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Who ordered the burning of Norfolk?
The smoke that rose from the burning of Norfolk in the first few days of January 1776 lingers still, obscuring from historical view the responsibility for the destruction.
But enough clues remain to make a case that Edmund Pendleton, effectively governor of Revolutionary Virginia, ordered his field commanders to level the port city, according to Andrew Lawler, the Norfolk-born writer who describes the event in a cover story in the November edition of Smithsonian magazine.
Not everyone agrees. Patrick Hannum, a retired Marine officer and historian, believes it more likely that soldiers on the ground took matters into their own hands, and their sympathetic officers declined to stop them.
There’s little dispute about what actually happened in Virginia’s largest city in the first few days of 1776. Lord Dunmore, Virginia’s last royal governor, had fled Williamsburg in June 1775. He took refuge aboard a British warship in Norfolk harbor. Here, he gathered Loyalist supporters from among Scottish merchants, enslaved Africans, and small white farmers who had little in common with the tobacco aristocrats.
On Nov. 7, he issued Dunmore’s Proclamation, an offer of freedom for African men enslaved by “Rebels” who were willing to fight for the king. Hundreds escaped at the risk of their lives. Many enrolled in Dunmore’s Ethiopian Regiment, enraging the Virginia planters, whose privileged existence rested on whip-scarred Black backs.
See our previous coverage of Dunmore’s Emancipation Proclamation and listen to our podcast about it with author Andrew Lawler.
Eighteenth-century Norfolk County comprised modern Norfolk, Portsmouth and Chesapeake. Princess Anne County covered today’s Virginia Beach. Due to low-lying terrain, the two counties effectively formed an island. In 1775, a plank bridge over the Elizabeth River at Great Bridge (today, part of the city of Chesapeake) “was the only access point into that portion of Norfolk County and all of Princess Anne County,” Hannum said in an interview from his home in Virginia Beach. “So it had to be held.”
About the Battle of Great Bridge
See our previous coverage:
250 years ago today, Virginians went to war against their governor (and won), by Thomas Becher
The hero of the Battle of Great Bridge was a sentry who took on an entire British platoon. He was also a free Black man, by Leah Small
Podcast about Billy Flora, the sentry, by Dutchie Jessee
Water’s role in revolutionary history, by Thomas Becher
In early December, British, Loyalist and Black units manned a log stockade north of the river, while the 2nd Virginia Regiment and Culpeper minutemen under Col. William Woodford held the south side. Dunmore ordered a frontal assault on Dec. 9. Marching across the planks, the British were decimated by a Patriot fusillade. The survivors retreated to Norfolk.
On Dec. 14, Patriot forces occupied Norfolk. At their head was Col. Robert Howe, recently arrived from North Carolina. As an officer in Continental service, reporting to George Washington, Howe outranked Woodford. The two colonels led more than 1,200 “shirtmen” attired in fringed hunting shirts.
Dunmore’s sailors and marines took refuge aboard a floating city in the harbor along with Loyalist civilians and escaped Africans. Tensions rose as the Patriots blocked British attempts to gather food and fresh water. Howe and Woodford recommended to Edmund Pendleton that Norfolk be “totally destroyed” to deny its use to the British. It had little value to the Patriots, Howe said, and could not be held against a sea/land attack.
On Dec. 31, Dunmore warned the remaining townspeople to flee, as he planned to destroy several waterfront warehouses used by Patriot snipers. On New Year’s Day, four warships opened up with nearly 100 heavy guns, filling the harbor with smoke. Dunmore also sent men in boats to ignite warehouses on the wharf.
As the sun set on New Year’s Day, observers in the harbor — many of whom had houses in town — noticed an ominous glow rising from neighborhoods away from the warehouses. It was the beginning of a rampage of arson and looting lasting two days and nights. By Jan. 4, most of the town had been destroyed. On Jan. 15, the civilian leadership authorized Howe to destroy any remaining buildings potentially useful to the enemy.
The conflagration was a decisive propaganda victory for the Patriots, who, thanks to control of the press, succeeded in blaming it on Dunmore. Norfolk’s burning, along with the publication of Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense” on Jan. 10, helped tip many fence-sitters into the Patriot camp.
To get the real story, on Sept. 8, 1777, four committee members from the new General Assembly arrived to investigate. Their conclusion: “Very few of the houses were destroyed by the enemy, either from the cannonade or by the parties which landed on the wharves.” Troops from Virginia and North Carolina “most wantonly set fire to the greater part of the houses within the town….to burn all that came in their way.” In total, the Patriots destroyed 1,279 buildings, compared to 54 by Dunmore.
Norfolk resident Matthew McCrae testified that soldiers told him they had general orders to destroy all the houses. When a Patriot sailor named John Rogers tried to stop the burning of a house on Main Street, an officer told him, “It was better to destroy the town that be at the expense of arranging provisions to support the troops.” Shirtmen spared the home of a pregnant woman, but set fire to a neighbor’s home, telling her “they had orders to burn every house in the town.”
The investigative committee was careful in choosing witnesses, Lawler said in an interview from his home in Asheville. “These were depositions taken in a Patriot court in a Patriot setting. The individuals who provided those depositions had to show that they were good Patriots and they also couldn’t be property owners” with a financial interest in getting reimbursed.
“There’s no evidence that Howe or Woodford were officers who would have done something as dramatic and important as burning an entire city without having the permission of the civilian leaders,” Lawler said. “Their behavior both before during and after indicates that they were careful not to overstep their bounds.”
