A Most Insulting Violation the Burning of the HMS Gaspee and the Delaying of the American Revolution

A Most Insulting Violation The Burning of the HMS Gaspee and the Delaying of the American Revolution

peter c. messer

N 9 June 1772, in Narragansett Sound, the Royal Navy O schooner Gaspee gave chase to the sloop Hannah, aship suspected of carrying contraband goods. Near Namquit Point, south of the city of Providence, the Gaspee ran aground. Some time after midnight as the schooner’s crew waited for the tide to lift their vessel off the shoals, a number of small boats attacked the Gaspee, wounded its commanding ofﬁcer, William Duddingston, and burned the ship to the waterline. Rhode Is- land Governor Joseph Wanton responded with a combination of outrage calculated to convince the imperial government of his desire to punish the perpetrators of the attack and stud- ied foot-dragging to ensure that punishment never happened. Matters might have ended there except for the unexpected appearance of Aaron Biggs, a runaway servant, who, in a sworn deposition, named several prominent Rhode Island merchants as the attack’s leaders. Wanton dismissed the evidence as the complaints of a runaway servant and known liar, but Biggs’s accusations found a sympathetic ear, ﬁrst with Admiral John Mon- tagu, commander of His Majesty’s vessels in North America, and then Lord Dartmouth, secretary of state for the colonies. Dartmouth consulted with several attorneys and dispatched a Commission of Inquiry to Newport to assist local authorities in identifying those responsible so that they might be sent to England for trial. The Commission provoked outrage through- out the colonies, culminating with threats of violence in New

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00492 by guest on 01 October 2021 THE BURNING OF THE GASPEE 583 England and with the Virginia House of Burgesses calling for the establishment of inter-colonial committees of correspondence to coordinate resistance to such an unconstitutional act. In these less than auspicious circumstances, the Commission met in two sessions, in January and June 1773, before quietly disbanding without identifying those responsible for the attack. The Gaspee affair has, for the most part, figured very little in historians’ explanations for the coming of the Revolution. Schol- ars have seen it, at best, as a prologue, an opportunity for early, self-styled patriots to flesh out their constitutional grievances with Great Britain, or as a colorful illustration of popular resistance to tyranny.1 This minor role stands at odds with how contemporaries saw the event. One described the Commission as “an evil infinitely worse, in its consequences, than all the revenue laws, which have been passed from the reign of Charles the first, to this time.”2 Pennsylvania moderate John Dickin- son described “the proceedings in Rhode Island,” as “the most insulting violation of the Rights of Americans that could be de- vised.”3 The Commission’s creation, several colonists insisted,

1Stephen H. Park, “The Burning of the Gaspee and the Limits of Eighteenth- Century British Imperial Power” (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Con- necticut, 2005), has made the strongest recent case for the significance of the Gaspee affair, concluding that the controversy surrounding the schooner’s burning and the subsequent Court of Inquiry reawakened the slumbering colonists to the threat the empire posed to their liberties. William R. Leslie, “The Gaspee Affair: A Study of Its Constitutional Significance,” The Mississippi Valley Historical Review 39:2 (September 1952): 233-256, has suggested that it underscored the incompatibility of colonial and imperial understandings of legal jurisdiction enshrined in each’s view of the English Constitution. Pauline Maier, “Popular Uprisings and Civil Authority in Eighteenth- Century America,” The William and Mary Quarterly 3rd.ser.27:1 (January 1970): 3-35 (hereafter referred to as WMQ), used it as an illustration of the degree to which fun- damentally conservative Whigs would accept popular tumult in opposition to tyranny. Lawrence Henry Gipson, The Triumphant Empire: Britain Sails into the Storm, 1770- 1776, vol. XII in The British Empire Before the American Revolution (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1965), pp. 24-38, found it to be the first “breeze” of the “storm” gathering between Britain and the colonies and to help clarify the minds of the colonists on the constitutional question. This article complicates the argument of David Lovejoy, Rhode Island Politics and the American Revolution (Providence, 1958), who argues that the Commission of Inquiry threatened the colonists’ cherished political autonomy by expanding the focus beyond the control over offices and patronage to include their expectations of empire. 2Americanus, Providence Gazette, 26 December 1772. 3Dickinson to Richard Henry Lee, 30 May 1773, Richard Henry Lee Papers, Amer- ican Philosophical Society, Philadelphia (hereafter referred to as APS).

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00492 by guest on 01 October 2021 584 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY signaled a turning point in the colonies’ relationship to the empire. Henry Marchant, Rhode Island’s attorney general, observed that people “seem to be more in earnest, than at the Day of the Stamp Act” and if others followed suit “The American Congris [sic.] may be much nearer than the greatest prophet has ventured to predict.”4 Richard Henry Lee envisioned Vir- ginia’s proposed committees as a step towards “that union, and perfect understanding of each other, on which the political sal- vation of America so eminently depends.”5 When viewed from the perspective of these statements, the Gaspee affair appears as an invitation to inquire as to why something so important to contemporaries seems to matter so little to historians of the Revolution. To appreciate the signiﬁcance of the Gaspee’s burning and the Commission of Inquiry it produced, this paper explores the affair from the perspective of empire as lived experience. It argues that however much constitutional principles or political theories may have framed the perspective of imperial ofﬁcials or well-read colonists, the empire functioned on a day- to-day basis through a series of pragmatic arrangements nego- tiated between colonists and local and imperial authorities that comprised a vernacular vision of empire.6 These arrangements emerged around small-scale practices that regulated daily life, the colonists’ ability to provide for themselves and secure their

4Marchant to Samuel Ward, 28 Jan. 1773,Series4 Samuel Ward, Correspondence, Ward Family Papers, Rhode Island Historical Society, Providence (hereafter referred to as Ward Family Papers and RIHS). 5Lee to John Dickinson, 14 April 1773, Lee Family Papers (microfilm, Virginia Historical Society). 6Though evocative of older terms, benign or salutary neglect, the concept of a vernacular vision of empire differs in several notable respects. Benign neglect implies an empire defined by the interests of its core—that the conditions in the colonies arose because Crown and Parliament allowed them to exist—this new formulation stresses the active role of the colonists in defining and enforcing their vision of the empire. Similarly, the older terms imply that the colonies developed with little interest in the empire. This essay, building on ideas expressed by Brenden McConville, The King’s Three Faces: The Rise and Fall of Royal America, 1688-1776 (Chapel Hill, 2006), contends that the colonists had a particular sense of empire and the roles and responsibilities it placed on its members, and it was for that reason that the imperial reaction to the destruction of the Gaspee sparked a particularly intense and potentially violent reaction among the colonists.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00492 by guest on 01 October 2021 THE BURNING OF THE GASPEE 585 persons and property, and, most importantly, their ability to protest imperial actions that interfered with these processes.7 The Gaspee affair struck a powerful chord because it signaled that imperial officials in London had abandoned shared assumptions about the utility of these informal and pragmatic agreements. This concern dissipated when it seemed that the Commission would vindicate this understanding of empire, but before the colonists reached that conclusion they were forced to reflect on the possibility that this vernacular vision of empire might fail, and on what they might do if it did. The Gaspee affair, in other words, provides an important illustration of how, on the eve of the American Revolution, people understood their empire, their role in it, and the conditions under which they would accept or reject its authority.8 The ultimate significance of the Gaspee’s destruction lies in how it followed a clearly identifiable script that sheds light upon the colonists’ sense of both the legitimate boundaries of imperial authority and their right to correct imperial officials who transgressed those boundaries. Charles Dudley, the collector of customs for Rhode Island, demonstrated the scripted nature of the affair in a letter to Admiral Montagu. Dudley explained “the Attack upon the Gaspee” was the product “of cool de- liberation & forethought,” and proceeded to outline the steps the colonists had taken to justify their actions. A “paragraph” in the “News Paper under the Newport head” cataloging the Gaspee’s offensive behavior, Dudley explained, provided the

7This paper follows Karen Halttunen’s suggestion that early American historian “should be open to those times and places when local attachments, vernacular knowledge, and a powerful sense of place proved more important to our subjects’ experiences than transatlantic connections, imperial knowledge, and large scale spatial frameworks”; sentiments echoed in Ann Hughes’ observation that people do not always deﬁne legitimate authority according to abstract general principles or rational assessments of individual interest,” and instead fall back on “less coherent, more emotionally telling assumptions.” “Grounded Histories: Land and Landscape in Early America,” WMQ 3dser.68:4 (October 2011): 532; see also, Ann Hughes, Gender and the English Revolution (New York: Routledge, 2012), p. 9. 8See Timothy H. Breen’s observation that “a handful of elite gentlemen arguing about political theory makes for a debating society, not a revolution,” and that we need to consider “anger rather than enlightenment debate” pushed the colonists toward revolt., American Insurgents, American Patriots: The Revolution of the People (New York: Hill and Wang, 2010), pp. 4, 11.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00492 by guest on 01 October 2021 586 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY “prelude to the diabolical scene which followed”; the “next public step,” he continued, was “a memorial or petition from the merchants in Providence that was sent to “the superior court of Judicature” and then “the Governor,” demanding Duddingston present the commission that “authorized [him] to search ships.” When Duddingston refused to satisfy this demand, Dudley concluded, the Gaspee’s destruction became only a matter of time.9 As the public face of the attack on the Gaspee, the newspaper article, which appeared in Pennsylvania and South Carolina in addition to Rhode Island, and the petition to which Dud- ley referred provided the evidence of the vernacular vision of empire the perpetrators believed legitimated their actions. The article reported that “an armed schooner (what schooner we know not)” had recently conﬁscated “legally imported” rum from a vessel from Newport on its way “to Philadelphia, in order to purchase ﬂour, bread, &c” and three hogsheads of molasses, which “belonged to a poor man, who has now lost the full value of all he was worth under heaven.” The author of the article scoffed that the schooner had acted with imperial authority, presuming “his Br-t-nc Majesty” would not “keep men of war employed in robbing some of his poorest subjects, who are scarcely able to procure the common necessaries of

923 July 1772, Papers Related to the Gaspee, RIHS (hereafter referred to as Gaspee Papers). The proposition that crowd actions against government officials unfolded according to a specific script has a venerable history; most recently, Wayne Lee identified the procedures governing crowd action in North Carolina, which corresponds to the process Dudley outlined in the Gaspee case: a public protest against inappropriate behavior by those in authority, followed by a formal appeal, usually a petition, and finally by targeted violence, frequently led by men of standing within the community; Lee, Crowds and Soldiers in Revolutionary North Carolina: The Culture of Violence in Riot and War (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2001), pp. 43-45. Other reports of the Gaspee’s destruction also stressed the manner in which it represented a community action. Purdie and Dixon’s Virginia Gazette, 9 July 1772, emphasized the community origins of the assault noting that while some estimated the number of attackers at only fifty men, others estimated 150. The article illustrated the limited nature of the violence involved by pointing out Duddingston had been wounded only after he “came upon deck with a Pistol and sword, and fired the Pistol at the Boats”; similarly, the targeted nature of the attack appeared in the reassurance that the crowd “took possession of the Vessel without any further damage,” put the crew ashore “after dressing the Captain’s Wounds,” and when Duddingston “desired that his Money and Papers might be delivered him, tried to comply with the request,” though “the latter were destroyed.”

