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Gwynn’s Island 1776: A Forsaken Shore

  • Feb 28
  • 11 min read
Gwynn's Island
Gwynn's Island

Today, Gwynn’s Island is easy to miss. It lies low along the Virginia Chesapeake Bay’s western shore, connected to the mainland by a short bridge, folded into a landscape of tidy waterfront homes, private docks, and carefully kept lawns. Boats idle in the shallows. Ospreys circle above. On summer evenings, the water is calm enough to mirror the sky.


There are no monuments at the shoreline, no historical markers rising from the grass, nothing to suggest that this narrow strip of land was once a tragic site of untold suffering.


Perhaps that absence is the point.


It was July 10, 1776, Virginia's revolutionary militia forces crossed the channel at Milford Haven to take possession of Gwynn’s Island.  The first boats grounded on the island in silence.


There was no enemy line of Red Coats to meet them. No challenge from the shore. The British ships were already gone. What the militia found instead was abandonment. Tents were still standing, brush shelters were half-collapsed, cooking fires burned down to cold ash. The air was thick with sickness and decay. Flies rose in clouds as the men stepped ashore.


Inside the tents and shelters and scattered along the beach were the bodies. Tens, dozens, perhaps hundreds. Some lay where they had fallen, skin drawn tight by fever and exposure, limbs folded awkwardly on bare ground. Others were still alive, barely. Men and women too weak to lift their heads, children pressed against them, crying without strength. Smallpox sores marked faces and arms. Clothing had been torn away or discarded. There was no water nearby, no food within reach, no sign that anyone had expected help to come.


The dead had not been buried. They lay scattered through the camp, among overturned kettles, broken casks, scraps of sailcloth. Thomas Posey, one of the officers who crossed to the island, later wrote that he had “never seen more distress in my life.” The sick, he reported, were left “some dying, many calling out for help,” with bodies lying, scattered, “never buried.”


The Virginia Gazette described the island as being found in “a most deplorable condition,” the British retreat having left behind the sick and the dead alike, “without care and without burial.” The officers struggled to count what they saw. Some spoke of dozens, others of hundreds. What none disputed was the cause. These were not casualties of battle. Disease, smallpox and fever had done what musket and cannon had not.


Among the abandoned were a few ill and dying soldiers, but most were formerly enslaved men women and children, people perusing a promise, a path to freedom. A path that instead led to a deadly ending. 


Royal Governor Lord Dunmore
Royal Governor Lord Dunmore

The island had not always been silent. Eighteen months earlier, in Williamsburg, the first steps toward this shoreline drama had already begun. The colonial capital of Virginia stood on the edge of open rebellion. Tensions ran high. Rumors spread of local militias forming, of gun powder and arms being quietly secured.


The Royal Governor, Lord Dunmore, feeling threatened, made a decision. A decision that would lead to the collapse of British authority in the colony. He ordered weapons and gunpowder removed from the public magazine in the center Williamsburg. This order lit a fuse. Rather than calming matters, it provoked the rebel militias to mobilize. To Patriot leaders, it was a brazen attempt to disarm the colony.  The governor’s hold on Williamsburg rapidly eroded. On the night of June 7, 1775, fearing arrest or attack, Dunmore left the Palace with his family and his small contingent of British regular solders and fled to British warships anchored in the York River.


The contingent hurriedly sailed to Norfolk, the colony’s largest port relying on the presence of a squadron of Royal Navy ships and a number British merchant ships for safety.  Dunmore set up headquarters off-shore in the harbor.  Biding time, and in need of a fighting force, a loyalist army to defend the King’s colony and take back its capital, Dunmore put out a call to Loyalist Virginia citizens that went largely unanswered. All he had were fragments of a fragile force: his small outfit of British regulars’ numbering less than 300, and a limited number of sailors and marines in Norfolk’s harbor.



As the weeks passed, Dunmore’s position grew weaker. His authority had slipped from Williamsburg to the deck of a ship. Finally, on November 7, 1775, Dunmore made his boldest and most desperate move. He issued a proclamation declaring martial law throughout Virginia and called upon “every person capable of bearing arms” to rally to the King’s standard. Those who refused would be treated as traitors. This was not a respectful appeal for loyalty, but a harsh demand imposed upon the colony as a whole.


Most importantly, the proclamation went on to appeal to enslaved men, a promise of freedom, a pledge of emancipation to those who were able and willing to bear arms for the Crown. With that sentence, the war in Virginia shifted. The offer struck at the foundations of plantation society.


A few white Loyalists stepped forward, yet the surge of support Dunmore needed failed to materialize. Planters hesitated. Merchants calculated. Farmers watched and waited. Allegiance to the Crown, once assumed, now had vanished.

 

For Patriot leaders, the proclamation settled any lingering doubt. To these men, whose political authority rested upon enslaved labor, the proclamation was not simply a military maneuver. It was a direct threat to property, power, and social order. Whatever hesitation remained dissolved.


For enslaved Virginians, the meaning was entirely different. Word spread quickly. From plantations near and far, men slipped away in the night and made for Norfolk. Many brought wives, children, and kin. For them, Dunmore’s proclamation was not theory or politics. It was an opportunity, a chance for liberty.


