Providence men row out at night and burn HMS Gaspee to the waterline
By 1772, the Navigation Acts had long rankled American colonists, but nowhere more acutely than in Rhode Island, where the rum and molasses trades formed the backbone of the colonial economy. On June 9, HMS Gaspee — a Royal Navy revenue schooner enforcing customs laws in Narragansett Bay — ran aground off Warwick while chasing the packet boat Hannah. That night, 18 boatloads of Providence men armed with pistols, guns, and clubs, led by Abraham Whipple and merchant John Brown, rowed out, boarded the grounded ship, shot and wounded Lieutenant William Duddingston, and burned Gaspee to the waterline. The Crown launched a Royal Commission of Inquiry to identify and extradite the raiders for trial in England — a prospect that alarmed colonial Whigs from Boston to Virginia and helped forge the inter-colonial committees of correspondence that would become the nervous system of the coming revolution.
The Gaspee affair was the first act of violent armed resistance against Crown authority in British North America — more than a year before the Boston Tea Party. The Crown's attempt to extradite the raiders to England for trial unified colonial opinion across all thirteen colonies, directly spurring the formation of inter-colonial committees of correspondence in Massachusetts and Virginia that became the organizational infrastructure of the Revolution.
QWhat exchange of letters between Abraham Whipple and a British naval captain became one of the most quoted lines of the pre-Revolutionary period?
After Whipple led the burning of the Gaspee, Captain James Wallace of HMS Rose wrote him directly: 'You Abraham Whipple on June 10, 1772, burned his majesty's vessel the Gaspee and I will hang you at the yard arm.' Whipple wrote back six words: 'Always catch a man before you hang him.' The Crown never did catch him. Three years later, Whipple was commissioned a captain in the Continental Navy, and in 1779 he cut eleven prizes out of a British convoy in the fog off Newfoundland, a haul valued at over one million dollars — easily one of the richest captures of the entire war.
QWhy did Rhode Island Governor Joseph Wanton refuse to hand over the men accused of burning the Gaspee, even after being given names?
Rear Admiral John Montagu identified five Rhode Islanders by name — including John and Joseph Brown and Simeon Potter — and demanded Wanton bring them to justice. Wanton investigated the Crown's key witness, an indentured servant named Aaron Briggs, and found him thoroughly discredited: two farm proprietors and two fellow servants all testified that Briggs had been at work on Prudence Island throughout the night in question. Wanton concluded Briggs was an imposter and declined to act. Montagu disputed this, but the Royal Commission of Inquiry, staffed by supreme court chiefs from Massachusetts, New York, and New Jersey, ultimately found it could not obtain sufficient evidence and declared itself unable to proceed.
QHow did the Gaspee affair help create the organizational structure that coordinated the American Revolution across all thirteen colonies?
The Crown's plan to extradite the Gaspee raiders to England for trial — under the Dockyard Act of 1772 — alarmed colonial Whig leaders not just in Rhode Island but throughout the continent. The prospect of Americans being tried in England, far from sympathetic juries, was treated as a constitutional threat. A committee of correspondence convened in Boston to consult on the crisis, and Virginia's House of Burgesses was alarmed enough to form its own inter-colonial committee of correspondence to coordinate with similar bodies in all thirteen colonies. Reverend John Allen's sermon on the affair, warning of corrupt judges and conspiratorial London governance, was reprinted seven times in four colonial cities. The affair forged the communication network that, two years later, would coordinate the colonial response to the Intolerable Acts.
