The British Are Coming

At first light on Saturday, December 9, reveille drums woke the American camp only to be answered with a snicker of musketry from the northern causeway approaching the bridge. The firing at first seemed like “our usual sport—an exchange of a few morning guns,” one Virginian wrote. But moments later Colonel Woodford’s adjutant called, “Boys, stand to your arms!” Bullets whistled overhead, and sentries spotted redcoats replacing planks missing from the bridge stringers. British gunners muscled the two 4-pounders from inside the fort and lobbed several rounds toward the American lines. The damp morning thickened with shouts and smoke and the booming cannonade. Lieutenant Edward Travis led an American skirmish line of eighty militiamen to the breastwork, 160 yards below the bridge, while Woodford deployed his main force around the church a quarter mile to the south.

Through smoke and morning haze, grenadiers abruptly appeared on the causeway, six abreast in bearskin caps and red coats with buff facings. With bayonets glinting and two drums beating time, they tramped in parade order across the bridge, shoes clapping the wooden planks. At the head of the column was a tall, homely captain named Charles Fordyce, who had written a friend a week earlier that “a couple of thousand men would settle everything here in the course of this winter.” On this morning, at this place, Captain Fordyce had not a couple thousand but 120 regulars, trailed at a safe distance by a scruffy battalion of marines, sailors, volunteers, and liberty-to-slaves Ethiopians. Within fifty yards of the breastwork, Fordyce waved his hat in a gesture of encouragement and was heard to cry, “The day is our own!”

Those were his last coherent words. On order, Travis’s men rose up from behind their barricade, took aim, and fired. Lead and flame leaped from the top of the parapet to gall the British column. Fordyce fell with a bullet in the knee. Blotting at the wound with a handkerchief pulled from his cuff, he rose, hobbled forward, and fell again, a few paces from the rebel barrier; fourteen bullets would be counted in his corpse. More gunshots came from the American left, where Culpeper riflemen, Lieutenant Marshall among them, had flanked the bridge along a marsh hummock and now enfiladed the enemy column with cross fire. Volley upon volley blistered the grenadier ranks. “For God’s sake,” a voice shrieked, “do not murder us!”

The rear guard turned and pelted for the fort. Gunners spiked their 4-pounders by hammering nails into the touchholes; then they ran, too. Grenadiers dragged wounded comrades across the bridge, glancing over their shoulders; shirtmen were said to favor scalping. “We retreated with much fewer brave fellows than we took out,” a midshipman from the Otter later wrote. Breathless bodies lay scattered before the breastwork like bloody throw rugs. “They fought, bled, and died like Englishmen,” reported Captain Richard Kidder Meade of the 2nd Virginia. “Ten and twelve bullets through many. Limbs broke in two or three places. Brains turning out. Good God, what a sight!” The entire action, from reveille to retreat, had lasted half an hour, “an absurd, ridiculous & unnecessary attack,” a surviving British officer wrote home.

Thirty-three captured loyalists and reenslaved Ethiopians were handcuffed, black to white, for the march to Williamsburg jail cells. Woodford agreed to return the British dead and wounded under a truce flag. A list recorded the casualties by infirmity: “ball lodged in the leg, no fracture,” or “ball lodged in the bowels, judged mortal.” One corporal was reportedly still alive despite seventeen wounds. American losses amounted to one man nicked in the finger.

That night at seven p.m., after loading the wounded into wagons and carts, the British garrison crept from the fort and trudged toward Norfolk, five hours north. On Sunday morning, shirtmen found the Hog Pen empty but for a few axes, twenty-nine spades, eleven pairs of shoes, a pair of snuff boxes, and dead grenadiers, now stiff and stripped of their coats and waistcoats. Dunmore’s report to London would list seventeen killed and forty-nine wounded, but that excluded blacks and loyalists, who brought the total casualties to more than a hundred.

“His Lordship,” one British officer wrote, “has much to answer for.”

Norfolk might be a “dirty little borough,” in Governor Dunmore’s description, but it was Virginia’s major port as well as the colony’s biggest town, with six thousand residents. Fine houses owned by ship captains and tobacco factors faced the waterfront, and brick warehouses crowded the wharves. Waters converged here: the James and Elizabeth Rivers, the Chesapeake Bay, and, beyond Capes Henry and Charles, the briny deep. Before the war strangled much of the colony’s trade, rum, sugar, and European finery—linens, chafing dishes, pewter porringers—were hoisted from the holds of arriving ships, which then were loaded with timber, wheat, salt pork, and countless hogsheads of sweet-scented tobacco. Sailmakers patched canvas shredded in rough crossings, and lighters with bubbling kettles of tar glided through the shallows, carrying carpenters hired to repair leaky merchantmen. An annual fair in Market Square featured bullbaiting and a contest to see who could snatch a gold-laced cap from a greased pole. Fine fiddling might be heard at dances in Masons Hall. The town was despised by many Virginians as a haven for British mercantilists and their Tory collaborators. Yet in better days, Norfolk had flourished.

