Virginia’s royal governor, Lord Dunmore, had fled Williamsburg in the summer of 1775 and made a Norfolk shipyard his base of operations to defeat the rebels. By year’s end, however, the patriots had seized the town, pushing his troops and civilian loyalists onto ships in the harbor. On New Year’s Day 1776, after a bombardment by four Royal Navy warships to destroy sniper posts, an enormous fire swept the port that burned for three days. Soon not a single building was left standing. Dunmore was immediately fingered as the villain.
The news shocked and outraged Americans. John Hancock, presiding over the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia, called the act “contrary to the rules of war . . . by all civilized nations.” George Washington, commander of the young Continental Army, decried British leaders who behaved like “the most barbarous Savages,” and predicted “the destruction of Norfolk, & threatned devastation of other places, will have no other effect than to unite the whole Country.”
By the spring of 1776, moderates found themselves hard put to argue for accommodation with Britain as ships of war laid waste to defenseless American cities. What had long been a radical notion—independence—quickly found favor among colonists. Even members of Parliament were appalled by the actions. Speaking in the House of Lords on March 5, 1776, the Duke of Richmond lambasted “devastation hitherto unprecedented in the annals of mankind” that “would render us despised and abhorred.” He predicted the disaster in Virginia would “turn the whole continent . . . into the most implacable and inveterate enemies.” In response, the Duke of Manchester suggested that the colonists, despite their own wishes, might be “forced into independency.” That is precisely what happened.
What neither the American public nor Parliament knew was that the man who would go on to draft the Declaration had secretly encouraged Norfolk’s ruin shortly before it happened. Nor did they know that the colony’s patriots perpetrated the deed themselves and successfully blamed it on the enemy. Later historians continued to consider Dunmore the culprit in what was arguably the greatest war crime of the American Revolution.
The truth only came out sixty years later, when a 1777 report on Norfolk’s destruction, long hidden, came to light. The careful study of the blaze by a committee of Virginia patriots determined that 96 percent of the destruction was caused—on purpose—by the patriots themselves. They had used Dunmore’s bombardment, which by itself had caused limited damage, as an opportunity to set fire to and loot the town. They did not even spare the Anglican church, Masonic Hall, or homes of fervent patriots.