Lord Dunmore's Proclamation: Freedom, Slavery, and Loyalty in Revolutionary Virginia

On November 7, 1775, Virginia's last royal governor offered freedom to enslaved Patriots who joined the Crown, reshaping loyalties before independence.

3 August 2026 · Part of The American Revolution →

On November 7, 1775, aboard a British warship off the Virginia coast, the colony's last royal governor signed a single-page document that would outlast every battle he fought. John Murray, the fourth Earl of Dunmore, declared all indentured servants and enslaved people belonging to rebellious colonists free, provided they were "able and willing to bear arms" for the king. Published a week later, the proclamation did not save Dunmore's crumbling royal government — within two months he had lost his last land base and retreated permanently to the sea — but it forced a question the Revolution's founders had spent years avoiding: if liberty was the cause, who exactly was it for?

A Governor Losing His Colony

Dunmore had governed Virginia since 1771, and by the spring of 1775 his authority was collapsing. In the early hours of April 20, 1775 — the day after shots were fired at Lexington and Concord, though news of that clash had not yet reached Virginia — Dunmore ordered royal marines to remove gunpowder from the public magazine in Williamsburg. Virginians read the raid as proof the Crown meant to leave the colony defenseless, and militia companies began marching on the capital; Patrick Henry led one such column before a cash settlement defused the crisis. Dunmore was not appeased. By early June he had abandoned the Governor's Palace and taken his family aboard HMS Fowey in the York River, governing what remained of royal Virginia from shipboard for the rest of his tenure.

Cut off from the House of Burgesses and unable to raise enough loyal white militia, Dunmore looked for other leverage. Virginia's enslaved population, then close to 40 percent of the colony's people, had already been testing the chaos, with enslaved men approaching British ships that spring to offer service in exchange for freedom. Dunmore had floated the idea of arming enslaved people in private correspondence with London as early as 1772, and by autumn 1775 he judged the moment had come to make the offer formal and public.

The Text and Its Limits

The proclamation itself was narrower than either its supporters or its critics later remembered it. It did not abolish slavery in Virginia, nor did it free the enslaved people of Loyalist masters, nor even all those held by Patriots — only ones "able and willing to bear Arms" who reached British lines. Women, children, and older enslaved people were explicitly excluded, though many still fled toward Dunmore's ships in family groups, hoping proximity to the British would protect them regardless of the wording. The document also declared Virginia under martial law and threatened Patriot leaders directly, but it was the promise of freedom that seized colonists' attention and fear.

News of the proclamation spread through Virginia within days, carried partly by word of mouth among enslaved communities and partly by outraged Patriot newspapers determined to rally white opposition. Within weeks, several hundred enslaved men had made their way to Dunmore's floating base, and he organized the ablest of them into a fighting unit that became known as the Ethiopian Regiment. Its members reportedly wore sashes or breast pieces stitched with the words "Liberty to Slaves," a slogan that turned the language of the American cause directly back against it.

The Ethiopian Regiment and the Battle of Great Bridge

By late November 1775, Dunmore commanded a patchwork force: roughly 150 to 175 British regulars, several hundred men of the Ethiopian Regiment, and a Loyalist unit he styled the Queen's Own Loyal Virginia Regiment. He used this force to hold a strategic causeway at Great Bridge, south of Norfolk, blocking the route Patriot militia needed to relieve the town.

The attack, launched on December 9, 1775, went badly from the start. A mix-up left the Ethiopian Regiment out of position for its planned diversionary role, and the British commander, Captain Samuel Leslie, pressed ahead with a frontal assault across the narrow causeway anyway. Patriot riflemen entrenched on the far bank inflicted heavy casualties and drove the attackers back within minutes. The defeat broke what remained of Dunmore's position on Virginia soil. He evacuated to the naval squadron in the harbor, and on January 1, 1776, Norfolk — Virginia's largest town — burned during a chaotic bombardment that contemporaries, and later most historians, blamed primarily on Dunmore's ships, though Patriot forces contributed too.

