An Empire on the Edge

by Nick Bunker

  In Great Britain this became an article of faith among the nation’s leaders. When they asked themselves why America rose in revolt, they often traced the cause to contraband and nothing else. When in 1794 the British published their official history of the Revolutionary War, written by an American Loyalist, Charles Stedman, the book made the point emphatically, accusing the people of New England of a multitude of what the author called “illicit practices,” with six long pages devoted to the details. In search of hard currency to pay for all the things they needed, including guns and bullets, they sailed off to the Caribbean to flout the law by selling their wares to the Dutch, the Spanish, and the French. In return, they brought home cargoes of tea, molasses, and rum, as well as silver from Mexico, or paper IOUs they could turn into ready money in Lisbon. When the British tried to eradicate the smuggling trade, the Americans rose up in arms, and that, said Mr. Stedman, was how the revolution began.6

  Or so many people in London believed: a very simple analysis, which contained a grain of truth but little more. Nobody doubted that smuggling was rife. No one in America seriously denied it. For simple economic reasons, the contraband trade had come to be woven into the fabric of everyday life, just as it was in Europe and the British Isles, with the only difference being that in the English Channel cognac took the place of rum. But while smuggling certainly played its part in the revolutionary story, the British displayed an obsession with the topic that obscured other motives for rebellion.

  It was an obsession that might wreak havoc if a greedy officer took it too far. By 1772, Dudingston had a reputation for doing exactly that. From Virginia northward the press ran stories about his foul mouth and his freedom with his fists, and in Rhode Island he provoked the confrontation that gave him his place in history. The Gaspée incident, as it was known, would reveal in miniature all the forces driving Great Britain and its colonies apart. Too often dismissed as merely a riot by a mob, the affair needs to be taken very seriously indeed, because in London—and especially at the Admiralty—the incident caused deep and abiding anger, while in America the lieutenant’s behavior left an equally dire legacy of distrust. The incident would take place in June, after more than four months of tension between the Scotsman and the people of the coast.7

  The feud began when the weather cleared in the first week of February, allowing the Gaspée and another naval vessel, the Canceaux, to keep a close watch on the creeks and inlets of Buzzards Bay. Because drifting floes of ice made the entrance to the bay especially perilous, the navy sent in a small boat, under the command of an officer called Christie. Not far from Newport he sighted a sloop, lying low in the water and heavily laden: the Swanzey, bound for Boston, or so her master claimed. Armed with an act of Parliament and an order from the Privy Council in Whitehall, the navy had the law behind it if it stopped a craft that looked so obviously suspect. When Christie boarded the Swanzey, he found rum and sugar sourced from the Dutch West Indies but without the necessary papers. So he put the sloop under armed guard for the trip back to base; but night was closing in, and Christie dared not venture over the shoals around Cape Cod. Running for cover to Martha’s Vineyard, he found a place of safety beneath a whaling village called Holmes Hole.*1

  With the wind picking up and snow falling hard, Christie waited with his prize until, in the early hours of February 7, four boatloads of armed Americans came swarming over the side. When the newspapers picked up the story, they said the men were dressed as Indians. Seizing the crew, they stripped them of their weapons, cut the Swanzey’s cable, and made off toward the open sea, pausing only to dump Christie and his men in a dinghy to paddle their way back to shore in the bitter cold.8

  The following morning Dudingston appeared nearby with the Gaspée. Picking up Christie, he mustered a boarding party and sent them off in search of the Swanzey. They set off up a creek that led inland toward the road to Edgartown, the sloop’s most likely hiding place. Finding no trace of the sloop, they rowed back, only to hear a volley of shots from the village. A crowd of three hundred had gathered onshore, and they launched their boats to intercept the British sailors. The navy opened fire with small arms, the whaling men retreated, and both sides backed away from a battle neither could win. Even so, the incident did lasting damage. As word traveled along the coast, to be followed by more confrontations between the Gaspée and American seafarers, the lieutenant became a marked man, incurring the hatred of all those whom he met.