Those days were gone, and the town’s worst days had now arrived. Upon hearing of the defeat at Great Bridge, Dunmore raved incoherently, threatening to hang the boy who brought the news. The bedraggled column of survivors shuffled through Norfolk’s cobblestoned streets in the small hours of Sunday morning, December 10. The wounded pleaded for water, and women with pitchers moved among them as the uninjured regulars and Ethiopians marched to the docks to be rowed out to half a dozen ships; Dunmore believed the town indefensible. Some loyalist families soon followed, clutching a few treasured possessions, but much of the population, foreseeing trouble, fled inland or up Tidewater creeks. Men dashed about trying to hire horses and wagons, or at least drays and wheelbarrows. House slaves piled beds, mahogany tables, chairs, and a bit of salt meat onto each conveyance, and off they went, to Portsmouth, or Suffolk, or even the Carolinas, abandoning those handsome homes on Church and Talbot Streets. To bolster their spirits, some could be heard singing as they hurried down Princess Anne Road.

The rebel force, swollen to almost thirteen hundred, had moved toward Norfolk. Woodford yielded command to Colonel Robert Howe, a more senior officer who had brought reinforcements from North Carolina. By Thursday, December 14, the rebels occupied the town, sniping at British vessels and arresting a hundred suspected loyalists for interrogation in Williamsburg. “We have taken up some of the Tories and coupled them to a Negro with handcuffs,” one officer reported. “The most stupid kind we discharge.”

Dunmore was also reinforced with the arrival, on December 21, of the Liverpool after a miserable fourteen-week passage from Britain that had reduced the twenty-eight-gun frigate to a single cask of fetid water. Scurvy plagued the ship and her companion, the ordnance brig Maria. But when Liverpool’s captain, Henry Bellew, demanded fresh provisions for his crews, rebel riflemen replied with more gunfire. American sentries paraded along the waterfront, yelled taunts from the docks, and seized a brig loaded with salt, the price of which had soared from one shilling per bushel to fifteen. “They have nothing more at heart than the utter destruction of this once most flourishing country,” Dunmore wrote London.

By December 31, both the year and British patience had expired. Captain Bellew sent Colonel Howe an odd ultimatum: that “you will cause your sentinels in the town of Norfolk to avoid being seen.” American gibes persisted—“every mark of insult,” Bellew complained, including insolent sentries walking with “their hats fixed on their bayonets” for sure visibility from his quarterdeck. Bellew moored Kingfisher, Otter, and Liverpool, the three largest men-of-war, with their gun ports broadside to the waterfront. Jack pendants flew from the bowsprits to distinguish these vessels from merchantmen. Dunmore warned civilians loitering in Norfolk to get out.

After a minatory rattle of drums, Liverpool fired the first three cannonballs, at three p.m. on Monday, January 1, demolishing a wharf shack used for a guardhouse. Within moments more than a hundred guns lacerated the town, pummeling the warehouses and dockyards in an effort to chivy snipers from their nests. Dirty smoke draped the anchorage as boatloads of British troops rowed ashore to set more fires. Storerooms of pitch and turpentine blazed up, igniting large houses and humble shanties alike. By ten p.m. a crimson glow hung like a halo over the waterfront. “The wind favored their design,” Colonels Howe and Woodford wrote in a joint dispatch to authorities in Williamsburg, “and we believe the flames will become general.” In a separate note, Howe described “women and children running through a crowd of shot to get out of town.… A few have, I hear, been killed. Does it not call for vengeance, both from God and man?” A British midshipman wrote in the early hours of January 2, “The town is still burning, as it will be for three or four days.”

That was quite true, for vengeful shirtmen had picked up where British incendiaries left off, burning, looting, and filling their canteens with alcohol pinched from grogshops. “Keep up the jig” became a rallying cry for those determined to punish a Tory town and blame it on the enemy. A witness reported militiamen “drinking rum and crying out, ‘Let us make hay while the sun shines.’” Unrestrained by their officers—Howe and Woodford had been disingenuous, if not dishonest, in blaming only the British for the conflagration—they plundered warehouses and residences, selling booty on the streets. A young soldier in Hampton wrote his mother, “At night the fire was so great the clouds above the town appeared as red and bright as they do in an evening at sun setting.”

