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The HMS Gaspee, a British customs schooner that had been engaged in anti-smuggling operations, ran aground in shallow water on June 9, 1772, near what is now known as Gaspee Point in the city of Warwick, Rhode Island. A group of men led by Abraham Whipple and John Brown attacked, boarded, looted, and torched the ship. The Dockyard Act, passed three months earlier, allowed those suspected of burning His Majesty's vessels to be tried in England. But this was not the law that would be used against the Gaspee raiders; they would be charged with treason. In Boston, a visiting minister, John Allen, preached a sermon at the Second Baptist Church that utilized the Gaspee affair to warn listeners about greedy monarchs, corrupt judges and conspiracies at high levels in the London government. This sermon was reprinted and became one of the most popular pamphlets of Colonial British America. This pamphlet, along with the incendiary rhetoric of numerous colonial newspaper editors, awoke colonial Whigs from a lull of inactivity in 1772, thus inaugurating a series of conflicts that would culminate in the Battles of Lexington and Concord. Illustration appeared in Harper's New Monthly Magazine, August, 1883.
