When Thomas Jefferson sat down to pen the Declaration of Independence, he was under instructions to do two things: provide the flowery philosophical reasons for a break with the king and include a list of particular grievances against the monarch.
By the time he and his editors at the Continental Congress were done, there were 27 such grievances in the document. Lately, I’ve seen four of those grievances making the rounds on social media, circulated by those who aren’t fans of President Donald Trump, to make the case that Trump is as much of a tyrant as our founders felt George III was.
Those four grievances:
For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:
For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:
For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:
For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences:
This requires some context — and a history lesson, which has a very specific root in Virginia.
Those circulating those grievances today are referring to Trump’s tariffs and to the case of the Maryland man wrongly deported to El Salvador. These may all be topics worthy of debate, but the facts of 1776 don’t always align neatly with those of 2025.
Let’s take these one by one.
‘For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world’
Trump’s tariffs may discourage trade with certain countries — that’s their stated goal, particularly to reduce American imports from China. However, he has not cut off trade. In Colonial times, Britain tightly regulated where Colonial exports could go and where they couldn’t — and then in 1774, shut down the port in Boston altogether after Colonials had dumped British tea imports into the harbor. That’s what that grievance was about.
‘For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent’
Tariffs are simply taxes by a different name, and it’s true that none of us voted for them, just as we haven’t voted for certain other taxes, either. However, we have voted for the government officials who imposed them. In Colonial times, those tariffs were imposed by the British Parliament, and Colonial Americans couldn’t vote in those elections — that was the whole “taxation without representation” thing.
‘For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury’ and ‘For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences’
We’ll take these two together. This is where we get to the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia and Trump’s suggestion that certain U.S. citizens might get sent to foreign prisons. For Colonials, this was the case of the HMS Gaspee, and the Rhode Islanders who set the British naval vessel ablaze. You can decide for yourself to what extent they overlap and to what extent they don’t. Our focus today is on the historical event, but for a full understanding of what so upset our Colonial forebears in 1776, we must go back to the fields of Runnymede in the summer of 1215, when King John was forced to sign the Magna Carta, which guaranteed that “no free man” could be arrested or “banished” or otherwise punished “except by the lawful judgment of his peers and by the law of the land.” In other words, what today we call trial by jury.
After the last of the Stuart kings was chased from the throne, and William and Mary were installed as co-monarchs, these rights were reaffirmed and codified in the English Bill of Rights in 1689. The Colonists of the 1770s were unhappy with the British because they felt that the British were abrogating their rights under that act — and that independence was a way to preserve those rights.
The 1770s also saw the issue of tariffs and trials intersect in ways that eventually led to the American Revolution.
To fight the French and Indian War, the British had doubled their debt. They came out of the war eager to reduce their security costs in North America — and to make Americans pay for that protection. Their first attempt at taxing the Colonies, the Stamp Act, didn’t go well, so the British tried import duties. That didn’t go well, either. The Colonists insisted that the tariffs were illegal because they hadn’t elected the parliamentarians who imposed them. Meanwhile, the Colonists resorted to another tactic besides protesting — they turned to smuggling.
New Englanders were particularly adept at this. Britain responded by beefing up enforcement. Rhode Islanders, a particularly troublesome lot, responded by firing on one British naval vessel in 1764 and burning another in 1768. The British upped the ante by declaring they would charge smugglers in military courts — the tariffs were enforced by the Navy — which meant no trial by jury. That struck Colonists as a blatant violation of their right to a trial by their peers. If you get the sense here that things were spiraling out of control, you’re right.
The British bought six new ships, gave them French names in honor of their new acquisition of Quebec and sent them to New England to patrol the coasts against smugglers. In February 1772, the HMS Gaspee stopped a ship in Narragansett Bay and found undeclared rum, which was both a popular drink and a key component of the slave trade — sugar from the West Indies was turned into molasses which was sent to New England to become rum, which then was sent to Africa to trade for captives. For a musical history lesson on this, see the song “Molasses to Rum” from the musical “1776.”
