W&M ScholarWorks Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects Theses, Dissertations, & Master Projects 2010 Dunmore's new world: Political culture in the British Empire, 1745--1796 James Corbett David College of William & Mary - Arts & Sciences Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.wm.edu/etd Part of the African History Commons, and the United States History Commons Recommended Citation David, James Corbett, "Dunmore's new world: Political culture in the British Empire, 1745--1796" (2010). Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects. Paper 1539623561. https://dx.doi.org/doi:10.21220/s2-jexg-0r20 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Theses, Dissertations, & Master Projects at W&M ScholarWorks. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects by an authorized administrator of W&M ScholarWorks. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Dunmore's New World: Political Culture in the British Empire, 1745-1796 James Corbett David Villanova, Pennsylvania Master of Arts, The College of William and Mary, 2004 Bachelor of Arts, Boston College, 2000 A Dissertation presented to the Graduate Faculty of the College of William and Mary in Candidacy for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of History The College of William and Mary May, 2010 APPROVAL PAGE This Dissertation is submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Approved by the Committee, March 2010 Professor James Axtell, History The College of William and Mary Associate Professor Ronald Schecter, History The College of William and Mary ABSTRACT PAGE Despite his participation in the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745, John Murray, fourth earl of Dunmore, eventually became royal governor of New York (1770-1771), Virginia (1771- 1783), and the Bahama Islands (1787-1796). His life in the British Empire exposed him to an extraordinary range of political experience, including border disputes, land speculation, frontier warfare and diplomacy, sexual scandal, slave emancipation, naval combat, loyalist advocacy, Amerindian slavery, and trans-imperial filibusters, to say nothing of his proximity to the Haitian Revolution or his role in the defense of the British West Indies during the French Revolutionary Wars. Quick to break with convention on behalf of the system that ensured his privilege, Dunmore was an usually transgressive imperialist, whose career can be used to explore the boundaries of what was possible in the political cultures of the Anglo-Atlantic world at the end of the eighteenth century. Remarkably, Lord Dunmore has not been the subject of a book-length study in more than seventy years. With a few exceptions (the work of African American historians notable among them), modern scholars have dismissed him as a greedy incompetent. While challenging this characterization, the dissertation makes several arguments about the weakness of royal authority in pre-Revolutionary New York and Virginia, the prominent and problematic role of the land grant as a mechanism of political consent, the importance of Dunmore's proclamation of emancipation, and the endurance of British ambition in North America after 1783. It seeks to make a methodological contribution as well. By positioning Dunmore as the epicenter of a web of interrelations, one reflected in a variety of historical texts and involving people at all levels of the imperial social structure, the dissertation suffuses a host of elements and actors within a single biographical narrative. This integrated approach can serve to counter the excessive compartmentalization that has marked some academic history in recent decades. TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements 111 Introduction 1 Chapter 1: Family Politics, 1745-1770 16 Chapter 2: The Absence of Empire, 1770-1773 44 Chapter 3: The Land of Consent, 177 4 100 Chapter 4: A Refugee's Revolution, 1775-1781 169 Chapter 5: Abiding Ambitions, 1781-1796 235 Conclusion 324 Bibliography 336 Vita 368 For my parents ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS A number of institutions provided vital fmancial support for this project, including the Lyon G. Tyler Department of History at the College of William and Mary, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, the William L. Clements Library at the University of Michigan, the David Library of the American Revolution, the International Center for Jefferson Studies at Monticello, the John D. Rockefeller Jr. Library of Colonial Williamsburg, the Reeves Center for International Studies, and the Office of the Provost at William and Mary. For research assistance, I am indebted to staff at the New-York Historical Society, the New York Public Library, the National Archives of Scotland, the Bahamas National Archives, the Earl Gregg Swem Library at William and Mary, the William L. Clements Library, the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library