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00492 by guest on 01 October 2021 THE BURNING OF THE GASPEE 587 life” instead of deploying them “against Spain, who has insulted the Br-t-sh flag in almost all parts of the globe.”10 Lieutenant Governor Darius Sessions, testifying before the Commission of Inquiry in June 1773, summarized the petition’s complaints in similar terms. The Gaspee’s “chasing, firing at, searching” boats in Narragansett Bay, he testified, “and often treating the people onBoard...withthemostabusivelanguage”hadledlocals to petition the Superior Court for redress, which complied by declaring that any officer guilty of such behavior “without shewing his Commission to the Governor . . . was guilty of Trespass, if not Piracy.”11 The colonists had defined expectations—the empire protected its subjects from foreign Catholic enemies, left them free to pursue the common necessaries of life, and treated them as equals—that if not met, invalidated imperial authority. Significantly, these expectations centered on small scale, personal experiences—individuals’ savings, relationships, bodily integrity, and questions of obvious public good such as supplying Newport with food. Duddingston and his crew had erred not only in interfering with Rhode Island’s illicit commerce, but by infringing on the rights of those not directly involved in the eternal contest between customs officers and smugglers. His mistakes in this last regard gave colonists the justification for destroying the Gaspee. Ideally, this vernacular vision of empire tried to prevent con- flicts between colonists and imperial officials from escalating to the point of destroying naval vessels and the wounding of their officers. It had done so through officials who could explain the practical constraints local conditions and expectations placed upon the behavior of imperial authorities. In the Gaspee affair, Wanton filled that role with his request that Duddingston present his commission. Duddingston had no legal obligation to present his commission to the governor, but it had become the custom for newly arrived naval officers in Rhode Island

10The article provided the conceptual framework most colonists would use to un- derstand the attack on the Gaspee. In addition to the Rhode Island paper to which Dudley referred, the account appeared in the Pennsylvania Gazette on 12 March 1772 and the South Carolina Gazette on 31 March 1772. 11Sessions, declaration to Governor Joseph Wanton, 12 June 1773,inGaspee Papers.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00492 by guest on 01 October 2021 588 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY and the other colonies. When Duddingston refused to present his credentials, signaling his rejection of the mutual informal expectations of imperial relationships, the Gaspee’s destruction became inevitable.12 The most likely explanation for the practice lay in the symbolic acknowledgement it offered of the commander’s responsibility to work with local officials in pursuance of imperial interests; it also, however, provided governors and locals an opportunity to outline the practical realities of enforcing imperial policies in a particular jurisdiction.13 In Wanton’s letter to Duddingston notifying him that the colony’s Superior Court had declared him to be a pirate, the governor revealed a lack of confidence in Duddingston’s understanding of those realities. Wanton explained that a “considerable number of the Inhabitants of this Colony have complained to me of your having in a most illegal and unwarrantable manner interrupted their Trade by searching and detaining every little packet Boat plying between the several Towns”; consequently the governor instructed the lieutenant “without delay produce me your Commission and instructions if any you have which was your Duty to have done when you first come within the Jurisdiction of this Colony.”14 Given that the details in Wanton’s letter identified the boundaries of imperial authority in this mediated, customary vision of empire and his insistence that they meet in person, it seems likely Wanton intended to educate Duddingston about the practical limits to his authority and to reach an accommodated solution to his troubles with the local population. Wanton’s reaction to Duddingston’s refusal certainly suggests as much. When, out of fear of being arrested as part of a civil prosecution Duddingston sent a ju- nior officer to present his orders, the governor repeated his

12Park, “Burning of the H.M.S. Gaspee,”p.26; Leslie, “The Gaspee Affair,” p. 234. 13Rhode Island had a history of bribing customs ofﬁcers, a tradition that continued, at least according to Ezra Stiles, through the years of the Gaspee controversy. Elaine Forman Crane, A Dependent People: Newport, Rhode Island in the Revolutionary Era (New York: Fordham University Press, 1985), pp. 85-87; Park, “Burning of the H.M.S. Gaspee,”p.84. 14Wanton to Duddingston, March 1772, enclosed in Duddingston to Admiral John Montagu, 24 March 1772, and Wanton to Montague, 23 July 1772, Gaspee Papers.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00492 by guest on 01 October 2021 THE BURNING OF THE GASPEE 589 request for a personal interview, stressing that “my utmost ex- ertions shall not be wanting to protect your person from any insult or outrage, on coming ashore.”15 Of course, mediation could work only if both parties were interested in using it, but Wanton’s conspicuous effort to speak to Duddingston about his behavior suggests that he believed he needed to try, or at least be seen to be trying.16 The role of mediator in this vision of empire did not simply involve locally stationed naval officers and colonists. Although Wanton was locally elected and thus less dependent upon imperial connection and more upon a resident constituency to sustain his political authority than other colonial governors, he could not ignore official reactions in London to the Gaspee’s destruction.17 Consequently, he also set out to assure officials in Britain of the colonists’ loyalty while simultaneously pointing out the limits local conditions placed on imperial authority. Wanton’s official report to Lord Hillsborough, the secretary of state for the colonies, illustrated this process. Wanton began by assuring him that “the utmost vigilance of the civil authorities will not be wanting to bring” those who assaulted the Gaspee “to exemplary and condign punishment,” and that “the conduct of those who committed this outrage” was “universally condemned” by the colonists. He then explained that the inci- dent reflected the larger problem that many of the “officers” sent “under a pretense of assisting trade” did not conduct

15Wanton to Duddingston, 23 March 1772, in John Russell Bartlett, ed., A History of the Destruction of His Britannic Majesty’s Schooner Gaspee (Providence: A. Crawford Greene, 1861), p. 10. On Duddingston’s fears, see his letter to Montagu, 24 March 1772, Gaspee Papers. 16Subsequent justifications for the attack on the Gaspee point to Duddingston’s refusal to accept offers to mediate his difference with the local population and suggest that Rhode Islanders believed mediators should play a role in resolving disputes like these. 17Rhode Island’s turbulent politics lay largely outside of direct imperial control, and recent events made Wanton sensitive to perceptions of the colony in England. During the mid-1760s a group of prominent Newport residents, the so-called Tory Junto, had begun to petition the Crown to revoke the colonial charter and replace it with royal government. Though politically toothless, the colonial politicians remained concerned that these well-connected men might find a receptive audience for giving Wanton ample reason to want to appease imperial officials as well as colonists. Lovejoy, Rhode Island Politics and the American Revolution, pp. 48-51, 68-69.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00492 by guest on 01 October 2021 590 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY themselves “with the temper, prudence, and discretion, which persons entrusted with the execution of the laws ought upon every occasion to manifest.” To illustrate Duddingston’s failures in this regard, Wanton provided a series of specific examples. The governor cited a ship “with a small quantity of tobacco” being “transported to Newport for a market,” another for “three or four dozen wine” intended “for sea store,” the “small freight boats plying between the several tons with the produce of the Colony,” which “very sensible affects the whole colony, particularly the town of Newport,” whose “inhabitants are principally supplied with the necessaries of life by water,” and the efforts have “contributed not a little to enhance the price of food and provisions,” which “will ere long be involved in the deepest calamity.”18 Wanton undoubtedly hoped the catalog of Dud- dingston’s misdeeds, essentially the same as appeared in the colonists’ public complaints against him, would persuade Hills- borough to recognize the practical limits on imperial authority in this case and allow local justice to take its course. While ac- knowledging that Whitehall would have seen the burning of the Gaspee as illegal, Wanton was urging Hillsborough to consider that when viewed from the perspective of the vernacular vision of empire an alternative interpretation of those same events could and should be constructed. Wanton had reason to hope that Hillsborough would accept, if not fully embrace, this explanation. On three previous occa- sions, colonists and naval officers had clashed in Rhode Island, and in each case the governor had offered a similar excuse. When in 1764 a riot broke out over the conduct of the crew of the HMS St. Johns, then Governor Samuel Ward wrote to Hillsborough to explain that the “Schooner St. Johns robbed one of his Majesty’s Subjects, beat & wounded another, fired at the Townsmen & resisted the officers of Justice in the Exe- cution of the King’s Writ.” Similarly Ward explained a Newport crowd’s 1765 burning of the HMS Maidstone’s boat as a consequence of that vessel’s pressing local sailors, and people’s

18Wanton to Hillsborough, 16 June 1772, in Bartlett, A History of the Destruction of His Britannic Majesty’s Schooner Gaspee, p. 39.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00492 by guest on 01 October 2021 THE BURNING OF THE GASPEE 591 consequent fear “that the Supplies which come to the Town by Water (without which they cannot subsist) would be so much obstructed as greatly to enhance the Price of the necessaries of Life.” Finally, in 1769 the HMS Liberty ﬁred on a captain returning to his seized ship to retrieve his clothes; “this attempt of violence” by a crew “whose commander had never condescended to exhibit his commission to the Governor of this colony, so enraged a number of persons,” that they burned the Liberty. None of these incidents produced further notice from imperial government, undoubtedly giving Wanton hope that recycling these arguments in the Gaspee case could persuade Hillsborough to overlook the matter.19 Whatever expectations Wanton had for a quiet resolution to the controversy evaporated, when, contrary to experience and expectation, a witness appeared who claimed he could identify the men who led the assault on the Gaspee. In early July, Aaron Biggs, a runaway servant intending to enlist in the navy, had rowed a boat from his master’s plantation on Prudence Island to the HMS Beaver, where, under stern questioning from the vessel’s commander, John Linzee, he identiﬁed prominent Rhode Island merchants John Brown and Simeon Potter as leaders of the expedition. Linzee promptly forwarded the names to Montagu who wrote Wanton asking that Potter and Brown be “apprehended that they may be examined.”20 Wanton’s response to this potential crisis underscored the centrality of the role of the local mediator in the vernacular empire and added another dimension to it. In his letter to Hillsborough, Wanton wanted to provide Montagu a reason to ignore the affair while allowing the nominal authority of the empire to be maintained. In this instance, Wanton offered the not implausible claim that since the attack had happened in Rhode Island, Biggs should be delivered to its local

