The British Are Coming. Rick Atkinson
glinting and two drums beating time, they tramped in parade order across the bridge, shoes clapping the wooden planks. At the head of the column was a tall, homely captain named Charles Fordyce, who had written a friend a week earlier that “a couple of thousand men would settle everything here in the course of this winter.” On this morning, at this place, Captain Fordyce had not a couple thousand but 120 regulars, trailed at a safe distance by a scruffy battalion of marines, sailors, volunteers, and liberty-to-slaves Ethiopians. Within fifty yards of the breastwork, Fordyce waved his hat in a gesture of encouragement and was heard to cry, “The day is our own!”
Those were his last coherent words. On order, Travis’s men rose up from behind their barricade, took aim, and fired. Lead and flame leaped from the top of the parapet to gall the British column. Fordyce fell with a bullet in the knee. Blotting at the wound with a handkerchief pulled from his cuff, he rose, hobbled forward, and fell again, a few paces from the rebel barrier; fourteen bullets would be counted in his corpse. More gunshots came from the American left, where Culpeper riflemen, Lieutenant Marshall among them, had flanked the bridge along a marsh hummock and now enfiladed the enemy column with cross fire. Volley upon volley blistered the grenadier ranks. “For God’s sake,” a voice shrieked, “do not murder us!”
The rear guard turned and pelted for the fort. Gunners spiked their 4-pounders by hammering nails into the touchholes; then they ran, too. Grenadiers dragged wounded comrades across the bridge, glancing over their shoulders; shirtmen were said to favor scalping. “We retreated with much fewer brave fellows than we took out,” a midshipman from the Otter later wrote. Breathless bodies lay scattered before the breastwork like bloody throw rugs. “They fought, bled, and died like Englishmen,” reported Captain Richard Kidder Meade of the 2nd Virginia. “Ten and twelve bullets through many. Limbs broke in two or three places. Brains turning out. Good God, what a sight!” The entire action, from reveille to retreat, had lasted half an hour, “an absurd, ridiculous & unnecessary attack,” a surviving British officer wrote home.
Thirty-three captured loyalists and reenslaved Ethiopians were handcuffed, black to white, for the march to Williamsburg jail cells. Woodford agreed to return the British dead and wounded under a truce flag. A list recorded the casualties by infirmity: “ball lodged in the leg, no fracture,” or “ball lodged in the bowels, judged mortal.” One corporal was reportedly still alive despite seventeen wounds. American losses amounted to one man nicked in the finger.
That night at seven p.m., after loading the wounded into wagons and carts, the British garrison crept from the fort and trudged toward Norfolk, five hours north. On Sunday morning, shirtmen found the Hog Pen empty but for a few axes, twenty-nine spades, eleven pairs of shoes, a pair of snuff boxes, and dead grenadiers, now stiff and stripped of their coats and waistcoats. Dunmore’s report to London would list seventeen killed and forty-nine wounded, but that excluded blacks and loyalists, who brought the total casualties to more than a hundred.
“His Lordship,” one British officer wrote, “has much to answer for.”
Norfolk might be a “dirty little borough,” in Governor Dunmore’s description, but it was Virginia’s major port as well as the colony’s biggest town, with six thousand residents. Fine houses owned by ship captains and tobacco factors faced the waterfront, and brick warehouses crowded the wharves. Waters converged here: the James and Elizabeth Rivers, the Chesapeake Bay, and, beyond Capes Henry and Charles, the briny deep. Before the war strangled much of the colony’s trade, rum, sugar, and European finery—linens, chafing dishes, pewter porringers—were hoisted from the holds of arriving ships, which then were loaded with timber, wheat, salt pork, and countless hogsheads of sweet-scented tobacco. Sailmakers patched canvas shredded in rough crossings, and lighters with bubbling kettles of tar glided through the shallows, carrying carpenters hired to repair leaky merchantmen. An annual fair in Market Square featured bullbaiting and a contest to see who could snatch a gold-laced cap from a greased pole. Fine fiddling might be heard at dances in Masons Hall. The town was despised by many Virginians as a haven for British mercantilists and their Tory collaborators. Yet in better days, Norfolk had flourished.
