Eric Wilson RHS Executive Director
Dunmore’s
Proclamation
A Turning Point
Editor’s note: The following article is written by VMI Professor Emeritus of History Turk McCleskey, the sixth in this series of “Revolutionary Moments,” sponsored by the Rockbridge Historical Society and the regional committee for VA250: American Revolutions. Spanning a range of historical themes and events, articles in the series will be published periodically over the next three years to extend those commemorative reflections across four centuries of America’s revolutionary legacies.
In mid-November 1775, John Murray, fourth earl of Dunmore, declared martial law throughout the tumultuous colony of Virginia and proclaimed liberty for “all indentured Servants, Negroes, or others, appertaining to Rebels,” who were able and willing to bear arms to defend the king’s peace: “joining his Majesty’s Troops as soon as may be, for the more speedily reducing this Colony to a proper Sense of their Duty, to his Majesty’s Crown and Dignity.”
Historians typically consider Dunmore’s proclamation from an eastern perspective, but arguably the governor’s conditional offer of liberty to enslaved or indentured men was more historically significant west of the Blue Ridge than in Tidewater.
Dunmore apparently hoped to incentivize wavering eastern Virginia masters to remain loyal to the British crown. Additionally, he expected to mobilize muchneeded military reinforcements. Neither wish came true. Presented with nothing but bad choices, the wavering masters did nothing. Several hundred enslaved men — precisely how many is undocumented — accepted Dunmore’s offer of freedom in exchange for enlistment, but typhus and smallpox killed many, and the survivors were too few to tip the balance against Revolutionary forces.
Seen in one light, Dunmore’s proclamation looked like the latest impetuous dictum of a famously selfcentered autocrat. Eastern Revolutionary enslavers sputtered in outrage, but the proclamation changed little in Tidewater Virginia.
Viewed from west of the Blue Ridge, however, Dunmore’s offer of liberty to enslaved men amounted to an existential threat.
Westerners knew Dunmore well, and, until his proclamation, many powerful westerners were highly pleased with him. In 1774, several thousand Virginia men followed the governor into the Ohio Valley during a conflict we now call Dunmore’s War. Wielding his considerable executive authority, without a shred of authorization from the people’s elected representatives, Dunmore had mobilized numerous volunteers, led them beyond Virginia’s borders, and coerced an advantageous real estate cession from Shawnee towns north of the Ohio River. Westerners loved how Dunmore got things done.
Despite the cascading revolutionary events of early 1775, many westerners remained charmed by Dunmore’s pandering to their material self-interest. This was especially true in the District of West Augusta, Virginia’s local government on the strategic headwaters of the Ohio River. There, the governor’s recognition of western land claims overcame scruples about British tyranny even after the battles at Lexington and Concord, in Massachusetts, and even after Dunmore ordered Royal Marines to confiscate ammunition from the colonial magazine in Williamsburg, in May.
Ultimately, however, the governor’s offer of freedom to enslaved men in November 1775 broke his spell in the last strongholds of support for Dunmore. Enslaved labor was essential for amassing a frontier fortune, so Dunmore’s Ohio Valley followers at last turned against him.
Through the 1760s and early 1770s, eastern Virginians had trafficked enslaved children to western counties, where unfree labor was in very high demand. Westerners badly wanted enslaved labor to exploit Dunmore’s largess in land grants, so the governor’s offer of liberty for slaves turned key frontier leaders and many ordinary settlers into advocates of liberty from Britain.
