11.6.25

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome. This is Rebecca Shore for Radio Eye, and today
I will be reading the Smithsonian magazine dated November twenty
twenty five. As a reminder, Radio Eye is a reading
service intended for people who are blind or have other
disabilities that make it difficult to read printed material. Please
join me now for the article titled In January seventeen

(00:24):
seventy six, Virginia's port city of Norfolk was set ablaze,
galvanizing the revolution, But who really lit the match? Blaming
the British for the destruction helped persuade some wavering colonists
to back the fight for independence, But the source of
the inferno was not what it seemed. By Andrew Lawler,

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the first morning of seventeen seventy six dawned mercifully warm
and clear over Virginia's port of Norfolk, a welcome change
after the snow and bitter cold of December. It should
have been a fine day for visiting neighbors to exchange
gifts and share terrapins to apple toddy or the rum

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spiked heated punch called wassail. On this morning, however, the
townspeople were gripped with anxiety, thousands of them seeking protection
were crammed alongside a few hundred Loyalists and British Redcoats
aboard a motley fleet of one hundred or so vessels
that clustered in the harbor, including four British Royal Navy

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warships bristling with cannons only one hundred yards or so away.
Rifle carrying rebel sentries stood along the wharves lining the
river front, part of a fifteen hundred strong force of
Patriot soldiers. The two sides were locked in a fragile stalemate.
The previous spring, the Colonies Patriots, led by George Washington,

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Patrick Henry and other members of the planterentry, voted to
create a militia. By summer, Virginia's royal governor, the Scottish
Earl John Murray, known as Lord Dunmore, had abandoned Williamsburg,
then the capital city, for a shipyard near Norfolk. By fall,

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he had assembled an eclectic army of Redcoats, Scottish merchants,
and formerly enslaved black men who had recently been granted
freedom in exchange for military service. After the Patriots defeated
his outnumbered forces on December ninth at the Battle of
Great bridge, The governor and his supporters sought the safety

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of the ships, essentially handing control of the colony's premier
port to the Patriot army, led by North Carolina Colonel
Robert Hoe and Virginia Colonel William Woodford. For two and
tense weeks, both sides warily eyed each other. Patriot snipers
hidden in dockside warehouse began taking pot shots at people

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on the ship's exposed decks. Finally, at year's end, a
frustrated Dunmore ordered his officers to destroy the sniper posts,
but first Captain Henry Blow sent a warning ashore so
that women, children and innocent persons might have time to
remove out of danger. By New Year's morning, many of

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Norfolk's remaining residents had fled. The Patriot soldiers, known as
shirtmen for their long hunting shirts, stayed parading up and
down the wharves with coonskin caps on their hoisted guns
and taunting the British and the Loyalists with every mark
of insult, reported one Royal Navy captain. The answer came

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around three p m. That afternoon, when a broadside from
the twenty eight gun Liverpool raked the waterfront. When at
length the first heavy gun of the fleet broke. The
horrible suspense requiesed one civilian eye witness. We all simultaneously
started up with a sort of mournful cry or wail.

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Within fifteen minutes, artillery pieces on all four naval vessels
were lobbing shells at the nearby shore. Several boats filled
with British soldiers and armed Black loyalists then pushed off
from the fleet, dense white smoke obscuring their passage to
the town docks. By four thirty p m. Several warehouses

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were ablaze. What a glorious fight ensued, exalted one British sailor.
The cannon barrage continued into the night. The distressed residents
watching from the ship's decks were relieved when the firing
ceased and the city beyond the wharves emerged from the
smoke largely intact. Then flames began to proliferate throughout the

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town in its suburbs. The sky turned a luminous ruby color,
drawing the attention of a Patriot officer stationed in the
city of Hampton, more than a dozen miles to the
northwest the clouds. He wrote to his wife appeared as
red and bright as they do in an evening at sunsetting,
one local man recalled the horror of the night exceeds

