Joseph Harris must have been scared when the hurricane roared up the coast of Virginia, scattering the British fleet in Hampton Roads and blowing his small ship aground at Hampton. He must have been even more terrified when a band of local residents showed up at the wreck and took the sailors prisoner. After all, he was no ordinary crewman: He and two fellow crewmen had escaped slavery and joined the British Navy. Now here were some armed Virginians, eager to take the British captive and return their former slaves to bondage. Or, perhaps, execution.
What happened in the ensuing days 250 years ago this October led to the first battle of the American Revolution south of New England. It took place on the shore of Hampton — and involved the status of a runaway slave.
What history records as the Battle of Hampton is an event rarely mentioned in most Virginia history books but one which highlights the complexity of the revolution in Virginia — and the role that slavery played in the conflict.
The Battle of Hampton was small as battles go — perhaps 21 were killed on the British side, American casualties are unclear and perhaps nonexistent — but it set in motion great events. Virginia Patriots were emboldened by their victory; their ragtag force chased off the Royal Navy. Virginia’s royal governor, Lord Dunmore, then exiled to a British warship, declared martial law, essentially declaring war on the Colony. He also did something else far more consequential: He issued an emancipation proclamation that freed any slaves held by rebels who agreed to join the British cause. Patriot leaders reacted with outrage while hundreds, perhaps thousands, of enslaved laborers snuck away to join the British.
This is a part of Virginia history that our textbooks never taught us. However, the story is not nearly so clear-cut as this. While some enslaved workers joined the British, others enlisted on the American side. Within months, a multiracial Virginia force was battling a multiracial British force at Great Bridge, in modern-day Chesapeake, with Black soldiers on both sides hoping that victory would bring them freedom.
Today in Hampton there’s a school named for Cesar Tarrant, an enslaved river pilot who was so esteemed for his military service to the American cause that after the war the Virginia General Assembly bought his freedom and hailed him as a hero.
However, there is no public memorial to Tarrant’s counterpart, Joseph Harris, another enslaved river pilot who chose to join the British and twice helped save the life of his white captain.
Hampton was braced for war
This was the situation in late summer 1775: Gen. George Washington was in Massachusetts, laying siege to the British forces in Boston. The decision by the Continental Congress to put the Virginian in charge was both a military decision (Washington was the best-known American military figure due to his service in the French and Indian War) and a political one (making a Virginian the commander-in-chief signified that this was more than a New England conflict). Still, the only fighting thus far had been in the Northeast.
Virginia was tense, but unbloodied. The royal governor, the prickly Lord Dunmore, had fled the capital of Williamsburg for the safety of a British naval vessel. He may have been governor but he did not govern. He very much intended to regain power, though, even though he had more fury than forces. Virginians were expecting that when war came — more when than if — it would come in one of two places, either Williamsburg or Hampton, says Beth Austin, historian with the Hampton History Museum. Williamsburg was the Colonial capital, Hampton was the site of the administrative center for the port of Hampton Roads. Those were the only two places where Virginia stationed militia from outside their respective communities. Dunmore knew this and looked to find another place from which to mount his planned ground assault on the capital. He sent a small ship, the Liberty, to scout the York River to find a landing site to come at Williamsburg unexpectedly from the north.
As is often the case in war, the first conflict came about by accident.
Harris risked his life to spy for the British, then risked it again in naval service
We don’t know much about Harris, other than that he was the human property of Henry King, a prosperous Hampton merchant who had a small fleet of ships. Harris was trained to be one of his river pilots — think of him as a waterborne truck driver of his day. “If I could talk to one person in history, I think it would be him,” Austin says.
As the political situation worsened in 1775, Harris began spying for the British. We don’t know why. “I wish I knew his motivation for passing information to the British,” Austin says. “If it was a gambit for freedom, he was playing a pretty long game” because there was no hint at the time that such service would result in freedom.
Whatever his reasons, Harris was well-positioned to pick up information. His owner, King, was a prominent Patriot leader in Hampton. And as a pilot, “he had unlimited access to these waterways,” Austin says. “We don’t know how he got caught [for spying], but he got caught and escaped to the British.” Lawler writes that once Harris’ treachery became known (treachery to the Colonials, patriotism from the British point of view), the Colonial leaders in Hampton threatened to kill him. In his book “Forced Founders: Indians, Debtors, Slaves and the Making of the American Revolution in Virginia,” historian Woody Holton says that Harris “slipped away” one night in July 1775 and made his way to the British fleet.
