Qualla: Battle of Gwynn's Island

Battle of Gwynn's Island: Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

By July 1776, the men and women camped on Gwynn's Island had been dying for weeks. They were the followers of John Murray, 4th Earl of Dunmore - Virginia's last royal governor, his white loyalists, his British marines, and the people who mattered most to the story but who history has too often footnoted: roughly 500 escaped enslaved African-Americans who had joined him after his November 1775 proclamation offering freedom to any slave who fought for the British Crown. They had risked everything for that promise. Now most of them were dying of smallpox and an unknown fever on a four-square-mile island in the Chesapeake Bay, their bodies thrown overboard from anchored ships each night. The Battle of Gwynn's Island, fought July 8 to 10, 1776, was technically a two-day artillery duel that produced one patriot casualty. The deeper story is the catastrophe that had already destroyed Dunmore's force before the first shot.

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Battle of Gwynn's Island: Dunmore's Promise

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In November 1775, with Virginia tilting toward rebellion, Lord Dunmore issued a proclamation offering freedom to any enslaved person belonging to a patriot who would join the royal forces. The promise was strategic - it would weaken plantation owners and provide soldiers - but fo...

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Battle of Gwynn's Island: Smallpox on the Island

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Dunmore inoculated his African-American troops against smallpox, and that part worked - smallpox itself did not destroy them. But a second illness, an unknown fever, swept through the camp. The water supply on the island proved inadequate for several hundred people. Captain Andre...

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Battle of Gwynn's Island: The Cannons Speak

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

General Andrew Lewis arrived in the patriot camp on July 8, 1776, with a brigade of Virginia troops and the artillery that had been laboriously collected at Williamsburg. Two 18-pounder cannons were positioned opposite Dunmore's flagship, the Dunmore. Four 9-pounders covered the ...

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Battle of Gwynn's Island: Evacuation

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Dunmore and Hamond decided overnight that they could not hold Gwynn's Island. They loaded what they could - cannons, tents, supplies - and prepared to evacuate. On the morning of July 10, the patriot guns turned on the three vessels guarding Milford Haven, whose crews abandoned t...

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Battle of Gwynn's Island: The Long Aftermath

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Dunmore's surviving forces lingered in the Chesapeake into early August, raiding plantations along the Potomac. Patriots feared they would attempt to seize Martha Washington at Mount Vernon, but storms and local militia turned the raiders back. By early August, Dunmore's fleet re...

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