Long before Abraham Lincoln, Virginia’s last royal governor issued his own Emancipation Proclamation. Here’s what happened next.

The year 2026 marks the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Cardinal News has embarked on aproject 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:

Virginia’s rebellion reached the point of no return in June 1775, when a mob in Williamsburg rampaged through the Governor’s Palace, one of the finest buildings on the continent and a symbol of Great Britain’s domain.

The royal-appointed governor, Lord Dunmore, fled to the safety of a warship anchored in the York River. No one in the British government would have thought less of Dunmore if he had abandoned Virginia and set sail for England, as the governors of other Colonies had done.

But Dunmore decided to stay and fight.

It was a longshot at best. Most of Virginia’s planter class had resisted against Britain’s tax policies and constraints on western expansion. Acting in extralegal fashion, Virginians had appointed representatives to the Continental Congress and voted to establish a state militia in defiance of British rule. As shots rang out to the north in Lexington and Concord, Virginia moved inexorably from airing grievances to the cusp of declaring independence.

In standing his ground, Dunmore was driven by a sense of duty, an impetuous personality and a self-confidence that lapsed into arrogance. 

Less than a year earlier, Dunmore had led Virginia troops to a minor but clear victory against native Americans in the Ohio Valley. The brief campaign, which came to become known as Dunmore’s War, may have left the Scotsman with an inflated sense of his skills as a military leader.

To restore British authority, Dunmore would need a force much larger than the small fleet of ships that carried an estimated 300 sailors, soldiers and Loyalist volunteers. He could not expect Britain to send reinforcements. He would have to mobilize his own army.

As he anchored in Elizabeth River adjacent to Loyalist strongholds of Portsmouth and Norfolk, the most significant influx of manpower was an estimated 100 runaway slaves who offered their services in return for freedom.

The huge risks taken by enslaved Black people in search of liberty inspired Dunmore in November 1775 to issue an astounding proclamation, which underscored the Virginians’ differing meanings of liberty in the Revolutionary War.

Some historians have described Dunmore’s Proclamation as a precursor to the Emancipation Proclamation, which 88 years later President Abraham Lincoln would use to define the American Civil War as a clear moral crusade against slavery.

Dunmore’s proclamation briefly let him gain the high moral ground by drawing attention to the fact that Virginians’ quest for liberty was championed by enslavers.

But Dunmore, himself a slave owner, was motivated primarily by strategic considerations. His emancipation order was not universal; it applied only to able-bodied men who were owned by rebelling Colonists and who were willing to enlist in his army. The offer of freedom was not extended to women, children or any enslaved person owned by Loyalists. 

To Dunmore, liberty was a deal, not an inalienable right.

Within days of the proclamation, several hundred more slaves slipped away from their owners and took refuge with Dunmore’s fleet. Dunmore accepted them all, even women and children. Between 1,000 to 1,500 slaves eventually ran away and joined his ranks. But the vast majority of the estimated 220,000 enslaved Black laborers in Virginia were unable or unwilling to respond to his offer. 

His proclamation proved be a strategic blunder of the highest order. Dunmore’s gambit to arm slaves against their former masters galvanized support for independence among white Virginians, even moderate planters who had been inclined to remain loyal to Britain. 

“Men of all ranks resent the pointing a dagger to their Throats, thru the hands of their Slaves,” declared Archibald Cary of Chesterfield County.

“No other document — not even Thomas Paine’s Common Sense or the Declaration of Independence—- did more than Dunmore’s Proclamation to convert white residents of Britain’s most popular colony to the cause of independence,” observed Virginia-born historian Woody Holton.

In the Colonial period, the fear of slave insurrection was a daily fact of life for white Virginians. Whites living on large, isolated plantations in Tidewater were outnumbered by their Black enslaved workers. To many, any gathering of slaves could be considered an uprising in the making.

In fact, three years earlier during a debate on curtailing the transatlantic slave trade, Dunmore referenced the specter of a catastrophic slave insurrection. 

Many Virginia planters at the time wanted Great Britain to increase the tax on imported African slaves. While they couched their arguments in moral terms, historians say their true motivation in curtailing the transatlantic slave trade was economic self-interest and desire for “domestic tranquility.”

With the tobacco boom over, planters feared that additional labor would dilute the value of their existing slave holdings. And some believed that Africans who had known freedom in their home country would be more likely to stir up trouble. Planter William Byrd warned that if Virginia’s slave population were to continue to grow, Black insurgents would “tinge our rivers as wide was they are with blood.”

Parliament rejected Virginia’s request for a tax increase, but in 1772 — a year after Dunmore was posted to Williamsburg — the Virginia House of Burgess tried again. Dunmore pleaded their case in correspondence with his superiors in London. He noted that the high concentration of slaves represented a security risk that a foreign power might seek to exploit. He said that Blacks resented their situation and were “ready to join the first [enemy] that would encourage them to revenge themselves.”

Compelled by desperation, Dunmore came to represent white Virginians’ worst nightmare.

Patriotic newspapers were quick to publish the proclamation it in its entirety. To deter runaways, local patrols were increased. Newspapers speculated that Dunmore had cruel intentions, asserting he intended to sell runaway slaves to Caribbean sugar plantations, where conditions could be harsher than those in Virginia. There also was speculation that runaways would leave behind wives and children who could be subject to reprisal.

The largest howls against Dunmore were accusations about how he provisioned his fleet.

“Lord Dunmore sails up and down the river,” a Norfolk resident wrote to a friend in England, “and where he finds a defenceless place, he lands, plunders the plantation and carries off the negroes.”

Accusations of piracy shredded any remaining legitimacy of Dunmore’s authority. Patriotic newspapers derided him as “our African friend.”

Dunmore’s combined white and Black troops never grew quite large enough to quell the rebellion. A military setback at Great Bridge soon forced the fleet to abandon Norfolk. His situation became hopeless, however, when an outbreak of smallpox ravaged his followers. Runaway slaves suffered the worst.

By the summer of 1776, Dunmore was forced to give up the fight for Virginia. His diminished fleet set sail for New York in August, a month after the Continental Congress issued the Declaration of Independence.

After Dunmore exited the scene, domestic tranquility was restored in Virginia. Enslaved Virginians would have to wait nearly another century for their freedom. In fact, by 1781, the Commonwealth began to offer slaves as bounties for men who enlisted in the Continental Army. Historian Jim Piecuch noted that enslaved Black Virginians effectively became currency for white Virginians’ quest for liberty.

See our previous Cardinal 250 story: “About 900 Black Loyalists from Virginia escaped slavery and went to Nova Scotia.”