Tea as Poison

Patriots claimed tea was unhealthy to dissuade tea drinkers. The physician David Ramsay’s pamphlet, A Sermon on Tea, summed up much of the genre. Ramsay claimed tea caused every ailment, from farting to death. Tea made Europeans “some inches” shorter than their predecessors, “many degrees” weaker in “strength,” and inflicted a profusion of “disorders.” London tea drinkers were so weakened they could take only “half as much bleeding” as they used to. “Nervous complaints” had skyrocketed—“weak nerves are occasioned by strong tea”—and the “human frame” was left “so debilitated” from tea “that scarce any disorder” was enough to cause “spasms.” Tea’s effects were long-term and cumulative. Like opium or arsenic, a person could build up a tolerance but would suffer in the end. Tea “gradually saps the constitution, without surprising us with its immediate effects,” though some did have immediate effects, such as stomach pain and “tremors.” It caused drowsiness and wakefulness; farting and constipation; hysteria and hypochondria. Pregnant tea drinkers imparted “a whole tribe of diseases” to their children, making “their lives miserably wretched” and risking infant death. Ramsay imagined a tea drinker: “A ghost-like pale face spectre … not really dead, though she appears bloodless,” too weak to care for her child and bound for an early grave. The “Devil himself” could not make a more pernicious drink. It was a “poison” that “kills.”²

Ramsay’s was one of several essays of this sort. Dr. Thomas Young of the Boston committee of correspondence wrote a similar screed in the Newport Mercury. Disguising his political dislike of tea with the pseudonym “A Physician,” he warned that tea was a “highly debilitating” stomach “relaxant” and made “nervous ailments” such as “hypochondria, palsies, [and] cachexies [wasting away],” nearly universal. Reverend William Tennent declared tea “has in the Opinion of the best Physician, spread … Legions of Diseases, before unknown,” and “ruined the Nerves” and “Health” of its drinkers. Tea “fattened the Purse of the Physician and the Sexton, encreased the Number of the Dead, and enfeebled the Living.” By abstaining, readers could “save the Remains of your own Constitutions, and secure the Health of your Children.” Tennent saw tea’s medical ailments as a metaphor for the political diseases it brought: taxation and oppression. Dr. Benjamin Rush, writing as “Hamden,” concurred; he considered tea a “slow poison” physically and politically. One newspaper writer thought tea caused “certain feminine disorders.” It was “an offense against nature” that caused men to have “lost their stature and comeliness; and women their beauty.” It would “shorten your days.”³

Amateur and professional medical concern for tea’s effects on human health both predated and outlasted the Patriot movement. As early as 1731, a New York editorialist had worried that tea drinking was dangerous to “Health and Happiness” and caused physical and mental distress. Perhaps he had read A Dissertation upon Tea, published by the Scottish doctor Thomas Short the previous year. John Wesley, in his well-known Letter to a Friend, Concerning Tea (1748), lambasted tea for causing tremors (over-caffeination), which he characterized as a “Paralytick Disorder,” albeit one that passed after withdrawal. Wesley likened tea to alcohol in the dependency it created and discussed quitting at length. He recommended sage, green balm, mint, pennyroyal, the herbal mixture “Foltron,” and cocoa over the “slow poison” of tea. Jonas Hanway, in An Essay on Tea: Considered as Pernicious to Health, thought tea as “injurious” as gin and “pernicious to health, obstructing industry and impoverishing the nation” (Samuel Johnson, however, defended the beverage). Mid-century British middle-class reformers harped on about workingmen consuming too much tea and sugar and needing whole wheat, oats, and potatoes instead. They saw the new diet of tea and sugar as “less substantial” and more costly. Anti-tea ideas persisted in some parts of nineteenth-century Britain. Cobbett compared it to laudanum. Others worried tea “weakens the stomach” and “unbraces the nerves.” G. G. Sigmond noted various cases in which tea was thought to have harmed patients (and others where it had helped). The concern for tea’s effect on health appeared in France as well.⁴

