“One hundred barrels of gun-powder has been taken out”

On 2 Sept 1774, Gov. Nicholas Cooke reported that the Rhode Island government had finally acquiesced to Gen. George Washington’s wish for the colony to send an armed ship to Bermuda to pick up some gunpowder that island’s inhabitants were reportedly ready to sell to the American rebels.

The man for the job, Cooke said, was Abraham Whipple (1733–1819, shown here). He had commanded a privateer in the last war and had already taken one Royal Navy vessel: the Gaspee in 1772. Rhode Island had made him commodore of its fleet, which at that time consisted of two ships.

Rising from his sickbed, Whipple had one request:

He requests your Excellency to give him a Line under your Hand assuring the People of Bermuda that, in Case of their Assistance, you will recommend it to the Continental Congress to permit them to fetch Provisions for the Use of the Island. He does not purpose to make any Use of it unless he shall find it utterly impracticable to obtain the Powder without their Assistance.

Washington’s military secretary Joseph Reed drafted that document:

In the great Conflict which agitates this Continent I cannot doubt but the Assertors of Freedom & the Rights of the Constitution are possessed of your most favourable Regards & Wishes for Success. As the Descendants of Freemen & Heirs with us of the same glorious Inheritance we flatter ourselves that tho. divided by our Situation we are firmly united in Sentiment. The Cause of Virtue & Liberty is confined to no Continent or Climate it comprehends within its capacious Limits the wise & the good however dispersed & separated in Space or Distance. . . .

On 9 September, Cooke sent more news: “Zealous to do every Thing in our Power to serve the common Cause of America, the Committee have determined, instead of the small armed Sloop, to send the large Vessel with Fifty Men upon the Bermuda Enterprize.”

Whipple sailed on 12 September. Gov. Cooke probably thought the general would finally be satisfied. Then he noticed an item in the 14 September New-England Chronicle under a Philadelphia dateline:

Extract of a letter from Bermuda, dated August 21.

“Upwards of one hundred barrels of gun-powder has been taken out of our magazine: supposed by a sloop from Philadelphia, and a schooner from South Carolina: It was very easily accomplished, from the magazine being situated far distant from town, and no dwelling house near it.”

In fact, this gunpowder heist was an inside job. A Bermuda gentleman named Henry Tucker had made arrangements with the Continental Congress to trade that gunpowder for regular shipments of food. He had arranged for men to break into the storehouse on 14 August and load the 1,182 pounds of powder inside onto the two American vessels. Tucker even sent the Congress a bill for around £162. Read all about that in Hugh T. Harrington’s article for the Journal of the American Revolution.

Back in early August, Gov. Cooke had told Gen. Washington that there was no need for a special voyage since the Bermudans might very well move the gunpowder on their own. Now that turned out to be true. In fact, Tucker’s team had acted even as Cooke was maneuvering his legislature to fund Rhode Island’s effort for Washington’s sake. By the time Cdre. Whipple had sailed, the gunpowder in question had arrived at Philadelphia. Unfortunately, Cooke was unable to get Whipple and his armed ship back to Narragansett Bay.

Remarkably, the governor managed not to write to the general ‘I told you so.’

TOMORROW: Whatever happened to…

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.

What Washington Really Did about the Gunpowder

Having expressed great skepticism about James T. Flexner’s statement that George Washington directed a disinformation campaign to conceal the Continentals’ lack of gunpowder from the British, I feel I should address what the general actually did.

After all, Washington didn’t just sit there, not saying anything. Actually, he did, but only for half an hour, according to Gen. John Sullivan.

After that, the commander-in-chief wrote urgent letters to the executive authorities of the neighboring colonies and the Continental Congress, asking for any gunpowder they had. Those letters appear to have sped up shipments a bit, and some powder was already on its way to the army. The crisis Washington and his generals perceived lasted only a few days, though lack of ammunition continued to limit their action for a while.

Washington also proposed or endorsed two audacious ways to seize powder from British outposts. The American generals learned about the shortage at a 3 Aug 1775 council of war, and the minutes show their response:

It was proposed to make an attempt on the Magazine at Halifax where there is reason to suppose there is a great quantity of Powder. And upon the Question being seriously put, it was agreed to, by a great majority, and that the detachment for this enterprise consist of 300 Men.

