Before the Tea Party

Everyone knows the Boston Tea Party. Fewer people know that eighteen months before Bostonians dumped tea into the harbor, sixty men from Providence and Warwick rowed out into Narragansett Bay, boarded a British naval vessel, shot its captain, and burned it to the waterline. The royal commission that investigated found nothing. No witnesses. No perpetrators. Rhode Island had just shown the other colonies that it was possible to resist British enforcement directly, violently, and get away with it. Boston was paying attention.