Transcript

11.6.25 · Smithsonian Magazine

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Speaker 1: Welcome. This is Rebecca Shore for Radio Eye, and today
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I will be reading the Smithsonian magazine dated November twenty
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twenty five. As a reminder, Radio Eye is a reading
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service intended for people who are blind or have other
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disabilities that make it difficult to read printed material. Please
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join me now for the article titled In January seventeen
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seventy six, Virginia's port city of Norfolk was set ablaze,
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galvanizing the revolution, But who really lit the match? Blaming
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the British for the destruction helped persuade some wavering colonists
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to back the fight for independence, But the source of
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the inferno was not what it seemed. By Andrew Lawler,
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the first morning of seventeen seventy six dawned mercifully warm
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and clear over Virginia's port of Norfolk, a welcome change
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after the snow and bitter cold of December. It should
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have been a fine day for visiting neighbors to exchange
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gifts and share terrapins to apple toddy or the rum
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spiked heated punch called wassail. On this morning, however, the
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townspeople were gripped with anxiety, thousands of them seeking protection
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were crammed alongside a few hundred Loyalists and British Redcoats
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aboard a motley fleet of one hundred or so vessels
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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.
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Rifle carrying rebel sentries stood along the wharves lining the
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river front, part of a fifteen hundred strong force of
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Patriot soldiers. The two sides were locked in a fragile stalemate.
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The previous spring, the Colonies Patriots, led by George Washington,
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Patrick Henry and other members of the planterentry, voted to
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create a militia. By summer, Virginia's royal governor, the Scottish
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Earl John Murray, known as Lord Dunmore, had abandoned Williamsburg,
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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,
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and formerly enslaved black men who had recently been granted
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freedom in exchange for military service. After the Patriots defeated
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his outnumbered forces on December ninth at the Battle of
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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
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port to the Patriot army, led by North Carolina Colonel
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Robert Hoe and Virginia Colonel William Woodford. For two and
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tense weeks, both sides warily eyed each other. Patriot snipers
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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
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frustrated Dunmore ordered his officers to destroy the sniper posts,
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but first Captain Henry Blow sent a warning ashore so
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that women, children and innocent persons might have time to
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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
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shirtmen for their long hunting shirts, stayed parading up and
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down the wharves with coonskin caps on their hoisted guns
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and taunting the British and the Loyalists with every mark
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of insult, reported one Royal Navy captain. The answer came
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around three p m. That afternoon, when a broadside from
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the twenty eight gun Liverpool raked the waterfront. When at
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length the first heavy gun of the fleet broke. The
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horrible suspense requiesed one civilian eye witness. We all simultaneously
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started up with a sort of mournful cry or wail.
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Within fifteen minutes, artillery pieces on all four naval vessels
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were lobbing shells at the nearby shore. Several boats filled
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with British soldiers and armed Black loyalists then pushed off
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from the fleet, dense white smoke obscuring their passage to
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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.
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The cannon barrage continued into the night. The distressed residents
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watching from the ship's decks were relieved when the firing
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ceased and the city beyond the wharves emerged from the
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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,
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drawing the attention of a Patriot officer stationed in the
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city of Hampton, more than a dozen miles to the
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northwest the clouds. He wrote to his wife appeared as
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red and bright as they do in an evening at sunsetting,
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one local man recalled the horror of the night exceeds
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description and gives fresh occasion to lament the consequences of
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civil war. As the first day of seventeen seventy six ended,
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the thriving port city, home to nearly six thousand, five
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hundred people, was a roaring inferno. Within three days, most
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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,
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and the brutal act of destruction helped convince many wavering
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colonists to back independence from Britain, still a radical notion
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at the time. Thomas Jefferson referred to the calamity in
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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.
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No American city before or since has suffered such complete destruction.
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Numerous history books and even Philadelphia's Museum of the American
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Revolution maintain the story that Dunmore destroyed the entire town.
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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
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was built along a fifty acre oblong peninsula on the
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north side of the Elizabeth River, moored like a leaky
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ship to the mainland by a slender isthmus and pierced
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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,
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and tony new suburbs spilled north of the downtown. The
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city city lay along a protected deep water harbor that
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Dunmore deemed as fine a one as any I ever saw.
