The Gaspee Affair, Rhode Island's Own Revolution

On the evening of June ninth, seventeen seventy-two, a British Royal Navy schooner called the Gaspee ran aground on a sandbar called Namquid Point in Narragansett Bay, just south of Providence. The Gaspee had been patrolling the bay for months, aggressively enforcing the Navigation Acts, seizing cargo, and, by most accounts, helping herself to local livestock and produce without payment. The merchants of Providence and Newport had grown furious.

Word spread quickly. That night, a group of men led by a merchant named Abraham Whipple and organized by John Brown, one of Providence's leading trading families, rowed out to the stranded vessel in eight longboats. They overwhelmed the British crew, wounded the commanding officer, Lieutenant William Dudingston, put the crew ashore, and then burned the Gaspee to the waterline.

London was outraged. The Crown convened a special commission to identify the perpetrators and ship them to England for trial. Almost no one would name names.

The one witness who did, an indentured servant named Aaron Briggs, was discredited. The commission disbanded in seventeen seventy-three having accomplished nothing. The colonists had burned a Royal Navy vessel, assaulted its commander, and faced no consequences, because an entire community had closed ranks behind them.

The Gaspee affair preceded the Boston Tea Party by eighteen months. It is less famous, partly because it happened in Rhode Island, a small colony easy to overlook, and partly because no one was ever charged. But many historians consider it the first overtly revolutionary act of the American independence movement.

On May fourth, seventeen seventy-six, two months before the Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence, Rhode Island's General Assembly formally repealed all oaths of allegiance to King George the Third. Rhode Island was the first colony to renounce British authority. It had been practicing for four years.