Merchants, slaves fight against tea, taxes
The approaching sesquicentennial of the Revolutionary War prompts Jamestown to reflect on its role in the great conflict 250 years ago.
The nascent conflict spun out of control after Boston merchants threw British tea into the harbor in December 1773. Britain had incurred massive debts defending America in the earlier French and Indian War, and revenues were to be raised by selling cheap British tea to undercut Boston’s smuggled Dutch tea. Trying to quell protests, British ships blockaded Boston.
This alarmed merchants in Newport, who also traded in contraband. In January 1775, newspapers warned of British Vice Adm. Thomas Graves’ efforts to collect taxes. He had amassed 3,475 men with 502 guns aboard his 26 ships in Boston. His charge to patrol greater than 1,000 miles of coastline was an impossible task. Rhode Island, however, was within reach. He reported to London that “Rhode Island and Connecticut places notorious for smuggling are at present entirely unguarded.”
British Capt. James Wallace and his 20-gun frigate appeared off the shores of Jamestown in mid-1774. By December, his anti-smuggling campaign was being challenged. He wrote from Newport, “There was a mob raising with an intent to tar and feather the captain of the Man of War.”
When the rioters encountered 18 British soldiers, they reconsidered, instead breaking windows of the customhouse, which is the hated symbol of taxation. This did not deter large Newport merchants, like Christopher Champlin, or smaller farmers, like Jamestown’s John Martin, from provisioning the Navy. Martin managed the estate of Loyalist merchant Joseph Wanton. Rebel spies frequently saw Martin in the company of Wallace on the frigate Swan “on board both day and night” with others who supplied the British with mutton, pork, and milk.
For the preceding century, merchants smuggled contraband and assaulted tax collectors while also supporting the crown, which was the fount of commerce and wealth. As late as 1777, two years into the war, the Newport Gazette published a letter to Gen. Hugh Percy praising British rule written by those who “have long suffered the severest Evils from the wanton Exercise of lawless Power” by the rebels. All inhabitants who remained in Jamestown signed it, which was about half of the prewar population.
Most that left town fomented rebellion.
The 1st Continental Congress met in September 1774 in Philadelphia and by November, the Rhode Island Assembly distributed copies of the Articles of Association to towns, fostering boycotts of English goods. The same month, Quaker members of the Jamestown Committee of Correspondence sought “cash, fat sheep, or cheese” to send to their “suffering brethren” in Boston.
The assembly chartered independent military companies, including one in Newport. No blood had yet spilled, but a lack of gunpowder hamstrung rebel preparations. By 1775, supplies improved and Jamestown’s Quaker town clerk Benjamin Underwood recorded the receipt of “a quantity of gunpowder to be delivered to the Captain of the Trainband.”
While control of the nation’s wealth was being contested, the method of its accumulation remained unquestioned. The Newport Mercury decried the depredations of the British blockade and the “loss of rights and liberties” in August 1774, yet it also reported Jamestown Capt. Henry Fowler “Cleared for Departure, in Schooner Nancy, for Africa.” He returned in 1775 with 74 captives for sale after a shocking 21 died on the journey.
His family genealogy hints at why so many died: “He had a small dog on board his ship, which, by its barking, awoke Captain Fowler just in time to secure the slaves, who were in the act of rising on the crew. The blacks were, by promptness and energy, put down and secured, though with the loss of several lives. Captain Fowler abandoned that trade after this voyage.”
Henry and his brother, Gideon, each made two voyages to Africa in the years preceding the Revolution, transporting 290 captives. The merchants paying for the voyages were Wanton and Champlin, also provisioners of the Navy.
In this time of growing instability, there was not only continuing enslavement, but the unravelling of it. Fowler’s voyage was reported alongside reward offers for runaway slaves. One announced, “a Negro man slave named York ran away from his master,” Joseph Underwood. He lived on present-day East Shore Road and offered a $4 reward to detain York in “his Majesty’s jail”. Underwood invoked the crown’s law to secure his escaped property while his father, Benjamin, plotted to overthrow the crown.
The white Underwoods ultimately gained independence, but York also gained freedom at their expense.
