Changes

==Response==

==Response==

Colonial Whigs were alarmed by what they perceived to be a court operating entirely outside Rhode Island jurisdiction.  They believed the Commissioners could operate wholly independently from Rhode Island’s judicial system.  In Virginia the House of Burgesses was so alarmed that they formed an inter-colonial committee of correspondence to consult in the crisis with other colonial assemblies.  In Boston a little-known visiting minister at Second Baptist Church preached a sermon that utilized the ''Gaspee'' affair to warn listeners about greedy monarchs, corrupt judges, and conspiracies at high levels in the London government.  This sermon was printed seven different times in four colonial cities, becoming one of the most popular pamphlets of Colonial British America.  This pamphlet, along with the incendiary rhetoric of numerous colonial newspaper editors, awoke colonial Whigs from a “lull” of inactivity in 1772 thus inaugurating a series of conflicts that would culminate in the Battles of Lexington and Concord.<ref>[http://homepages.uconn.edu/~shp02001/Gaspee_research.html ]</ref>

Colonial Whigs were alarmed by what they perceived to be a court operating entirely outside Rhode Island jurisdiction.  They believed the Commissioners could operate wholly independently from Rhode Island’s judicial system.  In Virginia the House of Burgesses was so alarmed that they formed an inter-colonial committee of correspondence to consult in the crisis with other colonial assemblies.  In Boston a little-known visiting minister at Second Baptist Church preached a sermon that utilized the ''Gaspee'' affair to warn listeners about greedy monarchs, corrupt judges, and conspiracies at high levels in the London government.  This sermon was printed seven different times in four colonial cities, becoming one of the most popular pamphlets of Colonial British America.  This pamphlet, along with the incendiary rhetoric of numerous colonial newspaper editors, awoke colonial Whigs from a “lull” of inactivity in 1772 thus inaugurating a series of conflicts that would culminate in the Battles of Lexington and Concord.<ref>[https://opencommons.uconn.edu/dissertations/AAI3195552/ The burning of HMS Gaspee and the limits of eighteenth-century British imperial power]</ref>

==References==

==References==