A shift toward more militant tactics by colonial protestors. A British revenue schooner, the Gaspee, ran aground in shallow waters near Warwick, Rhode Island. Local men boarded the ship, looted its contents, and finally torched it. The event amplified hostilities between the American colonists and British officials, subsequent to the Boston Massacre in 1770. The British had wanted to decrease tensions with the colonies by cancelling some aspects of the Townshend Acts and working to end the American boycott of British goods. British officials in Rhode Island desired to increase their control over the trade that had clear the small colony. But Colonists progressively began to dispute the Stamp Act, Townshend Acts, and other British burdens that had clashed with the colony’s history of rum engineering, maritime profession, and slave trading.
