1775 (83 page)

As for broader repute, Dunmore first made his mark in 1774 by getting militia from Virginia’s western counties to march north for a short but successful October war against Ohio tribes, the Shawnee, Mingo, and Delaware. These Indians were in the way of westward expansion. Under its seventeenth-century charter, as we have seen, Virginia claimed what is now Ohio and much of the Great Lakes. Land hunger was a Virginian trait, and Dunmore issued numerous patents. King George did not approve of his appointee’s encroachment on tribal lands, and in September, Lord Dartmouth cautioned Dunmore that his practices were “a dishonor to the Crown.” Further encroachments, he wrote, would not be forgiven.
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However, before Dartmouth’s chastening letter arrived, the western Virginia regiments, on October 10, 1774, after hard fighting, defeated the Indians in the Battle of Point Pleasant.

Although not himself in the battle, Dunmore quickly met with Indian leaders who agreed to peace terms. Besides returning white captives, the Shawnee chiefs were required to deed to Virginia all land east of the Ohio River. This included part of what is now western Pennsylvania and, more important, all of present-day Kentucky.
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Contrary to western Virginian hopes, no demand was made for settlement north of the Ohio River. Nevertheless, tidewater Virginia leaders were pleased enough that the House of Burgesses congratulated the governor for what annals still call “Lord Dunmore’s War.” That military success went to his head.

Come spring 1775, Dunmore was too caught up in Williamsburg’s new Revolutionary stirrings to meet Ohio tribal leaders in Pittsburgh for a follow-up peace conference. Still, he must have believed that mild peace terms and six months of private words from his chief western representative, John Connolly, were turning October’s foes into potential allies against the Virginia frontier. His Lordship was already invoking the Indian threat in intemperate private conversations.

The principal controversies engaging Dunmore between late April and early June had to do with arms and munitions. On April 21, marines from HMS
Magdalen
had carried off the gunpowder from Williamsburg’s public magazine and taken it to their vessel. For the next week, the governor misled local officials that he still had the powder near at hand, although in fact it had been taken downriver on HMS
Fowey.
By early May, an edgy
Dunmore was fortifying the governor’s palace. His aide, Captain Foy, told those who would listen of supposedly parallel actions by King Charles XII of Sweden. He explained that Dunmore, like the famous Swedish monarch, “has fortified his Home, with Swivel guns at their Windowes, Cut loop holes in the Palace, and has plenty of small arms.”
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Tension continued. On June 4, when scions of respectable Williamsburg families trespassed and broke into the magazine, three were injured by a spring gun set as a trap. Enraged citizens converged on the magazine and carried away more weapons. The House of Burgesses then ordered the city volunteers to mount a guard at the magazine until further notice.
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At two o’clock in the morning of June 8, Dunmore and his family fled to the protection of the Royal Navy, the governor insisting that their lives were in danger.
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Local apprehensions also reflected the rumors of slave plots and imminent uprisings. Southern white fears fed on talk of local plots, few genuine, and more broadly on reports of supposed British interest in slave emancipation and plans to use blacks in the military.

In Maryland and South Carolina, Patriot-faction insistence on taking control of local gunpowder magazines and supplies openly invoked prospective slave revolts and alleged British encouragement. Historian Woody Holton has documented the concern in Virginia, citing mid-April reports of slave plots in four James River counties near Williamsburg. Virginia attorney general John Randolph, a Loyalist, acknowledged that blacks had approached Dunmore offering their services.
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Edmund Randolph, a Patriot, later argued that Dunmore “designed, by disarming the people, to weaken the means of opposing an insurrection of the slaves…for a protection against whom in part the magazine was at first built.”
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No other royal governor did more than hint, but Dunmore was blunt in threatening to raise the slaves. On April 22, he told a Williamsburg town councilor, William Pasteur, that should any senior British official be harmed, he “would declare freedom to the slaves and reduce the City of Williamsburg to ashes.” On April 28, he amplified that his threat would be implemented if the colony’s independent military companies came any closer than Ruffin’s ferry, 30 miles from the capital. On May 3, Dunmore issued a proclamation reminding Virginians of their “internal weakness”—the potential for slave revolts and Indian attacks. He added that he would “avail himself of any means” to maintain the authority of the Crown.
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What also made Dunmore unique among the royal governors, besides
his candor and rank—being an earl whereas most were untitled—was an unusual mix of personal attributes. On one hand, he showed considerable strategic awareness; on the other hand, critics believed that his volatile, egotistical personality bespoke instability or worse.

