On The First Shots Of The Revolution: The Gaspee Affair

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he First Shots Of The Revolution: The Gaspee Affair

Historian Charles Rappleye said “The attack on a ship and a uniformed officer of His Majesty’s Navy shocked the British authorities, exciting even the personal attention of the monarch. The news traveled slowly but the incident seemed to grow in infamy as the weeks went by. In August, Alexander Wedderburn, the attorney-general for Great Britain, pronounced the Gaspee affair to be a crime of ‘five times the magnitude of the Stamp Act riots’. The Earl of Dartmouth termed it ‘an offense of much deeper dye than piracy… an act of high treason, levying war against the king.” In 1772 and the years leading up to it the colonists had been becoming angry over taxes and England not letting them smuggle goods in from other countries. So the colonists finally got fed up with England's laws and retaliated. England thought of any disobedience by the colonies as a crime. So what exactly was the Gaspee Affair? How did this lead into the American revolution? …show more content…
The Gaspee was on patrol for colonists who were smuggling goods in. At this time the Gaspee was pursuing American Captain Thomas Lindsey’s packet with smuggled goods. On June 9th, 1772 an angry American merchant John Brown assembled a group of around 60 colonists and rowed eight boats out into the Narragansett Bay off the coast of Rhode Island and seized the Gaspee. John Brown’s crew shot Captain Dudingston who didn't die and burned the ship in the middle of the
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