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== The History of the Gaspee Episode – viewed by contemporaries ==
'''The History of the Gaspee Episode – viewed by contemporaries'''


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== As the founding generation was disappearing into history==
As the founding generation was disappearing into history'''Bold text'''


== Notes ==
== Notes ==

Revision as of 13:11, 30 May 2008

The Gaspée Affair was an important incident in the course of the American Revolution. HMS Gaspée, a British revenue schooner that had been vigorously enforcing unpopular trade regulations, ran aground in shallow water, on June 9, 1772 near what is now known as Gaspee Point in the city of Warwick, Rhode Island while chasing the packet boat Hannah. In an act of defiance that gained considerable notoriety, the ship was attacked, boarded, stripped of valuables and torched by American patriots led by Abraham Whipple.

Burning of the Gaspee

Background

The customs service in Britain’s North American colonies in the eighteenth-century had a violent history. The Treasury in London did little to correct known problems and Britain itself was at war during much of this period and was not in a strategic position to risk antagonizing its overseas colonies. At the end of the Seven Years' War, following Britain’s decisive victory, several successive ministries implemented reforms in an attempt to achieve more effective administrative control and raise more revenue in the colonies. The revenue was necessary, Parliament believed, to bolster the military and naval defensive positions along the borders of their far-flung empire. Among these reforms was the deputizing of the Royal Navy's Sea Officers to help enforce customs in colonial ports.

The incident

In early 1772, Lieutenant William Dudingston sailed HMS Gaspée into Rhode Island’s Narragansett Bay to aid in the enforcement of customs collection and inspection of cargo. Rhode Island had a reputation for smuggling and trading with the enemy during wartime. Dudingston and his officers quickly antagonized powerful merchant interests in the small colony. On June 9, when the Gaspée lay hard aground, a band of Providence members of the Sons of Liberty rowed out to confront the officers and crew before the rising tide allowed the ship to free herself.

The break of dawn June 10, the ship was boarded. The crew put up a feeble resistance and Lieutenant Dudingston was shot and wounded, and the vessel burned to the waterline. The man who fired was Joseph Bucklin.

JOSEPH BUCKLIN, was well known in Providence and kept a prominent restaurant, or place of resort, in South Main Street, where gentlemen resorted for their suppers.. Here, too, they assembled, to discuss politics, and where, possibly, the expedition which destroyed the Gaspee, was discussed, as well as at Mr. Sabin's house, which was near it.[1]

Aftermath

Previous attacks by the colonials on British naval vessels had gone unpunished. In one case, a customs yacht was actually destroyed (also by fire) with no administrative response. But in 1772, the Admiralty would not ignore the destruction of one of its military vessels on station. This attack can be considered the first shot of the American Revolution and the beginning of America's freedom.

The American Department consulted the Solicitor and Attorney Generals, who investigated and advised the Privy Council on the legal and constitutional options available. The Crown turned to a centuries-old institution of investigation, the Royal Commission of Inquiry. This commission would be made up of the chiefs of the supreme courts of Massachusetts, New York, and New Jersey, the judge of the vice-admiralty of Boston, and the governor of Rhode Island, Joseph Wanton. A recent law allowed those suspected of crimes against the naval establishment to be tried in England. The task of the commission was to determine against which colonists there was sufficient evidence for their trial in England. The Commission was unable to obtain sufficient evidence and declared their inability to deal with the case.

Colonial Whigs were alarmed at the prospect of Americans being sent to England for trial. A Committee of Correspondence was formed in Boston to consult on the crisis. In Virginia, the House of Burgesses was so alarmed that they also formed an inter-colonial committee of correspondence to consult in the crisis with other committees.

In Boston, a little-known visiting minister, John Allen (minister) at Second Baptist Church preached a sermon that utilized the Gaspée Affair to warn listeners about greedy monarchs, corrupt judges and conspiracies at high levels in the London government. This sermon was printed seven different times in four colonial cities, becoming one of the most popular pamphlets of Colonial British America. This pamphlet, along with the incendiary rhetoric of numerous colonial newspaper editors, awoke colonial Whigs from a lull of inactivity in 1772, thus inaugurating a series of conflicts that would culminate in the Battles of Lexington and Concord.

Legacy

The city of Warwick, Rhode Island commemorates the Gaspée Affair with Gaspée Days. This festival includes arts and crafts and races, but the highlight is the Gaspée Days parade. The parade features burning the Gaspée in effigy, a Revolutionary War battle reenactment, Revolutionary War era fife-and-drum bands, a marching band dressed as period sailors, local marching bands, and others. The accepted abbreviation for Gaspée Plateau is G-Plat.

