Who Wants to Be a General Anyway?

Here are a couple more wrinkles in how the Rhode Island legislature commissioned Nathanael Greene to lead its troops in 1775 which I haven’t seen discussed elsewhere.

First, the colony named Greene its brigadier general. That was one rung lower than the rank still held by Simeon Potter, major general.

At the same time the legislature commissioned Greene, it also promoted Potter into its upper house, the Assistants.

Those actions might have kept the hot-tempered man content that he was still being respected. The colony still wanted his cooperation (and his cannon).

At the siege of Boston, Greene was the youngest general and had the least seniority. But he was still lumped in with the other generals. In June, Nathaniel Folsom reported back to New Hampshire: “Mr. [Artemas] Ward is Capt. General, Mr. [John] Thomas Lieut. General, and the other Generals are Major Generals.” That was their practical pecking order, not their formal ranks.

In July, the Continental Congress listed Greene as a brigadier general, alongside Thomas, William Heath, Joseph Spencer, John Sullivan, and others. In the summer of 1776 Greene became a Continental major general, and that remained his official rank throughout the war.

Here’s another possible factor in Rhode Island’s choice of Greene to command its army in 1775: Nobody else wanted the job.

The army of observation was designated as 1,500 soldiers, smaller than the other three New England colonies. Whoever commanded that contingent was bound to be low man on the totem pole around Boston. And in practice Greene was able to collect only about a thousand men.

For a Rhode Island man of military ambition, it might have seemed more promising to stay home and organize the coastal defense against British naval raids. At least you’d be the biggest fish in the pond.

What’s more, prospects might have looked even more promising at sea. Rhode Island was a maritime society. Many of its leading men were merchant captains who in wartime commanded or invested in privateers. As the example of Simeon Potter showed, that form of warfare could be the path to a life-changing windfall. Even naval captains had a chance at wealthy prizes.

On 12 June, Rhode Island became the first rebellious colony to commission its own navy, making Abraham Whipple the commander over two armed vessels. Whipple seized the Diana, a tender of H.M.S. Rose, off Newport three days later.

In October, Rhode Island’s delegates to the Continental Congress pushed for the creation of a Continental Navy. Ultimately delegate Stephen Hopkins’s brother Esek was appointed the first commander in chief of that branch.

That fall, the Rhode Island assembly (having given up on Simeon Potter) had appointed Esek Hopkins a brigadier general for defense of the colony. But the man jumped at the opportunity to go to war at sea. Because that was probably where he and his neighbors saw the real prestige and money.

In sum, Nathanael Greene might have become a general because senior men in Rhode Island didn’t view that job as important. Nobody foresaw what Greene would make of it.

COMING UP: The New Hampshire army.

“I have pleased myself with the thought of serving under you”

As discussed yesterday, sometime in the first week of May 1775 the Rhode Island legislature appointed Nathanael Greene to be the brigadier general of its army of observation.

In his biography of his grandfather, George Washington Greene wrote:

There is a tradition, but I will not vouch for it, that the first choice fell upon an Episcopalian, who declined; the second, on a Congregationalist, who also declined; and that, when the third vote was announced as having fallen on Greene, he rose in his place, and said: “Since the Episcopalian and Congregationalist won’t, I suppose the Quaker must.”

That’s about as tepid an endorsement for a “tradition” as a nineteenth-century biographer could provide. And the religious terms “Episcopalian” and “Congregationalist” weren’t standard in 1775, suggesting it wasn’t exact.

One recent biographer of Nathanael Greene has suggested that those first two candidates for command declined on religious grounds. I think that’s a misreading of the tradition. The first two faiths mentioned weren’t pacifist. That was the point of the anecdote—the irony of a (lapsed) Quaker leading an army instead of men from sects that didn’t object to military action. And the story might have some validity, though I doubt it happened in a legislative session.

The legislature’s first choice probably was Simeon Potter, already major general of the colony militia. At least, the body couldn’t ignore him. And Potter was an Anglican, even if he’d punched his minister in the face back in 1761. (Incidentally, the Rev. John Usher died on 30 Apr 1775, just as these discussions about the Rhode Island army were under way.)

Another candidate for command whom G. W. Greene and later biographers mentioned is James Mitchell Varnum (shown here), captain of the Kentish Guards. He’d grown up in Dracut, Massachusetts, as what people would later term a Congregationalist. That said, there were many others of that faith in Rhode Island as well, some probably quite senior to the twenty-six-year-old Varnum.