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description and gives fresh occasion to lament the consequences of
civil war. As the first day of seventeen seventy six ended,
the thriving port city, home to nearly six thousand, five
hundred people, was a roaring inferno. Within three days, most
of Norfolk was a smoking ruin, and within five weeks

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not a single building was left standing. Lord Dunmore was blamed,
and the brutal act of destruction helped convince many wavering
colonists to back independence from Britain, still a radical notion
at the time. Thomas Jefferson referred to the calamity in
July's Declaration of Independence, charging that George the Third had

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burnt our towns and destroyed the lives of our people.
No American city before or since has suffered such complete destruction.
Numerous history books and even Philadelphia's Museum of the American
Revolution maintain the story that Dunmore destroyed the entire town.
There is, however, one problem with this dramatic claim about

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such a consequential revolutionary episode It Isn't True. Colonial Norfolk
was built along a fifty acre oblong peninsula on the
north side of the Elizabeth River, moored like a leaky
ship to the mainland by a slender isthmus and pierced
with swampy creeks. Elegant brick town homes and rickety wooden

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tenements shared narrow streets with grimy taverns, smoky factories, teeming shantytowns,
and tony new suburbs spilled north of the downtown. The
city city lay along a protected deep water harbor that
Dunmore deemed as fine a one as any I ever saw.
A Patriot officer wrote to George Washington that Norfolk was

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the finest and most advantageous port in America. What had
begun as a small regional port boomed in the seventeen
sixties when entrepreneurs from distant Glasgow made it their hub
and quickly gained control of the colony's lucrative tobacco trade.
These ambitious Scottish merchants plowed their immense profits into shipyards,

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rope walks, leather works, flour mills, and drum distilleries that
soon lined the Elizabeth's marshy banks. They built and operated
private fleets and served as the colony's bankers, lending money
to the largely English descended planters who were perpetually short
of hard cash. By seventeen seventy five, Norfolk was the

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eighth largest settlement in the thirteen colonies, and the most
populous between Philadelphia and Charleston, South Carolina. The bustling port
boasted a cross shaped brick Anglican church, a new powder magazine,
and North America's first purpose built Masonic hall. Stevadores trudged

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up and down piers that spiked into the river, ceaselessly,
hauling iron bars, tobacco, hogsheads, rum casks, barrels of turpentine,
and loads of timber between wading vessels and spacious warehouses.
In the evenings, they rubbed shoulders with pirates and prostitutes
in the many ramshackle pubs. Public improvements, however, did not

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keep up with growth. The sewage ditches are open, and
one crosses them on little narrow bridges made of short
lengths of planks nailed on cross pieces. A visitor noted
these fetid waterways served as receptacles of the filth of
all the privies and the nurseries of mosquitoes. Another account

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warned that putrid, bilious fevers, and verminous diseases were common.
To avoid the stink and pestilence, Scottish merchants built their
mansions in the village of Portsmouth across the river. The
dreadful conditions did not deter those seeking fortune or a
measure of freedom. Norfolk served as a magnet for white artisans,

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sailors and tradesmen, as well as enslaved people who had
escaped Virginia's plantations. Gone to Norfolk was a phrase frequently
found in newspaper ads placed by landowners looking for those
who'd run away. Nearly half the town's residents were held
in bondage. The majority worked as domestic servants in the

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factories or of board merchant vessels. A small but growing
quadra of legally free black residents, also, against all odds,
carved out a good living. Talbot Thompson was the rare
enslaved person in colonial Virginia who succeeded in purchasing himself
and then obtained official manumission from the Royal governor. Through

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his saale making business, he was able to claim at
auction his longtime wife, Jane, who was also later manumitted
on the eve of the revolution. They owned a spacious
two story home with a dairy and an orchard on
a fashionable street. Many of Virginia's planter class were already
inclined to look at Norfolk with suspicion before Dunmore sailed

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into its harbor in July seventeen seventy five with one
small worship and made a nearby ship yard his headquarters.
They also knew that, as in most colonial ports at
the time, many residents remained pro British, although the mayor
and several other leading officials were staunch Patriots. The governor's