Dunmore: A Personality to Ruin a Cause

Like many other short men in history, Dunmore was combative and touchy, given to making enemies unnecessarily. Some of these were fellow governors. Several held high office in England. Still others—a category that included both George Washington and Thomas Jefferson—were angry Virginians fearful that Dunmore was capable of sending a raiding party to seize their wives.

In Scotland, Dunmore had been an earl with a manor and a park, but without a castle or family pride. His father, the third earl, had been put under arrest for treason in the Forty Five, but the son was allowed to inherit the title in 1750. The future governor, as a teenager, had been a page boy to Bonnie Prince Charlie and remained sensitive about his family’s past. In late September 1775, a Norfolk newspaper laid out the governor’s father’s role and hinted at Catholicism in the family. Dunmore lost his temper and retaliated by sending a boatload of soldiers to seize the printing press of the
Norfolk Intelligencer
and carry off two of its printers. His high-handedness became a Virginia cause célèbre, damaging not only Dunmore’s reputation among Patriots but Norfolk’s, this because a crowd of several hundred stood around and let it happen.
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Lacking the huge acres of Scotland’s grander dukes and earls, Dunmore seems to have regarded his two American governorships as opportunities to amass in upper New York or Virginia’s west the territory his branch of the Murrays had been unable to gain in Stirlingshire or Perthshire. As a substitute for other listings, consider the bill for losses in the Revolution he filed with the British government in 1784. He claimed for a house and lot in Williamsburg; his plantation in York County; over 3,400 acres in what is now West Virginia; 51,000 acres on Otter Creek, on the eastern shore of Lake Champlain; and “3,700,000 acres representing his share of the Illinois-Wabash Company’s claim on the Wabash River in modern Indiana.”
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The Crown disallowed only the Indiana claim, and Dunmore had amassed this property in just five years.

No other royal governor circa 1775 could match Dunmore’s reputation
for impolitic behavior and arrogance. The king had been offended by Dunmore’s giving land patents beyond “the line specified by His Majesty’s authority.” Besides which, Dartmouth had also disliked Dunmore’s slowness in taking up his Virginia appointment. The governor’s further request for home leave produced the tart response that if he returned to Britain, please report immediately so that a replacement could be sent out.
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Dunmore also angered the American Department, as well as Pennsylvania governor John Penn, by contesting that colony’s western boundaries. Dartmouth reproached the combative Scot that “your Proclamation…implies too strongly the necessity for exerting a Military Force, & breathes too much spirit of Hostility that ought not to be encouraged in Matters of Civil Dispute between the Subjects of the same State.”
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During the autumn of 1775, Dunmore’s continual demands to be sent more companies from the Fourteenth Regiment stationed in St. Augustine angered Governor Patrick Tonyn of British East Florida, who complained that these subtractions left his colony exposed to France and Spain. During the summer, General Gage in Boston had sent Dunmore officers for Loyalist regiments. They turned out not to be needed because no such units had been organized. In June, when the governor commandeered the armed schooner HMS
Magdalen
to carry his wife and family back to Britain, he countermanded Admiral Graves’s orders assigning the vessel to Delaware Bay.
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In a July tantrum, Dunmore asked that Captain John McCartney of the frigate
Mercury
be removed for consorting with Americans and refusing to harbor escaped slaves without prior legal determinations. The charges against McCartney were dropped, and the tone of Graves’s report to London suggested that “the governor had become a bit of nuisance.”
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Dunmore was also given to naming forts after himself. Three posts in the Ohio forks region were named for three of his hereditary titles—Dunmore, Fincastle, and Blair. The ill-fated stockade he built south of Norfolk was grandly called Fort Murray. The merchant ship
Eilbeck,
which he had taken during the summer of 1775 to become his floating headquarters, was rechristened the
Dunmore.
The only rough parallel that comes to mind is President Lyndon B. Johnson, who named his daughters Lynda Bird and Lucy Baines and his dog Little Beagle—and whose oversize ego led to grandiosity and American frustration in Vietnam.

