Providence and the Revolutionary War: A City That Lit the Fuse

Long before the first shots rang out at Lexington and Concord, the merchants and mariners of Providence, Rhode Island, were already waging their own war against the British Crown. This compact city at the head of Narragansett Bay was not the largest colonial port, nor the wealthiest, nor the most populous — but it may have been the most defiant. Providence's contributions to the American Revolution span from the earliest acts of violent resistance to the final, reluctant embrace of the new constitutional order, and the city's story illuminates a dimension of the Revolution that is too often overshadowed by the great battles and famous declarations: the war was, in many ways, a merchants' rebellion, driven by men who understood that economic liberty and political liberty were inseparable, and who were willing to risk their fortunes, their ships, and their lives to prove it.

Stubborn, pugnacious, and cocksure, Rhode Island rushed pell-mell toward revolution after 1764.

Rhode Islanders had responded to British enforcement with escalating violence well before the Gaspee: they attacked HMS St John in 1764, and burned HMS Liberty in 1769 on Goat Island. But the event that truly thrust Providence onto the stage of imperial crisis occurred on the night of June 9, 1772, more than three years before the Revolution formally began. The HMS Gaspee, a British revenue schooner commanded by Lieutenant William Dudingston, had been terrorizing Narragansett Bay for months, aggressively enforcing customs laws, seizing colonial vessels on slim pretexts, and — most infuriatingly to local merchants — sending captured goods to Boston for adjudication rather than allowing cases to be heard in Rhode Island courts. Since Dudingston and his men were allowed to keep a portion of any cargo that they confiscated, many colonists suspected that the crew of the Gaspee was motivated as much by greed as any sense of duty. Dudingston's zeal made him despised — and it made him a personal enemy of some of the most powerful families in Rhode Island. After British official William Dudingston seized a vessel owned by Nathanael Greene and his brothers, Greene filed an ultimately successful lawsuit against Dudingston for damages.

After the Gaspee Affair in 1772, in which his family was accused of involvement in burning a British revenue ship, Greene began to take an interest in the growing discontent in the colonies. That growing interest would carry young Greene all the way to the Continental Army, where he would become one of George Washington's most trusted generals.

A number of Rhode Island seamen and traders delivered a petition seeking relief against the Gaspee to Rhode Island Chief Justice Stephen Hopkins , the most prominent statesman in Providence. Hopkins provided a legal opinion saying that British officers were obliged to present their orders and commission to Rhode Island's Governor before entering local waters, asserting a measure of colonial sovereignty. Dudingston, of course, refused to comply.

When the Gaspee ran aground on a sandbar near Warwick while pursuing the packet sloop Hannah, word reached Providence by evening. Captain Lindsey sailed the Hannah back to Providence, arriving later that afternoon and docking as usual at Fenner's Wharf, directly opposite Sabin's Tavern , the most frequented establishment in town. A drum was beaten through the streets accompanied by a crier, calling on all Sons of Liberty to join in a meeting at the tavern. John Brown, one of the city's most prominent merchants, organized a raiding party with striking speed. It was in the south-east room of this tavern on the evening of June 9, 1772, that Rhode Island patriots met and made plans to burn the British revenue schooner HMS Gaspee. The patriots even cast their bullets in the tavern fireplace, and it was from across the Main Street at Fenner's Wharf that the brave men from Providence departed in their longboats to attack the Gaspee.

Under cover of darkness, eight longboats carrying approximately sixty armed men from Providence rowed down the bay. The majority of these men, who comprised the social elite of Providence, were disguised with black-smeared faces or Indian headdresses.

The group, led by Abraham Whipple and John Brown, attacked, boarded, and burned the Gaspee to the waterline.

Eighteen-year-old Joseph Bucklin took a shot at the Gaspee's commander, Lt. William Dudingston , wounding him. The raiders removed the crew, went through the ship's papers, and set the vessel ablaze. The Gaspee burned to the waterline.

The destruction of a Royal Navy vessel was an act of breathtaking audacity — arguably the first significant act of violent resistance against British authority in the colonies. The Crown took it seriously. King George III authorized a Royal Commission of Inquiry with extraordinary powers, 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 Rhode Island Governor Wanton. The prospect that the commission could send suspects to England for trial horrified colonists who considered it a fundamental violation of their rights as Englishmen. The commission convened in January 1773 and spent months investigating, but Providence closed ranks with remarkable discipline. Chief Justice Hopkins declared that Rhode Island courts would not cooperate with the Gaspee investigatory commission by refusing to hand over any citizen so-indicted to the British Admiralty. Despite substantial rewards offered for information, not a single credible witness came forward to identify the attackers. The commission dissolved in failure by June 1773, its impotence a humiliation for the Crown and a powerful signal to other colonies that organized resistance could succeed. John Brown, widely known to have masterminded the raid, was never charged.

The Gaspee affair electrified the colonies and directly spurred one of the most consequential developments of the pre-Revolutionary period: the creation of intercolonial committees of correspondence. The Virginia Committee of Correspondence was an eleven-man group formed by the House of Burgesses on March 12, 1773, in response to perceived threats to colonial charters and legislative authority resulting from the Gaspee affair.

Its members included Peyton Randolph, Richard Henry Lee, Patrick Henry, and Thomas Jefferson. Thomas Jefferson himself later recalled that the Gaspee commission demanded the attention of the Virginia legislature at its spring 1773 session. The burgesses intended to create a permanent inter-colonial communication network that would be active in times of crisis and peace. In response to the request from the Virginia legislators, other colonial legislatures quickly agreed to form a network of committees of correspondence.

These permanent committees performed the important planning