An Empire on the Edge

by Nick Bunker

  For the time being, Hopkins did not wish to secede from the empire. Rather like Benjamin Franklin, he came to see it as something akin to a gentlemen’s club. The empire was old-fashioned, it was pompous, and many of the rules were silly, but membership offered some benefits that Americans preferred not to lose. Although the laws of trade could be irksome, at least they gave the colonies free access to the British market for the goods they sold. It was also worth belonging to the club for the sake of the Royal Navy: provided the admirals desisted from harassing honest traders and kept to their proper vocation of sinking the French.

  But none of this amounted to a ringing endorsement of loyalty to Great Britain. If Stephen Hopkins believed that Whitehall had no constitutional right to overrule a judge in Newport, and if he owed allegiance to the king only so long as he was given something in return, he had already strayed halfway down the road to independence. And by 1769 at the latest, we can find the i word being freely discussed in the circles in which Hopkins moved. When the new college at Providence held its first graduation day, it marked the occasion with a debate between two bright students. The question they discussed was this: “Whether British America can, under her present circumstances and consistent with good policy, affect to become an independent State.” We do not know which speaker received the most applause; what matters is the fact that they held the debate at all. Long before the Gaspée incident, Hopkins and his friends had already begun to equip an arsenal of ideas with which to justify the stiffest of resistance to the navy.15

  By the early 1770s, animosity between the colony and the Crown had come to be almost routine. The British complained about Hopkins for ignoring directives from London and for refusing to compensate victims of the riots against the Stamp Act. For their part, the Rhode Islanders demanded compensation of their own, to pay for their efforts to defeat the French ten years earlier. Worse still, a waterfront gang in Newport had nearly beaten to death an English customs officer, Charles Dudley. Causing outrage in London, the affair led to a swift rebuke and a warning of reprisals if it happened again. The British did not specify what form they might take, but one measure would have been by far the most effective. Sooner or later, Parliament might decide that the colony’s seventeenth-century charter was an eccentric throwback and take steps to revoke it. It might also do the same in Massachusetts. Before the Boston Tea Party, the British made no firm plans to do so in either colony, but both sides saw it was a possibility. This helped to darken the atmosphere in London and New England alike.

  Ironically enough, the terminal crisis in the relationship between Rhode Island and the British arose not from a slump in the local economy but from its very opposite. In Rhode Island and the other colonies the first half of 1772 marked the peak of a business cycle. The volume of shipping rose sharply to reach the highest level of the century so far, as Americans shared in the maritime boom that extended all the way to China, a boom that explains that year’s acceleration in the smuggling trade. With more money in their pockets, men and women bought more tea, brandy, and rum. At home in England, the files of His Majesty’s Treasury showed a sudden, alarming increase in all kinds of illegal traffic there as well, and across the ocean the shipping boom had a powerful effect on the little port at Providence.16

  It enriched the harbor’s most dynamic family, the famous commercial brotherhood called Brown. Allies of Hopkins, they shared his political views, and they led the rebuilding of the town. Joseph Brown designed the new Baptist church; his brother John supervised the work; and their sibling Nicholas paid for the bell. Like so many others in Rhode Island the Browns owed their wealth to the old, primary trade with the Caribbean, exchanging meat, fish, and tobacco for sugar and molasses. But since the end of the war with France in 1763, the Browns had begun to spread their wings, leading the way in the ventures that made the colony more diverse, including the ironworks and the candle factory. When the Gaspée first hove into view, they were expanding again, making new connections in the mother country with London and the textile mills of Lancashire.

