebellious colonists who was willing and able to bear arms in service to the British Crown. The proclamation was a calculated act of desperation. Dunmore had been driven from the colonial capital of Williamsburg months earlier by increasingly hostile patriot militias, and he now governed from a small flotilla of ships anchored off the coast near Norfolk. With limited British regulars at his disposal and little prospect of immediate reinforcement from London, Dunmore turned to the one resource that he knew would simultaneously strengthen his own forces and strike terror into the hearts of Virginia's slaveholding planter class: their enslaved labor force. The response was remarkable in its speed and courage. Within weeks of the proclamation's circulation, enslaved men and women began making harrowing escapes from plantations across eastern Virginia, navigating swamps, rivers, and patriot patrols to reach British lines. Those men deemed fit for military service were organized into what Dunmore designated the Ethiopian Regiment, a distinct military unit that stood as one of the earliest formal armed forces composed of Black soldiers in American history. The regiment's members were outfitted in military uniforms that bore a striking and deeply symbolic inscription across the chest: "Liberty to Slaves." These words, sewn onto the uniforms of men who had been held in bondage just days or weeks earlier, represented an extraordinary inversion of the rhetoric that white colonial revolutionaries were simultaneously deploying in their own cause. The regiment grew rapidly, reaching an estimated strength of roughly 300 men by early December 1775. The Ethiopian Regiment's first and most significant engagement came at the Battle of Great Bridge on December 9, 1775. Dunmore had fortified a position at a narrow causeway spanning the Elizabeth River south of Norfolk, hoping to maintain British control of the surrounding region. Members of the Ethiopian Regiment fought alongside British regulars and loyalist volunteers in the assault, which proved disastrous for the Crown's forces. Patriot sharpshooters, well entrenched behind their own fortifications, repelled the British advance with devastating musket fire. The defeat forced Dunmore to abandon Norfolk entirely and retreat to his ships, taking the Ethiopian Regiment and hundreds of Black civilian refugees with him. What followed was a catastrophe that no proclamation of liberty could have prepared these freedom seekers to endure. Crowded aboard Dunmore's vessels in the cold winter months, soldiers and civilians alike faced miserable conditions. Sanitation was virtually nonexistent, food supplies were inadequate, and the close quarters became a breeding ground for disease. A smallpox epidemic swept through the fleet with horrifying efficiency, killing far more members of the Ethiopian Regiment and the refugee community than British or patriot bullets ever had. Estimates suggest that hundreds of Black men, women, and children perished from the disease during these months. Many who had risked everything, who had fled under cover of darkness and crossed miles of hostile territory for the promise of freedom, died not as soldiers in battle but as victims of neglect and contagion aboard crowded, filthy ships. The story of the Ethiopian Regiment matters because it exposes the profound contradictions at the heart of the American Revolution. White Virginians like Thomas Jefferson and George Washington fought for liberty while holding hundreds of human beings in bondage, and they reacted to Dunmore's Proclamation not with moral reflection but with outrage at what they considered an incitement to insurrection. Meanwhile, the men who donned those "Liberty to Slaves" uniforms understood freedom not as an abstract philosophical principle but as an urgent, embodied reality worth dying for. Their willingness to take up arms against the very system that had enslaved them represents one of the Revolution's most powerful and most frequently overlooked acts of resistance. The Ethiopian Regiment also foreshadowed the complex and often bitter relationship between Black freedom seekers and the imperial powers that claimed to champion their cause, a dynamic that would repeat itself throughout the war and well beyond. Dunmore offered freedom, but he offered it as a weapon, not as a right, and the devastating cost borne by those who answered his call is a reminder that liberation, when granted by those who view it merely as a strategic tool, often comes at an unconscionable price.