The numerous black men, now former slaves, pouring into Norfolk were organized into what Dunmore called his Ethiopian Regiment; and the women and children clustered into camps near harbor as free civilians seeking protection.


Among those drawn by Dunmore’s proclamation was a man known as Yellow Peter, described as of mixed race, light complexion, well enough to stand apart to British officers from the anonymous mass of runaways. He arrived armed, carrying both musket and sword, and quickly stood out among the formerly enslaved people who had staked everything on Dunmore’s offer.


Dunmore’s officers noticed Peter and gave him the moniker “Captain Peter.” In this setting Peter was not bestowed a commission by the British Army; the Ethiopian Regiment, had white officers that held formal command. But Peter appears in the record as a true leader among Black recruits and refugees. He was the one who organized, spoke, and inspired the fragile coherence the ragtag ‘regiment’.


Over the next several weeks, Patriot militia and Dunmore’s forces engaged in a series of clashes and skirmishes outside Norfolk, resulting in several Patriot militiamen being captured or killed. The result was a tense and uneasy standoff.


Then came Great Bridge.


In early December, the rebellious Patriot forces organized and blocked the Great Bridge to Norfolk. This was a narrow causeway south of Norfolk, the only practical land route in and out of Norfolk. In response Dunmore chose to fight rather than remain trapped, ordering a swift attack on the Patriot fortifications.


At dawn on the morning of December 9, 1775, the British regulars in their red coats advanced across the narrow-exposed causeway in tight formation. The Patriot riflemen waited until Brits were within close range before firing. The result was swift and devastating. The British advance was cut down within minutes with roughly 60 British troops killed or wounded. Patriot casualties were minimal. The engagement lasted less than an hour.



The defeat cut Dunmore’s access to the interior and collapsed the possibility of holding territory on land. Any remaining Loyalist support inland evaporated. The only escape was onto the water.


The British regulars fell back and the Ethiopian Regiment followed. Loyalist civilians fled toward the harbor, where safety lay aboard the ships anchored offshore. A flotilla of thirty to forty vessels, warships, supply ships, merchant craft, and small tenders, crowded the waters. It was no orderly withdrawal but a hurried flight. Small boats ferried refugees well into the night. Formerly enslaved men and women, already gathered near British lines, pressed desperately onto the ships as well. For those formerly enslaved people who failed to reach the departing vessels, the future was perilous, facing certain recapture, punishment, or forced return to bondage at the hands of the Patriots who now controlled the shore.


With Norfolk lost, Dunmore’s forces and refugees were scattered but safe. In those first days afloat, there was, at least outwardly, a sense of relief. The ships lay beyond the reach of Patriot guns, and for a moment the harbor felt like sanctuary. Families crowded the decks. Soldiers tried to re-form their ranks.


The open water provided a distance from danger, but the sense of refuge did not last. Space was scarce, provisions uncertain. No one knew how long they would remain suspended between shore and sea. In order to survive on the water, under cover of darkness, members of the Ethiopian Regiment were sent ashore on foraging missions, led by white officers, bringing back what food, water and provisions they could. But the core problem remained, the people could not be put back on land. They waited, hoping for the arrival of Royal Navy fleet and additional troops.


For nearly five months, they waited.  The fleet and those needed reinforcements were never to come.  Fresh water spoiled. Food ran short. Sanitation collapsed. Disease, especially smallpox and fever, spread from vessel to vessel. To make matters worse, additional enslaved people continued to flee to the shoreline and come aboard, answering Dunmore’s call, each arrival deepening overcrowding and accelerating illness.


By spring, Dunmore was no longer attempting to maneuver or fight. He was trying to keep people alive long enough to find, somewhere, anywhere, to put them ashore. In late May 1776, that search ended on Gwynn’s Island.


Gwynn’s Island lay in the Chesapeake, separated from the mainland by the narrow channel of Milford Haven. The island’s open fields and surrounding waters offered anchorage, room to encamp, and a defensible position supported by the guns of the Royal Navy. To Dunmore, it presented exactly what he had been looking for: solid ground within reach of his ships, a place to regroup, restore order, and perhaps reestablish a foothold in Virginia.


After months confined to slippery decks and fouled air, the solid ground felt like a reprieve. Tents were raised. Rough shelters took shape from timber and sailcloth. Fires were lit for cooking. Families spread blankets on dry earth. For many of the formerly enslaved, stepping ashore carried the hope that this place might finally become the threshold to freedom.


But days turned into weeks. The damp air thickened as Virginia summer gathered strength. Heat settled over the low ground and lingered in the marshes. The crowded encampments offered little shade and less sanitation. The strength these people had summoned began to erode under the weight of exposure, hunger, and fever.

Disease, that had begun aboard the ships, spread through the encampment. The British fleet still had not come.


Meanwhile, on the mainland, Patriot militia kept watch. Word spread quickly that Dunmore had landed on Gwynn’s Island. Local committees gathered intelligence from fishermen, farmers, and small craft moving along the creeks. From the bluffs across Milford Haven, observers could see tents rising and smoke drifting above the trees. What was a scattered flotilla now appeared fixed in place.


