The year 2026 marks the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Cardinal News has embarked on a three-year project to tell the little-known stories of Virginia’s role in the march to independence. This project is supported, in part, by a grant from the Virginia American Revolution 250 Commission. You can sign up to receive a free monthly newsletter with updates. Find all our stories from this project on the Cardinal News 250 page.
Lord Dunmore has figured as the antagonist in several of the stories Cardinal News has produced for the Virginia 250 project, such as this one on the Day of Fasting, Humiliation and Prayer.
He’s been cast as the foe of freedom, the malignant monarch’s heavy-handed henchman, in countless accounts penned by Virginians since the 1770s.
Now, a writer/historian who is a native of Norfolk, the city whose destruction in 1776 was long blamed on Dunmore, is re-evaluating His Lordship’s record in the tumultuous early days of the American Revolution. And he finds that Dunmore wasn’t just a man trying to make the best of an impossible situation; he actually made many personally risky decisions where others — his peers, royal governors of other Colonies — turned and ran. And in at least one historically important way, he was a greater friend of freedom than Washington, Jefferson or Patrick Henry.
The winners write the textbooks, and Patriot leaders such as Jefferson, for all of their devotion to Enlightenment ideas and the fine burnish of their oil-painted portraits, weren’t above mudslinging. Politics never changes. But history can always be rewritten.
John Murray, the future fourth earl of Dunmore, was born in 1730 at the estate of his parents, William and Catherine Murray, in Scotland. As a teenager, Murray was embroiled in a game of thrones.
In 1688, James II (James Stuart) lost the British crown in the Glorious Revolution. In 1745, James’s grandson Charles (Bonnie Prince Charlie) tried to regain the throne for the Stuarts in the Jacobite Rebellion. (Jacob is the Latin version of James.) William Murray cast his lot with the Jacobites, and young John Murray served as a page in Prince Charlie’s court at his father’s behest.
The army of George II crushed the Jacobites in the Battle of Culloden Moor in 1746. The penalty for treason is death, and that would have been the fate of William Murray and possibly John as well, if not for the intercession of a highly placed relative. William’s brother (John’s uncle), the Second Earl of Dunmore, a general who remained loyal to George II, arranged a deal. William’s death sentence was commuted to imprisonment.
The adolescent John Murray rejected the model of his rebel father and instead identified with his loyalist uncle. Throughout his life, everyone knew John Murray’s history, and at every decision-point into which the Fates thrust him, suspicious noses were sniffing for treason.
Dunmore stayed loyal, but he never renounced his Scottishness. “While no doubt conflicted about his family’s ties to the house of Stuart,” James Corbett David wrote in “Dunmore’s New World” (2013), “Dunmore was proud to be a Scot. Nowhere is this clearer than in Joshua Reynolds’ 1765 portrait … Dunmore chose to be painted in the dress of his old regiment, the Scots Guards, complete with tartan jacket and kilt, feathered bonnet, and patterned socks.”
Who was the young man who emerged from a tumultuous adolescence? “Contrary to the propaganda of American revolutionaries, he was not ‘a brute and a dunce.’ He never studied at a university, but his education was sufficient for him to travel among some of the foremost figures of the Enlightenment,” David wrote. Dunmore knew Adam Smith. He dined with David Hume. He was friendly with James Boswell, the biographer of Samuel Johnson. “Not easily impressed, Boswell thought Dunmore ‘talked very well over dinner one night’ … All of this is not to say that he possessed a particularly formidable intellect, but his accomplishments and associations certainly indicate a capable one.
“The virtue that elicited the most admiration was conviviality. He was friendly, fun-loving, and social, sometimes to a fault.” One American observer described him as “short, strong-built, well shaped with a most frank and open Countenance, easy and affable in his manners, very temperate, and a great Lover of field sports.” Another acquaintance called him a “jolly, hearty companion, hospitable and polite at his own table.” On the other hand, the same companion felt he spent too much time eating, drinking, hunting and target-shooting when he should have been working.
His personality fit him for regimental life, and in 1750 he was commissioned into the Third (Scots) Foot Guards, his uncle’s old regiment.
The second earl died childless, and upon his father’s death in 1756, John Murray became the fourth earl of Dunmore. The five ranks of British nobility, top down, are duke, marquess, earl, viscount and baron. “The title, while it confers no official power or authority, is inalienable, indivisible, and descends in regular succession to all the heirs … until, on their failure [to produce heirs], it becomes extinct. Earl is the oldest title and rank of English nobles,” according to Encyclopedia Britannica.
