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by Joseph Siffred Duplessis

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US-POLITICS-BIDEN

Providence Daily Journal

You’d be forgiven for thinking you know this story.

American colonists, itching for independence, stormed a British vessel. A spark in New England helped ignite a national revolution.

Eighteen months before colonists dumped tea in Boston Harbor — an event that marks its 250th anniversary this week — Rhode Islanders attacked and destroyed a British navy ship off the coast near Providence, furious with what they saw as the crown’s overreach.

The burning of the HMS Gaspee on June 10, 1772, was the first major armed act of rebellion by the American colonists, Rhode Island historians and officials maintain. And the resulting fallout — with King George III demanding that the perpetrators be held accountable in a showdown between the colonial legal system and the British courts — helped unify the colonies for the war to come.

“[T]his is a Matter in which the whole American Continent is deeply concernd and a Submission of the Colony of Rhode Island to this enormous Claim of power would be made a Precedent for all the rest,” founding father Samuel Adams <a href="http://gaspee.org/SamAdams.html" target=_blank>wrote</a> to Rhode Island’s deputy governor in January 1773.

But the Gaspee affair, which shook the colonies and rattled the crown, has been largely forgotten outside of Rhode Island. It’s been overlooked in U.S. history classes and remains little studied by historians of the American Revolution. The Washington Post reviewed six high school and college U.S. history textbooks and found no mention of the burning of the Gaspee, even as multiple pages were devoted to later — and, in the minds of many Rhode Islanders, lesser — events such as the Boston Tea Party.

Dan Diamond

“Nobody knows that well before anybody pushed a tea bag off a civilian ship in the Boston Harbor, Rhode Islanders blew up a military vessel,” Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) said in a recent interview in his office — sitting in front of a painting that depicts the burning of the Gaspee.

The senator from Rhode Island has repeatedly given speeches that celebrate the Gaspee raiders, and he’s denounced the attention paid to Massachusetts, saying that leaders of his neighboring state have spent centuries spinning their own history.

Sen. Whitehouse Once Again Tells the Tale of the HMS Gaspee

“They got drunk, painted themselves like Indians and pushed tea bags into the Boston Harbor, which we in Rhode Island think is pretty weak tea compared to blowing up the goddamn boat and shooting its captain,” Whitehouse told The Post. “But you know, all those Massachusetts people went on to become president and run Harvard … so they told their story, and their story, and their story.”

The leak that ruined Ben Franklin’s reputation and spurred the Boston Tea Party

Rhode Island-based historians agreed that the Gaspee affair is a case study in how important chapters in history become, well, history. The state’s own firsts — Rhode Island, for example, was the first colony to declare independence from Britain on May 4, 1776, two months before the other 12 colonies — tend to get relegated to footnotes in national stories about the revolution.

“So much focus is put into Massachusetts history, and Rhode Island gets overlooked,” said Kathy Abbass, the principal investigator of the Rhode Island Marine Archaeology Project, which is working to locate the wreckage of the Gaspee off the shore of Warwick, R.I. “Partly that’s because the early histories were written by professors at Harvard and Yale, which set the tone for all the histories that came later.”

There’s little dispute over the events leading up to the burning of the Gaspee — only how historically significant they were.

In Rhode Island, as across the colonies, residents were bristling at the taxes, fees and other burdens imposed by a British parliament an ocean away. That parliament, meanwhile, grew frustrated by what leaders saw as Americans’ efforts to evade the responsibilities of being part of the British Empire.

“The British were trying to raise money by capturing vessels that were sneaking stuff in and not paying duty,” Abbass said. “And yes, of course we were smugglers [in Rhode Island] — there’s no doubt about that.”

Gaspee Virtual Archives

Commanded by Lieutenant William Dudingston, a Scottish naval officer, the Gaspee sailed into Narragansett Bay in early 1772, seeking to enforce trade laws that the American colonists were increasingly flouting. The British ship began to abruptly board colonial vessels off the coast of Rhode Island and seize their cargo, such as barrels of smuggled rum. Accusations soon proliferated that the Gaspee’s crew was stealing sheep and hogs from local farmers, and cutting down their fruit trees for firewood.

Rhode Islanders compared Dudingston to a pirate, sued him in a local court (which found against him) and even sought his arrest. But the British warned that anyone who attempted to interfere in the Gaspee’s work would be executed.

