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New scholarship by Gerald Horne, the John J. and Rebecca Moores Chair of History and African American Studies at the University of Houston, has argued that the taxation efforts by the British also were directly linked to contemporary efforts to abolish slavery in the wider British Empire. In his book The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America, Horne shows that the British abolitionist efforts included taxation on ships that trafficked in rum, molasses, and textile items that John Brown trafficked in regularly. "In that context, June 1772 proved to be a watershed, clarifying—in the eyes of many settlers—that London was moving toward abolition, which could jeopardize fortunes, if not lives, as Africans seeking retribution were unleashed. This was the import of…Gaspee Affair, which took place days before this important ruling was made in London. There had long been an illicit trade carried on in Narragansett Bay in Rhode Island. Taking note of the trade carried on by some settlers during the war with the French and as part of the postwar dispensation, London placed armed vessels there in 1764, which was not accepted with equanimity by settlers, particularly when the Crown’s military began stopping vessels and seizing some as complaints increased. As London saw things, this was all about piracy and illicit dealings—the settlers saw an attack upon commerce. A climax was reached on 10 June 1772 in the wee hours of the morning, when a brig arriving from Africa, the Gaspee, entered Newport and was boarded by officers of the Crown. In response, a mob of about five hundred male settlers rioted, burning the British ship. Yet what seemed to inflame the settlers was not only that the miscreants were to be tried in London but that the chief witness against them was a Negro, raising unsettling questions about the presumed equality of this mudsill group. The rioters had conscripted Aaron Briggs for their escapade, oblivious to the growing idea that he might have more in common with the Crown than with the settlers. He was to serve as a witness against one of the colony’s elite and a prominent pro-slavery advocate—John Brown— whose surname was bestowed upon a university in Providence. “I saw John Brown fire a musket,” said Briggs, and “the captain of the schooner immediately fell from the place he was standing.” The proclamation of King George III said that members of the crew of the vessel were “dangerously wounded and barbarously treated.” The Earl of Hillsborough apparently did not grasp the graveness of what his comrade on the scene told him about the Browns, the “principal people of that place,” the “ringleaders in this piratical proceeding”—that is, should they “arrest the parties charged by the Negro Aaron?” Briggs, described variously as a “mulatto lad of about sixteen years of age”—he may have been eighteen—was at the heart of a dispute that deepened the schism between the Crown and the mainland."