Excerpts
War! Patrick Henry's Finest Hour, Lord Dunmore's Worst
The story you are about read is both comic and tragic, and it is
hard to say which predominates. The villain in the piece, Lord
Dunmore, does try to get up a proper war, issuing bombastic
proclamations, tramping about the countryside at the head of a
regiment of British grenadiers and bombarding the homes of
former members of his Governor’s Council. There are the usual
atrocities: the young woman disemboweled by one of Col. Banastre
Tarleton’s dragoons and left nailed to the door of a house
at Jamestown; the death agonies of the scores of slaves who
answered Dunmore’s call for an army of Ethiopes; and, on the
promised lighter note, the spectacle of Capt. Squire of the Otter,
obstinately clinging to a tree in a hurricane after refusing an invitation
from the tree’s owner, a rebel, to take shelter in his house.
But it is largely a made-up war, waged by Dunmore for fear
of being thought inactive by his masters in the British ministry
and inspired by a desire for personal revenge. The promised
encounter between Patrick Henry (now Commander in Chief
of Virginia’s army) fails to come off, Henry having been pointedly
left cooling his heels in his war camp behind the College
of William and Mary by a Safety Committee that is afraid he
will use the army to make himself dictator. Less enemies than
foils to each other, Dunmore’s worst defect, bad judgment,
underscores Henry’s greatest virtue, intrepidity. The grudge
match between good and evil fades to the spectacle of an
“humane good man,” as one loyalist termed Dunmore, laboring
to turn himself into Washington’s “monster.”
• • •
Patrick Henry was not surprised to find his name put forward
for the position of Virginia Commander in Chief. He had
asked for the job. Pendleton, who had stunned John Adams by
being the only Virginian to vote against Washington as
Commander in Chief of the American Army, now astonished
many Convention delegates by not opposing Henry for
Colonel of the First Regiment, a title thought to carry with it automatic appointment to the position of Commander in
Chief.
• • •
Even before he became Chairman of the Committee of
Safety, Pendleton had had “anxious and uneasy moments”
over the thought of Patrick Henry at the head of an army.21 Part
of this uneasiness had to do with the belief that Henry was
simply unqualified for the job, and part with the memory of
Henry’s 1765 call for a Cromwell to stand up for America,
which Pendleton’s father-in-law, Speaker John Robinson, had
denounced as “treason.” Nor was Pendleton likely to forget
Henry’s ridicule of the former Speaker’s loan office proposal –
or his advocacy in support of the inquiry that exposed
Robinson’s practice of loaning the colony’s retired currency to
bankrupt planters. With his snowy hair and courtly manners
(Henry used to say Pendleton had “too much courtesy”),
Pendleton belonged to another era – Robinson’s era – with its
patronage and its political intrigue. Robinson’s patronage had
shaped Edmund Pendleton’s career, both as a lawyer and as a
legislator. Now the deftest political operator in Virginia,
Pendleton specialized in parliamentary obstructions so counterrevolutionary
that, according to Phillip Mazzei, he was called
“Moderation Pendleton.” As Pendleton put it in a December
24, 1775 letter to Woodford, Henry’s election to the position of
Commander in Chief was a mistake which could not be remedied
because he had done “nothing worthy of degradation and
must keep his rank.” Pendleton would see that Henry kept
his rank – knowing that his rank could be used to keep him.
Meanwhile, Henry’s second in command, Woodford, was to be
ordered into the field and invited to exercise powers that his
Commander in Chief, left languishing at the capital, could only
enjoy in theory.
• • •
Dunmore knew that he was ignorant of the arts of war; knew
that he lacked judgment. In his eponymous war against the
Shawnee he had been inept but lucky; now he was in danger of seeming merely incompetent. On the 17th of October, he was
given an opportunity to show that he was neither inept nor a
spectator: in the morning, he received intelligence of a large
cache of rebel gunpowder at Kemps Landing; by noon he had
Capt. Leslie and his 14th Regiment sailing down the Elizabeth
River’s South Branch. A few hours later, and Leslie had disembarked
and quick-marched to within two miles of town.
Though he had been told that there were 400 rebels in the
neighborhood, and though his line of march took him through a
dense forest at night, Leslie continued on to Kemps Landing.
There he found the town deserted and the powder gone, the
effect no doubt of a timely warning. After pillaging a few
houses, Leslie marched his men back through the same dense
forest, apparently as oblivious to the possibility of a rebel
ambush going as he had been in coming. How much of his
behavior was inspired by Dunmore’s anxieties over becoming a
tame spectator and how much by Leslie’s own fears of inaction,
the sources, unfortunately, fail to say.
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