Briggs identified John Brown as the shooter of Lieutenant Dudingston. Coupled with statements by British crewmen that the raiders were “well dressed, many of them with ruffled shirts, and appeared as storekeepers, merchants, or masters,” the testimony was proof enough for Admiral Montagu. He demanded the arrest of Brown and other “principal inhabitants of the town of Providence.”
But then a number of gentlemen, including several from Newport, came forward with sworn assertions of Briggs’s “general bad character.” This in turn was enough for Wanton, who informed the admiral that on the basis of Briggs’s “villainy” his testimony “must wholly be disregarded.” In a parting jab disguised as a defense of Sheriffs Brown and Whipple, the governor clucked about British authorities “conspiring in the most horrid manner to charge the officers of state with a crime that the whole world knew they could not possibly be guilty of.”
As the inquiry approached its second year, Montagu gave up. His main witness had been labeled a fraud. Multiple townspeople had signed, often with an illiterate X, virtually identical statements claiming “no intimation of an intention to burn the Gaspee, nor do I know any person or persons concerned in that transaction, or ever heard who they were.” A coordinated, collective amnesia left the Wanton-led investigating commission no choice but to inform royal authorities of “there being no probability of our procuring any further light on the subject.”
Admiral Montagu did, however, take pains to help Dudingston survive the fallout of Gaspee’s destruction. Undoubtedly harsh in his antismuggling methods, the lieutenant’s subsequent travails rather balanced the scale. Forced to plead for his life as he lay bleeding on the deck, he’d offered his bed linens to bind his wound rather than see a colonial surgeon tear his own shirt to make a bandage. When the raiders demanded payment for the seized rum, he promised “whatever reparation law would give” and asked only that his crew not be mistreated.
While recuperating in bed three days later, Dudingston was served legal papers by Sheriff Whipple demanding £300 (roughly $50,000 today) in damages for the Greene family. A local jury convicted him on grounds that his authority to conduct searches pertained only to the “high seas” and not Narragansett Bay. After his lawyer missed the appeal date due to weather “exceeding tempestuous,” the order went out for Dudingston’s arrest.
In a bit of good fortune, he was in England at the time, facing court-martial for the loss of his ship. Montagu’s assertion that he was “a sober, diligent, good officer” helped exonerate the young man, who went on to become an admiral and, as well, the father of a son he named William Montagu Dudingston, in gratitude.
A year before the Gaspee raid, a wealthy Newport customs official named Charles Dudley had been beaten by a street mob protesting the arrest of a Connecticut rumrunner. Governor Wanton had investigated the incident and ruled it a random mugging by “drunken sailors and lawless seamen,” hence impossible to prosecute. Seeing the Gaspee case given an identical whitewash, Dudley sympathized with Dudingston and personally paid the Greenes’ £300 award on the lieutenant’s behalf.
John Brown, far from exultant over the raid he’d orchestrated, lived in fear of summary arrest throughout the course of the inquiry. Even after it came up empty he kept a low profile, asking his brother Moses to represent the family on Rhode Island’s committee of correspondence formed in mid-1773.
Moses possessed little heart for activism. Morose by nature, he tended to question his family’s materialistic values whenever tragedy struck one of its members. His wife’s death the previous February had seemed a rebuke from heaven, and before the year was out he withdrew from business and politics. Having received comfort during her illness at the meeting house of the Society of Friends, Moses converted from Baptist to Quaker, embracing strictures of nonviolence and neutrality that later clashed with his sympathies for the Revolutionary movement.
No less profoundly for this pillar of Rhode Island mercantilism, his conversion compelled Moses to free his slaves on the basis “that the holding of Negroes in slavery however kindly treated by their masters has a tendency to encourage the iniquitous practice of importing them from their native country and is contrary to that justice, mercy, and humanity enjoined as the duty of every Christian.” He set them up with employment, education, land, and money, then lobbied his brothers to abandon the “guinea trade.”
