Preparing for the Storming of the Gaspee

As I mentioned yesterday, the sestercentennial of the attack on H.M.S. Gaspee is coming up on 10 June.

The Gaspee Days Committee has a program of commemorations scheduled for the weekend of 11–12 June in Warwick, Rhode Island, including a parade, a colonial encampment, musical performances, church services, games for children, and the burning of a model ship.

On Tuesday, 17 May, the Revolution 250 podcast will feature a conversation with Prof. Steven Park, author of The Burning of His Majesty’s Schooner Gaspee: An Attack on Crown Rule Before the American Revolution. You can tune in on YouTube or podcast platforms.

The Rhode Island State Archives has opened an exhibit subtitled “The Spark that Ignited the American Revolution” featuring documents from its collection related to the event. See news coverage here.

Now it’s the editorial position of Boston 1775 that the American Revolution began before 1772, and that what ignited the Revolutionary War was four stolen cannon.

That’s not to say the attack on the Gaspee, the Crown’s attempts to investigate it, and locals’ resistance to that investigation aren’t a dramatic and revealing episode in the build-up to the thirteen colonies’ break from Britain. Park’s book and the Gaspee Virutal Archives are very interesting reading.

But as I look at the 10 June 1772 attack today, I’m struck how little it didn’t ignite (apart from the Gaspee itself, of course).

Depending on what incidents one counts, the storming and burning of the Gaspee was the third or fourth time Rhode Islanders had attacked a ship owned by the British government in the preceding decade. Locals swarmed on board like pirates, clearly prepared and not just carried away like a mob. They shot a Royal Navy lieutenant in the groin. Expensive royal property was destroyed.

Yet there was no equivalent of the Boston Port Bill, closing Rhode Island’s big harbor to trade. The Crown didn’t send in troops, as it did in Boston in 1768 and then in 1774. Parliament didn’t rewrite the Rhode Island constitution the way it tried with the Massachusetts Government Act. Other colonies therefore didn’t respond with a Continental Congress or other extralegal steps.

Like Arthur Conan Doyle‘s dog that didn’t bark, the lack of a strong response from the central government might be the most significant dimension of the Gaspee burning in terms of how the overall American Revolution turned out.

TOMORROW: Lessons from the attack.

Dredging Up Details

Here are some recent dispatches from the realm of eighteenth-century marine archeology.

A few miles downstream from Savannah, a dredging operation has brought up nineteen cannon that experts believe date from the Revolutionary War.

Specifically, from the fall of 1779:

When French ships carrying troops were spotted off the Georgia coast, the British hurried to scuttle at least six ships in the Savannah River downstream from the city to block the French vessels.

Since the cannon would have been useful on other ships or ashore, the scuttling must have been hasty indeed.

Read more from WAMU here.

In Alexandria, Virginia, officials are trying to decide what to do with timbers from four ships discovered along the Potomac River from 2015 to 2018, as shown above. These were most likely merchant ships, not warships.

Preserving that wood requires keeping it wet. Since the finds, most of the timbers have been kept in city tanks while “Some pieces of the largest ship have been undergoing restorative treatment and study at Texas A&M.”

Now there’s a proposal to carefully place the pieces of at least one keel in a pond in a public park, which would be turned into a waterfront museum featuring the artifacts.

WJLA has more details.

Finally, with the 250th anniversary of the burning of H.M.S. Gaspee coming up next month, Rhode Islanders have renewed efforts to locate the remains of that ship.

Finding the Gaspee appears to depend on the wreck being preserved and hidden in deep silt that can nevertheless be penetrated by “sub-bottom-profiling sonar.”

Recovering artifacts would be a more expensive proposition for another season, and then there’s a legal issue: the Gaspee is still the property of the British government.

For more coverage, see the Providence Journal.

The Face of Esek Hopkins

To get back to my original point about the American Revolution Institute essay on a print issued in London in 1776, shown here is the same publisher’s portrait of Continental Navy commander Esek Hopkins.

This digital copy comes via the New York Public Library’s very helpful images collection.

As I noted two days ago, the London publisher Thomas Hart didn’t exist. Some other portraits of American leaders in the same series are clearly not based on actually looking at the men they claimed to depict.

Thus, we should be quite dubious that this image shows Esek Hopkins rather than any other white man on the planet. And thus skeptical that Hopkins, who would turn sixty in 1778, had a round face, dark hair, cleft chin, and other features visible here.

Yet if we look for other images of Hopkins, such as on this fine website about the Gaspée affair or this webpage from the U.S. Navy’s Naval History and Heritage Command wing, we find pictures clearly based on what Thomas Hart published.

One exceptional portrait on the U.S. Navy site is captioned:

Line engraving published in the Hibernian Magazine, Dublin, Ireland, August 1776. As with most contemporary Hibernian Magazine portraits, this is probably a purely fanciful representation of the subject. The engraver also provided an incorrect forename for Hopkins.

This portrayal is close enough to the Hart print that one could reasonably decide the two pictures show the same man. But if so, that man still probably wasn’t Hopkins.