This raid on one of the British military’s main garrisons in North America never took place. Which was probably good from the American point of view, since the plan seems to have been a bit too optimistic.

In a monograph titled “George Washington’s Armed Schooner,” Allen B. Hovey has suggested that preparation for that assault on Halifax prompted Washington to look into arming a ship for the first time. Later, after he had sent the Hannah to sea, the general told John Langdon of New Hampshire that schooner was part of “a scheme I had in view with the People of Hallifax.” So that 3 August plan might have produced results, just not the results the council of war had in mind.

The next day, Washington suggested a different naval expedition to Gov. Nicholas Cooke of Rhode Island:

one Harris is lately come from Bermuda, where there is a very considerable Magazine of Powder in a remote Part of the Island and the Inhabitants well disposed not only to our Cause in General, but to assist in this Enterprize in particular; we understand there are two Armed Vessels in your Province commanded by Men of known Activity and Spirit; one of which it is proposed to dispatch on this Errand, with such other assistance as may be required; Harris is to go along as the Conductor of the Enter prize and to avail ourselves of his knowledge of the Island, but without any Command. I am very sensible that at first view the project may appear hazardous and its Success must depend on the Concurrence of many Circumstances; but we are in a Situation which requires us to run all Risques.

Capt. Abraham Whipple did indeed head to Bermuda, but not until mid-September, as he later described. That expedition didn’t produce any powder, either, because a lot of it had already been stolen away. But we can’t say Gen. Washington didn’t think big.

Learning about John Adams and Abraham Whipple

On Thursday I attended a seminar at the Massachusetts Historical Society discussing a chapter from Richard Ryerson’s intellectual biography of John Adams. A former editor of the Adams Papers, Dick is writing this book for Johns Hopkins University Press. He described how he started out focusing on Adams’s formal essays, tracing how the lawyer developed his notions of republicanism. Gradually he’s adding thoughts on how Adams’s life might have affected his political philosophy—which of course makes for much bigger chapters.

Among the topics we attendees discussed was how to handle Adams's vice presidency and presidency. He wrote no major political essays between 1791 and 1801, but he actually got/had to act on his ideas and ideals. I sensed the book getting longer still.

I still feel dubious about any of John Adams’s pronouncements that he was the only man on one side of a particular issue, and/or was brave to hold that position. Specifically, we discussed this remark in his Thoughts on Government from 1776:

A man must be indifferent to the sneers of modern English men, to mention in their company the names of Sidney, Harrington, Locke, Milton, Nedham, Neville, Burnet, and Hoadly. No small fortitude is necessary to confess that one has read them.

Many of these political writers came from the period of the British Commonwealth, or were invoked to defend that supposedly non-monarchical government. Cromwell’s rule was seen as a mistake in Britain, and no longer openly celebrated even in New England. But to say one needed “No small fortitude” to admit to reading John Locke? Come on, John.

Curiously, on 27 March of that year Adams wrote to William Hooper: “In my early Youth, the Works of Sidney, Harrington, Lock, Milton, Nedham, Neville, Burnet, Hoadley, were put into my Hands…” So supposedly those same sneered-at authors—in the same order—were suitable reading for a man in “early Youth.”

The next day I sat in on a talk by Prof. Sheldon S. Cohen on his new biography of Commodore Abraham Whipple of Rhode Island. Like most of the top American naval officers of the Revolutionary War, Whipple had a stormy career. It’s actually pretty remarkable that we remember any naval commanders at all, they went up and down so fast. (It’s even more remarkable that the one we do remember is the tempestuous and unpopular John Paul Jones.)

After the war Whipple tried to retire to a plantation in Rhode Island, but suffered in the 1780s economy. He and his family moved to the new territory of Ohio and helped to settle the city of Marietta. How did a seaman adjust to life in a landlocked state? Cohen explained how Whipple and his fellow settlers built a shipyard on the Ohio River and started to transport goods downstream to New Orleans.