Dispatch from 1773: Smuggling in Rhode Island prompts Virginia to do something revolutionary

The year 2026 marks the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Cardinal News has embarked on a three-year project to tell the little-known stories of Virginia’s role in the march to independence. As part of this, I will be writing monthly columns about the politics of the era, written the same way I’d write them today. The events described here took place in 1773.

The events I am about to relate took place far to the north of Virginia. But these distant affairs have now come to shake our politics here, and set our elected House of Burgesses against our appointed governor, whose popularity was never high in the first place.

Here is what we’ve been able to piece together based on the accounts of travelers and correspondence with friends in the small colony of Rhode Island.

Other dispatches

Dispatch from 1772: Britain vetoes Virginia’s vote to abolish transatlantic slave trade.

Dispatch from 1769: Governor dissolves House of Burgesses; Virginia vows boycott of British goods

Dispatch from 1766: A sensational murder at Mosby’s Tavern highlights how much Virginia’s gentry is in debt to Britain.

Dispatch from 1766: In Tappahannock, the Stamp Act prompts threats of violence.

Dispatch from 1765: Augusta County mob murders Cherokees, defies royal authority.

Dispatch from 1763: Despite cries of ‘treason!,’ Hanover County jury delivers rebuke to the church – and the crown. (The court case that made Patrick Henry a celebrity.)

Dispatch from 1763: King’s proclamation has united often opposing factions in Virginia (Opposition to the king’s proclamation forbidding western settlement.)

As we all know, ever since the conflict — now a decade in the past — known as the French and Indian War, the government in London has been trying to squeeze more revenue from its American Colonies to pay the debts from that war, and pay the expense of the standing army it maintains here to guard against future wars.

More to the point, that means London has been trying to squeeze more revenues from American Colonists.

First came the hated Stamp Act, then the Townshend Acts, all sorts of acts … all of which have prompted protests in the Colonies. One thing that has often gone overlooked is how the Royal Navy has conducted aggressive enforcement in our ports to make sure no one is evading customs collections. Are there shippers who are trying to sneak their goods in or out to avoid paying those taxes? Of course there are. It’s said that the Boston merchant John Hancock once locked up a customs official in one of his ship’s cabins while employees unloaded some contraband Madeira wine.

Rhode Islanders are a spirited sort and twice have attacked those customs ships. In 1764, Colonists alleged the crew from one ship had stolen from merchants in Newport and felt it only natural to fire off some cannon shots at the ship. In 1768, a customs ship towed two confiscated Connecticut ships into the harbor at Newport, Rhode Island. The locals were so incensed that, in the spirit of brotherhood with their Connecticut neighbors, they burned the customs ship.

It is against that rowdy backdrop that HMS Gaspee, under the command of Lt. William Duddingston, sailed into Narragansett Bay early last year to enforce customs laws. (The British have acquired six new ships and named them all after their newfound French possessions in Quebec. What signal this is intended to send to English-speaking Colonists further south is unclear.) Soon after the Gaspee began patrolling, it found a suspected smuggler. The Gaspee seized the ship and 12 hogsheads of rum. Duddingston then took it upon himself to send the confiscated ship, its crew and its cargo to Boston, believing (probably rightly) that if they were sent ashore in Rhode Island the Colonists would free them.

However, by sending them to Massachusetts, he violated the Rhode Island charter that guaranteed that people arrested in Rhode Island would be tried in Rhode Island.

Matters devolved from there. Duddingston began raiding merchants on shore to inspect their wares. The governor of Rhode Island sent a stern note to the naval captain, who sent a rude reply back. Perhaps I should point out here that Rhode Island and Connecticut are allowed to elect their governors, while our governors here in Virginia are appointed by the king. Perhaps this is an innovation we should encourage, but I digress. Suffice it to say that by this point Duddingston was quite unpopular in Rhode Island, while the governor enjoyed the support of the people who had elected him.

