magazine at Williamsburg. As soon as this arbitrary seizure of the
colony's property became known, drums sounded alarm throughout the city
of Williamsburg, the volunteer company rallied under arms, and the
inhabitants assembled for consultation, and at their request the Mayor
and Corporation waited upon the Governor and asked him his motives for
carrying off their powder privately "by an armed force, particularly at
a time when they were apprehensive of an insurrection among their
slaves;" and they demanded that the powder should be forthwith restored.

Lord Dunmore first answered evasively; but learning that the citizens
had assembled under arms, he raged and threatened. He said: "The whole
country can easily be made a solitude; and by the living God, if any
insult is offered to me, or to those who have obeyed my orders, I will
declare freedom to the slaves, and lay the town in ashes."[378]

Lord Dunmore at the same time wrote to the English Secretary of State:
"With a small body of troops and arms, I could raise such a force among
_Indians, Negroes_, and other persons, as would soon reduce the
refractory people of this colony to obedience."

Yet, after all his boasting and threats, the value of the powder thus
unlawfully seized was restored to the colony. Lord Dunmore, agitated
with fears, as most tyrants are, left the Government House from fear of
the people excited by his own conduct towards them, and went on board of
the man-of-war ship _Tower_, at York (about 12 miles from Williamsburg,
the capital of the Province), thus leaving the colony in the absolute
possession of its own inhabitants, giving as a reason for his flight,
his apprehension of "falling a sacrifice to the daringness and
atrociousness, the blind and unmeasurable fury of great numbers of the
people;" and the assurance of the very people whom he feared as to his
personal safety and that of his family, and the repeated entreaties of
the Legislative Assembly that he would return to land, with assurance
of perfect safety from injury or insult, could not prevail upon Lord
Dunmore to return to the Government House, or prevent him from
attempting to govern the ancient Dominion of Virginia from ships of war.
He seized a private printing press, with two of its printers, at the
town of Norfolk, and was thus enabled to issue his proclamations and
other papers against the inhabitants whom he had so grossly insulted and
injured.[379]

"In October" (1775), sa