1775 (season disputed)
Dorchester officials report disarming Black residents
Dorchester County, Maryland
Dorchester County’s Committee of Inspection reported taking about eighty guns, along with bayonets and swords, from Black people. The committee linked the action to its claim that white speakers had encouraged enslaved people to expect freedom through a British victory, and called for vigilance and harsh treatment of those encouraging that expectation.
Dates preserve the source’s precision. This entry is part of a selected historical record; its qualifications and sources are retained below.
Context / qualification
Bouton’s teaching collection dates this report excerpt Fall 1775, while Timothy James Wilson places Dorchester disarmament in May 1775. Wilson’s nearby citation to Gilmor Papers, vol. 4 concerns a deposition and does not establish that both accounts describe the same report. The original report, addressee and exact date remain unverified; this entry therefore uses year-only precision. References to Black people and enslaved people do not establish the legal status of everyone disarmed. The committee’s allegations are not independent proof of an organized revolt.
Sources
- Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States, chapter 5, p. 82; supplied print pages, edition/year unidentified
- Terry Bouton, How Democratic was the Spirit of 1776?, section 4; excerpt of Dorchester Committee of Inspection report, Fall 1775, credited to Gilmor Papers, Maryland Historical Society ↗
- Maryland Center for History and Culture, Robert Gilmor papers, MS 0387.1; collection-level finding aid, not the report itself ↗
- Timothy James Wilson, “Old Offenders”: Loyalists in the Lower Delmarva Peninsula, 1775–1800, PhD dissertation, University of Toronto (1998), p. 100 and note 28; May chronology, with a Gilmor vol. 4 citation for the nearby deposition ↗