“Damn Virginia,” thundered John Murray, the Earl of Dunmore, at news of his gubernatorial reassignment in the American colonies. The reluctant Scottish aristocrat saw no advantage to his relocation from cosmopolitan New York to the “torpid and sickly rural backwater” of Virginia. The year was 1771. It ended up being so much worse than he imagined.
But first, there was a honeymoon. The tartan-clad royal import went full Virginian, buying two forced labor camps and enough enslaved people to work them. He cut a wide swath through colonial high society, discussing architecture with Thomas Jefferson and planter concerns with George Washington.
Then came the revolutionary tempest that had been brewing beneath the surface of every genteel exchange. By June 1775, Dunmore stood at the helm of a collapsing system of governance: Patriots ignored orders, courts closed and dissolved the General Assembly after Virginia’s colonists pledged support for Massachusetts’s tea-tossers. Dunmore removed gunpowder from the Williamsburg magazine to a British ship. The revolutionaries called him a liar, a rapist and a dunce. Washington condemned him as “that arch traitor to the rights of humanity.”
That’s the story the journalist Andrew Lawler learned as a boy in Virginia, but after a Black History Month assignment for National Geographic sent him poking around old historic haunts, he stumbled upon the Ethiopian Regiment; in 1775, Dunmore armed hundreds of Black volunteers who’d fled their patriot enslavers in exchange for freedom. Lawler began to wonder if the crown’s maligned minion was actually a complex figure caught in the maelstrom of revolutionary fervor.
The absorbing result of his meticulous research is “A Perfect Frenzy,” a new exploration of the crucible of colonial America. The author deftly dissects Dunmore’s choices in the midst of mounting revolutionary crises, revealing a man caught between competing loyalties and a rapidly shifting political landscape.
Lawler is especially good at casting a spotlight on the hypocrisy of the early insurrectionists as well as the double bind of Black Americans forced to navigate the treacheries of the Revolution. Fleeing an alarming number of men who were nearing the capital by land, Lord Dunmore established a “floating town” of 100 vessels off the coast of Virginia that became less a fief and more a purgatory, desperately cruising the Chesapeake in search of a friendly shore. A patriot-leaning Williamsburg newspaper chronicled his alleged “promiscuous ball” with “Black ladies” as guests but the grim reality was far from festive. These ships were floating petri dishes where typhus and smallpox played a deadly duet in the crowded holds. The Black passengers, already trying to escape one form of oppression, found themselves trapped in another, suffering disproportionately from cold, hunger and abysmal sanitation. More than 100 people died.
To underscore how intense the tension was on deck and on ground, the “crisis” in Lawler’s subtitle hasn’t even happened yet. It was “Dunmore’s Proclamation,” in November 1775, that promised freedom to enslaved people who joined the British military, that struck terror into the hearts of Virginia’s patriots. There was one exception: Enslaved people belonging to loyalists were promptly returned; the nearly 100 people Dunmore held in bondage fell in that category and he did nothing to help them out.
The proclamation wasn’t just an announcement and the Ethiopian Regiment wasn’t just a military unit; they were glitches in the colonial matrix, a paradox that short-circuited the Enlightenment narrative. “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes,” mused the English moralist Samuel Johnson.
Operating under the royal governor’s aegis, the regiment spread a contagion of hope through the enslaved population. Dunmore’s Black regiment reportedly wore uniforms that bore the phrase “Liberty for Slaves” — a nod to the revolutionary cry of “Liberty or Death.” For the patriots, it was a nightmare made flesh: armed, free Black men empowered to fight back. Dunmore’s proclamation, which was echoed and amplified by other British generals, became a catalyst rivaling the Boston Tea Party and the Battles of Lexington and Concord in its power to galvanize the patriots. “Lord Dunmore has commenced hostilities in Virginia,” wrote Jefferson, who enslaved over 600 people during his lifetime. “It has raised our country into a perfect frenzy.”
The irony of the rebel position apparently occasioned some thought but little deep reflection. As Lund Washington wrote to his now world-famous cousin George in December 1775, the “dreaded proclamation” might lead some of those enslaved at Mount Vernon to escape. Who could blame them, he went on: “Liberty is sweet.”
Indeed, while General Washington, commander in chief of the Continental Army, waxed poetic about freedom on far-flung battlefields, more than a dozen of the hundreds of people he held in perpetual bondage would eventually vote with their feet, fleeing his five farms for a sworn enemy. They ran to the British lines even after pragmatism trumped prejudice and Washington’s ban on Black soldiers in the fight for independence was lifted. (When the war was over, the general demanded that the men who had taken refuge with the British Army be returned to him. The request was denied.)
Ignited by a resolve forged in defiance, the patriots were ready to burn it all down. On Jan. 1, 1776, Dunmore’s forces unleashed a cannonade on Norfolk, a loyalist stronghold overtaken by patriots. But it was the patriots themselves, spurred on by Jefferson and colonial authorities, who transformed this military action into wholesale destruction. After plundering the town, they set it aflame, leaving not a single church standing. In three days, Norfolk was reduced to ashes.
Lawler calls this “the greatest single war crime of the conflict,” a dubious honor long pinned on Dunmore, though it needn’t be. A 1777 patriot investigation revealed the stark truth: Of 1,333 buildings razed, patriots torched 1,279 to Dunmore’s 54. Yet this report was buried for six decades, allowing the myth of Dunmore’s villainy to make its merry way into our collective memory.
Just about every early American historian — yours truly included — has touched on Virginia’s last royal governor’s last year in America, distilling the highlights into our broader narratives. And there have been excellent books on free and enslaved Black people in Virginia. Still, Lawler’s laser focus on Dunmore’s tumultuous swan song stands out as a rare, if not singular, feat. He isn’t a historian but when it comes to research, he does an excellent impression of one. (There are some tells along the way: I clutched imaginary pearls at a chapter titled “Dunmore’s Dunkirk,” but in the end, such moments were few and far between.)
“A Perfect Frenzy” is a sharp-eyed look at the messy, sometimes absurd, often cruel birth pangs of a nation. It prompts readers to question the simplistic narratives that have shaped our understanding of this pivotal period in American history. “We can feel revulsion for the acts of patriots,” Lawler argues, “and respect their enemy without betraying the founders’ call for a more just and equitable society.”
The struggle for racial justice, the ever-contentious role of government and the moral failures behind the pursuit of freedom are specters that continue to haunt us today. As we approach America’s 250th in 2026, Lawler’s history offers us the kind of challenge we should be posing to our revolutionary mythology. In Dunmore’s story, we find an uncomfortable truth: Our most cherished narratives can cast the deepest shadows.
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