19Samuel Ward to Lord Dartmouth et al., 23 Oct. 1765, and to Charles Antrobus, 12 July 1765, in Ward Family Papers; Providence Gazette, 29 July 1769. 20Admiral John Montagu Commander in chief of His Majesty’s Vessels in N. Amer- ica to Governor Joseph Wanton, 8 July 1772, in William R. Staples, ed., Documentary History of the Destruction of the Gaspee, Compiled for the Providence Journal (Provi- dence: Knowles, Vose, & Anthony, 1845), p. 17.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00492 by guest on 01 October 2021 592 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY authorities.21 To encourage Montagu to honor his request, Wanton attempted to frame matters in a way that would allow the admiral’s turning Biggs over to local authorities to appear to be consistent with the spirit, if not the letter, of imposing imperial authority: as necessary to the maintenance of social and racial hierarchies. To this end, Wanton sent Montagu three depositions from “some of the family with whom the declarant lived, persons of established credit and character,” whose testimony, combined with Biggs’s “general bad character” provided evidence that no regard could be given to his “information.” To reinforce the latter point, Wanton added that “villany” of Biggs’s kind, was “not new. —We have a recent instance of this sort at home”; men “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.”22 In keeping with the principles of the vernacular vision of empire, Wanton was attempting to fashion a middle ground on which local and imperial authority might overlap. He asked Montagu to lay aside the responsibility for enforcing imperial trade laws in favor of upholding the higher principle of social order by protecting men of standing from libel by unruly servants. At this point, Wanton’s vernacular vision of empire clashed with the recently invigorated imperial vision of empire. After the Seven Years’ War, imperial officials had concluded that the colonists’ growing self-confidence and economic independence combined with the mounting national debt required revisiting the relationship between colonies and empire. The colonists’ casual approach to complying with imperial restric- tions became a central focus of this re-visitation.23 As customs officials, naval officers, and sympathetic local officials stepped up enforcement of these laws, they repeatedly clashed with recalcitrant colonists, and, consequently, became increasingly

21Wanton to Montague, 22 July 1772, in Staples, ed., Documentary History, p. 19; the jurisdictional issues are outlined in Park, “Burning of the H.M.S. Gaspee,”p.47. 22Wanton to Montague, 22 July 1772, in Staples, ed., Documentary History, p. 19. 23Edmund S. Morgan and Helen M. Morgan, The Stamp Act Crisis: Prologue to Revolution, with a New Preface by Edmund S. Morgan (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), pp. 21–40.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00492 by guest on 01 October 2021 THE BURNING OF THE GASPEE 593 convinced that the health of the empire hinged on curtailing these pernicious practices. Montagu repeatedly gave voice to these sentiments in his correspondence. He complained the “practice of smuggling is carried on to a great degree at Rhode Island, and I am afraid the governor is as deeply concerned as the rest of the Inhabitants.” Similarly, the admiral characterized Wanton’s approach to Duddingston as the “most daring insults to the British Colours & ought by some means or other to be chequed, as otherwise it will be impossible for the Ofﬁcers to do their duty.”24 Montagu, in other words, saw an empire where the governor contributed through his local intervention to the tenor of disobedience to imperial law that pervaded the colony. Montagu refused the request to turn Biggs over to local authorities and informed Wanton that “it is clear to me from many corroborating circumstances, that he [Biggs] is no impostor,” while “the depositions your Excellency sent me prove nothing that confutes any thing he has said.” Adding that, in light of Biggs’s owner ﬁling a suit against Captain Linzee for theft of property, he would not turn the runaway servant over to the governor.25 Instead, Montagu kept Biggs in his custody and forwarded a copy of the servant’s testimony along with his own report to his superiors in Britain. In the near term, Montagu’s refusal to cooperate provided Wanton and the Rhode Island courts the excuse they needed to stop their investigations, but in the intermediate term, his refusal reaped the reward the admiral sought.26 Montagu’s report

24Montagu to Mr. Stephens, Boston, 18 April 1772, Gaspee Papers. 25Montagu to Wanton, 1 September 1772, in Staples, ed., Documentary History, p. 20. Montagu had a point. Samuel Tompkins, Biggs’s owner, and Samuel Thurston, Tompkins’s father-in-law, swore to seeing Biggs “at about 9 o’clockthatevening...and also very early in the Morning of the tenth” but could not account for the intervening time. Somerset and Jack, two “negro servants,” swore Biggs “lay in the same Room & bed with the deponents the whole of that Night,” but Montagu would not have had to stretch his imagination to think that servants might choose the convenient truth over the more accurate version their master did not want to hear. Samuel Tompkins to Wanton on the 11th of July; Samuel Thurston’s declaration to Governor Wanton, 10 July 1772; Somerset, a Mulatto, & Jack, a Negro, 11 July 1772, all in Gaspee Papers. 26James Helm, a justice on Rhode Island’s Superior Court, “intirely forgot to give the business of destroying the Gaspee and wounding Lieut. Duddingston in Charge to

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00492 by guest on 01 October 2021 594 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY outlining Biggs’s testimony arrived in a context in which imperial officials viewed slights to their authority with particular concern. Thomas Hutchinson, for example, had insisted to an unknown correspondent that the “flagrant insult at Rhode Is- land of burning the Kings Schooner can never be passed over” without fatally damaging imperial credibility.27 Hutchinson repeated the idea in a subsequent letter to John Pownall, secretary to the Board of Trade, stressing that if the burning of the Gaspee was “passed over without a full inquiry and due resentment our Liberty people will think they may with impunity commit any Act of violence.”28 Armed with eyewitness testimony in this tense atmosphere, Pownall advised Dartmouth, Hillsborough’s replacement as secretary of state for colonial affairs, to create the Commission of Inquiry.29 The Commission was a novel attempt to circumvent local authority without violating Rhode Island’s charter. The Com- mission consisted of three colonial chief justices—New York’s Daniel Horsmandan, New Jersey’s Frederick Smyth, and Mas- sachusetts’s Peter Oliver—Robert Auchmuty, judge of admiralty, and Wanton, who would serve as presiding officer. The Commission’s powers were limited; it could summon witnesses, examine them under oath, and call for any additional papers or reports they deemed relevant to the case; it could not arrest any offenders, however, and could only forward the names of suspects to local officials who had the final authority to arraign and arrest the accused. If the Commission identified any suspects and the local authorities consented to arrest them, they were to be remanded into the custody of Admiral Montagu to be transported to Britain for trial. If the commissioners faced any forceful local opposition, they had the power to request military assistance from General Thomas Gage, commander of

the Grand Jury.” Testimony of James Helm before the Commission of Inquiry, 5 June 1773, in Staples, ed., Documentary History, p. 46. 27Hutchinson to unknown recipient, 27 August 1772, transcripts of Thomas Hutchinson’s Letterbooks, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston (hereafter referred to as Hutchinson Letterbooks and MHS). 28To Pownall, 29 August 1772, Hutchinson Letterbooks. 29Leslie, “The Gaspee Affair,” p. 255.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00492 by guest on 01 October 2021 THE BURNING OF THE GASPEE 595 His Majesty’s forces in North America.30 In theory, Dartmouth hoped that this show of imperial authority would bring recalcitrant Rhode Islanders to heel and establish the principle that the ofﬁcial vision of empire, not its vernacular variants, gov- erned the empire. In practice, however, it had the opposite effect. When word of the Commission of Inquiry reached the colonies, the colonists reacted with outrage based largely on their perception that it violated their understanding of the empire. The Providence Gazette offered readers “a short History of the Behavior of the Gaspee Schooner” that restated the case for the attack on the schooner as a lamentable but understandable assertion of local prerogative checking an abuse of imperial authority. The paper reported that Duddingston had “maltreated” ships “without shewing any Commission,” which was “represented to his Honour the Governor” who sent the Sheriff “to see who and what she was,” only for Duddingston to refuse to “wait on the Governor.” As a further proof of Duddingston’s obstinacy, the paper pointed to his refusal to accept various efforts at arbitration. Duddingston, apparently, “was even told, by one of his Friends, what must be the Consequence of such Behav- ior.” The article described how before the attack Duddingston had been “personally ill-treating every Master and Merchant of the Vessels he boarded, stealing Sheep, Hogs, Poultry, &c. from the Farmers round the Bay, and cutting down their fruit and other Trees for Fire Wood.” These actions became “so piratical and provoking, that Englishmen could not patiently bear it,” which “gave Rise to the unhappy Scheme of destroying the Gaspee.”31 This summary of the Gaspee affair offered a quick reprise of the complaints aired against Duddingston in the papers and in the colonists’ petitions to the Superior Court and governor demanding that the lieutenant present his commission: he had violated the persons and property of the

30Park, “The burning of the Gaspee,” provides a detailed description of the historical origins of commissions of inquiry, and the legal precedents that guided the creation of the one tasked with investigating the Gaspee affair as well as a summary of its powers, pp. 49–50. 31Providence Gazette, 9 January 1773.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00492 by guest on 01 October 2021 596 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY colonists and refused to acknowledge the authority of local government. To that litany of familiar complaints, the paper added the observation that the colonists had, in accordance with the presumption of their vision of empire, attempted to find a middle ground between themselves and Duddingston only to be rebuffed. The lieutenant, quite simply, was asking for trouble, and no one was surprised when he found it. The writer of the article continued on this theme when he turned his attention to the colony’s, and particularly the gover- nor’s response. The lieutenant governor, Darius Sessions, had interviewed the crew and discovered that the attack “was hastily concluded on, and very secretly executed,” so that the local authorities “had not the last Knowledge of it.” Despite this hand- icap, on hearing of the attack “the most effectual Steps were immediately taken” by the governor “to discover the Perpetra- tors of this riotous affair,” which should have put the matter to rest. The author explained the appearance of Biggs in the same language that Wanton had used with Montagu. When “no Witness of Validity” appeared, the author continued, “the brave Captain Linzee kidnapped a Mulatto, and by Promises and Threats made the Villain swear to a Number of False- hoods, whereby he has impeached some of the best Characters in the Colony.” To make matters worse, when the local authorities “did not think the Evidence sufficient to apprehend” those Biggs had named, the article concluded, “the Admiral and other Officers, in their great Wrath against the Colony,” persuaded the Ministry to appoint the Commission.32 The colonists, in other words, continued to search for an acceptable resolution to the controversy only to be rebuffed by Montagu, who continued Duddingston’s serial violations of their understanding of theempire.Hehadinflictedthesametypeofhighlypersonal harm—damaging reputations, threatening the common good, and attacking the social and racial order on which the community rested—with the same tone of passionate rage that had led Duddingston afoul of the locals. The colonists, quite simply, had been entirely right, while the empire’s representatives had