A naive reader could see the question of tea’s effects on health in the Revolution as a sincere intellectual dispute. But it is important to distinguish between the medical tradition examining tea’s effects on health and Ramsay’s and Tennent’s selective drawing from that tradition to suit their politics. Their arguments appeared alongside every other possible reason not to drink tea: that it brought tyranny, monopoly, taxes, and that Chinese peasants packed it with their dirty feet. Perhaps they believed their propaganda, but not everyone did. One writer in the Massachusetts Spy deprecated such “scare crow stories.” If tea was dangerous, “Why were not these arguments used against the use of [tea] in former times, before it was thought a political evil?” Drs. Rush and Young’s urgency about tea’s health effects in 1774 was matched by how quickly they forgot about it. They did not campaign about tea’s health effects in 1776, after Congress reauthorized tea’s use.⁵

Other scare crow stories were obvious lies, like the rumor that the tea the East India Company sent to the colonies was infested with an insect, “which renders it more pernicious to health than usual.” Conservatives joked with all these tales of tea poison, Patriotic smugglers would have to claim Dutch tea had “the poisonous quality” “drawn off” before shipment.⁶

In addition to tea’s alleged poisonousness, Patriots pointed out the economic savings in abandoning tea—another idea with a long lineage. Wesley, too, had seen tea as a needless expense. The well-off could better use the money as alms; the poor should rather save their funds to escape poverty.⁷ Patriots claimed that tea burdened the individual’s purse and drained the colonies on a macro-level, mirroring the mercantilist arguments about the East India trade hurting Atlantic economies by exporting specie to Asia.

Just how many readers believed Ramsay is unclear. Ramsay’s authorities—doctors—were the last people eighteenth-century Britons called when sick. Dismissing the medical and economic arguments against tea, Hannah Griffitts noted that only “Doctors & Misers” “rail at Tea.” To everyone else tea was “Blest.” “Tea I must have,” she wrote, “or I shall dye.”⁸

Tea as Tonic

Some colonists claimed to need tea for medical reasons, suggesting the diversity of medical opinions (official and folk) about tea. Ramsay may have emphasized tea’s dangers strenuously because belief in tea’s benefits was ubiquitous. Folk remedies often claimed tea was a tonic. Some thought tea prevented scurvy. In 1770, 300 Patriotic women had promised to abstain from tea, “Sickness excepted.” The claim, made in the Boston Evening Post, was sincere. Medical exemption was not a hypocrite’s loophole but a common home remedy. Landon Carter recorded various self-administered medicines in his diary and noted that medical exemptions to boycotts and associations were common. He had come to his own conclusions about tea. Tea had “medical qualities,” which he had discovered from his forty years of use. He thought hyson stopped his diarrhea; others agreed green tea did the same. “I speak not this with a desire to indulge,” but out of medical experience. He would stick to the boycott—unless, perhaps, his bowels disagreed. Others went further. Conservative John Randolph, in Considerations on the Present State of Virginia, argued it would be “dangerous to Health” to stop drinking tea, especially if colonists were to “stop suddenly” after being “long accustomed to” it. Peter Oliver thought tea was fine, but its herbal substitute, Labrador tea, caused “Disorders in Health”—cases, perhaps, of conservatives believing the medical ideas that suited their politics. In the Norfolk Intelligencer, “Penelope House-Wife” warned other families about what happened when her “poor deluded” “patriotic Husband” switched the family from tea to “sage and baum.” They were “scoured off their feet by the use of these herbs,” their two children sick in bed. The cause was “their tender bowels being abraided by a too free use of these acrid plants.” Having switched to rosemary and lavender, others supposedly suffered from giddiness and diminished eyesight. Tea, by contrast, was “soothing and agreeable.”⁹

High medical discourse also noted tea’s health benefits. It was thought to cure ague. Seventeenth-century Dutch treatises argued it cured asthma, colds, constipation, and fatigue. Nahum Tate, British poet laureate, celebrated tea in his mock-heroic “Poem upon tea with … Directions in the Uses of It for Health” (1702). In The Good and Bad Effects of Tea Consider’d (1745), Simon Mason noted the broader pro-tea British medical literature. It “cools, and allays Drought, helps Digestion, makes clean the Stomach, attenuates Viscidities, augments the Velocity of a sluggish Circulation, invigorates, and gives new Spirits, promotes Secretions, strengthens the Bowels, and prompts natural Evacuations”—the complete opposite of Ramsay. For Mason, though, tea’s good was for the better sort. For the poor tea was “very pernicious to their Healths, Circumstances, and Morals.” The poor aping their betters put ill ideas of life above their stations in their heads. Writing in the 1820s, New Englander Dr. Edward Holyoke attributed his longevity to tea, among other things.¹⁰

