A Smithsonian magazine special report
What Spurred the South to Join the American Revolution?
How a disagreement with a Scottish lord over westward expansion, a cache of gunpowder, and the future of enslaved labor helped kick-start the southern colonies’ embrace of the radical cause
Everyone knows how the redcoats clashed with patriots at Lexington and Concord in April 1775, sparking the American Revolution. Yet often forgotten is an incident that took place two days later and some 500 miles to the south, an event that proved nearly as significant to the cause of independence as the bloodshed in Massachusetts. It was the moment when the South was finally roused against the British, and its main participants were some of the nation’s most famous founders.
It began after Patrick Henry convinced the conservative tobacco planters of Virginia—the largest, most populous and richest of the Thirteen Colonies—to organize a militia. That decision put Virginia’s royal governor, Lord Dunmore, in a bind. Appointed by George III in 1771, the gregarious Scottish earl had purchased plantations, bought enslaved Africans and schemed with his friend, a gentleman farmer named George Washington, to obtain vast tracts of Indigenous land in the distant Ohio Valley. Among Dunmore’s neighbors in the capital of Williamsburg was Peyton Randolph, then serving as the first president of the Continental Congress.
As patriots thrilled to Henry’s stirring words—“Give me liberty, or give me death!”—and agreed to form a militia, London was buzzing with news that New Englanders had seized cannon and gunpowder from a British fort. Dunmore decided to remove the ammunition kept in Williamsburg’s Powder Magazine, a whimsical octagonal building in the town’s market square, but patriots posted sentries to guard the colony’s arsenal. Dunmore, in turn, had his own spies watching the watchers.
In the early hours of April 21, 1775, gale-force winds whipped across the town square, driving the shivering sentries from their posts to the shelter of their beds. Dunmore’s informants quickly reported the guards’ absence and roused him from sleep at the nearby Governor’s Palace. The earl scribbled a note in the candlelight and sent a messenger to deliver the letter, and the magazine key, to the captain of a Royal Navy ship anchored a half-dozen miles away, in the James River.
About three o’clock that morning, under a waning moon, a wagon carrying 20 Royal Navy marines and sailors trundled into the sleeping capital. The blustery winds muffled the clank of wheels and thud of hooves. Dismounting, the ship’s captain unlocked the outer gate, and his men scurried into the courtyard, squeezing through the small door that led into the gunpowder room. The men stacked 15 half-barrels, each weighing about 65 pounds, in the wagon. By the time some early riser spotted the intruders and sounded the alarm, it was too late. The precious cargo was soon rolling toward the James River and the safety of the ship’s hold.
The alarm awakened William Pasteur, a London-trained surgeon who served on the town council and was sympathetic to the patriot cause. He pulled on his breeches and waistcoat and rushed into the street amid “a great commotion.” Most of the city’s white, male inhabitants were out in force, he recalled, “many of them under arms.” Dunmore later said an angry crowd had gathered on the green in front of the stately palace, making “continual threats … to my house.” He was sure they intended “to seize upon or massacre me, and every person found giving me assistance, if I refused to deliver the powder immediately into their custody.”
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This article is a selection from the April/May 2025 issue of Smithsonian magazine
Randolph and other town leaders quieted the furious mob, knocked on the palace door and “humbly” presented Dunmore with a petition asking that the gunpowder be returned. The governor argued that he had removed the ammunition because of intelligence that enslaved Africans—who made up nearly half the colony’s residents—planned to seize the powder to launch an insurrection. His goal, he claimed, had been to protect the colonists, not to disarm them. Given recent rumors that those in bondage intended to rebel, the delegation accepted his explanation, withdrew and convinced the waiting crowd outside to disperse. The crisis seemed to have passed.
Dunmore’s suspicion of the colonists, on the other hand, had not. The next morning, he told Pasteur that two of his officers had been threatened by town residents the previous day and swore that if any injury befell them or his family, “he would declare freedom to the slaves and reduce the city of Williamsburg to ashes.” With no British troops on hand, Dunmore saw this threat as his only option to avert violence. Yet the move only incensed white colonists throughout the Colonies. One angry Virginian accused Dunmore of “stirring up the Negroes to rebellion,” while a Charleston newspaper fulminated over “the monstrous absurdity that the governor can deprive the people of the necessary means of defense” against their human chattel.
As news of the affair spread, hundreds of patriot militia members gathered in Fredericksburg, a tobacco port typically two days’ ride north of the capital, to show “zeal in the grand cause by marching to Williamsburg.” They sent an urgent letter to George Washington, asking for his blessing as well as men and ammunition to launch their assault. Yet the man recognized as the foremost military expert in the colony never responded to repeated messages from the Fredericksburg militia. During what was arguably the most consequential month in American history, Washington remained silent at Mount Vernon.