32Providence Gazette, 9 January 1773.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00492 by guest on 01 October 2021 THE BURNING OF THE GASPEE 597 been entirely wrong; in this context, the sudden appointment of the Commission to investigate the affair appeared as an of- ﬁcial abandonment of the vernacular principles the colonists believed held the empire together. This view of the affair resonated in other commentaries on Duddingston and the Commission. Henry Marchant described the lieutenant as “a very dirty low fellow,” who had “suffered his People to commit many outrages upon the Pos- sessions and Property of the Inhabitants on Shore.” In particular, he had “so harassed all the woodmen that they were afraid to go up or down the Rivers,” which raised the “Price of Wood” so that many “suffered greatly thro’ one of the sever- est Winters We have had for forty years past.” He added to the stakes by noting how “Bullets from the man of War laying in Our Harbour often whistle along across our Wharfs to the Danger of the Lives of the Inhabitants,” an act, he insisted, that “would meet with severe Chastisement” if it occurred in England.33 William Samuel Johnson, a prominent Connecticut attorney, judge, legislator, and colonial agent, informed a correspondent that it was “Not that the People do not detest the offence of burning a Kings ship,” so much as they believed Duddingston had “wantonly exasperated the People” before they had taken that drastic step. As to the Commission, John- son stressed that the people objected because “even an Acquital would be ruinous, & the Witnesses must be undone by the ex- pense & length of the Voyage.”34 For Marchant and Johnson, the colonists simply had exercised their rights within an imperial system that, as the original newspaper had suggested, had abandoned its responsibility to protect their persons and

33Marchant to Benjamin Franklin, 21 November 1772, William B. Willcox, ed., Papers of Benjamin Franklin, 1772 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975), 19: 379-80 (hereafter referred to as Franklin Papers). Reports of some of the incidents to which Marchant referred appeared in newspapers in other colonies. An account of naval officers firing unprovoked on colonial ships appeared in the Pennsylvania Gazette, 11 November 1772, Virginia Gazette, 10 December 1772,andtheSouth Carolina Gazette, 1 December 1772. Another report of the disparate reaction to American and English attacks on ships enforcing the revenue laws with specific reference to the Gaspee appeared in the South Carolina Gazette, 20 October 1772. 34Johnson to Richard Jackson, 26 February 1773, William Samuel Johnson Papers, Connecticut Historical Society, Hartford (hereafter referred to as Conn. Hist. Soc.).

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00492 by guest on 01 October 2021 598 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY property. A responsibility, Johnson concluded, that the creation of the Commission of Inquiry indicated no longer interested imperial officials in London. In light of the Boston Massacre, to say nothing of the threats to the colonists’ persons to which Marchant alluded, the Com- mission’s power to summon troops added another dimension to the empire’s abandonment of the vernacular vision. “What shall hinder the late scene of blood, rapine, and slaughter in the capital of Rhode Island,” an author from Boston asked, “if the commissioners of inquiry there so readily call for the military aid as the commissioners of the Customs did here?”35 The admiral, another writer observed, “cheerfully undertakes an expedition which promises to gratify his rancour against your colony,” suggesting “the same tragedy may be acted on New- port and Providence, which makes the 5th of March so mem- orable at Boston.” Another reminded readers that the admiral “is determined to lay your town, and Providence, in ashes.”36 Imperial officials had not only abandoned their responsibility to respect colonists’ property and estates, as Johnson noted, but also the obligation to protect their lives. In giving the Commis- sioners the power to summon troops, the Ministry had empow- ered Montagu, who clearly shared Duddingston’s haughty and vindictive demeanor, to inflict a level of harm upon his local antagonists beyond anything his lieutenant had attempted. Authors also used the image of the Commission to connect the Gaspee affair to the ongoing controversy over Parliament’s authority in the colonies. One writer conflated the constitutional questions surrounding the Commission with the same sense of personal violation and community disruption that had enraged the colonists against Duddingston. The power to take the accused, he insisted, “under the points of Bayonets” to be tried in Britain, where “whether guilty or innocent, they must unavoidingly fall Victims alike to Revenge or Prejudice,” was “shocking to Humanity, repugnant to every Dictate of Reason,

35Boston Gazette, 21 December 1772; Rind’s Virginia Gazette, 21 January 1773. 36Providence Gazette, 26 December 1772; Purdie and Dixon’s Virginia Gazette, 19 December 1772.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00492 by guest on 01 October 2021 THE BURNING OF THE GASPEE 599 Liberty and Justice, and in which Americans and Freemen ought never to acquiesce.”37 Concord, Massachusetts’s town meeting tied constitutional principle to the vernacular empire’s concern for preventing social disruption and economic devas- tation. Under this precedent, the town declared, colonists were “Exposed to the Rage of some Malicious persons who out of compliance To Some court Sycophant may accuse any person,” who would then be shipped to Britain, for “to be judged by Strangers & Perhaps by Foraners (and whether Innocent or Guilty) is in danger of being Ruined in Person & Estate, which we Look upon to be a great infringement of our Rights.”38 Sim- ilarly, “Americanus” complained that under the Commission “we are robbed of our birth-rights, and treated with every mark of indignity, insult, and contempt,” and at the mercy of “a pack of worse than Egyptian tyrants, whose avarice nothing less than your whole substance and income will satisfy; and who, if they can’t extort that, will glory in making a sacrifice of your and your posterity, to gratify their master, the d—l, who is a tyrant, and the father of tyrants and liars.”39 To illustrate the seriousness of these particular transgressions, writers equated them with physical abuse, assault on individual’s economic security, indif- ference to religious sensibilities, and a threat to social order. The most influential statement in this regard was John Allen’s An Oration on the Beauties of Liberty, an immensely popular sermon that prior to the appearance of Common Sense was the most widely published and distributed discussion of the imperial crisis. Allen, a minister at Boston’s Second Baptist Church who had recently arrived from England with a reputation for fiery Whig politics, used the same kind of accessible argument that Paine would make famous in his pamphlet. Allen framed the abstract legal and political issues raised by the Commission in the language and assumptions of the vernacular empire.40

37Providence Gazette, 19 December 1772; Rind’s Virginia Gazette, 19 December 1772; South Carolina Gazette, 26 January 1773. 38To Capt. James Barrett, from Concord, 11 January 1773, American Revolution Collection, American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Mass. 39Providence Gazette, 26 December 1772; Rind’s Virginia Gazette, 28 January 1773. 40On the extent of the inﬂuence of Allen’s pamphlet and its attempt to put a human face on the legal issues, see Park, “The Burning of the H.M.S. Gaspee,” pp. 134-60;on

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00492 by guest on 01 October 2021 600 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY He explained that Rhode Islanders “looked upon the Gaspee Schooner as a stranger,” and “a Pirate, who took away their property without their consent, by violence, by guns, by oaths and damning power,” which the colonists “thought . . . was very impolite; as they could not so much as pass by them, but must bow to them.” Consequently, they decided it would be “best for themselves and the strangers all to be free: and therefore, one night, my Lord, they it is said set the strangers (who by the way were all prisoners) free” and “burnt their prison.” With regard to the Commission, Allen offered it as the latest in a series of violations of the vernacular vision of empire. He noted the colonists’ “harbours blockaded,” their “castle secured by captives—your lives destroyed—revenues imposed on you—taxation laid—military power oppressing—your Char- ter violated,” and now the empire attacked “the life, the soul andcapitolofallyourliberties—tochuseyourjudges...and erect new courts of admiralty” with the power “to take away by violence, the husband from his family, his wife, his home, his friends,andhisall...Tobeconﬁn’d, and tried for his life, by the accusation of a negro.” Allen framed the larger issue at stake, the power of Parliament to levy taxes on imported goods to raise a revenue in the same terms. He predicted what had started as “duties for teas, imports, clearances, entries, &c. &c.” would escalate to include “a ﬁxed tax for every acre of land you enjoy, for every apple tree you rear, for every barrel of cyder you make, for every pound of candles you burn, for every pound of soap you use, for every pair of shoes you wear, for the light of the morning, and the sun, that a king heaven gives you.”41 Once again, the outrage focused on the inconveniences and hardships imposed by an imperial government that stretched its claim to power over the bodies, lives, and livelihoods of the colonists. Thrown in for good measure was the challenge to social order—both racial and gender—that the threat to arrest

Allen, see John M. Bumsted and Charles E. Clark, “New England’s Tom Paine: John Allen and the Spirit of Liberty,” WMQ 3dser.21:4 (October 1964): 561–70. 41John Allen, An Oration, on the Beauties of Liberty (Boston: Kneeland & Davis, 1773), pp. xi–xii, 27, 30.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00492 by guest on 01 October 2021 THE BURNING OF THE GASPEE 601 men on the accusation of an escaped servant had created.42 The history and consequences of the Commission, in other words, revealed that the abstract constitutional principles that animated Whig concerns about Parliament’s recent claims to authority over the colonies were pivotal to preserving the more tangible principles that underpinned the vernacular empire. If the colonists hoped to enjoy the benefits of the latter, Allen’s sermon made clear, they would need to mobilize in defense of the former. As the Commissioners assembled in Newport in January 1773 to conduct the court of inquiry, they and the colonists found themselves in awkward positions. The Commissioners could accept, in Marchant’s words, that “unknown disguised rash men” had concocted the scheme to destroy the Gaspee, effectively affirming the vernacular empire, or it could assert its technical, legal powers in the face of growing colonial opposition.43 The latter decision had ominous implications. Allen, for example, insisted the authority the King used to create the Commis- sion “destroys his Right as King, on Revolution principles, to reign over them as their King”; under those circumstances, Allen concluded, “what can the Ministry expect but blood for blood, life for life, and death for death to decide the contention.”44 To what extent Allen’s threats reflected a broader willingness to confront the empire is unclear, but he was not the only writer making them. A poetic exchange between Cuf- fee and his owner ended with the latter promising that if the Commission arrested anyone “The people rise, and aids from far/ Will rush to join the sacred way,” before adding that if the commissioners’ actions led to violence “For every drop,

