Europeans watching the 1861-65 conflict in America recalled that Lincoln was doing exactly what British Lord Dunmore, Royal Governor of Virginia, was doing eighty-six years earlier against Americans seeking political independence. Lincoln would also demand loyalty oaths, and issue an emancipation proclamation as did Dunmore in an effort to provoke race war and weaken the so-called rebellion.
Bernhard Thuersam, Chairman
North Carolina War Between the States Sesquicentennial Commission
www.ncwbts150.com
"The Official Website of the North Carolina WBTS Sesquicentennial"
Lincoln Imitates Lord Dunmore:
“When the British governor became a self-made fugitive from Williamsburg during the summer of 1775, he seemed driven chiefly be a vengeful spirit toward the citizens who had caused him his indignity.
Based on warships in the great watery area of Chesapeake Bay, he directed landing parties composed of sailors and regulars, armed slaves and renegades, in destructive raids on plantations and outlying communities, stealing slaves and provisions. In the early fall, emboldened by success and grown aware of the strong loyalist sentiment in the Norfolk region, Dunmore conceived the strategic stroke of seizing the port city.
Like Philadelphia and New York….Norfolk’s native-born shipping and mercantile class were more closely linked by all bonds to England than to local revolutionaries. When Dunmore came, the poor and the ignorant, caught under the joint rule of their economic betters and British force, signed loyalty oaths of allegiance and the city was British.
[Dunmore] proclaimed the slaves free and tried to incite them to insurrection. Taking this from threat to actuality, he armed the several hundred runaways [slaves] who reached his lines and, with loyalists and regulars, pillaged the countryside.
[Later defeated and forced to return to] his ships in the harbor, on New Years’ Day (1776), he bombarded the city where the loyalists had given him refuge and, under cover of the heavy guns, sent in landing parties to set houses afire. Dunmore lurked around the waters until July, ravaging the shore lines of Virginia and Maryland, before he sailed away to his native Scotland with his vengeance still unsated.”
(The Great Plantation, A Profile of Berkeley Hundred and Plantation Virginia, Clifford Dowdey, Bonanza Books, 1957, pp. 230-232)
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