Source: The Bulwark
by Andrew Lawler
“Virginia’s royal governor, Lord Dunmore, had fled Williamsburg in the summer of 1775 and made a Norfolk shipyard his base of operations to defeat the rebels. By year’s end, however, the patriots had seized the town, pushing his troops and civilian loyalists onto ships in the harbor. On New Year’s Day 1776, after a bombardment by four Royal Navy warships to destroy sniper posts, an enormous fire swept the port that burned for three days. Soon not a single building was left standing. Dunmore was immediately fingered as the villain. … What neither the American public nor Parliament knew was that the man who would go on to draft the Declaration had secretly encouraged Norfolk’s ruin shortly before it happened. Nor did they know that the colony’s patriots perpetrated the deed themselves and successfully blamed it on the enemy.” (07/04/25)