In fact, only one image of Hopkins appears to have been created by an artist who actually knew him. That’s the infamous “Sea Captains Carousing in Surinam” painting by John Greenwood. (The Gaspée website includes a detail from this image on its Hopkins page as an alternative view.)

Greenwood wasn’t the greatest portraitist, and in this painting he put his effort into creating a broad scene of revelry rather than representing the precise facial features of every person involved.

Nonetheless, heirs of the man who commissioned and owned this picture understood that Greenwood had depicted some particular individuals, Rhode Islanders who traded in Surinam. Those identifications were written down in 1878 and published in Rhode Island History in 1977.

According to that tradition, “The gentleman on the far side of the table wearing a tricorn hat and blue coat with red facing is said to be Esek Hopkins. . . . Esek would have been about 40 when Greenwood painted the picture” in the late 1750s.

There’s still a lot of uncertainty involved, but the image of Commodore Esek Hopkins that we have the best reason to rely on is actually this one.

Call for Papers on the Long End of H.M.S. Gaspee

The Rhode Island Historical Society and Newport Historical Society have issued a call for submissions for a combined issue of their journals on the theme of “The Bridge: The Gaspee Affair in Context.”

The call says:

Prior to the end of the Seven Year’s War in 1763, the British colonies had enjoyed what historians often called “salutary neglect,” which had enabled economic and political development with little interference from the crown for nearly a century. After 1763, the British government took advantage of a period of European peace to overhaul the empire, seeking tighter control and more revenue, especially from North America. The late 1760s saw a series of acts which sent shock waves through the colonies and sparked various forms of colonial opposition. One such instance in Rhode Island was the Gaspee Affair.

On June 9, 1772, the British customs schooner HMS Gaspee ran aground on a sandbar at what is today known as Gaspee Point, Warwick, Rhode Island. The Gaspee had been chasing the Hannah, a packet vessel that had evaded the empire’s customs duties at Newport. At Providence, the Hannah’s captain Thomas Lindsey notified merchant John Brown of the Gaspee’s compromised position.

Mobilizing other merchants including Simeon Potter, Joseph Tillinghast, Ephraim Bowen, and Abraham Whipple in protest of the empire’s customs duties, Brown instigated a mob, including artisans, merchants, and several enslaved people, to attack the beached Gaspee. At dawn on June 10, the rioters boarded the Gaspee, shot the vessel’s captain, forced its crew to abandon ship, seized the vessel’s documents, and set the vessel ablaze.

Since the Revolution, Rhode Islanders have commemorated the Gaspee Affair as one of the earliest watersheds of the movement toward American independence.

We seek article submissions which re-contextualize the Gaspee Affair within the broader imperial crisis of its era, with a focus on such topics as other acts of colonial resistance to the crown prior to the Boston Tea Party; a better understanding the Gaspee Affair within the development of global capitalism; situating the role of enslaved and indigenous people in forms of colonial resistance in Revolutionary War period; examining the ways in which the Gaspee has been remembered, reconstructed and recast in various moments of American history; and a better understanding of how communication about pre-war acts of resistance helped to form regional identities that carried into the New Republic period.

Articles should be 5,000 to 7,000 words long with citations in the Chicago style. Deadline for submission is 15 Jan 2022. Articles will go through peer review and revision before being published in the spring. For other details on how to submit, see the call webpage.

Searching for Daniel Vaughan

The third Rhode Islander that sailor George Gailer sued for tarring and feathering him in October 1769 was “Daniel Vaun[,] Mariner.”

Unfortunately, as this webpage shows, there were a lot of men with that name (surname also spelled Vaughan and Vaughn) documented in eighteenth-century Rhode Island. I think there are a couple of top candidates.

One is the man whom the Newport Mercury and a headstone both reported dying in March 1800 at the age of 56. This Daniel Vaughan was therefore a contemporary of Eleazer and Benjamin Trevett, the brothers from Newport that Gailer also accused. He could have been another sailor on their father’s ship Success.

This man was also the right age to have been the Daniel Vaughan who became one of the first third lieutenants commissioned in the Continental Navy in December 1775. And he could have been the owner of the Daniel Vaughan house in Newport, built after the war and shown above.

Another possibility is an older Daniel Vaughan, born in 1716 or 1722. Such a man appears to have been the right age to have been involved in all of these incidents:

• A Daniel Vaughan was first lieutenant under Capt. Simeon Potter on the privateer Prince Charles of Lorraine during King George’s War in 1744. Potter and his crew sacked a settlement in French Guiana. A priest’s detailed report suggests Lt. Vaughn took the lead in trying to hunt down slaves and plunder villages. Potter eventually stranded a lot of his men and took their shares of the loot, as Vaughan testified in the ensuing controversy back in Rhode Island.
• A Daniel Vaughan was first lieutenant on the Tartar under Capt. James Holmes in 1748 when it captured a schooner carrying sugar. There was another inquiry about that capture since the schooner had been flying a flag of truce.
• In 1764, a Daniel Vaughan was the gunner at Fort George on Goat Island off Newport. The local authorities ordered him to fire cannon at H.M.S. St. John. Ostensibly they were trying to stop the Royal Navy ship from sailing away with sailors suspected of stealing hogs, but the real reason for their animosity was that its captain had clamped down on molasses smugglers. Vaughan’s gun crew reportedly fired thirteen shots, striking the warship’s sails and rigging. This was the first of several examples of Rhode Islanders attacking royal government vessels in the years before the Revolutionary War.