The British officer in charge of the Gaspee, Lt. William Duddingston, sent the captured rum-running ship and its smuggled contents to Boston, fearing that if he docked the ship in Rhode Island, the locals would seize it. This incensed Rhode Islanders — their royal charter guaranteed that any trials of local residents would be held there, not in some other Colony. A Rhode Island sheriff threatened to arrest the commander of the Gaspee; a British admiral vowed to hang anyone who tried to liberate seized vessels.
In June 1772, the Gaspee gave chase to a suspected smuggler and ran aground. Duddingston decided to wait for high tide to free the vessel. Meanwhile, the prominent Rhode Island merchant John Brown — whose merchandise included human property in that aforementioned slave trade and whose fortune helped endow the future Ivy League school Brown University — saw an “opportunity offered of putting an end to the trouble and vexation she daily caused.” He led a band of men who rowed out to the stranded Gaspee and burned the ship. They also shot Duddingston in a very unfortunate part of the male anatomy. To literally add insult to injury, a local sheriff then arrested Duddingston.
The lieutenant was eventually freed, but Britain demanded that the Colonial perpetrators be sent to Britain to be tried for treason. The inquiry foundered, though, because Rhode Island officials were strangely unable to find out who was responsible. The identities of the men involved were well-known, but all produced an alibi. If you’re thinking of how difficult it’s been over the years for “revenuers” to prosecute moonshiners, you’re not far off. The Rhode Islanders simply had no intention of turning over some of their leading citizens to be sent to Britain for trial (or, perhaps, for trial anywhere).
The real impact of what became known as “the Gaspee Affair” wasn’t in New England; it was in Virginia. The Colonies had not been much on cooperating with one another, but the British threat to try the men involved in burning the Gaspee — if they could be found — across the ocean alarmed Colonists up and down the Eastern Seaboard.
The news that Britain had empanelled a Royal Commission of Inquiry to pursue the Gaspee attackers arrived in Virginia just as the royal governor, Lord Dunmore, had called an unrelated session of the House of Burgesses. The arrival of legislators in Williamsburg gave them the chance to talk about how Virginia should respond. Encyclopedia Virginia says a “small group of young, radical burgesses” met regularly in the Raleigh Tavern: Dabney Carr, Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson, Francis Lightfoot Lee and Richard Henry Lee. They concluded that Virginia should set up a “committee of correspondence” with leaders in other Colonies to keep in touch. Think of it as a Colonial group chat.
“Richard Henry Lee later said that he and his colleagues painstakingly worded this resolution to make it difficult for royal officials to accuse them of treason as they had the Massachusetts House in 1768,” according to Encyclopedia Virginia. “But for those reading between the lines, the resolution’s proposed communication network was an insurance policy against future Parliamentary encroachment.”
Being clever politicians, those five “young, radical burgesses” proposed a committee dominated by older, more moderate legislators. “Thus, the young, radical burgesses at the Raleigh Tavern crafted a committee that would deemphasize the novelty of their idea to establish intercolonial communication in a time of relative calm,” Encyclopedia Virginia says.
That kind of intracolonial communication may seem a small thing now, but it was a big thing then, and it helped to bind the Colonies together in a way they hadn’t been before. The Virginia Committee of Correspondence became the first in a series of 13 such committees, from Georgia to New Hampshire. As events unfolded at a quickening pace over the next three years, these committees became the focal point for organizing Colonial resistance. It was eventually the Virginia Committee of Correspondence that proposed a meeting of representatives from multiple colonies — the Continental Congress, an extra-legal meeting that, in its second iteration, was the body that declared independence.
All that came from the burning of the Gaspee, and the British threat to send the ship-burners to Britain for trial.
Whether you see connections between the Colonial grievance about the king sending “transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences” and current events or not is up to you — but this is the history that got us here, nonetheless.
I wrote more about the Gaspee as part of our Cardinal 250 project to tell the little-known stories of Virginia’s role in the American Revolution as we approach the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. You can sign up for our monthly Cardinal 250 newsletter below, as well as our weekly West of the Capital political newsletter.