  Of all the family, the most reckless was John Brown, aged thirty-six, small but abrasive, a trader in slaves, and another man ready to gamble in pursuit of profit. If the Royal Navy posed a threat to his thriving business, he would have to stop it, by force if necessary. As the ice melted and word spread about the Fortune, John Brown prepared to meet the Scottish lieutenant head-on.17

  FIRE AND SWORD

  With the Fortune taken into custody, the Gaspée continued to prowl inshore in pursuit of more cargoes to seize. On February 20, Dudingston found another prize in the form of a boatload of molasses. Four days later the Newport Mercury appeared, sounding the alarm about what it called a “piratical schooner,” heavily armed, attacking poor but honest traders. “Americans take CARE of your PROPERTY!!” the newspaper shouted. While some people said the ship belonged to the Crown, with heavy irony the newspaper doubted that this could be so. The navy existed, said the Mercury, to defend the empire and surely not to plunder the honest seafarers of the coast.

  It was a fine piece of journalism: forthright, timely, and even accurate, more or less. As the revolution drew near, the press played an essential role, as a reporter but also as a catalyst, driving forward the process of disobedience. Swiftly, the column in the Mercury found a wider audience in Boston and Philadelphia. Like any good story, it upset the powerful, in this case Admiral Montagu, who sent the article home to London as more evidence of anarchy in New England. Dudingston simply ignored it, heading out to sea to intercept another boat from the West Indies. Then, with the weather growing colder again, he returned to Narragansett Bay. After such a hard winter everything was in short supply, and yet, it was reported, his men stole hogs from local farmers, stripped the shore of firewood, and fired at passing fishermen. Most of these incidents occurred, it seems, around Prudence Island, where the Gaspée could cut the route upriver from Newport to Providence. By the middle of March, with more snow on the way, Dudingston had created something close to a blockade that might cripple the colony’s economy.18

  If, as English law allowed, the Gaspée searched every craft she met, she might wreck the trade in rum. Despite the Browns’ efforts to diversify, this remained the core of their activities, a reliable source of cash from an everyday item. Before the age of bourbon, Americans drank rum in heroic quantities for the charge of warmth and energy it gave. To make it, they needed huge volumes of molasses, the sticky brown fluid from which it was distilled. At least a third of the molasses passed through the hands of smugglers, which meant that if Dudingston patrolled the bay tightly, he would find an endless stream of unlawful goods to confiscate.

  Of course the importers could avoid arrest simply by paying the customs duty. But while the sums involved were modest from a British point of view, they amounted to a heavy burden for the local traders. If every gallon of molasses bore the tax, the annual bill for Rhode Island alone would come to £1,000 in sterling, payable in silver, which the colonists did not have. As John Adams once said, molasses was “an essential ingredient in American independence.” We can see why the Browns felt obliged to protest even if this meant attacking the Royal Navy.19

  From the outset a threat of violence loomed over the affair, as it would later in Boston in the weeks before the destruction of the tea. Soon after he arrived, Dudingston heard rumors that the colonists planned to arm a ship of their own against him; and later the British would come to believe that John Brown always intended to resort to force. Initially, however, his tactics were entirely peaceful. In the middle of March nine merchants from Providence signed a petition against the Gaspée, with Brown’s name at the top. They showed the paper to Hopkins, who wrote his legal opinion on the back. According to him, before a British officer entered the colony’s waters, he had to show the governor his orders and his commission from the king. The Gaspée had failed to do so, which meant, said Hopkins, that she was little better than a pirate ship herself.

  With Hopkins on
their side, the petitioners approached the governor, Joseph Wanton, a rich but popular man, genteel and charming. Although he owed his rank to support from Hopkins, he never claimed to be a radical, and later he refused to back the revolution. Here was a dignitary with whom the British should have been able to negotiate. Instead, the navy made an enemy of the one man who might have prevented the clash that was about to occur. In the small world of Rhode Island, Wanton could hardly ignore a petition from John Brown and his allies. Traders to the Caribbean, the Wantons counted the Browns among their friends and business partners, buying from them the tobacco they needed for their own slaving voyages to Africa. Nor could the governor disregard an opinion from his chief justice. When he received the petition, Wanton wrote a firm letter to the lieutenant asking for sight of his papers.20

  At this point Dudingston should simply have complied with good grace, since he had the necessary documents. Instead, he reminded Wanton of their earlier meeting in February and questioned his authority to ask for anything more. An angry reply came back from Wanton, which the lieutenant sent straight to Boston. With reports arriving of more Dutch ships with illegal tea, the admiral had no time for a lecture from Rhode Island. On the contrary, Montagu had already sent a bigger warship, a sloop called the Beaver, to seal the entrance to Long Island Sound. Two weeks later the admiral wrote Wanton a rude letter of his own, wrecking any hope of compromise. Calling the governor insolent and ridiculous, he threatened to hang any man who tried to oppose the Gaspée.

