Settlers mad that a slave who was a witness against the suspect in this Gaspee case in 1772 thought slaves were linking up with London and pissed Settlers off in the run up to 1776
Gaspee Affair - Wikipedia
The Gaspee Affair was about the business of slavery
https://upriseri.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/The-Gaspee-Affair-and-the-Slave-Trade.pdf
Through all this praise, the Gaspee Affair’s deep connections to the slave trade are rendered fully invisible. Articles occasionally note that Gaspee attackers like John Brown and Simeon Potter were slave traders, but the fact is presented as a side note, a small stain on the character of these otherwise freedom-loving men. A re-examination of the Gaspee Affair, though, suggests that preserving the slave economy was in fact the central issue motivating Brown, Potter and the rest of the attackers. These Rhode Islanders who burned the Gaspee were wealthy merchants who had made fortunes in the business of slavery, and were furious that British taxation was beginning to cut into their profits and power. In this context, the Gaspee raid emerges not as a heroic spark for freedom, but rather the self-interested violence of merchants protecting their personal economic and political power.
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The Crown Clamps Down
With the end of the Seven Years’ War, also known as the French and Indian War, in 1763, Britain succeeded in vanquishing the French and Spanish from most of eastern mainland North America. 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 1733, 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 1760s, 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 1764, which attempted to update the Molasses Act by reducing the tax on molasses, but ramping up enforcement. The rum trade became seriously regulated for the first time, as British boats began navigating New England’s shores, seizing and searching smugglers, and fining and confiscating boats.
The new customs enforcement enraged Rhode Island’s merchant elite. 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. Here, in condemning British taxation, he bluntly admits Rhode Island’s heavy dependence on the business of slavery: “Putting an end to the importation of foreign molasses at the same time puts an end to all the costly distilleries in these colonies, and to the rum trade to the coast of Africa.”
Hopkins goes on to repeatedly declare that any British taxation reduced the colonists to “slaves”: “…those who are governed at the will of another, or of others, and whose property may be taken from them by taxes or otherwise without their own consent and against their will, are in the miserable condition of slaves.” Thus this future signer of the Declaration of Independence pressed the bizarre conclusion that London taxing colonists’ involvement in the trade of literal enslaved people entailed the enslavement of colonists. The metaphor would be echoed by countless future American revolutionaries.
Fear of Abolition
The colonial ruling class was further angered by the growing belief that Great Britain was uniting with free and enslaved Indigenous and Black people, as well as Catholics and other groups consider outsiders, to limit White Protestant colonists’ autonomy. 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. Following the 7 Years’ War, however, Britain shifted its policies, and began granting other subjects certain rights. The Proclamation Line of 1763 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 1774. The Continental Congress denounced the Act as “dangerous in an extreme degree to Protestant religion and to the civil rights and liberties of all America.”
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 trends coalesced into a set of court cases leading to the landmark Somerset judgement—centered on the enslaved James Somerset’s successful petition for freedom—which effectively ended slavery within England itself. The case began in 1771 and was decided in June, 1772, 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, 1772.
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. Numerous works, such as Robert G Parkinson’s Common Cause, Gerald Horne’s The Counter-Revolution of 1776, and the Blumrosens’ Slave Nation, have outlined just how much fear colonists had that Britain was stoking Black and Indigenous uprisings to destroy them. The feeling was strong enough to make its way directly into the Declaration of Independence, which lists amongst its complaints that “[King George] has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian savages, whose known rule of warfare, is undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes, and conditions.”
The Gaspee Attack
By the mid 1760s, then, the Crown’s interference in the business of slavery, coupled with broader political trends in the empire, had turned Rhode Island’s elite largely against London. Following the new regulations of the 1760s, British vessels now patrolled Narragansett Bay, seizing illegal rum ships. Rhode Island merchants quickly responded in 1764 with a Remonstrance addressed to the Lords of Trade in London, followed by Stephen Hopkin’s Rights of the Colonies Examined. In 1764, Rhode Islanders fired cannons from Fort George at HMS St John in response to its confiscation of rum. In 1769, 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 1772 the Gaspee entered Narragansett Bay and began chasing down Rhode Island rum smugglers. The elite grew to revile the ship’s Captain William Dudingston for his particularly zealous enforcement. In February 1772, the Gaspee captured a ship belonging to future revolutionary war hero Nathanael Greene, then confiscated the boat and its 12 hogsheads of undeclared rum. The British, fully knowing the likelihood of the rum and ship ending back in merchants’ hands if it passed through the corrupt Rhode Island courts, brought the ship and its cargo to Boston. Rhode Island’s merchant princes interpreted the seizure and inter-colony transfer as an intolerable attack on their economic interests and authority.
On June 9, 1772 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. The smaller Hannah escaped to Providence, where its captain Thomas Lindsey informed merchant leader John Brown of the Gaspee’s vulnerable position. 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. The attackers told Dudingston they would return his papers if the Captain promised to release the rum he had seized from Nathanael Greene’s vessel. 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.
Governor Joseph Wanton—a member of Newport’s wealthy Wanton family, who had made their fortunes in the West Indies and triangle trades—was appointed as head of the commission, and clearly had little interest in prosecuting his co-conspirators. Rhode Island Chief Justice Stephen Hopkins simply declared that the colony’s courts would not cooperate with the British, and refused to to hand over any indicted citizens. 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. Wanton, Hopkins, and Sessions conspired to stall and ultimately derail the investigation.
Colonists, British officials, and the commissioners all knew who had led the attack, yet no one would testify against them. The collective silence was likely a reflection of the actual solidarity of White colonists, but court records also show that the ruling class intimidated anyone attempting to testify, going so far as to post armed guards along roads where witnesses would travel to report to the British. Eventually, one man came forward: Aaron Briggs.