Prince William has American ancestors — dating to the Revolution

“Let them be cautious what they do; for as sure as they attempt it, and any of them are taken, I will hang them as pirates,” British Adm. John Montagu <a href="https://docs.sos.ri.gov/documents/CivicsAndEducation/TeacherResources/Gaspee/Transcription-Letter-Montagu-to-Wanton.pdf" target=_blank>wrote</a> to Rhode Island’s governor in April 1772.

A small ship called the Hannah, reportedly owned by Rhode Island entrepreneur John Brown, was headed toward Providence. It refused the Gaspee’s exhortations to stop — probably because the Hannah carried illegal cargo — and the British gave chase. But the Hannah’s captain, a local man named Benjamin Lindsey, knew the area better than Dudingston, and he led the Gaspee into waters that had receded because of the daily tides. The British ship ended up stuck on a sandbar, waiting for the tides to change again hours later.

The Hannah successfully slipped away to Providence, where Lindsey quickly recounted his tale to Brown, one of the city’s leading merchants, who was a member of the loose resistance movement known as the Sons of Liberty and part of the family that helped found Brown University, the Ivy League university that would later bear its name.

Brown was also a smuggler — one of Rhode Island’s most notorious, Abbass said — and had been nursing a grudge against Dudingston and his ship.

Learning that the Gaspee was temporarily marooned, “Mr. Brown immediately resolved on her destruction,” Ephraim Bowen, a local man who was among the several dozen men who joined Brown, would <a href="http://gaspee.org/Bowen.html" target=_blank>recount decades later</a>.

As many as 60 men gathered in the Providence harbor that evening, launching boats and muffling their oars to quietly row out to the Gaspee under cover of darkness. As they approached the ship, a confrontation began — with one of the Gaspee raiders asserting that Dudingston was a criminal who had evaded the local law, Bowen recounted — that led to Dudingston being shot in the groin and arm and all of the ship’s crew being taken from the vessel.

The Rhode Islanders burned the Gaspee to the water line early on the morning of June 10. Then the gunpowder on board exploded, sending pieces of the ship flying.

As news of the attack made its way to London, British leaders seethed. In a royal proclamation, King George III offered a reward of up to 1,000 pounds sterling — more than $150,000 in today’s currency — to anyone who could help identify and convict the “outrageous and heinous Offenders” behind the ship’s burning. He also established a commission to conduct a formal inquiry, and the British vowed to transport any colonists indicted in the attack to England for trial and, almost certainly, execution.

But no arrests were ever made. Rhode Islanders refused to volunteer information about the Gaspee raiders, and local officials found ways to slow or stymie the British investigation. Colonial leaders further argued that anyone involved in the Gaspee’s burning should face a jury of their peers in America. A Rhode Island sheriff even arrested Dudingston as he recovered from his wounds, charging him for the Gaspee’s previous seizures of cargo.

Meanwhile, the nation’s founding fathers exchanged fervent messages about the Gaspee’s burning and the British response, setting up the committees of correspondence that helped them coordinate strategies in the years to come.

Adams, particularly, warned that Britain’s determination to pursue the Gaspee affair, and the discussion of the deployment of troops, could lead to a cascade of events that might spark “a most violent political Earthquake through the whole British Empire if not its total Destruction,” he wrote in January 1773 to Rhode Island’s deputy governor, Darius Sessions.

“I have long feard that this unhappy Contest between Britain &amp; America will end in Rivers of Blood,” Adams wrote.

An ‘uncelebrated burning’ is forgotten

Most of the Rhode Islanders involved in the burning of the Gaspee successfully concealed their identities from the British and even other colonials, helping confound the crown’s probe. In some ways, their effort to hide was too successful: Even today, about half the men who burned the Gaspee are unknown.

But as the American Revolution began to slip out of living memory, Rhode Islanders tried to lay a claim to the first shot fired.

“The first blood that was shed in the revolutionary contest, by that very act begun, stained her deck, and it was drawn by a Rhode Island hand,” William Hunter, a former U.S. senator from Rhode Island, said in an <a href="https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=hvd.32044086258852&seq=34" target=_blank>address</a> on July 4, 1826 — 50 years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence. “Yes, the blood of Lieutenant Duddington was the first blood drawn in the American cause.”

