53. The Gaspée Incident

During the period of relative calm, trouble had not only been stirred by British aggressiveness against Massachusetts and South Carolina. The restrictive trade and Navigation Acts, to which were now added the sugar and tea duties, were always in danger of being enforced now that the era of salutary neglect was gone forever. Underneath the seeming calm there remained the inner contradictions of potential conflict over enforcement. Only a spark, only a minor incident, was needed to bring this potential to the surface.

Customs enforcement had intensified since late 1771. Already in November two incidents of resistance against the officials had occurred. The controller of customs at Falmouth, Massachusetts, had been forced by a mob to tell them the name of an informer. And off Philadelphia, thirty armed men captured the crew of a customs schooner and rescued a confiscated merchant vessel.

It is not surprising, however, that the culminating crisis should have burst forth in prickly, steadfastly independent little Rhode Island. Here was a colony that valued its trade so much as to have proved a poor security risk during the days of nonimportation. But this very spirit led the Rhode Islanders to resent with particular bitterness British customs collectors’ trespassing upon their freedom of trade. Rhode Island had had a stirring recent history of conflict with customs officials. We have already seen its struggles with the hated John Robinson. After Robinson became one of Boston’s customs commissioners in late 1767, he was replaced as Rhode Island collector of customs by Charles Dudley, Jr., and the Rhode Island resistance continued. In May 1769, the customs commissioners sent to Newport the Liberty, which had been converted to a naval sloop after being seized from John Hancock. The Liberty, commanded by the zealous captain William Reid, promptly began to seize merchant vessels right and left.

This intensification of customs enforcement in Rhode Island swelled the resentment of its citizens. In mid-June 1769, Dudley’s deputy collector, Jessie Saville, was seized as an informer by an angry mob and nearly beaten to death. Whereupon the fiery Providence Gazette trenchantly declared that Saville “was treated with more tenderness and lenity than is perhaps due an Informer.” In mid-July, Captain Reid called the attention of the townspeople of Newport to the depredations of his sloop. For, in the harbor, the Liberty fired brutally upon one of the ships it had seized, even firing upon the captain escaping in an open boat. The next night the angry people of Newport rose up; forcing Reid to remove his crew from the Liberty, they grounded, scuttled, and then burned the customs sloop to the ground. The seized vessels naturally took the opportunity to escape. True to Rhode Island tradition, nothing was done by the democratically elected government to apprehend the leaders of the mob. Finally, by the spring of 1771, Rhode Islanders were moved to proceed against Dudley himself; the highest representative of royal authority in Rhode Island was beaten almost to death.

Thus the stage was set in Rhode Island for the smashing of the relative lull of 1770–72. In March 1772, there sailed into Rhode Island waters the British naval schooner Gaspée, commanded by Lieutenant William Dudingston, known to Rhode Islanders for having savagely beaten up a defenseless fisherman in Pennsylvania three years before. Dudingston lost no time in impressing his personality upon the public. Without even notifying Governor Joseph Wanton, Dudingston illegally launched a systematic campaign of hounding local vessels. Soon Dudingston intensified the drive and arrogantly stopped, searched, or fired upon everything afloat on the pretext of rigorously enforcing the laws. Dudingston and his men also stole livestock from Rhode Island farms, and lumber from woodsmen. The public was understandably hard put to distinguish the British sailors from mere pirates. The Rhode Island merchants proposed to outfit an armed ship to rescue any vessels seized by the Gaspée, but Admiral John Montagu, based at Boston, scotched the plan by threatening to hang all concerned as pirates.

On June 9, 1772, the hated Gaspée ran aground off Warwick in the course of a fierce pursuit of a merchant vessel. When the people of Providence heard the good news, the town’s wealthiest merchant and a Son of Liberty, John Brown, organized a joyous party of citizens to finish the job begun by nature. Brown and his party, which included James Sabin and Captain Abraham Whipple, sailed to the Gaspée, shot and wounded Lieutenant Dudingston, removed the crew, and burned the Gaspée to the ground. A satisfactory night’s work done, the people of Providence then went about their business.

Ever since the attack on the British vessel St. John eight years earlier, Rhode Islanders had been steeped in the pleasant tradition of a lack of strenuous search by the government for the parties responsible for such incidents. But, in early September, the Crown suddenly decided to bypass Rhode Island authorities and to send the guilty parties to England for high treason. A Royal Commission of Inquiry was appointed to find the culprits, deliver them to England via the Royal Navy, and to call on General Gage’s troops, if necessary, for support. Appointed to the commission was Governor Wanton of Rhode Island, who could be depended upon not to search too hard. But he was more than offset by the other members: four of the top royally appointed judges in the colonies—specifically, Robert Auchmuty, who was the vice admiralty judge at Boston, and the chief justices of New Jersey, Massachusetts, and New York.

Now here, in the escalation of law enforcement into the hands of British authorities by setting up a star-chamber procedure and threatening trials for treason in England, was not only a dramatic incident of conflict, but also a serious threat to colonial liberties. The Pennsylvania Journal, representing American sentiment, warned that such a commission could make the lot of the colonists worse than the subjects of “the most despotic power on earth.”

Thus, in June 1772, the people of Rhode Island burned the British schooner Gaspée, and the British reacted ominously by appointing a Royal Commission of Inquiry in early September. The latter move was followed later in the month by a step long feared by the citizens of Massachusetts: the announcement of a decision by the Crown to pay judicial salaries in Massachusetts out of customs revenue. No longer would judges be paid by and, therefore, subject to the control of the colonial Assembly. Specifically, the salaries to be paid permanently and securely by the Crown were those of the attorney general and the solicitor general of Massachusetts and the five judges of the superior court of the colony—a reward to precisely those officials who had shown their tenderness for the British troops responsible for the Boston Massacre. It is not surprising that these deeds—especially the appointing of the Gaspée commission—should have aroused the dormant radical movement in America, or that the first sign of revival should have come in Massachusetts, or that its first spokesman should have been Samuel Adams.