  By the middle of May the situation had reached a deadlock far beyond diplomacy. Cruising in and out of Narragansett Bay, the Beaver and the Gaspée stopped boat after boat, traded insults with the crews, and seized a few cargoes of coffee, wine, and rum. Meanwhile, the locals ran their own campaign of obstruction, refusing to sell the British any stores and harassing the navy with lawsuits in the local courts, led by Nathanael Greene and his brothers.

  The assembly convened in an angry mood, with five men called Greene among their number. They instructed Governor Wanton to write to London about the Gaspée, which he did, but the admiral refused to alter course. Fearing the worst but unable to climb down, he kept his ships in place but warned his officers to be on their guard against attack. At last it came in the early hours of Wednesday, June 10. Some of the details are open to debate, but nobody can quibble about the central element of what occurred. The seafarers of Rhode Island took up arms and committed an act of treason.21

  Tuesday, the ninth, had begun cold and dull. Close to Newport the Beaver and the Gaspée lay at anchor until noon, when Dudingston set off toward Providence, thirty miles away, to pick up some new crewmen. Although this should have been a routine errand, the wind was against him, and his route contained hazards of which the lieutenant knew nothing. Under orders to save money, the navy would not pay for coastal pilots, and so the Gaspée had to find her course unaided. The first twenty miles were easy enough, in deep water across the bay, but beyond that the land closed in on either side. A long spit of sand curved out from the western shore, marking the point where the bay ended and the Providence River began: a watery corridor lined with marshes, shoals, and shallow coves where without warning the current would suddenly rip around a headland.

  Somewhere out in the bay, at about three o’clock that afternoon, Dudingston spotted a vessel called the Hannah and gave chase. Later, when he was court-martialed for losing his ship, he preferred not to mention this detail, but American sources gleefully describe what happened next. A mile inside the river, close to a promontory called Namquit Point, the skipper of the Hannah suddenly changed course and veered toward the shore. Dudingston did the same, hit a sandbank, and settled in two feet of water. The Hannah vanished around a bend, arriving in Providence in time for supper. There was nothing the Gaspée could do except wait for the tide to float her off the next morning. The lieutenant ordered his crew over the side to splash around the hull and scrape its bottom, and they sent out a boat to take some soundings. As night fell, they turned in, leaving only one seaman on the deck.

  The moon dropped below the horizon soon after midnight, and so it was almost entirely dark when, at about 12:45, the lookout noticed what he took to be some rocks between the Gaspée and the shore. As the rocks came closer, the crewman realized that they were six or seven longboats, each one filled with men. When they ignored a challenge, he tried to shoot, but his musket failed to fire. Hurrying below, he roused the lieutenant.

  Before he came aloft, Dudingston paused and ordered his midshipman to open the ship’s chest full of guns. The chest was locked, and no one could find the key or matches to light the lamp. Armed only with his cutlass, the lieutenant reached the deck and leaped up on the starboard bow. The line of boats was fifty yards away and making straight for the Gaspée. The lieutenant called on them to halt.

  An American voice swore loudly out of the dark. “God damn your blood, we have you now,” he said, or something like it, and the lieutenant swore back. As the two men hurled insults at each other, the midshipman broke open the box and slung an armful of weapons up through the hatchway. The British had time to fire only a few pistol rounds before the first of the raiders clambered over the bows. Still in his shirtsleeves, Dudingston raised his sword to strike, and a musket shot rang out. The lieutenant fell back, with bullet wounds in his arm and in his thigh.