Varnum and Greene had worked together in the fall of 1774 to form the Guards, an independent militia company based in East Greenwich. Varnum, a rising young attorney, was chosen as the first captain. Encouraged by a cousin, Greene put his name forward to be a lieutenant, only to learn that some members thought his limp meant he didn’t look good marching in an elite company at all.

Sometime in October, it appears, Greene wrote to Varnum:

If I conceive right of the force of the objection of the gentlemen of the town, it was not as an officer, but as a soldier for that my halting was a blemish to the rest. I confess it is my misfortune to limp a little, but I did not conceive it to be so great; but we are not apt to discover our own defects. . . .

I have pleased myself with the thought of serving under you, but as it is the general opinion that I am unfit for such an undertaking, I shall desist. I feel not the less inclination to promote the good of the company, because I am not to be one of its members. I will do anything that's in my power to procure the charter.

Apparently Varnum had spoken of leaving the company himself if Greene was forced out because the letter continued:

Let me entreat you, Sir, if you have any regard for me, not to forsake the company at this critical season for I fear the consequences—if you mean to oblige me by it, I assure you it will not, I would not have the company break and disband for fifty Dollars

Varnum stayed with the company and apparently convinced Greene to do the same.

On 29 October, the legislature, with Greene as a delegate, issued a charter for the Kentish Guards. Its act listed the dozens of men who had petitioned for that charter, starting with Varnum and the other three designated as officers, including Christopher Greene. The fifth name on that list was Nathanael Greene. So officially he was a leading member.

It’s conceivable that some fallout from that affair influenced the choice of Greene as general in May 1775. If the legislature did approach Varnum, he may have thought it was Greene’s turn to lead. Or perhaps, with a real war looming, organizational skills seemed a lot more important than a slight limp.

TOMORROW: Hidden factors in the decision.

The Mysterious Rise of Nathanael Greene

In Massachusetts, the lower house of the General Court published annual detailed journals of what it (officially) discussed each day.

The clerk of the Provincial Congress kept similarly detailed notes, and that record was published in 1838.

Rhode Island’s assembly, in contrast, issued a bare-bones record of each legislative session: lists of elected and appointed officials, texts of resolutions and new laws. No specific dates between the day the assembly convened and when the session ended. No mention of failed petitions, disagreements with the upper house, committee reports, or the like.

As a result, Rhode Island’s legislative process is opaque. We know a session started on 22 April to wrap up the fiscal year and, in response to news from Massachusetts, to form a 1,500-man “army of observation.” But the only official clue to the date of that crucial resolution was how Gov. Joseph Wanton and Lt. Gov. Darius Sessions’s protest against it was dated 25 April.

Among the last actions of that legislature was:

IT is Voted and Resolved, That Mr. Nathaniel Greene be, and he is hereby, appointed in the Room of the Honorable Samuel Ward, Esq; (who is going to the Continental Congress) to wait on the General Assembly of the Colony of Connecticut, to consult upon Measures for the common Defence of the Four New-England Governments.

A new assembly convened on “the First Wednesday in May,” or 3 May. The legislature continued to build up the army. With Gov. Wanton staying home, lawmakers established a committee of safety to oversee that process.

Nathanael Greene and fellow delegate William Bradford were reimbursed for “their Service, Horse-Hire and Expences” on that Connecticut trip. Simeon Potter, Greene, and Daniel Owen were made a committee to audit the accounts of a man making “Six Gun-Carriages” for the colony. There was more activity.

And then suddenly the records shows a long list of new appointments. Simeon Potter was elevated to the upper house. William Bradford went onto the committee of safety. And atop the first list of “Officers of the Army of Observation” was:

Nathaniel Greene, jun. Esq; Brigadier-General.

Greene’s commission was dated 8 May, so the discussion that led to the creation of that handsome formal document must have taken place over the preceding week. But we know next to nothing about it.

We know Greene had represented the town of Coventry in the assembly for a few years. (For a while historians thought this was a different man, and indeed there were other Nathaniel Greenes active in Rhode Island affairs, but documents came to light to confirm his service.) The Greene family was enmeshed in the colony‘s politics.

We know Greene was particularly involved in the formation and training of the Kentish Guards, in Rhode Islanders’ initial response to the Lexington Alarm, and on the military committees listed above.

