Celebrating Hampton Roads’ forgotten Revolution heroes
By Andrew Lawler
November 8, 2025
The American Revolution all but ended at Yorktown. Far less known is Hampton Roads’ dramatic role at the war’s start, and the brave Black Americans who, 250 years ago this month, risked their lives in the cause of liberty. Their stories will be at the heart of Friday’s symposium “Competing Freedoms: Hampton Roads at the Start of the American Revolution” at The Slover in downtown Norfolk.
During the summer of 1775, an enslaved ship’s pilot named Joseph Harris slipped away from his patriot owner in Hampton and sought sanctuary on a Royal Navy ship. Virginia’s royal governor, Lord Dunmore, had abandoned the capital of Williamsburg for Portsmouth’s Gosport shipyard; the vessel was part of a small fleet assembled to counter the growing rebellion.
The flight of the “small mulatto man” was a gamble. If caught or returned by the ship’s captain, Harris faced torture, imprisonment, or even execution. But his bold bid for freedom helped turn a regional rebellion in New England into a full-fledged continental war.
Harris proved his worth in a daring rescue of the HMS Otter’s Captain Matthew Squire during a devastating September hurricane. Furious Hampton patriots demanded the return of “Joseph Harris, the property of a gentleman of our town, and all our other slaves whom you may have on board.” Squire refused. On Oct. 26, after repeated patriot taunts, he led a convoy of Royal Navy tenders crewed by British and Black American sailors — including Harris — to Hampton.
There are conflicting accounts as to who fired the first shot, but the crackle of patriot muskets and the boom of British cannon marked the Revolution’s start south of Massachusetts. The next day, Virginia riflemen beat back a full-fledged attack. During the brief but bloody fight, Harris jumped overboard to save a British lieutenant but managed to escape patriot clutches.
The victory bolstered patriot confidence while bringing the most important colony into the conflict. “Lord Dunmore has commenced hostilities in Virginia,” wrote Thomas Jefferson from Philadelphia. “It has raised our countrymen into a perfect frenzy.”
A patriot army of some 1,500 men soon was on the march to crush the Scottish earl’s forces. By then, hundreds of enslaved people had made their way to Gosport seeking liberty, and Dunmore secretly gave some arms and training. On Nov. 15, local militia attacked his multiracial troops in what is now Virginia Beach. The patriots were routed, and an enslaved man wielding only a sword captured the patriot commander — who also was his owner.
Impressed, Dunmore published the British Empire’s first emancipation proclamation, freeing any person enslaved or indentured by a patriot in exchange for military service — and inspiring later proclamations, including President Abraham Lincoln’s more famous 1863 decree.
The royal governor hastily assembled “Lord Dunmore’s Ethiopian Regiment,” the first Black corps in the British Army.
During the first week of December, they clashed with patriots near Great Bridge in today’s Chesapeake. In the first skirmish, the Black men attacked and scattered the patriots. In the final Dec. 9 battle, however, a British frontal assault failed, opening the way for the patriots to seize Norfolk.
Thousands of terrified civilians evacuated with the surviving British and loyalist soldiers to ships in Norfolk’s harbor. When patriot snipers in warehouses along the shore shot at anyone on deck, Dunmore ordered the warehouses burned. On Jan. 1, 1776, a naval bombardment provided cover for the British and Black troops to land and set fire to the snipers’ posts.
In the chaos, patriot officers — with the approval of their civilian leaders — ordered their men to burn the entire town, leaving Norfolk an utter ruin. The British were blamed for the war crime which persuaded many wavering Americans to back independence.
Yet despite Norfolk’s loss, Dunmore continued the fight. In a remarkable moment of interracial cooperation, troops of both colors built and patrolled a base at Hospital Point in Portsmouth. This continued threat was a factor in the unanimous May 1776 vote by Virginia’s patriot leaders backing separation from Britain. They urged the Continental Congress to do the same, breaking the deadlock in Philadelphia.
Ultimately, a smallpox epidemic forced Dunmore to decamp to Gwynn’s Island in Chesapeake Bay, where his depleted forces were defeated five days after the Declaration of Independence was signed. By then, Harris was dead of disease, but his surviving comrades went on to fight for the king in New York.
Two and a half centuries later, it is time to commemorate these momentous events that took place in Hampton Roads, and to celebrate those who gave their lives to gain liberty — no matter the color of their skin or coat.
Andrew Lawler of Asheville, N.C., is the Norfolk-born author of “A Perfect Frenzy.” For more, visit andrewlawer.com.