42Not surprisingly, Allen’s invoking of Biggs’s race resonated in South Carolina where reports of the trial described “AARON the BLACK, alias the American Britain . . . who, we learn,” has “for some time past, been kept under severe discipline, for the aforesaid purpose” of testifying against Brown and Potter. South Carolina Gazette, 2 February 1773. 43Henry Marchant to Benjamin Franklin, 21 November 1772, Willcox, ed., Franklin Papers, 19: 379–80. 44John Allen, “An oration upon the Beauties of Liberty, or the essential Rights of Americans,” 3 December 1772, pp. 7, 20, Gaspee Papers.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00492 by guest on 01 October 2021 602 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY thus vilely shed,/ I’d gladly count a soldier dead.”45 “Ameri- canus,” declared that “ten thousand deaths, by halter, or the axe” would be “preferable” to accepting the Commissioners’ authority.46 The Providence Gazette reported that the Com- missioners’ “motions are carefully watched, and that it is not probable they will be suffered to execute a commissioner so in- consistent with their own and Magna Charta.”47 The colonists, it seems, did not relish membership in an empire in which their local expectations had ceased to matter, and were willing to resist violently if they were not restored to a prominent, if not central, place in the practice, if not letter, of imperial rule. How seriously people took these threats is debatable. Mon- tagu sensed the rising tensions and reported that “the King’s Proclamation” of a reward for information about the Gaspee’s destruction “was not suffered to remain above two hours after it was put up but taken down and trodden under foot in the most contemptuous manner.” He added that “I am told the People are determined not to suffer any of the Persons to be taken, nor will the Civil Magistrate do his duty.”48 Commissioner Fredrick Smyth, in a February letter to Dartmouth, also remarked on the tense atmosphere, reporting that the idea of sending people to England has “an universal abhorrence” among Rhode Islanders and “all the neighboring colonies.”49 Finally, looking back, in his Origins and Progress of the American Rebellion, Peter Oliver argued that any action against colonists by the Commissioners “would have rushed into Rebellion 3 Years before they did.”50 At least three imperial ofﬁcials, in other words, were under no illusions about the unpopularity of their assignment, and took seriously the possibility that any effort to enforce their powers

45Providence Gazette, 26 December 1772. 46Providence Gazette, 26 December 1772; Rind’s Virginia Gazette, January 28, 1773. 47Providence Gazette, 23 January 1773. 48Montagu to Stephens, 19 January 1773, Gaspee Papers. 49Frederick Smyth to Lord Dartmouth, 8 February 1773, Gaspee Papers. 50Peter Oliver, in Douglas Adair & John A. Schutz, ed. Peter Oliver’s Origin & Progress of the American Rebellion: A Tory View (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1961), p. 99.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00492 by guest on 01 October 2021 THE BURNING OF THE GASPEE 603 in ways locals considered violated their customary rights would have drastic consequences. In this environment, the Commissioners chose not to enforce the literal extent of their authority and ask local authorities to detain Potter and Brown. The way in which they reached that decision, however, underscores that the entire affair had become a debate about the viability of the vernacular vision of empire. The court’s deliberations pitted ofﬁcials who understood the utility of this interpretation of empire as a working arrangement that explained and contained disagreements against those who found it contrary to the fundamental, formal principles on which imperial authority rested.51 The conclusion that the Commission reached, though favorable to the former view, ultimately underscored the fragile ground on which the vernacular vision of empire rested; it also suggested the likely outcome if the empire chose to pursue the more aggressive posture that the Commissioners had eschewed. The task of leading the Commission of Inquiry fell to Gov- ernor Wanton who used his role to encourage fellow judges to realize the impracticality of identifying any of the perpetrators. One key element in this strategy lay in his careful stage-managing of the inquiry. Wanton and Lieutenant Gov- ernor Darius Sessions made sure that that no one who knew much about what had happened appeared before the Com- mission, and that those who appeared did not ﬁnd themselves revealing any inconvenient truths.52 This strategy alone, however, would not entirely work, since, as Thomas Hutchinson explained in a letter to Hillsborough, the “Perpetrators of the late atrocious crime are well known.”53 As Hutchinson suggested, locals might be kept in line by the realization “that it

51That the court was entirely composed of men who in the Revolution, in the words of William Staples, “joined the ministerial party” and “who, were by no means luke- warm in the service of his Majesty,” suggests that their conclusion not to arrest those named by Biggs reﬂected a desire to preserve imperial authority. Staples, Documentary History, p. 55. 52Park, “The Burning of the Gaspee,” p. 166. 53Hutchinson to Hillsborough, 25 June 1772, Hutchinson Letterbooks. John B. Hedges, The Browns of Providence Plantations: The Colonial Years (Providence: Brown University Press, 1968), p. 210.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00492 by guest on 01 October 2021 604 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY would be as much as a man’s life is worth to bring forward a prosecution,” but Commissioners would have been free from such naked coercion.54 Wanton’s solution lay in presenting the affair as an illustration of the principles of the vernacular empire, and asking the Commissioners to embrace the role of mediators between American colonists and British officials in London. Accord- ing to Ezra Stiles, when Justice Horsmanden asked Wanton “what motives he supposed influenced towards the burning the Gaspee, the Governor alleged the Violence & Depredations of the Officers &c of the Men o War, mentioning instances.”55 Those included the complaints of “sundry persons” that “an armed schooner was cruising in the Narragansett Bay, inter- rupting” the colony’s “legal commerce by searching and unnec- essarily detaining the freight boats, &c.”56 Wanton’s testimony was supplemented by Rufus Greene, the captain of one of the vessels in the original public complaint about the Gaspee, who recounted his mistreatment at the hands of one of its officers. When Greene asked to see the authorization for a demand to search his vessel, “one Dundass,” the officer in charge, “draw- ing his sword,” had “caught” Greene “by the collar and pushed him into” his cabin. When Greene protested this treatment, Dundass “jammed the companion leaf upon his head, knocked him down upon a chest in said cabin, and confined him there for a considerable time.”57 Wanton, as he had done with Hills- borough, asked the Commission to consider the attack on the Gaspee as technically illegal but, according to long practice and

54Hutchinson to Hillsborough, 25 June 1772, Hutchinson Letterbooks; if locals had any doubts about the fate if any informants they need look no further than that of Sylvanus Dagget, the Gaspee’s pilot, who, whilst ashore, “was seized by” a “Company, who cut off his Hair, and performed on him the Operation of Shearing in such a Manner, that his Ears and Nose were in imminent Danger.” Providence Gazette, 13 June 1772. 55Ezra Stiles, Literary Diary, vol. 4, 1773-74, 9 January 1774, Ezra Stiles Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, Conn. (hereafter referred to as Stiles Papers). 56Testimony of Governor Wanton before the Commission of Inquiry, 21 January 1773, Gaspee Papers. 57Testimony of Rufus Greene, 14 January 1773, in Staples, Documentary History, p. 34.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00492 by guest on 01 October 2021 THE BURNING OF THE GASPEE 605 precedent, a justifiable response to the abuse of colonial persons, property, and livelihoods by Duddingston and his crew. Wanton also informed his fellow Commissioners that he had made considerable effort to mediate the differences between Duddingston and the locals. Testifying that after receiving the complaint against the lieutenant, he believed it was “his duty, in order to satisfy the complainants, and at the same time to give the persons complained of an opportunity of exculpating themselves.” He informed Duddingston of the complaints and requested to see his commission, a request with which the latter only partially and belatedly complied. Wanton added ex- tra emphasis to this last point by adding something previously not mentioned in his testimony. After warning Duddingston through his representative that his actions were “repugnant” to imperial law, Wanton presented him with “another complaint,” that the schooner’s crew had committed “a trespass and waste” on trees on Goose Island. Wanton successfully de- fused this situation by encouraging the complainant to forsake pursuing legal action and “to demand such satisfaction as was adequate to the damage,” with which Duddingston complied.58 In contrast to Duddingston who had failed to live up to his responsibilities in the practical working imperial relationship, Rhode Islanders had complied with theirs—providing public notice of their complaints and attempting to settle the dispute. That Duddingston plainly knew how to navigate this pragmatic vision of empire when in his interest to do so made him cul- pable for his unfortunate fate and the colonists’ reaction to his persistent abuses comprehensible. Wanton and Sessions appealed to another element of the vernacular empire when addressing the identification of Pot- ter and Brown as the leaders of the attack on the Gaspee: the interest of all imperial officials in maintaining the social order. Wanton, of course, had broached this issue in his first attempts to persuade Montagu to ignore Biggs’s testimony and, with his lieutenant governor, offered a wider ranging version of

58Testimony of Governor Wanton before the Commission of Inquiry, 21 January 1773, Gaspee Papers.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00492 by guest on 01 October 2021 606 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY the same logic to the Commission. Thus, when Stephen Gulley came before the Commission to testify that he had heard the names Brown and Potter connected with the Gaspee’s burning, the court proceeded to inquire into the character of the witness rather than the potential accuracy of his accusation. Gulley, the court learned, “treated his parents in such a manner, especially in his Cups, that his Father swore the peace upon him &c”; that he was a “spendthrift madman” whom the town of Smith- field prevented from receiving his estate for fear he would become “a vagabond,” which “exasperated him against some in his own Town & some in the Town of Providence, against whom he swore Revenge.”59 To cap it off, Sessions presented a deposition from William Thayer, “a man of good character” and owner of the tavern in which Gulley heard Potter’s and Brown’s names, swearing that if Gulley “had any idea of the villany” of the man who had identified Potter and Brown as the leaders of the assault on the Gaspee “neither” Gulley “nor any one else” would have “been troubled by” the accusations.60 Just as Wanton had encouraged Montagu to view Biggs’s testimony through the lens of lying servants, the court was now encouraged to view Gulley’s accusation through the lens of a community plagued with disreputable and disruptive characters whose loose morals threatened to undermine the foundations of social order. The Commission’s dismissal of Gulley as “a drunkard” suggests Wanton had partially succeeded in this task.61 Biggs, as a potential eyewitness, presented a more substantial threat to the colonists than Gulley, but the strategy remained the same: to frame the case as a struggle on the part of Wanton and the Commission to maintain order in the face of the forces of disorder. The latter forces now included the Royal Navy. James Brenton testified that when presented with a warrant to deliver Biggs into local custody, Captain Linzee declared “that he knew no civil Authority in said Colony; that in regard to the

