Book review: ‘A Perfect Frenzy’: Who torched Norfolk in 1776?
Blame the Patriots more than the cunning Dunmore. Andrew Lawler’s latest book is a lively gathering of research into area’s importance to the Revolution.

Many students of American history know that the Revolutionary War effectively ended at Yorktown, Virginia, when in 1781 the British forces under Lord Charles Cornwallis surrendered to the American and French forces under Gen. George Washington. But far fewer know about the important role that the rest of Hampton Roads, particularly Norfolk, played in the months before and after the adoption of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. Andrew Lawler’s interesting and important book “A Perfect Frenzy” should do much to close that gap.

“A Perfect Frenzy: A Royal Governor, His Black Allies, and the Crisis That Spurred the American Revolution” by Andrew Lawler. (Atlantic Monthly Press)

Although most of the information in Lawler’s book has long been known, the author does a masterful job of assembling it in one place in a lively and readable manner. His two main arguments are that the Patriots, not the British, were primarily responsible for burning Norfolk in early 1776 and that British emancipation of enslaved people in late 1775 and early 1776 was a major cause of the Revolution. Lawler does a commendable job of providing facts and figures, many from primary sources, to support his claims, with the result that readers get a fresh look at a key turning point in American and world history.

Tensions between the Virginia colony and the crown rose a few years after the appointment in 1771 of the Scot John Murray, fourth Earl of Dunmore, as governor. He became a slave owner, prosecuted “Lord Dunmore’s War” against the Shawnee and Mingo in the trans-Appalachian region of the colony, and developed a friendship with Washington. But he had difficult relations with Virginia’s House of Burgesses, and his hold on power waned as the colonists’ desire for separation from Great Britain grew, famously exemplified by Patrick Henry’s “Give me Liberty or give me Death!” speech in March 1775.

Dunmore fled the Colonial capital of Williamsburg and, after being wounded by rebels, took refuge aboard a British naval vessel. Eventually he and his forces retreated to what he called “the dirty little borough of Norfolk.” Actually, Norfolk was the largest town in Virginia and the eighth-largest town in the Colonies. Home to a number of Scottish-born merchants and characterized by more social mixing of the races than anywhere else in Virginia, the seaport was known for its strong Loyalist sympathies.

“Part of the Province of Virginia.” A pen-and-ink and watercolor map from the era, about 1791, showing “Princess Ann County,” Norfolk County and part of Nansemond County. It places north at the bottom and south at the top. Great Bridge and Kemp’s Landing — sites of major battles — are visible just to the left of the southern and eastern branches of the “Elisabeth River.” (Library of Congress)

Dunmore was astute enough to realize that Virginia’s large enslaved population — more than 200,000 people, almost half the Colonies’ total — was a major vulnerability. Hence, in November 1775 he issued his “Offer of Emancipation,” which granted freedom to enslaved people “able and willing to bear Arms” who left Patriot owners to join the British cause. A few days earlier Thomas Jefferson had claimed that a recent British naval raid on Hampton had “raised our countrymen into [a] perfect frenzy,” and Dunmore’s offer must have contributed to that feeling. Although the exact numbers are uncertain, enough formerly enslaved people came to Dunmore for him to form the “Ethiopian Regiment,” composed of several hundred Black soldiers. (Washington subsequently allowed free African Americans to serve in his army.)

Dunmore’s forces won the Battle of Kemp’s Landingon Nov. 15, 1775, but lost the Battle of Great Bridgeon Dec. 9. (Those sites are in today’s Virginia Beach and at the Elizabeth River in Chesapeake.) Then Dunmore, his white and Black soldiers, and many Loyalist civilians took refuge aboard British naval and merchant ships in the Hampton Roads harbor — perhaps as many as 3,000 people on 200 ships, large and small. Faced with sniping by Patriot “shirtmen” (soldiers wearing hunting shirts), Dunmore ordered a ships’ cannon bombardment of Norfolk on Jan. 1, 1776, and sent troops ashore to burn waterfront warehouses that the shirtmen used for cover.

Angered by the bombardment, which lasted from seven to 11 hours, the burning of the warehouses, and the Norfolk Loyalists’ provisioning of Dunmore’s “fleet,” the poorly disciplined shirtmen set fire to much of the rest of Norfolk. The combination of Dunmore’s attacks and the Patriots’ response left Norfolk largely a charred ruin. In late 1777, Virginia’s new government conducted a study which concluded that of 1,333 buildings, the British had destroyed 54 and the Patriots 1,279. But that study was not made public for 60 years, and Dunmore has received most of the blame for the town’s burning.

