Thinking Globally, Acting Locally: the Struggle for Community in Revolutionary Newport

W&M ScholarWorks Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects Theses, Dissertations, & Master Projects 2002 Thinking Globally, Acting Locally: The Struggle for Community in Revolutionary Newport Joshua Fogarty Beatty College of William & Mary - Arts & Sciences Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.wm.edu/etd Part of the United States History Commons Recommended Citation Beatty, Joshua Fogarty, "Thinking Globally, Acting Locally: The Struggle for Community in Revolutionary Newport" (2002). Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects. Paper 1539626371. https://dx.doi.org/doi:10.21220/s2-cdhq-qe19 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Theses, Dissertations, & Master Projects at W&M ScholarWorks. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects by an authorized administrator of W&M ScholarWorks. For more information, please contact [email protected]. THINKING GLOBALLY, ACTING LOCALLY: THE STRUGGLE FOR COMMUNITY IN REVOLUTIONARY NEWPORT A Thesis Presented To The Faculty of the Department of History The College of William and Mary in Virginia In Partial Fulfillment Of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts by Joshua Beatty 2002 APPROVAL SHEET This thesis is submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts Author Approved, June 2002 a- U m TT Christopher Grasso Philip Daileader TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Acknowledgments iv List of Figures v Abstract vi Introduction 2 Chapter 1: “No Compliment, at the Expense of Truth”: The Struggle in the Press 21 Chapter 2: “The Whole was Conducted with Moderation”: The Struggle in the Streets 47 Chapter 3: “A Public Precedent to the World”: The Struggle Remembered 86 Conclusion 110 Bibliography 112 iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The archivists and librarians at the research institutions I have visited have been unusually helpful. Thanks must go to the professionals at Swem Library, the Manuscripts Division of the Library of Congress, the Rhode Island Historical Society, the Rhode Island State Court Archives (go Hawks!), and the Newport Historical Society. Myron Stachiw introduced me to the Newport Stamp Act riot through the house of Martin Howard Jr. James Axtell and Chandos Brown commented on drafts of chapters 1 and 3 respectively. Dan Ingram and Dave Corlett helped refine my thinking through their thoughtful critiques of an earlier conference paper. My thesis advisor, Christopher Grasso, has simultaneously been unfailingly supportive and analytically demanding; the former quality helped me soldier through the arduous process, while the latter ensured that the product was worth the struggle. He and my other committee members, James Whittenburg and Phil Daileader, have waited patiendy for the finished product. But behind it all have been my parents, who have been waiting for somewhat longer. iv LIST OF FIGURES Figure Page 1. Map of Newport by Charles Blaskowitz (1777) 20 v ABSTRACT This thesis chronicles the mid-1760s contest over British policy in Newport, Rhode Island. It argues that the Stamp Act crisis in Newport should be viewed as a multilayered struggle in which actors used many different culturally-defined forms of communication, including print, oratory, rituals of celebration and justice, and face-to-face speech, to advance their own goals during a time of uncertainity. By deploying various forms of communication Newporters tried create a community of like-minded people. The use of cultural forms (except for print) was not limited to certain social classes, though class did have a strong influence on actors’ general goals. But the printed word offered certain advantages because it could be quickly and accurately transmitted across the colonies; by writing about their own struggle and reading similar news from other cities, the literate elite of Newport were able to envision themselves as part of a larger community that encompassed virtuous persons not just in one town but in many. The first chapter studies the debate in print between supporters and opponents of Parliamentary actions to tax the colonies and more closely control their commerce. The ideal of a rational argument between anonymous writers quickly devolved into a contest of personal insults and ad hominem attacks. When two writers who had supported imperial policy were hung and burned in effigy, the perpetrators attached labels bearing those same slanders on their bodies. Chapter 2 concentrates on the turbulent week of late August 1765 that encompassed the effigy-hanging, a night of rioting, and a series of other disturbances that together revealed as much social conflict as ideological consensus in Newport. Elite merchants and the common folk came into conflict over their goals even as they worked together, while Crown officers and Stamp Act supporters found themselves opposed to both. After the events, the elite merchants who controlled the printing press were able to spread