Local author’s latest book sheds new light on early U.S. history

“The American Revolution was very much alive in my family’s quirky household,” says local author Andrew Lawler about his childhood in Norfolk, Va. He visited Colonial Williamsburg every other weekend, toured battle sites with his grandparents and held a deep reverence for the Founding Fathers, referring to his home state hero as “Mr. Jefferson.”

Between this and his schooling, plus years of reading as an adult, he thought he knew everything there was to know about our nation’s founding. It was only when he was leafing through a book at a Williamsburg gift shop in 2021 that he realized he hadn’t been told the full story.

The book mentioned that Lord Dunmore, the British governor of Virginia whom Lawler had always seen as an authoritarian brute, was one of the first in our country to formally emancipate slaves, arming them to fight against the patriots in Norfolk as the Revolutionary War broke out in 1775.

In A Perfect Frenzy, coming out at the end of the month, Lawler brings this critical piece of history to light. While Dunmore and his army were eventually defeated by the patriots after the destruction in Norfolk, Lawler shows that his emancipation decree had long-lasting effects — it forced George Washington to accept former slaves into his own army, led to masses of Black veterans who demanded rights after the war and sowed the seeds for the abolitionist movement. Perhaps most notably, Dunmore’s decree directly influenced Abraham Lincoln’s famous Emancipation Proclamation nearly 100 years later.

Lawler will be celebrating the launch of his book at Malaprop’s Bookstore/Cafe, 55 Haywood St., on Tuesday, Jan. 28, at 6 p.m. Joining him in conversation will be Ellen Holmes Pearson, Roy Carroll professor of arts and sciences at the UNC Asheville.

‘I guess I have to write it’

Upon learning of Lord Dunmore’s actions, Lawler was upset. “Why had this really interesting story not been told to me as a child? Or even as an adult?”

He didn’t intend to write a book, but when he realized how little he and others knew of Dunmore’s impact on our nation’s founding and that it had never been explored in depth by professional historians, he knew what he had to do. “If I can’t find the book, then I guess I have to write it,” Lawler says.

Lawler — who has authored several other historical works and who has written for The New York Times, National Geographic and other national outlets — set out to uncover what had been hidden. “It was surprisingly difficult,” Lawler says of his initial research. “I thought anything to do with the American Revolution would be well documented and well organized.”

Many of the period’s writings are not centralized online, which required Lawler to dig very deeply to find information, pestering historians and deciphering 18th-century scrawl along the way.

His research took him to the Library of Congress, the Library of Virginia, ballrooms and battlefields where the conflict unfolded, and castles and tea parlors in Scotland, where Dunmore came of age and first challenged the status quo. In 1745, a band of Scots that included the young Dunmore and his father, tried to overthrow King George II, the head of the regime that years later in Virginia, he would fight to preserve.

“I was fascinated by the psychological aspect of this,” says Lawler.

Challenging the myth

Unlike some of his previous books and the 1,000-plus articles he’s written for newspapers and magazines, Lawler had to focus on hard history over traditional reporting for A Perfect Frenzy. “All of my characters are dead,” he says.

One of the most shocking pieces of information Lawler came across was an investigation that came 60 years after the fighting in Norfolk. It revealed that the devastation of the port, where over 95% of the buildings were destroyed, was not caused by Lord Dunmore but by the patriots themselves. The brutal act was encouraged by Thomas Jefferson as retribution against Dunmore’s emancipation decree; the destruction was subsequently blamed on Dunmore and his army of freed slaves.

This discovery contradicted everything Lawler thought he knew about his hometown and challenged what has widely been accepted as fact in the public imagination. And while this information has been available for over 100 years, the myth persists.

But why?

“It’s pretty simple,” Lawler says. “The story of the patriots is a story of people who were fighting for liberty and freedom. It is not the story of people who were destroying their own cities and attempting to reenslave African Americans.”

This wasn’t a convenient story for the 19th century, nor is it for the 21st, Lawler notes, and he expects that a lot of people will be uncomfortable with what he’s uncovered. “I didn’t come into this with any kind of political angle or wanting to convince anybody of anything,” Lawler says. Instead, he hopes A Perfect Frenzy presents “a fresher, fuller and more accurate account of what happened at this key moment in the American Revolution.”

Seeking freedom

The 250th anniversary of American independence is quickly approaching. While we may see the events of the revolution as firmly in the past, Lawler argues that our present-day issues tied to race, gun control and the divide between urban and rural communities all have their origins during the pivotal years of 1775 and 1776 in Colonial Virginia.

In A Perfect Frenzy, Lawler returns to the source of our modern-day controversies in an effort to put them into context. Why do we behave the way we do? Why do we have these differences? Why is our country so polarized? He hopes this book can help us learn from our past and contribute to the conversation about the type of nation we want to have.

“We are, in effect, still fighting our revolution,” Lawler writes in the prelude, “albeit with sound bites rather than bullets.”

Lawler also hopes to bring to light the characters of the American Revolution who have been suppressed or ignored — people who may not have served in the Continental Army but are just as much a part of the story of American independence. “I want people to understand that the enslaved Blacks who escaped bondage and fought for the king were fighting for the same thing that the patriots were fighting for,” he tells Xpress. “They were both seeking freedom.”

While he no longer sees “Mr. Jefferson” with the luster that he did as a child, Lawler still believes our third president to be a visionary. “Our founders set up a system that created a freer and more equitable society,” he says. “They did not achieve it, but they gave us the means to do it.” Now, 250 years later, Lawler challenges us to the task.