59Stiles, Literary Diary, 14 January 1773,vol.4, 1773–74, Stiles Papers. 60Deposition of William Thayer to Darius Sessions, 15 January 1773, Staples, Doc- umentary History, p. 40. 61Stiles, Literary Diary, 14 January 1773,vol.4, 1773–74, Stiles Papers.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00492 by guest on 01 October 2021 THE BURNING OF THE GASPEE 607 Governor he was a damned rascal and that Admiral Montagu’s power was the only power he knew in America and without his orders he should not deliver the said Mulatto.”62 As to Biggs himself, Daniel Vaughn deposed that the servant initially denied any knowledge of the Gaspee affair, claimed he had run away because “his Master had used him badly, and he was determined to leave him.” Only when he was about to be “to be tyed up to the Mast and whipped” for being a runaway, Vaughn continued, did Biggs “declare he knew some of the people that burnt the Gaspee,” and that after naming Potter, Brown and others, Biggs “was released from a Whipping.”63 Wanton also reminded the Commission of the testimonies of Tompkins, Thurston, and the servants, which “agreed . . . that Aaron was a runaway, and could not . . . have any knowledge” of the destruction of the Gaspee.64 Where Gulley was a spendthrift drunk who threatened his parents and relied on the word of vile men to sully the names of reputable citizens, Biggs was a runaway servant trying to avoid punishment with a grudge against his master. He was aided, perhaps not acci- dentally given Linzee’s reaction, by naval officers who openly defied legally constituted authorities and slandered their good names. Arrayed against this rogues’ gallery was the testimony of the good men and obedient servants who had stepped forward to declare the impossibility of Biggs’s claim. The Commission, in other words, was being asked to dismiss his testimony less for what he had said, than that to believe him would send a negative message about the necessity to obey masters and recognize the importance of local authorities. When confronted with unexpected developments, Wanton and Sessions seamlessly blended them into the same narrative of order. When Patrick Earls, one of the Gaspee’s men, testified that he had sat next to Biggs when the attackers rowed

62Testimony of James Brenton before the Commission of Inquiry, 8 January 1773, Gaspee Papers. 63Deposition of Daniel Vaughan to Darius Sessions, 18 January 1773, Gaspee Papers. 64Testimony of Joseph Wanton, before the Commission of Inquiry, 21 January 1773, Gaspee Papers.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00492 by guest on 01 October 2021 608 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY the schooner’s crew to shore, Sessions provided evidence in- validating the testimony.65 After he had deposed the Gaspee’s crew, the lieutenant governor informed the judges that some of them had mentioned that their attackers “were blacked, or negroes,” but the sailors also had stated that “it was so dark” that they “could not tell which.” Consequently, testimony from “any of the Gaspee’s people” supporting “the negro’s evidence, by swearing to the identity of him,” must be “absolutely false.” Sessions concluded by suggesting that Earls’s recent recollection of Biggs’s appearance indicated that testimonies had been arranged so that “some of the Gaspee’s people might with greater appearance of truth, swear he was on board the schooner that night.” What at first glance appeared to be cor- roboration became more evidence of disruptive behavior by the navy, demonstrated by first Duddingston, then Linzee, and now Earls, and underscored the need for discerning men to be vig- ilant against such disruptive forces. This point seems especially important in light of Sessions’s admission that the questions he had asked the crew and their answers “were not set down in writing,” and constituted only his own recollection. The power of Sessions’s rebuttal lay in its appeal to the shared assumptions about imperial authority among all men of discernment and how they needed to regulate disruptive influences in their respective spheres and communities as well as exposing the defects in Earls’s testimony.66 When the Commission recessed in January to wait for several of the Gaspee’s crew to appear as witnesses, Wanton’s

65Testimony of Patrick Earls, before the Commission of Inquiry, 16 January 1773, Gaspee Papers. 66Testimony of Darius Sessions to the Commission of Inquiry, 18 January 1773,in Staples, Documentary History, p. 41. The navy ﬁgured as a particular source of social disruption even before word of the Commission of Inquiry reached the colonies; a thrice-published report charged that marines on board the HMS Beaver had started a rumor “that the Inhabitants of Newport intended to raise a Mob,” to “murder” Duddingston, “to keep up the farcical Fear, and to bring a further Odium on Lord Hillsborough loyal Colony of Rhode Island.” Their subsequent attempt to rescue the lieutenant, according to the Boston paper, ended with one marine accidently shooting one of his fellow soldiers, which “raised Mr. Brenton’s family, and greatly frightened his wife.” Pennsylvania Gazette, 19 August 1772; Purdie and Dixon’s Virginia Gazette, 3 September 1772; Boston Gazette, 10 August 1772.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00492 by guest on 01 October 2021 THE BURNING OF THE GASPEE 609 strategy appears to have worked, if only partially by design. Daniel Horsmandan, one of the two judges to offer detailed recollections of the trial, embraced the explanation Wanton and Sessions had crafted in the tone and spirit intended.67 According to Stiles, after Wanton suggested Duddingston’s behavior had contributed to the burning, “Mr. Horsmanden sd. they sat to hear complaints against the men o war, & told the Governor if there were any they might be freely offered & they should be heard & redressed”;68 sentiments that suggest Hors- manden had embraced the role assigned him and his fellow Commissioners as mediators between colonists and imperial ofﬁcials negotiating the practical limits to the empire’s theoretical authority. Similarly, in a letter to Dartmouth, Horsmandan repeated the story that Duddingston “had not communicated his commission to governor on his arrival,” and in seizing illegal goods “had treated the boatmen with severity, roughness and scurrilous language, by which the people of that place might be provoked to this daring resentment; and not knowing Dud- dingston bore the King’s commission” they “looked upon his as a pirate and treated him as such.” Horsmandan added that “on complaint of his abuses,” Wanton had “expostulated with Mr. Duddingston and demanded he would satisfy him as to the commission upon which he acted, which at length he did,” but too late to resolve the problems his actions had raised.69 These sentiments mirrored the argument laid out by Wanton (to say nothing of the colonists’ original public protests against the Gaspee). Duddingston should have placed himself under the jurisdiction of the governor so he too would have been a mediator between the empire and the colonists, but because

67Horsmandan’s position in this regard is not surprising. As Jill Lepore has argued, he made a successful career in New York, during the slave conspiracy scare in 1741– 42, presenting himself as an intermediary to imperial and local ofﬁcials to advance his career; being a mediator in a vernacular empire would have allowed him to play the same role in this case. New York Burning: Liberty, Slavery, and Conspiracy in Eighteenth-Century Manhattan (New York: Knopf, 2005), pp. 82–83. 68Stiles, Literary Diary, 9 January 1773,vol.4, 1773–74, Stiles Papers. 69Horsmanden to the Earl of Dartmouth, 20 February 1773,inK.G.Davies,ed. Documents of the American Revolution, 1770–1783, Colonial Ofﬁce Series, vol. VI Transcripts 1773 (Dublin: Irish University Press, 1974), pp. 86, 87.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00492 by guest on 01 October 2021 610 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY he persisted in abusing the colonists, he had incurred their understandable wrath. Turning his attention to Biggs, Horsmandan embraced Wan- ton’s theme of the contest between unruly servants and virtuous masters. Horsmandan wrote Dartmouth that Biggs’s testimony “was much to be suspected,” despite being told with “much plausibility and pertinaciously” and being supported by Earls who “swore he was one of the Negroes after the attack that road the boat that landed” the crew. Key testimony, however, came from Biggs’s master, “a person of undoubted credit,” who swore that at nine o’clock the night the Gaspee was destroyed “that he [had] ordered this Negro to bed and that he saw him go accordingly with his two other Negroes” with whom he slept until “his master called him up in the morning on business.” The master, of course, may have been correct, but the framing of the argument suggests that, at least for Horsmandan, the determination of its truth rested on the quality of the people involved, not the plausibility of their testimony. As Wanton had suggested to Montagu, and as Sessions had encouraged the Commission to think, Horsmandan was telling Dartmouth that servants and sailors lied, and to prevent dangerous consequences, Biggs’s testimony should be dismissed. Not all the judges eagerly embraced the version of empire offered by Wanton and Sessions. Fredrick Smyth, the chief justice of New Jersey, rejected the governor’s case entirely. Where Horsmandan focused on Duddingston’s failures and Wanton’s efforts to avoid confrontation, Smyth embraced a narrative more consistent with an invigorated imperial vision of empire. Smyth explained the Gaspee’s destruction as the consequence of the “egregious excess” of the illegal trade in Rhode Island; from his perspective, Duddingston’s effort to enforce the law “naturally excited the indignation of the people, oppro- brious insults and illiberal reﬂections were plentifully thrown out to stimulate revenge against him, which at length was ef- fected.”70 Smyth’s view, of course, reﬂected that of Montagu and Hutchinson who saw the Gaspee’s burning as the logical

70Frederick Smyth to Dartmouth, 8 February 1773, Gaspee Papers.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00492 by guest on 01 October 2021 THE BURNING OF THE GASPEE 611 extension of an empire grown lax in the enforcement of its laws. The real issue for Smyth was not Duddingston’s behavior, but the colonists’ repeated violation of law, and the need for them to be called to account. Fortunately for the colonists and the empire, Smyth did not believe that under the circumstances this commission would be able to achieve that end. Part of the problem was local obstinacy. He noted that while the “actors must be known to hundreds of the inhabitants of the Colony,” the Commis- sion had been frustrated because “to keep this matter secret is now become a common cause.” More problematical was Biggs. Smyth explained that “upon the whole I cannot help thinking that our enquiry is rather disgraced than aided by his information.” Smyth called Dartmouth’s attention to the fact that after a crew member identified Biggs as one of the Gaspee’s attackers, Linzee had “ordered the fellow to be released from punishment,” and “then, and not before” had Biggs identified the supposed ringleaders. He also then described Biggs’s testimony as “intermixed with so many mistakes, contradictions, and improbabilities, that it was hardly worth attending to, and after all his Master and his two fellow Servants if called upon are ready to swear positively that he was in Bed and asleep on the Night the Schooner was burnt.”71 Ironically, Horsmandan found the testimony believable, only to be undermined by his appreciation for the local knowledge contained in the depositions of Biggs’s master. Smyth, on the other hand, simply found the testimony implausible, adding credibility to the claims of Biggs’s master. Ultimately, he and Horsmandan had ended up with the same opinion of the truth of Biggs’s testimony but had taken different routes to get there. Which of these two views dominated the Commission’s deliberations is unclear, but subsequent events confirmed what they had in common: Biggs’s testimony was unreliable. When the Commission resumed after a five-month hiatus, the evidence against him had only increased. John Cole and George Brown, local attorneys, and William Dickenson, a midshipman on the

