Skirmish at Kemp's Landing

KV-27

Lord Dunmore, royal governor of Virginia, led a detachment of the British 14th Regiment to this area on 15 Nov. 1775 to disrupt militiamen forming in resistance to royal authority. The Princess Anne militia, waiting in a thicket, fired on the British advance guard. Heavy return fire scattered the militia and killed several men. Dunmore's force, augmented by African American volunteers who had escaped from slavery, took a number of prisoners, including Col. Joseph Hutchings. The emboldened Dunmore issued a proclamation declaring martial law and offering freedom to slaves willing to fight for the king. Many militiamen and others subsequently signed oaths of loyalty to the Crown.

Department of Historic Resources, 2018

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References/Bibliographic Citation:

Virginia Gazette (Purdie), 17 Nov. 1775. D.R. Anderson, ed., “The Letters of Col. William Woodford, Col. Robert Howe, and Gen. Charles Lee to Edmund Pendleton, President of the Virginia Convention,” Richmond College Historical Papers, vol. 1, no. 1 (June 1915), 96-106. Lord Dunmore to Lord Dartmouth, 6 Dec. 1775, in William Bell Clark, ed., Naval Documents of the American Revolution, vol. 2 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1966). H. W. R. Curle, “Intercepted Letters of Virginian Tories, 1775,” The American Historical Review (Jan. 1907), 341-346. Peter Force, ed., American Archives, ser. 4, vols. 3 and 4 (Washington, D.C., 1837-1846.) “Virginia Legislative Papers,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, vol. 14, 1907. Robert L. Scribner and Brent Tarter, Revolutionary Virginia: The Road to Independence, vol. 4 (University Press of Virginia, 1978). John E. Selby, The Revolution in Virginia, 1775-1783 (Williamsburg; Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, 1988). Woody Holton, Forced Founders: Indians, Debtors, Slaves, and the Making of the American Revolution in Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999). James Corbett David, Dunmore’s New World (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2013).