From Lord Dunmore’s siege on Jan. 1, 1776: A cannonball and one of the few buildings that survived — what’s now St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, on St. Paul’s Boulevard in downtown Norfolk. (Gary C. Knapp, freelance / File)

As Lawler notes, among the many reasons the Declaration of Independence gives for separation from Great Britain are that the British “burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people” and “excited domestic insurrections amongst us,” that is, revolts by enslaved people. Dunmore was also thought to have endeavored to incite Native Americans to attack colonists, and the Declaration accuses the British of that as well.

Dunmore’s fleet left Hampton Roads in May 1776, and the British held out for a time on Gwynn’s Island in the Chesapeake Bay about four miles southeast of modern Deltaville. But disease, including smallpox, and lack of supplies reduced the number of effective troops to a few hundred, and in August Dunmore left for New York. (He was later governor of the Bahamas, where he again became a slave owner.) In 1776 Abigail Adams wrote that although she was “willing to allow [Virginia] great merit for having produced a Washington,” she thought Virginians had “been shamefully duped by a Dunmore.”

In giving readers this fresh look, Lawler generally succeeds in being even-handed among Patriots, Loyalists and the British. But his understandable desire to realistically portray the Patriots occasionally leads him to cast them in a worse light than perhaps the facts warrant. For example, he writes of the British planning a “surprise” attack when three pages earlier he characterized the Patriots as making a “sneak” attack (a more loaded word often used to describe the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941). More seriously, he twice calls the Patriots’ burning of Norfolk buildings a “war crime,” but he never identifies any legal framework of that era under which their actions would have been considered a crime. He also does not make clear whether Dunmore’s hours-long bombardment of Norfolk — a largely civilian target that housed many women and children — and his own burning of numerous buildings were part of that alleged crime or a separate crime or any crime at all.

Although not a perfect read (what book is?), “A Perfect Frenzy” is a well-researched, well-written, and colorful retelling of a tale with which more people should be familiar. Lawler, an experienced and widely published journalist, wrote the national bestseller “The Secret Token,” about the Lost Colony of Roanoke, and “Under Jerusalem,” about the archaeological history of what he calls “the world’s most contested city”; that book was honored by the Archaeological Institute of America. A contributing editor for Archaeology magazine and a contributing writer for the journal Science, he grew up in Norfolk and lives in Asheville, North Carolina.

Dunmore does not deserve the amount of blame he received back then and since, but his actions in Virginia in 1775 and 1776 ensured that history would not treat him kindly. Journalism has been called “the first draft of history,” and the Williamsburg Gazette reported in December 1775 that because of his hostility toward the Patriots, his erstwhile constituents “Norfolk, Hampton, and all the river settlements are threatened with fire and sword.”

Timothy J. Lockhart is a Norfolk lawyer, a retired Navy Reserve captain, and the author of six mystery and thriller novels, all from Stark House Press.

By WILFORD KALE | Correspondent
PUBLISHED: June 26, 2025 at 12:26 PM EDT

Kale on Books: Was Lord Dunmore actually a villain? This books sheds some light

For the past six to eight weeks, Virginians in central and eastern Virginia have been celebrating the 1775 campaign of the colony’s last royal governor, John Murray, the 4th Earl of Dunmore, who fled the capital in Williamsburg for a safer haven aboard a British ship off Norfolk.

Journalist and author Andrew Lawler, known for his fascinating book, “The Secret Token: Myth, Obsession and the Search for the Lost Colony of Roanoke,” has written recently about an amazing saga, “A Perfect Frenzy: A Royal Governor, His Black Allies and the Crisis that Spurred the American Revolution” (Atlantic Monthly Press, 666 pgs., $30 hardback).

Obviously timed for the 250th anniversary of Lord Dunmore’s Virginia activities, it is a largely unknown story that has been lost amid the battles of Lexington and Concord, “the shot heard round the world,” and the deliberations of the Continental Congresses.

Gerard Helferich in The Wall Street Journal said: “‘A Perfect Frenzy’ reminds us that ‘Virginia, not Massachusetts or Pennsylvania, was the largest and wealthiest of the 13 colonies and that without the crucial events that unfolded through the 1770s in places such as Williamsburg, Norfolk and Richmond, the Declaration of Independence might never have been signed.’”

Dunmore, who early on was a close friend of George Washington, began to build his stronghold in Norfolk with the proviso that enslaved people who joined the British ranks would be freed. That concept — an Ethiopian regiment — brought trouble and fear to the white colonists. Black soldiers, Dunmore declared, would be sought if the colonists continued their rebellion.