Lawler believes that Howe and Woodford received an order from Williamsburg in the last days of December 1775, and “the evidence points to Pendleton,” acting on his own initiative.
Edmund Pendleton was born in Caroline County to a poor, widowed mother. He rose to become a lawyer, a Burgess, and a Virginia delegate to the First and Second Continental Congresses.
As the break with Britain deepened, Virginia leaders, many of them former Burgesses, began meeting outside Dunmore’s control. Five Virginia Conventions were held from 1774 to 1776. In August 1775, the Third Virginia Convention elected a smaller, executive body called a Committee of Safety. Pendleton, receiving the most votes, became the committee’s president. “Until the next convention met, the Committee of Safety, with no precedent to guide them, would wield almost dictatorial power over both the sword and the purse of the Colony,” wrote David J. Mays in his Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Pendleton.
The Fourth Virginia Convention met in Williamsburg during December and January. Pendleton was president of that body as well.
“Pendleton, I think was very nervous about proposing such a radical step to the Convention,” Lawler said. “So I think it would have been very difficult for him to have gotten the votes to approve the destruction of the colony’s only major city.”
Some Patriots clearly favored Norfolk’s destruction. On Oct. 31, 1775, Thomas Jefferson wrote John Page, “DELENDA EST NORFOLK,” echoing a phrase from Roman history, delenda est Carthago — Carthage must be destroyed.
With the military leaders also favoring an extreme solution, “I think he [Pendleton] probably felt that he wasn’t doing this solo, that he had backup,” Lawler said. None of the other Patriot civilians were in a position to make such a decision alone.
The Convention’s Jan. 15 decision to destroy the rest of Norfolk passed only on the second vote. “That’s important because it shows that there was significant opposition to this move, which I think may explain why Pendleton was a little more secretive about taking the first step of ordering the destruction of Norfolk,” Lawler said.
In addition to his 29 years with the Marines, Patrick Hannum served 16 years as a civilian professor at the Joint Forces Staff College, National Defense University. He favorably reviewed Lawler’s book “A Perfect Frenzy” on allthingsliberty.com, the website of the Journal of the American Revolution. He wrote Encyclopedia Virginia’s entry on the burning on Norfolk.
“The gentry knew Norfolk was a problem but there is no evidence they directed its destruction until two-thirds of the city burned during the first days of January,” he said. “There is no evidence any instructions were issued to the troops to burn the city, they seem to have taken matters into their own hands. It is clear based on the deposition of Norfolk residents taken during the 1777 investigation that Howe and Woodford did nothing to stop the destruction.
“While anything is possible, all surviving evidence indicates Pendleton ordered the destruction of the remaining one-third of Norfolk only after the troops ran wild while Howe and Woodford stood by and watched. Dunmore’s bombardment provided the perfect cover for Howe and Woodford to achieve the destruction of the city without any instructions or guidance from the political leadership or orders from Howe or Woodford to the troops.”
“My assessment is everyone was happy to see Norfolk burnt to the ground and blame it on Dunmore, but there is no evidence that any instructions were issued prior to later in January.”
Mays, the biographer of Pendleton, has Woodford struggling to control the vandalism of his men, rather than carrying out orders from superiors.
Setting aside the question of responsibility, was the burning of Norfolk even necessary?
Lawler compares Norfolk to other contested cities such as Boston, Philadelphia, Charleston and Wilmington. “I think you could look at every other example and see clearly that there was no real military necessity in destroying the city when you weigh that against the damage it would do to the economy and to public safety and to public morale.”
Hannum disagrees. “My conclusion is, it was a military necessity to burn the city. There was no way the Patriots could hold Virginia without destroying it because if even a portion of Norfolk would remain standing, it would provide a base of operations for the British.” In an essay on allthingsliberty.com he wrote: “One may correctly conclude that the seeds of the British defeat at Yorktown in October 1781 took root with the destruction of Norfolk in early 1776.”
Norfolk was still partly in ruins when architect Benjamin Latrobe visited in 1796. But the advantages of its great natural harbor could not be ignored, and residents began to rebuild. Today, the Port of Virginia handles almost two million containers per year, and Naval Station Norfolk is the world’s largest navy base.
In Buddhism there is a concept called “dependent origination,” which posits that every effect has a multitude of, or perhaps an infinite number of causes. The burning of Norfolk in January 1776 had many causes, some of which are visible to historians’ telescopes at a distance of 250 years, and others which may have receded beyond our ability to see.
Parts of this story are reprinted from Randy Walker’s previous Cardinal story on Andrew Lawler’s “A Perfect Frenzy.”
SOURCES/FURTHER READING
Hannum, Patrick, in Encyclopedia Virginia, “The Burning of Norfolk.”
Hannum, Patrick, “Norfolk, Virginia, Sacked by North Carolina and Virginia Troops,” 2017.
Lawler, Andrew, “A Perfect Frenzy: A Royal Governor, His Black Allies, and the Crisis That Spurred The American Revolution,” 2025.
Lawler, Andrew, “In January 1776, Virginia’s Port City of Norfolk Was Set Ablaze, Galvanizing the Revolution. But Who Really Lit the Match?” November 2025 edition of Smithsonian magazine.
Mays, David J., “Edmund Pendleton, A Biography,” in two volumes, 1952.
Tartar, Brent, in Encyclopedia Virginia, “The Virginia Revolutionary Conventions (1774-1776).”
Virginia Museum of History & Culture, “Edmund Pendleton.”