Nicholas, the eldest, had lost a fortune bankrolling a voyage several years earlier in which 88 out of 196 slaves had died at sea, most from disease, some at the hands of the crew during an attempted uprising, and the rest from jumping overboard rather than submitting to captivity. Joseph, a technician rather than a speculator, managed the family’s iron foundry and spermaceti candle factory, so like Nicholas was content to quit the slave business for practical reasons. Though neither displayed his fervor in the cause of emancipation, Moses wrote that “happily they and I lived to regret” their earlier participation “in that unrighteous traffic.” The same couldn’t be said of John.
On the contrary, he expanded his participation even after the General Assembly’s 1774 ban on bringing slaves into Rhode Island. His way around the law was through the “triangular trade,” whereby the proceeds of rum exported to Europe went toward the purchase of African slaves for delivery, via the brutal Middle Passage across the Atlantic, to West Indian markets, where they were exchanged for molasses and sugar to supply distilleries back in New England. It was an efficient, self-perpetuating cycle that required investors to put up money only to fund the initial cargo of rum, and featured a further advantage of keeping actual slaves, with all the squeamish details their traffic involved, far out of sight and mind of Puritan-descended New Englanders.
Moses attributed his brother’s slave activities to “love of money and anxiety to acquire it,” but they expressed John’s philosophy as much as his greed. “As the arch individualist, he was inalterably opposed in principle to any interference by government with so-called free enterprise in business.” That same philosophy had motivated his raid on Gaspee, though history would judge it much differently.
Chastened by his close brush with the law, John tempered his political passions after 1772 and concentrated on business. But his past caught up with him in April 1775 when he was arrested in Newport by Captain James Wallace of HMS Rose, a twenty-four-gun frigate. Popular hatred of Wallace, who was said to erupt in “mad fits” of randomly discharging his cannon into coastal villages, was the best measure of his success against illicit trade, now suppressed to the degree that a majority of Newport businessmen had moved to Providence to pursue prospects further inland. He accused Brown of selling flour to colonial militia in Massachusetts. On delivering his prisoner to Admiral Samuel Graves, Montagu’s successor at the Royal Navy’s Boston headquarters, the charge was expanded to include participation in the Gaspee affair.
John Brown, a hard-nosed businessman, epitomized Rhode Island’s reputation for nonconformism and self-interest. His aggressive ventures in cannon-production and private warships furthered the Patriot cause and fattened his wallet, not necessarily in that order. His activities in the African slave trade would fracture his family and forever damage his legacy.
Moses saved the day. Rushing north to appeal to Graves and the British Army’s General Gage, he put his pacifist credentials on the line with a promise that his brother, the renowned rabble-rouser, would personally lobby the Rhode Island government “to adopt a more moderate and conciliatory attitude” toward the crown. In a testament to the commanders’ desire to douse further fires of rebellion—three hundred British had fallen in battles at Lexington and Concord a week earlier—Graves and Gage approved John’s release on assurances “binding both upon the Browns and the British officials.” And indeed John, who’d wept with dread while in the brig in Boston Harbor, kept his end of the bargain, telling the General Assembly four days later “that it is now in the power of this colony and continent to make such propositions to his Excellency General Gage as will effecti
vely put a stop to any hostilities.”
It took him only a month to return to form, however. He filed a court claim for £10,000 against Captain Wallace not on the expectation of winning but rather to counter perceptions that the Browns had gone soft on the British. Moses was furious that the suit violated his promise to military authorities and impugned his reputation for “sincerity and honesty.” Unmoved, John shrugged that he was “so clear in opinion that the measures now taking to force America are wrong that it is out of my power to restrain myself from wishing success to the country in which I was born.”
His differences with Moses now widened past reconciliation, John renewed ties with his eldest brother. Nicholas combined political gloom (“Divine providence hath left the two countries to be scourges to punish each other for their sins,” he wrote) with a cool eye for opportunity. Partnered as Nicholas Brown & Company, the brothers’ first project was to supply American troops mustering in Massachusetts.
