“Great expectations from the late affair at Rhode Island”

On 12 June 1772, the day after the Boston News-Letter broke the news of the Gaspee burning, Gov. Thomas Hutchinson sent a copy of that newspaper to the secretary of state in London, the Earl of Hillsborough.

Hutchinson added his own commentary:

If some measures are not taken in England in consequence of so flagrant an insult upon the King’s authority I fear it will encourage the neighbouring Colonies to persevere in their opposition to the Laws of Trade and to be guilty of the like & greater Acts of Violence.

As the Town of Providence joins to this Province and is less than 50 miles from this Town and the flame may spread here I hope your Lordship will not think that I go out of my line in this information.

That letter appears in the latest volume of The Correspondence of Thomas Hutchinson issued by the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, which runs through June 1772.

Hutchinson had experienced the limits of Massachusetts justice himself after an anti-Stamp Act mob destroyed his house in the North End in 1765. He then witnessed more problematic proceedings as governor. He expected the Rhode Island courts to be ineffectual against these rioters. 

On 25 June the governor wrote to Hillsborough again, reporting, “A Gentleman yesterday from Providence informs me that the Perpetrators of the late atrocious crime are well known but that it would be as much as a man’s life is worth to bring forward a prosecution.”

That second letter also raised the possibility of American smugglers arming ships to fight government vessels, which would be “Acts of Rebellion upon the High Seas.” Anyone captured doing that, the governor suggested, should be shipped to England where “the Law must take its course.”

At the end of the month Hutchinson returned to that idea in telling Royal Navy commodore James Gambier about the Gaspee attack:

I hope if there should be another like attempt, some concerned in it may be taken prisoners and carried directly to England. A few punished at Execution Dock would be the only effectual preventive of any further attempts. In every Colony they are sure of escaping with impunity.

It’s notable that the governor didn’t suggest that the Gaspee attackers themselves be taken to Britain for trial. Instead, he wrote about conjectural future events. That was partly keeping himself out of the Rhode Island case, partly “slippery slope” thinking.

Later in the summer Hutchinson began to raise another possible response by the imperial government: changing the constitution of Rhode Island so that London had more leverage there.

On 29 August the governor wrote to John Pownall, the secretary managing the Colonial Office:

People in this province, both friends an enemies to government, are in great expectations from the late affair at Rhode Island of burning the King’s schooner, and they consider the manner in which the news of it will be received in England, and the measures to be taken, as decisive.

If it is passed over without a full inquiry and due resentment, our liberty people will think they may with impunity commit any acts of violence, be they ever so atrocious, and the friends to government will despond, and give up all hopes of being able to withstand the faction.

The persons who were immediate actors are men of estate and property in the colony. A prosecution is impossible. If ever the government of that colony is to be reformed, this seems to be the time, and it would have a happy effect on the colonies which adjoin to it.

Hutchinson felt he wasn’t alone in that assessment, telling Adm. Samuel Hood on 2 September:

So daring an insult as burning the King’s schooner, by people who are as well known as any who were concerned in the last rebellion and yet cannot be prosecuted, will certainly rouse the British lion, which has been asleep these four or five years. Admiral [John] Montague says that Lord Sandwich will never leave pursuing the colony, until it is disenfranchised.

After the Revolutionary War broke out, Patriots found Hutchinson’s copies of those letters left behind in his Milton mansion. Newspapers published most of these quoted passages in late 1775. By then, the Massachusetts Whigs were convinced that Hutchinson and his crowd had been conspiring against their self-government, and these letters seemed to confirm that.

TOMORROW: A letter from London.