In 1773, a man named Daniel Vaughan—who could have been either of these candidates—testified in the investigation of the burning of H.M.S. Gaspee, the most famous of those Rhode Island attacks. The leader of that assault was almost certainly none other than Simeon Potter, acting with the encouragement of the Browns and the Greenes. Vaughan’s testimony, however, discredited one of the Crown’s only cooperating witnesses. This Vaughan was also involved in salvaging iron out of the destroyed warship.

It’s possible those Daniel Vaughans were related. It’s also possible that another Daniel Vaughan got into the mix. But all in all, I’d say either man’s activities are consistent with helping to tar and feather an unpopular informer in Boston in 1769.

COMING UP: The tailors from Boston.

Recreating the Aftermath of the Gaspee in Providence, 2 June

On Saturday, 2 June, the Rhode Island Historical Society and Newport Historical Society are teaming up for a History Space program exploring the aftermath of the Gaspee Affair of 1772.

As you recall, H.M.S. Gaspee was a Royal Navy ship that patrolled Narragansett Bay for smugglers. On 9 June it ran aground. Local merchants and mariners saw an opportunity, stormed the railings, wounded the commander, and set the Gaspee on fire. (That was the third royal government ship that Rhode Islanders had destroyed in a decade.)

At Saturday’s “What Cheer Day” event at the John Brown House Museum, visitors can chat with reenactors portraying such key figures as Gov. Joseph Wanton, merchant John Brown, innkeeper James Sabin, and Lt. William Dudingston of the Royal Navy (presumably recovering from his chest wound). In a market scenario, street peddlers will hawk their wares while upper-class ladies discuss the political situation over tea.

Family-friendly activities include:

• The Liberty Poll, an interactive scavenger-hunt questionnaire to help officials determine who was responsible for Gaspee’s burning. (Hint: The event’s at John Brown’s house. Though I put more blame for the violence on Simeon Potter.)
• Making traditional crafts such as a beeswax candle or a clay pinch pot to take home.
• Eighteenth-century toys and lawn games.

From noon to 2:00 inside the John Brown House Museum, Prof. Adam Blumenthal of Brown University and Optimity Advisors will present a sneak peek at his work-in-progress, “The Gaspee in Virtual Reality.”

“What Cheer Day” is free and open to the public. It will take place rain or shine on the lawn of the John Brown House Museum, 52 Power Street in Providence. The museum will also be free during its regular open hours on Saturday.

New Study of the Gaspée Incident

The Boston Tea Party of December 1773 produced a forceful response from London: the Boston Port Bill, a new royal governor, army regiments back in town, the Massachusetts Government Act, and other supporting legislation.

To be sure, Bostonians had destroyed more than £9,000 of property belonging to the well-connected British East India Company.

On the other hand, compare that damage to what people in Rhode Island had done over the preceding decade:

• In June 1765, Newporters upset by naval impressment had seized the boat belonging to the Royal Navy warship Maidstone, dragged it to the town common, and set it on fire.
• In July 1769, another Newport crowd saw the unpopular Customs patrol ship Liberty, confiscated the previous year from John Hancock, run aground, so they set it on fire.
• In June 1772, men from Providence and surrounding towns attacked the Royal Navy’s patrol ship Gaspée from rowboats, shooting its commanding officer in the chest. And then, of course, they set it on fire.

According to Rif Winfield’s British Warships in the Age of Sail series, H.M.S. Victory cost £63,176 to build and equip in 1765. So, even though the Victory was a much larger ship than these three, Rhode Islanders did serious damage to the royal government with each ship they destroyed.

But was Newport harbor shut down? Was the colony’s constitution changed? Was anyone brought to trial? No. I suspect the imperial government in London recognized that Rhode Island was a lawless place.

Of course, one might argue that the royal government’s alarm about those mounting attacks, especially the one on the Gaspée, made Parliament more determined to ensure Boston wouldn’t get away with anything of the sort.

The latest title in the Journal of the American Revolution book series is Steven Park’s The Burning of His Majesty’s Schooner Gaspee: An Attack on Crown Rule Before the American Revolution, published this month. It explores that story in depth:

Between the Boston Massacre in 1770 and the Boston Tea Party in 1773—a period historians refer to as “the lull”—a group of prominent Rhode Islanders rowed out to His Majesty’s schooner Gaspee, which had run aground six miles south of Providence while on an anti-smuggling patrol. After threatening and shooting its commanding officer, the raiders looted the vessel and burned it to the waterline.

Despite colony-wide sympathy for the June 1772 raid, neither the government in Providence nor authorities in London could let this pass without a response. As a result, a Royal Commission of Inquiry headed by Rhode Island governor Joseph Wanton zealously investigated the incident. In The Burning of His Majesty’s Schooner Gaspee: An Attack on Crown Rule Before the American Revolution, historian Steven Park reveals that what started out as a customs battle over the seizure of a prominent citizen’s rum was soon transformed into the spark that re-ignited Patriot fervor.