Those efforts to highlight the Gaspee affair had limited success. In the fight over the American legacy, Rhode Island would end up largely nudged to the side — a casualty of a battle between larger states, chiefly Massachusetts and Virginia, that were disproportionately home to some of the era’s most influential figures.

“There was a very busy group of Boston-based intellectuals who were eager to frame Boston as the driver of the revolution and Bostonians as the inheritors of the legacy of the revolution,” said Nat Sheidley, a historian who runs <a href="https://revolutionaryspaces.org/" target=_blank>Revolutionary Spaces</a>, a Boston-based organization that runs public programs about colonial America — including this week’s <a href="https://revolutionaryspaces.org/explore/boston-tea-party-250th-anniversary/" target=_blank>anniversary of the tea party</a>. He added that America’s elite leaders initially downplayed a number of revolutionary events, such as the destruction of tea in Boston’s harbor, fearing that it would undermine the sense of order in the young nation.

“But by the 1830s, it felt a little bit safer to go there,” Sheidley said. “And so that’s the moment where … the name ‘Tea Party’ is invented, and it becomes popularized as a story of what led us to the revolution.”

duncan1890

A century later, a 1922 New York Times <a href="https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1922/06/11/99029981.pdf?pdf_redirect=true&ip=0" target=_blank>article</a> detailed “the uncelebrated burning” of the Gaspee and asked why the Boston Tea Party had developed a “much stronger hold” upon Americans.

“[A]s an exhibition of daring the tea party was literally a tea party and nothing more compared with the Gaspee incident,” Jonathan A. Rawson Jr. wrote in the Times.

The Gaspee affair’s place in history

Even today, some historians are largely unfamiliar with the Gaspee or suggest that its burning was a regional matter, The Post found. But in Rhode Island, lore about the Gaspee is thriving. For 57 years, local volunteers have held an annual celebration — known as Gaspee Days — featuring a parade to celebrate the burning of the ship, which is increasingly joined by government officials, reenactors and thousands of residents.

“Declare your independence from bank fees!” reads one ad from a local credit union in last year’s 250th <a href="https://issuu.com/beaconcommunications/docs/gaspee_days_250th_2022_e-edition?e=3213028/91802087" target=_blank>anniversary booklet</a>.

Other efforts abound. Rhode Island’s secretary of state offers <a href="https://www.sos.ri.gov/divisions/civics-and-education/for-educators/themed-collections/gaspee" target=_blank>free Gaspee posters</a> on demand. A Brown University instructor created a <a href="https://www.gaspeevr.com/" target=_blank>virtual reality app</a> that allows users to be immersed in a reenactment of the story. A license plate depicting the burning of the Gaspee became available to state drivers this fall — and it looks “wicked cool,” said John Concannon, a retired pediatrician who is Gaspee Days’ historian.

It’s all part of a larger state goal: to ensure that the burning of the Gaspee is never forgotten again. Historians who have studied the event said that it merits more mention, particularly in textbooks.

“The thing about the Gaspee that is important was that the king took notice,” said Abbass, who has <a href="https://www.rimap.org/rimap-publications-1/vsabzfg71r40upxklekji64lujwkl6" target=_blank>written</a> about other colonial attacks on British vessels that preceded the burning of the Gaspee but provoked negligible reaction from the crown.

The king’s intervention also led to a British attempt to circumvent the colonial courts, causing alarm and ultimately backfiring on the crown, Concannon said. He argued that several articles in the Declaration of Independence, including the right to a jury of one’s peers, stem from the Gaspee affair — a more significant contribution to that document than made by the Boston Tea Party, he said.

That’s one reason this weekend’s latest celebration of the events in Massachusetts continues to vex Rhode Islanders. When it comes to the founding of America, Concannon said, the burning of the Gaspee is “just as important.”

Philip Bump, Azi Paybarah and Dan Lamothe contributed to this report.

Because of a transcription error, an earlier version of this story initially misquoted Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) as saying the Boston Tea Party participants "painted themselves like idiots." In fact, he said they "painted themselves like Indians." This version has been corrected.

George Polk Award, 2020

Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting finalist, 2021

University of Pennsylvania, BA in history

Dan Diamond is a national health reporter for The Washington Post. He joined The Post in 2021 after five years at Politico, where he won a George Polk award for investigating the Trump administration's response to the coronavirus pandemic.

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Boston Tea Party? Rhode Island says its rebellion was first — and just as important.

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