The Paper Chase

On New Year’s Day 1776, Lord Dunmore, the last royal governor of Virginia, and thousands of his Loyalist allies were huddled aboard ships bobbing in the harbor of Norfolk, the strategic port at the southern end of the Chesapeake Bay. A ragtag army of patriots occupied the town and, from the safety of the warehouses lining the shore, took potshots at anyone who appeared on deck.

At around three in the afternoon, four British naval ships riding at anchor opened fire on the waterfront as several boatloads of redcoats and emancipated Black Americans came ashore to torch the snipers’ posts. Terrified patriots scattered amid the barrage. After several buildings were left in smoldering heaps, the British and Loyalist troops returned to the ships.

The fleet’s passengers, many of whom owned homes and businesses on shore, were relieved at first to see that their town was still largely intact. Relief turned to horror, however, as pinpricks of flame sprang up through the darkened streets that evening. Soon the clouds “appeared as red and bright as they do in an evening at sun setting,” wrote one observer watching from more than a dozen miles away.

Fires raged for three days. When the blaze finally subsided, Norfolk, the largest city in the largest of the 13 American colonies, lay in ruin. Not one of its 1,333 buildings remained intact, and all of its nearly 6,500 residents were displaced. Never has an American city suffered such complete devastation.

The patriot commanders put the blame squarely on Dunmore and the fires lit by his troops. Newspapers repeated that assertion. Even the governor’s colleagues in the House of Lords expressed outrage. From Massachusetts, George Washington predicted that the burning of the port would persuade reluctant Americans to back independence—still a radical notion at the start of 1776.

The unprecedented disaster indeed encouraged Virginia’s patriot leaders to vote unanimously for separation on May 15. This stunning decision broke what had been a deadlock in Philadelphia and led the wavering colonies to adopt the Declaration of Independence on July 4.

The owners of Norfolk’s burned homes and businesses, meanwhile, demanded compensation. In 1777, Virginia’s new patriot assembly created a commission to determine who was culpable. The results, which appeared that year, were unequivocal. The commission found that the patriots themselves had taken advantage of the British attack to loot and torch the town and were directly responsible for a shocking 96 percent of the destruction.

Central to this stunning revelation were sworn depositions from dozens of eyewitnesses, each of whom—to avoid conflicts of interest—was a confirmed patriot who did not own property in Norfolk. James Nicholson, for example, watched as patriot soldiers “went from house to house plundering and firing them,” and according to another local man, the soldiers explained they “had general orders for destroying all the houses.” The report made it clear that patriot commanders had lied about Dunmore’s culpability—and even the direction of the wind on that fateful night—to hide their guilt.

“The intent of these records was to set the record straight about what really happened in Norfolk,” said Greg Crawford, state archivist at the Library of Virginia. The meticulously researched report, written in the neat hand of a clerk, also provides some of the most dramatic and reliable first-person accounts of the American Revolution. Yet it was not publicly released at the time, and the story of Dunmore as perpetrator of a terrible crime remained unchallenged.

Sixty years later, the commission’s papers were discovered in the attic of the state capitol in Richmond. The decaying document had been relegated to the shelves of the state library and largely neglected. By this time, the myth that the British burned Norfolk was accepted fact; many history books today still repeat this false piece of patriot propaganda, and I even saw it displayed in an exhibit at Philadelphia’s Museum of the American Revolution. Who hid the report, and why, remains a mystery.

The only proof that the British were not to blame, aside from Dunmore’s protestations, were the recovered documents. But as the 250th anniversary of the nation’s founding approached, the report was again in danger of vanishing—part of a quiet but alarming crisis threatening millions of paper records scattered across dozens of archives.