  For Admiral Montagu the affair was utterly outrageous. If smuggling was a felony, here was something close to treason: outright contempt for the British flag and two violent assaults on his sailors. Although he was new to America, the admiral knew that incidents like this had taken place before. Three years earlier, at Newport, a crowd had taken a customs sloop and destroyed her by fire. Sometimes naval officers came under attack when they tried to press Americans into the king’s service. But while these earlier incidents could mostly be dismissed as isolated affairs, spontaneous and unplanned, in 1772 the violence seemed to take a more sinister shape, resembling an organized conspiracy. Montagu soon came to believe that the harshest measures were needed to drag New England back within the rule of law.

  In the meantime, the Gaspée carried on with her mission, seizing another American sloop, bound in from Haiti and loaded with sugar. Taking her into Newport for prosecution as a smuggler, Dudingston went to introduce himself to the governor of Rhode Island. There followed a brief and awkward exchange of courtesies that, in due course, would become yet another source of angry disagreement. The governor inquired about the Swanzey affair, and then the Scotsman hurried back to his ship.

  In the middle of February, when at last the ice started to melt in Narragansett Bay, the Gaspée began to probe inland along the chain of coves that led to the Providence River. For what happened next, we have conflicting sources, British and American, a common problem with the revolution, disagreeing about the precise date and location and about the rights and wrongs of what took place. Fortunately, they agree about the gist of what occurred and the identity of the Americans whom Dudingston offended.

  On February 17—or the nineteenth, depending on which source we read—the Gaspée spotted a sloop called the Fortune close inshore, with small boats moored on the tidal flats and again a crowd assembled on the beach. Off went another boarding party to seize the sloop, with the rum and sugar she carried. Later the Americans claimed that the Fortune was merely a coaster making a routine voyage when the navy stopped her without a reason. According to the lieutenant, the sloop fired on his men, and the rum was smuggled from the Dutch Antilles. Unwilling to trust a local judge, he sent the Fortune round to Boston, a step of doubtful legality that only made matters worse. Unwittingly, the Gaspée had antagonized a family of Rhode Islanders who embodied all the values for which the colony stood.9

  The rum belonged to the Greenes, Quakers with a farm or two, a sawmill, and a forge for making anchors. The navy had not the slightest idea who they were or why it might be unwise to upset them. But one of the men who owned the cargo was Nathanael Greene, who would soon shed his Quaker beliefs to become the youngest general in George Washington’s army and his closest aide from Bunker Hill to Yorktown. As Greene wrote soon after the arrest of the Fortune, the loss of her cargo created “such a Spirit of Resentment that I have devoted almost the whole of my time in devising measures for punishing the offender.” In saying that, Greene spoke for many other people in a province deeply attached to its distinctive way of life.10

  When it seized the Fortune, the Gaspée collided not only with the Greenes but with an entire society, with an alien culture the navy viewed with disdain. Although factors such as these are notoriously hard to quantify, already the values and the attitudes of Britons and Americans had drifted far apart. While they spoke what seemed to be a common language, the words it contained—like “God,” “liberty,” “patriotism,” and “law”—had acquired different meanings on each side of the ocean, so that as they slid towar
d war often each nation simply misunderstood what the other was saying. Here was another reason why the rift between them became impossible to mend.

  Like their colleagues in the army, Dudingston and Montagu came from the British landed gentry, rural oligarchs of a traditional society built from bricks of deference. In Rhode Island they came up against a very different environment for which they felt no sympathy. By 1772 the province had already become one of the most advanced societies of its time, and one over which Whitehall exercised almost no control. Here by the sea a visitor could taste the flavor of avant-garde America, chiefly in the thriving town of Providence.

