By Peter Wood | 9 Dec 2025
On December 9, 1775, Virginia’s Lord Dunmore launched an attack on the rebel forces holding the southern side of the James River at Great Bridge. The bridge was strategic. It was the gateway to the Port of Norfolk, which at that point was the only refuge for Dunmore and the British forces who had been forced to retreat there after seven months of successful harassment by American forces. The bridge was also crucial to the American supply line. Using it, they could bring in more men and guns from North Carolina.
Dunmore, aware of the vulnerability, had thrown up a hasty fort on the north side of the bridge, Fort Murray, and had ordered that the bridge planks be removed to prevent the colonials from rushing across it.
Dunmore had several cards to play. Since his Declaration of November 7, inviting slaves to desert their masters and join the British forces, he had assembled an “Ethiopian Regiment” to augment his British troops. He could rely on the Great Dismal Swamp, on either side of the bridge, to prevent any surprise maneuvers on the part of the Americans. And he had information that the colonials had no more than 400 men. On that point, he was misinformed. The colonial forces amounted to nearly 900, outnumbering the British, who had about 600. He was also informed—correctly—that the Americans had brought in artillery. But he didn’t know that the heavy guns lacked gun carriages and were therefore unusable.
Piecing this together, Dunmore decided the best way to attack was to send his Ethiopian Regiment through the swamp to divert the Americans from the bridge, then charge across the bridge itself. Matters did not work as planned. The Ethiopians had been deployed elsewhere that day, but the British decided to charge the bridge with a 120-man assault force anyway. Forced by the bridge to advance six abreast with no room to maneuver, they were mowed down by the well-fortified American forces.
The battle lasted only an hour and resulted in over 100 British dead and wounded, with only one American lightly wounded—shot in the finger.
The casualties might make the event a mere skirmish in the larger war, but this was the first real battle of the American Revolution fought in Virginia, and it was a decisive American victory. Dunmore was forced back to his ships in Norfolk and was never again a force to be reckoned with in the Chesapeake. He left behind Norfolk—a loyalist stronghold and the eighth largest British city in North America—a smoking ruin. After a few months of being chased around the Atlantic, Dunmore retreated to New York City.
Americans celebrated the Battle of Great Bridge as a replay of the Battle of Bunker Hill with better results. An American force had annihilated a charge by a well-trained professional army in an improvised fortification. After Bunker Hill, the British retreated to their secure control of Boston. After Great Bridge, the British lost Norfolk and sailed away.
Among the losers in this debacle for the British were the members of the Ethiopian Regiment. They joined Dunmore‘s retreat and were left at Gwynn’s Island at the mouth of the Rappahannock River, where they endured a smallpox epidemic. Survivors were taken to New York, but Dunmore disbanded the regiment in August 1776. The veterans were offered safe passage to Nova Scotia.
The Battle of Great Bridge has an outsized significance in the early days of the American Revolution. Small in scale as it was, it freed a key colony from British military control, giving the Continental Army, established in June 1775, the scope to contest the Northeast. As in most battles, the outcome was partly or perhaps mostly a matter of chance. Dunmore’s battle plan might have worked if the Ethiopian Regiment had been available for the diversion, or if the Americans hadn’t so quickly reinforced their position. The hugely disproportionate casualties—100 British vs. one finger of an American—were an immense boost to American morale.
In this series on the American Revolution, we try to draw parallels to contemporary America. What today resembles the Battle of Great Bridge? Perhaps the army and navy of the narco-traffickers? They too recruit regiments of the downtrodden who are so desperate to escape their condition that they are willing to be used as expendable pawns in the schemes of others. They, too, are cut down with barely a second thought. The Great Dismal Swamp always surrounds the only bridge to freedom.
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Art by Beck & Stone
https://amrev250.substack.com/p/a-bridge-too-near
