River,
called the "Lexington of the South."

=The _Gaspee_ Affair and the Virginia Resolutions of 1773.=--On sea as
well as on land, friction between the royal officers and the colonists
broke out into overt acts. While patrolling Narragansett Bay looking for
smugglers one day in 1772, the armed ship, _Gaspee_, ran ashore and was
caught fast. During the night several men from Providence boarded the
vessel and, after seizing the crew, set it on fire. A royal commission,
sent to Rhode Island to discover the offenders and bring them to
account, failed because it could not find a single informer. The very
appointment of such a commission aroused the patriots of Virginia to
action; and in March, 1773, the House of Burgesses passed a resolution
creating a standing committee of correspondence to develop cooeperation
among the colonies in resistance to British measures.

=The Boston Tea Party.=--Although the British government, finding the
Townshend revenue act a failure, repealed in 1770 all the duties except
that on tea, it in no way relaxed its resolve to enforce the other
commercial regulations it had imposed on the colonies. Moreover,
Parliament decided to relieve the British East India Company of the
financial difficulties into which it had fallen partly by reason of the
Tea Act and the colonial boycott that followed. In 1773 it agreed to
return to the Company the regular import duties, levied in England, on
all tea transshipped to America. A small impost of three pence, to be
collected in America, was left as a reminder of the principle laid down
in the Declaratory Act that Parliament had the right to tax the
colonists.

This arrangement with the East India Company was obnoxious to the
colonists for several reasons. It was an act of favoritism for one
thing, in the interest of a great monopoly. For another thing, it
promised to dump on the American market, suddenly, an immense amount of
cheap tea and so cause heavy losses to American merchants who had large
stocks on hand. It threatened with ruin the business of all those who
were engaged in clandestine trade with the Dutch. It carried with it an
irritating tax of three pence on imports. In Charleston, Annapolis, New
York, and Boston, captains of ships who brought tea under this act were
roughly handled. One night in December, 1773, a band of Boston citizens,
disguised as Indians, boarded the hated tea ships and dumped the cargo
into the harbor. This was serious busi