On the other hand, Nathanael Greene didn’t have a high rank in the colony militia. Indeed, he was only a private in the Kentish Guards, as I’ll discuss tomorrow.

Nonetheless, when the time came to go to war, the legislature promoted Greene above that unit’s captain, James Mitchell Varnum, and all other militia colonels to command its army. How that happened is an enduring mystery.

TOMORROW: Other candidates.

Simeon Potter and Rhode Island’s Army of Observation

Capt. Simeon Potter’s appeal to Rhode Island’s top court to overturn the verdict against him for assaulting the Rev. John Usher in 1761 didn’t work, despite having Robert Treat Paine to represent him.

So Potter appealed to an even higher court: the Privy Council in London.

According to Bruce Campbell MacGunnigle, who published the surviving record of this case in the Rhode Island Historical Society’s journal in 2006:

Usher won again, but under the condition that [he] come to England to collect [the judgement]. As Usher couldn’t afford the voyage, Potter never paid a cent.

Clifford K. Shipton likewise reported that Usher never collected any damages.

Capt. Potter continued to command respect in his home town of Bristol because of his wealth. He continued to serve in public offices. Usher continued to be the minister of St. Michael’s Church in the same neighborhood.

In 1772 Potter personally helped to attack H.M.S. Gaspee. When the Crown started an inquiry and found some witnesses, the captain apparently leaned on people to ensure he wasn’t identified. That whole affair seems to have made him only more popular.

At the end of 1774, Rhode Island made Potter the first major general of its militia forces. He looked like the right man to stand up to the Crown. By then people knew he was violent, possessive, and extremely stubborn—but those were pluses. Nobody could make Simeon Potter do what he didn’t want to do.

Come spring, Simeon Potter didn’t want to fight in the Revolutionary War.

On the evening of 19 April, according to American newspapers, Continental Congress delegate Stephen Hopkins wrote to Potter, calling on him to report to Providence in his capacity as major general; “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.”

Potter stayed home. In Beggarman, Spy: The Secret Life and Times of Israel Potter, David Chacko and Alexander Kulcsar wrote that Potter “claimed to have received a letter from the commanding general of the Massachusetts Militia telling him that no troops were needed,” but I can’t trace that reference and don’t trust the claim.

By 22 April Rhode Island’s legislature, having sidelined Gov. Joseph Wanton, was voting to form an “army of observation” which might march into Massachusetts. But the government had no one to lead those men.

TOMORROW: Finding a general.

“The said Potter, said it was not worth a Cussing”

At the civil trial of the Rev. John Usher v. Capt. Simeon Potter in November 1761, eight witnesses from Bristol, Rhode Island, testified through sworn depositions followed by questioning in court.

Those witnesses for the plaintiff agreed that both Usher and Potter were angry. They described Usher gesticulating with his cane. They all said Potter struck the first blow. One even said that about ten days later he’d asked Potter “if he thought Mr. Usher struck him,” and Potter said no.

Capt. Potter participated in part of that trial, cross-examining Usher’s witnesses. But he appears not to have tried to mount a defense with his own evidence. The court found him in default and awarded Usher £1,000 plus costs.

Potter actually had three witnesses lined up on his side. Jeremiah Bosworth claimed in a deposition, “once I plainly see said Usher strike sd. Potter over the head with his Cane.” Bosworth also accused the minister’s son Hezekiah of hitting and knocking down the captain’s father, Hopestill Potter—the same sort of assault that Capt. Potter was accused of.

A second witness testified to seeing Usher hit Potter. However, that witness was Capt. Potter’s father, obviously an interested party. The third witness said Usher was “aiming as I thought at striking sd. Potter,” but because of a tree he didn’t see any blow before Potter hit Usher. (Potter actually had a fourth deposition, but it came from someone whom Usher’s lawyer had already called.)

Instead of putting up an argument in the county court, Capt. Potter appealed the verdict to Rhode Island’s highest court. The case was scheduled for September 1762. In preparation, Potter collected more testimony. Now his sister Hope claimed, “I saw Mr. John Usher Clerk Strike att Capt. Simeon Potter with his Cane several times.”

