The favorite avocation of New Englanders in general and Rhode Islanders in particular—smuggling

From The Road to Guilford Courthouse by John Buchanan. Page 263.

Prior to 1772 surviving records reveal no interest on the part of Nathanael Greene in the momentous political and constitutional issues that were building to a boiling point between mother country and the colonies. Then, on the night of 17 February 1772, Lieutenant William Dudingston, a particularly tough British naval officer and skipper of HMS Gaspee, sailed into Narragansett Bay to stop the favorite avocation of New Englanders in general and Rhode Islanders in particular—smuggling. Off North Kingstown he seized the sloop Fortune. It carried rum, Jamaica spirits, and brown sugar and was commanded by Rufus Greene, Nathanael Greene’s twenty-three-year-old cousin. Fortune was the Greene family’s coastal trading vessel. Rufus Greene was insulted, pushed around, hit on the head, knocked down, and threatened by a British officer with a sword. The Greenes were incensed and Rhode Islanders took up the family’s cause as theirs, for what happened to one merchant could happen to others, who were, after all, only engaged in their God-given right to smuggle rum, sugar, and molasses rather than pay duties that everyone knew Parliament had no right to levy. On the night of 9 June 1772, after Gaspee ran aground seven miles south of Providence, a mob that included respectable merchants rowed silently from the city in eight longboats to Gaspee, shot Lieutenant Dudingston in the arm and groin, evacuated the vessel, and burned it. It was the most celebrated incident of defiance in Rhode Island before the climate was changed by the event in Lexington, Massachusetts. The evidence points strongly to Rufus Greene being one of the mob. And thereafter Nathanael Greene feared that the “Priviledges and Liberties of the People will be trampled to Death by the Prerogatives of the Crown,” as he wrote on 25 January 1773 to his friend Samuel Ward, Jr.