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. Its people were more united, its leaders more outspoken in favor of independence than those of any other colony. In open disobedience, it was the spearhead of the Revolution — the first colony to resort to armed resistance, to call for a Continental Congress, to renounce allegiance to the king, to create an American naval force.

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 Rhode Island waters.

On June 9, 1772, the Gaspee chased the packet boat Hannah as she sailed north from Newport to Providence. The Hannah's captain, Benjamin Lindsey, lured the Gaspee into the shallows, where she ran aground on a sandbar at what is now called Gaspee Point, about seven miles below Providence.

Lindsey continued upriver and, upon reaching Providence at sunset, alerted merchant John Brown.

The sixty-four attackers were organized by Brown and led by Captain Abraham Whipple — a Providence-born sea captain who had earned a fearsome reputation during the French and Indian War, capturing twenty-three French vessels in 1759–1760.

That night, about eighty intrepid patriots boarded eight longboats and rowed from Fenner's Wharf in Providence to the stranded schooner.

Several leading merchants and sea captains had organized the party; in the ensuing confrontation, the Gaspee's commander, Lieutenant Dudingston, was wounded by a musket ball, and the attackers ultimately boarded the ship, captured its crew, and set it ablaze.

The burning of the Gaspee was not merely a local act of defiance — it was an act of war against the Crown that reverberated across the colonies. On August 26, 1772, King George III called for a Royal Commission of Inquiry, headed by Rhode Island Governor Joseph Wanton and including the chief justices of New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts.

Convinced that an impartial trial could not be secured in the colonies, the ministry intended that indicted persons would be sent to England for trial — a prospect that terrified colonists who saw it as a violation of their right to trial by a local jury. The commissioners, after many sessions interviewing numerous people, failed to apprehend or commit anyone; on June 22, 1773, they issued their final report and closed the investigation. No one was ever punished for the burning of the Gaspee.

Despite a £500 reward offered for information, the British were never able to uncover sufficient evidence to try the culprits.

But the political aftershocks of the Gaspee affair proved more consequential than the fire itself. The Virginia Committee of Correspondence was formed by the House of Burgesses on March 12, 1773, in direct response to perceived threats to colonial charters and legislative authority resulting from the Gaspee affair.

The greatest clamor occurred in Virginia's House of Burgesses, whose members voted resolutions establishing a committee of correspondence while urging other colonies to do the same; by December 1773, eleven had appointed similar bodies.

By setting up an intercolonial network, the colonies were able to organize resistance to British policies, leading to the First Continental Congress in 1774. In this way, the flames that consumed the Gaspee off the shores of Warwick lit a chain of political fires that would ultimately unite the colonies against the Crown.

Providence continued to lead the march toward confrontation. A Providence Town Council meeting on May 17, 1774, became the first official government body to advance proposals for a general congress of all the colonies to formulate united resistance to the policies of England.

The Rhode Island General Assembly, on June 15, 1774, made Rhode Island the first colony to appoint delegates to the First Continental Congress. Among those delegates was Stephen Hopkins himself — now nearing seventy, but no less fierce in his convictions. By 1774, Hopkins believed that war with the Crown was inevitable and told his fellow delegates: "The gun and bayonet alone will finish the contest in which we are engaged, and any of you who cannot bring your minds to this mode of adjusting the quarrel, had better retire in time."

Few Rhode Islanders today know of the Providence Tea Party of March 2, 1775 — one of many so-called "tea parties" that occurred across the colonies in the wake of the events in Boston.

Public notices in the Town Crier announced that at 4:00 PM on Thursday, March 2nd, a gathering would happen in Market Square, the heart of the city.

The women of Providence showed their disdain for British authority by burning tea at Market Place; the incident included a mock funeral for "Madam Souchong," the personification of the tea.

The protest occurred just 48 days before the first shots rang out at Lexington and Concord.

When war came, Providence was ready.