Black Slaves Fight for Freedom by Fighting for Britain: America 250

Lord Dunmore's "Ethiopian Regiment"

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Michael Hoffman

This is the second of a two-part revisionist study of anomalous and neglected facts about the American Revolution. Part is One is here.

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“In American patriotic tradition the first full-fledged villain to step from the wings as the Revolutionary War unfolded was John Murray, Earl of Dunmore.”

— Benjamin Quarles, The Negro in the American Revolution

Uniform of of a fighter in the Ethiopian Regiment during the American Revolution

As a researcher who has attempted for more than 30 years to authenticate and gain acceptance for the anomalous reality of the enslavement of white people in early America, I would be remiss if I were to fail to adequately account for the anomalous situation of black people in Virginia and other colonies who traveled in the opposite direction from the American patriots and their revolution, and sought freedom by bearing arms for King George in the ranks of the British military.

Anomalous it was indeed. The true story is likely to unnerve partisans on the Left and the Right.

Lord Dunmore and His “Emancipation Proclamation”

John Murray was the Fourth Earl of Dunmore. His father William Murray, the third Earl of Dunmore had been a rebel for Bonnie Prince Charlie (Stuart). His son John came to own land in Scotland worked by tenant farmers. Flour shortages in 1766 sparked riots among the workers, who found it difficult to survive while also paying rent to their absentee landlord.

Lord Dunmore’s Lady Charlotte Stuart Murray was the niece of an admiral, daughter of one Scottish earl, and wife of another. She and her sister used their connections to secure William a lucrative job as royal governor of New York. In September 1770 he took up his office in British America. Transferred to Virginia against his desire in 1771, he served as the king’s royal governor in North America’s largest and wealthiest British colony, in its capital of Williamsburg.

Lord Dunmore “proved…an able administrator” in Virginia…Among the first friends he made was an ambitious planter three years his junior…George Washington…In 1773 Dunmore “acquired a dozen indentured white servants and at least 57 enslaved Africans…” (Andrew Lawler, A Perfect Frenzy [Atlantic Monthly Press, 2025], pp. 22-23; 29). Washington was godfather to Lord and Lady Dunmore’s ninth child born in January 1775.

Dunmore was soon between rock and a hard place. Shawnee warriors led by “Logan” were murdering settlers on the frontier, including women and children. Meanwhile, in response to the Boston Tea Party, Britain had blockaded Boston, America’s second largest seaport, as punishment for the patriot rebellion.

One wing of the Virginia mountain man militia, under Colonel Andrew Lewis, a veteran of the French and Indian War, fought the main Battle of Point Pleasant on October 10, at the confluence of the Kanawha-Ohio rivers. Afterward Dunmore pressured the great Shawnee Chief Cornstalk into the Treaty of Camp Charlotte. Cornstalk ceded 40,000 square miles of territory.

Dunmore dissolved the restive House of Burgesses, Virginia’s colonial legislature, on May 26, 1774. From August 1-6, the patriots assembled for an alternative “Virginia Convention.” At this gathering Washington and George Mason submitted an anti-slavery motion from their home county of Fairfax. Their “Fairfax Resolves” demanded an end to the “wicked, cruel and unnatural trade” in humans. Other participants at the Convention declared that the “African slave trade in injurious to this colony, obstructs our freemen, manufacturers and others who would emigrate from Europe and settle here.” These anomalous details are not particularly well-known or commonly emphasized in mainstream education or popular history where they have been demoted to the status of a mere oddity.

In 1774 as the First Continental Congress convened in Philadelphia, Lord Dunmore was in Pennsylvania successfully concluding his punitive militia expedition (“Dunmore’s War”) against the Shawnee. What was the royal governor of Virginia doing in Pennsylvania? He was backing Virginia’s expansive western land claims, which overlapped with those of Pennsylvania. Dunmore treated the Pittsburgh area as part of Augusta County, Virginia. In early 1774, Dunmore’s agent John Connolly had asserted Virginia’s jurisdiction and organized militia.

The patriots’ Second Virginia Convention met in St. John’s Episcopal Church in what was then the tiny village of Richmond. In the aftermath of Patrick Henry’s famous “Give me Liberty” oration, the delegates agreed to form a militia to protect the colony from “invasion or insurrection.” At the same time they praised their Royal Governor Dunmore for his “spirited conduct on the late expedition against our Indian enemy” (allegedly in defiance of King George’s command against such reprisals).

As the patriots’ freedom talk morphed into action, enslaved blacks saw their chance to capitalize on the coming conflict by offering to fight for the king if he would liberate them when victory had been achieved, a message a group of black slaves communicated to British General Thomas Gage.

John Murray, 4th Earl of Dunmore

Dunmore had long contemplated the threat this posed to the colonists. He observed that they “with great reason trembled at the facility that an enemy would find in procuring such a body of men who were attached by no tie to their masters or to the country.” Alluding to the 200,000 black slaves in Virginia alone, he stated, “On the contrary, it is natural to suppose their condition must inspire them with an aversion to both, (and) to revenge themselves, by which means a conquest of this country would inevitably be affected in a short time.”