Patriot Pirates (3 page)

Political disputes within Rhode Island were likewise set aside to present a united front against the
Gaspee
inquiry. In recent years, territorial rivalries had divided the colony as its commercial hub shifted north from Newport at the lower end of Narragansett Bay to Providence, where a sheltered, upriver harbor and proximity to interior Massachusetts and Connecticut had proved a long-term advantage.

The more established Newport featured a blithe, loyalist-leaning aristocracy whose indifference to the anti-British nonimportation agreements had, by association, hurt Providence’s reputation in the eyes of other colonies. In 1770, the upstart northern town had scored a coup by outbidding Newport to become the home of Rhode Island College. The move was good for business and, its supporters hoped, would garner “every other public emolument” that accompanies a prestigious place of learning. The political tussle was heated and personal, and tipped in favor of Providence on the basis of “zeal,” wrote Moses Brown, expressed in practical terms by construction discounts and free land given the project by his brothers, Nicholas and John.

Yet the Newport–Providence factions joined together to shield the
Gaspee
raiders from justice. The collusion was exemplified by the partnership of Governor Wanton and Lieutenant Governor Sessions, from Newport and Providence respectively, in obstructing the very inquiry they headed. It also figured in the deluge of rebuttal to testimony supplied by Aaron Briggs, an eighteen-year-old indentured servant variously described as “Negro” and “mulatto” who’d been coerced into rowing one of the longboats to the
Gaspee
attack.

Briggs identified John Brown as the shooter of Lieutenant Dudingston. Coupled with statements by British crewmen that the raiders were “well dressed, many of them with ruffled shirts, and appeared as storekeepers, merchants, or masters,” the testimony was proof enough for Admiral Montagu. He demanded the arrest of Brown and other “principal inhabitants of the town of Providence.”

But then a number of gentlemen, including several from Newport, came forward with sworn assertions of Briggs’s “general bad character.” This in turn was enough for Wanton, who informed the admiral that on the basis of Briggs’s “villainy” his testimony “must wholly be disregarded.” In a parting jab disguised as a defense of Sheriffs Brown and Whipple, the governor clucked about British authorities “conspiring in the most horrid manner to charge the officers of state with a crime that the whole world knew they could not possibly be guilty of.”

As the inquiry approached its second year, Montagu gave up. His main witness had been labeled a fraud. Multiple townspeople had signed, often with an illiterate
X
, virtually identical statements claiming “no intimation of an intention to burn the
Gaspee
, nor do I know any person or persons concerned in that transaction, or ever heard who they were.” A coordinated, collective amnesia left the Wanton-led investigating commission no choice but to inform royal authorities of “there being no probability of our procuring any further light on the subject.”

Admiral Montagu did, however, take pains to help Dudingston survive the fallout of
Gaspee
’s destruction. Undoubtedly harsh in his antismuggling methods, the lieutenant’s subsequent travails rather balanced the scale. Forced to plead for his life as he lay bleeding on the deck, he’d offered his bed linens to bind his wound rather than see a colonial surgeon tear his own shirt to make a bandage. When the raiders demanded payment for the seized rum, he promised “whatever reparation law would give” and asked only that his crew not be mistreated.

While recuperating in bed three days later, Dudingston was served legal papers by Sheriff Whipple demanding £300 (roughly $50,000 today) in damages for the Greene family. A local jury convicted him on grounds that his authority to conduct searches pertained only to the “high seas” and not Narragansett Bay. After his lawyer missed the appeal date due to weather “exceeding tempestuous,” the order went out for Dudingston’s arrest.

In a bit of good fortune, he was in England at the time, facing court-martial for the loss of his ship. Montagu’s assertion that he was “a sober, diligent, good officer” helped exonerate the young man, who went on to become an admiral and, as well, the father of a son he named William Montagu Dudingston, in gratitude.

A year before the
Gaspee
raid, a wealthy Newport customs official named Charles Dudley had been beaten by a street mob protesting the arrest of a Connecticut rumrunner. Governor Wanton had investigated the incident and ruled it a random mugging by “drunken sailors and lawless seamen,” hence impossible to prosecute. Seeing the
Gaspee
case given an identical whitewash, Dudley sympathized with Dudingston and personally paid the Greenes’ £300 award on the lieutenant’s behalf.

J
ohn Brown, far from exultant over the raid he’d orchestrated, lived in fear of summary arrest throughout the course of the inquiry. Even after it came up empty he kept a low profile, asking his brother Moses to represent the family on Rhode Island’s committee of correspondence formed in mid-1773.

Moses possessed little heart for activism. Morose by nature, he tended to question his family’s materialistic values whenever tragedy struck one of its members. His wife’s death the previous February had seemed a rebuke from heaven, and before the year was out he withdrew from business and politics. Having received comfort during her illness at the meeting house of the Society of Friends, Moses converted from Baptist to Quaker, embracing strictures of nonviolence and neutrality that later clashed with his sympathies for the Revolutionary movement.

No less profoundly for this pillar of Rhode Island mercantilism, his conversion compelled Moses to free his slaves on the basis “that the holding of Negroes in slavery however kindly treated by their masters has a tendency to encourage the iniquitous practice of importing them from their native country and is contrary to that justice, mercy, and humanity enjoined as the duty of every Christian.” He set them up with employment, education, land, and money, then lobbied his brothers to abandon the “guinea trade.”

