Liberty to Slaves

The names of most of them are lost. We know that perhaps 800 to 2,000 enslaved people made it to Lord Dunmore's ships after his November 1775 proclamation, and that many more tried and failed. We know they were organized into a unit called the Ethiopian Regiment and given uniforms bearing the words "Liberty to Slaves." We know they fought at the Battle of Great Bridge. Beyond that, the individual stories dissolve into silence.

What we can reconstruct is the calculus of their decision. To answer Dunmore's proclamation, an enslaved person had to learn of it — often through the same networks of communication that slaveholders tried to suppress. They had to evaluate whether the offer was genuine. They had to plan an escape across terrain patrolled by militia and slavecatchers. They had to leave behind family members who might not be able to come. And they had to reach British lines before being caught, knowing that the punishment for failure would be severe.

Those who made it found conditions that were, by any standard, terrible. Dunmore's ships were crowded, unsanitary, and poorly supplied. Smallpox broke out in early 1776 and killed hundreds. The people who had risked everything for freedom died in the holds of ships, surrounded by disease and filth. The British had offered liberty, but they had not offered care.

Dunmore's proclamation was not an act of conscience. It was a military tactic — a way to weaken the enemy by destabilizing their labor force. The governor had no interest in abolition as a principle. He offered freedom only to the enslaved people of rebels, not to those belonging to Loyalists, and certainly not to those he himself might have owned. The freedom on offer was conditional, instrumental, and limited.

And yet. For the people who answered the call, the distinction between principled emancipation and tactical liberation may not have mattered much. They were enslaved, and they were offered a chance — however flawed, however dangerous — to be free. That many of them took that chance, knowing the risks, tells us something about the human need for liberty that no philosophical treatise could express more clearly.

The survivors scattered. Some went to New York, some to the Caribbean, some to Nova Scotia, and eventually some to Sierra Leone. They carried the memory of Dunmore's proclamation with them, a memory of a promise that was both real and radically incomplete. Like the Revolution itself.