The British Are Coming. Rick Atkinson

But vengeance had not yet run its course. Paraphrasing the Roman war cry that baneful Carthage must be destroyed, Thomas Jefferson had declared, “Delenda est Norfolk.” The Virginia Convention agreed and “ordered the remains of Norfolk to be burnt,” a major told his wife. “We expect to see the blaze soon.” Officers banged on doors, ordering all remaining residents within a mile of the water to evacuate. Shirtmen soon rampaged through the town again, setting blazes to structures still standing on Bermuda, Catherine, and Church Streets.

      “The detested town of Norfolk is no more!” a midshipman wrote. The “dirty little borough,” now reduced to ash and skeletal chimneys, had suffered greater damage than would befall any town in America during the Revolution. An investigative commission the following year found that of 1,331 structures destroyed in and near Norfolk, the British had demolished 32 before evacuating the town, then burned 19 more during the January 1 bombardment. Militia troops burned 863 in early January, and another 416 in the subsequent razing ordered by the convention. But that accounting remained secret for sixty years and then was buried in a legislative journal that stayed hidden for another century, as the historian John E. Selby would note. Blaming the redcoats for wanton destruction was convenient, and like ruined Falmouth in Maine or Charlestown in Massachusetts, Norfolk became a vivid emblem of British cruelty.

      “Never can true reconcilement grow,” the Virginia Gazette declared, “where wounds of deadly hate have pierced so deep.” The war had become both brutal and continental, from Montreal to southern Virginia, and would grow nastier and spread farther. Dunmore’s actions drew Virginia into the insurrection full-bore: in mid-January the Virginia Convention enlarged the two existing militia regiments and then created seven more, most of them commanded by officers who had served with Washington during the French war. All nine Virginia regiments would be mustered into the new Continental Army, which Washington was forming into a national force outside Boston, as ordered by Congress. The convention, in an act of independence, also declared Virginia ports open for trade to any nation except Britain, Ireland, and the British West Indies.

      Virginians got on with hunting their runaways. A notice in the Gazette offered a reward for “a servant boy named Bartholomew Archibald, about 18 years of age, about 5 feet 6 inches high, of a dark complexion, pitted with smallpox, very slim made.… I am apt to think he will pass for a free man.” Captured “renegadoes” who had served Dunmore were publicly flogged, occasionally after having an ear severed. Some were sold to sugar plantations in the West Indies or sent to work the lead mines in Fincastle County, digging ore for rebel bullets. One account reported that some blacks caught bearing arms for the British had their severed heads impaled on poles at crossroads. Owners were compensated for their losses.

      By triggering Norfolk’s immolation, Dunmore had ruined his friends and deprived himself of sanctuary. American contempt for the governor only intensified. He was accused in the press of keeping two enslaved girls as “bedmakers,” and it was said that he had “barreled up some dead bodies of the smallpox and sent them on shore” to spread disease. Banished from both Williamsburg and Norfolk, he took refuge with a hodgepodge cluster of ninety vessels at Tucker’s Mill Point, a malarial spit on the west bank of the Elizabeth River. A six-foot breastwork and a ditch three hundred yards long protected a four-acre encampment where several wells were sunk for fresh water.

      But rebel riflemen lurked on the perimeter, and jail fever—typhus—spread through both the Royal Navy crews and the refugees trapped in what was derisively called the “King’s Four Acres.” Grave mounds began to sprout on the riverbank, first a few, then a few score, and eventually a few hundred, half of them reportedly belonging to freed slaves. Moreover, Dunmore reported, “there was not a ship in the fleet that did not throw one, two, or three or more dead overboard every night.” Otter became a virtual ghost ship. Dunmore sent armed boats to forage for food along the coast with little success, even as additional runaways slipped into the camp each day. Bread and salt meat supplies began to dwindle, sickness grew epidemic, and soon enough, the governor knew, he would have to lead his wandering tribe elsewhere.

      Dunmore poured out his troubles in an endless letter to London. “I wish to God it had been possible to have spared some troops for this colony,” he wrote. “I am now morally certain had I had 500 men here six weeks ago … [the rebels] would not have been able to raise any number that could possibly have opposed my march to any part of the colony.” Instead, the fate befallen the proud royal colony of Virginia “is a mortification.”

      “God only knows,” he added, “what I have suffered.”