Another new witness was Jonathan Fales, who owned the house on the corner where the fracas occurred. Several months after the fight, Fales signed off on this account:

Usher run from off the Causeway up to said Potter with his Cane lifted up as tho’ he was going to strike at him, said Potter not having before said Usher run up to him taken any notice of said Usher nor so much as turned towards him,

Upon said Usher’s coming up to said Potter I saw him shake his Cane over said Potter several times aiming as I thought at striking him

Interestingly, Jemima Gorham and William Lindsey signed depositions describing how they’d seen the same thing in almost exactly the same language.

What’s more, Richard Smith, a witness at the original trial, came forward to say Gorham had told a grand jury in January that she’d gone “into hur hous” and hadn’t seen anyone hit anybody.

And the Bristol justice of the peace who recorded those three new depositions, Daniel Bradford, also took the stand to say he’d asked Fales why he hadn’t testified back in November 1761. Bradford said that Fales

Answered that he went out of the way for fear of being called upon, as an Evidence. . . . Fales further said that a few days before ye Court said Potter asked him for his evidence and that he was in his Calm hours Wrote One and Shend ye same to said Potter, and that the said Potter, said it was not worth a Cussing and then Went and Sent ye Said Fales one already wrote, which said [Fales] Refused to sign.

In sum, it looks like Simeon Potter had leaned on or rewarded some of his neighbors to sign off on testimony he or his lawyer had prepared. I suspect if we knew more about employment and trade in Bristol, we’d see the levers of power that the captain was pulling.

TOMORROW: And did all that effort succeed?

[The photo above shows a fist-headed walking stick owned by Thomas Hancock and displayed at the Massachusetts Historical Society several years back. It has no link to this case, but I thought the design was appropriate.]

“Success in this troublesome affair”?

When I broke off yesterday, Capt. Simeon Potter of Bristol, Rhode Island, had just hit the Rev. John Usher in the face.

And then he did it again.

According to the minister’s son, Hezekiah Usher, that “made the blood fly out of his Mouth.”

The younger Usher described rushing out from his doorway:

I run and catch him [Potter] by the collar & took him off from my Father and received two blows in my Face from sd. Potter.

The captain’s father, Hopestill Potter, aged about seventy-one, also joined the fray. Eventually the minister and captain were pulled apart.

In the fall of 1761, the Rev. John Usher sued Capt. Simeon Potter for the punches “…And also the left Thumb of the Plaintiff at said Time & Place did Sprain by all which the Plaintiffs Life was despaired of.” He asked for “Fifty Thousand Pounds current Money of New England” in damages.

Capt. Potter threw up every roadblock. He argued that he’d been an unarmed man acting in self-defense. That Usher shouldn’t have sued in Newport. That “this Cause might be continued to next Court as he is not provided with an Attorney and his principal Evidence is at Sea.” Ultimately Potter put up no defense and defaulted, and the county court awarded Usher £1,000 plus costs.

Both parties appealed to the Rhode Island Superior Court of Judicature, Usher “because the Damages given were not adequate to the Injury recd.” and Potter because the verdict was “wrong and erroneous and ought to be reversed.”

Meanwhile in January 1762 a grand jury in Bristol County considered criminal assault charges against Capt. Potter. I can’t tell how far that process got.

In the summer of 1762 Potter called in a big legal gun from Massachusetts: Robert Treat Paine (shown above, later in life). Paine’s 6 August letter assured Potter that he could appeal both criminal and civil cases with “the Deposition you have of the Jurys dissatisfaction in their Verdict.” Paine called Usher “a Crafty powerfull Antagonist” and closed “wishing you success in this troublesome affair & that you may finally prevail against Ecclesiastical or Political Tyranny.”

On 10 September, Paine traveled to Newport to argue for Potter. The captain was presenting testimony from several witnesses not heard at the original civil trial.

TOMORROW: Examining the evidence.

“You shake it within an Inch of my Nose”

Some years back, I mentioned Simeon Potter’s dispute with John Usher, but I was relying on a secondary source that I’ve come to see as unreliable.

I’m therefore retelling that story in more detail using the court documents published by the Rhode Island Historical Society in 2006 (available as a P.D.F. from Family Search) and other sources.

In 1761 Potter was a wealthy gentleman in Bristol, Rhode Island. He’d been born in that town forty-one years earlier to a poor or middling family. He’d therefore grown up without much schooling, trained to be a cooper. But because of a privateering windfall at the start of King George’s War, Potter had made himself into one of the richest men in the whole colony.

Reflecting his new genteel status, Capt. Potter took on prestigious positions in politics and the church. He became a warden of the local Anglican church, St. Michael’s. Few New England towns of Bristol’s size—about 1,200 people in 1774—had an Anglican church, but this was at the coast and therefore served mariners.

