Murray, John

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Murray, John

MURRAY, JOHN. Royal governor of Virginia. Son of the third earl of Dunmore, John Murray succeeded his father to become the fourth earl of Dunmore in 1756, and it is by this name that he is best known. He was an army officer from 1749 to 1760, when he resigned his commission. He was elected in 1761 as one of sixteen Scottish peers to sit in Parliament. He supported Lord North for the office of prime minister, and in 1770, when Lord North took that office, Dunmore was named governor of New York by Wills Hill, the earl of Hillsborough, who was the colonial secretary at the time.

Arriving in New York on 19 October 1770, Dunmore readily accepted and participated in the provincial aristocracy's thirst for land speculation. Eleven months later he was promoted to governor of Virginia, Britain's most important mainland colony, to succeed Governor Norborne Berkeley, baron de Botetourt, who had died on 15 October 1770. Dunmore arrived at Williamsburg in September 1771, and was initially popular with Virginia's land-hungry aristocrats, including George Washington. The House of Burgesses even named the new frontier counties of Dunmore and Fincastle (another of his titles) in his honor.

When the Shawnee, beset by land-hungry whites from Pennsylvania and Virginia, precipitated a conflict, Dunmore responded by raising the western militia and taking the field himself to subdue the tribe and lay claim to their lands. When Colonel Andrew Lewis defeated the Shawnee at Point Pleasant on 10 October 1774, Dunmore reached the zenith of his popularity in the colony, a fact which was reflected by his naming his eleventh child Virginia in January 1775.

Attention paid to frontier matters diverted Dunmore from a rising tide of opposition to imperial control in Virginia. The first discordant note was struck in 1773, when Dunmore dissolved the House of Burgesses after it proposed forming a committee of correspondence. He did the same thing the next year when the burgesses set a day of mourning over the Boston Port Bill. While he was away on the frontier in 1774, the first Virginia Convention embargoed British trade, began to make preparations for armed resistance, and sent delegates to the first Continental Congress. Dunmore thought the unrest was the work of a few troublemakers and took measures in the spring of 1775 that shattered his reputation with Virginians, making him arguably the most reviled of all the royal governors.

On 21 April Dunmore seized the gunpowder in the Williamsburg magazine, threatened to raise the slaves against those who protested this action, and broke completely with the House of Burgesses on 1 June 1775 over Lord North's peace proposal. He and his family fled to the safety of a British warship on 8 June. With a small fleet, he eventually gathered in the strongly Loyalist Norfolk area a force composed of sailors, marines, and a few companies of the Fourteenth Regiment of Foot. He also began to recruit the Queen's Own Royal Regiment and the Ethiopian Regiment, made up of runaway slaves. With this amphibious force, he raided the area around the tidewater through the fall, but the presence of runaway slaves as soldiers in his force was inflammatory to nearly every white Virginian. On 14 November 1775 he issued his Emancipation Proclamation which, by offering freedom to military-age male slaves who left their rebel masters to join him, destroyed his appeal with the rebel aristocrats.

Overconfidence led to Dunmore's defeat by Colonel William Woodford at Great Bridge, Virginia, on 9 December 1775, after which Dunmore withdrew to his ships. An attempt to retake part of the town on 1 January 1776 led to its destruction, for which Dunmore was blamed. Sir Henry Clinton made contact with Dunmore in February, but Clinton was on his way to Charlestown, South Carolina, and left no reinforcements. By May 1776 Dunmore had to withdraw to Gwynn Island, from which he was driven in July. He raided up the Chesapeake River to the Potomac before sailing for New York with a force that included the 300 soldiers of the Ethiopian Regiment. He shortly returned to Britain. He again sat as a Scottish peer in Parliament before being named governor of the Bahamas from 1786 to 1796. He died at Ramsgate, Kent, on 25 February 1809.