The alarming news spread along the East Coast. The Royal Navy had turned a defenseless city into a desolate wasteland. Would Charleston, New York or even Philadelphia be next? Washington predicted that “the destruction of Norfolk and threatened devastation of other places will have no other effect than to unite the whole country.” Even in Britain’s House of Lords, where Dunmore had long held a seat, members accepted the patriots’ accounts. He was castigated for an act that “would shock the most barbarous of nations,” according to Charles Lennox, the third Duke of Richmond, who also warned that such “wanton ruin” would turn “the whole continent into the most implacable enemies.”
On January 9, Philadelphia’s Pennsylvania Evening Post carried the text of the king’s October speech accusing the rebels of seeking independence, as well as a notice of the publication of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, which plainly stated the case for separation from the mother country. The two events, along with the burning of Norfolk, gave proponents of independence political ammunition against those counseling moderation, yet another sign that compromise with the British was no longer possible.
Dunmore proclaimed his innocence, but the truth about Norfolk’s destruction did not surface until the fall of 1777, after Virginia’s new patriot government created a commission to consider Norfolk residents’ demands for compensation. Commission members contracted with carpenters and surveyors to reconstruct the vanished city on paper. They also interviewed only those eyewitnesses determined to be honest patriots with no real-estate interests to sway their sworn testimony. Over several days, a scribe took down their recollections under oath. The sheaf of yellowing papers resides today in a small, plain box stored on the second floor of Richmond’s Library of Virginia. The carefully collected depositions offer heart-rending accounts of the city’s destruction.
One local man named James Nicholson recalled standing near Main Street on the afternoon of January 1 as “rejoicing” patriot troops were “coming up from the warehouses loaded with plunder.” After parceling out the goods, the men “went from house to house plundering and firing them.” Another resident recalled hearing a rebel soldier say, “The people in Norfolk were a foul nest of damned Tories, and ought to have all their houses burnt and themselves burnt with them!”
A third local man watched that night as shirtmen torched buildings. When he accosted them, the interviewer recorded, “they told him they had general orders for destroying all the houses.” He told the committee that he was “positively certain” the fire could not have spread among homes “had they not been wantonly destroyed by the provincial troops.” Experienced sailors also testified that the wind had been light and from the north before it died out entirely at dusk, debunking Howe’s claims that a stiff southerly breeze from the wharves had carried the flames to the town.