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arrivals marked a rush by enslaved workers seeking sanctuary aboard
the small fleet. The town's pro patriot newspaper noted that
white residents were angered at the elopement of their negroes,
owing to a mistaken notion which has unhappily spread amongst them,
of finding shelter on board the men of war because

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they were considered private property. Granting them sanctuary was seen
as tantamount to theft, and therefore further proof of British tyranny.
That same month, Joseph Harris, described in a Williamsburg newspaper
as a small mulatto man and an accomplished ship's pilot,

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escaped his Hampton Patriot owner to join the King's cause.
His enslaver's insistence that he be returned led to an
argument with the Royal Navy captain that in October prompted
the officer to attack the small port, the first battle
south of Massachusetts. The deadly aim of Patriot rifleman forced

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a hurried British retreat. Lord Dunmore has commenced hostilities in Virginia,
Jefferson reported, and a letter from Philadelphia to a friend
in Britain, it has raised our country into a perfect frenzy.
Both sides prepared for an all out war. Patriot leaders
now accused Norfolk residence of lackluster's support for the glorious cause.

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Calls for the port's destruction proliferated. Virginia Patriot Richard Henry
Lee wrote to Washington on October twenty second that he
hoped to hear soon of the demolition of that infamous
nest of tories, a term particularly applied to the Glasgow businessman.
Nine days later, at the bottom of a letter to

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John Page, the second in command on Virginia's Committee of Safety,
Jefferson wrote, de Linda st. Norfolk, Latin Fort Norfolk must
be destroyed, a point reference to ancient Rome's obliteration of
its rival Carthage on the North African coast. Like many
in his class, Jefferson made the Scottish factor's scapegoats for

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the planter's economic troubles. Alan Taylor, a University of Virginia historian,
explains patriots also feared that the town would continue to
attract people escaping enslavement. This made Norfolk a potential cancer
in the side of Virginia. Taylor added, even if Jefferson's

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comment was meant as hyperbole, Page seemingly understood it to
mean actual annihilation. On November eleventh, he responded from Williamsburg,
we must be prepared to destroy it, adding that many
of the town's residents deserved to be ruined and hanged.
By then, a Patriot army was on the march from

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the capital to Norfolk to oust Dunmore, and rumors swirled
that the troops would burn the port. Patriot leaders, however,
insisted that they were bent on liberation. Not vengeance. The
same day Page responded to Jefferson. Committee of Safety head
Edmund Pendleton publicly assured residents that talk of destroying the

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town was false and malicious, and he promised in the
most solemn manner that the troops en route to Norfolk
would guard and protect the inhabitants. Four days later, an
armed Black Loyalist captured a Patriot militial leader, also his enslaver,
who led a botched ambush against Dunmore and his forces.

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The Royal Governor, impressed, published a decree liberating any one
enslaved by a Patriot if they were willing to fight
for the king. He then quickly formed Lord Dunmore's Ethiopian Regiment,
the first black corps in the British military, to combat
the approaching Patriot army. They went into battle to Boas

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weeks later in a series of bloody skirmishes at a
ford near the strategic crossing of Great Bridge outside Norfolk.
When on December ninth, an assault led by British troops
on the main Patriot positions failed, the combined British and
Loyalist forces fell back to the ships in Norfolk's harbor.

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The Shirtmen were close behind. We are marching to Norfolk
with no intention to injure the inhabitants of the town,
either in their persons or property. The patrician patriot commanding
colonels Robert Howe and William Woodford assured citizens privately. However,
Howe wrote his superiors in the Waning Days of seventeen

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seventy five that given British naval superiority, Norfolk cannot be
maintained with any troops you can place there against an
attack by sea and land. As night fell on January first,
Norfolk's dazed and deafened residents watched from the decks of
the makeshift flotilla as cannon balls rained down on their city.

