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July 19 - July 28, 2020
“the horrors of a civil war … [that] may terminate in the dismemberment of our empire, or in a barren and ruinous conquest.” He warned that the longer the conflict persisted, the greater the chance “for the interference of the Bourbon powers” in France and Spain.
native tobacco in the early seventeenth century, the crop had dominated Virginia’s economy. The thirty-five thousand tons exported annually from the colony by the early 1770s had brought wealth but also more than £1 million in debt, nearly equal to that of the other colonies combined and often incurred by Tidewater planters living beyond their means.
Rebel leaders persuaded Virginians that rebellion “would enhance their opportunities and status,” the historian Alan Taylor later wrote, while also safeguarding political liberties threatened by an overbearing mother country.
evangelical churches, notably the Baptists and Methodists, were promised elevated standing “by disestablishing the elitist Anglican Church” favored by Crown loyalists.
The colony became a leader in boycotting British goods and in summoning the Continental Congress to Philadelphia. Courts closed. Militia companies drilled. The Virginia Gazette published the names of loyalists considered hostile to liberty; some were ordered into western exile or to face the confiscation of their estates.
“Lower-class men who did not own property saw the break from Britain as a chance to gain land and become slaveholders,” the historian Michael Kranish would write.
In April 1775, even before learning of events in Lexington and Concord, he ordered a marine detachment to confiscate gunpowder from the public magazine in Williamsburg on grounds that “the Negroes might have seized upon it.”
then the earl decided to become an emancipator.
Roughly five hundred thousand Americans were black, some 20 percent of the population, and nine in ten of those blacks were slaves.
40 percent of Virginia’s half million people were of African descent—often from cultures with military traditions—and white fear of slave revolts was a prominent reason ...
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On November 7, using his confiscated printing press, Dunmore declared martial law and issued a proclamation: “I do hereby further declare all indented servants, Negroes, or others (appertaining to rebels) free, that are able and willing to bear arms, they joining His Majesty’s troops as soon as may be.”
nor would loyalists’ chattel be freed.
British sailors in cutters raided riverside plantations in “Negro-catching” forays. On November 14, Dunmore personally led a detachment of Ethiopians, regulars, marines, and twenty Scottish clerks in a rout of Virginia shirtmen at Kemp’s Landing, southeast of Norfolk.
The proclamation backfired throughout the South, even though many runaways from Georgia to Mount Vernon eventually made their way to coastal waters wherever British men-of-war appeared. Rumors spread that slaves who murdered their masters would be entitled to their estates.
For many, a war about political rights now became an existential struggle to prevent the social fabric from unraveling.
Edward Rutledge, a prominent South Carolina politician, wrote in December that arming freed slaves tended “more effectually to work an eternal separation between Great Britain and the colonies than any other expedient which could possibly have been thought of.”
General Washington. “That arch traitor to the rights of humanity, Lord Dunmore, should be instantly crushed, if it takes the force of the whole colony to do it,”
Dunmore warned civilians loitering in Norfolk to get out. After a minatory rattle of drums, Liverpool fired the first three cannonballs, at three p.m. on Monday, January 1, demolishing a wharf shack used for a guardhouse. Within moments more than a hundred guns lacerated the town, pummeling the warehouses and dockyards in an effort to chivy snipers from their nests.
British had demolished 32 before evacuating the town, then burned 19 more during the January 1 bombardment. Militia troops burned 863 in early January, and another 416 in the subsequent razing ordered by the convention.
Blaming the redcoats for wanton destruction was convenient, and like ruined Falmouth in Maine or Charlestown in Massachusetts, Norfolk became a vivid emblem of British cruelty.
inoculation had been practiced for centuries in Asia and Africa,
Pus swabbed from a smallpox sore was deliberately introduced into an open incision on a healthy patient’s arm or thigh. The consequent eruption usually was milder and far less lethal than “natural” infection, although the procedure was risky and could trigger fresh epidemics if those newly inoculated were not isolated.
Frederick the Great likewise inoculated his Prussian legions.
late December smallpox was spreading among the Americans at an alarming rate.
the Americans had formed their own cockleshell fleet to bedevil British mariners in New England waters. Almost a dozen merchant ships berthed at Marblehead, Plymouth, and Beverly were converted into men-of-war with gun carriages and short-range swivels, as well as topsails and flying jibs for pursuit or flight.
some flew flags depicting a pine tree on a white background with the motto “AN APPEAL TO HEAVEN.”
