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with “parasitical” Rhode Island merchants unless, through compliance, they began sharing the financial hit caused by the boycott. Though these nonimportation agreements eventually broke down due to the colonies’ temptation “to turn the self-denial of their neighbors to their own immediate advantage,” the mistrust of Rhode Island persisted.
    Even so, citizens everywhere were alarmed by rumors that suspects in the
Gaspee
raid might be sent to Britain for trial. In Massachusetts, John Adams decried the inquiry as “the Star Chamber Court, the Court of Inquisition.” His cousin Samuel, confronting “such provocation as is now offered to Rhode Island,” on the one hand warned of potential “rivers of blood” while on the other urged the colony to do nothing “which may by the invention of our adversaries be construed as even the appearance of acquiescence in so grasping an act of tyranny.”
    In March 1773 Thomas Jefferson reacted to the ongoing inquiry by calling on the Virginia House of Burgesses to coordinate resistance to British legal encroachment wherever it occurred. “We were all sensible that the most urgent of all measures was that of coming to an understanding with all the other colonies to consider the British claims as a common cause to all, and to produce a unity of action.” Committees of correspondence were established throughout the colonies as a result, a major step in the unification of their often contentious constituencies. And all due to actions undertaken by a little-loved colony whose maverick government, a Newport loyalist wrote Montagu one month after the
Gaspee
attack, “bears no resemblance to any other government under the crown of England.”
    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