Nicholas, the eldest, had lost a fortune bankrolling a voyage several years earlier in which 88 out of 196 slaves had died at sea, most from disease, some at the hands of the crew during an attempted uprising, and the rest from jumping overboard rather than submitting to captivity. Joseph, a technician rather than a speculator, managed the family’s iron foundry and spermaceti candle factory, so like Nicholas was content to quit the slave business for practical reasons. Though neither displayed his fervor in the cause of emancipation, Moses wrote that “happily they and I lived to regret” their earlier participation “in that unrighteous traffic.” The same couldn’t be said of John.

On the contrary, he expanded his participation even after the General Assembly’s 1774 ban on bringing slaves into Rhode Island. His way around the law was through the “triangular trade,” whereby the proceeds of rum exported to Europe went toward the purchase of African slaves for delivery, via the brutal Middle Passage across the Atlantic, to West Indian markets, where they were exchanged for molasses and sugar to supply distilleries back in New England. It was an efficient, self-perpetuating cycle that required investors to put up money only to fund the initial cargo of rum, and featured a further advantage of keeping actual slaves, with all the squeamish details their traffic involved, far out of sight and mind of Puritan-descended New Englanders.

Moses attributed his brother’s slave activities to “love of money and anxiety to acquire it,” but they expressed John’s philosophy as much as his greed. “As the arch individualist, he was inalterably opposed in principle to any interference by government with so-called free enterprise in business.” That same philosophy had motivated his raid on
Gaspee
, though history would judge it much differently.

Chastened by his close brush with the law, John tempered his political passions after 1772 and concentrated on business. But his past caught up with him in April 1775 when he was arrested in Newport by Captain James Wallace of HMS
Rose
, a twenty-four-gun frigate. Popular hatred of Wallace, who was said to erupt in “mad fits” of randomly discharging his cannon into coastal villages, was the best measure of his success against illicit trade, now suppressed to the degree that a majority of Newport businessmen had moved to Providence to pursue prospects further inland. He accused Brown of selling flour to colonial militia in Massachusetts. On delivering his prisoner to Admiral Samuel Graves, Montagu’s successor at the Royal Navy’s Boston headquarters, the charge was expanded to include participation in the
Gaspee
affair.

John Brown, a hard-nosed businessman, epitomized Rhode Island’s reputation for nonconformism and self-interest. His aggressive ventures in cannon-production and private warships furthered the Patriot cause and fattened his wallet, not necessarily in that order. His activities in the African slave trade would fracture his family and forever damage his legacy.

Moses saved the day. Rushing north to appeal to Graves and the British Army’s General Gage, he put his pacifist credentials on the line with a promise that his brother, the renowned rabble-rouser, would personally lobby the Rhode Island government “to adopt a more moderate and conciliatory attitude” toward the crown. In a testament to the commanders’ desire to douse further fires of rebellion—three hundred British had fallen in battles at Lexington and Concord a week earlier—Graves and Gage approved John’s release on assurances “binding both upon the Browns and the British officials.” And indeed John, who’d wept with dread while in the brig in Boston Harbor, kept his end of the bargain, telling the General Assembly four days later “that it is now in the power of this colony and continent to make such propositions to his Excellency General Gage as will effectively put a stop to any hostilities.”

It took him only a month to return to form, however. He filed a court claim for £10,000 against Captain Wallace not on the expectation of winning but rather to counter perceptions that the Browns had gone soft on the British. Moses was furious that the suit violated his promise to military authorities and impugned his reputation for “sincerity and honesty.” Unmoved, John shrugged that he was “so clear in opinion that the measures now taking to force America are wrong that it is out of my power to restrain myself from wishing success to the country in which I was born.”

His differences with Moses now widened past reconciliation, John renewed ties with his eldest brother. Nicholas combined political gloom (“Divine providence hath left the two countries to be scourges to punish each other for their sins,” he wrote) with a cool eye for opportunity. Partnered as Nicholas Brown & Company, the brothers’ first project was to supply American troops mustering in Massachusetts.

Beyond arms, uniforms, and blankets, gunpowder was most lacking, its import banned by the British since 1774. On taking command in July 1775, George Washington found the Continental Army, a patchwork of New England militia dug in around 6,500 redcoats in Boston, to be so bereft of powder and lead that “for want of them we really cannot carry on any spirited operation.” His infantry had ten shots per man. His artillery feared returning enemy volleys lest it have no ammunition to repel a British breakout.

Advised of the shortages, the recently convened Continental Congress announced an up-front offer of “a generous price” for military goods. Merchants pounced. Beyond imploring them to “not take undue advantage of the distresses of their country so as to exact an unreasonable price,” Washington had no choice but to pay what was demanded.

More than 90 percent of the gunpowder used by rebels in the first three years of the war originated abroad. Most of it came through Philadelphia, but with Boston under occupation and New York torn with political strife (two-thirds of its inhabitants were British sympathizers), Providence was in good position to take early advantage. The Browns launched “powder voyages” to Spain, Holland, and France, where suppliers were eager to grab some of the bountiful American trade after decades of control by the mercantile houses of Britain.

The natural dangers of seafaring were compounded by threats of Royal Navy interception. Soon the preference, as in the triangular slave trade, was to make the West Indies the exchange point of American commodities for European munitions. This left the journey’s long transatlantic leg to slow, durable, heavy-laden square-riggers rendered immune to British harassment by the sovereign flags they flew and by their neutral destinations, among them Spanish Cuba, St. Eustatius in the Dutch Antilles, and French-owned Martinique. It left the shorter, homeward run to swift American sloops and schooners manned by men with knowledge of coastal waters and the capability, if pressed by British blockaders, of darting into any convenient harbor on the eastern seaboard and hauling their cargoes overland from there.