The year 2026 marks the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Cardinal News has embarked on a 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. Find all our stories from this project on the Cardinal 250 page. You can sign up for our monthly newsletter:
By the time that Americans officially shed the yoke of British control on July 4, 1776, the 13 Colonies were already at war. For years before Independence Day, various acts of Parliament and rigid colonial administrators had fostered resentment among many colonists, and combatants had already spilled blood in engagements at Lexington and Concord and Bunker Hill.
But for Virginians who were standing on the cusp of revolution, hostility was no distant event occurring on the doorsteps of their New England brethren. The Old Dominion, too, proved to be an early theater, and the conflict touched inhabitants of every social class.
Nearly 250 years after Norfolk burned to the ground during the Revolutionary War Nearly 250 years after Norfolk burned to the ground during the Revolutionary War — the only North American city destroyed at such scale — scholars, historical interpreters and enthusiasts of colonial America gathered in the port city to reflect on the significant role that eastern Virginia played in shaping both the course of the war and of the complex culture that the conflict begot. At the core: Competing notions of freedom.
Author and Norfolk native Andrew Lawler, along with the Slover Library Foundation and Norfolk State University, staged the symposium, “Competing Freedoms: Hampton Roads at the Start of the American Revolution,” on Nov. 14 at The Slover. Lawler, who has written four books, including the 2025 volume, “A Perfect Frenzy: A Royal Governor, His Black Allies, and the Crisis That Spurred the American Revolution,” said that he organized the symposium because key events in Virginia early in the war have not gotten the attention they deserve.
A cast of scholars from across the United States and Canada presented brief lectures on local events in the first days of the Revolutionary War that influenced not only the outcome of the war but also the look of the globe in the centuries that followed. Many of the discussions examined the ripple effects of Dunmore’s Proclamation, a 1775 decree by Virginia’s royal governor that promised freedom to enslaved people who agreed to join British forces. Hundreds took up the offer, many of whom ended up in the Royal Ethiopian Regiment.
First among the presenters was Woody Holton, a Roanoke native and professor of history at the University of South Carolina. Holton argued that if it hadn’t been for the activism of Black Americans, the white ruling class might never have declared independence from Great Britain.
As a young boy growing up in Roanoke, Holton said that he had been taught that enslaved and free Black Americans were spectators of the American Revolution. Not so, said Holton. Black Americans, looking for leverage in a stratified society, had been begging the British to make alliances with them. “The British did not stir up the slaves,” he said. “The slaves stirred up the British.”
Lawler also presented a narrative that bucked conventional wisdom, a notion he spelled out in a November 2025 Smithsonian magazine article. The burning of Norfolk has long been attributed to British and Loyalist forces who were positioned on a flotilla offshore, having retreated there to lick their wounds after a defeat at the Battle of Great Bridge. In Lawler’s retelling, it was patriots who stoked the fires that reduced Norfolk to ashes, an effort to recruit Americans to the patriot cause by blaming the Redcoats for the destruction.
Attendees also heard an international perspective on how local events spilled beyond national borders. Andrea Davis is the executive director of the Black Loyalist Heritage Centre in Shelburne, Nova Scotia. At the conclusion of the Revolutionary War in 1783, the British relocated some 3,500 Black Loyalists to Nova Scotia and New Brunswick in Canada. The largest settlement of formerly enslaved people outside of Africa — roughly 2,500 people — was at Birchtown, Nova Scotia.
See our previous story on the Virginians who fled to Nova Scotia.
Davis, who joined the symposium online from her hometown, told participants that she traces her ancestry to an 18th-century Norfolk resident, Peter Herbert. The mission of Davis’ organization is to celebrate and honor the legacy of the Black Loyalists who made a new life up north. “We like to refer to ourselves as Canada’s best-kept secret,” she said. “Black Loyalists do exist. We have the lifeblood of our ancestors running through us.”
Also presenting at the symposium were Ami Pflugrad-Jackisch, professor of history at the University of Toledo; Adam Xavier McNeil, a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Virginia; Sean Gallagher, assistant professor of history at the University of South Carolina; and Graham Nickerson, a Ph.D. candidate in history at the University of New Brunswick and a Black Loyalist descendant.
Symposium participants were also invited to step back in time with personalities from the past — James Fayette (also known as Lafayette), an enslaved man who spied for patriot forces by infiltrating British lines at Yorktown; Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence and Governor of Virginia during the American Revolution; and Gowan Pamphlet, the first ordained Black minister in American history.
Leading the discussion was Cassandra Newby-Alexander, dean of the College of Liberal Arts and a history professor at Norfolk State University. The historical personas provided a snapshot of the perspectives of 18th-century Americans — viewpoints that often revealed uncomfortable truths. Jefferson spoke of one of the Declaration of Independence’s most famous phrases — “all men are created equal” — and how his 18th-century colleagues nervously pulled him aside about that line: “They wanted assurances that this was written by white people for white people,” he said.
Pamphlet, who founded and led the congregation that would become First Baptist Church in Williamsburg, spoke of how songs sung by enslaved people, such as “Follow the Drinking Gourd,” contained secret messages intended to pass along important information to those who hoped to escape — or were already on the run.
As the historical interpreters stepped out of the 18th century and into the 21st — Steven Alexander as Fayette, Clay Jenkinson as Jefferson and James Ingram as Pamphlet — Newby-Alexander mused on her own historical reckoning with the intricacies of the past. As a student at the University of Virginia decades ago, she held contempt for a statue of Jefferson that she regularly passed.
Her perspective changed as she matured, she said, and came to realize that Jefferson was neither all bad, nor all good, and that possessing both positive and negative traits was not mutually exclusive. “What I see is a very complicated man,” she said. “He had the capacity to dream beyond the space he occupied.”
Newby-Alexander told symposium participants that the celebration of the nation’s 250th anniversary presented an important opportunity for the nation, a chance to move beyond the narratives that have been retold so often. She encouraged people to share and advocate for lesser-known stories from those who shaped the nation we have today. “We can stop talking about one group as being our founding fathers, when there were founding mothers, too,” she said.
Lawler said that his hope with bringing in scholars from across the country and beyond was to inspire broad reflection and research on the momentous, if little-known, events that occurred in Virginia at the outset of the American Revolution. Virginia’s role in the conflict transcended just feisty patriots fighting against overbearing royal authority. “What happened here 250 years ago was people fighting on both sides for their freedom,” he said.