Biography

Born in Ireland to a formerly wealthy family, raised by an uncle because of “relentless rancor” at home, Thomas Burke emigrated to Virginia by age 17. He became a doctor and felt he was good at it. But it didn’t pay well, so he shifted to the law instead, practicing in Norfolk.[a] He also wrote poetry! An early rebel, he published a poem in opposition to the 1765 Stamp Act. In 1770 Burke married Mary Freeman, and two years later he bought a plantation north of Hillsborough, which he named “Tyaquin” after his family home. The move came, he wrote, to stop him from overworking, and because he felt the climate was healthier. Eventually he held at least 12 people in slavery on the farm.[b]

After serving in the provincial congresses that created the state government, Burke was elected to the Continental Congress in 1776. He had lost his left eye to smallpox (despite what his picture shows), but told good stories, “sang a good song,”and was able to write poetry on demand.[1] His love of the good life comes through in his “Young Man’s Thought”:

The Queen who gives soft Wishes birth,
And Bacchus, God of Wine and Mirth—
Me, their Friend and Favorite, own;
And I was born for them alone.[f]

When a new county was carved out of Rowan in the west in 1777, the assembly named it for him. That year Burke observed the Battle of Brandywine (Penn.), and soon after left Philadelphia with the rest of the Continental Congress upon the approach of the British Army.[c] Burke’s sense of honor got him into trouble at times, as when he refused to go back to the Continental Congress for a late-night vote. He was reprimanded.[g] But he continued in the congress, with occasional trips home to care for the farm, until the chaotic year of 1781, when he was elected by the General Assembly to be the third governor of the state. He did what he could to reform the militia and the courts, initially from Halifax.[2] Controversy arose when he vetoed assembly decisions, common now, but not allowed under the state constitution then. Just three days after Burke moved back to Hillsborough to help suppress Loyalist activity, he was kidnapped by Tory leader David Fanning. He was turned over to the British in Wilmington and then imprisoned in Charleston.

Sources differ on what happened next. Burke repeatedly wrote letters to the commandant ther