In 1759, the earl married Charlotte Stewart. From 1761, Dunmore sat in the House of Lords as a Scottish peer.
In 1769, he was appointed governor of New York. “Virtually all British governors who moved to America did so for financial reasons,” David wrote. “For Dunmore, the appointment was a windfall.” Not long after arriving in New York, Dunmore hatched a legally dubious plan to acquire 51,000 acres in what is now Vermont.
With the scheme underway, Dunmore was displeased to receive word of his appointment to Virginia’s governorship, even though the Old Dominion was more prestigious. After dithering for seven months, Dunmore finally appeared in Virginia.
Andrew Lawler grew up in Norfolk, where Dunmore was an odious name. Lawler spoke to Cardinal News from his home in Asheville.
“I was more than once taken to St. Paul’s Church to witness the cannonball [that Dunmore] fired into this church, proof that he destroyed the largest city in Virginia,” Lawler said. “He was my childhood villain because he burned down my hometown, and he was the opponent of all my childhood heroes like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.”
Dunmore’s career in Virginia started on a sour note. He replaced a popular governor, Lord Botetourt, who died in the Governor’s Palace, and Dunmore’s reluctance to leave New York was well known. But Dunmore gradually earned respect and even friendship, in part through a commonality of interests with Virginia’s intellectual leaders.
“When Dunmore arrived in Virginia he had one of the largest private libraries in the Colonies,” Lawler said. His collection of musical instruments was “unmatched by pretty much anybody in Virginia and maybe all of the Colonies. And he also had a suite of scientific instruments. Probably they included a telescope. Dunmore was the royal patron of Virginia’s first scientific society. Washington was part of that, Jefferson probably was. Clearly it was organized under his prerogative.”
From rude beginnings in Jamestown, the British Empire in Virginia had reached its apogee by the 1770s.
The Governor’s Palace “was among the grandest structures on the continent,” David wrote. “The wealth, discipline and strength of the British Empire were most impressive in the palace entry halls, the walls of which featured royal coats of arms and hundreds of the very finest firearms and swords in an awe-inspiring array.”
The royal governor became a Virginia planter himself.
“He bought plantations, he bought enslaved Africans,” Lawler said. “He became one of George Washington’s closest friends during that period.” He had Jefferson draw up plans to enlarge William and Mary and enrolled three of his sons in the college.
Dunmore pushed for new roads, new ferries, and a lighthouse at Cape Henry. He encouraged the General Assembly to invest in Virginia. The Burgesses thought highly enough of him to name a county after him in 1772 (Dunmore, later Shenandoah County). “If you put together Dunmore’s record from his arrival in 1771 to April of 1775, he was really considered a very able governor,” Lawler said.
Like a Roman emperor, he even led a victorious campaign to subdue unruly tribes on the frontier. Some scholars have characterized Dunmore’s War, in 1774, as a land grab by Dunmore and other wealthy Virginians. But Glenn F. Williams in “Dunmore’s War” (2017) concluded that “Governor Dunmore acted in what colonists perceived were the best interests of the colony … the Virginia governor led his colony’s forces in defense of what they viewed as legally acquired territory and demanded no further land concessions from those they defeated.”
Grateful citizens heaped laurels on the lord when he returned in triumph to the capital. “Proclamations of thanks and gratitude abounded in print on the pages of the Virginia Gazette as well as in oratory,” Williams wrote. “Everyone, it seemed, congratulated and thanked him for performing ‘a dangerous and fatiguing service’ and achieving the ‘defeat of the designs of a cruel and insidious enemy.’ The king’s Virginia subjects likewise congratulated their governor on the newest addition to his family, a daughter whom he and Lady Dunmore appropriately named Virginia. The celebrations continued in the best traditions of British America with the illumination of the Capitol and a ball.”
Wine flowed, violins played, and candlelight gleamed on burnished brass, as powder-wigged gentlemen and perfumed ladies danced minuets and gavottes in a final flourish of imperial splendor. Though few realized it, the end of British Virginia was very near.
Modern-day visitors to Colonial Williamsburg get a glimpse of vanished grandeur when they encounter Lord and Lady Dunmore, as portrayed by David Catanese and Corinne Dame. Catanese is a programming lead, and Dame the artistic director of the department of performing arts at Colonial Williamsburg.
