Key figures: John Murray, 4th Earl of Dunmore; Colonel Robert Howe; Colonel William Woodford
Summary
On January 1, 1776, a Royal Navy squadron under Virginia’s exiled royal governor, Lord Dunmore, bombarded the port town of Norfolk after Patriot forces refused his demands for provisions and fresh water. The cannonade, which began around three o’clock in the afternoon, destroyed a small number of waterfront buildings, but the far greater damage came over the following days and weeks, when Patriot soldiers — and, by a 1777 Virginia inquiry’s finding, Patriot troops far more than the British — set fire to and looted the town, ultimately razing roughly two-thirds of Norfolk within three days and the remaining structures by early February. Contemporary Patriot propaganda blamed Dunmore entirely for the destruction, a narrative that stood largely unchallenged for six decades and that helped harden wavering colonists’ support for independence just as Thomas Paine’s Common Sense began circulating. Norfolk, then Virginia’s largest and wealthiest town, never recovered its prewar prominence; Dunmore evacuated Virginia’s waters entirely by August 1776, ending royal government in the colony.
Background: Dunmore’s Retreat to the Fleet
Lord Dunmore had governed Virginia from the colony’s capital at Williamsburg until mounting unrest forced him to flee to a Royal Navy warship in June 1775. From shipboard, he organized Loyalist forces, including the “Ethiopian Regiment” raised from enslaved people who answered his November 1775 proclamation offering freedom to those who joined the British cause. Dunmore’s combined force of regulars, Loyalists, and freedmen was decisively defeated by Virginia militia at the Battle of Great Bridge on December 9, 1775, forcing his remaining troops to abandon their positions near Norfolk. Patriot Colonel William Woodford occupied Norfolk on December 13, while Dunmore and his followers took refuge aboard the crowded, poorly provisioned ships of his fleet anchored in the harbor.
The Bombardment of January 1
With his fleet suffering from overcrowding and dwindling supplies, Dunmore demanded that Norfolk’s occupying Patriot forces, commanded by Colonel Robert Howe (of North Carolina, not to be confused with British General William Howe), supply his ships with food and water. Howe refused, and Patriot riflemen on shore fired on Dunmore’s vessels and taunted their crews. After issuing an ultimatum on Christmas Eve 1775 warning that he would take provisions by force, Dunmore ordered his ships to open fire on Norfolk’s waterfront at roughly 3:00 p.m. on January 1, 1776. The bombardment, combined with landing parties who set fires along the docks, destroyed a limited number of buildings directly.
The Wider Destruction
The cannonade proved only the opening act. Over the next three days, Patriot soldiers occupying the town — some reportedly drunk on liquor found in abandoned warehouses — set fire to and plundered far more of Norfolk than British gunfire had touched, shouting “keep up the jig” as they spread the flames; Colonel Howe himself had indicated he expected to “burn up” Loyalist property in the area. Patriot forces returned in early February 1776 and destroyed the remaining structures Dunmore’s bombardment and the January fires had spared, and a nearby settlement at Gosport was burned days later. In total, roughly two-thirds of Norfolk’s buildings were destroyed in the initial three days, and virtually the entire town — well over a thousand structures — was gone within five weeks. A Virginia legislative commission that investigated the destruction in 1777 concluded that Patriot forces, not the British, were responsible for the overwhelming majority of the damage, but the commission’s findings were suppressed and did not become widely known until the 1830s.
The Propaganda Effect
At the time, Patriot leaders and newspapers attributed the destruction entirely to Dunmore and the Royal Navy, casting the burning of Norfolk as proof of British barbarity toward a defenseless civilian population. News of the town’s destruction spread through the colonies in January 1776, arriving in Philadelphia at nearly the same moment that Thomas Paine’s Common Sense — published January 10, 1776 — was making its case for outright independence. The two developments reinforced one another in colonial opinion: Norfolk’s smoking ruins gave visceral, immediate proof to the abstract argument that reconciliation with Britain was no longer possible.
Aftermath
Deprived of its principal Virginia town, Dunmore’s fleet lingered in Chesapeake waters through the spring of 1776, raiding coastal plantations for supplies and continuing to recruit enslaved people to his colors, but with no secure base his position steadily deteriorated. Disease swept his crowded ships, and by early August 1776 Dunmore abandoned Virginia altogether, ending royal government in the colony. Norfolk itself remained largely in ruins for the rest of the war and took decades to rebuild its prewar commercial standing as Virginia’s principal seaport.
Significance
- Elimination of a Loyalist stronghold: Norfolk’s destruction denied Britain its only significant remaining foothold in Virginia and forced Dunmore’s final withdrawal from the colony by August 1776.
- Propaganda and momentum for independence: The (largely inaccurate) Patriot narrative blaming Britain for the town’s destruction, arriving alongside Common Sense, contributed to the surge of pro-independence sentiment in the first weeks of 1776.
- A contested legacy: The 1777 Virginia commission’s finding that Patriot forces caused the great majority of the destruction remained obscured for sixty years, illustrating how wartime propaganda shaped — and long outlasted — the historical record of the Revolution’s early months.