As to the importance of the Gaspee Affair in the start of unified American actions, see the following description by Professor Lawrence S. Patrolling the waters of Narragansett Bay, a notorious center of smuggling, the Gaspee had a reputation for excessive zeal in exposing violations of the Navigation laws. When it ran aground near Providence it was not surprising that it received unwanted attention from hostile Rhode Islanders who promptly set upon the vessel.
The ship was burned, the commander wounded, and royal authority in the person of royal officers was grievously affronted. The outrageous assault was all the more galling because of the subsequent false arrest of the unfortunate British commander by civil authorities, and the inability of anyone to identify the American culprits behind the action. As everyone knew, they were leading men of business in Providence.
Essentially the incident was not different from a number of other clashes in the preceding decade; and essentially the British response was similar to earlier responses. In the first instance the colonial provoked by a British regulation and recognizing limitations in local British power strikes out at an exposed extension of authority.
In the latter Britain promises punishment which she is unable to deliver. T he major difference on this occasion [the American attack on the Gaspee and the British response] was in the aftermath of the affair.
In the past the colonies had spoken vaguely of future concert against British policy, but never fulfilled their pledges. This time Samuel Adams and his network of colleagues in other colonies established a continental Committee of Correspondence with the objective of circulating information quickly about future British abuses and of addressing the world with a single American voice.
The Gaspee affair revealed how much the events of the previous decade had radicalized the colonies. Reaction to news of a royal commission interfering in the Rhode Island case was immediate. The commission became a court of the inquisition in the rhetoric of its opponents, who claimed that its purpose was to compel Americans to bow before alien and illegal jurisdictions, Anticipating the summoning of troops in January, , in consequence of the investigation, the Boston Gazette conjured up slaughter worse than the Boston Massacre, and asked itself how long the patience of the colonies would Iast before an effective riposte was made.
It came within two months as Virginia, spurred by Richard Henry Lee, took the initiative and appointed a standing committee of eleven to keep watch over the acts of Parliament and to correspond with the other colonies.
The motion of the young Virginian found a response first in Boston and then within a year in all the colonies except Pennsylvania, which delayed the appointment of a committee until after the Boston Port Bill had passed in While a Continental Congress would soon overshadow the Committees of Correspondence, they symbolized a spirit of union which had not been present in the previous crises. Here were permanent units different from the ad hoc basis of the Stamp Act Congress or from the unstructured reactions to the Circular Letter.
New leaders emerged inside and outside the legislatures who could give currency to the language of conditional independence. Not only did the Boston Gazette deny Britain's right to make laws for the colonies but it warned that "if Britons continue their endeavors much longer to subject us to their government and taxation, we shall become a separate state.
However, Dudingston himself regularly overstepped the law, stopping ships without cause, delaying their passage, looting goods, and inflicting bodily harm upon the colonial sailors. This small act of resistance angered Dudingston and provoked a chase up the Bay. Hoping that Dudingston was unfamiliar with a hazard off the coast of Warwick, Lindsey used his ship, the Hannah, to lure the Gaspee into shallow waters at Namquid Point today called Gaspee Point , where it stranded on a sandbar.
The Gaspee burns to the waterline at Namquid point. With the Gaspee held captive until the rising tide of the following day, Lindsey went into town to spread the word. Under cover of darkness and with their oarlocks muffled, a raiding party of 80 men set out into the night, rowing south from Providence toward the stranded Gaspee. Simeon Potter was an infamous slave trader, privateer, and pirate, and owned at least 11 enslaved people, more than any other resident of Bristol, RI.
He made fortunes in the West Indies and triangle trades, both directly and by pirating other ships. Simeon Potter became a mentor to James, teaching him the intricacies of slave trading, including how to evade authorities cracking down on the trade, helping lead James and his family to become the largest slave traders in US history.
Abraham Whipple was a ship captain working for the Brown brothers, trading rum, enslaved people, and other goods between the colony and the West Indies. He was also the brother-in-law to RI Supreme Court Justice, former colonial governor, and future Declaration of Independence signer Stephen Hopkins Joseph Tillinghast was heavily involved in the West Indies trade, primarily shipping to St Croix, and sometimes working directly for the Brown brothers.
He owned multiple enslaved people, and operated two wharves in Providence where he sold rum and goods imported from the Caribbean. Ephraim Bowen grew wealthy via a large rum distillery he owned in Pawtuxet Village. Several other prominent Rhode Islanders with ties to the slave and rum trades, including Nathanael Greene and Esek Hopkins, also likely took part in the attack.
