Gaspee affair
The Gaspee affair was a significant event in the lead-up to the American Revolution. HMS Gaspee was a Royal Navy customs schooner that enforced the Navigation Acts around Newport, Rhode Island, in 1772. It ran aground in shallow water while chasing the packet boat Hannah on June 9 off of Warwick, Rhode Island. A group of men led by Abraham Whipple and John Brown I attacked, boarded, and burned the Gaspee to the waterline.
| Gaspee affair | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Part of the American Revolution | |||||||
An August 1883 Harper's Magazine illustration of the burning of HMS Gaspee | |||||||
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| Belligerents | |||||||
| Sons of Liberty | Great Britain | ||||||
| Commanders and leaders | |||||||
|
Abraham Whipple John Brown I | William Duddingston | ||||||
| Casualties and losses | |||||||
| None | HMS Gaspee captured and burned | ||||||
The event sharply increased tensions between American colonists and Crown officials, particularly given that it had followed the Boston Massacre in 1770. Crown officials in Rhode Island aimed to increase their control over the colony's legitimate trade and stamp out smuggling in order to increase their revenue from the colony. Concomittantly, Rhode Islanders increasingly protested the Stamp Act, the Townshend Acts and other British policies that had interfered with the colony's traditional businesses, which primarily rested on involvement in the triangular slave trade.
Along with similar events in Narragansett Bay, the affair marked the first acts of violent uprising against Crown authority in British North America, preceding the Boston Tea Party by more than a year and moving the Thirteen Colonies as a whole toward the coming war for independence.