A Proclamation That Made Washington See Red
In November, 1775, Lord Dunmore, the governor of Virginia where George Washington’s plantation Mount Vernon is located, issued a proclamation that offered freedom to slaves who served the British. Washington was livid. Within weeks, hundreds of slaves escaped their American owners and joined his troops in Norfolk. Hundreds more arrived each week. As the number of runaways steadily grew, so did the fear and fury of American slave owners. Lord Dunmore’s proclamation did not win many hearts and minds amongst colonial whites, but it certainly won the hearts and minds of many colonial blacks. It also addressed a severe manpower shortage that had confronted Virginia’s British governor. It increased his side’s manpower, and simultaneously reduced that available to rebellious colonists. Dunmore armed and hastily trained the escaped slaves, and doubled his available forces within a few weeks.
Unfortunately, diseases – particularly smallpox and typhoid – devastated the escaped slaves. The standards of medical care and sanitation in those days were generally low even in ideal conditions, and conditions in the camps hastily thrown up for the new recruits were far from ideal. Epidemics swept the runaways’ camps, killed them off almost as fast as they were assembled, and prevented Dunmore from raising the vast slave armies he had once envisioned. Nonetheless, the survivors were assembled in Dunmore’s Ethiopian Regiment, led by white officers and sergeants. On November 15th, 1775, the new soldiers got their first taste of combat in the small scale Battle of Kemp’s Landing. It was a British victory in which one of the rebel militia colonels was captured by a former slave fighting for Britain. As seen below, the slaves who joined Dunmore included one of Washington’s.