at the University of Virginia, and Colonial Williamsburg. The McNeil Center for Early American Studies provided office space and access to the libraries of the · University of Pennsylvania from 2008 to 2010. I received valuable feedback at several conferences during the writing process, including the 2008 International Seminar on the History of the Atlantic W odd at Harvard University, a 2007 brown bag session at the McNeil Center, and the 2006 Graduate Student Forum at the Colonial Society of Massachusetts. Among the many individuals who lent their time and talent to the project were Maya Jasanoff, Rhys Isaac, Sean Harvey, Chris Grasso, Dan Amsterdam, Patricia Gibbs, Sarah Thanhauser, Barbara Luck, Matthew Bumb, Kris Lane, Jeffrey Edwards, Mendy Gladden, Rob Parkinson, Liam Paskvan, Fredrika Teute, Brent Rushforth, and Bob Gross. I am particularly grateful to the members of my committee. Ron Schecter agreed to serve with very little information about me or the project; I hope he is glad to have made that leap. Jim Axtell and Cassandra Pybus have both been extremely generous with their advice and encouragement over the years. They deserve special thanks. Finally, it was Ron Hoffman's seminar that sparked my interest in the American Revolution and his recommendation that led me to write about Dunmore. I consider myself very fortunate to have worked with him. After more than five years of research and writing, it is a rare pleasure to thank the people closest to me. Sarah, your love and support mean the world. Mom and Dad, these pages could only be dedicated to you. iii Introduction Sometime before 9 o'clock on the morning of December 5, 1793, a couple identifying themselves as Augustus Frederick and Augusta Murray were married at St. George's church in Hanover Square, London. The bride had arrived in a hackney coach, the equivalent of a modem taxi, wearing a "common linen gown" beneath a winter cloak. The groom was dressed in a brown greatcoat not unlike those worn by London shopkeepers at the time. She was in her early thirties; he was ten years her junior. The curate who performed the ceremony didn't recognize either one of them, but St. George's was a large parish, so he believed them when they claimed to be congregants. If he noticed the bulge in the bride's coat-she was nearly eight months pregnant-he never mentioned it. They seemed to him totally unremarkable, well "below the rank of gentleman," as he told the Privy Council several weeks later, " ... not at all distinguished by their dress from the appearance of persons in trade."1 He had no reason, in short, to believe that the marriage of this Augustus Frederick and Augusta Murray represented anything but the dawn of an ordinary day in the life of his church. Across the Atlantic Ocean, more than four thousand miles away, the father of the bride was equally unaware of the forces in motion at St. George's that day. At sixty-three, John Murray, fourth earl of Dunmore, was an aging Scots aristocrat living on the margins of the British Empire. A veteran of imperial service, he now found himself in Nassau, New Providence, where for the last six years he'd served as governor of the Bahama Islands. It was a modest post for someone of such elevated 1 Privy Council Minutes, 27 and 28 January 1794, in A. Aspinall, ed., The Later Correspondence of George III, Vol. 2 (Cambridge, 1963), 157, 166, 154. 1 social status-an earl was a rare thing on this side of the Atlantic-but the path to Nassau had been treacherous and his position there hard won. The son of a convicted Jacobite, Dunmore had served as a page of honor in Bonnie Prince Charlie's court during the Rebellion of 1745. After working his way back into the Hanoverian fold with the help of a prominent uncle, he went on to become a colonial governor, first in New York and then Virginia. It was in the latter post, in 1774, that he led an expedition against the Shawnee Indians and their allies in the Ohio River Valley. Dunmore's War, as the conflict came to be known, forced the Shawnees to accept the 1768 Treaty of Fort Stanwix, through which the British Empire had acquired the coveted Kentucky country. Dunmore remained loyal to George III during the American Revolution and famously offered freedom to rebel- owned slaves who were able to reach British lines and fight for the king. Approximately one thousand enslaved men, women, and children answered the call. It wasn't the first time a European had armed black slaves, far from it, but Dunmore's proclamation of emancipation, dated November 7, 1775, was unique. Never before had a British official promised liberty to slaves on the express condition that they commit themselves to the destruction of their masters-and in the context of a civil war no less. For this, George Washington thought him an "Arch Traitor to the Rights of Humanity," one with the potential to "become the most formidable Enemy America has.