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A Patriot officer wrote to George Washington that Norfolk was
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the finest and most advantageous port in America. What had
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begun as a small regional port boomed in the seventeen
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sixties when entrepreneurs from distant Glasgow made it their hub
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and quickly gained control of the colony's lucrative tobacco trade.
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These ambitious Scottish merchants plowed their immense profits into shipyards,
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rope walks, leather works, flour mills, and drum distilleries that
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soon lined the Elizabeth's marshy banks. They built and operated
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private fleets and served as the colony's bankers, lending money
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to the largely English descended planters who were perpetually short
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of hard cash. By seventeen seventy five, Norfolk was the
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eighth largest settlement in the thirteen colonies, and the most
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populous between Philadelphia and Charleston, South Carolina. The bustling port
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boasted a cross shaped brick Anglican church, a new powder magazine,
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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,
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hauling iron bars, tobacco, hogsheads, rum casks, barrels of turpentine,
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and loads of timber between wading vessels and spacious warehouses.
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In the evenings, they rubbed shoulders with pirates and prostitutes
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in the many ramshackle pubs. Public improvements, however, did not
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keep up with growth. The sewage ditches are open, and
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one crosses them on little narrow bridges made of short
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lengths of planks nailed on cross pieces. A visitor noted
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these fetid waterways served as receptacles of the filth of
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all the privies and the nurseries of mosquitoes. Another account
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warned that putrid, bilious fevers, and verminous diseases were common.
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To avoid the stink and pestilence, Scottish merchants built their
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mansions in the village of Portsmouth across the river. The
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dreadful conditions did not deter those seeking fortune or a
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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
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escaped Virginia's plantations. Gone to Norfolk was a phrase frequently
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found in newspaper ads placed by landowners looking for those
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who'd run away. Nearly half the town's residents were held
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in bondage. The majority worked as domestic servants in the
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factories or of board merchant vessels. A small but growing
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quadra of legally free black residents, also, against all odds,
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carved out a good living. Talbot Thompson was the rare
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enslaved person in colonial Virginia who succeeded in purchasing himself
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and then obtained official manumission from the Royal governor. Through
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his saale making business, he was able to claim at
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auction his longtime wife, Jane, who was also later manumitted
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on the eve of the revolution. They owned a spacious
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two story home with a dairy and an orchard on
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a fashionable street. Many of Virginia's planter class were already
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inclined to look at Norfolk with suspicion before Dunmore sailed
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into its harbor in July seventeen seventy five with one
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small worship and made a nearby ship yard his headquarters.
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They also knew that, as in most colonial ports at
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the time, many residents remained pro British, although the mayor
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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
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the small fleet. The town's pro patriot newspaper noted that
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white residents were angered at the elopement of their negroes,
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owing to a mistaken notion which has unhappily spread amongst them,
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of finding shelter on board the men of war because
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they were considered private property. Granting them sanctuary was seen
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as tantamount to theft, and therefore further proof of British tyranny.
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That same month, Joseph Harris, described in a Williamsburg newspaper
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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.
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His enslaver's insistence that he be returned led to an
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argument with the Royal Navy captain that in October prompted
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the officer to attack the small port, the first battle
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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,
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Jefferson reported, and a letter from Philadelphia to a friend
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in Britain, it has raised our country into a perfect frenzy.
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Both sides prepared for an all out war. Patriot leaders
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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
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Lee wrote to Washington on October twenty second that he
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hoped to hear soon of the demolition of that infamous
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nest of tories, a term particularly applied to the Glasgow businessman.
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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,
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Jefferson wrote, de Linda st. Norfolk, Latin Fort Norfolk must
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be destroyed, a point reference to ancient Rome's obliteration of
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its rival Carthage on the North African coast. Like many
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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,
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explains patriots also feared that the town would continue to
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attract people escaping enslavement. This made Norfolk a potential cancer
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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
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mean actual annihilation. On November eleventh, he responded from Williamsburg,
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we must be prepared to destroy it, adding that many
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of the town's residents deserved to be ruined and hanged.
