Historiography of the Gaspee affair facts for kids
The historiography of the Gaspee affair examines the changing views of historians and scholars with regard to the burning of HMS Gaspee, a British customs schooner that ran aground while patrolling coastal waters near Newport, Rhode Island and was boarded and destroyed by colonists during the lead up to the American Revolution in 1772. Though scholars agree that the incident sparked a period of renewed tension between Great Britain and its colonies in North America, they disagree as to the specific long and short-term impacts of the attack on British and colonial policies and attitudes.
Contemporary reports
There were 38 newspapers in mainland British America in 1772. At least 11, mostly in the Northeast, reported the attack on the Gaspee within the first few weeks following the incident. Moreover, the Gaspee Commission of Inquiry was the topic of one of the most important pre-independence pamphlets to circulate within the colonies, John Allen’s An Oration, Upon the Beauties of Liberty, Or the Essential Rights of Americans. Allen, a little-known preacher at the Second Baptist Church in Boston, gave an emotional sermon in December 1772 that played upon colonial fears and prejudices. Though Allen was not a particularly notable thinker or writer, and his arguments were not always accurate or consistent, his Oration went through seven printings (five editions) published in four different cities. Allen argued that Great Britain and the American colonies were separate judicial spheres and one could not interfere with the other. He addressed his message to Lord Dartmouth and portrayed the actions of colonials as merely self-defense, not rebellion, an important distinction for his reading audience in early 1773. When Oration was published it ranked among the best-selling pamphlets of the crisis.
Bernard Bailyn included Allen among only three colonial pamphleteers were who able to demonstrate the "concentrated fury" comparable to that found in tracts and treaties by Europe's more imaginative and capable writers. While Allen's Oration was among the more incendiary, there is no evidence that it was every serialized or extracted in newspapers. Perhaps that was partly because of his death in 1774. Moreover, subsequent events like the Boston Tea Party quickly overshadowed the Gaspee incident. The reactions (and overreaction) of Parliament in 1774 preoccupied Patriot presses and later historical narratives. Forever afterwards, the Gaspee episode has remained of minor concern to those who recounted the events leading up to April 1775. When, in 1796, Richard Snowden published his history of the American Revolution in Baltimore, he started with the Boston Tea Party and made no mention of the Gaspee or, for that matter, any event prior to 1773. Mercy Otis Warren skipped from 1770 to 1773 in her massive two volume history of the American Revolution in 1805. Even a book focused on the Royal Navy's difficulties in the colonies from 1763 to 1782 failed to mention the Gaspee. To this day, no scholar has dedicated a monograph to the Gaspee episode, such as Benjamin Woods Labaree’s The Boston Tea Party or Hiller B. Zobel’s The Boston Massacre.
Early 19th century
After 1800 chroniclers and biographers started to write histories about the events and well-known personalities of the American Revolution. Many romanticized it as a "Golden Age" and de-emphasized its revolutionary character, especially in light of disturbing revolutionary events in France, Haiti, and Latin America. Others sought to interview aging survivors of the Revolution, even tracking down those who had fled to Canada or London. Three colonial participants from the attack on the Gaspee documented their memories of that night: Dr. John Mawney, the doctor who tended to the Lieutenant's wounds; Ephraim Bowen, who provided Joseph Bucklin with the firearm used to shoot the British lieutenant; and Aaron Biggs, an indentured servant who gave contemporary testimony that he was an eyewitness to the events of 9–10 June 1772.
The colonial government and Patriot press worked hard to discredit his deposition. Biggs was retained on a British vessel for his own safety. Bowen was only 19 in 1772, but later achieved the rank of Colonel and went on to run a successful rum distillery in Pawtuxet Village. In 1839, at 86, two years before his death, Bowen attempted to recall the events of that night 67 years earlier. Confident that everyone else who was involved was dead, he named as many individuals as he could remember. While Mawney's and Bowen's accounts contain a few errors in detail, they are the only detailed eyewitness narratives from the colonial side. They tell that the men convened at Sabin's Tavern, John Brown organized a flotilla of eight boats, and Abraham Whipple identified himself to the Gaspee lookouts as the Sheriff of Kent County. From the Gaspee's crew and officers, there is ample testimony, but Rhode Island's Patriots left only scanty information.
Pre-Civil War
For four decades leading up to the American Civil War, American historians and Revolutionary Era popularizers agonized over whether their generation was worthy of the founders’ sacrifices. While their sectional divisiveness tore the fragile nation apart, Northerners and Southerners competed to assert possession of the founders’ dream. Massachusetts’ conservative leaders carefully crafted and published American histories that prominently featured New Englanders as the "true" founders of the entire North American republic. Theirs was an attempt to define the national identity of the young republic through sectional concerns and anxieties.