Even some committeemen thought that tea was not the poison Ramsay suggested. After the Association came into force, Patriot authorities granted medical exemptions to the tea ban. These permissions were popular workarounds. In Wethersfield, Connecticut, magistrate and committeeman Elisha Williams issued medical permits for various people to receive tea from pharmacist Leonard Chester. Mrs. Baxter requested “Liberty to buy” a quarter pound of tea; Williams reasoned that because of her “Age & bodily Infirmities it will not be acting contrary to the Design of our Association,” to grant the request—allowing another half-pound for her later. In August, Williams’ neighbor, Seaman Riley, said that “one of his Children is very sick and the Doctor advises to the use of Tea.” Williams allowed half a pound. A Mr. Samuel Boltwood of Amherst, Massachusetts, indicated that two elderly women in that town needed tea on “physicians” advice. Williams approved the request, and another for a Mrs. Kellogg, who “Beeing sick wants Bohe Tea for med[i]c[in]e.”¹¹

Williams was not alone. When a cargo of tea was discovered in Salem, Massachusetts, committeeman David Mason found his wife was “in a very low state of health and could take but little nourishment excepting tea,” and suggested getting permission to use it (she declined). Though it had publicly resolved against dutied tea, the Westerly, Rhode Island town meeting permitted the “Doctor [to] sell his Tea (now of his property) if he pleases.” In Virginia, Colonel Lawrence Taliaferro asked the Orange County, Virginia committee “in behalf of Mother Judah & after inform[in]g them of her situation”—presumably, a medical one—“all agreed that she Might Drink Tea.” In Annapolis, Maryland, Charles Willson Peale “beged a little tea of Mrs. Scott for my [ill] mother” in October 1775. Three days later he “got a note from Mr. [William] Paca,” a Maryland delegate to Congress, “of leave for Mr. [Thomas] H[y]de to sell my mother what Tea she may really want.” Fortunately for Peale, Hyde still had stock. In North Carolina, Elizabeth Catherine De Rosset was “very ill,” and asked permission to drink tea, the committee granting “permission in the consideration of my age and infirmities.” The presence of “proper” medical advice in some cases and its absence in others suggest tea functioned as formal medicine and folk remedy across the colonies.¹²

Committeeman Williams took these cases seriously. He agonized over Pattison’s case—wishing he had brought a doctor’s note, or a certificate from his local committee, before allowing it. Williams was a true believer. To him, these permission slips were not bogus excuses but medical needs. Other colonists, caught drinking tea, used illness as a justification. How many applicants saw things the same way is unclear. False claims of infirmity or age could be easy ways to get tea. Peter Oliver, inclined to see the worst in Patriots, suspected as much when he noticed Patriotic Boston women stocking up before the 1770 boycott. They “were cautious enough to lay in large Stocks before” the boycott commenced, and “could be sick just as it suited their Convenience or Inclination” after. Oliver mocked colonists suffering under the “Evasion of Sickness.” “They, poor Souls! Were forced to take Turns to be sick & invite their Acquaintance[s] to visit them [for tea], & so the Sickness went on by Rotation.” The Continental Association contained no medical exemption for tea, but medical exemptions were part of the broader discussion around the Association. The Virginia Association, for instance, banned all imports from Britain—except medicine—and the medical dispensation to drink tea may have been made in that spirit. Such exemptions make the tea ban less effective as local Patriots bent a Continental Association toward folk customs.¹³

Colonists did abuse the medical permits. According to the Hartford County committee of inspection, the trick was to apply to a committee in another town, as Samuel Boltwood had, to get “permits” to buy tea “under pretence for the use of the sick,” since the local committee might realize the applicant was faking. Then colonists presented their local committee with an out-of-town note and received tea. The county committee was displeased—less with the tea drinking and more with the circumvention of its authority. Medical licenses for tea drinking were not to be issued anymore—“except for the use of the sick in their respective towns,” which meant that they were.¹⁴ Ramsay’s claim that tea was a medical danger was propaganda, pure and simple, and colonists did not believe it.

