4 June 1765
Black participants are reported in Newport’s resistance to naval impressment
Newport, Colony of Rhode Island
A Newport crowd seized and burned a boat belonging to HMS Maidstone after the warship pressed local seamen into service. Governor Samuel Ward later reported Black people and boys among those involved, while disparaging their social standing. The Boston Evening-Post dated the burning to the king’s birthday, June 4, and reported that a naval lieutenant was also attacked.
Dates preserve the source’s precision. This entry is part of a selected historical record; its qualifications and sources are retained below.
Context / qualification
Ward’s July 12 letter relays information received from others; it does not identify individual Black participants or establish whether they were free or enslaved. His account links the disturbance to impressment. An official calendar of naval correspondence records Captain Charles Antrobus’s competing explanation: retaliation for a customs seizure. The destroyed vessel was a ship’s boat, not the Maidstone itself. No crowd total or common motive is treated as established.
Sources
- Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States, chapter 4, p. 67; supplied print pages, edition/year unidentified
- Boston Evening-Post, June 10, 1765, p. 2, right column: Newport report; Harbottle Dorr collection, vol. 1, handwritten p. 100 ↗
- Samuel Ward to Charles Antrobus, June 11 and July 12, 1765, in Records of the Colony of Rhode Island, vol. 6, pp. 444, 446–447; printed correspondence ↗
- Calendar of Home Office Papers, 1766–1769 (1878), pp. 26–27, item 84, March 20, 1766; abstract of Admiralty letter and enclosures, including Antrobus’s account ↗