What Became of the Black Loyalists?
Hoping to weaken the rebels’ cause, Britain offered freedom to enslaved people who joined the British army. At the end of the American Revolutionary War that promised freedom had to be honoured – but how and where?
On 7 November 1775, during the opening months of the American War of Independence, the governor of Virginia, John Murray, 4th earl of Dunmore, issued a proclamation that declared martial law in the colony and that all people enslaved by the American rebels would be free should they join the British army. Dunmore’s proclamation declared:
all indented Servants, Negroes, or others (appertaining to Rebels) free, that are able and willing to bear arms, they joining HIS MAJESTY’S TROOPS, as soon as may be, for the more speedily reducing this Colony to a proper Sense of their Duty.
Dunmore’s proclamation – unauthorised by the British government and initially limited to Virginia – was not made on humanitarian grounds. A plantation owner and enslaver himself, he had no intention of freeing those he had enslaved. No abolitionist statement, it was, instead, a naked attempt to bring the rebellious colonials to heel.
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