The Myth of Britain Forcing Tea on the Colonists

Patriots also told the story that Britain had forced tea on the colonists, who did not want it. Taken literally, this is clearly false: colonists liked tea and did not need to be forced to drink it. Usually interpreted as a reference to the tea destroyed in the Boston Tea Party (or the tea shipped by the Company in 1773 generally), it might have been a better fit for the tea from the William, stored in Castle William outside Boston. The Boston Port Act required trade be safe and duties be collected as part of Boston’s re-opening, which meant the ministry was trying to force the William’s tea upon colonists. Yet the disappearance of the William’s tea from colonial public discussion after January 1774 indicates colonists did not make this connection explicitly, if at all. (This disappearance is why we have missed the fate of the William’s tea for the last 250 years.) Tryon in New York, Wentworth in New Hampshire, and Bull in South Carolina had tried to help land tea cargoes. But as Patriots moved to a generalized opposition to all teas in 1774, a general sense of tea being forced upon colonists was a helpfully simple propaganda point, creating the notion that colonists were against tea while Britain forced it down their throats.

The idea may have originated in a rumor about William Kelly. In 1773, Kelly was said to expect that Governor Tryon would “cram the tea down their throats.” Kelly was a prominent New York merchant who had retired to London and helped his partner, Abraham Lott, become a consignee for the New York shipment. The story got Kelly hung in effigy. In 1774, colonial papers expanded on the underlying idea, claiming that the King-in-Council determined, “Bostonians are to be chastised, and are to drink tea, though ever so great an emetic.” “We hear that it is intended to ship a fresh Cargo of tea for Boston, and to send it thither with a military force,” wrote the Boston Post-Boy, reminding readers that, in 1773, the plan had also been, “in case of refusal, the tea was to be crammed down the people’s throats.”¹⁵

In “The Able Doctor, or America Swallowing the Bitter Draught” (1774) (see figure 8.1), the cartoonist took this literally, and depicted the King’s ministers stripping, holding down, and preparing to gang rape a young female America, as Lord North shoves the tip of his teapot down her throat. The cartoon is crudely sexual. It is also very much about tea. The central action in the image is Lord North forcing the tea upon America. He is violating her with the pot, and she resists by spitting the tea in his face. The cartoon, with a partially denuded woman and a perverted, upskirting Lord Sandwich (a notorious womanizer), was catchy.¹⁶

Patriots appropriated “The Able Doctor.” It was first printed in the London Magazine in April 1774 (the journal likely used the image not so much to elicit sympathy for Bostonians as to attack the ministry for the Boston Port Act). Yet it was a compelling image and was soon reproduced throughout the empire, the unwanted tea and victimized America resonating with Patriots’ self-image. The Able Doctor appeared the next month in Dublin in the Hibernian Magazine. In June, Paul Revere rendered it for the Boston-based Patriotic Royal American Magazine (printed by Isaiah Thomas). Revere tweaked the image, adding the word “TEA” to the pot. It appeared in Philadelphia as a broadside in August (where it would have likely been put up in taverns), retitled “The Persevering Americans”). It appeared in Salem in 1774, and in late 1775 it appeared on the cover of Freebetter’s New-England Almanack (New London).¹⁷ Continental soldiers carved it on their powder horns during the war.

There were various conceits here: in London, it criticized the ministry for assuming it could get colonists to buy taxed tea. But the tea in this image is just tea, not taxed tea, and was read as just tea in the colonies through Revere’s putting “TEA” on the pot, rather than “EIC,” the Company logo, or the rate of duty.

The second conceit conflated taxed tea with all tea. The Tea Party was about dutied tea, but this image helped reimagine the destruction of the tea as a general tea protest. With The Able Doctor there was no need to explain why some teas were bad but not others, and it was easy to explain why a cut in the tea tax was bad—it was the ministry’s means to force tea upon the colonies.

