As the American Revolution broke out in New England in the spring of 1775, dramatic events unfolded in Virginia that proved every bit as decisive as the battles of Lexington and Concord and Bunker Hill in uniting the colonies against Britain.
A Perfect Frenzy: A Royal Governor, His Black Allies, and the Crisis That Spurred the American Revolution (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2025) relates the largely untold story of rebellion in Virginia that should forever change our understanding of the American Revolution.
Virginia, the largest, wealthiest, and most populous province in British North America, was led by John Murray, 4th Earl of Dunmore, known to history as Lord Dunmore, who counted George Washington as his close friend.
But the Scottish earl lacked troops, so when patriots imperiled the capital of Williamsburg, he threatened to free and arm enslaved Africans — two of every five Virginians — to fight for the Crown.
Virginia’s tobacco elite was reluctant to go to war with Britain but outraged at this threat to their human property. Dunmore fled the capital to build a stronghold in the colony’s largest city, the port of Norfolk.
As enslaved people flocked to his camp, skirmishes broke out. “Lord Dunmore has commenced hostilities in Virginia,” wrote Thomas Jefferson. “It has raised our countrymen into a perfect frenzy.”
With a patriot army marching on Norfolk, the royal governor freed those enslaved and sent them into battle against their former owners.
In retribution, and with Jefferson’s encouragement, furious rebels helped burn Loyalist Norfolk homes to the ground on January 1, 1776 as British forces bombarded the city in retaliation for the town’s refusal to supply British ships.
The port’s destruction and Dunmore’s emancipation prompted Virginia’s patriot leaders to urge the Second Continental Congress to split from Britain, breaking the deadlock among the colonies and leading to adoption of the Declaration of Independence.
Days later, Dunmore and his Black allies withdrew from Virginia, but the legacy of their fight would lead, ultimately, to Abraham Lincoln’s 1863 Emancipation Proclamation.
Chronicling these widely overlooked events in full for the first time, A Perfect Frenzy offers a striking new perspective on the American Revolution that reorients our understanding of its causes, and highlights the radically different motivations between patriots in the North and South.
Andrew Lawler is the author of the national bestseller The Secret Token, about the lost colony of Roanoke, and the award-winning Under Jerusalem. As a journalist he has contributed to the New York Times, Washington Post, National Geographic, and Smithsonian. He is a contributing writer for Science and contributing editor for Archaeology magazines.
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