He was apparently welcomed. “He made himself extremely vital,” Austin says. “He was promoted to piloting British warships” — and eventually was formally listed as part of the crew.
On Sept. 2, 1775, a hurricane — in those days storms didn’t have names — blew through. “Infinite damage has been done to the crops of corn and tobacco, much wheat spoiled in barns, a great number of trees blown down, and almost every mill-dam in the country given way,” the Virginia Gazette in Williamsburg reported. Most of the British fleet in Hampton Roads managed to escape, except for two. The Mercury sank. The Liberty — captained by Matthew Squire on that recon mission to the York River — “very near perished in the storm” and ran aground at Hampton. Lawler believes it was only the skill of the Liberty’s pilot, a relatively new recruit, that kept the ship from sinking. His name was Joseph Harris.
A hurricane, a dramatic escape, and then a military standoff
Stuck on shore, the Liberty crew members agreed to split up, to make it less likely they’d be discovered, Lawler writes. Squire and Harris stuck together, perhaps a sign of how much the captain trusted his pilot, even on land. Lawler writes that Harris led them to a friend’s house, where they spent the night. The evaded the patriot squads searching for them, somehow obtained a canoe “and boldly paddled past the entrance to Hampton harbor to return to Gosport,” a shipyard in modern-day Portsmouth where Lord Dunmore was temporarily based.
Their crewmates weren’t so lucky. Patriots soon captured the rest, including two formerly enslaved men who had escaped from a farm in King and Queen County.
The locals then looted the ship and burnt it to the waterline.
Dunmore was furious when he heard about what the Hampton residents had done to the Liberty and its crew. Dunmore was furious a lot that year.
“This was a legal problem the British were required to respond to,” Austin says. Burning the Liberty constituted destruction of royal property.
Under threat from the shipbound governor, the Patriot leaders in Hampton released the British crew members — but kept the two formerly enslaved men.
Still, there was the matter of the burned ship. Squire demanded payment or he would hold “the people of Hampton, who committed the outrage … answerable for the consequences.”
The people of Hampton — well, the patriot leaders — refused. They demanded the British return the runaway slaves they had taken into their care.
Squire responded by stopping all ship traffic in and out of Hampton.
“This stalemate continued and escalated through September and October,” Austin says.
Hampton had closed the customs house, another rebuke to royal authority. Dunmore demanded it be reopened. In a sign of the conflicting loyalties of that era, one customs official snuck out of Hampton in the night and helped establish the custom house in Norfolk.
Eventually Dunmore — and Squire — had enough of Hampton’s insolence. On Oct. 26, 1775, a portion of the British fleet sailed to Hampton. Squire intended to enter the Hampton River and fire his guns on the town, Austin says. Anticipating this, Patriots had sunk ships in the mouth of Hampton River, a 3.2-mile tidal estuary that flows into Hampton Roads. It’s unclear who fired first but shots were fired and “for an hour or so,” Lawler writes, the two sides harmlessly shot at each other from a distance.
No damage was done, but war had come to Virginia.
The Patriots dispatched a messenger to Williamsburg to rouse more militia units. “If Hampton were lost, Virginia’s capital of Williamsburg — a Patriot stronghold and command center — would be open to British attack,” Lawler writes. Meanwhile, the ones already in Hampton were thirsty after an afternoon of shooting ineffectually at the British ships out in the harbor.
The Patriots “retreated to the town tavern,” Lawler writes.
The frustrated British worked through the night to cut their way through the blockade. The next morning, Oct. 27, five British ships sailed right up to Hampton’s wharves. “They caught the inhabitants completely by surprise; despite the previous day’s events, no Patriot sentry was on duty to warn of the incursion,” Lawler writes in an article for Naval History. Squire sent word that he would that day land and burn the town,” the Virginia Gazette reported.
What followed was a classic conflict between formal British naval doctrine and the guerrilla tactics of the Americans, many of them experienced in frontier warfare from “Lord Dunmore’s War” against the Shawnee along the Ohio River just a year prior. Squire ordered his cannon to fire on the town. The Patriots hid in buildings and aimed at the crew members on the deck. Squire was not accustomed to this kind of fighting. His men couldn’t fire their guns when they were being shot at.
