APPENDIX B

Tea and Coffee Consumption Estimates

Americans did not turn from tea after the Revolution. Trade data, though far from perfect, show this. The CUST 16/1 file records colonial imports, 1768–1772. Net tea imports into the thirteen colonies from this data set (imports minus exports) show consumed tea. Population data for 1760, 1770, and 1780 are drawn from Historical Statistics of the United States and interpolated to provide annual population estimates. Dividing consumed tea by population gives estimated per-capita tea consumption. This yields an average of 373,000 pounds of legally imported tea for 2.168 million colonists over the 1768–1772 period at 0.17 pounds per year, with annual levels varying, depending on non-importation. (If one wished to determine tea consumption per free person, one would divide imported tea by 1.712 million, the estimated free population circa 1770, resulting in a legal tea consumption level of 0.22 pounds per free person. Late colonial per-capita consumption figures can be multiplied by 1.25 to estimate per-free-person consumption.)¹

An alternative data set, CUST 3, recounts English tea exports to the thirteen colonies over a longer period, 1761–1775, and corroborates the above data.² (See figure B.1.) This set has been adjusted to remove the tea shipped by the Company to North America in 1773 (none of which was consumed in 1773), with the tea from the William added back in 1775. Adjusted numbers are indicated in bold in table B.1.³ Averaging the CUST 3 data over its longer time series gives 0.14 pounds of legal tea per person a year, but this average obscures significant variance.

The CUST data omit smuggling, with CUST 16 giving a suspiciously low zero pounds of tea imported into Philadelphia in 1771. The CUST data are thus a bottom threshold for tea consumption.

Actual consumption was more, but how much more? One way to estimate this would be to look at the drop off in legal tea imports in response to the Townshend Acts using the CUST 3 series. From 1763 through 1767, average annual exports of legal tea from England to America amounted to 407,336 pounds (0.216 pounds per capita). From 1768 through 1772—between the Townshend and the Tea Acts—legal English tea exports fell to 365,298 pounds (0.168 pounds per capita), a drop in per-capita consumption of 22 percent.⁴

Smuggled tea can be estimated by positing that colonists smuggled tea to make up this difference. This is a conservative estimate, as it does not attempt to factor in the base level of tea smuggling common to the 1763–1767 era, which may have been considerable. There were various estimates of this, as discussed in chapter 2. Dutch sales and export records, which could, in theory, shed light on this, are unavailable.⁵

The question of how much tea was smuggled is impossible to answer definitively. Assuming smuggled tea merely compensated for the 20 percent drop off in legal supply gives a low estimate. Assuming half the tea in the colonies was smuggled, which would match the assumption that roughly half of tea in Britain was smuggled, would yield a colonial consumption level of 0.33 pounds of tea per capita from the CUST 3 data (and 0.34 from the CUST 16 data). Assuming three-quarters were smuggled (the highest plausible scholarly estimate) gives 0.67 pounds per capita from the CUST 3 data and 0.69 from the CUST 16 data.

These estimates can be paired with US federal customs records, which provide reliable runs of tea import and export data beginning in the mid-1790s.⁶ A three-year moving average of net tea imports removes year-on-year volatility. These figures are divided by population data from the decennial US census, interpolated to fill in missing years. Between 1797/98 and the start of the War of 1812, this three-year moving average of per capita tea consumption fluctuated between 0.36 and 0.76 pounds. The variance seems to be due to changes in supply—the dates coincide with the Jeffersonian Embargo and the War of 1812, suggesting that supply constraints, not a distaste for tea, caused the lower data points in this series. There is little indication of tea smuggling in this period, meaning net legal tea imports in the US period can stand for all tea imports. This gives us post-independence tea consumption levels in the 1790s and early 1800s as high as or higher than the various late colonial estimates.⁷ Americans after independence liked tea as much as or more than before (see table B.2 and figure B.2).

Coffee trade data provides another way to consider the problem. The assumption tends to be that Americans shifted away from tea to coffee, tea’s nearest, most measurable substitute. Yet during the Townshend Act boycotts we see no substantial shift in colonial coffee consumption to match tea’s decline. The Townshend Act did not change the tariff on coffee; there was no American coffee boycott commensurate to that on tea; coffee smuggling is not known to have had particular growth or decline in this era. CUST 16’s coffee import data are thus a good starting point for determining coffee consumption.⁸ CUST 16 shows a relatively stable level of American net coffee imports during the 1768–1772 period. (See table B.1.)

Looking at figure B.3, it is also clear that Americans consumed more tea than coffee in the late colonial period, and more coffee than tea in the early republic. The increase in per capita coffee consumption by the 1790s was greater than the increase in tea.⁹ In the early republic, Americans consumed more than twice as much coffee as tea. But the increase in coffee consumption was not at tea’s expense. Consumption of tea had returned to, or exceeded, late colonial levels by the 1790s. In the quarter-century between 1772 and 1797, the switch was not from the teacup to the coffee cup, but to both—with both growing in absolute terms, and coffee growing relatively more. Whatever the reason for rising coffee consumption, being anti-tea is not one of them.

So why the increase in coffee consumption? There was perhaps a generational transition in taste, although more data on the tea and coffee trades in the 1770s and 1780s would be needed to prove this. Changes in tariffs, prices, and quality of tea and coffee might be at work. Certainly new trade networks and supplies, from the growth in coffee planting in Jamaica and other British colonies to American commercial access to French, Spanish, and Dutch coffee colonies (notably Saint Domingue and Cuba) during the French Revolution, encouraged the switch. It is thus possible that the French and Haitians Revolutions had more influence on this shift in American tastes than the American Revolution did. Habits formed during the Continental Association and persisting after the spirit of ’76 had passed did not dissuade Americans from drinking tea in the 1790s. The tea parties of 1774 did not cause an abrupt and lasting switch to coffee as a distinctly national taste, since for all their coffee, the Americans of John Quincy Adams’s generation drank no less tea than their fathers had. And yet with coffee consumption burgeoning around them, one can see how Americans of the 1820s, attempting to remember the Revolution as the men of John Adams’s generation faded away, might have latched onto the myth that shunning tea for coffee was part of what made the Revolution so American.¹⁰