“But by the Law of This Colony”: The Gaspee Affair in American History Abby Chandler Abby Chandler is Associate Professor of Early American History at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. Her first book, Law and Sexual Misconduct in New England, 1650-1750: Steering Toward England, was published by Routledge in 2015. Her second book project examines political rebellions from the 1760s in Rhode Island and North Carolina, and this article draws from that research.
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is Majesty’s schooner Gaspee was stranded off the Rhode Island coast with her crew on June 9, 1772. The ship burned to the waterline the following day, and local colonists, who often had harassed customs officials in Narragansett Bay, soon were credited with setting the fire. Hundreds of miles to the south, North Carolina Governor Josiah Martin spent the early 1770s engaged in a battle of wills with his colonial legislature. The stalemate came to a close on May 31, 1775, when the Mecklenburg Committee of Safety voted to adopt the Mecklenburg Resolves, which effectively ended British rule in North Carolina. These actions placed Rhode Island and North Carolina in the vanguard of colonial efforts to politically sever the North American colonies from Britain. The roots, however, for the burning of the Gaspee and the creation of the Mecklenburg Resolves lie in Rhode Island’s and North Carolina’s colonial pasts, even as they point to the future. Despite their geographic differences, one in New England, the other seven hundred miles to the south, Rhode Island and North Carolina brought shared concerns to the revolutionary era. Their residents were long accustomed to struggling to preserve local control in the face of demands for a more centralized authority, whether these demands came from their neighbors, other colonies, or the British Empire itself.1 Many came from neighboring British colonies where, as retired historian Patrick Conley notes, they often were “outcasts” known for their “individualism and separatist tendencies.”2 Early government structures in Rhode Island
and North Carolina welcomed a multiplicity of religions, and later efforts to increase the role of the Anglican Church in North Carolina were met with resistance from non-Anglican colonists.3 Furthermore, whether in the colonial period or in contemporary scholarship, Rhode Island and North Carolina often have been overshadowed by their immediate neighbors. Political fervor on both sides of the imperial crisis led to early action in Rhode Island and North Carolina, but most accounts of this period are focused on Massachusetts and Virginia.4 Many Rhode Island and North Carolina residents hoped for independence but not necessarily union, a point further underscored by both states’ reluctance to ratify the United States Constitution in 1787.5 News of the Gaspee reached London within the month. An unknown London editor wryly observed on July 18, 1772, that “in all disagreements between the parent state and her children,” the children “are more affected by views of private interest than by the prosperity of their country.”6 Dating back to the earliest settlement period, British colonists always had run goods along the Eastern Seaboard to the many ports in the Caribbean. Rhode Island’s ties to the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the sugar plantations made it particularly easy for captains engaged in the legitimate funneling of people and comestibles between New England and the Caribbean to pick up illegal goods, all activities central to Rhode Island’s developing economy.7 British North American merchants believed that the risks they took as colonists in a multinational world entitled them to the resulting profits. Most Parliament members
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