The minister of St. Michael’s was the Rev. John Usher. He was the son of a wealthy bookseller who had risen to be lieutenant governor of New Hampshire. After graduating from Harvard College, Usher had joined the Church of England, defying the New England orthodoxy. The missionary Society for the Propagation of the Gospel paid part of his salary, and his congregants sometimes paid the rest.

In 1761 Usher was over sixty years old. His exact age is unclear since his tombstone says he was seventy-five when he died in 1775, but a memorial plaque later installed in his church says he was eighty. Either way, he’d been the minister at St. Michael’s since 1724, when Simeon Potter was still a little boy.

According to Usher’s report back to the S.P.G., the trouble started because

Notwithstanding he [Potter] has an agreeable wife, he has by report for some years back kept a criminal conversation with a young woman, one of my parish. . . . After many general hints from the Pulpit…I told her what reason I had to suggest she was guilty of the notorious sin of Adultery. . . . Upon this she told the man immediately what I had said

Frankly the minister shouldn’t have been surprised by that.

On the morning of 14 August, Charles Munro said, “the Rev. Mr. John Usher and Capt. Simeon Potter…engaged in warm words or Differing” on the street. Richard Smith added that Usher told Potter, “wherever he went there was whoring carried on.” Smith also quoted the men as saying:

[Potter:] if it wont for your Age and Gown I would not have your Cane shook over my head

[Usher:] I don’t shake it over your head nor mean to shake it over

[Potter:] you shake it within an Inch of my Nose

Simeon Potter, despite his fearsome reputation, was “small in stature,” according to Father Elzear Fauque. Also, in the manners of the time clubbing another man with a cane implied that the caner was a gentleman and the canee was not; given Potter’s background, his class status might have been a sensitive spot.

The minister’s son, Hezekiah Usher, called this “Ill treatment” of his father. Potter may also have said something about the minister’s daughter, but I can’t find another trace of her.

On 18 August, Usher and Potter met yet again on Church Lane. They picked up where they had left off. Hezekiah Usher stated:

I heard my Father say to sd. Potter if ever he cast any more reflections on his Family especially on his daughter twould cause him to reflect on his family and upon that the said Potter came up to my Father who was then on the edge of the Gravell’d Walk and said who of my Family and my Father said Your Father

Potter’s father, Hopestill Potter, was in fact sitting in a chair at his own front door nearby.

The quarrel caught the ears of several neighbors, though trees along the street blocked some people’s views. Witnesses agreed that Usher was holding his walking-stick in the middle, waving it around as he spoke. Some said this was “Usher’s naturall way of Shaking his Cane at any Person when he is earnest in talk.” One said the cane was “up as if he was agoing to strike.” But all the trial witnesses agreed they never saw the minister actually touch the captain.

According to Hezekiah Usher, after his father mentioned the captain’s father, Capt. Potter “rusht close up to my Father and said what reflections can you cast on him”? Usher replied, “I’ll blow him up.”

The captain then punched his sexagenarian minister in the face.

TOMORROW: In court.

“Capt. Potter answered that he would share none”

Rhode Island actually began its military build-up back in December 1774, as detailed in a letter from former governor Samuel Ward that I quoted back here.

At that time the colony appointed its first ever major general: Simeon Potter (1720–1806).

Potter was a militia colonel, representative of the town of Bristol in the colonial assembly, and veteran privateer captain.

Indeed, Potter had already helped to lead one attack on the British military: while several fellow merchants supported the assault on H.M.S. Gaspee in 1772, he actually commanded one of the boats.

Now in fact, Potter’s most successful privateering haul came in 1744 not from attacking enemy ships but from raiding a poorly defended settlement in French Guyana that hadn’t even heard the empires were at war.

According to one of his captives, he sailed away with:

seven Indians and three negroes [none previously enslaved], twenty large spoons or ladles, nine large ladles, one gold and one silver hilted sword, one gold and one silver watch, two bags of money, quantity uncertain; chests and trunks of goods, etc., gold rings, buckles and buttons, silver candlesticks, church plate both gold and silver, swords, four cannon, sixty small arms, ammunition, provisions, etc.

Father Elzéar Fauque reported that the looting included “tearing off the locks and the hinges of the doors, particularly those which were made of brass,” before burning everything to the ground.

