Who burned Norfolk?

What happened

Norfolk was Virginia's largest town, a port of about six thousand people, with Scottish merchants and their clerks, wharves and warehouses on the Elizabeth River, and a good many Tories. Lord Dunmore had fled there in June 1775, and in the fall he had raised his standard, offered freedom to slaves who would fight for him, and lost the battle at Great Bridge on December 11. The rebels then took Norfolk and the Tories began fleeing. On New Year's Day, with reinforcements from Boston and St. Augustine behind him, Dunmore's ships opened fire on the waterfront in the afternoon, and British landing parties set fire to the warehouses the rebel marksmen were using for cover. Rothbard says the rebels then used that as a pretext, burning nearly nine hundred houses to Dunmore's fifty. The burning went on for three days and took about two-thirds of the town. In February the Virginia Convention ordered the rest burned, over four hundred more houses, to keep Dunmore from ever using it as a base. Yet in the war of propaganda the rebels laid the blame for it on Dunmore, who had tried and failed to burn Hampton the October before. Rothbard calls it a harsh collective sentence passed by "moderate" revolutionaries upon a whole town. Most of its people were gone by the end. One of the few buildings left standing was St. Paul's Church, which still shows a cannonball in its wall.