August and September saw controversial raids carried out by Dunmore’s sloops and tenders against Virginia Patriots whose tidewater plantations could be reached along rivers like the James, the York, and their tributaries.
Slaves were carried off or turned loose; houses and barns were plundered.
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George Washington believed in late 1775 that Dunmore might sail up the Potomac and raid Mount Vernon. His “greatest fear,” said one chronicler, “was that the British would take his wife, Martha, hostage. Washington had left Mount Vernon on May 4, 1775, and had not been back.” To his estate manager, the general wrote that “I can hardly think that Lord Dunmore can act so low, and unmanly a part as to think of seizing Mrs Washington by way of revenge on me.”
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Thomas Jefferson had a comparable concern about his wife, another Martha. In November 1775, when she and their daughter were away from Monticello visiting her parents’ plantation near the James River, Jefferson told his brother-in-law that he had sent her a letter telling her “to keep yourselves at a distance from the alarms of Ld. Dunmore.” Mrs. Jefferson soon returned to Monticello.
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Some views of Dunmore verged on demonization.

Many Virginia historians have ventured short attempts at characterizing Dunmore’s behavior. Some of the words and phrases include “intemperate, arrogant,” “lack of self-control,” “frantic,” and “in a state bordering on what would appear to have been frenzied desperation.”
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One unintended consequence might have been that in September and October, when King George, Lord North, and Lord Dartmouth were considering the destination of the southern expedition ultimately sent to North Carolina, the colony of Virginia—despite its obvious size and importance—remained in third place behind the two Carolinas. In addition to Dunmore’s summer and autumn crowing that with a few hundred more soldiers he could bring Virginia to submission, the king and Dartmouth had too many examples of his unreliability and inattention to instructions. A less controversial governor might have won Virginia a higher priority in the ministry’s late 1775 counterrevolutionary planning.

Lord Dunmore’s Personal Counterrevolution

Dunmore had not the slightest sympathy with the Revolution. His political connections were with the anti-American Bedfordite wing of Lord North’s coalition. His brother-in-law, Earl Gower, was in North’s Cabinet as Lord President of the Council. And notwithstanding his bluster, the 45-year-old
Scot had shrewd perceptions. He understood that slaves, servants, and Indians represented crucial components of Patriot vulnerability. He appreciated Norfolk’s importance to British naval supremacy in Chesapeake Bay, as well as the unusual opportunity for raiding offered by Virginia’s wide rivers, many navigable by frigates for 20 to 40 miles into the interior. He was especially mindful of the Potomac as a military corridor to and from the interior and well aware of Loyalist strength not only in the Norfolk area but across the bay on the Eastern Shore. These insights might have achieved much, implemented carefully by a sober governor with credibility and stature in London, but Dunmore had offsetting weaknesses.

The trajectory of Dunmore’s twelve-month rise and fall can be broken down into stages. For a month or so after his June 8 flight to safety on HMS
Fowey,
he did relatively little. Instead of the open war that seemed to threaten in May, the result was “only a breaking off of communications between a fled chief magistrate and decamping burgesses…based on years of irritation festering into hatred and scorn.”
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In mid-July, he led his small flotilla to Sprowle’s shipyard in Portsmouth. From this convenient location, his captains escalated their August raids on the lower Chesapeake and up nearby rivers, bringing away slaves and plunder. Even so, Virginia’s Third Convention, meeting between July 17 and August 26, devoted most of its attention to military reorganization rather than to their governor’s depredations.

Late August brought more raids by the two Royal Navy sloops and their tenders. Townspeople in Hampton, after an early September hurricane, found one of the British sloop
Otter
’s tenders driven ashore and promptly burned it. The eight-man crew was captured, but Captain Matthew Squire, also on board, managed to escape. Squire and the
Otter
were hated for what the
Virginia Gazette
called his trade of “negro-catching, pillaging the farms and plantations of their stock and poultry, and other illustrious actions highly becoming a Squire in the king’s navy.”
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It was a boatload of soldiers and marines from the
Otter
who seized the
Norfolk Intelligencer
’s printing press and equipment on September 30. Dunmore’s next move, however, was a sound one—a mostly successful series of raids aimed at capturing rebel ordnance and gunpowder supplies.