One of the British ships, the Hawke, ventured too close to shore. Two of the Hawke’s crewmen were shot dead. The captain and the pilot “plunged from the tender into the chilly river,” Holton writes. The captain later washed up dead. The pilot made it to safety onto another ship. That pilot was, yes, Joseph Harris. The townspeople of Hampton captured the Hawke and its remaining crew, which consisted of two runaway slaves, several white men (including an indentured servant who had run away from George Washington) and a white woman whose name goes unrecorded, but in anonymity stands as testament that women weren’t bystanders to the conflict.
Sensing that things weren’t going as planned, and with men dead and dying around him, Squire ordered his small fleet to withdraw.
“It’s a pretty decisive Patriot victory,” Austin says.
Small battle, big consequences
For a small battle, it had big consequences — the biggest of which was Dunmore’s emancipation proclamation. Much like Abraham Lincoln’s proclamation during the Civil War, Dunmore didn’t set out to free everyone held in bondage, just the ones held by those who were rebelling against the crown. Still, it set off a stampede of “freedom seekers,” as they’re called today — enough that Dunmore was able to form a Black regiment known as the Royal Ethiopian Regiment. The Black soldiers wore uniforms that brazenly proclaimed “Liberty to Slaves.” The regiment was disbanded in 1776, after Dunmore had fled for good, but many of the soldiers wound up being absorbed into other British forces. It’s unclear how many enslaved people fled to Dunmore’s side; estimates range from 800 to 2,500. Over the course of the war, it’s estimated that 100,000 enslaved people (almost entirely in the South) escaped and fled behind British lines. After the war ended in a British defeat, about 3,000 escaped slaves resettled in Nova Scotia, a British Colony that stayed loyal to the crown. (See our previous story and podcast on the Black Loyalists in Nova Scotia.)
As for those two runaway slaves captured on the Hawke, their story is a more tragic one. The white prisoners were “treated with great humanity,” according to contemporary accounts. Te recaptured slaves were put on trial for their lives. Virginia leaders often spared recaptured slaves, though, because they were considered too valuable to kill. These two men on the Hawke were named Tom and Tawley, no last names given. Tom had escaped from Hampton, Tawley from Lynnhaven in what was then Princess Anne County but today is Virginia Beach. They were sent to work the lead mines in modern-day Wythe County, Austin says. (See our previous story on the lead mines.) Eventually Virginia decided to sell Tom and Tawley back into slavery and shipped them to a slave market in Antigua. They never got there. A British ship intercepted them, and they disappeared from history, Austin says. We don’t know whether the British freed them or not.
As for Harris, he stayed with the British Navy, but not for long. In the summer of 1776, smallpox was going around and Harris fell ill. Austin says it’s unclear whether he didn’t survive a rudimentary inoculation — the British were big on trying to inoculate their forces against disease — or succumbed to one of the many other diseases rampant on naval vessels. Either way, he died aboard a British ship in the Chesapeake Bay on July 19, 1776, probably unaware of what had happened in Philadelphia about two weeks before.
His story, documented at the time, did not resurface until around the time of the Bicentennial in 1976. Austin says people didn’t know what to do with it at the time. “Joseph Harris’s story was too much of an oddity for them in that era,” Austin says. With the Bicentennial coming just after the civil rights movement, it was considered important to celebrate Cesar Tarrant, the enslaved river pilot who sided with the Patriots. “He was celebrated so strongly,” Austin says. “It was very important for Cesar Tarrant to be a freedom seeker.” Harris, an enslaved river pilot who made the opposite choice, didn’t fit the story. “It just wasn’t the right time in history,” Austin says. It’s only been recently that Harris’ story has been more publicly told and is featured in an exhibit at the Hampton History Museum.
As for the Battle of Hampton, it rarely gets mentioned in any history book, despite the multiple “firsts” it marked. It was the first battle outside New England, “making a regional conflict a continental war,” Lawler says. It was also the first time that Black Loyalists took up arms against the patriots.
Why does Hampton get so little attention?
“It’s not a conventional battle,” Austin says, since it was partly on water and partly on land, and involved complicated issues on both sides. But it was a battle nonetheless. And it was the first one in the war in Virginia.
Recommended reading: “A Perfect Frenzy: A Royal Governor, His Black Allies and the Crisis That Spurred The American Revolution,” by Andrew Lawler. See our previous story on Lawler’s book about Lord Dunmore.