English Reactions to the Gaspee Attack
When the news of the destruction of the Gaspee eventually reached London
by ship, the
English Attorney General called the Gaspee capture five times as serious as the
Stamp Act protest. The English Attorney General joined with the
English Solicitor General in London to give a formal opinion to King George III
and Parliament which stated the attack on the Gaspee was "treason" and an "act
of war." Until then, each of the acts of violence or resistance by the colonists
had not been so labeled by the English legal system.
Lord
Hillsborough, the Royal Secretary of State for the Colonies, ordered Admiral Montague to go to Rhode Island and arrest the
persons involved. Parliament quickly passed an act specifically providing
that the burning of the Gaspee was treason, and the men involved were to be
brought back and tried in England.
Legal proclamations were issued
both by the Governor or Rhode Island and also by King George, each proclamation seeking information about the
identity of the Gaspee raiders. The Governor's was a weak proclamation,
without substantial reward, intended mainly to show the King that the government
of Rhode Island was doing enough so that the colony's charter should not be
revoked.
But the proclamation by King George V had teeth! The King proclaimed a
reward of £1000
- plus full pardon for your treason if you were one of the
attackers - to anyone giving information leading to the arrest of the person who
shot the English ship captain. This was a substantial reward. The Gaspee itself had been purchased
as a new ship from a shipyard and
outfitted at a cost of less than £545. A person getting
the £1000 reward could easily purchase a ship of
the type used by most merchants, pay for a crew to go on a voyage, and still have enough left over to buy a
house!
The Bucklins of Rhode Island and Massachusetts obviously had reasons for
hoping that the American Revolution did not end in failure, because then the
Bucklin family most likely eventually would be found out and treated as
conspirators in a treason.
The most impressive legal event by the English was formation of the Royal Commission.
The Royal Commission was formed by the King's direct order to investigate and
bring to English the "traitors". There was an old statute of Henry VIII
giving courts within England jurisdiction to try citizens accused of committing
treason outside the country island of England. This was the statute which
the Crown intended to use to try the offenders who attacked the Gaspee.
Whether or not the
Americans so considered it, the English considered that a war had begun.
Apparently recognizing that by the time a large fleet and suitable new troops
could be assembled it would be near the autumn time when it would not be good
for an Atlantic crossing, England
began to
assemble a large fleet and additional troops to move to the American
colonies in the spring of the next year.
American Reactions to the Gaspee Attack
Thomas Jefferson of Virginia proposed
an important united reaction by all the
American colonies. It
was the reaction of all the colonies to this attempt to take Americans to
England for trial that began the consolidation of the sundry colonies into a
union of states.
When Rhode Island learned the terms of the Royal Commission, they became
concerned about the probability of recourse to arms in defense of the colony.
Many expected the English troops already stationed in Boston would to be landing in Rhode Island to take the colony by
force.
The Rhode Island patriots sought the expert counsel of Samuel Adams. A group
of men, including the deputy governor, wrote to ask him what to do next. Adams
agreed with Thomas Hutchinson that the Gaspee's burning should open eyes to the
seriousness of the growing rebellion. Adams took the position that the Gaspee
affair should unite the colonists against the English government. In
a second letter, Adams wrote to Darius Sessions:
"I have long feared this
unhappy contest between Great Britain and America would end in rivers of blood.
Should that be the case, America, I think, may wash her hands in innocence."
The most meaningful legal event to the English navy men was the Court Martial
of Lt. Dudingston. Lieutenant William Dudingston was reluctant to testify in any
civil inquiry. He wanted no civil testimony recorded that could harm
him in a later court martial. His fear of testifying was not without
basis. He wanted to only testify at his court-martial, where he was in danger of
a penalty of death.
His fear of testifying was not without basis. Dudingston had surrendered his
ship and the ship had been destroyed. In those days an English sea
captain who lost his ship for whatever reason was always the subject of a
court-martial. One of the court-martials of the navy probably in
Dudingston's mind was the 1757 court-martial of Admiral Byng. The Admiral
had been ordered to take his ships and men and relieve the English force at Minorca.
The Admiral did not have sufficient forces, and thinking it irrational to incur
complete and useless destruction of his own ships and men, he finally
gave up the attempt. Found guilty of neglect of duty, he was taken to his
ship and publicly and promptly executed (by shooting) on the quarterdeck of his
own ship in Portsmouth Harbor. Following that event, probably
few English captains felt it proper to give up a ship because fighting more
would cause the death of most
of the crew.
Furthermore, Lt. Dudingston had let his ship be grounded on a sand bar during
the chase of the Hannah. Another clause of the Royal Navy Regulations
made that also a hanging offense for the captain of a Royal Navy ship.
Dudingston's court-martial went well for him. For example, skillful advocacy
by Dudingston's counsel at Dudingston's court-martial in London managed to avoid
having the Admirals on the court martial board learn about the chase of the
Hannah. Instead the grounding of the Gaspee was portrayed as a
deliberate grounding of the ship to scrape the barnacles off the hull!
Dudingston's court martial resulted in his acquittal, and he went on to become a
Admiral of the English Navy during the American Revolutionary War.
However, after the Gaspee raid, Lt. Dudingston was sued in three separate lawsuits in the colonial
courts, each suit alleging unlawful seizure of goods and ships. He lost all three.
More detailed information on post-Gaspee events is maintained at biographical
material on the persons in the longboats that attacked the Gaspee is stored at
our
Gaspee.Info specialized site, centering on their
post-Gaspee events section.
-
Rootsweb has a page devoted to Rhode Island History which contains
reproductions of a number of post-Gaspee documents, such as depositions in
the investigation of the burning of the Gaspee; from Aaron Briggs, responses
by Daniel Vaughan and Deputy Governor Sessions relative to the deposition of
Aaron Briggs, and the Report from the Honorable the Commissioners, appointed
by Royal Commission .
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