This story shifted my thinking on early U.S. history

Now I'm passing it along to you.

When I ambled into Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse’s office on Capitol Hill, the plan was to talk health reform.

The Rhode Island senator wants to change how hospitals and doctors get paid — and I wanted to discuss that as part of a story for The Washington Post.

But don’t worry. This Substack is not going to be about health care payment formulas.

The senator was a few minutes late, so I wandered around his conference room — checking out the photos on the walls — before plopping down at the table. Sen. Whitehouse soon walked in, and I made a joke to break the ice — had I taken his favorite seat?

No, no favorite seat.

Ok, well, what about a favorite photo?

The senator got serious. He pointed to a painting of a ship on fire.

“You’re in for an education,” Sen. Whitehouse said.

And that’s when I first learned about the Gaspee affair.

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, and his favorite painting, when I returned to his D.C. office last week.

As Sen. Whitehouse launched into a lengthy story about why the Boston Tea Party is overrated, I wasn’t sure why he’d rather vent to me, a health reporter, about something that happened in 1773 than pitch me on the 2023 health reforms that I knew he wanted to wonk out about. I also was struggling to follow the sudden eruption of 18th century names, dates and details — there was something about a British royal naval ship called the Gaspee, and its “arrogant bastard” of a captain.

But the Rhode Island senator’s frustration was obvious.

“Nobody knows that well before anybody pushed a tea bag off a civilian ship in the Boston Harbor, Rhode Islanders blew up a military vessel,” Sen. Whitehouse said.

He also took more than a few swipes at Massachusetts, arguing that its leaders have spent centuries building up their history at the expense of his own state next door.

“They got drunk, painted themselves like Indians and pushed tea bags into the Boston Harbor¹, which we in Rhode Island think is pretty weak tea compared to blowing up the goddamn boat and shooting its captain,” the senator added, before leaving me with a thought about why the 1772 burning of the Gaspee had been forgotten in popular memory. “But you know, all those Massachusetts people went on to become president and run Harvard … so they told their story, and their story, and their story.”

You can listen to some of Whitehouse’s remarks here.

That was almost two months ago. And to be honest, I walked out of Sen. Whitehouse’s office a little frustrated — because we spent nearly 10 minutes on the Gaspee, we ran out of time for health reform questions. (In the clip above, you can even hear me speaking and laughing over the senator’s recounting of the Gaspee affair because I was trying to move him along.)

But I couldn’t get the Gaspee out of my mind. Why was a U.S. senator so fired up about a centuries-old attack that he was willing to spill his tea on Boston rather than stick to his planned interview with The Washington Post?

Was the Gaspee really that important — and if so, why was it forgotten?

I texted some history writers and academics. I found some U.S. history textbooks (and later, emailed the Post newsroom to ask colleagues for more). I visited the Smithsonian’s exhibit on the rising tensions in the 1770s between the colonies and the crown.

All produced the same result: the Boston Tea Party was universally known and well-chronicled. The Gaspee affair was unknown and not widely taught.

But I kept running into Rhode Islanders — sometimes in unexpected places, like during a visit to New York City Hall — who swore that the long-ago attack on the ship was a big deal. That it led to an international crisis that drew in King George III and even helped shape the Declaration of Independence.

My gut said it was worth investigating further. Thankfully, my editors agreed. And that led to this Washington Post story — which you can read without a paywall — explaining the attack and why it mattered as the U.S. colonies headed toward war.

Boston Tea Party? Rhode Island says its rebellion was first — and just as important.

One more thing about this story: we timed it to run before this weekend … which is the 250th anniversary of the Boston Tea Party.

Sorry to be tea party-poopers.

So why was the Gaspee affair broadly forgotten?

Whitehouse’s attack on Harvard wasn’t wrong; multiple historians said that the school’s professors and other Bostonians shaped the story of the U.S. revolution through their local lens.

“The history books are written by the victors. And the victors, in the Revolutionary War’s case, were concentrated in Boston as far as the printing presses and the men of knowledge and the leaders of the revolution,” said John Concannon, a pediatrician who is also the historian for the Gaspee Days Committee in Rhode Island². “So they spun the revolution in their terms and forgot about the Gaspee.”

Given the shots at long-dead Harvard professors, I tried several times to get a living one to comment on the Gaspee, reaching out to U.S. history experts there and asking if they thought the burning of the ship was significant, especially given Rhode Islanders’ arguments that it had been overlooked. But they all declined interviews.

“I'm just not expert in RI's local history, and the [Massachusetts] vs. [Rhode Island] framing doesn't strike me as productive,” one prominent Harvard scholar emailed in response.

I’m just a health reporter who spent a few days moonlighting as a history writer. But I walked away from this story musing about how history gets written — what gets included, and why, and how it’s self-reinforcing.³ The Boston Tea Party still has a cultural footprint, inspiring everything from Jeopardy! questions to the branding of a modern political movement. The Gaspee is scarcely known outside of Rhode Island.

I’m not the only reporter with a new perspective.

Ted Nesi, Rhode Island’s widely respected political and investigative journalist, told me that he’s also been won over, thanks to steady efforts by his senator and his staff.

"I didn't know a thing about the Gaspee until I got to Rhode Island — being a Massachusetts native, I mainlined Boston Tea Party propaganda," said Nesi. “But Sen. Whitehouse has convinced me.”

1. More on how angry colonists dumped tea into the water as an act of protest, sparking punishment from Britain that worsened tensions with the colonies.

2. A group that has conducted research into the Gaspee’s burning and annually celebrates the burning of the ship.

3. This goes beyond the Gaspee. The Rhode Island secretary of state’s website describes the burning of the ship “as the spark that ignited the American Revolution,” but surely there are other, even earlier flares and flickers that could arguably be the start of the march to war.

And had the U.S. revolution failed, our British overlords wouldn’t talk about the Gaspee raiders, the Boston Tea Partiers and other key figures from that era as heroes — they’d be portrayed as terrorists.