71Frederick Smyth to Dartmouth, 8 February 1773, Gaspee Papers.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00492 by guest on 01 October 2021 612 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY Gaspee, testiﬁed that the distance from where the crowd had burned the ship to Biggs’s home on Prudence Island was between eight and ten miles.72 The distance was twice what the escaped servant had estimated and made it virtually impossible to row from Namquit to Prudence against an incoming tide in the roughly forty-ﬁve minutes between when he claimed to have left the Gaspee’s crew and when seen by his master.73 Biggs claimed that he could identify Potter because Samuel Faulkner had pointed him out on a previous trip to the nearby town of Bristol; the same Faulkner, the servant swore, had asked Biggs to row him from Prudence Island to Bristol, which accounted for Biggs being abroad on the night of the attack. When called to testify, however, Faulkner denied both having pointed out Potter to Biggs and asking the servant to row him off Prudence Island.74 This new information lent considerable credibility to Thurston’s assessment that Biggs was “a person much addicted to Lying,” and Smyth’s contention that the servant’s testimony was simply implausible.75 With testimony stacking up against the one man who was thought could identify the perpetrators, the investigation quickly unraveled. Peter Oliver left before the session ended to ride circuit in Massachusetts.76 Smyth attempted to drum up interest in expanding the Commission’s inquiry to include the burning of the Custom Service’s sloop Liberty in 1769, but he failed to entice his fellow Commissioners to follow his lead.77

72Examinations of William Dickinson, 14 June 1773, John Cole, 3 June 1773,and George Brown, 5 June 1773, before the Commission of Inquiry, Gaspee Papers. 73Peter May, Dickinson, Earls, and Biggs all put the Gaspee’s destruction and the boat’s departure from the scene between 3:30 and 4:30 AM. The Rhode Island Almanack predicted sunrise, the time Biggs was seen on Prudence Island, at 4:30 AM; it also predicted an incoming tide. Testimony of May before the Commission of Inquiry, 19 January 1773, and those of Dickinson, Earls, and Biggs before the Commission of Inquiry, 14 June 1773, Gaspee Papers; John Anderson, “June,” The Rhode-Island Almanack, or Astronomical diary, for the year of our Lord, 1772 (Newport: Solomon Southwick, 1771), n.p. 74Testimony of Samuel Faulkner of Bristol, 11 June 1773, Gaspee Papers. 75Samuel Thurston’s declaration to Governor Wanton, 10 July 1773, Gaspee Papers. 76Peter Oliver to Dartmouth, 20 July 1773, Gaspee Papers. 77Smyth to the Commissioners, Gov. Wanton, Mr. Horsmandan, and Mr. Auchmuty, 23 June 1773 in Staples, ed., Documentary History, pp. 48–49.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00492 by guest on 01 October 2021 THE BURNING OF THE GASPEE 613 After two additional weeks of hearings, the Commissioners sent the accumulated evidence to the justices of Rhode Island’s Su- perior Court, which ruled that it did “not induce a probable suspicion,” that anyone mentioned therein was “guilty of the Crime aforesaid” and thus refused to indict anyone.78 With this ruling, the Commission wrote its final report summarizing its investigation and disbanded. The final report underscored the successes and failures of Wanton’s strategy to use the vernacular vision of empire to defend Rhode Islanders for their attack on the Gaspee.With regard to the former, much of the language of the report suggests that members of the Commission embraced Wanton’s explanation for the attack. It stressed how the navy had undermined local authority, refused to allow it to mediate between the empire and the colonists, and chastised Linzee, who “obstinately refused” to deliver Biggs and “treated the Civil Authority in as contemptuous & unjustifiable Manner.” The report noted the “principal inhabitants” complained about Duddingston “disturbing & obstructing their vessels & Boats, firing at & searching them,” and the governor’s failed efforts to get him to produce his commission. If Duddingston had “waited on the Governour, acquainted him with his Power & Authority & thereby have early made his duty a matter of No- toriety he would at least have acted a prudent Part.” It also asserted that “there is also too much Reason to believe, that in some instances Lieutenant Duddingston, from an intem- perate, if not reprehensible, Zeal to aid the Revenue Service, exceeded the Bounds of his Duty.” Though not entirely con- doning the Gaspee’s violent end, the report, nonetheless, made it clear that by personally interfering with trade and abusing the colonists, Duddingston had created conditions that led to his ship’s destruction. Read in this context, the report’s conclusion, that it was “not able to discover any evidence” of who planned the Gaspee’s destruction, and it appeared “that the whole was

78Stephen Hopkins, C. Justice, Ja[mes] Helme, M. Bowler, Job Bennet, Assistant Justices of the Superior Court, to the Commissioners, 11 June 1773, Gaspee Papers.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00492 by guest on 01 October 2021 614 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY conducted suddenly & secretly,” was an endorsement of the vernacular vision of empire.79 The unmistakable perspective of Justice Smyth, however, also appeared in the report. It noted that after Linzee refused to deliver Biggs “the Civil magistrates cease their Endeavours to discover the Offenders,” making particular note that “not any charge was given to the Grand Jury to inquire into that atrocious breach of Law, nor any Information thereof by the then acting Attorney General nor was they any thing done thereon.” For good measure it also included a description of the “plundering & burning” of the Liberty off Newport in 1769, in which “the Perpetrators . . . escaped with Impunity, not one Person being so much as apprehended.” In addition, the report emphasized the “great Impatience of some People in this Colony under any Restraint of Trade, however illicit” that trade might be; this dubious resentment was made worse “by the necessary Aid & Assistance” the royal navy “afforded the revenue Officers” in enforcing those perfectly legitimate restraints.80 Clearly, not all of the Commissioners embraced Wanton’s vision of empire and his interpretation of its distribution of authority. Instead, they averred that colonists and officials alike had to obey and comply with imperial laws, and if that meant accepting the occasional rough treatment and abusive language that their defiance of those laws provoked, so be it. Ultimately, Biggs’s testimony allowed two very different views to come together in the same report. Those more sympathetic to Wanton’s and Horsmandan’s perspective pointed to the disorderly conduct of the navy and the flawed character of the witnesses; “the Conduct of Captain Linsee” this part of the report suggested, “tended too strongly to extort from a weak or wicked Mind, declarations not strictly true.” Smyth’s perspective appeared in the observation that the time of the attack and the time of Biggs’s return to Prudence rendered

79Commissioners of Inquiry to Earl of Dartmouth (and to the King), 22 June 1773, Gaspee Papers. 80Commissioners of Inquiry to Earl of Dartmouth (and to the King), 22 June 1773, Gaspee Papers.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00492 by guest on 01 October 2021 THE BURNING OF THE GASPEE 615 “his being at the taking & destroying her totally impossible, the distance being so great between Namquit Point & said island.” Both sides seemed comfortable with concluding that the “full & satisfactory Evidence to prove him the whole of that Night, to have been at Home” which when combined with Faulkner’s testimony meant that “no Credit is due to the said Aaron’s Tes- timony.”81 Whether these points were considered separately or as a whole, they convinced the Commissioners that Biggs had lied, and in light of what Smyth had described as the “universal abhorrence” toward the Commission in “all the neighboring colonies,” further prosecution would have been unwise.82 The vernacular vision of empire and its more assertive, robust imperial alternative, had arrived at the same conclusion despite their manifest differences. This temporary convergence, notwithstanding the presence of both perspectives in the report, ultimately illustrates the precarious state of the empire in the summer of 1773.TheProv- idence Gazette reported an undoubtedly apocryphal encounter between Admiral Montagu, returning from the Commission’s hearings to Boston, and a local farmer that provides a fitting window into how colonists saw the Inquiry. When the farmer refused to yield the road to the admiral’s carriage “his Excel- lency threatened him in high Terms, and proceeded to brandish his Cane. The honest Farmer resolutely asserted his Right, and raising the But of his Whip, stood on the Defensive.” Montagu “thought proper not to contest the Matter further, prudently lowered his Cane, gave Way to the Cart,” though, the paper added, the admiral “at the next Inn,” asked “after the Farmer’s Name, perhaps with Design, agreeable to the modern Model, to indict him for High Treason.”83 This set-to showed readers how far the official attitudes toward the empire had drifted from a vernacular embraced by the colonists. Haughty imperial officials thought nothing of interfering with colonists’ daily life

81Commissioners of Inquiry to Earl of Dartmouth (and to the King), 22 June 1773, Gaspee Papers. 82Frederick Smyth to Dartmouth, 8 February 1773, Gaspee Papers. 83Providence Gazette, 23 January 1773.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00492 by guest on 01 October 2021 616 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY and did not hesitate to threaten them when they protested. If such attitudes in the past had been confined to minor naval officers such as Duddingston, they now appeared to have infected their superiors and, judging from the “modern Model” of treason law, imperial officials as well. The only solution was that of the honest farmer, to defend with force, if necessary, his rights. That newspapers in South Carolina and Virginia reprinted this anecdote suggests widespread approval of this position.84 As the Commission seemed less likely to indict anyone for the attack, colonists portrayed its inaction as a victory for the vernacular vision of empire. An article in the Pennsylvania Gazette expressed the hope that the ministry’s newfound interest in the affairs of the customs service in North America would mean “there will be no more unnecessary Firing on, and terrifying the poor, honest, industrious Woodmen, and others, who bring the Necessaries of Life to this Market; nor any more knocking down Boatmen, throwing their Wood overboard, and cutting down the best Wood and Timber on private Gentleman’s Es- tates.”85 Marchant was a little more optimistic, claiming the Commission’s enquiries revealed the failings of “the Maritime Gentry,” who should “meet with a severe chastisement,” and “will be brought a little to their Senses & be somewhat more Circumspect in their future Conduct.”86 In other words, the colonists saw the inability or unwillingness of the Commission