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Yet when the guns fell silent, most of the city
remained surprisingly unscathed. There were no confirmed deaths during the
shore attack. The sole documented civilian injury was that a
nursing mother named Mary Webbley, who suffered a broken leg
when an iron ball bounced through her house. After the

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barrage ended, though pinpricks of orange light mysteriously multiplied along
the streets far beyond the docks, the individual blazes soon merged,
and within hours most of the down town and many
of the areas north of the Isthmus were engulfed in
a tremendous fire storm. The Thompsons would have watched from

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the deck of a ship as their property went up
in flames. According to how Norfolk burned for three full days,
with seven eighths of it being being reduced to ashes
by the time the flames subsided. Howe and other patriots
blamed the British, charging that a stiff southerly breeze carried

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embers from the burning warehouses that spread the conflagration. One
week after the bombardment, Richard Smith, a New Jersey delegate
to the Continental Congress in Philadelphia, noted in his diary
that the delegates were told Dunmore destroyed the town of
Norfolk and Virginia. The alarming news spread along the East coast.

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The Royal Navy had turned a defenseless city into a
desolate waste land. Would Charleston, New York, or even Philadelphia
be next. Washington predicted that the destruction of Norfolk and
threatened devastation of other places will have no other effect
than to unite the whole country. Even in Britain's House

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of Lords, where Dunmore had long held a seat members
accepted the Patriot's accounts. He was castigated for an act
that would shock the most barbarous of nations, according to
Charles Lennox, the third Duke of Richmond, who also warned
that such wanton ruin would turn the whole continent into

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the most implacable enemies. On January ninth, Philadelphia's Pennsylvania Evening
Post carried the text of the King's October speech accusing
the rebels of seeking independence, as well as a notice
of the publication of Thomas Paine's Common Sense, which plainly
stated the case for separation from the mother country. The

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two events, along with the burning of Norfolk, gave proponents
of independence political ammunition against those counseling moderation, yet another
sign the compromise with the British was no longer possible.
Dunmore proclaimed his innocence, but the truth about Norfolk's destruction

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did not surface until the fall of seventeen seventy seven,
after Virginia's new Patriot government created a commission to consider
Norfolk residents' demands for compensation. Commission members contracted with carpenters
and surveyors to reconstruct the vanished city on paper. They

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also interviewed only those eye witnesses determined to be honest
patriots with no real estate interests. To sway their sworn testimony.
Over several days, a scribe took down their recollections under oath.
The sheaf of yellowing papers resides today in a small
plane box stored on the second floor of Richmond's Library

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of Virginia. The carefully collected depositions offer heartrending accounts of
the city's destruction. One local man named James Nicholson recalled
standing near Main Street on the after noon of January first,
as rejoicing Patriot troops were coming up from the warehouses

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loaded with plunder. After parceling out the goods, the men
went from house to house, plundering and firing them. Another
resident recalled hearing a rebel soldier say the people in
Norfolk were a foul nest of damned tories, and ought
to have all their houses burnt and themselves burnt with them.

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A third local man watched that night as shirtmen torched buildings.
When he accosted them, the interviewer recorded, they told him
they had general orders for destroying all the houses. He
told the committee that he was positively certain the fire
could not have spread among holmes had they not been

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wantonly destroyed by the provincial troops. Experienced sailors also testified
that the wind had been light and from the north
before it died out entirely at dusk, debunking Howe's claim
that a stiff southerly breeze from the wharves had carried
the flames to the town. Others described observing helplessly as

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shirtmen plundered stocks of rum and wine. A woman named
Parnell Archdeacon Ingram, meanwhile, lay in her bed, attended by
a midwife as she labored to give birth. A band
of patriots burst into the room, declaring that they would
torch the home unless she could prove her loyalty to

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the cause. She managed to produce a note from how
the rebel commander and the intruders left, but not before
warning Ingram that they had orders to burn every house
in the town, even outhouses and fences were fair game.
Sarah Smith told the committee that she had observed a

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soldier taking down the pales which enclosed the garden of
her home, only to be told that she need not
complain for she might think herself worse off that she
was not burnt with the house. The outraged smith sought
out how and bluntly asked him if he intended to
burn the house in which she lived. After hesitating for