That reticence had to do with real estate. To avoid an expensive war with Native Americans, Britain had forbidden colonists from claiming tribal lands on the western side of the Appalachian Mountains. Members of Virginia’s gentry chafed at this ban, and Washington had spent years lobbying Dunmore to use his influence to reverse this restriction. In April 1775, he was still pleading his case. An attack on Williamsburg and his patron would be sure to derail his dreams of greater wealth in the west.
When Dunmore learned of the patriot march, he reiterated his threat to free and arm enslaved Virginians. Randolph, president of the Continental Congress, faced the prospect of war breaking out virtually on his doorstep. He sent a letter to Fredericksburg fudging the truth, insisting that the governor had promised “that the powder shall be returned to the magazine, though he has not condescended to fix the day for its return.” He urged the militia to stand down, warning that “violent measures may produce effects which God only knows the consequence of.”
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Just before Randolph’s letter arrived, a dispatch about the Massachusetts battles had reached the militia encampment. Emboldened by the news from Lexington and Concord, the assembled officers were eagerly preparing for the offensive. They read Randolph’s letter aloud, and only after a stormy debate did they grudgingly agree to disperse the troops to avert “the horrors of a civil war.”
What was for Randolph a crisis to defuse and for Washington one to avoid was for Patrick Henry an opportunity. The country lawyer saw a chance to engage Virginia’s small farmers and tenants, most of whom remained loyal to the king and largely indifferent to tensions with Britain. Unlike their New England counterparts, these men had not suffered from the presence of British troops, cared little about tariffs and preferred cider to tea. But they did care about their muskets, rifles and gunpowder.
“You may in vain mention the duties to [the people] upon tea, etc.,” Henry explained to a friend that month. “These things will not affect them. They depend on principles too abstracted for their apprehension and feeling. But tell them of the robbery of the magazine, and that the next step will be to disarm them,” he added, “you bring the subject home to their bosoms, and they will be ready to fly to arms to defend themselves.”
Henry’s claim that the British intended to seize weapons owned by Virginians was patently false, but it proved effective, and the idea swept the colony. Dunmore, another patriot reported, “designed, by disarming the people, to weaken the means of opposing an insurrection of the slaves”—a constant paranoia. Guns were essential for white owners to control the enslaved population, and white Virginians feared such an uprising more than a British invasion. The powder incident gave Henry the means to energize previously uncommitted colonists.
A few days after the militia in Fredericksburg had disbanded, Henry assembled his own small army and gave a rousing speech. The famed orator, one biographer reports, “showed them that the recent plunder of the magazine in Williamsburg was nothing more than a part of the general system of subjugation.” On the fine spring morning of May 3, Henry led more than 100 armed men singing patriotic songs on the road to Williamsburg, halting that evening only 16 miles shy of the capital. A panicked Dunmore, with little time to muster a defense, sent a delegate to negotiate a deal. If Henry’s men would depart, the governor would pay for the powder impounded on the warship. After tense talks that lasted until nearly dawn, Henry agreed to the compromise and wrote a note declaring the powder affair was “now settled.” He mounted his horse and headed to Philadelphia to join Randolph and Washington for the Second Continental Congress.
But the incident was far from over. Dunmore’s threat to emancipate enslaved Africans twice kept the rebels at bay, but in June, amid fears of a kidnapping or assassination plot, he fled Williamsburg, later settling in the coastal port of Norfolk. In late October, as hundreds of enslaved people flocked to British lines for refuge, Henry’s patriot army marched on Norfolk. An outnumbered Dunmore published the continent’s first emancipation proclamation, granting freedom to those enslaved by patriots—if those freedmen would then fight for the king. Lacking British troops to defend his position, he gave the freedmen guns and training and sent them into battle, sometimes against their former owners.
After Dunmore’s proclamation, even his erstwhile friend Washington, now in charge of the Continental Army, lost some of his enslaved workers to Dunmore’s camp. He railed against the governor as “that arch traitor to the rights of humanity.” Meanwhile, frightened Southern planters, those reluctant revolutionaries, threw in with their radical New England cousins. By May 1776, Virginia’s patriot leaders voted unanimously to separate from Britain and urged the Continental Congress to do the same.
That key decision broke the deadlock among the squabbling Colonies, paving the way for adoption of Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence. Soon after, Dunmore and his multiracial troops were driven from Virginia. But his decision to arm men of color forced Washington to accept freedmen into the Continental Army, where they fought for American liberty until the final battle at Yorktown. And nearly a century later, the decree published by Washington’s nemesis would serve as the model for a more famous document: President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation.