84Purdie and Dixon’s Virginia Gazette, 18 March 1773; South Carolina Gazette, 9 March 1773. In all three newspapers a “Letter from a Gentleman at Law” appeared immediately after the report of the encounter between the farmer and Montagu. The “Letter” asserted it was a “very Extraordinary Stretch of Power” for the Commission to “arbitrarily apprehend, and most cruelly and unconstitutionally carry beyond the Sea for Trial” people suspected of burning the Gaspee. It was “a most ﬂagrant attack on American Liberty” to have the suspects “drawn three Thousand Miles from the Jurisdiction where the supposed Offences are committed, to be tried by Minions of Powers,” which would render “all Hopes of Acquittal vain, and a Defense impossible.” Consequently, it urged colonists to “like Men, show, by every constitutional Method, that we intend to hold our Liberties free from Invasion, and transmit them inviolate to unborn Generations.” Read sequentially, the report of the farmer staring down the admiral and the “Letter” integrated the defense of the vernacular empire implied in the former with the defense of constitutional principles found in the latter, connecting both sets of principles in a single call for resisting imperial authority. 85Pennsylvania Gazette, 20 January 1773. 86Marchant to Samuel Ward, 28 January 1773, Ward Family Papers.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00492 by guest on 01 October 2021 THE BURNING OF THE GASPEE 617 to execute its theoretical powers, as a vindication of their vision of empire as a matter of effective, if not literal policy. While some confidence in the empire may have been restored, the Gaspee affair had changed many colonists’ views of it. Ezra Stiles appreciated that the Commissioners had embraced the role as mediators but believed that if “this commission been in the hands of Adm Montagu & a few tars,” they would have “seized such persons as a Negro or a Duddingston might accuse, & whip him aboard ship & so to England for trial.” Even the existing Commissioners might have done something similar, he continued, if news of its powers “had not . . . given an extensive Alarm to all the Assemblies upon the Conti- nent.” In any event, the experience had changed the colonies; the spread of Virginia’s proposed “Committees of Correspon- dence” to investigate the Commission, Stiles believed, “will finally terminate in a general Congress,” which would have “been sure, if one person had been seized & carried off from Rh. Island.”87 Silas Deane, an ambitious Connecticut politi- cian, described the court as an illustration of “what Lengths they would willingly go, had they power to give form to their projects,” while Henry Marchant reflected that it served as “an everlasting monument of the base Intentions of a weak and ridiculous Administration.”88 Despite the vindication implied in the Commission’s report, these men suspected that imperial officials’ true sympathies lay with Montagu’s, Smyth’s, and Hutchinson’s interpretations of the Gaspee affair, and, unless checked by the colonists, would pursue them to their logical conclusion. Perhaps the most obvious sign of the shifting sentiment appeared in the proposal of Virginia’s House of Burgesses to create inter-colonial committees of correspondence. The letter to Boston’s Sons of Liberty accompanying the proposal began with the observation that Virginians had made the proposal

87Stiles, 10 June 1773, Literary Diary, vol. 4, 1773–74, Stiles Papers. 88Silas Deane to Gurdon Saltonstall, 24 July 1773,Series2,WritingsBox7, Silas Deane Papers, Conn. Hist. Soc.; Marchant to Gordon Court, 7 December 1774, Marchant Letterbook, 1773–89, Marchant Papers, RIHS.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00492 by guest on 01 October 2021 618 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY so “we shall not be kept in the Dark for the future, and that we shall have from the different Committees the earliest In- telligence of any Motion that may be made by the Tyrants in England to carry their infernal Purposes of enslaving us into Execution.”89 The resolutions themselves described how Vir- ginians were “much disturbed, by various rumours, and reports of proceedings, tending to deprive them of their antient, legal and constitutional rights,” leading to the proposal “to remove the uneasinesses, and to quiet the minds of the people.”90 The slightly optimistic tone in Boston’s praise of the committees as essential to “restore that mutual Harmony and Conﬁdence between the British Nation and the English Colonies so important to both,” belied the precarious situation that had called them forth, the appearance in Rhode Island of imperial Commis- sioners who the colonists should see, according to the Virginia Gazette, as akin to “a Banditti of Slave Makers on the Coast of Africa.”91 The committees themselves ultimately may have played a minor role in the Revolution, but the motives behind their creation indicate that colonists no longer believed the empire would live up to either its constitutional or vernacular responsibilities unless they took a more active role in ensuring it did. At least two of the Commissioners seemed to sense some of these implications. Oliver found while riding circuit that “the Uneasiness of the Pple was so great against him that he had been obliged to declare in his Charges to the Grand Juries” what he insisted were the very limited “powers of this Rhode Is- land Commission.”92 With this sentiment in mind, Oliver wrote to Dartmouth reporting that had their “Endeavours, to discover the Perpetrators of that most abandoned Piece of villainy met with Success, it would have given to us as well as to every other loyal Subject, a distinguished Pleasure.” He presented the inability, however, “to accomplish what we ardently wished

89Purdie and Dixon’s Virginia Gazette, 13 May 1773. 90Pennsylvania Gazette, 7 April 1773. 91Purdie and Dixon’s Virginia Gazette, 3 June 1773. 92Stiles, Literary Diary, 10 June 1773,vol.4, 1773–74, Stiles Papers.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00492 by guest on 01 October 2021 THE BURNING OF THE GASPEE 619 for” not as failure, but as a success of sorts, asking “that our Endeavours, faithfully to discharge our duty, will be honoured with the approbation of a Sovereign who justly merits every Testimony of Loyalty from the most obliged Subject.”93 In light of Oliver’s concerns about the level of hostility toward the Commission and his fears that any actions against the colonists would have provoked a dramatic confrontation, his insistence that the Commissioners’ efforts constituted a faithful discharge of their duty to their sovereign suggests a subtle reminder of his preference for living with a vernacular vision of empire than living without it. Horsmandan offered a more complicated, but perhaps even more telling, assessment of the situation in a letter to Dart- mouth in July 1773. Seeking reimbursement for money he had spent during the inquiry, he wrote that he “was accidently informed of a piece of evidence which had it came to light sooner most probably would have cut our business shorter.” An officer of the ship on which Biggs was confined described how he had “prevaricated much but still persisted in the main of his story notwithstanding [being] confronted by the master and his two Negroes,” and how “upon what he had heard from the master and his Negroes and observed from the conduct of Aaron upon the occasion concluded he was an imposter and charged him home as such . . . and conjured him to tell the truth.” Thus, when confronted, Biggs “at length confessed ‘twas all a fiction which he was constrained to for saving himself from the punishment threatened him.”94 This episode offered a subtle primer on the role of mediation and a guide to a pragmatic vision of an empire that accommodated local and imperial goals. Unlike Montagu and Duddingston, the unnamed officer lis- tened to the colonists, took guidance from them, considered the character of those involved, and drew his conclusions accordingly. Unlike Linzee, he did not rely on brute force to get a confession but was content to rest his case on the powers

93Oliver to Dartmouth, 20 July 1773, Gaspee Papers. 94Horsmandan to the Earl of Dartmouth, 23 July 1773, in Davis, ed., Documents of the American Revolution, pp. 195, 196.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00492 by guest on 01 October 2021 620 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY of persuasion, which were rewarded with a confession. Such officers, properly attuned to the nuances of local life and the practical limits they placed on imperial authority, Horsmandan reminded Dartmouth, would be needed if the empire hoped to avoid future situations such as those that had arisen around the Gaspee. The ministry, however, did not derive the same lessons from the outcome of the affair. Dartmouth hinted at its reaction when, on receiving the Commission’s report, he wrote Wanton asking for “an authentic copy” of the Commission’s minutes and copies of the testimony of “Aaron Biggs, Patrick Earls, Peter May, & William Dickenson, and of the depositions of Samuel Tompkins, Samuel Thurston, and of Sommerset & Jack.”95 What became of the report is unclear; one can only speculate on Dartmouth’s reaction to the conclusion that no evidence of guilt could be found. Dickenson had not named any names, but described “the Person who was called the Captain of the gang” as “a well set Man of a Swarthy Complexion, full Face, hoarse Voice & wore a white Cap, was well dressed, & appeared rather above the Common Rank of Mankind”; the “Head Sheriff, was a tall genteel Man dressed in Blue Cloathes, his Hair tied behind, and had on a ruffled shirt,” and the surgeon as “about Eighteen years of age very much marked with the Small Pox, light brown hair, tied behind, about five feet five or six inches high.”96 Earls had added a description of a man called Potter “who was a tall, slim man, with a long, sharp nose, in light colored long cloths, his hair tied behind, who looked more like a shoreman, than a seaman.”97 Neither the Commission nor the local magistrates made any mention of this testimony which would have puzzled Dartmouth in light of Dickenson recalling that he met the surgeon “in one of the Streets of

95Dartmouth to Commissioners of Enquiry at Rhode Island, 17 August 1773, Gaspee Papers. 96Dickinson to the Commission, 1 June 1773, in Staples, ed., Documentary History, p. 44. 97Earls to the Commission, 16 January 1773, in Staples, ed., Documentary History, p. 35.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00492 by guest on 01 October 2021 THE BURNING OF THE GASPEE 621 Providence.”98 Dartmouth would not have known that Earls’s description “corresponds very well with” extant “descriptions of Colonel [Simeon] Potter,” but the level of detail he and others provided should have raised questions as to why no one could have identified the men involved.99 The Commission that John Dickinson had described as a most profound violation of colonists’ rights, in all probability, appeared to Dartmouth as a grievous insult to imperial prerogative. In any event, when the colonists next defied imperial authority on a scale of the Gaspee, the Boston Tea Party, the ministry placed its faith in General Thomas Gage and did its best to provide him with support that did not require the assistance of the local population. The Gaspee Affair did not precipitate the American Revolu- tion, but it does provide a useful window into how colonists understood the empire, their role in it, and the conditions under which they would reject its authority. In particular, it highlights the importance of the small-scale processes and experiences that shaped daily life in framing and directing the constitutional and ideological debates that produced the American Revolu- tion. The Gaspee affair mattered to American colonists because they believed it indicated that the empire had ceased to respect the boundaries individuals had drawn around themselves, their estates, and their communities that defined for them the limits of imperial authority. In the process, it provided the sort of tangible and compelling illustration of the consequences of the empire’s departure from constitutional principles, consequences that led people not only to protest imperial authority but to confront it physically. That the affair did not escalate further in the summer of 1773 was in part a result of the willingness of some members of the Commission of Inquiry to use their positions to reestablish customary boundaries that many colonists felt first the Gaspee and then imperial government had violated. Deprived of this oxygen, the constitutional firestorm

98Dickinson to the Commission, 1 June 1773, in Staples, ed., Documentary History, p. 45. 99Earls to the Commission, 16 January 1773, in Staples, ed., Documentary History, p. 35; on the correspondence of that description with images of Potter, see Munro, The History of Bristol, R.I, p, 172.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00492 by guest on 01 October 2021 622 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY it had sparked subsided. Of course, the other reason the controversy ended was that the Commissioners who found fault with the colonists did not want to risk the credibility of imperial authority on the suspect testimony of an escaped servant. The next signiﬁcant confrontation between colonies and empire would involve no such suspect testimony to identify culpability, and it produced the heavy-handed reprisal against colonial persons, property, and communities that the Gaspee controversy suggested would transform resistance to revolution.

Dr. Peter C. Messer is an associate professor of history at Mississippi State University. He is the author of Stories of Independence: Identity, Ideology, and History in Eighteenth Century America. Funding for the research to complete this article came from the New England Regional Fellowship Consortium, the American Antiquarian Society, and the David Library of the American Revolution.

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