Somerset in 1772, Dunmore in 1775, the Declaration in 1776. The middle term is a colonial governor offering freedom to the enslaved, and the founding document lists it among the grievances.
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On the seventh of November, 1775, John Murray, Earl of Dunmore, royal governor of Virginia, declared martial law and proclaimed free all indentured servants and enslaved people belonging to rebels who were able and willing to bear arms for the Crown.
Within a month he had recruited some three hundred Black men into what was called Lord Dunmore's Ethiopian Regiment, some of whom are reported to have worn shirts inscribed Liberty to Slaves. Estimates of those who reached him in that first wave run from eight hundred to two thousand. Over the whole war the number who crossed to British lines from all thirteen states is estimated in the tens of thousands, with the higher figures contested and the lower ones already large enough to make the point.
The proclamation was not an emancipation and was not offered as one. It was a military instrument, restricted to the enslaved of rebels, conditioned on service, and Dunmore held slaves himself. What matters is not his motive. It is what the people it reached did with it, and what the parties it alarmed did next.
[See PLANTATION'S BUSINESS PLAN · THE OCCUPATION]
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THE THREE YEARS
Set the dates in order and the sequence states itself.
In 1772 Lord Mansfield decided Somerset v Stewart and found the condition so odious that nothing could be suffered to support it but positive law, and that the common law the colonies had inherited supplied no such warrant. The scale had weighed the enslaver's claim and refused the goods.
In 1775 a governor of the Crown whose court had issued that finding stood in Virginia and offered freedom to the people the claim was made about, and hundreds walked to him.
In 1776 the men whose claim had been refused declared themselves outside that jurisdiction and founded one of their own.
A business plan that has lost on the scale and cannot answer the finding does not answer it. It changes the court, and here the interval between the finding and the removal is three years and four months.
[See SOMERSET v STEWART · REFUSAL OF JURISDICTION]
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IT IS IN THE DOCUMENT
The Declaration of Independence lists among the King's offenses that he has excited domestic insurrections amongst us.
Domestic was the period's euphemism, and the clause is the Congress's reference to Dunmore and to the officials who followed him. It is what remained after Jefferson's longer passage on the slave trade was struck: some hundred and seventy words reduced to a phrase, and the phrase preserved the part that mattered to the men signing.
Read plainly, the founding instrument of the United States enters, among its stated reasons for separation, that the Crown had offered freedom to enslaved people. The grievance is not that the King failed to protect liberty. The grievance is that he extended it to the wrong parties, and the sentence survived every revision.
[See FOUNDER'S THEOLOGY · OFFICIAL RECORD]
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WHAT THE WALKING ESTABLISHES
The evidentiary weight of Dunmore is not in the proclamation. It is in the response to it.
Whatever the enslaved of Virginia are said to have wanted, believed, or been suited to, several hundred of them heard a conditional and dangerous offer within days of its issue and walked towards it through a war, and many thousands did so across the following eight years. No document produced by the parties holding them records that capacity, because the books had no column for it.
This is the prior resident appearing in the record by her own act rather than by anyone's testimony about her. The residency did not require recognition in order to operate, and the moment a route appeared it was taken at a scale the whole apparatus of the plantation had been built to make unthinkable.
[See THE PRIOR RESIDENT · THE CAPACITY TO REFUSE]
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AND WHAT FOLLOWED THEM
Many died of disease in Dunmore's camps. Many who reached British lines were re-enslaved by British officers or sold in the Caribbean. Those evacuated at war's end to Nova Scotia met cold, poor land and hostility, and roughly twelve hundred of them left again in 1792 for Sierra Leone.
The route was real and it was not a deliverance. It was a second jurisdiction, offered on terms by a party with its own plan, and the people who took it were not thereby delivered into anything that had stopped keeping books on them.
A creature who leaves an occupation by the only door available has left the occupation and has not thereby arrived anywhere, and recording the exit as a liberation is the second court's version of the first court's account.
[See LICENSED PRESENCE · THE CHEAPER RATE]
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The dates are the argument and they are not contested. A court refused the goods in 1772. A governor opened a door in 1775 and people came through it in numbers nobody had predicted. A new sovereign was founded in 1776 whose positive law would supply exactly what Mansfield had said was the only thing capable of supporting the claim.
And among the reasons it gave for founding itself was that the old sovereign had opened the door.
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RegenerativeLaw is a religion in the direct-encounter Protestant tradition, carrying a documented four-century lineage through Böhme, the Behmenists, the Friends, and Penn, and it diagnoses trespass theology as an establishment of religion. Its exercise consists substantially in refusal: it shelters the conscientious refusal of performed subordination as religious exercise. This entry states sincere religious belief concerning matters of ultimate concern, protected under the First Amendment and, as to federal action, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, 42 U.S.C. § 2000bb.