The greatest prize, however, was Nancy, a lightly armed, 250-ton British ordnance brig that had separated from her convoy during an autumn storm
2,000 muskets, bayonets, steel ramrods, and cartridge boxes; more than 100,000 flints; 31 tons of musket shot;
11 gun carriages and 7 ammunition wagons; plus watch coats and harnesses for both horses and men to move field guns. Most impressive was a 13-inch brass mortar, carefully lowered into a wagon bed and driven forty miles southwest to Cambridge.
“The loss of the ordnance storeship,” Lord Sandwich, first lord of the Admiralty, wrote Germain, “is a fatal event.”
in mid-December with the arrival of Martha Washington in a white coach-and-four adorned with the family crest, accompanied by five slaves
would henceforth share her husband’s camp life for half of the war’s one hundred months.
So desperate was Washington for manpower that he reversed an earlier edict prohibiting free blacks from reenlisting,
Roughly five thousand African Americans would eventually serve in the Continental Army,
No malady worried Washington more than what some called the “king of terrors.” “Smallpox rages all over the town,” he wrote Hancock.
(A British major publicly proposed a year later, “Dip arrows in … smallpox and twang them at the American rebels.”)
He was, the writer Washington Irving would observe, “one of those providential characters which spring up in emergencies as if formed by and for the occasion.” This surely was an emergency, and here was young Henry Knox to announce that against stiff odds he had transported, in midwinter by boat and by sled, fifty-eight fine guns from Fort Ticonderoga and Crown Point—cannons and mortars, brass and iron.
A few weeks before the British marched to Lexington, Knox offered a shilling pamphlet on “the dispute between Great Britain and the colonies” by a precocious New York college student named Alexander Hamilton.
In less than two weeks he had selected a “noble train of artillery” weighing sixty tons, lowered the guns from the fortress walls, shipped them thirty miles south across Lake George, then used five hundred fathoms of three-inch rope—more than half a mile—to lash the barrels to forty-two “exceeding strong sleds.”
Each British soldier deployed to America needed a half ton of food every year to sustain him,
regular’s pay of eight pence a day, minus deductions for uniforms and provisions, had not increased in a century, but recruiting bounties of more than a guinea were now offered. As announced in mid-December, volunteers no longer had to enlist for life; they could resign at the end of the American war if they had served at least three years.
an eleven-page explanation of the southern strategy that cited “the very important advantages which may be expected.” The large slave population and the need for European commodities made the southern colonies vulnerable,
George replied within two hours. “Every means of distressing America,” he wrote, “must meet with my concurrence.” By the next morning, the king had identified British regiments in Ireland and two artillery companies for the expedition; loyalists in the Carolinas should be offered land grants and army pay to encourage fealty.
If Howe’s host reached 35,000 troops and 4,000 horses later in the year, as anticipated, thirty-seven tons of food and thirty-eight tons of hay and oats would be required every day,
To carry away nine thousand soldiers, along with their military equipment and twelve hundred dependents, plus more than a thousand loyalists, would require twenty-eight thousand tons of shipping; Shuldham had only twenty-two thousand tons in Boston, some seventy-eight vessels.
The first thousand Continental troops into the town, he decreed, must be smallpox survivors. An informant had told him that the British had “laid several schemes” to infect his army, and so an immune vanguard would look for signs of pestilence.
Dr. Warren also reported that drugs found in the Alms House, used as a British hospital, had been maliciously spiked with “12 or 14 pounds of arsenic.”
the British Army and the Royal Navy had been driven off by a rabblement of farmers and shopkeeps, led by low-born, ascendant men like the plowman Israel Putnam, the anchorsmith Greene, and the book vendor Knox. Washington had displayed persistence and integrity, as well as political agility. This revolutionary hour had passed, to be succeeded by other hours, some of them dreadful. But already the commander in chief was seen as “the embodiment of purpose,” in the phrase of his biographer Douglas Southall Freeman.
Congress also seemed to be moving toward a proclamation of independence. That would give Washington a clear strategic objective, an American definition of victory: formal separation from Britain and the creation of a new nation.
Should the British “get that town & the command of the North River,” he added, “they can stop the intercourse between the northern & southern colonies, upon which depends the safety of America.”
