Ways to Explore the Gaspee Affair

As long as I’m virtually hanging out in Rhode Island, I’ll share some new links about the Gaspee affair.

Two hundred and fifty years ago last month, local men stormed a Royal Navy schooner that had run aground chasing a suspected smuggler. They shot the schooner’s commander, Lt. William Dudingston, though not fatally. They took the crew captive. And they set fire to the king’s ship.

The follow-up to that event violent dragged on over the next several months, into 1773. As part of the Sestercentennial, the Rhode Island Secretary of State’s office has digitized its archive of documents related to the Gaspee. We can browse that collection here.

Most of those documents are the records of the official commission that the London government set up to investigate the matter, headed by Rhode Island governor Joseph Wanton. He wasn’t keen on actually identifying who organized or led the attack on the Gaspee since that group almost certainly included some of the colony’s leading merchants. Much of the official correspondence therefore consists of navy commanders proffering one lead or witness after another, only for the governor and lieutenant governor to wave them off.

The commission papers appear to come to 221 pages. The digital archive includes those pages singly and as a bound batch, an index, transcriptions in English and Spanish, modern audio readings of a couple of witness testimonies, and a complete digital version of William R. Staples’s Documentary History of the Destruction of the Gaspee, compiled in 1845.

Another Sestercentennial Gaspee commemoration can be viewed at the Rhode Island Historical Society’s John Brown Museum in Providence. The exhibit “The Gaspee Legacy: Resistance or Treason?” (called “Resistance of Treason?" on this webpage) includes “more than 15 items from the RIHS collections related to the Affair, including John Brown’s cane engraved with the Gaspee’s name and rumored to be constructed of wood from the Gaspee.”

(You remember what I said about the colony’s leading merchants being behind that attack? John Brown, shown above, was almost certainly one of them. And he and his family don’t seem to have been ashamed of the association.)

The “Gaspee Legacy” exhibit will be on view through the end of 2022.

Earlier this year the Rhode Island Historical Society also cooperated with the Newport Historical Society in announcing a collection of scholarly essays to be titled The Bridge: The Gaspee Affair in Context. I’ve been told by one of the contributing authors that this book has been printed, but there’s still no mention of it on the societies’ websites. When it becomes available to the public, I hope to provide a pointer for ordering copies.