With a lone avatar, the image simplified Bostonians (indeed, all colonists) into a single unit, even though they were hardly a unitary group—some Patriots, some Loyalists, some willing to buy dutied tea and some not, some ready to reimburse the Company for its losses and some unwilling. It transformed the Boston Tea Party from an act of violence that shocked consciences into spittle on North’s face: sympathetic protest and justifiable self-defense.¹⁸

The final conceit was the other half of the first: colonists did not want tea. The same conceit was imbedded in Henry Laurens’s quip to his son in 1775. Even “Our Cherokee Indians … blame King George exceedingly for quarreling with his Children about ‘the Leaves of a Tree’—they Say ‘he is foolish’—‘Why does not he see that the People in America don’t Love it’ ‘if they did, would they have thrown a whole Ship Load of it into the Sea.” The revolutionary dislike for tea would be a long-lasting conceit, born of the myths spread by the Boston Gazette in the wake of the Boston Tea Party of booming coffee sales, and forming the basis for the unexamined assumption that in the Revolution “Americans were weaned from the teacup to the coffee cup, where … their devotion still rests.”¹⁹

The image contained layers of unintentional irony as well. When it was first printed in London, the title, The Able Doctor, referenced tea’s reputed medical properties. North here was a bungling doctor torturing his patient—a gag that hit home for anyone who had had one too many bloodlettings—but the underlying implication that tea was a tonic, not a risk, remained intact. Isaiah Thomas retained the title when he reprinted it in Boston, even though he could have changed it to “The Rape of America” or another punchy name. Later versions cut the title and simplified the image. Yet Thomas’s title retained (accidentally, one presumes) the implication that tea was healthy.

A second layer of unintentional irony, especially in Boston, was the juxtaposition of The Able Doctor’s vision of America—a woman held down by force, stripped, tea shoved down her throat—with how Boston Patriots treated customs collector John Malcom in chapter 4: beaten, half-naked, with tea forced down his throat. When Patriots did it, it was supposed to be fitting. When North did it, it was outrageous.

Philadelphian John Leacock’s American Chronicles of the Times blamed the King for the tea. Leacock lampooned the ministry, but his work was complex, and its humor both mocked and celebrated the Patriot cause (Leacock was a member of the Philadelphia Sons of Liberty). A “biblical parodic satire,” as Carla Mulford terms it, American Chronicles recapitulated current events in biblical prose by parodying the tone of the Geneva and King James bibles and referencing a pastiche of biblical stories in describing contemporary events. American Chronicles came out in six chapter-length installments in 1774 and 1775, complete with notation dividing it into “verses.” It reflected the latest developments in the crisis engulfing the colonies. Its timeliness, political coverage, and allusion to familiar scripture meant it was widely distributed and avidly followed. Various chapters were printed in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, North Carolina, Connecticut, and Rhode Island, and it came out in more editions than all but a few prints of its era.²⁰ American Chronicles lampooned the ministry’s approach to the colonies, framing the colonists as stout Israelites resisting a bad king and his ministers (George III appears as an amalgamation of the darker moments of Kings Saul and David, the kings of Judah, and the kings of Babylon).

American Chronicles described forced tea. “And hast thou not send forth a decree, that all the world should be taxed for the God of the TEA CHEST?” Leacock asked the King in a jeremiad. “And yet, notwithstanding, would we not all to a man … sooner agree voluntarily to burn our throats with a ladle of hot mush, our own country produce, and manufacture, than have the nosle of a teapot crammed down our throats, and scalded with the abominable and baneful exotic, without our own consent?”²¹

American Chronicles dwelled not on the image of tea forced upon colonists but on the idea that the King introduced tea to the colonies in the first place. The claim that George III introduced tea is, in its delusion and need to blame Britain for everything, not far off from slaveholder Thomas Jefferson’s claim, made in an early draft of the Declaration of Independence, that King George III had forced slavery upon the colonists. The idea that the King introduced tea to the colonies transformed the story.

The Chronicles began with the Boston Tea Party:

And behold! When the tidings came to the great city that is afar off, the city that is in the land of Britain, how the men of Boston, even the Bostonites, had arose, a great multitude, and destroyed the TEA, the abominable merchandise of the east, and cast it into the midst of the sea.