There is also a plaque in the front of a parking lot on North Main Street in Providence, Rhode Island, commemorating the location of the incident.

Historiographical Background

The History of the Gaspee Episode – viewed by contemporaries


There were 38 newspapers in mainland British America in 1772. At least eleven, mostly in the Northeast, reported the attack on the Gaspee within the first few weeks following the incident.[2] Moreover, the Gaspee Commission of Inquiry was the topic of one of the most important pre-independence pamphlets to circulate within the colonies, John Allen’s An Oration, Upon the Beauties of Liberty, Or the Essential Rights of Americans. Allen, a little-known preacher at the Second Baptist Church in Boston, gave an emotional sermon in December of 1772 that played upon colonial fears and prejudices. Though Allen was not a particularly notable thinker or writer, and his arguments were not always accurate or consistent, his Oration went through seven printings (five editions) published in four different cities.[3] Allen argued that England and America were separate judicial spheres and one could not interfere with the other. He addressed his message to Lord Dartmouth and portrayed the actions of colonials as merely self-defense, not rebellion - an important distinction for his reading audience in early 1773. When Oration was published it ranked among the best-selling pamphlets of the crisis.[4]

Bernard Bailyn included Allen among only three colonial pamphleteers were who able to demonstrate the “concentrated fury” comparable to that found in tracts and treaties by Europe’s more imaginative and capable writers.[5] While Allen’s Oration was among the more incendiary, there is no evidence that it was every serialized or extracted in newspapers. Perhaps this was partly due to his death in 1774.[6] Moreover, subsequent events like the Boston Tea Party quickly overshadowed the Gaspee incident. The reactions (and overreactions) of the Imperial government in 1774 preoccupied patriot presses and later historical narratives. Forever afterwards the Gaspee episode has remained of minor concern to those who recounted the events leading up to April of 1775. When in 1796 Richard Snowden published his history of the American Revolution in Baltimore, he started with Boston Tea Party and made no mention of the Gaspee, or, for that matter, any event prior to 1773. Mercy Otis Warren skipped from 1770 to 1773 in her massive two volume history of the American Revolution in 1805.[7] Even a book focused on the British Navy’s difficulties in the colonies from 1763-1782 failed to mention the Gaspee.[8] To this day, no scholar has dedicated a monograph to the Gaspee episode, such as Benjamin Woods Labaree’s The Boston Tea Party or Hiller B. Zobel’s The Boston Massacre.[9]


As the founding generation was disappearing into historyBold text

Notes

  1. ^ A History of the Destruction of His Britannic Majesty's Schooner Gaspee by John Russell Bartlett, p. 20, note 6.
  2. ^ David A. Copeland, Colonial American Newspapers (Newark, University of Delaware Press, 1997), 279. The South Carolina Gazette reported it within three weeks. Merrill Jensen, The Founding of a Nation: A History of the American Revolution, 1763-1776 (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1968, 2004), 428.
  3. ^ Eds. G. Jack Gravlee and James R. Irvine, Pamphlets and the American Revolution: Rhetoric, Politics, Literature, and the Popular Press Scholar’s Facsimiles & Reprints (Delmar, NY, 1976), viii.
  4. ^ John M. Bumsted and Charles E. Clark, “New England’s Tom Paine: John Allen and the Spirit of Liberty,” William and Mary Quarterly Third Series, Vol. 21, Issue 4 (October 1964): 561, 566.
  5. ^ Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1967), 18.
  6. ^ The time of his death remains uncertain, see Steven H. Park, The Burning of H.M.S. Gaspee and the Limited of Eighteenth-Century British Imperial Power, 2005, Unpublished Dissertation, Chapter 4.
  7. ^ Mercy Otis Warren, History of the Rise, Progress and Termination of the American Revolution: interspersed with Biographical, Political and Moral Observations Vol. I & II (Indianapolis: LibertyClassics, 1805, 1988), 59.
  8. ^ Captain W.M. James, The British Navy in Adversity: A Study of the War of American Independence (London: Longmans, Green and Co. LTD., 1926) p. 25 skips from 1770 to 1773.
  9. ^ Lawrence J. DeVaro and Steven H. Park have written the only dissertations that represent a non-fiction book-length work aimed at an adult readership.
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