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1 Introduction Sometime before nine o’clock on the morning of 5 December 1793,a couple identifying themselves as Augustus Frederick and Augusta Murray were married at St. George’s Church in Hanover Square, London. The bride had arrived in a hackney coach, the equivalent of a modern taxi, wearing a“common linen gown” beneath a winter cloak. The groom was dressed in a brown greatcoat , not unlike those worn by London shopkeepers of the day. She was in her early thirties; he was ten years her junior. The curate who performed the ceremony did not recognize either one of them, but St. George’s was a large parish so he believed them when they claimed to be congregants. If he noticed the bulge in the bride’s coat—she was nearly eight months pregnant— he never mentioned it. They seemed to him totally unremarkable, well“below the rank of gentleman,” as he told the Privy Council several weeks later,“not at all distinguished by their dress from the appearance of persons in trade.” He had no reason to believe that the marriage of this Augustus Frederick and Augusta Murray represented anything more than the dawn of an ordinary day in the life of his church. Across the Atlantic Ocean, more than four thousand miles away, the father of the bride was equally unaware of the forces in motion at St. George’s. At sixty-three, John Murray, 4th Earl of Dunmore, was an aging Scots aristocrat living on the margins of the British Empire. For the last six years, he had been in Nassau, New Providence, as governor of the Bahama Islands. It was a modest post for someone of his social status—an earl was a rare thing on that side of the Atlantic—but the path to Nassau had been treacherous and his position there hard won. The son of a convicted traitor, Dunmore had been a page of honor in Bonnie Prince Charlie’s court during the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745.After working his way back into the Hanoverian fold with the help of a prominent uncle, he 2 dunmore’s new world was appointed royal governor of New York in 1770. Transferred to Virginia less than a year later, he went on to lead an expedition against the Shawnee Indians and their allies in the Ohio River Valley. Dunmore’s War, as the con- flict came to be known, forced the Shawnees to accept the 1768 Treaty of Fort Stanwix, through which Great Britain had acquired the coveted Kentucky country. Dunmore remained loyal to George III during the American Revolution and, though a slaveholder himself, issued a proclamation in November 1775 that offered freedom to rebel-owned slaves who were able to reach British lines and fight for the king. Approximately one thousand enslaved men, women, and children answered the call. It was not the first time a European had armed black slaves—far from it—but Dunmore’s proclamation of emancipation was unique. Never before had a British official promised liberty to slaves on the express condition that they commit themselves to the destruction of their masters—and in the context of a civil war no less. For this, his erstwhile friend George Washington thought him an “Arch Traitor to the Rights of Humanity,” one with the potential to“become the most formidable Enemy America has.” Due to a variety of circumstances, most of them outside of Dunmore’s control, this dreaded strength never materialized. Even so, the proclamation made him one of the great villains of the American Revolution , a status that, for different reasons, he retains to this day. In 1793, Dunmore faced a whole new set of problems in the Bahamas. In the wake of the war, an influx of loyalist refugees had transformed the colony. Mainly from South Carolina and Georgia by way of East Florida, the new inhabitants immediately outnumbered the existing population,but British of- ficials continued to support the old inhabitants’ claims to a majority share of power. Aggrieved, the newcomers formed “the Board of American Loyalists” to oppose the political establishment.They forced Governor Richard Maxwell to flee to England in 1785. Before long, they came to despise Dunmore as well, accusing him of obstructing justice, doling out patronage to“the husbands of his whores,” and promoting disorder in an effort to divide and rule. Their attempts to secure his recall had thus far been in vain, but Augusta Murray’s...

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