Steven Park, Ph.D., teaches and is the Director of Academic Services at the University of Connecticut’s maritime campus at Avery Point. My copy of his book is on its way to me from Amazon—presuming, of course, that the delivery vehicle doesn’t go through Rhode Island and get set on fire.

The Brief Army Career of John Anthony Aborn

Quoting from Donald A. D’Amato’s Warwick: A City at the Crossroads, this website about the history of Warwick, Rhode Island, describes the experiences of the Aborn family:

The fort at Pawtuxet was manned by the Pawtuxet Rangers who are officially ranked in the state militia as the Second Independent Company of the County of Kent. At that time they numbered 50. The commander of the militia unit was Samuel Aborn, one of the leading citizens of the village and the “host at the Golden Ball Inn, on Post Road, at the western end of the village.” Aborn two years earlier, in his small sloop, Sally, had taken the anchors, guns, stores, and other effects from the Gaspee to Pawtuxet. Aborn remained the Rangers’ commander throughout the struggle for independence. His officers were First Lieut. Benjamin Arnold, Second Lieut. Rhodes Arnold and Ensign Stephen Greene.

Captain Aborn’s experiences during the war serve to remind us of the bitterness and the tragedy of the time. Very early in the struggle, his sloop, Sally, was captured by the British, causing him serious financial hardship. Later, his young son, a boy of 14, joined the Continental Army. Boys at that young age were anxious to take part in the war and often served as drummer-boys. Young Aborn, at the special request of Gen. Nathanael Greene, was granted permission to return home because of ill health. [Horace] Belcher tells us it was too late as “the boy came home only to die”.

Horace Belcher was a Pawtuxet newspaper reporter and chronicler.

On 5 Sept 1775, Gen. Nathanael Greene indeed wrote from Prospect Hill to his commanding officer, Gen. Charles Lee, encamped on Winter Hill, with a special request (and a variant spelling):

The bearer Colonel Ebbons from Rhode Island is a Gentleman of good Character and a family of distinction—from his public Spirit he has permitted his Son to enter into the Service a lad of about fourteen years of age. He is now Sick in hospital—the Doctor recommends a ride into the Country—The Colonel has brought down a Shaize to carry him and one Thornton home with him, they are both unfit for duty and will be for some time. As soon as they get fit for duty the Colonel promises to return them to Camp—You may depend upon his honor in what he engages—I wish you may find freedom to gratify the Colonel in his request.

Lee did as Greene asked, granting “John Anthony Aborn & Christr Thornton in Colo [James] Varnum’s Regiment” a “leave of absence for five weeks for the recovery of their Health.”

John Anthony Aborn had been born on 4 Nov 1761 in Providence, according to this genealogy page. That means he was well short of his fourteenth birthday when he served in the siege of Boston.

Other documents show that Rhode Island rented Samuel Aborn’s ship Sally in 1776, and it was then captured by the British. So the sequence of events in that passage is off: Aborn lost his ship after his young son’s service.

Further research also reveals good news. The name “John A. Aborn” appears among the privates in a company on duty at Pawtuxet in July 1778. On 16 July 1789, the United States Chronicle, a newspaper issued in Providence, reported the marriage of Sally Rhodes and “Capt. John A. Aborn, at Pawtuxet.” The following year, President George Washington nominated young Aborn to be “Surveyor of the Port of Patuxet,” though he declined. The census that year recorded him living with two free white females in Warwick.

Rather than dying young, Revolutionary veteran John Anthony Aborn died in Pawtuxet on 1 Apr 1821, age fifty-nine.

[The picture above is the banner of the recreated Pawtuxet Rangers.]

Hagist on the Stamp Act in Newport, 24 Mar.

This week the New York Post called The Revolution’s Last Men: The Soldiers behind the Photographs, Don Hagist’s latest book, “An astonishing piece of American history.”

Don will be speaking on Thursday, 24 March, at the Newport Historical Society on the topic “The Stamp Act in Newport: How the World Heard the News as Reported in American and British Newspapers”:

This spring marks the 250th anniversary of the repeal of the Stamp Act, one of the first direct taxes imposed on American colonists. This tax sparked a series of riots in colonial cities, including Newport, and is considered one of the first conflicts in the American Revolution.

This talk will explore how newspapers reported the tension and turmoil in Newport from the time the Stamp Act was passed in 1765 until it was repealed in 1766. Most Rhode Islanders are familiar with the burning of the Gaspee, but they are not aware that Rhode Island’s vehement opposition to Parliamentary policies actually began a decade earlier when colonists refused to abide by laws that violated their colonial charter. By presenting extracts from 18th-century newspapers in Rhode Island, other colonies, and England, Hagist will illustrate how news of this opposition traveled and how other people learned what was happening in Newport.

Don Hagist is an editor for the Journal of the American Revolution and maintains the British Soldiers, American Revolution blog. In addition to his books, he’s published a number of articles in academic journals, including Newport History.