  A LIVELY EXPERIMENT

  Although we think of Rhode Island as a little place, its small dimensions were a source of strength. Only sixty thousand people lived there, barely a fifth as many as in Massachusetts, but they were tightly clustered around the rim of the bay, not scattered across a hundred miles of farms and forest. One in four of its people lived in sizable towns, making this the most urban province in America. And so information traveled fast in the columns of two newspapers or on the weekly stage from Boston. Of all the colonies, Rhode Island was also the one where the ocean entered most deeply into the lives of the people, and this made the province all the more open and more extrovert.11

  Thanks to hard work, a little luck, and its geography, it had already built a free republic, albeit one that fell far short of perfection. Elections were rigged; the courts were political; and a gulf of inequality divided the rich from the poor, with the top 10 percent of the population owning two-thirds of the wealth. And yet by the shores of Narragansett Bay a visitor would find democracy in action, and very successfully so.

  A singular place, Rhode Island liked to flaunt its achievements. Go to Providence today, and in the eighteenth-century buildings that remain you will see the evidence of enterprise and flair. Some might even call it arrogance. Just before the revolution the town reinvented itself with a new town hall, a brick schoolhouse, a covered market, and of course the College of Rhode Island, later to become Brown University, all of them still to be seen along a grid pattern of streets first marked out in the year of the Gaspée.

  One edifice towers above all the rest: the First Baptist Church, begun just after the Boston Tea Party and finished a few weeks after Lexington. A handsome building, painted white, with an illustrious wooden steeple, it climbs up the hillside above the inner harbor, with a bold design that symbolized the ambition of the town. When the church held its first Sunday service, the worshippers filled only the first five rows of pews in a huge interior that could accommodate several thousand, a sign of their confidence about the town’s future. In the previous twenty years, while the town of Boston stagnated, hardly growing at all in the decades before the revolution, the population of Rhode Island had risen by 50 percent, with Providence advancing especially rapidly.

  To trace the origins of its prosperity, a new arrival in Providence had only to follow his nose along the waterfront, to enjoy the fragrance left by cocoa, molasses, charcoal, apples, and rum. Nearby at a place called Tockwotton, he would encounter the most distinctive smell of all, oily and full of the sea. Sprawling across eleven acres, a factory made candles from the wax inside the heads of whales. It sold the best candles in America, wrapped in blue paper, for shipment up and down the coast and off to England.12

  Narragansett Bay and the coast of Rhode Island, with Providence at top left and Newport at the bottom, from the first scientific British naval chart of the region, published in 1777. Gaspée Point, where the schooner ran aground, is on the western side of the Providence River immediately above the topmost fold on the left. © National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London

  An industrial town of artisans as well as mariners, turning out iron, cider, and chocolate as well as candles and liquor, Providence bore at least a passing resemblance to seaports in the mother country, and especially in the eastern neighborhoods of London, such as Stepney and Wapping. There you might have found the same combination of ships, wharves, and factories, and the same dissenting attitudes in matters of belief as well as politics. In London behind the docks you would see chapels for many different kinds of Christians, even the least orthodox. In just the same way, in Providence and Newport the people played many variations on the theme of God. In Rhode Island, at least five Christian denominations vied with each other for believers, led by the Quakers and the Baptists, followed closely by the Congregationalists and the Episcopalians. Close behind came the Presbyterians, not to mention the Jews at Newport, and free thinkers like Nathanael Greene who were swiftly abandoning any formal creed.

  And yet, despite some vague affinities with parts of London, there was nothing in the old country that really compared with Rhode Island. King George could hardly fail to raise his eyebrows when he thought about the way the colony chose its leaders. Even by American standards it was an extreme case of popular government; and ironically enough, this was partly the legacy of an earlier monarch. In the 1630s, Rhode Island came into being as a haven of religious freedom, thanks to Roger Williams. In due course, after the English Civil War the Puritans lost the mother country, and King Charles II regained his throne. At that moment, we might have expected the sovereign to draw the colony firmly back within the pale. In fact he did the reverse. In 1663, the king gave Rhode Island a charter that protected the system Williams had created: “a lively experiment,” as the charter put it, “with a full liberty of religious concernments.” At the same time, the king upheld its other liberties as well, with the charter making every public office an elected post, including the governorship.13