Role: Formerly Enslaved Persons

**Smallpox Epidemic Among Dunmore's Forces, 1776** In November 1775, John Murray, the Fourth Earl of Dunmore and Royal Governor of Virginia, issued one of the most provocative documents of the early Revolutionary War. Dunmore's Proclamation declared martial law in Virginia and, more controversially, offered freedom to any enslaved person belonging to a rebel who was willing to bear arms in service of the British Crown. The proclamation was a calculated military strategy born of desperation. Dunmore had been driven from the colonial capital of Williamsburg months earlier and was operating from a small naval flotilla off the Virginia coast, lacking the manpower to reassert British authority. By promising liberty to the enslaved, he hoped to simultaneously bolster his own forces and destabilize the plantation economy that sustained the Patriot rebellion in Virginia. The response was significant. Hundreds of enslaved men, women, and children risked extraordinary danger to reach Dunmore's lines, crossing rivers, slipping past armed patrols, and traversing miles of hostile territory in the hope of securing their freedom. Those who arrived and were fit for military service were organized into what became known as the Ethiopian Regiment, a unit that bore the motto "Liberty to Slaves" across their uniforms. They fought alongside Dunmore's loyalist forces, most notably at the Battle of Great Bridge in December 1775, where Dunmore's combined force suffered a decisive defeat at the hands of Patriot militia. That loss forced Dunmore to abandon Norfolk and retreat entirely to his ships, crowding soldiers, loyalist civilians, and formerly enslaved refugees into a fleet of vessels anchored in the waters of the Chesapeake Bay and the Elizabeth River. It was in these cramped, desperate conditions that catastrophe struck. In the early months of 1776, a devastating smallpox epidemic swept through Dunmore's crowded fleet. The disease found ideal conditions for its spread aboard the packed ships, where hundreds of people were confined in poorly ventilated holds with little access to clean water, adequate food, or basic sanitation. Medical care was virtually nonexistent, and there were no meaningful quarantine measures available in such close quarters. Smallpox, already one of the most feared diseases of the eighteenth century, moved through the fleet with terrifying speed. The epidemic fell with particular ferocity on the formerly enslaved refugees who had answered Dunmore's proclamation. Many of these individuals had little or no prior exposure to smallpox, making them especially vulnerable. Estimates suggest that as many as half of the enslaved people who had managed to reach Dunmore's lines perished from the disease. The Ethiopian Regiment, which had represented both a military unit and a powerful symbol of Black resistance to slavery, was decimated. Civilian refugees — including women, children, and elderly individuals who had fled bondage seeking the protection of the British — died in appalling numbers. Bodies were buried at sea or on the shores of small islands along the coast. The epidemic effectively destroyed Dunmore's military viability in Virginia. His forces, already weakened by the defeat at Great Bridge, were reduced to a shadow of what he had hoped to assemble. His ability to recruit additional enslaved people was crippled, both because word of the deadly conditions aboard his ships spread through the enslaved community and because Patriot authorities intensified their efforts to prevent further escapes. By the summer of 1776, Dunmore abandoned Virginia altogether, sailing first to New York and eventually returning to England. His brief campaign was over. The smallpox epidemic among Dunmore's forces matters in the broader story of the Revolution for several reasons. It reveals the enormous risks that enslaved people were willing to take in pursuit of freedom, and it exposes the tragic inadequacy of the promises made to them. Dunmore had offered liberty, but he lacked the resources, infrastructure, and perhaps even the genuine commitment to protect those who answered his call. The epidemic also demonstrated how disease could shape military outcomes as decisively as any battle, a reality that would haunt both sides throughout the war. George Washington himself would eventually order the inoculation of Continental Army troops against smallpox, having recognized the disease as a strategic threat equal to British arms. For the people who fled slavery to join Dunmore's forces, the epidemic was a cruel and devastating injustice. They had risked everything — leaving behind families, homes, and the only lives they knew — for the chance at freedom, only to die in squalid conditions aboard ships that became floating graveyards. Their courage and their suffering deserve to be remembered not as a footnote to Dunmore's failed campaign but as a central and deeply human chapter in the story of the American Revolution.

Role: Formerly Enslaved Persons

**Dunmore's Fleet Departs Virginia, 1776** By the summer of 1776, the last vestiges of British royal authority in Virginia were clinging to existence not on land but on water. John Murray, the Fourth Earl of Dunmore and Royal Governor of Virginia, had spent months operating from a makeshift floating headquarters in the Chesapeake Bay, commanding a ragged fleet of warships, supply vessels, and transport ships. His departure from Virginia waters that summer was not a sudden decision but the culmination of a long and bitter unraveling — one that had begun more than a year earlier when tensions between the governor and Virginia's patriot leadership made his position on shore untenable. When Dunmore's fleet finally sailed away, it carried with it the last tangible symbol of the British Crown's governance over one of its oldest and most important American colonies, and it sealed a political reality that many Virginians had already accepted: royal government in Virginia was finished. The story of Dunmore's flight from Virginia is inseparable from his most controversial and consequential act. In November 1775, increasingly desperate and operating from aboard the warship HMS Fowey, Dunmore issued a proclamation that sent shockwaves through the slaveholding colonies. Known to history as Dunmore's Proclamation, it offered freedom to enslaved people owned by patriot masters who were willing to bear arms for the Crown. The proclamation was a calculated military measure, designed to weaken the rebellion by striking at the economic and social foundation of Virginia's planter class. It worked — at least partially. Hundreds of enslaved men, women, and children risked their lives to reach Dunmore's lines, and those men who were able to fight were organized into what Dunmore called the Ethiopian Regiment. But the proclamation also galvanized patriot resistance. Many white Virginians who had been ambivalent about independence were outraged by what they saw as an incitement to insurrection, and Dunmore's action arguably pushed the colony more firmly toward the revolutionary cause. The months that followed were disastrous for Dunmore's forces. At the Battle of Great Bridge in December 1775, patriot militia decisively defeated a small force of British regulars and Loyalist volunteers, effectively ending Dunmore's ability to hold any territory on land. In January 1776, the burning of Norfolk — a catastrophe caused in part by British naval bombardment and in part by patriot forces themselves — destroyed the most significant Loyalist stronghold in Virginia. Dunmore was left with nothing but his ships. Disease, particularly smallpox, ravaged the crowded vessels, killing a devastating number of the formerly enslaved people who had sought refuge with the British. Supplies dwindled, morale collapsed, and Dunmore's fleet became less a military force than a floating refugee camp. When the fleet finally departed Virginia in the summer of 1776, it carried a human cargo defined by loss and uncertainty. Loyalist families who had staked everything on the Crown's authority found themselves exiled, their property confiscated, their futures dependent on the mercy of a distant empire. The formerly enslaved people aboard the ships occupied an even more precarious position. Though they had answered Dunmore's promise of freedom, their legal status remained ambiguous, and the British commitment to their liberty would prove inconsistent in the years ahead. Many would not survive the journey. Those who did found themselves scattered across the British Atlantic world in a diaspora of remarkable scope. Some were taken to New York, where the British still held power. Others eventually made their way to Nova Scotia, where they formed free Black communities under harsh conditions. Still others ended up in the Bahamas, in London, or ultimately in Sierra Leone, where Black Loyalists helped establish the colony of Freetown. Dunmore's departure mattered far beyond Virginia. It demonstrated that British authority could not be maintained in the American interior without significant military commitment, and it foreshadowed the broader British strategy of operating from coastal enclaves and naval power. It also revealed the deeply tangled relationship between the American Revolution and the institution of slavery — a contradiction that would haunt the new nation for generations. The people who sailed away on Dunmore's ships were living proof that the Revolution's promise of liberty was far more complicated, and far more selective, than its rhetoric suggested.