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a moment, the colonel then gave a chilling reply, Yes,
I believe we shall burn up the two counties, he said,
referring to Norfolk and neighboring Princess Anne to day's Virginia Beach.
At Pendleton's order, he sent parties to destroy distilleries, shipyards,

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flour mills, and other industrial facilities beyond the town limits.
The seventeen seventy seven Commission found that four hundred and
sixteen buildings, or nearly one third of the town's one thousand,
three hundred thirty three structures, had survived the first weeks
of January seventeen seventy six. On January fifteenth, Virginia's new

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Patriot government ordered the demolition of all of these, including
the church and Masonic Hall. How obliged on February sixth,
ordering his men to set fire to the remaining structures,
then to torch farms and homes as they retreated to
Great Bridge. The report concluded that Patriot troops destroyed ninety

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six percent of the port. Not a single building remained intact.
In subsequent months, enslaved people continued to flop to the flotilla.
Dunmore planned a spring seventeen seventy six assault on Williamsburg,
until smallpox and other illnesses devastated his troops. Five days

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after the declaration of Independence was signed, a Patriot attack
forced the Royal governor and the Euopian regiment to sail
to New York. There, the black soldiers fought for the
British as freemen until the war's end, when they joined
an exodus to Canada to avoid re enslavement by the
victorious Patriots. Among them were Jane Thompson and her children.

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Her husband, Talbot, had died earlier in New York. Norfolk, meanwhile,
lay abandoned. The state government deported all Scottish merchants, and
the port was slow to recover. Nothing is here but
a ruinous town. Nothing but brick walls and chimneys is
to be seen, wrote one Patriot soldier a few months

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after its destruction. Nobody can conceive that did not see it,
how much it is altered, added a British woman who
had viewed the devastation. It shocks me exceedingly. For reasons
that went unrecorded, The seventeen seventy seven report was not
made public for sixty years. By then, the myth that

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Dunmore had flattened the port had taken firm route. Even today.
A placard in the Museum of the American Revolution cites
January one, seventeen seventy six, as the day British forces
burned Norfolk. Among those present at the port's destruction was
a young Patriot soldier named John Marshall. In eighteen o four,

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as Chief Justice of the U. S. Supreme Court during
Jefferson's presidency, he criticized what he felt was the Patriot's
short sighted and senseless decision. Thus was destroyed the most
populous and flourishing town in Virginia, he wrote in his
Biography of Washington, its destruction was one of those ill

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judged measures of which the consequences are felt long after
the motives are forgotten. Yet Marshall didn't take into account
the propaganda valley reaped by the Patriots in the aftermath
of the conflagration. Their success in blaming the British encouraged
Americans to risk what Jefferson called our lives, our fortunes,

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and our sacred honor to free themselves from the world's
most formidable empire. By reducing their own city to ash,
the Patriots helped birth the nation. Next ask Smithsonian, you've
got questions, We've got experts from Alexander Charles Elkins Park, Pennsylvania.

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Why didn't the Allies divide and occupy Italy after World
War Two as they did with Germany. The answer is
from Frank Blazick, Junior Curator of Modern Military History, National
Museum of American History. There are several reasons. In nineteen
forty three, the Allies invasion of Sicily brought the fall

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of Benito Mussolini and his national Fascist government. Italy signed
an armistice which halted hostilities with the Allies and turned
its armed forces over to the Allied powers. Adolf Hitler
moved Nazi German forces into northern Italy to prevent the
complete loss of the country. Subsequently, Italy became less a

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hated enemy than a battle ground nation. There is also
the fact that the Soviet Union did not fight on
Italian soil, and therefore didn't have the same interest in
occupying Italy that it had in occupying Germany. Finally, Catholic
and Italian American communities helped strengthen domestic support in the
United States, arguing that Italy would be useful in the

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fight against communism. Italy subsequently benefited from the European Recovery Program,
becoming a founding member of NATO and a unified nation
friendly to democracy and the United Nations. This concludes readings
from the Smithsonian Magazine for today. Your reader has been

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Rebecca Shore. Thank you for listening, and have a great day.