their version of events to a reading public in a way that others could not. The third chapter examines the “Stamp Act Notebook” of E 2ra Stiles, a Congregational minister in Newport who had a small part in the aftermath of the riot. Between June of 1765 and March of 1767 Stiles feverishly recorded news and information connected to the Stamp Act. The “Notebook” reveals Stiles’s fear of British corruption and his joy over the vigorous colonial resistance; it illuminates his vision of a trans-Atlantic virtuous community based on that resistance; and it describes the petty factions that reemerged in the local community after the crisis had passed. vi THINKING GLOBALLY, ACTING LOCALLY: THE STRUGGLE FOR COMMUNITY IN REVOLUTIONARY NEWPORT INTRODUCTION The HMS Squirrel sailed into Narragansett Bay on a cool spring morning in 1764. A moderate westerly breeze allowed the sloop to quarter the wind as it sliced northward through the narrow strait between Conanicut Island to the west and Aquidneck Island to the east. The master shouted an order, sailors sprang to ropes and hauled, and the Squirrel smoothly shifted its course eastward, the breeze filling its sails as the sloop gained speed, gliding into Newport harbor towards the wharves and warehouses on the waterfront. The docks, it seemed, were less crowded than on a usual Monday morning; intermittent rain kept the seamen and laborers under cover for as long as they could avoid their overseers. Shopkeepers and artisans looked out from small windows in their decrepit wooden shops along the long stretch of Thames Street, saw the Squirrel and muttered about profits lost. Further up the hill, above the busde of Thames, wealthy merchants gazed down from their paneled third-floor bedrooms, over the shops and docks below, and made mental notes to invite theSquirrel s captain for an elegant dinner. With luck he would be bom and bred from a genteel English family and would arrive with good manners and welcome news.1 Indeed, merchants, artisans, and seamen all had reasons for concern. By 1764, Newport was mired in an economic recession. The glorious end of the Seven Years’ War had unexpectedly become the harbinger of despair, marking the end of a brief “golden age” 1. Meteorological information is drawn from Ezra Stiles’ “Meteorological Journals,” book 1, entry for April 23,1764. TheSquirrel arrived that day from Virginia: see the Newport Mercury (Newport, RI), April 23,1764. The general landscape of Newport is as pictured by Elaine Forman Crane, A Dependent People: Newport, Rhode Island in the Revolutionary Era (New York: Fordham University Press, 1985), 49-52. 2 3 of prosperity during which Newport had become the fifth-largest city in British North America and had secured positions as an important post in the triangular slave trade and as a favored resort of elites across the colonies. Newport’s wealth was concentrated among a class of merchant magnates; the city was as hierarchically stratified as were the other urban areas of the Adantic seaboard. Divided like Boston, Philadelphia, or New York into relative segments of upper, middle, and lower classes as well as an underclass of indentured servants and slaves, Newport’s extremes of wealth and poverty were as great as those seen in any of the cities. Still, the town was built on commerce, not on agriculture or industry, and the necessities of trade, legal and illegal, required wealthy merchants, seamen, skilled artisans, and unskilled laborers to work together. The people of Newport were dependent on each other and on the vagaries of the sea.2 Wealthy merchants, then, would hope to charm the Squirrels captain, hoping that fortified by good food and the company of Newport’s young ladies he would be less interested in harassing the town’s shipping. Under the jurisdiction of the new Sugar Act and backed by stiffened vice-admiralty laws, the sloop was assigned to search for smugglers carrying goods to and from foreign countries and their colonies. Further, the officers had a personal stake in being vigilant, for they were allowed to retain a share of any captured goods. While this edict was designed to reduce collusion among crown officers and colonial merchants, those same merchants believed that it would increase corruption going the other way: now the Royal Navy and vice-admiralty judges had incentive to cheat them. The men who looked out over the town from their great houses in the genteel “Court Square” section of the city, magnates like Godfrey Malbone, William Vernon, and William Ellery, had made their fortunes from expensive slaving voyages and did not depend on smuggling to keep themselves afloat financially. But smaller merchants, other middle- 2. Crane, A. Dependent People, 91. Crane’s social history of revolutionary Newport is the foundational source for my description of Newport and the everyday lives of its people. 4 class professionals, and artisans also directly dipped their hands into the sea of commerce, perhaps buying shares in a trading voyage.

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