Gaspee Affair

On the night of June 9 and early June 10, 1772, Rhode Island patriots attacked and burned HMS Gaspee in Narragansett Bay after the British customs schooner ran aground near Warwick. Lieutenant William Dudingston had pursued the packet Hannah under Captain Benjamin Lindsey, and local men led by Abraham Whipple and John Brown seized the chance to strike the stranded vessel. The raiders wounded Dudingston, removed the crew, and set the Gaspee on fire before dawn.

The destruction of the Gaspee intensified the constitutional conflict over customs enforcement and imperial authority in Rhode Island. British officials treated the attack as treason and created a royal commission of inquiry, raising colonial fears that suspects might be sent to England for trial outside local juries. The affair therefore sharpened the argument that vice-admiralty power and imperial investigation threatened traditional English liberties in British America.

The Gaspee investigation helped inspire the expansion of committees of correspondence in Massachusetts and Virginia during 1772 and 1773. Those networks later carried colonial protests against the Tea Act and the Coercive Acts into coordinated intercolonial action.