The Biggest Coverup of the American Revolution

WE ALL KNOW THAT THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE, adopted 249 years ago today, proclaims that “all men are created equal,” and that the brave members of the Second Continental Congress pledged “our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor” to the cause of separation from Britain.

But largely forgotten amid the Declaration’s historically consequential opening and its stirring conclusion is the true heart of the document: its laundry list of twenty-seven grievances against King George III. The representatives in Philadelphia sought to explain to Britain and the world why Americans demanded independence. This catalogue assembled by the Declaration’s drafter, 33-year-old Virginia delegate Thomas Jefferson, was designed to clinch the case.

Most of the points detail the monarch’s interference with the colonists’ courts and assemblies, but perhaps the most serious charge was that he “ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.” Within these short phrases lies the biggest patriot coverup of the war, one in which Jefferson was intimately involved—and one perpetuated long after the Revolutionary War was won.

THERE IS NO DISPUTING that King George III’s military forces treated New England’s coastal towns harshly at the start of the conflict. At the Battle of Bunker Hill in June 1775, redcoats torched the Boston suburb of Charlestown to prevent patriot snipers from targeting their troops during the bloody fight.

That fall, in retaliation for a deadly patriot attack on a Royal Navy ship in Maine, Admiral Samuel Graves, writing from Boston Harbor on July 6, ordered a fleet under Captain Henry Mowat “to lay waste burn and destroy such Sea Port towns as are accessible to His Majesty’s ships” in the northern province. On October 17, Mowat gave the residents of Falmouth—today’s Portland—two hours to evacuate. The subsequent bombardment and landing parties left most of its four hundred buildings in ruin and nearly half the population of 2,500 homeless.

But the fates of Charlestown and Falmouth paled in comparison with the annihilation of the port of Norfolk—Virginia’s largest city and the eighth-largest settlement in the thirteen colonies—which lay five hundred miles to the south. With its fine harbor and recent influx of Scottish merchants, the port had burgeoned from a regional trading center into an important node in the expanding Atlantic trade. As the largest port between Philadelphia and Charleston, it boasted a population triple that of the capital of Williamsburg. Half were enslaved people, many of whom were highly skilled laborers in the Scottish-owned factories, at the shipyards, on the docks, and aboard the many vessels plying the waters.

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.

This was not, however, the result of raw troops running amok. According to eyewitnesses deposed by the committee, officers urged them on. Letters from patriot leaders also reveal that there was a secret plan to destroy the town, despite their public insistence that they would protect all property. Just weeks before the blaze, a pseudonymous newspaper writer urged the patriotic residents of Norfolk to take action for “the general good,” even if it “cost the lives of a few” and resulted in “either the partial or total destruction” of the town. A few days after that, Jefferson wrote a letter to John Page, a senior Virginia patriot, that concluded on an intriguing line, rendered in capital letters: “DELENDA EST NORFOLK”—Latin for “Norfolk must be destroyed,” an allusion to the famous declamation about Carthage with which Cato the Elder ended all his speeches while calling for war.

THE PERPLEXING QUESTION IS WHY Virginia’s patriot leaders would want to burn the leading city in their own colony. Other ports like Philadelphia and New York had large loyalist factions, but no one proposed demolition as a solution. Some have argued that Norfolk’s destruction was a simple move to deny the British a strategic harbor. Yet after the Royal Navy abandoned Boston in the spring of 1776, no one seriously proposed leveling that town.

A major reason has little to do with tea or taxes and a lot to do with immigrants and race. The rich tobacco planters of English descent who led Virginia’s rebellion had long viewed Norfolk’s prosperous Scottish merchants with suspicion. Many also owed them a good deal of money. As Jews were (and often still are), these savvy Scots were viewed as wealthy and untrustworthy cosmopolitans.

The port posed another threat to tobacco planters, since it had long been a magnet for the enslaved people who made their lives easy. In the crowded alleys and dark taverns along the waterfront, those who had fled plantations could hide, forge papers, and even find a measure of liberty in servitude rare in Virginia’s plantations, which were tightly controlled forced-labor camps. Then, in November 1775, Lord Dunmore freed those in bondage if they would fight for the king. This emancipation proclamation, and the resulting black regiment, terrified the patriots. Norfolk’s destruction promised to snuff out this dual threat to their wealth and power.

By the end of 1776, Virginia’s patriot assembly ordered deportation of all Scottish merchants, crippling the young state’s economy. New restrictions were placed on those in bondage to prevent them from seeking liberty. Their freedom only came ninety years later, after an even bloodier war. Meanwhile, the myth of Dunmore’s villainy can still be found in textbooks.

We still struggle with Jefferson’s challenging call in the Declaration to treat all people as equals under the law. But we can at least face up to the often-ugly facts of our founding, whether the senseless demolition of a city, the tragic deportation of valuable residents, or the inhumanity of lifetime servitude. Surely, we are old enough now—nearly a quarter of millennium—to handle the self-evident truths of our beginnings.