Areas beyond Patriot Enforcement

Buying and selling tea was easiest in areas outside Patriot control. Georgia ratified the Association late, and the provincial congress ignored non-consumption before July. Tea advertisements and sales continued into June in Georgia. Edward Telfair sold tea before the July ban came into effect (in addition to what he sold during the ban). New tea imports had been banned since March, but merchants could sell existing stock. This is what Telfair did, licitly, Patriotically, and self-interestedly selling into a market from which he had legislated away competition. Edward Telfair & Co made ninety-six tea sales between the ban on tea imports and the ban on tea sales, suggesting extensive tea consumption in 1775 Georgia. Georgia tea advertising stopped in July, after which Telfair continued tea sales underground.⁵

Boston merchants sold tea. Patriot Joseph Barrell sold tea on April 6, 1775. Loyalist James Murray sold in March and early April. Boston Patriots detected neither. Simon Tufts was caught because his customer, Thomas Lilly, was discovered with tea in Marblehead and informed on Tufts. When Boston Patriots finally found out and confronted Tufts, he pled ignorance, blaming his clerk for selling tea without his knowledge. “I will not buy or sell any more” tea without “permission,” he promised.⁶

After the Battles of Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775, Boston ceased to be under Patriot control. British troops freed the city, and most Patriotic colonists fled. The civilian population fell from 15,000 to 3,500, two-thirds of whom were Loyalists. The city’s food situation also changed. Patriots across North America had been feeding Boston since the Port Act. Now they besieged and blockaded the town instead. The war made the Port Act, once a matter of contention, pointless. The act mandated that merchants land their cargoes outside Boston, but the only merchants left in Boston were Loyalists who could not land their cargoes elsewhere “on Account of the Rebellion.” Fearing their vessels would fall “into the hands of the Rebels,” General Gage and Admiral Samuel Graves began letting supply vessels into Boston instead. Shortages persisted, exacerbated by an accidental fire. Bostonians survived on salt meat. Lack of vegetables and milk caused illness among Gage’s troops. By fall, bread shortages were severe, as supply vessels were delayed or captured.⁷

Yet the Association was void in Boston. Colonists were free to buy, sell, drink, and advertise tea openly if, shortages allowing, they had any. English merchants shipped 8,055 pounds of tea to “New England” in 1775, most likely to Boston. It was probably then, freed from Patriot control, that Simon Tufts sold more tea. At least three other merchants retailed tea in British Boston. Among the buyers was John Soley, a Patriotic merchant.⁸

The tea salvaged from the William was still in the castle in the harbor. But with a wartime rethinking of the restrictions on Boston’s port, that tea could sell. On August 8, 1775, those East India Company’s consignees still in the city sold more than fifty chests of Company tea at public auction, remitting £1,054 11s8d sterling to London. The tea found ready drinkers among Boston Loyalists and His Majesty’s soldiers and sailors.⁹ This was the tea that was supposed to have gone to the bottom of Boston Harbor in 1773. It did not. Patriots had been right to oppose landing it: when sold, there were Bostonians who would drink it.

Evidence of tea in British Boston abounds. John Grozart and James Perkins advertised tea—perhaps the Company’s—in the Massachusetts Gazette, the only paper published in Boston during the siege, throughout the winter. Loyalist William Perry, who probably bought his tea from the consignees’ auction, still had tea on hand in early March when his shop was looted by British troops evacuating the city. Tea was movable enough for retreating soldiers to take; bulkier supplies, like salt and sugar, were “thrown into the river.” As a result, while Bostonians of all ranks had tea in early March (amid final preparations to evacuate, army engineering officer Archibald Robertson reported being “kindly invited to breakfast and drink a dish of green Tea by a Black” person), the incoming Continental Army found none.¹⁰

This was just as well, as the freedom to sell tea did not survive the return of the Association. Some tea advertisers and sellers fled with the British evacuation (as did the publisher of the Gazette). Perkins stayed behind and was arrested shortly thereafter (but not, it seems, for violating the tea ban). He was briefly exiled to Medfield. Tufts was proscribed in 1778. Selling tea was not the most Loyalist thing these men did. It was, as with Batchelder, a sign of their broader unwillingness to conform to Patriot morality.¹¹

The Association was initially void in Marshfield, Massachusetts, too. There, 300 people signed a loyalist association and formed a militia. They dominated the town and were reinforced by some of Gage’s troops in January 1775. A Marshfield resident could “freely utter his thoughts, drink his Tea, and kill his sheep as profusely as he pleases.” Gage hoped success at Marshfield would encourage other towns suffering rebel oppression to speak out, but Marshfield’s freedom was short-lived. The day after the fighting at Lexington, 1,000 Patriot militiamen swarmed the town. British troops and 100 Loyalists fled, and the Continental Association began.¹²

