Burning the Gaspee

On the night of June ninth, seventeen seventy-two, a British revenue schooner called HMS Gaspee ran aground on a sandbar at Gaspee Point, south of Providence. The ship had been the scourge of Rhode Island merchants for months, aggressively stopping and searching vessels, seizing cargo under the Navigation Acts. Its commander, Lieutenant William Duddingston, had made himself deeply unpopular.

Word reached Providence quickly. By midnight, roughly eighteen longboats had gathered in the harbor. Among those leading the raid was John Brown, a Providence merchant who had already decided that British customs enforcement was an offense not to be suffered quietly. The boats pulled silently to the grounded ship. Duddingston came on deck, was shot in the groin during the boarding, and was carried ashore before his ship was set aflame.

The burning of the Gaspee preceded the Boston Tea Party by more than a year. It was among the first acts of violent armed resistance against Crown authority in British North America. London was furious. A royal commission was convened to identify and try the raiders in England, which itself alarmed colonists across all thirteen colonies. The prospect of being shipped across the ocean for trial mobilized the committees of correspondence that would become the organizational backbone of the Revolution.

No one was ever arrested. The Providence men kept quiet. Four years after the Gaspee affair, in May of seventeen seventy-six, Rhode Island would become the first colony to formally renounce its allegiance to the Crown.