This talk will start at 5:30 P.M. at the society’s Resource Center, 82 Touro Street in Newport. Admission is $5 per person, only $1 for society members and active or retired military personnel with identification. Because space is limited, the society suggests people make reservations by calling 401-846-0813 x110.

The Limits on Fatal Violence in Boston, 1765-1774

Though Boston earned a reputation as a riotous town in the ten years after the first public Stamp Act protests of 1765, those Boston rioters never killed anyone.

A mob did ruin Lt. Gov. Thomas Hutchinson’s North End mansion in 1765, and damaged several other royal officials’ houses in the same months. In 1768, the Customs service’s seizure of John Hancock’s ship Liberty prompted another crowd to manhandle three Customs officials.

The next year, Bostonians learned the ritual of tarring and feathering, which they inflicted on several lower-level Customs employees over the next few years. But those actions all stopped short of killing people.

There are examples from elsewhere in New England of fatal, or nearly fatal, resistance to the Crown. In April 1769, as detailed here, sailors out of Marblehead resisting impressment into the Royal Navy killed Lt. Henry Panton at sea.

During the Gaspée seizure of 1772, the Rhode Islanders storming that Royal Navy vessel shot its commander, Lt. William Dudingston, in the chest—which sure sounds like he could have been killed. But he survived with medical care. Guns were also fired, though not hitting anyone, during some rural demonstrations against mandamus Council members in the fall of 1774.

One might argue that the lack of fatalities in Boston riots was only a matter of luck. There were some close calls:

• After Ebenezer Richardson shot Christopher Seider on 22 Feb 1770, he was nearly lynched by an angry crowd. The Whig leader William Molineux insisted on taking the unpopular Customs employee to a magistrate for indictment.
• Later that year, a crowd frightened importer Patrick McMaster with tar and feathers so badly he collapsed.
• In 1774, a mob attacked John Malcolm, yet another Customs employee, after he clubbed George Robert Twelves Hewes. That attack lasted for hours, and involved choking Malcolm with a noose as well as beating, whipping, and tarring and feathering him. But he survived.

In addition, Hutchinson felt that his nephew Nathaniel Rogers was hounded to an untimely death in 1770.

Nonetheless, the fact remains that during those tumultuous years no Crown official, soldier, or supporter was killed in political violence in Boston. In contrast, during a month-long stretch of early 1770 employees of the royal government shot dead four men and two boys, and wounded several more. A big reason for that difference was that Bostonians didn’t use guns in their conflicts, preferring to intimidate their opponents through numbers.

On 18 Oct 1774, an angry sailor named Samuel Dyer broke that pattern. He attacked two Royal Artillery officers at noon on Boston’s main street, firing pistols at their heads. Both his guns misfired, but the army naturally saw Dyer’s actions as an escalation.

I’ll talk about Dyer, his claims of mistreatment, what the record actually shows, and how his assault with deadly weapons might have started the American War off quite differently at this Saturday’s History Camp.

Nick Bunker’s Sharp Edges of Empire

After so much reading about the approach of the Revolution in New England, I’m always pleased to find books that give me a new perspective on the major events of those years. Sometimes that perspective comes from a tight focus on an individual or a lesser-known aspect of the conflict.

Nick Bunker’s An Empire on the Edge: How Britain Came to Fight America manages that even while examining the well-known Gaspée incident, Boston Tea Party, and response to the Coercive Acts.

Bunker, an Englishman, describes those events as seen from London, where the American mainland colonies were a source of mystery and bother if the government’s overworked ministers had any time for them at all. His book has chapters on major events in New England from 1772 to 1774, but Bunker emphasizes sources that tell the British side of each story.

A great deal of archival work went into An Empire on the Edge, and its notes brim with unfamiliar sources that can set a researcher’s mouth to salivating: the War Office’s accounting of British army dead from 1774 to 1780; private verses that the Earl of Suffolk, junior secretary of state, wrote about the nascent rebellion; a painting of Boston in 1764 by Byron’s great-uncle; Lt.-Col. Alexander Leslie’s bitter letter from Castle William ten days before the Tea Party; a 1774 intelligence report about gunpowder shipments from Holland.

Bunker was a financial journalist before he turned to writing history, and that seems to surface in his analyses of economic pressures: abundant credit led to overproduction of tea in China, harvests failed in India and later in Europe at just the wrong times, a London banker tried to short East India Company stock a little too early and set off a cascade of banking failures. The book profiles John Hancock as a businessman more prominently than Samuel Adams as a politician, and devotes relatively little space to political philosophy, religion, and other forces.

Bunker’s background is especially valuable as he lays out how the East India Company finally ran aground in 1773 and the British government—despite George III and Lord North being no fans of the company—deemed it too big to fail. Competing business and political interests ultimately produced two redundant rescue schemes: one that allowed the Crown to take over the company’s territory in India, the other that rewrote the rules for sending surplus tea to North American ports. The first gave Britain the basis of its nineteenth-century empire while the second ultimately cost it much of the empire it had built in the previous two hundred years.