On the night of June 9, 1772, the Gaspee gave chase to another suspected smuggler and made a mistake — it ran aground in shallow water. Duddingston decided to wait for high tide to free the ship. News of its predicament spread through the city of Providence. A merchant by the name of John Brown (whose name is also affixed to that city’s Brown University) decided he had been vexed enough by Duddingston and the Gaspee. He rounded up a band of men. At daybreak, they sailed out to the grounded Gaspee and boarded it. They shot Duddingston in what we’ll discreetly say is a very sensitive area, forced him and the crew off the ship and then set fire to the Gaspee.

That solved their problem, but created another. The British admiralty could hardly condone an attack on one of its vessels. A royal commission was empaneled to determine who was responsible, with the goal of having those men arrested and sent back to Britain to be tried for treason. (To date, Rhode Island has avoided extraditing the men; London suspects the local authorities are simply making excuses for why they can’t find the perpetrators.)

This is where this Rhode Island affair became a Virginia one. Throughout the Colonies, people have reacted with alarm to this royal inquiry, and the prospect that Colonists who run afoul of the law might be sent across the ocean for trial. This isn’t the first time this issue has come up. In 1769, there was talk of sending some Boston rioters to London for trial. At the time the House of Burgesses sent a communication to London to protest. The revival of this transoceanic extradition threat seems a direct rebuke to what Virginia had complained about then. If that could happen in Rhode Island, it could happen in Virginia — or any of the other Colonies.

All this might have remained just chatter except for one thing: Our governor, Lord Dunmore, had just called the House of Burgesses into session. He had other matters in mind for the House to deal with, but once the assembly was in Williamsburg, he had no control over what the burgesses did. The most important business did not happen during official sessions, but rather in rump gatherings at the Raleigh Tavern where a group of mostly young — and, to some, mostly radical — legislators gathered to discuss the situation in Rhode Island. (Their numbers are said to have included Dabney Carr of Goochland County, Patrick Henry of Hanover County, Thomas Jefferson of Albemarle County, Francis Lightfoot Lee of Richmond County and Richard Henry Lee of Westmoreland County.) Their solution was that Virginia needed a permanent committee empowered to communicate with the other Colonies — a “committee of correspondence.”

Massachusetts has had such committees locally for some time for purposes of communicating colony-wide, but Virginia is the first to propose such a thing on a colony-to-colony basis. The five plotters were politically clever. They also labored over the wording of the resolution to try to avoid allegations of treason, a crime that London officials are increasingly quick to raise. They also envisioned a 12-member committee — themselves plus seven others, and for those they proposed more moderate or even conservative members of the House who would not make their novelty arouse suspicion. By the time they finished, their resolution appeared so innocuous that it passed unanimously.

Make no mistake, though. The creation of his committee is a revolutionary act. For the first time, there is now an official body to speak for the House of Burgesses even when it’s not in session. This has the effect of undermining some of the authority of the royal governor — something that Lord Dunmore is now keenly (and peevishly) aware of. The governor promptly sent the House home, but the committee of correspondence remains intact. The committee promptly sent out letters to 11 other Colonies as far north as New Hampshire (no word on why Nova Scotia was omitted), asking for information on the Gaspee situation, any intelligence other Colonies had on relations with London, and a request for other Colonies to create their own committees of correspondence. For the first time, all these separate and disjointed Colonies are united, if only by the pen. It’s hard to tell where all this will lead, but for the time being, the Colonies can now begin to present a single front to a distant and sometimes seemingly hostile crown.

Alas, one of the main instigators of this committee has passed, far too soon.

Carr, who introduced the measure, caught a fever soon after returning home and passed away at the age of 29. He was deeply mourned by his brother-in-law, the aforementioned Jefferson. It’s said that the two young men often hiked up the mountain where Jefferson now makes his estate and sat under an oak tree to discuss their futures. So close they were that they both vowed to be buried by that same tree — and Carr was, this past May, the first to be interred there at Monticello, but apparently not the last. His gravestone reads that “this stone is dedicated by Thomas Jefferson, who of all men loved him most.” At a critical hour, the fever has robbed Virginia of one of its rising leaders.

Sources consulted include Encyclopedia Virginia, Monticello and “The New Dominion” by Virginius Dabney.

This project is supported, in part, by a grant from the Virginia American Revolution 250 Commission . You can sign up to receive a free monthly newsletter with updates :

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