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.