At length the flames subsided. Colonel Howe reported that Norfolk “is in a very ruinous condition.” But vengeance had not yet run its course. Paraphrasing the Roman war cry that baneful Carthage must be destroyed, Thomas Jefferson had declared, “Delenda est Norfolk.” The Virginia Convention agreed and “ordered the remains of Norfolk to be burnt,” a major told his wife. “We expect to see the blaze soon.” Officers banged on doors, ordering all remaining residents within a mile of the water to evacuate. Shirtmen soon rampaged through the town again, setting blazes to structures still standing on Bermuda, Catherine, and Church Streets.

“The detested town of Norfolk is no more!” a midshipman wrote. The “dirty little borough,” now reduced to ash and skeletal chimneys, had suffered greater damage than would befall any town in America during the Revolution. An investigative commission the following year found that of 1,331 structures destroyed in and near Norfolk, the British had demolished 32 before evacuating the town, then burned 19 more during the January 1 bombardment. Militia troops burned 863 in early January, and another 416 in the subsequent razing ordered by the convention. But that accounting remained secret for sixty years and then was buried in a legislative journal that stayed hidden for another century, as the historian John E. Selby would note. Blaming the redcoats for wanton destruction was convenient, and like ruined Falmouth in Maine or Charlestown in Massachusetts, Norfolk became a vivid emblem of British cruelty.

“Never can true reconcilement grow,” the Virginia Gazette declared, “where wounds of deadly hate have pierced so deep.” The war had become both brutal and continental, from Montreal to southern Virginia, and would grow nastier and spread farther. Dunmore’s actions drew Virginia into the insurrection full-bore: in mid-January the Virginia Convention enlarged the two existing militia regiments and then created seven more, most of them commanded by officers who had served with Washington during the French war. All nine Virginia regiments would be mustered into the new Continental Army, which Washington was forming into a national force outside Boston, as ordered by Congress. The convention, in an act of independence, also declared Virginia ports open for trade to any nation except Britain, Ireland, and the British West Indies.

Virginians got on with hunting their runaways. A notice in the Gazette offered a reward for “a servant boy named Bartholomew Archibald, about 18 years of age, about 5 feet 6 inches high, of a dark complexion, pitted with smallpox, very slim made.… I am apt to think he will pass for a free man.” Captured “renegadoes” who had served Dunmore were publicly flogged, occasionally after having an ear severed. Some were sold to sugar plantations in the West Indies or sent to work the lead mines in Fincastle County, digging ore for rebel bullets. One account reported that some blacks caught bearing arms for the British had their severed heads impaled on poles at crossroads. Owners were compensated for their losses.

By triggering Norfolk’s immolation, Dunmore had ruined his friends and deprived himself of sanctuary. American contempt for the governor only intensified. He was accused in the press of keeping two enslaved girls as “bedmakers,” and it was said that he had “barreled up some dead bodies of the smallpox and sent them on shore” to spread disease. Banished from both Williamsburg and Norfolk, he took refuge with a hodgepodge cluster of ninety vessels at Tucker’s Mill Point, a malarial spit on the west bank of the Elizabeth River. A six-foot breastwork and a ditch three hundred yards long protected a four-acre encampment where several wells were sunk for fresh water.

But rebel riflemen lurked on the perimeter, and jail fever—typhus—spread through both the Royal Navy crews and the refugees trapped in what was derisively called the “King’s Four Acres.” Grave mounds began to sprout on the riverbank, first a few, then a few score, and eventually a few hundred, half of them reportedly belonging to freed slaves. Moreover, Dunmore reported, “there was not a ship in the fleet that did not throw one, two, or three or more dead overboard every night.” Otter became a virtual ghost ship. Dunmore sent armed boats to forage for food along the coast with little success, even as additional runaways slipped into the camp each day. Bread and salt meat supplies began to dwindle, sickness grew epidemic, and soon enough, the governor knew, he would have to lead his wandering tribe elsewhere.

Dunmore poured out his troubles in an endless letter to London. “I wish to God it had been possible to have spared some troops for this colony,” he wrote. “I am now morally certain had I had 500 men here six weeks ago … [the rebels] would not have been able to raise any number that could possibly have opposed my march to any part of the colony.” Instead, the fate befallen the proud royal colony of Virginia “is a mortification.”

“God only knows,” he added, “what I have suffered.”