²That the Lord the King waxed exceedingly wroth, insomuch that the form of his visage was changed, and his knees smote one against the other.

³Then he assembled together the Princes, the Nobles, the Counsellors, the Judges, and all the Rulers of the people, even the great Sanhedrim, and when he had told them what things were come to pass,

⁴They smote their breasts and said, ‘These men fear thee not, O King! Neither have they obeyed the voice of our Lord the King, not worshipped the TEA CHEST, which thou hast set up, whose length was three cubits, and the breadth thereof one cubit and an half.

The Chronicles continued, lamenting the Boston Port Act, which meant Boston would be “made tributary, and bow down to the TEA CHEST, the God of the Heathen: tell it not in Gath, nor publish it in the streets of Askalon.” Colonists, however, would not be deceived, and refused to “to sell our birthright for a dish of TEA.”²²

Leacock’s description of tea parties helped canonize these events as righteous stands of a moral, God-fearing people against the King’s iniquity. In Leacock’s telling, tea was akin to Exodus’s golden calf or the Baal of 1 Kings—a bad king’s heresy. Tea was sin, and those who resisted it were righteous. Leacock began Chapter V with the burning of the Peggy Stewart (a “free-will offering”), and covered the Virginia incident as well. The “Marylandites were like watchmen on the towers,” he explained, “they kept a good look out (for the spirit of liberty, of watchfulness and freedom, went throughout the land).” And so when “it came to pass about this time, that there came a ship from the land of Britain afar off, with merchandize and TEA,” the vigilant Marylandites were ready for the Peggy Stewart. They asked the tea importers, “Wherefore have ye committed this iniquity in the land? behold, ye be but three, and ye be not able to stand before this multitude.”

⁹Now they were sore afraid and dismayed, and said until the men of Maryland, We have indeed sinned against the people of the land.

¹⁰Nevertheless, suffer us as we pray ye, to make an atonement, and moreover that we make a sacrifice of the TEA, and a burnt-offering of the ship,

the smoke blowing “onward towards the NORTH.”²³

Meanwhile,

⁴⁷ there came another TEA SHIP from the land of Britain, and cast her anchor in the river of York, in the land of the Virginites, and the Sons of Liberty and the Virginia Rangers assembled themselves together, and the TEA and their TEA CHESTS ascended up in a pillar of fire and smoke, and vanished out of sight.

⁴⁸But the ship being innocent, and the owner thereof a righteous man, and knowing nought of the matter, for his sake therefore they suffered her to depart.

Leacock’s framing identified Patriotic colonists with God’s chosen people, casting these events as demonstrations of colonial virtue and unity, however unjust their actions may have seemed to locals and however divided Patriots and colonists were. This framing made the tea parties into a part of the struggle against the ministry worth chronicling. In such a cause, details (the Virginia’s tea was drowned, not burned), hardly mattered.²⁴

Leacock perpetuated Patriot myths about the Peggy Stewart: that the Maryland Patriots were unified, and that the ship owners destroyed their ship freely. Patriot newspapers whitewashed as much, but Leacock went a step further, casting these events as canonical acts of resistance and making the Patriot version canon.

The East India Company had not introduced tea to the colonies in 1773 nor forced tea upon them. Tea was not particularly bad for colonists’ health, either. It is unlikely this hoodwinked too many colonists. Perhaps Gordon Wood’s optimistic claim that “Propaganda could never move men to revolution” is right. It is hard to convince someone of something they know to be false, and one doubts anyone took up arms in 1775 because they thought the King was forcing the colonists to drink poisoned tea. But this sort of propaganda could have an emotional effect, making the tea drinker marginally more afraid for his health and marginally more likely to follow the Association. Channeling colonists’ anger at the ministry toward tea made them less likely to consume it. In evoking fear and anger, Patriot propagandists called upon emotions that many colonists must have felt as they considered the crisis of 1774, giving tea propaganda an emotional truth.²⁵

In addition to fear and anger, Patriots preyed upon one other emotion to get readers to boycott tea: pride. Only women, they told men, lacked the strength to boycott it.