It was in this era of sectionalism that the Gaspee found its great chronicler. In 1845, Rhode Island Judge William R. Staples published what remains the most accessible (reprinted in 1990), detailed, and best-known work on the Gaspee, the Documentary History of the Destruction of the Gaspee. First appearing in the Providence Daily Journal, his account later appeared as a substantial pamphlet. Staples's work contained 56 pages of contemporary correspondence surrounding the events of 1772-73. He graduated from Brown University in Providence, studied law, and was admitted to the bar. Later, he served on Rhode Island's Supreme Court and ultimately became Chief Justice. He helped found the Rhode Island Historical Society, where he served in the roles of secretary, librarian, and vice-president.
Staples’ work is peppered with brief notes of commentary, allowing his own Whig Partygish interpretation of the events to shine through, but he supplies little narrative or analysis in Documentary History. Staples mostly let the historical actors speak for themselves. When he spoke, Staples did not hide his sympathies ascribing just motives to the colonials and sinister ones to royal representatives. When Staples’ work was republished in 1990, Richard M. Deasy wrote an introduction reflecting on the Gaspee and the lasting contribution of Judge Staples’ compilation of documents. Deasy mentioned other maritime attacks on British government property as well as the Dockyards Act of 1772 (see arson in royal dockyards), but he explained the reaction of the Crown to the Gaspee as "simply the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back."
Fifteen years after Staples, in 1860, Samuel G. Arnold produced a brief treatment of the Gaspee in his History of the State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations. He dedicated ten pages to the arrival of the Gaspee in Narragansett Bay, to early troubles with Dudingston and to the destruction of the vessel, the Commission of Inquiry, and Ephraim Bowen's account of that night. Arnold wrote up the Gaspee incident as a chronological narrative with the year, month, and day displayed in the margins (as he did for all of Rhode Island's history). Arnold celebrated the triumph of liberty over tyranny throughout the section on the American Revolution and described Lieutenant Dudingston's wounds as "the first British blood shed in the war of independence."
Around the same time, from 1856 to 1865, John Russell Bartlett, the Secretary of State of Rhode Island, published Records of the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations in New England, a ten-volume set. In 1862, volume 7, which covered the years 1770–1776 was released. In the 136 pages, the Gaspee affair was covered, including a few additional pages of correspondence, not found in Staples, surrounding the destruction of the Gaspee. George Bancroft assisted Bartlett by securing copies of documents in London. A year earlier, Bartlett had published exactly the same pages under the title A History of the Destruction of His Britannic Majesty’s Schooner Gaspee, in Narragansett Bay, on the 10th June, 1772. Almost identical to Staples's work in content and layout, Bartlett provided more analysis and commentary than the judge's work. Bartlett offered more comments in the footnotes and laid out the text in one column instead of two, making it a 141-page book.
In the introduction, Bartlett justified the release of a book similar to Staples's work not because the latter was found wanting but because it was scarce and out of print Given the Whig view of the American Revolution shared by both prestigious Rhode Islanders and most of their readers, they had sufficiently covered the topic for their era, and no full-length treatment for an adult readership of the Gaspee was published thereafter. Their work reflected the more celebratory and confident attitude of the earlier part of 19th century, they did not seem to struggle with living in the shadows of the accomplishments of their parents and grandparents, unlike many others of their generation.
Imperial School
The period from 1865 to 1900 was a dry spell for historians writing about Rhode Island events leading up to the American War for Independence although there was a significant body of work written on Massachusetts at the time. A great deal of creative energy went into writing about the perceived causes of the Civil War and narratives recalling minute details of every battle Many of the histories were disconnected from longer developments and large secular changes of the 19th century, giving them an antiquarian flavor. Academic historians, on the other hand, were busy professionalizing their discipline. It was during the decades following the Civil War that historical associations (like the American Historical Association in 1884) were founded and many prestigious American universities implemented Ph.D. programs, largely modeled after German institutions. The publication of scholarly journals rose in quantity and quality.
Meanwhile, more professional and academic American historians were following in the footsteps of Jared Sparks (1789–1866) and George Bancroft (1800–1891) by visiting British archives to uncover the information that officials in London had at their disposal and how they made decisions that affected the North American colonies. Their work, later known as the "Imperial School" of historical interpretation, provided a more balanced view of the conflict that took into account both the reasonings of the Patriot and Loyalists in their actions alongside that of the British Parliament. George Louis Beer (1872–1920) and Herbert L. Osgood (1855–1918) examined the changes in mercantilist ideology among European theorists that influenced the decisions of the Privy Council in dealing with the American colonies.
After the Seven Years' War, Britain returned some colonies in the Caribbean to the French but retained Canada, which marked a shift in colonial administration, and new and emerging markets were valued more highly than mere production of resources. Controlling, regulating, and collecting the revenues of colonial markets, the scholars explained, would become divisive points of contention in the 1760s and the 1970s.