As the lord, Catanese wears a wig, a long frock coat with shiny buttons, a military-style cocked hat (later called a tricorner), a ruffled shirt, cravat and white stockings.
As the lady, Dame wears a cotton chintz gown with printed flowers and a pleated back. One can imagine Lady Dunmore, daughter of the sixth earl of Galloway, charming the locals with her polished manners and Scots accent. “One thing she was known for was her charity, her charisma, her kindness,” Dame said. “Everyone loved her.”
The glitter of a ball at the Governor’s Palace was real enough, but it rested on a foundation of sweat and suffering — the pain of the enslaved people that made possible the lifestyles of Washington and Jefferson and their planter colleagues.
Even the word “plantation” puts a spin on history, conjuring as it does an image of a tea-sipping aristocrat overseeing a well-ordered farm from the shade of his porch. A more accurate name for these sprawling agricultural operations, said Lawler, is “forced labor camps” — a phrase that may shock older Virginians introduced to history via segregation-era textbooks.
While the congratulations Dunmore received following the war’s victorious conclusion were no doubt sincere, there were already tensions between the governor and the Burgesses. Dunmore had dissolved the General Assembly in May 1774, after the Burgesses had protested the Boston Port Act. As the calendar rolled over to 1775, events moved quickly. In March, Dunmore was unable to prevent the Second Virginia Conventions from electing delegates to the Second Continental Congress. In April, reacting to rumors of an impending slave rebellion, Dunmore removed gunpowder from the public magazine in Williamsburg, angering Patrick Henry and other Patriots. Dunmore sent his family back to Britain, fled the palace for a British warship early in June, and tried to gather Loyalist supporters in Hampton Roads.
On Nov. 7, 1775, Dunmore issued the proclamation for which he is best remembered, an offer of freedom for slaves of rebels.
With all the British troops and ships in Boston, Lawler said, “if he was going to defeat these rebels, there was only one way, and that was to do what Bonnie Prince Charlie had done in 1745, and that is to raise his own army and to pull together those allies who would back the king.”
Those allies primarily consisted of wealthy and powerful Scottish merchants, particularly those based in Norfolk, and the enslaved Africans who constituted 40% of the population. From these disparate elements Dunmore tried to forge a multiracial army.
Within weeks of the proclamation, some 200 to 300 Blacks joined Dunmore. Eventually, “something on the order of 1,000 runaway slaves, and perhaps as many as 1,500, reached Dunmore’s fleet,” David wrote. “While the letter of the proclamation applied only to the male slaves of rebel masters, Dunmore accepted all comers — men, women, and children of every age, whether of Patriot or Loyalist origin. Since many ran in family groups, often across plantations, Dunmore likely had little choice but to take women, children, and elders along with husbands, brothers and sons … The men fit for fighting were enlisted in a new outfit: ‘Dunmores Ethiopian Regiment.’ They were commanded by white officers and paid a wage.” Naming the unit for himself suggests Dunmore was proud of it.
The proclamation created instant hostility among Virginia planters. Dunmore’s ex-friend Washington called him an “Arch Traitor to the Rights of Humanity,” as if slaves had neither rights nor even humanity. The Ethiopian Regiment frightened the Patriots, and it might have been an effective force had disease not ravaged its ranks.
After a Patriot victory at the battle of Great Bridge, many Loyalist supporters took refuge aboard British vessels. Patriot forces occupied Norfolk. In retaliation for the town’s refusal to provision his ships, and for Patriot sniping from dockside buildings, Dunmore ordered a naval bombardment and the firing of some buildings. “In a matter of days, fire had reduced the entire city of Norfolk to ashes,” David wrote. “Well into the 20th century, Dunmore was blamed for this destruction. As the Virginia Convention concluded following a confidential investigation, however, he was responsible for only a small fraction of the more than 1,300 buildings that were ultimately lost. The rest were set ablaze by Virginia and North Carolina militiamen, who reviled the town for its Tory sympathies.”
The annihilation of Norfolk is arguably “the greatest war crime during the American Revolution,” Lawler said, and it was done intentionally, “not just by drunk soldiers, but with the agreement of the Patriot leaders of the day, starting with Thomas Jefferson. He said Norfolk should be completely decimated, as Carthage was by the Romans.”
Why? Norfolk was a center of loyalism and of Scottish merchants who were disliked, much as Jews were. Norfolk was also a magnet for runaway slaves who tried to get waterfront jobs while escaping slave-catchers, presenting a threat to Virginia’s slavery-based economy.