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By then, a Patriot army was on the march from
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the capital to Norfolk to oust Dunmore, and rumors swirled
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that the troops would burn the port. Patriot leaders, however,
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insisted that they were bent on liberation. Not vengeance. The
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same day Page responded to Jefferson. Committee of Safety head
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Edmund Pendleton publicly assured residents that talk of destroying the
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town was false and malicious, and he promised in the
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most solemn manner that the troops en route to Norfolk
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would guard and protect the inhabitants. Four days later, an
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armed Black Loyalist captured a Patriot militial leader, also his enslaver,
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who led a botched ambush against Dunmore and his forces.
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The Royal Governor, impressed, published a decree liberating any one
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enslaved by a Patriot if they were willing to fight
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for the king. He then quickly formed Lord Dunmore's Ethiopian Regiment,
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the first black corps in the British military, to combat
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the approaching Patriot army. They went into battle to Boas
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weeks later in a series of bloody skirmishes at a
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ford near the strategic crossing of Great Bridge outside Norfolk.
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When on December ninth, an assault led by British troops
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on the main Patriot positions failed, the combined British and
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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
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with no intention to injure the inhabitants of the town,
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either in their persons or property. The patrician patriot commanding
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colonels Robert Howe and William Woodford assured citizens privately. However,
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Howe wrote his superiors in the Waning Days of seventeen
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seventy five that given British naval superiority, Norfolk cannot be
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maintained with any troops you can place there against an
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attack by sea and land. As night fell on January first,
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Norfolk's dazed and deafened residents watched from the decks of
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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
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remained surprisingly unscathed. There were no confirmed deaths during the
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shore attack. The sole documented civilian injury was that a
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nursing mother named Mary Webbley, who suffered a broken leg
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when an iron ball bounced through her house. After the
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barrage ended, though pinpricks of orange light mysteriously multiplied along
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the streets far beyond the docks, the individual blazes soon merged,
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and within hours most of the down town and many
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of the areas north of the Isthmus were engulfed in
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a tremendous fire storm. The Thompsons would have watched from
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the deck of a ship as their property went up
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in flames. According to how Norfolk burned for three full days,
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with seven eighths of it being being reduced to ashes
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by the time the flames subsided. Howe and other patriots
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blamed the British, charging that a stiff southerly breeze carried
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embers from the burning warehouses that spread the conflagration. One
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week after the bombardment, Richard Smith, a New Jersey delegate
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to the Continental Congress in Philadelphia, noted in his diary
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that the delegates were told Dunmore destroyed the town of
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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
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desolate waste land. Would Charleston, New York, or even Philadelphia
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be next. Washington predicted that the destruction of Norfolk and
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threatened devastation of other places will have no other effect
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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
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accepted the Patriot's accounts. He was castigated for an act
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that would shock the most barbarous of nations, according to
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Charles Lennox, the third Duke of Richmond, who also warned
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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
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Post carried the text of the King's October speech accusing
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the rebels of seeking independence, as well as a notice
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of the publication of Thomas Paine's Common Sense, which plainly
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stated the case for separation from the mother country. The
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two events, along with the burning of Norfolk, gave proponents
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of independence political ammunition against those counseling moderation, yet another
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sign the compromise with the British was no longer possible.
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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,
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after Virginia's new Patriot government created a commission to consider
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Norfolk residents' demands for compensation. Commission members contracted with carpenters
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and surveyors to reconstruct the vanished city on paper. They
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also interviewed only those eye witnesses determined to be honest
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patriots with no real estate interests. To sway their sworn testimony.
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Over several days, a scribe took down their recollections under oath.
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The sheaf of yellowing papers resides today in a small
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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
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the city's destruction. One local man named James Nicholson recalled
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standing near Main Street on the after noon of January first,
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as rejoicing Patriot troops were coming up from the warehouses
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loaded with plunder. After parceling out the goods, the men
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went from house to house, plundering and firing them. Another
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resident recalled hearing a rebel soldier say the people in
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Norfolk were a foul nest of damned tories, and ought
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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.
