Blaming the British for the destruction helped persuade some wavering colonists to back the fight for independence. But the source of the inferno was not what it seemed
By Andrew Lawler
November 2025
The first morning of 1776 dawned mercifully warm and clear over Virginia’s port of Norfolk, a welcome change after the snow and bitter cold of December. It should have been a fine day for visiting neighbors to exchange gifts and share terrapin stew, apple toddy or the rum-spiked, heated punch called wassail.
On this morning, however, the townspeople were gripped with anxiety. Thousands of them, seeking protection, were crammed alongside a few hundred loyalists and British redcoats aboard a motley fleet of a hundred or so vessels that clustered in the harbor, including four British Royal Navy warships bristling with cannons. Only 100 yards or so away, rifle-carrying rebel sentries stood along the wharves lining the riverfront, part of a 1,500-strong force of patriot soldiers.
The two sides were locked in a fragile stalemate. The previous spring, the colony’s patriots, led by George Washington, Patrick Henry and other members of the planter gentry, voted to create a militia. By summer, Virginia’s royal governor—the Scottish earl John Murray, known as Lord Dunmore—had abandoned Williamsburg, then the capital city, for a shipyard near Norfolk. By fall, he had assembled an eclectic army of redcoats, Scottish merchants and formerly enslaved Black men, who had recently been granted freedom in exchange for military service. After the patriots defeated his outnumbered forces on December 9, at the Battle of Great Bridge, the governor and his supporters sought the safety of the ships, essentially handing control of the colony’s premier port to the patriot army, led by North Carolina Colonel Robert Howe and Virginia Colonel William Woodford.
For two intense weeks, both sides warily eyed each other. Patriot snipers hidden in dockside warehouses began taking potshots at people on the ships’ exposed decks. Finally, at year’s end, a frustrated Dunmore ordered his officers to destroy the sniper posts. But first Captain Henry Bellew sent a warning ashore, so that “women, children and innocent persons might have time to remove out of danger.” By New Year’s morning, many of Norfolk’s remaining residents had fled. The patriot soldiers—known as shirtmen, for their long hunting shirts—stayed, parading up and down the wharves with coonskin caps on their hoisted guns and taunting the British and the loyalists with “every mark of insult,” reported one Royal Navy captain.
The answer came around 3 p.m. that afternoon, when a broadside from the 28-gun Liverpool raked the waterfront. “When at length the first heavy gun of the fleet broke the horrible suspense,” recalled one civilian eyewitness, “we all simultaneously started up with a sort of mournful cry or wail.”
Within 15 minutes, artillery pieces on all four naval vessels were lobbing shells at the nearby shore. Several boats filled with British soldiers and armed Black loyalists then pushed off from the fleet, dense white smoke obscuring their passage to the town docks. By 4:30 p.m., several warehouses were ablaze. “What a glorious fight ensued!” exulted one British sailor.
The cannon barrage continued into the night. The distressed residents watching from the ships’ decks were relieved when the firing ceased and the city beyond the wharves emerged from the smoke largely intact. Then flames began to proliferate throughout the town and its suburbs. The sky turned a luminous ruby color, drawing the attention of a patriot officer stationed in the city of Hampton, more than a dozen miles to the northwest. The clouds, he wrote to his wife, “appeared as red and bright as they do in an evening at sun setting.” One local man recalled: “The horror of the night exceeds description and gives fresh occasion to lament the consequences of civil war.”
As the first day of 1776 ended, the thriving port city, home to nearly 6,500 people, was a roaring inferno. Within three days, most of Norfolk was a smoking ruin, and within five weeks not a single building was left standing. Lord Dunmore was blamed, and the brutal act of destruction helped convince many wavering colonists to back independence from Britain—still a radical notion at the time. Thomas Jefferson referred to the calamity in July’s Declaration of Independence, charging that George III had “burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.”
No American city before or since has suffered such complete destruction. Numerous history books and even Philadelphia’s Museum of the American Revolution maintain the story that Dunmore destroyed the entire town. There is, however, one problem with this dramatic claim about such a consequential Revolutionary episode: It isn’t true.
Colonial Norfolk was built along a 50-acre oblong peninsula on the north side of the Elizabeth River, moored like a leaky ship to the mainland by a slender isthmus and pierced with swampy creeks. Elegant brick townhomes and rickety wooden tenements shared narrow streets with grimy taverns. Smoky factories, teeming shanty-towns and tony new suburbs spilled north of the downtown. The city lay along a protected deep-water harbor that Dunmore deemed “as fine a one as any I ever saw.” A patriot officer wrote to George Washington that Norfolk was “the finest and most advantageous port in America.”
What had begun as a small regional port boomed in the 1760s, when entrepreneurs from distant Glasgow made it their hub and quickly gained control of the colony’s lucrative tobacco trade. These ambitious Scottish merchants plowed their immense profits into shipyards, ropewalks, leather works, flour mills and rum distilleries that soon lined the Elizabeth’s marshy banks. They built and operated private fleets and served as the colony’s bankers, lending money to the largely English-descended planters who were perpetually short of hard cash.
