April 22, 1775, Dunmore announced that “by the living God” he would “declare freedom to the slaves, and reduce the city of Williamsburg to ashes” should there be further “injury or insult” to the royal establishment.46 Reaction was swift and predictable.47 From Pennsylvania, a colonist wrote a friend overseas: “Hell itself could not have vomited anything more black than his design of emancipating our slaves.”48 Colonists with slaveholding sympathies either began or accelerated their preparations for war, Jefferson among them.
