Lord Dunmore: Proclamation

In November 1775, the royal governor of the colony of Virginia, John Murray, 4th Earl of Dunmore, issued a proclamation from aboard a warship lying off the port of Norfolk. The impact was electric—Dunmore offered the first large-scale emancipation of enslaved people in the history of colonial British America. Any enslaved or indentured servants who would join Dunmore’s forces against the rebels would be granted their freedom immediately. Despite the fact he was a slaveholder himself, Dunmore expected the proclamation to cripple the American colonists’ rebellion effort in Virginia. Enslaved people abandoning their plantations would disrupt food production, and nothing frightened the colonists like the fear of a revolt of enslaved workers. The freed slaves also supplemented Dunmore’s military forces, which doubled within a few months with the creation of his “Ethiopian Regiment.” Many people ran away from their enslavers to join the British, despite a counter- proclamation by the Virginia House of Burgesses meting out the death penalty to any slave who fled for British lines.