By 1775, Norfolk was the eighth-largest settlement in the 13 colonies, and the most populous between Philadelphia and Charleston, South Carolina. The bustling port boasted a cross-shaped brick Anglican church, a new powder magazine and North America’s first purpose-built Masonic hall. Stevedores trudged up and down piers that spiked into the river, ceaselessly hauling iron bars, tobacco hogsheads, rum casks, barrels of turpentine and loads of timber between waiting vessels and spacious warehouses. In the evenings, they rubbed shoulders with pirates and prostitutes in the many ramshackle pubs.
Public improvements, however, did not keep up with growth. “The sewage ditches are open, and one crosses them on little narrow bridges made of short lengths of planks nailed on cross pieces,” a visitor noted. These fetid waterways served as “receptacles of the filth of all the privies, and the nurseries of mosquitoes.” Another account warned that “putrid bilious fevers” and “verminous diseases” were common. To avoid the stink and pestilence, Scottish merchants built their mansions in the village of Portsmouth, across the river.
The dreadful conditions did not deter those seeking fortune or a measure of freedom. Norfolk served as a magnet for white artisans, sailors and tradesmen, as well as enslaved people who had escaped Virginia’s plantations. “Gone to Norfolk” was a phrase frequently found in newspaper ads placed by landowners looking for those who’d run away. Nearly half the town’s residents were held in bondage; the majority worked as domestic servants, in the factories or aboard merchant vessels.
A small but growing cadre of legally free Black residents also, against all odds, carved out a good living. Talbot Thompson was the rare enslaved person in Colonial Virginia who succeeded in purchasing himself and then obtained official manumission from the royal governor. Through his sailmaking business, he was able to claim at auction his longtime wife, Jane, who was also later manumitted. On the eve of the Revolution, they owned a spacious two-story home with a dairy and an orchard on a fashionable street.
Many of Virginia’s planter class were already inclined to look at Norfolk with suspicion before Dunmore sailed into its harbor in July 1775 with one small warship and made a nearby shipyard his headquarters. They also knew that, as in most Colonial ports at the time, many residents remained pro-British, although the mayor and several other leading officials were staunch patriots. The governor’s arrival sparked a rush by enslaved workers seeking sanctuary aboard the small fleet. The town’s pro-patriot newspaper noted that white residents were angered at “the elopement of their Negroes, owing to a mistaken notion which has unhappily spread amongst them, of finding shelter on board the men of war.” Because they were considered private property, granting them sanctuary was seen as tantamount to theft—and therefore further proof of British tyranny.
That same month, Joseph Harris, described in a Williamsburg newspaper as a “small mulatto man” and an accomplished ship’s pilot, escaped his Hampton patriot owner to join the king’s cause. His enslaver’s insistence that he be returned led to an argument with a Royal Navy captain that, in October, prompted the officer to attack the small port, the first battle south of Massachusetts. The deadly aim of patriot riflemen forced a hurried British retreat. “Lord Dunmore has commenced hostilities in Virginia,” Jefferson reported in a letter from Philadelphia to a friend in Britain. “It has raised our country into [a] perfect frenzy.” Both sides prepared for all-out war.
Patriot leaders now accused Norfolk residents of lackluster support for the glorious cause. Calls for the port’s destruction proliferated. Virginia patriot Richard Henry Lee wrote to Washington on October 22 that he hoped to hear soon of “the demolition of that infamous nest of Tories”—a term particularly applied to the Glasgow businessmen. Nine days later, at the bottom of a letter to John Page, the second in command on Virginia’s Committee of Safety, Jefferson wrote “Delenda est Norfolk”—Latin for “Norfolk must be destroyed,” a pointed reference to ancient Rome’s obliteration of its rival Carthage on the North African coast. “Like many in his class, Jefferson made the Scottish factors scapegoats for the planters’ economic troubles,” Alan Taylor, a University of Virginia historian, explains. Patriots also feared that the town would continue to attract people escaping enslavement. “This made Norfolk a potential cancer in the side of Virginia,” Taylor added.
Even if Jefferson’s comment was meant as hyperbole, Page seemingly understood it to mean actual annihilation. On November 11, he responded from Williamsburg, “We must be prepared to destroy it,” adding that many of the town’s residents “deserve to be ruined and hanged.” By then, a patriot army was on the march from the capital to Norfolk to oust Dunmore, and rumors swirled that the troops would burn the port. Patriot leaders, however, insisted that they were bent on liberation, not vengeance. The same day Page responded to Jefferson, Committee of Safety head Edmund Pendleton publicly assured residents that talk of destroying the town was “false and malicious,” and he promised “in the most solemn manner” that the troops en route to Norfolk would “guard and protect the inhabitants.”
Four days later, an armed Black loyalist captured a patriot militia leader—also his enslaver—who led a botched ambush against Dunmore and his forces. The royal governor, impressed, published a decree liberating anyone enslaved by a patriot if they were willing to fight for the king. He then quickly formed “Lord Dunmore’s Ethiopian Regiment”—the first Black corps in the British military—to combat the approaching patriot army.
