Political Quotes

“every year, I come to the Senate floor around the anniversary of June 9 of 1772 to educate our pages--and anyone else listening--about an event that took place that night in Rhode Island as the United States moved towards its revolutionary conflict with Great Britain. And the lead-up to this was that Rhode Island was a shipping and a trading State; and Newport, in particular, was an extremely wealthy and active trading community. And the British government very much wanted to tax all of that trading, and the Rhode Islanders very much wanted not to be taxed. And so there was considerable back-and-forth between the colonists in Rhode Island and what was then the mother country. And when the obstreperousness of the Rhode Islanders reached a certain point, a new ship and a new captain were detailed to Rhode Island to do a better job of collecting taxes from the shipping traffic. The captain was named Dudingston--Lieutenant Dudingston--of her majesty's royal Navy. And he came in with a rather very poor attitude about Rhode Island and behaved quite badly. He seized ships without much provocation. He would grab them and send them off to be sold for salvage. He would steal cargoes out of ships. He made himself extremely unpopular to a point that the chief justice of Rhode Island said: Excuse me, you don't get to do this.…”