Rhode Island got the jump on Boston Tea Party

Colonists burned HMS Gaspee a year earlier in act of defiance, rebellion

You’d be forgiven for thinking you know this story.

American colonists, itching for independence, stormed a British vessel. A spark in New England helped ignite a national revolution.

But this was not the Boston Tea Party.

Eighteen months before colonists dumped tea in Boston Harbor — an event that marks its 250th anniversary this week — Rhode Islanders attacked and destroyed a British navy ship off the coast near Providence, furious with what they saw as the crown’s overreach.

The burning of the HMS Gaspee on June 10, 1772, was the first major armed act of rebellion by the American colonists, Rhode Island historians and officials maintain. And the resulting fallout — with King George III demanding that the perpetrators be held accountable in a showdown between the colonial legal system and the British courts — helped unify the colonies for the war to come.

“[T]his is a Matter in which the whole American Continent is deeply concerned and a Submission of the Colony of Rhode Island to this enormous Claim of power would be made a Precedent for all the rest,” founding father Samuel Adams wrote to Rhode Island’s deputy governor in January 1773.

But the Gaspee affair, which shook the colonies and rattled the crown, has been largely forgotten outside of Rhode Island. It’s been overlooked in U.S. history classes and remains little studied by historians of the American Revolution. The Washington Post reviewed six high school and college U.S. history textbooks and found no mention of the burning of the Gaspee, even as multiple pages were devoted to later — and, in the minds of many Rhode Islanders, lesser — events such as the Boston Tea Party.

“Nobody knows that well before anybody pushed a tea bag off a civilian ship in the Boston Harbor, Rhode Islanders blew up a military vessel,” Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., said in a recent interview in his office — sitting in front of a painting that depicts the burning of the Gaspee.

The senator from Rhode Island has repeatedly given speeches that celebrate the Gaspee raiders, and he’s denounced the attention paid to Massachusetts, saying that leaders of his neighboring state have spent centuries spinning their own history.

“They got drunk, painted themselves like Indians and pushed tea bags into the Boston Harbor, which we in Rhode Island think is pretty weak tea compared to blowing up the goddamn boat and shooting its captain,” Whitehouse told The Post. “But you know, all those Massachusetts people went on to become president and run Harvard ... so they told their story, and their story, and their story.”

Rhode Island-based historians agreed that the Gaspee affair is a case study in how important chapters in history become, well, history. The state’s own firsts — Rhode Island, for example, was the first colony to declare independence from Britain on May 4, 1776, two months before the other 12 colonies — tend to get relegated to footnotes in national stories about the revolution.