The outcome brought significant safety and stability to English settlers who had lived in fear of Spanish and French incursions, but it also put London into great debt, and the Crown began to focus on more seriously managing and taxing its colonies. Decades prior, Britain enacted the Molasses Act of , which taxed molasses traded between British subjects and non-British islands, such as Spanish Hispaniola or French Martinique. The law should have deeply constrained the business of slavery, as the main currency for New England traders was rum made of molasses obtained in the West Indies.
But Rhode Island traders flagrantly evaded the laws, and continued to freely trade with Spanish, Dutch, and French colonies. The British, militarily occupied in spreading empire in south Asia and elsewhere, largely turned a blind eye. In the s, following the war, London began an intensified system of taxation in the colonies in order to pay its post-war debts.
The Crown passed a set of new taxes, notably the Sugar Act of , which attempted to update the Molasses Act by reducing the tax on molasses, but ramping up enforcement. Stephen Hopkins, the 15 year governor of colonial Rhode Island who made his wealth in the West Indies trade, penned Rights of the Colonies Examined , one of the foundational documents of the revolution.
The metaphor would be echoed by countless future American revolutionaries. White Protestant colonists felt themselves unique within the British empire, imagining themselves as British subjects with the same rights and privileges as any White man within England itself. The Proclamation Line of limited White expansion past a certain line, in a concession to Indigenous peoples whom Britain did not feel equipped to continue war with. The Crown also began debating giving Catholics in newly-conquered Canada some rights, which culminated in a full list of rights outlined in the Quebec Act of Most shocking to colonists, however, was the shifting imperial policy on slavery.
Great Britain in reality had no interest in abolition, and in fact earned enormous sums off the slave trade and the slave plantations across its empire. But because of constant slave uprisings in the Caribbean and elsewhere, growing domestic protests, and self-interested imperial calculations, British administrators had been inching toward granting certain rights to enslaved people for some years. The case began in and was decided in June, , the very same month Rhode Islanders burned the Gaspee.
The decision terrified the colonies, as settlers feared the Crown would soon outlaw slavery across the colonies. Settlers imagined London would use enslaved people against them, arming Black and Indigenous people just as they had done to fight the Spanish in Havana.
Of course, as the Somerset decision occurred concomitantly with the Gaspee attacks, its unlikely it directly influenced them, but the imperial trends leading to Somerset had certainly influence colonists prior to June, Britain would not ban slavery in its empire for many decades.
Yet even minuscule shifts away from full settler autonomy on questions of slavery terrified the colonial ruling class. Following the new regulations of the s, British vessels now patrolled Narragansett Bay, seizing illegal rum ships. In , the British customs ship Liberty seized two boats belonging the New England merchant Joseph Packwood and held them in Newport. In a prelude to the Gaspee Affair, Rhode Islanders responded by forcibly boarding the Liberty , then scuttling and burning the vessel.
British ships continued patrolling New England waters, and in early the Gaspee entered Narragansett Bay and began chasing down Rhode Island rum smugglers. In February , the Gaspee captured a ship belonging to future revolutionary war hero Nathanael Greene, then confiscated the boat and its 12 hogsheads of undeclared rum.
On June 9, the Gaspee began chasing the Rhode Island rum ship Hannah, and ran aground on a sandbar outside Warwick. Captain Dudingston decided to wait until the tide returned before attempting to free the ship. Brown decided to seize the rare opportunity. He riled up the other scions of the colony, and they decided they would row out to destroy the demobilized British vessel. As discussed above, these attack leaders were all wealthy men with deep connections to the business of slavery, including Brown, Simeon Potter, Joseph Tillinghast, Ephraim Bowen, Abraham Whipple, and likely others such as Esek Hopkins and Nathanael Greene.
The leaders marched a drum through town to recruit more men, likely forced a number of enslaved men to join them, then secured boats and began toward the British. The colonists approached the Gaspee , and demanded that Dudingston abandon the ship. Dudingston refused, so the colonists shot him through the groin and arm. The rebels swarmed the ship, disarmed and brought the crew ashore, and stole the ships logbooks and documents.
Brown, Whipple, and company then lit the boat on fire and retreated to the beach, where they watched fire consume the Gaspee until it reached the magazine and the ship exploded. No one claimed responsibility for the attack. In the following weeks, the furious British launched an inquiry into the incident. A commission was formed in Newport to investigate, and the King of England issued a large reward for anyone with information. The British threatened to extradite the attackers for trial in England.
The lawyer and later judge John Cole, who likely participated in the attack and at minimum was present at the attack planning site, perjured himself in court by denying any knowledge. Lieutenant Governor Darius Sessions, who had also made his money in the West Indies trade, shared in letters that he was deliberately impeding the investigation.
0コメント