Tensions in Virginia rose in April 1775 - the same week the war broke out at Lexington and Concord. The Whigs in the colonial assembly were already recruiting troops. Dunmore, fearing for his safety, ordered British marines to remove the gunpowder from the colonial storehouse in Williamsburg, which the Whigs took as provocation. In June he left Williamsburg, put his family aboard a Royal Navy ship, and set up his own floating government in the waters off Norfolk - a port town with Loyalist merchant families and a usefully tense relationship with the Whig countryside. Through the autumn, General Thomas Gage in Boston sent small detachments of the 14th Regiment of Foot to support him. By October those troops were raiding nearby counties for rebel military supplies.

Dunmore landed near Great Bridge on November 14 with 109 regulars and 22 Norfolk volunteers - he was investigating rumors that Patriot militia were arriving from North Carolina. The rumors turned out to be wrong. But his landing called out the Princess Anne militia under Joseph Hutchings and Anthony Lawson, who mustered about 170 men at Kemp's Landing and set up an ambush along the road from Great Bridge. The ambush was poorly placed. Dunmore's troops drove through it. The Patriots broke. Dunmore captured Hutchings and several others, and lost a single man to a minor wound. It was, in military terms, a small action. In political terms, it gave the governor a stage.

Dunmore had written his proclamation on November 7, eight days before Kemp's Landing, in response to earlier Whig actions at Hampton. He had not yet made it public. After his victory at Kemp's Landing he read it aloud, and within days it was printed and distributed. The proclamation declared martial law in Virginia and offered freedom to enslaved Virginians held by Patriot owners who would join His Majesty's forces. This was the founding document of what became known as Lord Dunmore's Ethiopian Regiment - a unit of formerly enslaved people who fought for the British. Whether Dunmore believed in emancipation or whether he was using the threat of slave revolt to coerce Virginia planters has been argued for two and a half centuries; most historians think the second. What is not debated is the effect: the proclamation hardened the Patriot leadership across Virginia and was a turning point in the colony's commitment to the Revolution.

Dunmore returned to Norfolk after Kemp's Landing, raised the British standard, and began organizing defenses. He did not hold the position long. On December 9, 1775 - just over three weeks after the skirmish at Kemp's Landing - Continental forces under Colonel William Woodford defeated him at the Battle of Great Bridge, a few miles south. Dunmore withdrew his forces from the town to ships in the harbor. On January 1, 1776, a combination of British naval bombardment and Patriot arson burned Norfolk to the ground. Dunmore continued raiding the Virginia coast through the spring, eventually departing for New York in August 1776. Royal government in Virginia ended with him.

Kemp's Landing incorporated in 1778 as Kempsville and became the county seat of Princess Anne County. The seat moved away later, and Princess Anne County itself was merged into the new city of Virginia Beach in 1963. The landing on the river is gone; the village is gone; the county is gone. What remains is Kempsville, an urban district of Virginia Beach with strip malls and subdivisions and a handful of colonial-era buildings sprinkled into the modern street grid. The plaque marking the battle is easy to miss. The proclamation that Dunmore read here, on the other hand, is in every textbook of the American Revolution, and the people who answered its offer of freedom - the men and women of the Ethiopian Regiment - belong in any honest telling of the war.