  Only adult males with property could vote, but the electorate still came to about a quarter of the population. In May, they picked sixty-four deputies to form their assembly for the following year. In turn the assembly chose the governor and his deputy and the judges, who sat in the five county courts. Then they picked the local justices, the sheriffs, and the captains of militia, all elected too. Each town had its own council, while committees met to build bridges or schoolhouses or manage the lotteries that paid for them. The same principle of democracy extended to matters of faith, but perhaps the most radical feature of the colony was the way it ran its courts of law.

  To the British then and now, the very idea of an elected judge seems absurd, a recipe for bias and misconduct. But although in Rhode Island the judges were often amateurs, and their decisions sometimes blatantly one-sided, the system had its merits, providing not only a degree of openness that England could not match but also an element of originality. On the bench a justice chosen by the people might develop ideas a professional jurist dare not express.

  A case in point was the political boss of Providence, a man of sixty-five named Stephen Hopkins. At the time of the Gaspée he served as chief justice, as he always did, with a veto over anything the governor might decide. A farmer but also an industrialist, he owned ships and dealt in iron, he read the poetry of Pope, and he drank a lot of liquor: but as far as we can tell, Hopkins never endured a day’s formal tuition in the law. Near the town’s new college, he lived in a clapboard house from which he pulled strings and mentored the young, keeping in close touch with the patriots in Boston and writing for the Providence Gazette. Amateur though he was, Hopkins fashioned a powerful doctrine that helped to inspire the campaign against the Gaspée. As early as 1757, he told his friends that “the King & Parliament had no more Right to make Laws for us than the Mohawks.” Again, it was the sort of thing a man might say in a pub, but it was entirely consistent with Rhode Island’s charter.

  As a way to maintain some influence over the colony, the king had included in the charter a phrase saying that Rhode Island could pass no laws “contrary and repugnant” to those of England. But although these words might seem clear enough, the following clause introduced a caveat that opened the way for radicals to interpret the document as something close to a manifesto for independence. The statutes of Rhode Island must be “agreeable” to English laws
, the charter said, but only after taking into account what it called “the nature and constitution of the place and people.” From words like these, so rich in ambiguity, a lawyer might forge a revolutionary creed. He might take them to mean that only the people of Rhode Island, and nobody else, could decide what laws they lived by.14

  It seems that Stephen Hopkins read the clause in precisely that way, and then, during the 1760s, he went further still to become a theorist of liberty for all the colonies, and not merely his own. Given his background, naturally he began by opposing the new Grenville taxes on sugar and molasses. To start with, Hopkins’s arguments did not seem new or unusual: like many other Americans he merely cited an ancient principle of English law, dating back to King Edward I in the thirteenth century. By virtue of a statute enacted in 1297, taxes required the consent of those who had to pay them; and consent took the form of a vote by their representatives in Parliament. It would never have occurred to George III to question such a hallowed tradition, and he never did. Americans, including Hopkins, simply pointed out that since they sent no elected delegates to Westminster, they could not have given their consent to Grenville’s taxes, including those levied under the Stamp Act: hence their refusal to pay them.

  So far, so familiar; but by itself, the colonial critique of imperial taxation need not have led to outright rebellion. It was perfectly feasible—in fact, it was commonplace—for a colonist to object to taxation by the British while remaining loyal to the Crown in every other way. To legitimize a revolution, Americans required a far more radical ideology, which Hopkins began to develop as early as 1764. According to him, every action taken by the British government in America, fiscal or not, required the consent of the people, given locally in Rhode Island or its sister colonies. And if you wished to know if any particular law was valid, you had to ask the local judges. If their opinion differed from that of the king and Lord North, so much the worse for the British, since the local colonial view should always prevail.