RI patriot says "cease and desist" to those denying Revolution's first shot was fired here

Of the areas where Rhode Island doesn’t get enough respect, I’ve long thought the most maddening could be the Gaspee.

That was the British tax ship burned to the bilge by local patriots, yet that silly tea party in Boston gets all the billing.

Even more galling is the claim that the alleged first shot of the Revolution was at Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775, after Paul Revere’s ride.

Emphasis on “alleged.”

Providence’s Bob Burke has had it with that.

On Monday, he went to file a legal action to stop the madness.

His counterclaim: Three years before the Paul Revere saga, the revolution’s real first bullet was fired here, at the Gaspee’s captain, with considerable result.

Why, Burke wants to know, isn’t that remembered as “the shot heard round the world”?

Aside from owning Pot Au Feu restaurant downtown seemingly since Colonial times, the bow-tied Mr. Burke is a rhapsodist of Rhode Island history, having created a walking tour called the Providence Independence Trail.

Bob is also the kind who perhaps should try the decaf, because before I could even ask a question when I called him, he excitedly launched into a Gaspee history oration. I had to jump in to slow him down.

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Bob, I asked, what about this cease and desist thing? Is that real?

Completely, he said.

“This is a clear case of identity theft. Massachusetts stole our identity. ”

“So you’re mad?” I asked.

“Mad as hell.”

And he’s taking formal action with a legal letter drawn up by attorney James Marusak, who has a side-gig as Lincoln town solicitor.

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As the aggrieved party, Bob is sending the letter to 15 defendants who are aggrieving him. He planned to sign each with a quill pen.

The recipients include the Governor of Massachusetts and Secretary of the Interior, who overseas U.S. Park Service sites that don’t give us credit.

Burke is demanding they cease and desist claiming the Revolution’s first shot was in Massachusetts when everyone knows it was here.

I saw a copy of the letter and it’s so legally serious it includes Latin phrases like “casus belli.”

I had to ask Bob what that meant.

“Cause of war,” he explained.

The letter states: “Despite the … unassailable fact that the Gaspee Attack … occurred three years prior to … Lexington and Concord … their misinformed acolytes have perpetrated the false … claim that the first shot was …” and on like that.

Sorry about the ellipses, but legalese is wordy.

Yet I have to admit I like Mr. Marusak’s language.

Like telling Massachusetts to: “Publicly confess your transgressions in the perpetration of 250 years of false history.”

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And: “Permanently and publicly disavow, recant and cease and desist your violative assertions.”

Specifically: “Admit that the title of having fired ‘The First Shot’ is the rightful property of The Gaspee Attack.”

Burke is peeved both as a historian and a businessman, pointing out false claims have brought untold millions of tourist dollars to Massachusetts instead of Rhode Island.

He’s right about that. I remember seeing them selling tons of tickets for hourly tea party reenactments in the water off Boston’s downtown Congress State Bridge, when we should be getting that off Warwick’s Gaspee point.

That’s where it happened.

And now on the phone, Bob Burke is revving up his spiel on that night.

The night of June 9, 1772.

That’s another reason Burke is making his move now: the 250th anniversary of the real first shot is coming up.

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As for the Gaspee, it was a despised British ship captained by William Dudingston, the king’s new sheriff in town seizing goods and even boats on Narragansett Bay for taxes.

On that June 9, a gutsy patriot named Benjamin Lindsay went out on a small sloop to play cat-and-mouse with the Gaspee, luring it onto a sandbar off what’s now Gaspee Point, where it got stuck.

Then Lindsay headed to the area of Providence’s current South Main Street, where stood the Sabin Tavern, and now stands a granite monument marking it.

Soon, scores of the secretive Sons of Liberty gathered there to plot an attack far bolder than any tea party, against the most powerful empire on earth.

“They drunk up enough Rhode Island courage,” Burke said, “and over 100 rowed six miles from Providence under a setting moon with muffled oars.”

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Around midnight, they closed in on the grounded Gaspee.

As for that “shot heard 'round the world” at Lexington and Concord three years later, no one knows who fired it, and indeed, it may have been a Brit.

But it is known that the night of June 9, 1772, a Rhode Islander named Joseph Bucklin leveled a pistol at Dudingston, the Gaspee’s captain, and fired a bullet that hit him in the upper thigh, and then it was on.

The Providence patriots boarded the Gaspee and after some hand-to-hand, subdued the crew. They put them in boats as captives and burned the despised tax ship to the waterline.

No one debates that this was indeed the first hostile gunshot fired at the British by an American patriot angry over taxation without representation.

So why, I asked Bob Burke, do the folks in Massachusetts get all the attention?

They do better PR, he said.

By the way, the king wanted to hang those patriots, but Burke told me it was an early example of the code of silence – nobody, he said, knew nuthin’.

For now, Burke’s cease-and-desist demand is aimed at the court of public opinion, and he’ll soon have a website up at justaminuteman.com where folks can “like” or vote for his demands.

But with only half a wink, he says, who knows – it’s possible that the Interior Department will have to answer in federal court why its National Park properties in Lexington and Concord and elsewhere make false claims.

Ever the orator, he said: “For 250 years Rhode Island has been bound in the shackles of historical ignorance, and we will be unbound in 2022.”

Journalists aren’t supposed to take sides in legal disputes.

But in this case, I say amen.

mpatinki@providencejournal.com

This article originally appeared on The Providence Journal: RI man takes legal action against MA gov, others over Revolutionary War