Volume 3, Chapter 53, The Gas Pay Incident
During the period of relative calm, trouble had not only been stirred by British aggressiveness
against Massachusetts and South Carolina. The restrictive trade in navigation acts,
to which were now added the sugar and tea duties, were always in danger of being enforced
Now that the era of salutary neglect was gone forever, underneath the seeming calm there
remained the inner contradictions of potential conflict over enforcement.
Only a spark, only a minor incident was needed to bring this potential to the surface.
Customs enforcement had been intensified since late 1771.
Already in November, two incidents of resistance against the officials had occurred. The Comptroller
of Customs at Falmouth, Massachusetts had been forced by a mob to tell them the name
of an informer. And, off Philadelphia, thirty armed men captured the crew of a customs schooner
and rescued a confiscated merchant vessel. It is not surprising, however, that the culminating
with Customs Officials.
We have already seen its struggles with the hated John Robinson.
After Robinson became one of Boston's Customs Commissioners in late 1767,
he was replaced as Rhode Island Collector of Customs by Charles Dudley Jr.
And the Rhode Island resistance continued.
In May 1769, the Customs Commissioners sent to Newport the Liberty,
The Liberty, which had been converted to a naval sloop after being seized from John Hancock.
The Liberty, commanded by the zealous captain William Reed, promptly began to seize merchant
vessels right and left. This intensification of customs enforcement in Rhode Island swelled
the resentment of its citizens. In mid-June 1769, Dudley's deputy collector, Jesse Seville,
was seized as an informer by an angry mob and nearly beaten to death, whereupon the
fiery Providence Gazette trenchantly declared that Seville was treated with more tenderness
and leniency than is perhaps due an informer.
In mid-July, Captain Reed called the attention of the townspeople of Newport to the depredations
of his sloop, for in the harbor the Liberty fired brutally upon one of the ships it had
Finally, by the spring of 1771, Rhode Islanders were moved to proceed against Dudley himself.
The highest representative of royal authority in Rhode Island was beaten almost to death.
Thus the stage was set in Rhode Island for the smashing of the relative lull of 1770-72.
In March 1772, there sailed into Rhode Island waters the British naval schooner Gaspé,
Commanded by Lieutenant William Duddingston, known to Rhode Islanders for having savagely
beaten up a defenseless fisherman in Pennsylvania three years before. Duddingston lost no time
in impressing his personality upon the public. Without even notifying Governor Joseph Wanton,
Duddingston illegally launched a systematic campaign of hounding local vessels. Soon Duddingston
Duddingston intensified the drive and arrogantly stopped, searched or fired upon everything
afloat on the pretext of rigorously enforcing the laws. Duddingston and his men also stole
livestock from Rhode Island farms and lumber from woodsmen. The public was understandably
hard put to distinguish the British sailors from their pirates. The Rhode Island merchants
was proposed to outfit an armed ship to rescue any vessel seized by the Gaspé, but Admiral
John Montague, based at Boston, scotched the plan by threatening to hang all concerned
as pirates. On June 9, 1772, the hated Gaspé ran aground off Warwick in the course of a
fierce pursuit of a merchant vessel. When the people of Providence heard the good news of
The town's wealthiest merchant and a son of liberty, John Brown, organized a joyous party
of citizens to finish the job begun by nature. Brown and his party, which included James
Saban and Captain Abraham Whipple, sailed to the gas-pay, shot and wounded Lieutenant
Duddingston, removed the crew and burned the gas-pay to the ground. A satisfactory night's
Ever since the attack on the British vessel St. John, eight years earlier, Rhode Islanders
had been steeped in the pleasant tradition of a lack of strenuous search by the government
for the parties responsible for such incidents. But in early September, the Crown suddenly
decided to bypass Rhode Island authorities and to send the guilty parties to England
for High Treason. A Royal Commission of Inquiry was appointed to find the culprits, deliver
them to England via the Royal Navy, and to call on General Gage's troops, if necessary,
for support. Appointed to the Commission was Governor Wanton of Rhode Island, who could
be depended upon not to search too hard, but he was more than offset by the other members.
Four of the top royally appointed judges in the colonies, specifically Robert Ock Moody,
who was the Vice Admiralty Judge at Boston, and the Chief Justices of New Jersey, Massachusetts
and New York.
Now, here, in the escalation of law enforcement into the hands of British authorities by setting
up a star chamber procedure and threatening trials for treason in England, was not only
The Pennsylvania Journal, representing American sentiment, warned that such a commission could
make the lot of the colonists worse than the subjects of the most despotic power on earth.
Thus, in June 1772, the people of Rhode Island burned the British schooner Gaspé, and the
The British reacted ominously by appointing a Royal Commission of Inquiry in early September.
The latter move was followed later in the month by a step long feared by the citizens
of Massachusetts, the announcement of a decision by the Crown to pay judicial salaries in Massachusetts
out of customs revenue.
No longer would judges be paid by, and therefore subject to, the control of the colonial assembly
It is not surprising that these deeds, especially the appointing of the gaffer to the assembly,
specifically the salaries to be paid permanently and securely by the Crown,
were those of the Attorney General and the Solicitor General of Massachusetts
and the five judges of the Superior Court of the colony,
a reward to precisely those officials who had shown their tenderness for the British troops
These deeds, especially the appointing of the Gaspe Commission, should have aroused
the dormant radical movement in America, or that the first sign of revival should have
come in Massachusetts, or that its first spokesman should have been Samuel Adams.