Lord Dunmore’s Proclamation

About the Author

John Murray, the future Lord Dunmore, was born in England in 1732, a direct, albeit distant, descendant of royalty. He later inherited his title, making him the 4th Earl of Dunmore. Dunmore served briefly in the House of Lords in Parliament, until, in 1770, he was appointed the royal governor of the New York Colony. Approximately a year later he left to be the royal governor of Virginia.

The first thing Dunmore did as governor was to eliminate the Virginia House of Burgesses, which was controlled by Patriots like Thomas Jefferson. In 1774, problems with the Shawnee Indians, who were in bitter conflict with the settlers in western Virginia, caused Dunmore to gather troops and hasten to the field of battle. At Point Pleasant, on the Virginia (later West Virginia) side of the Ohio River, one part of Dunmore’s troops, led by General Andrew Lewis, was attacked by great numbers of the Shawnees. In a daylong battle, the Virginians came out victorious, though at great cost in numbers of men. Dunmore then negotiated a treaty with the Shawnees, which stated that the tribe would not hunt south of the Ohio River. This successfully cleared the way for English settlement in Kentucky.

Despite this victory, problems with the Patriots worsened. In June 1775, after an unsuccessful attempt at emptying the public magazine of gunpowder, Dunmore fled Williamsburg for the ship Fowey. From shipboard he considered his next move and gathered troops. After issuing his proclamation in November 1775, Dunmore was derisively nicknamed “African Hero” by Richard Henry Lee, one of the Virginia delegates to the Continental Congress. In the summer of 1776, Dunmore disbanded his fleet and returned to England. However, in early 1782, Dunmore, with no official assignment, tried to advance a plan in Charleston, South Carolina, to recruit slaves into the British army again on a large scale. Nearly ten thousand men would be placed under the command of provincial officers. Although he was encouraged by other officers to accept the plan, commander in chief Henry Clinton refused to do so. In 1787, Dunmore was appointed royal governor of the Bahamas in the British West Indies. There he was responsible for building most of the forts in and around Nassau. One of the forts was dubbed “Dunmore’s Folly” for being built at great cost in an area of the Bahamas where attack was highly improbable. He died in England in 1809.