054. The number of Americans
in this engagement was 1,500; and their killed, wounded, and missing
amounted to 453."[374]

In each of these conflicts the attack was made and the first shot was
fired on the part of the British troops. Of this, abundant evidence was
forthwith collected and sent to England. It was carefully inculcated
that in no instance should the colonists attack or fire the first shot
upon the British troops; that in all cases they should act upon the
defensive, as their cause was the defence of their rights and property;
but when attacked, they retaliated with a courage, skill, and deadly
effect that astonished their assailants, and completely refuted the
statements diligently made in England and circulated in the army, that
the colonists had no military qualities and would never face British
troops.[375]

About the same time that General Gage thus commenced war upon the
people of Massachusetts, who so nobly responded in defence of their
constitutional rights, Lord Dunmore, Governor of Virginia, committed
similar outrages upon the traditionally loyal Virginians, who, as Mr.
Bancroft says, "were accustomed to associate all ideas of security in
their political rights with the dynasty of Hanover, and had never, even
in thought, desired to renounce their allegiance. They loved to consider
themselves an integral part of the British empire. The distant life of
landed proprietors, in solitary mansion-houses, favoured independence of
thought; but it also generated an aristocracy, which differed widely
from the simplicity and equality of New England. Educated in the
Anglican Church, no religious zeal had imbued them with a fixed hatred
of kingly power; no deep-seated antipathy to a distinction of ranks, no
theoretic zeal for the introduction of a republic, no speculative
fanaticism drove them to a restless love of change. They had, on the
contrary, the greatest aversion to a revolution, and abhorred the
dangerous experiment of changing their form of government without some
absolute necessity."[376]

But the Virginians, like all true loyalists, were "loyal to the people's
part of the Constitution as well as to that which pertains to the
Sovereign."[377] To intimidate them, Dunmore issued proclamations, and
threatened freeing the slaves against their masters. On the night of the
20th of April he sent a body of marines, in the night, to carry off a
quantity of gunpowder belonging to the colony, and stored in its