One player in shaping the latter policy, An Empire on the Edge argues, was Massachusetts governor Thomas Hutchinson, through his letters to British tea magnate William Palmer. Hutchinson’s interests were all mixed up: his sons were in the tea business, and his salary as governor (and those of his in-laws, the Oliver brothers) came from the tea tax. Thus, while Hutchinson sincerely sought the best for the British Empire and for Massachusetts, he looked corrupt—and just when the leak of some private letters made him look devious.

While many American authors emphasize the strength of the British Empire after the Seven Years’ War, especially its military, Bunker paints it as fragile and overextended. Stretched tight between North America and India, much of it was “only a make-believe empire.” The book starts symbolically with a description of that dominion’s western edge at Fort Charters in modern Illinois, a structure won from the French in 1763 and then allowed to slip gradually into the Mississippi. The figure of Edward Gibbon, Member of Parliament, floats through the book, not because of any astute observations on the political situation from him but perhaps because he wrote about another empire’s decline and fall.

An Empire on the Edge is thus a “sympathetic study of failure,” Bunker writes. He offers portraits of the top government ministers in London—especially Lord North and the Earl of Dartmouth—that bring out their good qualities instead of making them distant antagonists. (I recall how Bernard Donoughue’s British Politics and the American Revolution from 1964 struck me with a story of Lord North being robbed by a highwayman even as he won a government majority; this book does the same with the picture of the prime minister laying out a playing field for his sons.)

But none of those men’s personal strengths, Bunker says, were right for avoiding the “tragedy” of “a war the British should never have allowed themselves to fight.” Neither North nor Dartmouth had the broader vision that the situation demanded. At no point in the book, however, do I see a turning-point that would have allowed the British government to satisfy all the needs of its 1770s empire. I have a sense of what would have satisfied the Massachusetts Whigs, but I doubt that approach would have satisfied Bunker.

TOMORROW: An Empire on the Edge on Massachusetts.

An Empire on the Edge on the T.V.

On Sunday, 7 December, C-SPAN 2 will air a talk by Nick Bunker, author of An Empire on the Edge: How Britain Came to Fight America, at the New-York Historical Society in October.

An Empire on the Edge focuses on the years 1772 to 1775, starting with the East India Company’s troubles and the Gaspée incident in Rhode Island and ending with the orders to march to Concord. Not the orders Gen. Thomas Gage gave, really, but the orders he received from his superiors in London, telling him that he had to act quickly.

That’s because Bunker, while writing in detail about important events in North America like the legal and political impasse in Boston leading up to the Tea Party, concentrates most on the decision-making in London. He uses British sources that rarely show up in American histories. Government ministers and members of Parliament come across as individuals rather than, as in many accounts from a purely American perspective, a rather faceless mass.

I got an early look at Nick Bunker’s book and found it solid and provocative; I plan to share more thoughts soon. I also got to hear Nick talk about it at the Boston Athenaeum this fall. After that talk a couple of audience members told me that they’d had trouble hearing; the acoustics and amplification in the room weren’t ideal, and Nick had so much to say (in a British accent, of course) that it might have been hard to keep up. I suspect that makes this recorded presentation all the more valuable.

Nick Bunker’s talk is scheduled to air on C-SPAN 2 on Sunday, 7 December, starting at 7:00 P.M.

Newport’s “Revolution House” Coming in 2015

The Newport Historical Society reports it will reinterpret its Wanton-Lyman-Hazard House as “Revolution House.” Rather than continue to present that building as a standard house museum, it will use it to tell the history of Newport in the American Revolution.

“Revolution House” will open next summer. In the meantime, the society has launched a new “Revolutionary Newport” website. And on Saturday, 23 August, it will commemorate the anniversary of when in 1765 the Wanton-Lyman-Hazard House was almost sacked because it was then home to Martin Howard, stamp tax collector. There will be a reenactor-led public “riot” and other programs.

The society’s press release argues that the first violent resistance of the Revolution took place in Rhode Island:

In the wake of the Sugar Act of 1764, violence broke out when colonists took over Fort George on Goat Island, off the far end of Long Wharf, and fired cannon on the British ship St. John whose crew allegedly stole merchandise from Newport businesses but which was also enforcing tax laws against local ships.

More violence erupted in 1765 when a long boat from the British ship the Maidstone was captured by an angry mob, dragged through the streets, and set fire in the square. This ship had been impressing Rhode Islanders into the British Navy, that is, capturing them and forcing them to serve on British ships, a common but highly unpopular practice of the British here and elsewhere.

In 1769 Newporters destroyed the British revenue sloop the Liberty. After harshly questioning the captains of two ships out of Connecticut, the Captain of the Liberty was surrounded by an angry mob of Newporters and forced to bring his crew in from the ship. Locals boarded the empty ship, cut it loose and it floated around the Point where it was stripped and burned. London protested to Rhode Island officials, but decided to let the matter drop.

And lastly there was the burning of the Gaspee, a Royal Navy ship, in 1772, after it had stopped the Hannah, out of Newport.

I’d argue that the 1764 and 1765 events weren’t really part of the Revolution because there was an ongoing conflict between mariners and officers of the Customs service and Royal Navy. In 1747, for example, Boston was shut down by riots over impressment. The Liberty and Gaspee riots are easier to link the new Crown taxes and duties that brought on the Revolution.