  As he staggered toward the stern, a second wave of raiders appeared over the port side. The crew tried to hold them back in a fight with fists and handspikes, but they were outnumbered by three to one. Lying in a pool of blood, Dudingston told his men to surrender. The Americans carried him into his cabin and gave him first aid with scraps of linen. They tied up the crew, rifled through the Gaspée’s official papers, and, the British said, the raiders even stole her silver spoons.

  That accomplished, their business was done with the navy. They bundled the Gaspée’s crew into small boats and tossed them out on a beach nearby. The lieutenant was too badly wounded to stand up, and so the Americans released five crew members, who carried him over the side in a blanket. As Dudingston was ferried to the shore, from the bottom of the boat he heard a series of explosions. The raiders had set his ship alight. As the flames leaped up in the darkness, they ignited the charges of gunpowder inside its cannon. By the time the sun rose, the Gaspée had ceased to exist.

  When the midshipman swore an affidavit later that day, he called the raiders a mob. Modern historians sometimes use the same word, but it does little justice to the efficiency with which they acted or the complete success of their mission. At the time nobody came forward to confess, because they knew that they were traitors and might hang; but many years later, when America celebrated half a century of independence, at least four of the raiders were still alive.

  On the Fourth of July 1826 they took part in the festivities in Rhode Island, as guests of honor riding in an open carriage. The papers printed the recollections of one of them, Ephraim Bowen, who at the time of the raid had been a medical student from Providence and dressed the lieutenant’s wounds. Although his narrative differs from the British sources and from an account by another of the raiders, the points of disagreement are trivial. It is perfectly clear that far from being a mob, the raiders were led by the maritime elite of Providence. Alongside them, in spirit at least, stood the chief justice, Stephen Hopkins, whose legal opinion had justified the onslaught on the Gaspée.

  Who was the man who swore out of the dark? A master mariner, Abraham Whipple, a frequent sailor to the West Indies on behalf of the Browns. His accomplices included at least three other sea captains and two nephews of the chief justice, while Whipple himself was married to Hopkins’s niece. Two of the raiders served as trustees of the new schoolhouse, while another was the son of the town’s leading doctor. We can safely assume that the rank and file mainly consisted of seamen, mustered by their skippers, or artisans employed by the Browns. According to another eyewitness, the Hannah alerted John Brown to the beaching of the Gaspée, and he
sent a drummer down the waterfront to assemble the raiders at an inn. We have no reason to doubt that this is what took place.22

  So the raiders were more than a rabble, and we cannot dismiss the attack on the Gaspée as just another riot. A military operation three years ahead of its time, it arose not merely from a private quarrel with a Scotsman but also from a matrix of ideas, formed in the circle that surrounded Stephen Hopkins. From the very start, when Brown wrote out his petition, he made this point emphatically. He did not object to the Gaspée simply because its commander was a bully, although of course that did not help. He attacked the ship because the lieutenant was acting unlawfully by failing to show his commission to the governor and by ignoring the local judges. For Brown and Hopkins the only law they recognized was theirs, laid down by their assembly and their local courts. They saw no role in Rhode Island for the English laws that gave the navy its authority.23

  For their part, the British had never seen anything quite like the Gaspée affair. At home they were accustomed to riots, they remembered the Jacobite rebellion of 1745, and in Ireland small insurrections were frequent. But with the great exception of the ’45 these affairs were hopeless and chaotic, entirely unlike the incident at Namquit Point.

  It was the combination that was new. Brown had assembled a new and potent mixture of elements: clear and simple ideas; an economic grievance; and a great deal of raw anger against the wider system of which the navy was a part. Added to that was something else: the sheer audacity with which the men of Providence had behaved. Seven years earlier, during the riots against the stamp tax in New York, a crowd had come close to storming the army’s headquarters, but deals were done and the crowd backed off. John Brown and the Gaspée raiders acted in a way that made compromise impossible. Like the Boston Tea Party, their attack on the ship amounted to a gesture of absolute denial: a complete rejection of the empire’s right to rule.