Beyond arms, uniforms, and blankets, gunpowder was most lacking, its import banned by the British since 1774. On taking command in July 1775, George Washington found the Continental Army, a patchwork of New England militia dug in around 6,500 redcoats in Boston, to be so bereft of powder and lead that “for want of them we really cannot carry on any spirited operation.” His infantry had ten shots per man. His artillery feared returning enemy volleys lest it have no ammunition to repel a British breakout.
Advised of the shortages, the recently convened Continental Congress announced an up-front offer of “a generous price” for military goods. Merchants pounced. Beyond imploring them to “not take undue advantage of the distresses of their country so as to exact an unreasonable price,” Washington had no choice but to pay what was demanded.
More than 90 percent of the gunpowder used by rebels in the first three years of the war originated abroad. Most of it came through Philadelphia, but with Boston under occupation and New York torn with political strife (two-thirds of its inhabitants were British sympathizers), Providence was in good position to take early advantage. The Browns launched “powder voyages” to Spain, Holland, and France, where suppliers were eager to grab some of the bountiful American trade after decades of control by the mercantile houses of Britain.
The natural dangers of seafaring were compounded by threats of Royal Navy interception. Soon the preference, as in the triangular slave trade, was to make the West Indies the exchange point of American commodities for European munitions. This left the journey’s long transatlantic leg to slow, durable, heavy-laden square-riggers rendered immune to British harassment by the sovereign flags they flew and by their neutral destinations, among them Spanish Cuba, St. Eustatius in the Dutch Antilles, and French-owned Martinique. It left the shorter, homeward run to swift American sloops and schooners manned by men with knowledge of coastal waters and the capability, if pressed by British blockaders, of darting into any convenient harbor on the eastern seaboard and hauling their cargoes overland from there.
Military trade was a seller’s market in the extreme. Merchants as readily sold “warlike stores” to any other paying customer, usually provincial governments bolstering local defenses or outfitting naval squadrons to patrol their rivers and harbors, as to the Continental Army. Washington’s lack of leverage was apparent in one deal with John Brown, whose last-minute retraction of an agreement to deliver fifteen casks of gunpowder was unapologetic. The General Assembly had offered more money, Brown shrugged, hence he “must give them the preference.”
The arms business was far from a sure thing, however. Several of the Browns’ early voyages “entirely failed,” and tactical tips included in their sailing instructions to skippers (“run in by night so as to escape them”) clearly came of painful experience. The ability to take risks and absorb losses was a key factor in their company’s emergence as an important supplier of powder and weapons.
To ensure its needs took precedence, Congress formed the Secret Committee to begin financing supply expeditions in the fall of 1775. Lacking credit or hard currency, the committee shipped tobacco, indigo, grain, or timber as barter for foreign munitions. Merchants brokered the deals. They used Congress’s money to buy export commodities and to hire vessels, captains, and crews. Then they arranged with their foreign contacts to complete the exchange on the other end.
They received commissions on each phase of the transaction—
5 percent of the value of the initial cargo, 2.5 percent of its sale price overseas. Congress covered any losses, news of which often came matter-of-factly from merchants with no real stake in the outcome. Reported one firm after spending a $45,000 advance on German arms, “It unfortunately happened that the ship has never been heard of and our agent perished in her. This of course prevented the execution of the contract.” The advance wasn’t refunded.
It was a lopsided arrangement to say the least. Since merchants worked on commission rather than set fees, there was no incentive to seek cheaper terms; indeed, higher prices meant higher commissions. The availability of items in foreign ports was hard to predict given voyages lasting weeks and months, so dispatching a cargo of tobacco in hopes of converting it to munitions was no assurance that the vessel would return with mortars and firing flints instead of pickles and table linen. And letting merchants, as enticement to participate in the effort, piggyback their private trade aboard vessels bound by contract to make military purchases created an environment vulnerable to manipulation.