Still, Rhode Island deserves credit for destroying three government ships in less than a decade, and getting away with that. The closest Bostonians were able to match that was burning a small boat belonging to Customs official Joseph Harrison in 1768.

But Rhode Island was already known as a hard place to enforce the law. In contrast to Massachusetts, the governor was elected locally, not appointed by the king, and the harbor was much bigger and harder to patrol. I get the impression that Crown officials didn’t try so hard down there because they knew they couldn’t win.

Rhode Island’s First Major General

A few days back, I quoted Samuel Ward’s December 1774 letter describing how Rhode Island was putting itself on a footing for war by, among other things, appointing the first major-general in the colony’s history. That was not Nathanael Greene, who sprang from the rank of private to that of general only after the war had begun. So who was it?

The Rhode Island legislature appointed Simeon Potter (1720-1806) of Bristol. He had gained wealth and notoriety as a privateer during the mid-century imperial wars and allegedly helped to lead the raid on the Royal Navy’s Gaspée in 1772.

According to Beggarman, Spy: The Secret Life and Times of Israel Potter, by David Chacko and Alexander Kulcsar, Simeon Potter was not a mild-tempered man. For instance, in 1761 he beat up a seventy-four-year-old minister. (To be fair, the minister had told Potter, “There is whoring wherever you go.”)

What did Maj.-Gen. Potter do in the spring of 1775? On 19 April, two members of the Massachusetts Provincial Congress—James Warren of Plymouth and Dr. Charles Pynchon (1719-1783) of Springfield—came to Providence to consult with Rhode Island legislators about the outbreak of fighting in Middlesex County. One of the Rhode Island politicians, Stephen Hopkins, sent Potter a letter reporting:

The King’s Troops are actually engaged butchering and destroying our brethren in the most inhuman manner. The inhabitants oppose them with great zeal and courage.

Hopkins asked Potter to come to Providence to consult with Lt. Gov. Darius Sessions, who had been put in charge of the colony’s military preparations.

Potter never took the field. According to Beggarman, Spy, he “claimed to have received a letter from the commanding general of the Massachusetts Militia telling him that no troops were needed.” Unfortunately, Chacko and Kulcsar don’t quote that letter, and their citation isn’t specific or clear.

That book’s notes mention “Simeon Potter’s letter of September 3, 1774 to his nephew Nathan Miller of Warren in WHS [Warren Historical Society] that is only partially reprinted in NDAR [Naval Documents of the American Revolution].” The second volume of N.D.A.R. does include a letter from Potter dated 3 Sept 1775, saying it went to Col. William Turner Miller and is at the Rhode Island Historical Society. But that letter says nothing about the April crisis or a message from Massachusetts. It’s conceivable that that published transcript is based on an incomplete, mislabeled copy and that the Warren Historical Society holds a longer document, but I wish the information were more solid.

In any event, the Rhode Island legislature cleaned house in May 1775. It replaced Lt. Gov. Sessions with Nicholas Cooke, and later pushed out Gov. Joseph Wanton in favor of Cooke as well. It made Greene a brigadier-general commanding three regiments of infantry and an artillery company outside Boston. For its own defense, the colony chose a new major-general: William Bradford (1729-1808), also of Bristol. In October Bradford became lieutenant governor and Joshua Babcock (1707-1783) of Westerly became the new major general.

As for Potter, one of these days I’ll quote that September 1775 letter to show his resentment about the whole situation. Potter did end up providing cannon for the Continental Army—at a price. In 1776 the Rhode Island legislature even appointed him an Assistant, or member of the upper house. But Potter didn’t show up for sessions, the next year he stopped serving in town offices, and he refused to pay taxes to the new government. That didn’t save him from losing his mansion in a British raid in 1778. Potter had to move into a smaller house, which is now a bed-and-breakfast.

A New John Adams Note?

The Warwick (Rhode Island) Beacon reports that today in North Kingston auctioneer William Spicer will sell a short, ragged John Adams letter—really more of a note. I don’t believe this document is mentioned in the published Papers of John Adams.

The letter is dated “Boston Decr. 26 1772” and addressed to an “old Friend” named William Elliot. The newspaper’s transcription reads:

We are all in a fury here about the Dependency of the governor and the Dependency of the Judges, the Commission for trying the Rhode Islanders for Burning the Gaspee. I wonder how your Colony happens to sleep so securely in a whole skin, when her sisters are so worried and tormented! . . .

[Postscript:] The Fools call it the Independency of the Govr, Judges etc

The letter comments on two political issues. One was the royal inquiry into the destruction of the Royal Navy ship Gaspee, which was disrupting Adams’s court schedule because it required the attention of some judicial figures.

The other was the Crown’s move to pay salaries to royal governors, judges, and other colonial appointees from the tea tax rather than leave it up to the local legislatures to pay those salaries (or delay doing so). The Crown salaries made those officials more independent of local opinion, more dependent on royal favor—hence the semantic debate within the letter.

