Patriot Pirates Read Online Free Page B
Author: Robert H. Patton
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
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
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