The year was 1775, and Virginia stood at the edge of a storm. In the calm before revolution turned to full war, one British governor, an imperious Scotsman named John Murray, Fourth Earl of Dunmore, issued a decree that would send shockwaves through the colonies and echo across centuries. From the deck of a British warship anchored off Norfolk, Lord Dunmore declared martial law in the colony of Virginia. More explosively, he promised freedom to “all indentured servants, Negroes, or others, appertaining to Rebels,” who would bear arms for the King. It was November 7, 1775, and in one stroke of the pen, Dunmore transformed the struggle for American liberty into a crisis of freedom itself.

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