Those days were gone, and the town’s worst days had now arrived. Upon hearing of the defeat at Great Bridge, Dunmore raved incoherently, threatening to hang the boy who brought the news. The bedraggled column of survivors shuffled through Norfolk’s cobblestoned streets in the small hours of Sunday morning, December 10. The wounded pleaded for water, and women with pitchers moved among them as the uninjured regulars and Ethiopians marched to the docks to be rowed out to half a dozen ships; Dunmore believed the town indefensible. Some loyalist families soon followed, clutching a few treasured possessions, but much of the population, foreseeing trouble, fled inland or up Tidewater creeks. Men dashed about trying to hire horses and wagons, or at least drays and wheelbarrows. House slaves piled beds, mahogany tables, chairs, and a bit of salt meat onto each conveyance, and off they went, to Portsmouth, or Suffolk, or even the Carolinas, abandoning those handsome homes on Church and Talbot Streets. To bolster their spirits, some could be heard singing as they hurried down Princess Anne Road.
The rebel force, swollen to almost thirteen hundred, had moved toward Norfolk. Woodford yielded command to Colonel Robert Howe, a more senior officer who had brought reinforcements from North Carolina. By Thursday, December 14, the rebels occupied the town, sniping at British vessels and arresting a hundred suspected loyalists for interrogation in Williamsburg. “We have taken up some of the Tories and coupled them to a Negro with handcuffs,” one officer reported. “The most stupid kind we discharge.”
Dunmore was also reinforced with the arrival, on December 21, of the Liverpool after a miserable fourteen-week passage from Britain that had reduced the twenty-eight-gun frigate to a single cask of fetid water. Scurvy plagued the ship and her companion, the ordnance brig Maria. But when Liverpool’s captain, Henry Bellew, demanded fresh provisions for his crews, rebel riflemen replied with more gunfire. American sentries paraded along the waterfront, yelled taunts from the docks, and seized a brig loaded with salt, the price of which had soared from one shilling per bushel to fifteen. “They have nothing more at heart than the utter destruction of this once most flourishing country,” Dunmore wrote London.
By December 31, both the year and British patience had expired. Captain Bellew sent Colonel Howe an odd ultimatum: that “you will cause your sentinels in the town of Norfolk to avoid being seen.” American gibes persisted—“every mark of insult,” Bellew complained, including insolent sentries walking with “their hats fixed on their bayonets” for sure visibility from his quarterdeck. Bellew moored Kingfisher, Otter, and Liverpool, the three largest men-of-war, with their gun ports broadside to the waterfront. Jack pendants flew from the bowsprits to distinguish these vessels from merchantmen. Dunmore warned civilians loitering in Norfolk to get out.
After a minatory rattle of drums, Liverpool fired the first three cannonballs, at three p.m. on Monday, January 1, demolishing a wharf shack used for a guardhouse. Within moments more than a hundred guns lacerated the town, pummeling the warehouses and dockyards in an effort to chivy snipers from their nests. Dirty smoke draped the anchorage as boatloads of British troops rowed ashore to set more fires. Storerooms of pitch and turpentine blazed up, igniting large houses and humble shanties alike. By ten p.m. a crimson glow hung like a halo over the waterfront. “The wind favored their design,” Colonels Howe and Woodford wrote in a joint dispatch to authorities in Williamsburg, “and we believe the flames will become general.” In a separate note, Howe described “women and children running through a crowd of shot to get out of town.… A few have, I hear, been killed. Does it not call for vengeance, both from God and man?” A British midshipman wrote in the early hours of January 2, “The town is still burning, as it will be for three or four days.”
That was quite true, for vengeful shirtmen had picked up where British incendiaries left off, burning, looting, and filling their canteens with alcohol pinched from grogshops. “Keep up the jig” became a rallying cry for those determined to punish a Tory town and blame it on the enemy. A witness reported militiamen “drinking rum and crying out, ‘Let us make hay while the sun shines.’” Unrestrained by their officers—Howe and Woodford had been disingenuous, if not dishonest, in blaming only the British for the conflagration—they plundered