Dunmore moved his fleet to Gwynn’s Island in what later became Mathews County. By August 1776, he gave up hope for reinforcements and abandoned Virginia for New York. He returned to Britain later that year and resumed his seat in the House of Lords.
Even then, “he doesn’t give up on Virginia,” Dame said. Dunmore beseeched King George III — whose grandfather Dunmore’s father had tried to overthrow — for more redcoats to go back and take Virginia, and advocated for using Indians to fight the Americans.
“Because of his own history he feels like he has to go above and beyond to constantly prove his loyalty to the crown,” Catanese said. “If he’s thought to be a Jacobite himself, he will be disinherited, he will be disowned, he will be executed.” In addition, he takes his oaths seriously, a Scottish trait. “He’s sworn an oath to be governor of Virginia, and he’s going to do it until he can’t anymore.” He’s one of the few members of Parliament to vote against the 1783 Treaty of Paris ending the war.
It still rankled that Virginia had auctioned off the Dunmores’ personal possessions — clothing, furniture, whatever they couldn’t take when they fled the Governor’s Palace. “In his estimation, the people of Virginia literally robbed him and his family,” Catanese said.
Dunmore lived to see his ex-friends George Washington and Thomas Jefferson become presidents of the independent United States of America. John Murray, the fourth earl of Dunmore, died in Kent, England, in 1809.
The assault on Dunmore’s reputation began while the war was still hot. “For more than 200 years, historians have characterized Dunmore as a greedy incompetent,” David wrote. “This view is rooted in the overheated criticism of his contemporaries.”
The charges against him “almost always come from a period when Patriots were intent on vilifying anybody who was supporting the British,” Lawler said. He was, they claimed, “an incompetent and lecherous drunk who cavorted with Black women.”
“Lord Dunmore, in my opinion, has been painted for the past 250 years as this great villain of society, on purpose,” Catanese said. “That’s the way they intentionally built the story in his own lifetime, as well as in the 19th century, because you can’t create a good story about the heroes of America, unless you have good villains to go against. And really, he was just kind of a man trying to do his job as best he can.”
As crisis piled on crisis in 1775 and 1776 with no way of getting quick instructions from London, could anyone in Dunmore’s position have averted bloodshed, or saved Virginia for the Crown?
No, said Dame; with anyone else, “it would have turned out a very similar situation.”
“He had to go either all in for the king or all in for the Patriots, and by the spring of 1775 there simply was no middle road,” Lawler said. Committed to the king, Dunmore stood and fought. “I really admire Dunmore for taking the hard road. Dunmore could have done what other governors did. Almost every royal governor turned tail and fled, for good reason — they’re outnumbered.”
As early as 1775, Lord Dartmouth, secretary of state for the Colonies, “told him in no uncertain terms that he had the king’s blessing to return to England whenever he saw fit. So the choice to stay and fight was his alone,” David wrote. “It was one that he made at great personal risk and with little reasonable expectation of victory. Given the odds he was up against, no one could have questioned his bravery or loyalty to the Crown had he left Virginia.
“Perhaps he was merely trying to scrub the stain of Jacobitism from his name or to protect his access to the places and profits of empire. But whatever the underlying motivation, his even-handed treatment of runaway slaves and his efforts on behalf of white loyalist exiles in London leave little room to doubt that he felt a deep sense of responsibility for those who put their faith in him during the war.”
The books by Williams and David, along with Lawler’s upcoming book, may change perceptions of Dunmore.
“He is a heroic figure for emancipating enslaved Africans owned by Patriots, a move that made him a villain in the eyes of many white Virginians,” Lawler said. “There is a good deal of evidence that Dunmore came to see Black soldiers as brave and effective warriors, willing to die for their freedom. I actually think he could be ranked as one of the heroes of the American revolution.”
Andrew Lawler’s “A Perfect Frenzy: A Royal Governor, His Black Allies and the Crisis That Spurred The American Revolution” will be published in January of 2025 by Grove Atlantic.
Sources:
“The Bombardment of Norfolk, 1776,” City of Norfolk historical marker.
“Dunmore’s New World,” By James Corbett David, 2013, University of Virginia Press.
“Dunmore’s War,” by Glenn F. Williams, 2017, Westholme Publishing.
“John Murray, fourth earl of Dunmore,” article in Encyclopedia Virginia, contributions by William C. Lowe.