This week I wandered around the whitewashed homes, pruned gardens, and split-rail fences of Colonial Williamsburg. The rebellious spirit of our founding mothers and fathers still permeates the open-air museum that depicts colonial life in early America. It filled me with pride and wonder at the courage of our nation’s first citizens.
Colonial Williamsburg
The story of Colonial Williamsburg sits in sharp contrast with the recent rash of political antics set off like so much political gunpowder by some of our country’s most immature, power-hungry demagogues.
In Texas, the governor closed down commercial trade at the Mexican border- snarling up 2.4 billion dollars of the Texas economy. Florida’s most powerful citizen decided to teach the state’s largest private employer a lesson about criticizing his anti-gay legislative agenda. He signed legislation removing Disney World’s ability to govern, collect taxes, and develop infrastructure for their theme parks. Expensive costs likely to be leveraged onto local Floridians. Meanwhile, Georgia’s 14th congressional district is currently using the 14th Amendment to deliberate on whether its representative engaged in insurrection.
Shocking as this raw, misuse of political power is, it’s happened before. And it usually backfires. History, once again, is repeating itself.
DeSantis, Abbott, and Greene could have taken their lessons from as far back as 1775, when Lord Dunmore, a royalist representative of King George, reigned as governor of the Province of Virginia.
Thomas Jefferson Authoring the Declaration of Independence
In 1775, political temperatures ran high. On April 21st, fearing a rebellion of his Virginia colonists, Lord Dunmore secretly removed the state’s cache of gunpowder from a storage magazine in the capital of Williamsburg. Virginians were mad. They believed the gunpowder belonged to them and essential to their protection. Bad timing. Two days before the heist, the Battles of Lexington and Concord took place in Massachusetts, and the governor’s move effectively kickstarted the start of the Revolutionary War in Virginia.
Dunmore was forced to flee the capital. He retreated to Norfolk to form an army. The casualties at the battles of Lexington and Concorde left him with no access to British troops, and he was forced to raise soldiers without the aid of the British crown. Desperate, he declared that he would free any enslaved male Virginians of the age of 18 or older- if they joined the Ethiopian Regiment.
The Ethiopian Regiment; Liberty to Slaves
While freeing slaves was a brilliant idea, this plan didn’t include women and children. It offered conditional freedom to some single men, but endangered the lives of other enslaved family members. Dunmore wasn’t a humanitarian, he was an opportunist.
Like some of our politicians of today, he was only interested in retaining power, and his strategy included trying to divide people to do it.
Since 40% of the Virginia population were slaves, and most commerce relied on slave labor, the strategy was designed to divide the rebel colonists against each other, and give the English royalists the military edge.
In the end only about 1100 African slaves signed on, most of them perishing during their service to the king.
For 247 years we’ve been slogging through this messy business of democracy. We still have a long way to go to get things right. But the revolution started because we didn’t like power-hungry politicians trying to control us, divide us, or try to tell us what to do.
The difference between Lord Dunmore and our modern day politicians- is that now we have a democracy. We elect our public servants. It might be time to remind them that they work for us, our Constitution, and our democracy, not their own personal, political gain.