By the time war broke out in 1775, Virginia seemed comfortably distant to David George. But the repercussions of conflict disrupted his enclave in time, for reasons originating in the very place from which he had fled. British military fortunes did not get off to a good start in Virginia. The governor, John Murray, fourth Earl of Dunmore, bore part of the blame. Despite being born into considerable privilege as a member of the Scottish aristocracy, Lord Dunmore came of age acutely aware of the precariousness of fortune. In 1745, his father had supported the bid of Charles Edward Stuart (“Bonnie Prince Charlie”), the Jacobite pretender, to reclaim the British throne from the Hanoverian king George II. The choice to stay loyal to the Stuarts cost many prominent Jacobites their titles and more. Though Dunmore’s family managed to avoid serious sanctions, the near miss must have informed his subsequent hard-nosed pursuit of power and personal gain. Appointed governor of New York in 1770 and governor of Virginia a year later, he was perhaps best known for his aggressive approach to land acquisition—achieved through war against the Indians—and he quickly acquired a reputation for autocracy, arrogance, and self-interest. These qualities were displayed the day after Lexington and Concord, when Dunmore ordered his men to remove the gunpowder from the Williamsburg magazine, to protect it from possible rebels. His unilateral move alienated moderates and patriots alike.79 Armed volunteers demanded the return of the gunpowder; Dunmore responded by booby-trapping the magazine with a spring-loaded gun, wounding three men who tried to break in. The Virginia capital bayed for the governor’s blood. Under cover of night, Dunmore and his family fled to the safety of a British frigate in the James River.
Dunmore did not mean this as an admission of defeat. He promptly turned HMS Fowey into the headquarters of an extraordinary government in exile, using the fleet to launch operations against patriots in Hampton, Norfolk, and other coastal towns. Hundreds of loyalists rowed out to join this waterborne outpost of British Virginia—as did runaway slaves, who were also given sanctuary. Soon Dunmore governed a “floating town” inhabited by three thousand people on board nearly two hundred ships.80 Patriots denounced Dunmore for “throwing the affairs of this colony in extreme confusion, by withdrawing himself unnecessarily from the administration of government.” But that was not the worst of it. For Dunmore also appeared to be “exciting an insurrection of our slaves” by putting guns in the runaways’ hands.81
If the prospect of Indian attacks struck terror into frontier colonists, slave rebellions formed the stuff of nightmares for whites in every British colonial slave society. Since 1774 anxious patriots had rumored that the British might arm the slaves, inciting revolt from within the very bosom of American homes.82 Now Dunmore did just that. On November 7, 1775, he issued a proclamation that declared “all indented Servants, Negroes, or Others (appertaining to Rebels) free, that are able and willing to bear Arms, they joining His Majesty’s Troops, as soon as may be.”83 Within two weeks of the proclamation, Dunmore reported that two to three hundred slaves had joined him on his ships. He formed the runaways “into a Corps as fast as they come.” Called the “Ethiopian Regiment,” these black soldiers went into battle wearing uniform badges that boasted “Liberty to Slaves,” a slogan chilling to the white patriot champions of liberty.
Dunmore’s proclamation may have stemmed more from pragmatism than principle. The offer of freedom, limited as it was to patriot-owned slaves, brought valuable recruits into British service and dealt a huge blow to rebel morale, without openly undercutting the support of loyalist slaveowners. Motives aside, however, the proclamation’s social impact is hard to underestimate. From one mouth to the next, talk of freedom spread across the plantations of the south—and the slaves began to run. Single mothers led their children to the British; old and young traveled side by side; entire communities sometimes ran away together, dozens of slaves escaping from single plantations. Dunmore’s Ethiopian Regiment quickly numbered more than eight hundred men, and might have attained twice that strength were it not for a smallpox epidemic that killed hundreds on board Dunmore’s fleet. In pointed irony, some of the most prominent patriots lost their own slaves to the British. Several of George Washington’s slaves ran from Mount Vernon to the floating town. So did several belonging to Virginia burgess Patrick Henry—known for his patriotic rallying cry “Give me liberty, or give me death!”—who cited Dunmore’s proclamation as a reason that Americans should declare independence.84
By July 4, 1776, though, Dunmore’s floating town was decimated by disease, and there was no improvement in sight. Dunmore was forced to retreat to New York with his Ethiopians. Despite the governor’s die-hard instincts, his effort to preserve royal authority in Virginia had become a farce, another lost cause for the onetime Jacobite. But Dunmore’s proclamation took on a life of its own. By inviting African Americans to join, it dramatically changed the character—and the material strength—of loyalist support for the British. British military commanders promptly repeated the promise of freedom to slaves who would fight. When the British bombarded Wilmington, North Carolina, in the spring of 1776, so many slaves ran to join them that General Sir Henry Clinton formed them into another black regiment, the Black Pioneers. (One of those Wilmington runaways, Thomas Peters, would later emerge as a significant leader of black loyalists in exile.) All told, approximately twenty thousand black slaves joined the British during the revolution—roughly the same number as the whites who joined loyalist regiments. Though hopes of a great white loyalist surge would prove elusive to British commanders, Dunmore and others harbored enduring fantasies of blacks helping to save the colonies for Britain.
News of black liberation wound into the southern backcountry, as far as Silver Bluff and the ears of David George and his friends. George’s master Galphin had come out as a patriot—or in George’s more muted phrase, an “antiloyalist.” Galphin was appointed Indian commissioner by the patriots, a position in which he vied with his loyalist counterpart Thomas Brown for Creek support. Because of Galphin’s efforts, Creek backing for the British remained uncertain as the redcoats advanced into the backcountry. But when the British army encamped opposite Silver Bluff, the choice for Galphin’s black slaves was clear. On January 30, 1779, David George and his family—among ninety of Galphin’s slaves—crossed the Savannah River to the British camp, to earn their freedom as black loyalists.85 The Georges made their way to British-occupied Savannah, where David found work as a provisioner and butcher and Phillis did laundry for the British soldiers. Better yet, from George’s point of view, he was reunited in Savannah with his spiritual mentor George Liele. Together they continued to preach, knitting together a community of faith among other runaway blacks. Such ties among black loyalists, as among white loyalists, would provide an important sense of togetherness in years to come and destinations unknown.86
By 1781, with northern offensives abandoned and the southern advance under General Cornwallis running into trouble, the British army’s mass liberation of slaves had come, in some minds, to look more strategically necessary than ever. In August 1781, a sergeant in the Black Pioneers named Murphy Stiele had a brush with the supernatural. He was sitting in the regimental barracks on Water Street in New York City when he heard a piercing yet disembodied voice. It instructed Stiele to tell General Clinton (now commander in chief ) to “send word to Genl. Washington That he must Surrender himself and his Troops to the King’s Army, and that if he did not the wrath of God would fall upon them.” If Washington refused, Clinton “was then to tell him, that he would raise all the Blacks in America to fight against him.”87 For two weeks the voice pestered Stiele, until he relayed his message to the commander in chief. Stiele’s vision of blacks thronging to the British standard—a very particular version of those recurring hopes of loyalist support—must have given Clinton pause, since he had always promoted British recruitment of slaves. Such an influx might be just the thing to rescue Cornwallis’s campaign.
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