They went into battle two weeks later, in a series of bloody skirmishes at a ford near the strategic crossing of Great Bridge, outside Norfolk. When, on December 9, an assault led by British troops on the main patriot positions failed, the combined British and loyalist forces fell back to the ships in Norfolk’s harbor.
The shirtmen were close behind. “We are marching to Norfolk with no intention to injure the inhabitants of the town either in their persons or property,” the patrician patriot commanding colonels Robert Howe and William Woodford assured citizens. Privately, however, Howe wrote his superiors in the waning days of 1775 that, given British naval superiority, “Norfolk cannot be maintained with any troops you can place there against an attack by sea and land.”
As night fell on January 1, Norfolk’s dazed and deafened residents watched from the decks of the makeshift flotilla as cannonballs rained down on their city. Yet when the guns fell silent, most of the city remained surprisingly unscathed. There were no confirmed deaths during the shore attack. The sole documented civilian injury was that of a nursing mother named Mary Webley, who suffered a broken leg when an iron ball bounced through her house.
After the barrage ended, though, pinpricks of orange light mysteriously multiplied along the streets far beyond the docks. The individual blazes soon merged, and within hours, most of the downtown and many of the areas north of the isthmus were engulfed in a tremendous firestorm. The Thompsons would have watched from the deck of a ship as their property went up in flames. According to Howe, Norfolk burned for three full days, with “seven-eighths of it being reduced to ashes” by the time the flames subsided.
Howe and other patriots blamed the British, charging that a stiff southerly breeze carried embers from the burning warehouses that spread the conflagration. One week after the bombardment, Richard Smith, a New Jersey delegate to the Continental Congress in Philadelphia, noted in his diary that the delegates were told Dunmore “destroyed the town of Norfolk in Virginia.”
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.
Others described observing helplessly as shirtmen plundered stocks of rum and wine. A woman named Parnell Archdeacon Ingram, meanwhile, lay in her bed attended by a midwife as she labored to give birth. A band of patriots burst into the room, declaring that they would torch the home unless she could prove her loyalty to the cause. She managed to produce a note from Howe, the rebel commander, and the intruders left—but not before warning Ingram that “they had orders to burn every house in the town.”
Even outhouses and fences were fair game. Sarah Smith told the committee that she had “observed a soldier taking down the pales which enclosed the garden” of her home, only to be told that “she need not complain, for she might think herself worse off that she was not burnt with the house.” The outraged Smith sought out Howe and bluntly “asked him if he intended to burn the house in which she lived.” After hesitating for a moment, the colonel then gave a chilling reply. “Yes. I believe we shall burn up the two counties,” he said, referring to Norfolk and neighboring Princess Anne, today’s Virginia Beach. At Pendleton’s order, he sent parties to destroy distilleries, shipyards, flour mills and other industrial facilities beyond the town limits.
The 1777 commission found that 416 buildings, or nearly one-third of the town’s 1,333 structures, had survived the first weeks of January 1776. On January 15, Virginia’s new patriot government ordered the demolition of all of these, including the church and Masonic hall. Howe obliged on February 6, ordering his men to set fire to the remaining structures, then to torch farms and homes as they retreated to Great Bridge. The report concluded that patriot troops destroyed 96 percent of the port. Not a single building remained intact.
In subsequent months, enslaved people continued to flock to the flotilla. Dunmore planned a spring 1776 assault on Williamsburg, until smallpox and other illnesses devastated his troops. Five days after the Declaration of Independence was signed, a patriot attack forced the royal governor and the Ethiopian Regiment to sail to New York. There, the Black soldiers fought for the British as free men until the war’s end, when they joined an exodus to Canada to avoid re-enslavement by the victorious patriots. Among them were Jane Thompson and her children; her husband, Talbot, had died earlier in New York.
Norfolk, meanwhile, lay abandoned. The state government deported all Scottish merchants, and the port was slow to recover. “Nothing is here but a ruinous town, nothing but brick walls and chimneys is to be seen,” wrote one patriot soldier a few months after its destruction. “Nobody can conceive that did not see it, how much it is altered,” added a British woman who had viewed the devastation. “It shocks me exceedingly.”
For reasons that went unrecorded, the 1777 report was not made public for 60 years. By then, the myth that Dunmore had flattened the port had taken firm root. Even today, a placard in the Museum of the American Revolution cites January 1, 1776, as the day “British forces burn Norfolk.”
Among those present at the port’s destruction was a young patriot soldier named John Marshall. In 1804, as chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court during Jefferson’s presidency, he criticized what he felt was the patriots’ shortsighted and senseless decision. “Thus was destroyed the most populous and flourishing town in Virginia,” he wrote in his biography of Washington. “Its destruction was one of those ill-judged measures, of which the consequences are felt long after the motives are forgotten.”
Yet Marshall didn’t take into account the propaganda value reaped by the patriots in the aftermath of the conflagration. Their success in blaming the British encouraged Americans to risk what Jefferson called “our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor” to free themselves from the world’s most formidable empire. By reducing their own city to ash, the patriots helped birth the nation.
