Lord Dunmore’s Ethiopian Regiment
In November of 1775, Virginia’s governor, Lord Dunmore’s issued a proclamation offering freedom to slaves in exchange for service to the Crown. Within weeks, hundreds of slaves escaped their American owners and joined his troops in Norfolk. Hundreds more arrived each week, and as the number of runaways steadily grew, so did the fear and ire of American slave owners.
Lord Dunmore’s proclamation did not win him or the British many hearts and minds amongst colonial whites, but it certainly won the hearts and minds of many colonial blacks. It also helped alleviate a severe manpower shortage that had confronted Virginia’s British governor by increasing his side’s manpower, and simultaneously reducing that available to rebellious colonists.
Arming and hastily training the escaped slaves, Dunmore doubled his available forces within a few weeks. Unfortunately for him and his black recruits, diseases – particularly typhoid and smallpox – swept the escaped slaves. The standards of medical care and sanitation in those days were generally low even in ideal conditions, and conditions in the camps hastily thrown up for the new recruits were far from ideal. Epidemics swept the runaways’ camps, killing them off almost as fast as they were assembled, and preventing Dunmore from raising the vast slave armies he had once envisioned.
Nonetheless, the survivors were assembled in what came to be known as Dunmore’s Ethiopian Regiment, led by white officers and sergeants. On November 15th, 1775, the new soldiers got their first taste of combat in the small scale Battle of Kemp’s Landing. It was a British victory over colonial militia, in which one of the militia colonels was captured by a former slave fighting for the British.
Dunmore grew overconfident as a result of the easy victory at Kemp’s Landing, and became convinced that the Patriots were cowards. A few weeks later, on December 9th, 1775, the Ethiopian Regiment fought in the Battle of Great Bridge, in which the British were tricked by a double agent into making a frontal assault across a bridge. They were decisively repulsed. The Patriot victory compelled the British to evacuate Norfolk.
With British prospects in Virginia collapsing, Lord Dunmore disbanded the Ethiopian Regiment in 1776, and many of its members joined other units, particularly the Black Pioneers, in New York. A former member of the Ethiopian Regiment, a runaway slave from New Jersey named Titus Cornelius, grew famous upon his return to his birthplace, where he became a Loyalist guerrilla leader nicknamed Colonel Tye.
Dunmore’s Ethiopian Regiment marked a significant step in British policy, as its members were the first of thousands who fought for the British during the war. The recruitment of black soldiers by the British also led the Continental Congress to override George Washington’s wishes to keep blacks out of the Continental Army. In 1777, Congress restored the eligibility of blacks to serve in Continental forces – which Washington had rescinded in 1775.