Chronology

Disease, Retreat, and Dissolution

Crowded aboard ships with poor sanitation, the Ethiopian Regiment and the refugees who had joined it were devastated by smallpox and typhus through the winter and spring of 1776. In May, Dunmore relocated his fleet roughly fifty miles north to Gwynn's Island, hoping isolation would help control the outbreak; instead, disease kept killing faster than volunteers could replace losses. By late June, Dunmore reported the epidemic had killed an "incredible number" of his people, "especially the Blacks," and his effective force had shrunk to barely 150 men fit for duty. On July 9, 1776, Patriot artillery and militia stormed the island, forcing a hurried evacuation that left many sick behind. Historians estimate several hundred members of the Ethiopian Regiment died from disease during the campaign, a toll that likely dwarfed the unit's combat losses. In August 1776, Dunmore sailed what remained of his squadron north to New York, formally ending royal government in Virginia.

Reshaping Loyalties Across the Colony

The proclamation's most immediate effect was political, not military. Many white Virginians who had hesitated over independence — including slaveholding planters normally cautious about provoking London — read Dunmore's offer as confirmation that the Crown would arm their human property against them. Committees of safety used it as recruiting propaganda, and Patriot leaders such as Patrick Henry cited it as proof that reconciliation with Britain was no longer possible. Even colonists who had shown little enthusiasm for independence a year earlier moved toward the Patriot camp once the specter of an armed, British-backed emancipation was raised. Dunmore's gamble to shore up royal authority thus helped accelerate the very rebellion it was meant to suppress.

For the enslaved people who answered the proclamation, outcomes were varied and often bleak. Some who reached British lines gained lasting freedom, evacuating with Crown forces later in the war; others were recaptured and returned to slavery, sometimes sold further south as punishment; many more died of disease before the war's larger battles were even fought. Dunmore's offer was not the war's only one of its kind — Sir Henry Clinton's 1779 Philipsburg Proclamation extended a similar promise on a much larger scale — but it was the first, and it set the template later British commanders would follow.

Conclusion

Lord Dunmore's Proclamation lasted barely two months as an effective instrument of royal power in Virginia, undone by disease, defeat at Great Bridge, and the destruction of Norfolk. Yet its consequences outran its brief operational life. It forced white Virginians to confront, far earlier than they wished, the contradiction between a rebellion fought in the name of liberty and a society built on slavery, and it gave hundreds of enslaved Virginians a narrow, dangerous, but real chance to claim freedom on their own initiative. The document remains one of the clearest points in the Revolutionary War where the war's professed ideals and its social order collided in the open.

The proclamation belongs to a wider pattern of rulers using decrees to redraw the boundaries of freedom and loyalty in a crisis, visible a century earlier in France's Edict of Nantes and in the settlement that followed England's Glorious Revolution of 1688. Dunmore's willingness to fracture colonial society along the fault line of bondage also echoed the divided allegiances of the English Civil War, when subjects were forced to choose between crown and countrymen. The proclamation's tangled legacy for those who sought freedom through it has a colonial parallel in the Dutch Cape settlement described in Fortune and Famine, where bondage and freedom shaped an outpost's fate from its earliest years.

Frequently asked questions

Did Lord Dunmore's Proclamation free all enslaved people in Virginia? No. It applied only to enslaved people and indentured servants owned by Patriot supporters, and only to those who were able-bodied and willing to bear arms for the Crown. Enslaved people held by Loyalist masters, along with women, children, and older men, were not covered by its terms.

What happened to the Ethiopian Regiment? Several hundred enslaved men joined Dunmore's forces and were organized into the Ethiopian Regiment, but disease — chiefly smallpox and typhus — killed far more of them than combat did. After the defeat at Great Bridge and a devastating epidemic at Gwynn's Island in 1776, the survivors evacuated with Dunmore to New York.

Why did the proclamation push some Virginians toward independence? Many slaveholding Virginians who had been reluctant to break with Britain saw the proclamation as evidence that the Crown would arm enslaved people against them. That fear, more than abstract political principle, hardened opposition to royal government across the colony.

Was Dunmore's Proclamation the only such offer the British made? No. In 1779, Sir Henry Clinton issued the Philipsburg Proclamation, extending a similar offer to enslaved people of rebels across all thirteen colonies, on a far larger scale than Dunmore's 1775 offer.

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