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Click on the
Yellow Tabs at the top of this page to read about
the Gaspee Attack or
read Biographies of each Raider.
Click on the Blue Tabs below to obtain a table of contents to
a division of the
total Gaspee information available to you.
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American History Mystery - Identities Hidden During the Revolution - Being Solved by The Gaspee Scholars.
The participants in the first act of war in the American Revolution deserve
commemoration. We present at this site the
List of the Gaspee Raiders, the list of the Rhode Island men who actually were in the raiding
party that attacked and destroyed the Gaspee in 1772.
The Rhode Island Men who Attacked the Gaspee.
 Most accounts
of the Gaspee attack state there were about 60 men in the longboats of Rhode Island men that attacked the
Gaspee. We believe there were probably
more than 100. Read Why. Yet
until 1999 most historians
had identified only about ten of the raiders (the listed names vary). Starting in 1999, our
society researchers and John Concannon of the Gaspee Virtual Archives
have identified other Rhode Island men who probably were in the attacking party. Our
present list
more than triples the number of previously known participants in the Gaspee raiding
party, although it still is less than then legendary 60!
The history and biographical information in these pages was last
 on
Monday, 19 February 2007.
Our site here at
www.Gaspee.Info focuses on "who" and "how" and "why", regarding the
attack. We discuss the incident and what our research shows.
We call some of our research
"forensic history"
because it is a forensic style reconstruction of the most likely events.
Our Gaspee Raiders list has more than tripled the number
of men previously publicly
named by historians. There are three reasons for this.
- Research by our society,
made possible by donated funds, plus dedicated, long term, research aimed at
this effort. The two greatest collections of publicly and freely available
information about the Gaspee Affair are (1) the Joseph Bucklin Society and
this website, and (2) the Gaspee Virtual Archives.
- Great aid from Gaspee (dot) org.
The
Gaspee Virtual Archives has been a twin driver of research. Like Gaspee
Info, the Gaspee Virtual Archives has had the advantages of being constant
in its research, and being publicly available. Our Gaspee Info
research has been greatly aided by John Concannon, the tireless Rhode Island
researcher and intelligent webmaster at the Gaspee Virtual Archives. Much of
our research and critical analysis started with items gathered by Concannon.
Much or our research started with items gathered by Concannon. We owe
him much.
- Decision to list all possible Gaspee Raiders. We have chosen to
list all those who have been identified by any researcher, author, or
historian, amateur or not, as long as the claim is rational, based on
historical fact, and reasonably justified. Each of the
persons on our Raiders list has been identified either by us or by at least one
outside researcher. We have
reasonable doubts regarding some of them, but we recognize that there are
reasonable arguments for inclusion of the person. We have decided that by listing all who
are probable raiders, we assist future
research.
Our list of the Gaspee Raiders includes biographical information on
the individuals in the Gaspee raiding party. It also is the place where we
discuss the inter-relations among the individuals in the raiding party.
List of the Gaspee Raiders.
Other Men Involved in the Revolutionary Events.
Information about persons other than the raiders is found at our page "Cast of Characters", That page has the
information about some other persons, both in Rhode Island and elsewhere, both
on the American side and on the English side,
who did not actually participate in the raid but are noteworthy if you are learning the
full Gaspee story and the events leading to the American Revolution.
Colonists we still are investigating.
John Howland wrote a short list of persons who were Gaspee Raiders, but he
did not document his sources. Because he wrote so soon after the end of
the Revolutionary War, we assume he based his list on personal knowledge or
accepted Providence town oral history. John Howland
was a boy of 11 or 12 years old
during the Gaspee Affair. After the end of the War he claimed to have been there when the boats put off
from Providence for the attack in June 1772. Howland then gave the names of
individuals he knew were in the raid, and he grew up among many of them.
Because Howland was in 1839 the first director of the RI Historical Society, we
take his undocumented list seriously.
Any
merchant, large or small, as well as any master of a boat, might have been eager
to join the expedition and rid Narragansett Bar of English Navy enforcement of
customs laws. Most likely suspects are the Providence merchants who signed
the complaint against Dudingston, claiming he was acting without authority. In addition to John Brown, the other persons signing the
complaint were:
 | Angell. Nathan Angell |
| Brown. Nicholas Brown |
| Greene. Thomas Greene
See Rufus
Greene page. |
| Lovett. James Lovett |
| Nightingale. Joseph Nightingale |
| Page. Ambrose Page |
| Smith. Job Smith |
Three lawyers, a judge, and a court clerk were accused of being participants in the affair, but they
successfully escaped arrest by each furnishing alibis for the others. They
may well have been involved as participants
in
legal planning -- before the attack -- for the
justification of the attack. They were named by the English navy,
based on military intelligence by a spy, as: "John Andrews, Esq., Judge of
the court of Vice Admiralty within the Colony of Rhode Island; Mr. Arthur
Fenner, Clerk in the Supreme Court in the county of Providence; Messrs. John
Cole, George Brown, and Daniel Hitchcock, Attorneys at Law in the town of
Providence."
Now, look at our
List
of Gaspee Raiders.
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Gaspee Information