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When he accosted them, the interviewer recorded, they told him
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they had general orders for destroying all the houses. He
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told the committee that he was positively certain the fire
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could not have spread among holmes had they not been
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wantonly destroyed by the provincial troops. Experienced sailors also testified
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that the wind had been light and from the north
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before it died out entirely at dusk, debunking Howe's claim
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that a stiff southerly breeze from the wharves had carried
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the flames to the town. Others described observing helplessly as
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shirtmen plundered stocks of rum and wine. A woman named
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Parnell Archdeacon Ingram, meanwhile, lay in her bed, attended by
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a midwife as she labored to give birth. A band
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of patriots burst into the room, declaring that they would
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torch the home unless she could prove her loyalty to
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the cause. She managed to produce a note from how
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the rebel commander and the intruders left, but not before
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warning Ingram that they had orders to burn every house
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in the town, even outhouses and fences were fair game.
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Sarah Smith told the committee that she had observed a
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soldier taking down the pales which enclosed the garden of
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her home, only to be told that she need not
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complain for she might think herself worse off that she
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was not burnt with the house. The outraged smith sought
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out how and bluntly asked him if he intended to
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burn the house in which she lived. After hesitating for
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a moment, the colonel then gave a chilling reply, Yes,
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I believe we shall burn up the two counties, he said,
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referring to Norfolk and neighboring Princess Anne to day's Virginia Beach.
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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.
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The seventeen seventy seven Commission found that four hundred and
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sixteen buildings, or nearly one third of the town's one thousand,
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three hundred thirty three structures, had survived the first weeks
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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
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the church and Masonic Hall. How obliged on February sixth,
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ordering his men to set fire to the remaining structures,
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then to torch farms and homes as they retreated to
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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.
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In subsequent months, enslaved people continued to flop to the flotilla.
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Dunmore planned a spring seventeen seventy six assault on Williamsburg,
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until smallpox and other illnesses devastated his troops. Five days
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after the declaration of Independence was signed, a Patriot attack
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forced the Royal governor and the Euopian regiment to sail
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to New York. There, the black soldiers fought for the
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British as freemen until the war's end, when they joined
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an exodus to Canada to avoid re enslavement by the
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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,
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lay abandoned. The state government deported all Scottish merchants, and
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the port was slow to recover. Nothing is here but
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a ruinous town. Nothing but brick walls and chimneys is
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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,
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how much it is altered, added a British woman who
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had viewed the devastation. It shocks me exceedingly. For reasons
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that went unrecorded, The seventeen seventy seven report was not
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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.
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A placard in the Museum of the American Revolution cites
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January one, seventeen seventy six, as the day British forces
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burned Norfolk. Among those present at the port's destruction was
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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
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Jefferson's presidency, he criticized what he felt was the Patriot's
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short sighted and senseless decision. Thus was destroyed the most
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populous and flourishing town in Virginia, he wrote in his
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Biography of Washington, its destruction was one of those ill
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judged measures of which the consequences are felt long after
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the motives are forgotten. Yet Marshall didn't take into account
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the propaganda valley reaped by the Patriots in the aftermath
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of the conflagration. Their success in blaming the British encouraged
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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
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most formidable empire. By reducing their own city to ash,
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the Patriots helped birth the nation. Next ask Smithsonian, you've
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got questions, We've got experts from Alexander Charles Elkins Park, Pennsylvania.
26:36
Why didn't the Allies divide and occupy Italy after World
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War Two as they did with Germany. The answer is
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from Frank Blazick, Junior Curator of Modern Military History, National
26:49
Museum of American History. There are several reasons. In nineteen
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forty three, the Allies invasion of Sicily brought the fall
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of Benito Mussolini and his national Fascist government. Italy signed
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an armistice which halted hostilities with the Allies and turned
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its armed forces over to the Allied powers. Adolf Hitler
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moved Nazi German forces into northern Italy to prevent the
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complete loss of the country. Subsequently, Italy became less a
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hated enemy than a battle ground nation. There is also
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the fact that the Soviet Union did not fight on
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Italian soil, and therefore didn't have the same interest in
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occupying Italy that it had in occupying Germany. Finally, Catholic
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and Italian American communities helped strengthen domestic support in the
27:39
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,
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becoming a founding member of NATO and a unified nation
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friendly to democracy and the United Nations. This concludes readings
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from the Smithsonian Magazine for today. Your reader has been
28:06
Rebecca Shore. Thank you for listening, and have a great day.