Potter’s lieutenant Daniel Vaughan testified in 1746 that at Suriname

Capt. Potter put a Quantity of sd. Merchandize up at Vendue on board a Vessel in the Harbour and purchased the most of them himself and ship’t them to Rhode Island on his own account; then said Sloop Sailed for Barbadoes on wch. passage the men demanded that Capt. Potter would Share the Money taken, according to the Articles, to which Capt. Potter answered that he would share none until his Return for all the Men were indebted to the Owners more than that amounted to and Swore at and Damn’d them threatning them with his drawn sword at their Breasts, which Treatment Obliged the Men to hold their Peace and when said Sloop arrived at Barbadoes Capt. Potter without consulting the Men put part of the afore mentioned Effects into the Hands of Mr. Charles Bolton and kept the other part in his own Hands and Supply’d the Men only with Rum and Sugar for their own drinking, and further this Deponent saith that Capt. Potter refusing to let the men have their Shares and his Ill Treatment of them by beating them occasioned about twenty-four to leave the Vessel whose Shares Capt. Potter retained in his Hands

Simeon Potter came home to Bristol a rich man. A few years later, in 1747, the peninsula that contained that town was shifted from Massachusetts to Rhode Island, making Potter one of the richest men in the small colony.

Potter launched various maritime businesses: a ropewalk, a distillery, a wharf, a store, and so on. He invested in slaving voyages to Africa. By the 1770s he owned more enslaved people than anyone else in Bristol. According to a nephew, Potter declared, “I would plow the ocean into pea-porridge to make money.”

In those years, Potter’s neighbors recognized his status by electing him to the legislature and to militia commands, and he was happy with the power.

TOMORROW: A fighting man.

Rhode Island and the Royal Commission of Inquiry

Yesterday I pointed to the upcoming sestercentennial of the attack on H.M.S. Gaspee, a Royal Navy ship patrolling Narragansett Bay for smugglers.

Some of Rhode Island‘s leading merchants were involved in some way in destroying that ship, including the Browns, the Greenes, Abraham Whipple, and the notorious Simeon Potter.

The organized attackers wounded a British military officer, Lt. William Dudingston, and destroyed a British warship. Some authors, especially from Rhode Island, view it as a prelude or even the first battle of the Revolutionary War. But as I wrote yesterday, it seems significant that this event, for all its bellicosity, didn’t lead to a broader crackdown and war.

One big reason is that the Crown had far less leverage in Rhode Island. That colony was one of only two in North America (the other being Connecticut) where citizens elected their governor via the legislature. In the other colonies, London chose the governor, and usually he arrived with no local allegiances or favors owed.

Furthermore, the Rhode Island legislature chose judges for each year. Elsewhere, the royal government appointed judges for life. And elsewhere those appointed royal governors also appointed sheriffs and justices of the peace.

Rhode Island’s unusual charter left the Crown with only two groups of officials who owed their position and thus their full allegiance to London: the Customs service and the Royal Navy. And of course those arms of government had limited local popularity, as shown by the fact that Rhode Islanders had just burned a naval schooner enforcing the Customs laws.

To investigate the attack, therefore, Lord North’s government set up a Royal Commission of Inquiry. The five officials appointed to it were:

• Peter Oliver, chief justice of Massachusetts.
• Robert Auchmuty, judge of the vice-admiralty court in Boston.
• Daniel Horsmanden, chief justice of New York.
• Frederick Smythe, chief justice of New Jersey.
• Joseph Wanton, governor of Rhode Island (shown above).

The first four men were already strong Loyalists. Wanton wasn’t yet in that camp, and he was also the only man with local knowledge. When Adm. John Montagu used testimony from an indentured servant named Aaron Briggs to demand an investigation of John Brown, Simeon Potter, and others, Wanton responded by collecting evidence that undercut what Briggs said. The commission’s investigation led nowhere.

Royal authorities in Massachusetts and London learned from the frustrations of the Gaspee inquiry and put those lessons into practice after the next big attack—the Boston Tea Party of December 1773. They didn’t wait for local authorities, even the more numerous and powerful Crown appointees, to identify individual malefactors. Instead, Parliament adopted the Boston Port Bill to pressure the whole town, installed a more forceful governor, sent in troops, and eventually tried to rewrite the provincial constitution.

Thus, for the Crown the main lesson of the Gaspee affair was what not to do.

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.

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.