Twitter Feed, 1-7 June 2010

• WASHINGTON POST on when Ronald Reagan unknowingly quoted Revolutionary War mythmaker George Lippard: bit.ly/csAIvY #
• RT @lucyinglis: The Noble Savage, also known as Wilson post.ly/i9VO // 1810: Boston sailor goes to London to become…a male model! #
• RT @gordonbelt: Teed Off: The Tea Party, Then and Now bit.ly/df8oK6 // Podcast featuring guest @bencarp #
• The search for cannon made in Salisbury, CT, during Revolution continues: bit.ly/ctrvXT #
• RT @amhistorymuseum: Today in 1731: Martha Washington is born. Her silk gown painted with flowers and insects: ow.ly/1T3Au #
• Just climbed to high point of British Empire in Massachusetts: cupola that Gov William Shirley built on his mansion in Roxbury. #
• RT @lucyinglis: The Noble Savage, also known as Wilson post.ly/i9VO // 1810: Boston sailor goes to London to become…a male model! #
• Massachusetts House does its part to fix the mess that is the Electoral College: bit.ly/9a8Ex0 #
• RT @history_book: War and Empire: The Expansion of Britain, 1790-1830 - by Bruce Collins - Longman. amzn.to/jwUwY #
• Quack Doctor profiles the Poor Man's Friend, late-18c medication made of beeswax, lard, and heavy metals: bit.ly/bRHxVC #
• Visiting the Handel Museum in London with @lucyinglis: bit.ly/ccl7X4 #
• Lecture at Saratoga this weekend—"How Capture of Gen Burgoyne turned American Revolution into World War": yhoo.it/ctBFp8 #
• RT @HeritageMuse: The arrival of our c1710 Queen Anne at the Sinclair Inn's 300th Anniversary this afternoon. twitpic.com/1ub7w6 #
• Review of KNIGHTS OF THE RAZOR, study of African-American barbers in slavery and freedom: bit.ly/cKfy5t #
• John Adams shares his opinions on the Jews (after meeting, like, twenty of them in his life?): bit.ly/aujcUC #
• RT @gordonbelt: On the Posterity Project: Revolution, Memory and John Sevier's State of Franklin bit.ly/9viyVx #
• RI Hist Socy: "we begin celebrating Gaspee Days with children dressed as gravediggers." Not sure why, but they do: bit.ly/b3SueT #
• Salem Maritime Natl Hist Site rebuilding pre-Revolutionary dockside warehouse: bit.ly/dzV6UD #
• John Maass's article on Gen Nathanael Greene, Gov Thos Jefferson, and the Virginia militia in 1780-81 readable online: bit.ly/aRGefq #
• RT @myHNN: Peabody, Mass. teacher finds 1792 document in classroom bit.ly/bHN9fl #
• RT @KevinLevin: website on history of slave rebellions in USA bit.ly/a3AiOr // 4 listed in Massachusetts, but 2 only rumors. #
• RT @franceshunter: William Clark was the Ethel Waters to Meriwether Lewis's Billie Holiday: ht.ly/1VF1I #
• RT @amhistorymuseum: Today in 1845: Andrew Jackson dies. See his War of 1812 sword: ow.ly/1VCrM // Last colonial-born President. #
• RT @CapitolHistory: Today in 1789 James Madison (VA) introduced to the House amendments to the Constitution that became the Bill of Rights. #

Rhode Island’s Last Gaspée

In his History of the Province of Massachusetts Bay, former Massachusetts governor Thomas Hutchinson wrote of the American response to Parliament’s “act for the better preserving his majesty's dockyards, magazines, ships, ammunition, and stores”:

Through inattention to dates, this act was supposed to have been occasioned by an assault upon the officers and men of his majesty’s armed schooner Gaspee [in 1772], and the burning of the schooner in the harbour of Rhode Island. This act did not arrive in America until some months after the fact, but it passed in parliament before the fact was committed; and the setting fire to the storehouses in the king’s yard at Portsmouth [in England] seems to have given rise to it.

This fact at Rhode Island, and the consequences of it, had a great tendency to strengthen the attempts making in Boston to raise a fresh spirit in the colonies. A vessel in the king’s commission and service had been attacked by a great number of armed men, the commander grievously, and, it was supposed, mortally wounded, and the vessel, and all that was combustible, burnt. Many of the persons concerned were known, and little, if any attempt was made, by authority in the colony, to bring any of the offenders to justice.

It was therefore thought fit, in England, that a special commission should issue from the crown, to authorize and direct an inquiry into the affair, and to grant the necessary powers for that purpose. The governor of the colony, though elected annually by the people, was named at the head of the commission. An authority to grant such commission is indisputably in the crown. . . . Such a commission, however, became an additional article of grievance.

The commissioners met, and sat some time to no purpose, and, after an adjournment of some months, met a second time, but with no better success. Such persons as had been groundlessly suspected, they found no difficulty in convening; but the persons really concerned in the fact, they either were never able to apprehend, or, if any such were apprehended, no witnesses would appear to give testimony against them.

Gaspee.org is a fine website of material about the burning of the Gaspée, drawn largely from the records of this commission. Click on the site’s spinning logo above and immerse yourself in the event.