No stigma whatever was attached to the slave traffic as carried on in the seventeenth century and for the greater part of the eighteenth. The voyages, while always dangerous, were not always profitable. The vessels engaged in them were ordinarily small; sometimes they were sloops of less than a hundred tons. A fleet of them could be stowed away in the hold of a Lusitania. They had to be small and of light draft in order to run up the shallow rivers to whose banks their human cargo was driven. Lying at anchor in the stifling heat, with no wind to drive away the swarming insect life, the deadly coast fever would descend upon a ship, and, having swept away half its crew, leave those who survived too weak to hoist the sails. The captains were, for the most part, God fearing men, working hard to support their families at home. One piously informs his owners that “we have now been twenty days upon the coast and by the blessing of God shall soon have a good cargo.” The number of negroes taken on board a ship was never large until the trade was declared to be piratical. Then conditions changed horribly. It did not pay to take more on board than could be delivered in the West Indies in prime condition. They were not packed more closely than were the crews of the privateers of whom we shall read later on.
Naturally not a few slaves found their way to Bristol. When the first slave was brought there we do not know. Nathaniel Byfield, in his will, gives directions for the disposition of his “negro slave Rose, brought to Bristol from the West Indies in the spring of 1718.” Quickly they became numerous. The census of 1774 records 114 blacks in a total population of 1209, almost one-tenth. At first they lived on the estates of their owners, and were known by his name, if they had any surname. After the Revolutionary War, when slavery had been abolished (mainly because it was unprofitable), they gathered into a district by themselves on the outskirts of the town. This region was called “Gorea” from that part of the coast of Africa with which the slave traders were most familiar. It continued to be known as such until the buildings of the great rubber works crowded it out of existence in the early ’70s of the last century.
Naturally and inevitably the town became involved in the contest that resulted in the independence of America. The affair of the Gaspee was the first in which her people participated. The Gaspee was an armed schooner stationed in Narragansett Bay for the prevention of smuggling. Smuggling was as much in vogue in American waters as in the waters surrounding the British Isles, and was regarded with no more disfavor in one case than in the other. The commander of the vessel was Lieutenant Thomas Duddington, a man who was entirely lacking in tact, and who carried himself with such haughty arrogance as to make himself most obnoxious. One day while chasing one of the packet sloops that plied between New York and Providence, he ran aground on Namquit (now Gaspee) Point. His “chase” escaped and carried the joyful tidings of his plight to Providence. At once drummers were sent through the streets proclaiming the situation of the vessel, and calling for volunteers to destroy her before the next high tide. Eight long boats were furnished by John Brown, the leading merchant of the town, which were quickly filled by a rejoicing band. No attempt at disguise was made by those who took part in the expedition, but the oars were muffled to enable the boats to make the attack without being seen. As they drew near the vessel, a little after midnight, they were joined by a whaleboat containing a party from Bristol under the command of Captain Simeon Potter.[6]
Their approach was discovered by the watch upon the Gaspee, and as the boats dashed forward they were fired upon from the schooner. The fire was at once returned by the attacking party, and the vessel was boarded and captured after a short but desperate struggle. In this struggle Lieutenant Duddington was wounded, though not seriously. The crew were captured, bound and set on shore. The vessel was set on fire and completely destroyed. Then, having been entirely successful in their expedition, the boats rowed joyfully homeward. Those who took part in the exploit made no effort to conceal it and some of them even boasted of what they had done. The British Government at once offered a large reward for information that would lead to the conviction of the bold offenders. Some of them were among the foremost men in the Colony and almost every one knew their names, the name of Abraham Whipple especially being on the lips of all the people, but no man of any character could be found to testify against them and none of them were ever brought to trial. The affair took place on June 10, 1772. It was the first contest in which British blood was shed in an expedition openly organized against the forces of the mother country, and it differed from all the other preliminary encounters because of the character of those engaged in it. Other outbreaks were the work of an irresponsible mob. Crispus Attucks, for instance, who fell in the so called Boston Massacre, was a mulatto and the men whom he led were of his type. But some of the leading men of Rhode Island sat on the thwarts of the nine boats, and their boldness seems almost incredible to us of the present day. It shows that while public sentiment at Newport and New York and the other great seats of commerce along the coast may have favored the king, the people of the Providence Plantations were already prepared to sever their relations with England.
The only “lyric” to commemorate the affair came from the pen of Captain Thomas Swan of Bristol, one of those who took part in it. His effusion has never appeared in any history of American literature, for good and sufficient reasons, but it is printed in full in Munro’s “History of Bristol.” The participation of the Bristol men in the Gaspee affair is often denied by “out of town” people. I have no doubt respecting the matter. My own grandmother, born in 1784, the daughter of a soldier of the Revolution who was born in 1762 and lived until 1821, and whose grandfather, born in 1731, lived until 1817, firmly believed in it. She had had opportunities for talking the subject over with two generations who were living on June 10, 1772.
In January, 1881, Bishop Smith of Kentucky, born in Bristol in 1794 and a graduate of Brown in 1816, wrote to me calling my attention to a slight difference between the “Swan Song,” as I had given it in my “History of Bristol,” and a version pasted upon the back of a portrait of Thomas Swan’s father by Thomas Swan himself. Capt. Swan was Bishop Smith’s uncle. The Bishop wrote, “I should not have troubled you on so inconsiderable a point had not the tradition in our family been that the Bristol boat was manned by men in the disguise of Narragansett Indians.”
When Bishop Smith penned those lines several men were living in Bristol who had heard the story from Captain Swan’s own lips. He delighted in telling it and was accustomed to give the names of Bristol participants. Those names had unhappily escaped the memory of his auditors. The correspondence on the subject of the Gaspee, which occurred during the Revolutionary War between Abraham Whipple and Captain Sir James Wallace, the commander of the British naval forces in Narragansett Bay, is worthy of another reproduction:
Wallace to Whipple:
“You, Abraham Whipple, on the 10th June, 1772, burned his Majesty’s vessel, the Gaspee, and I will hang you at the yard arm.—James Wallace.”
Whipple to Wallace: