The historiography of the Gaspee affair examines the changing views of historians and scholars with regard to the burning of HMS Gaspee, a British customs schooner that ran aground while patrolling coastal waters near Warwick, Rhode Island and was boarded and destroyed by colonists during the lead up to the American Revolution in 1772. Scholars agree that the incident sparked a period of renewed tension between Great Britain and its American colonies, but they disagree as to the specific long- and short-term impacts of the attack on British and colonial policies and attitudes.

Contemporaneous accounts There were 38 newspapers in America in 1772. At least 11, mostly in the Northeast, reported the attack on the Gaspee within the first few weeks following the incident.David A. Copeland, Colonial American Newspapers (Newark, University of Delaware Press, 1997), 279. The South Carolina Gazette reported it within three weeks. Merrill Jensen, The Founding of a Nation: A History of the American Revolution, 1763–1776 (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1968, 2004), 428. Moreover, the Gaspee Commission of Inquiry was the topic of John Allen's An Oration, Upon the Beauties of Liberty, Or the Essential Rights of Americans,An Oration, Upon the Beauties of Liberty, Or the Essential Rights of Americans one of the most important pre-independence pamphlets to circulate within the colonies. Allen was a little-known preacher at the Second Baptist Church in Boston, but he gave an emotional sermon in December 1772. His Oration went through seven printings published in four different cities.G. Jack Gravlee and James R. Irvine, eds. (1976). Pamphlets and the American Revolution: Rhetoric, Politics, Literature, and the Popular Press Scholar's Facsimiles & Reprints. Delmar, NY. p. viii. Allen argued that Great Britain and the American colonies were separate judicial spheres and one could not interfere with the other. He addressed his message to Lord Dartmouth and portrayed the actions of Americans as merely self-defense, not rebellion, an important distinction for his audience in early 1773. Oration ranked among the best-selling pamphlets of the crisis.John M. Bumsted and Charles E. Clark (October 1964). "New England’s Tom Paine: John Allen and the Spirit of Liberty". William and Mary Quarterly Third Series, Vol. 21, Issue 4: 561, 566.

Bernard Bailyn included Allen among three colonial pamphleteers who were able to demonstrate the "concentrated fury" comparable to that found in tracts and treaties by Europe's more imaginative and capable writers.Bernard Bailyn (1967). The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 18. Subsequent events quickly overshadowed the Gaspee incident, such as the Boston Tea Party.

Richard Snowden published The American Revolution; Written in the Style of Ancient History in Baltimore, and he started with the Boston Tea Party and made no mention of the Gaspee or any event prior to 1773. Mercy Otis Warren skipped from 1770 to 1773 in her massive two volume history of the American Revolution in 1805.Mercy Otis Warren, History of the Rise, Progress and Termination of the American Revolution: interspersed with Biographical, Political and Moral Observations Vol. I & II (Indianapolis: LibertyClassics, 1805, 1988), 59. Even a book focused on the Royal Navy's difficulties in the colonies from 1763 to 1782 failed to mention the Gaspee.Captain W.M. James, The British Navy in Adversity: A Study of the War of American Independence (London: Longmans, Green and Co. LTD., 1926) p. 25 skips from 1770 to 1773. No scholar has dedicated a monograph to the Gaspee episode, such as Benjamin Woods Labaree’s The Boston Tea Party or Hiller B. Zobel’s The Boston Massacre.Lawrence J. DeVaro and Steven H. Park have written the only dissertations that represent a nonfiction book-length work aimed at an adult readership.

Early 19th century

After 1800, chroniclers and biographers started to write histories about the events and well-known personalities of the American Revolution. Many romanticized it as a "Golden Age" and de-emphasized its revolutionary character, especially in light of disturbing revolutionary events in France, Haiti, and Latin America. Others sought to interview aging survivors of the Revolution, even tracking down those who had fled to Canada or London. Three colonial participants from the attack on the Gaspee documented their memories of that night: Dr. John Mawney, the doctor who tended to the Lieutenant's wounds; Ephraim Bowen, who provided Joseph Bucklin with the firearm used to shoot the British lieutenant; and Aaron Biggs, an indentured servant who gave contemporary testimony that he was an eyewitness to the events of June 9–10, 1772.

The colonial government and Patriot press discredited his deposition. Bowen was only 19 in 1772, but later achieved the rank of Colonel and went on to run a successful rum distillery in Pawtuxet Village. In 1839 at age 86, Bowen attempted to recall the events of that night 67 years earlier. He was confident that all others involved in the attack were dead, and he named as many individuals as he could remember. Mawney's and Bowen's accounts are the only detailed eyewitness narratives from the colonial side. They tell that the men convened at Sabin's Tavern, John Brown organized a flotilla of eight boats, and Abraham Whipple identified himself to the Gaspee lookouts as the Sheriff of Kent County. From the Gaspees crew and officers, there is ample testimony, but Rhode Island's Patriots left only scanty information.

Pre–Civil War

For four decades leading up to the American Civil War, Harlow Sheidley claims that Massachusetts’ conservative leaders published American histories that prominently featured New Englanders as the "true" founders of the American republic.Harlow W. Sheidley, Sectional Nationalism: Massachusetts Conservative Leaders and the Transformation of America, 1815–1836 (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1998) esp. chapter 5.

In 1845, Rhode Island Judge William R. Staples published the Documentary History of the Destruction of the Gaspee], first appearing in the Providence Daily Journal.William R. Staples (1990). The Documentary History of the Destruction of the Gaspee, Introduced and Supplemented by Richard M. Deasy. Providence, RI: Published jointly by the Rhode Island Publications Society, The Rhode Island Bicentennial Foundation and The Rhode Island Supreme Court Historical Society p. xxxii. His account later appeared as a substantial pamphlet.It first appeared on Tuesday, March 11, 1845. Knowles, Vose, and Anthony published the newspaper and the pamphlet. Staples's work contained 56 pages of contemporaneous correspondence surrounding the events of 1772–73.James Grant Wilson, Appleton's Cyclopedia of American Biography (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1889–1900), 651. A more detailed 19-page biographical piece was written by William Greene in 1870 when six of Staples’ eleven children were still living. See "Introductory Memoir" in William R. Staples, Rhode Island in the Continental Congress (Providence: Providence Press Company, Printers to the State, 1870), xv-xxxiii.

Staples mostly let the historical actors speak for themselves. When his work was republished in 1990, Richard M. Deasy wrote an introduction reflecting on the Gaspee and the lasting contribution of Judge Staples’ compilation of documents. Deasy mentioned other maritime attacks on British government property as well as the Dockyards, &c. Protection Act 1772 (12 Geo. 3. c. 24) (see arson in royal dockyards), but he explained the reaction of the Crown to the Gaspee as "simply the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back."

Samuel G. Arnold produced a brief treatment of the Gaspee in 1860 in his History of the State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations. He dedicated ten pages to the arrival of the Gaspee in Narragansett Bay, to early troubles with Dudingston, and to the destruction of the vessel, the Commission of Inquiry, and Ephraim Bowen's account of that night. Arnold celebrated the triumph of liberty over tyranny throughout the section on the American Revolution and described Lieutenant Dudingston's wounds as "the first British blood shed in the war of independence."Samuel Greene Arnold, History of the State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations Vol II 1700–1790 (New York: D. Appleton & Company, 1860), 313.

Secretary of State of Rhode Island John Russell Bartlett published Records of the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations in New England, a ten-volume set. Volume 7 covered the years 1770–1776, published in 1862. He covered the Gaspee, including a few additional pages of correspondence not found in Staples surrounding the destruction of the Gaspee. George Bancroft assisted Bartlett by securing copies of documents in London. Bartlett had published the same pages under the title A History of the Destruction of His Britannic Majesty’s Schooner Gaspee, in Narragansett Bay, on the 10th June, 1772.

Imperial School

The period from 1865 to 1900 was a dry spell for historians writing about Rhode Island events leading up to the American War for Independence, although there was a significant body of work written on Massachusetts at the time.

Meanwhile, American historians were following in the footsteps of Jared Sparks (1789–1866) and George Bancroft (1800–1891) by visiting British archives to uncover the information that officials in London had at their disposal, and to discern how they made decisions that affected the American colonies. Their work became known as the "Imperial School" of historical interpretation, and it took into account both the reasonings of the Patriots and Loyalists in their actions alongside that of the British Parliament. George Louis Beer (1872–1920) and Herbert L. Osgood (1855–1918) examined the changes in mercantilist ideology among European theorists that influenced the decisions of the Privy Council in dealing with the American colonies.

After the French and Indian War, Britain returned some colonies in the Caribbean to the French but retained Canada, which marked a shift in colonial administration. Controlling, regulating, and collecting the revenues of colonial markets, the scholars explained, became divisive points of contention in the 1760s and the 1770s.

Early 20th century and "progressive" interpretations

In the early 20th century, educational leaders expressed an interest in teaching Rhode Island school children about the Gaspee. According to historian Michael Kammen, the years between 1886 and 1906 marked a time of national "obsession with revolutionary America in juvenile fiction."Kammen, Michael "The American Revolution in National Tradition" in Perspectives on the American Revolution (The York Campus of the Pennsylvania State University, 1976), 43. Horatio B. Knox published a 98-page book on the Gaspee in 1908 "written expressly for the school children of Rhode Island."Knox, Horatio B., The Destruction of the Gaspee (Department of Education: State of Rhode Island, 1908)