Merchants commonly gave their captains shopping lists in which military supplies shared priority with high-demand civilian goods or personal wants such as the “good Florence oil, a chest of claret, and a keg of the best brandy” that Nicholas and John tacked onto a government order for sulphur, guns, and canvas. Initially, no negative stigma attached to these glaring conflicts of interest. It was accepted that capitalism and patriotism went hand in hand. John Brown bragged of unloading on Congress a surplus of candles that had been decaying in storage. He got top price and a commission besides. The army, once the candles were sold in France, got two hundred firearms and three thousand pounds of gunpowder.
But Congress grew impatient with results falling short of promises. Nicholas Brown & Company delivered only nine of thirty-six tons of powder stipulated in contracts worth $44,000, for example. After temporarily forbidding any international ventures not explicitly tied to military procurement, Congress concluded that the economic necessity of open trade outweighed the likelihood of some American goods falling into British hands. Merchants thus were permitted again to make deals in their own interest, meaning munitions, though always desirable, could take second place to whatever foreign products might pull a higher price back home.
“Powder expected to fall soon,” ran a typical purchase order. “All kinds of dry goods very high, selling at four times cost in America.” The decision? “Would advise you not to be large in powder. Put every shilling you can command in dry goods.” The needs of the army, in short, could wait.
Striking liberal arrangements with savvy, experienced businessmen was Congress’s best option to supply Washington’s troops early in the war. The Secret Committee went on to appoint its own agents to negotiate foreign arms purchases while merchants gladly resumed independent operation. Though government contracts had offered surefire returns, huge markups on private imports were worth the risk of going it alone.
Too, critics had begun to complain about the Secret Committee’s operating procedures. A number of its members had received lucrative arms contracts. Willing, Morris & Company, a Philadelphia firm run by the committee chairman, Robert Morris, cleared £12,000 in powder deliveries “without any risk at all,” John Adams grumbled. The deal prompted “vitriolic” exchanges among members of Congress “on the general theme of business and patriotism.”
As war profits became manifested in business expansion and ever grander lifestyles, resentment increased. Commercial ties to the government invited suspicions of graft and, in a new development, inhibited me
rchants from obtaining munitions for themselves rather than for their country.
Nicholas Brown & Company began reflecting this altered priority in 1776. The “many accusations” of price gouging (“indecent as well as uncharitable,” sniffed John) were followed with charges that when it came to cannon and gunpowder, the company wasn’t interested in selling at all, preferring to arm its own vessels rather than supply the army and navy.
The Browns’ affronted contention that they were “as deeply engaged in the cause of the United States as any other men on the continent” wasn’t the denial it appeared to be. Though still seeking profits through traditional paths, they indeed were withholding munitions in expectation of embarking on an exciting new enterprise. It was the Gaspee paradox all over again—in doing for themselves, they were advancing the cause more than anyone could have realized. Begun in Massachusetts and quickly embraced by Providence’s wily entrepreneurs, privateering had come to Rhode Island.
1775
MACHIAS, MAINE
Eight weeks after the battles at Lexington and Concord, HMS Margaretta, an armed cutter carrying four cannon and 40 crewmen, sailed to Machias, Maine, seeking lumber to fortify the Boston garrison. It was commanded by a Royal Navy midshipman named James Moore. Hoping that news of the recent bloodshed hadn’t yet reached this far north, he planned to trade for the lumber with cargo items from two supply ships in convoy with him. Unfortunately villagers had heard rumors of war out of Massachusetts and were disinclined to deal.
To drive home the point they erected in their town green a “liberty pole,” a tall pine stripped of all but its top branches that had become a symbol of patriotic solidarity. Moore, a young man clearly on edge, demanded they provide the lumber and chop down the tree or else be shelled by his guns. The strong-arm tactic backfired. Immediately a mob assembled with “fouling pieces, pitchforks, a few scythes, and ten or twelve axes,” commandeered one of the British supply ships, Unity, and rammed it into Margaretta.
Patriot Pirates Page 3