Virginia’s Revolutionary Patriot leadership recognized the opportunity. Artillery was summoned. Guns were dragged across sandy roads and positioned on the mainland heights opposite the island, carefully sited to attack. The plan was not a reckless charge but a calculated strike, bringing cannons within range, isolating the ships. As the hot days of early July approached, preparations were made quietly and deliberately.


On the morning of July 9, 1776, the guns opened.


The first heavy shot struck Dunmore’s flagship, splintering her stern and wounding the governor slightly with flying debris. The American 18-pounders outranged the British ship guns. Round after round crossed the narrow water, smashing timbers, cutting rigging, and punching through hull planking. The British returned fire, but the elevated mainland batteries held the advantage.


For several hours the exchange continued. Smaller tenders were struck or forced to withdraw. The ships could not silence the militia guns, nor safely remain where they lay. That night Dunmore ordered evacuation.


Under cover of darkness and tide, tenders moved steadily between island and ship, ferrying whatever provisions could be saved. Able-bodied officers and troops embarked, including those members of the Ethiopian Regiment still fit for service, along with British regulars, Loyalist volunteers and a few healthy civilians. There was neither capacity nor time to remove everyone. The sick and dying, many incapacitated by smallpox and fever, were simply left behind in their tents and rough shelters, most unable to stand, unable to be carried.


At dawn on July 10, Patriot guns briefly resumed fire, but only a few abandoned tenders remained. The British squadron had withdrawn down the Chesapeake, ending Dunmore’s occupation of Gwynn’s Island.

When militia crossed to the island, they found a deserted encampment and the human toll of disease. What had begun as Dunmore’s last foothold in Virginia had lasted barely six weeks.


In Williamsburg that summer, Thomas Jefferson having just returned from Philadelphia, was serving in Virginia’s revolutionary government, gathering reports from the field.  As was his duty at the time, Jefferson sketched a map of the Gwynn’s Island action, measuring channels, noting ship positions, calculating gun ranges. It was not drawn from the island itself, but from information carried back by officers and messengers.


There had been no final stand at Gwynn’s Island. Royal authority in Virginia ended not with bloodshed, but with withdrawal. Within days, Dunmore had sailed away from Virginia for good.


Jefferson’s map survives and is preserved today in the Library of Congress. It shows channels, ships, guns, distances measured and annotated. The map records distances, batteries, vessels. It does not record the dying and dead or who were left behind.


Thomas Jefferson's Hand Drawn Map
Thomas Jefferson's Hand Drawn Map

There are no marked graves, no memorials. The island kept no account of them.


Gwynn’s Island did not decide the American Revolution. But in July 1776, before independence was gained, it revealed something essential about it. Liberty was proclaimed, rationed, deferred, and, when circumstances demanded, abandoned.


The Revolution moved on. What it left behind remained silent.


Whether Yellow Peter survived to reach Gwynn’s Island cannot be said with certainty. What can be said is that scores of men like him were consumed by the same ordeal of hope, disease, retreat, and abandonment.


Most of the names and faces of victims on that forsaken island are long forgotten to history. Yet, a few names do survive, a handful of names of formerly enslaved women. They survive simply because a muster role was recovered from one of the British vessels at the island. The document recorded these women aboard ship in May 1776: Mary Williams, Hannah Williams, Patience Butt, Jenny Cook, Dinah Morris, Rose Moseley, Belinda Edwards, Penelope Hopkins, and Mary Taylor. These names appear without description, rank, position, or outcome. Written down not because they were saved or lost but because someone once was keeping an account. An account that now echoes of the lost souls of Gwynn’s Island.

 


NOTES:


This essay draws upon contemporary newspaper accounts, Revolutionary War correspondence, Jefferson’s 1776 map of the Gwynn’s Island action, and modern scholarship on Dunmore’s Proclamation and the Ethiopian Regiment.

  1. Yellow Peter / Captain Peter


    References to Yellow Peter (sometimes styled Captain Peter) appear in Revolutionary-era accounts and later secondary scholarship examining Dunmore’s forces and the Ethiopian Regiment. While his presence and visibility are documented, no complete biographical record survives.

  2. Thomas Jefferson’s map


    Jefferson’s hand-drawn map of the Gwynn’s Island action, prepared while he was in Williamsburg in 1776, is preserved today in the Library of Congress as part of the Thomas Jefferson Papers. The map reflects Jefferson’s synthesis of reports received after the event rather than an eyewitness account.

Selected Sources

Primary Sources

  • Thomas Jefferson Papers, Library of Congress.


    Jefferson’s 1776 map of the Gwynn’s Island action, drawn from reports received in Williamsburg.


    https://www.loc.gov/collections/thomas-jefferson-papers/

  • Virginia Gazette, July 1776 issues.


    Contemporary reporting on the condition of Gwynn’s Island after Dunmore’s evacuation.

  • Posey, Thomas. Revolutionary War correspondence describing the condition of Gwynn’s Island following the British withdrawal.

  • British naval and colonial correspondence relating to Lord Dunmore’s 1775–1776 campaign in Virginia.

Secondary Sources

 

 
 
 

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