They did and he did, as Lawler so graphically details.

Thomas Jefferson wrote that Dunmore’s actions “has raised our country into (a) perfect frenzy.”

With the former slaves actively involved in military action around Norfolk, a response was necessitated, Lawler explains. The result was the burning of Norfolk on Jan. 1, 1776. The crime was blamed on Dunmore, but it was really the action of patriots.

In fact, a 1777 investigation revealed that of 1,333 buildings razed, the patriots burned 1,279 while Dunmore’s men accounted for only 54. “Yet this report was buried for six decades, allowing the myth of Dunmore’s villainy to make its way into our collective memory,” Lawler says.

“’A Perfect Frenzy’ is a sharp-eyed look at the messy — sometimes absurd, often cruel — birth pangs of a nation,” Alexis Coe wrote in his New York Times review of the book. “It prompts readers to question the simplistic narratives that have shaped our understanding of this pivotal period in American history.”

Dunmore’s part in Virginia’s insurrection in 1775-76 pushed Virginia’s colonial leaders (rebels in the eyes of the British) to ultimately urge the Continental Congress to debate a resolution for independence. Shortly after the approval of independence, Dunmore and his Black allies withdrew from Virginia.

Lawler “deftly dissects Dunmore’s choices in the midst of mounting revolutionary crises, revealing a man caught between compelling loyalties and a rapidly shifting political landscape,” Coe wrote.

Dunmore, the man Virginians loved to hate, may not have been so bad after all.

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Siblings, beer and hiking

Take a sister and brother, English and Jim Knowles, who like to hike and then add beer and microbreweries and familiar locales and you have the makings of a new book.

“Beer Hiking Virginia, North Carolina and DC: The Mountains, Beaches, and Breweries from the Blue Ridge to the Outer Banks” (Helvetiq, 288 pgs., $24.95 paperback) is an adventure worth your while.

This is a guide for hikers and beer fans, but it is also a mini-history of some of the sites that surround various beer haunts. The hikes range in various lengths. For example, the duo has outlined a 2-mile, hour-and-a-half hike around Maymount Gardens in Richmond with turn-by-turn directions to make sure you see the best things in the Japanese Garden, its primary feature.

Your hike, or simple meander, will take you through the award-winning gardens of a Gilded Age estate at Maymount that includes an arboretum, wildlife habitat and stately mansion. Then, “head to Scott’s Addition, a gentrified industrial neighborhood” not far away. It’s “booming with breweries and eateries.”

The book is also part of a wide-ranging series of beer-hiking books by other authors, including “Beer Hiking” in Chicago; Pennsylvania and New Jersey; New England; and New York — all by the same publisher.

These 40 hikes are from the mountains to the sea — from the Blue Ridge to Virginia Beach and the Outer Banks to Grandfather Mountain. They include hikes around battlefields, mountains and sandy coasts of Virginia and North Carolina. And, oh, don’t forget, amazing and tasty beer along the way.

The Knowles siblings came upon their beer and hiking love from different directions. English, who splits her time between the Shenandoah Valley and Chamonix, France, developed her interest in craft beer while working in the fermentation industry in California.

Jim got his taste for ale and hiking while living in the Scottish Highlands in the 1990s. Currently, he is a professor in the English department at North Carolina State University and calls Durham, North Carolina, his home.

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Is someone really guilty?

Using his 38 years of legal experience, Ashville, North Carolina, lawyer Frank Abrams has crafted a novel about injustice and redemption, “The Cockfight” (Frank Abrams, 262 pgs., $15.95 paperback).

In recent years, a notion has developed, he writes, that once charged with a crime — always guilty. Society now seems slow to recognize the fact that individuals are presumed to be innocent and that the burden of proof is on the government to prove guilt.

“Many individuals,” Abrams says, “suffer injustice under the color of law.”

Teach — William Bradford — becomes one of the victims as he is charged and convicted of a heinous sex crime in Georgia. The riveting saga, laid out by Abrams, details how the alleged crime wound its way through the justice system. Teach, the “Teacher of the Year,” was convicted and served 10 years in prison. But once out, he wanted to prove he was innocent.

That’s Abrams’ story. Eventually, lawyers, not the court-appointed barrister he first had, learned of his plight and realized he was not guilty. In the end, Teach was successful and was vindicated.

Normally, I don’t feature books that are self-published. However, this story is a goodie and I made an exception. Some publishers just missed the opportunity for a winner. Congratulations to Frank Abrams!

Have a comment or suggestion for Kale? Contact him at Kalehouse@aol.com.