Nantucket declared neutrality. The island was simultaneously exposed to Royal Navy patrols and dependent on mainland Patriots for supplies and thus could not afford to take sides. Many islanders were Quakers, or Friends, and their pacifism and their eschewal of swearing oaths left the Association unenforced. Mainlanders found Nantucket a haven after fighting began; refugees from Boston and Loyalists from Salem and the North Shore fled to Nantucket as Patriots escaped out of Boston. William Vassall Sr. left Boston on May 10, 1775. “The distressed Situation of the Town of Boston induced me” to move to Nantucket “for the Sake of retiring from Noise, Tumult & War to a place of Peace & Quietness.”¹³

A mandamus councillor and wealthy plantation owner, Vassall was a stereotypical “High Tory”; he leased an entire vessel to ferry his family to Nantucket. Dr. Edward Holyoke sent his wife, Mary, and children to Nantucket, continuing his isolated existence as a Loyalist in Salem. On Nantucket, Mary had tea at “old Friend Husseys [who had come from Lynn] with Friend Vassal” (William Vassall’s wife, Margaret). Meanwhile, her husband signed (perhaps after being shunned) a public recantation of his Loyalism in Salem. Melatiah Bourn left Boston after the siege began and found Nantucket a convenient place to sell tea. Elizabeth Winslow, the mother to tea consignee Joshua Winslow, relocated with three daughters to Nantucket in June 1775. Her son-in-law, Newport merchant and tea seller Simon Pease, joined them when Continental troops took over Newport at the end of 1775.¹⁴

The Massachusetts provincial congress boycotted Nantucket in June for fear islanders were supplying British forces, and refugees started to move on. Three months later, the provincial congress entrusted a Falmouth, Cape Cod committee to regulate Nantucket’s trade with the mainland. Facing shortages of flour and wood, Nantucketers smuggled supplies from Newport (before Patriots took over the town) and Connecticut—their tea probably made excellent barter. Tea was still available and drunk on the island the following summer. Islanders could get more tea abroad through trade with the Caribbean, particularly at St. Eustatius, where many returning whalers stopped.¹⁵

Other islands evaded the Association. In South Carolina, the Sea Islands saw rampant smuggling, and the Beaufort committee could not effectively enforce the Association there. The HMS Scarborough’s presence off Tybee Island (on the South Carolina-Georgia border) in early 1776 made enforcing the Association hard there, too.¹⁶

Colonists were reluctant or openly hostile to joining the Patriot movement in the backcountry. This included areas with open skirmishes (Maine), areas with long-standing backcountry/coastal antagonism (the Carolinas), and peoples reluctant to join the Anglos’ revolution, including Native Americans and German-speaking Pietists. Many were alienated from coastal elites and had little interest in non-consumption. Prior to the war, colonists in Worthington, Massachusetts, were so divided over the Association and its enforcement that they spent eight hours debating in town meeting whether to punish a man for using tea—with no resolution. The region joined more forcefully with the rest of Massachusetts after warfare began. Moravians brought tea with them when they trekked from Pennsylvania to North Carolina. Having hauled tea along the Appalachians, they were unlikely to give it up. In Salem, North Carolina, Moravians allowed tea sales until March 12, 1775, and permitted home consumption thereafter. Moravians in nearby Bethania, North Carolina did not ban tea either, cherishing it for special occasions. Finding no buns for the Lovefeast (a Moravian religious service at which simple food is provided), Reverend John Jacob Ernst and his wife served communicants a meal from their larder “only of bread, salt, and a mug of tea” on July 8, 1775. “Several members,” wrote the reverend, “said afterwards that for a long time they had not had so sweet a Lovefeast, and it was dearer to them than if they had had the best of cake,” though the reverend attributed this to Christ, not tea.¹⁷ Native Americans were wholly uninterested in the Association. In August 1775, Nicholas Cresswell, surveying land, came upon a town of “Christianized Moravian Indians” called Schoenbrunn (in present-day Ohio). Schoenbrunn had log-and-clapboard homes and a church with shingles, glass windows, a bell, and a German pastor. Cresswell attended evening services, which he thought put any “bigot”’s ideas of Indians to shame. After church he was “Treated with Tea, Coffee and Boiled Bacon at supper.”¹⁸

Even Patriotic colonists consumed tea outside of Patriot territory. Ethan Allen was famous for his capture of Fort Ticonderoga. He was later taken prisoner. In January 1776, he was held aboard HMS Soledad, off Cork, Ireland. Allen reported that the Irish populace took up a collection to supply him and thirty-three other rebel prisoners. For Allen, the celebrity, supporters provided a panoply of luxuries. But every man got clothes, sugar, and “two pounds of tea.” The captain, declaring “the d—d American rebels should not be feasted at this rate, by the d—d rebels of Ireland,” seized some of the goods and gave the prisoners’ tea to the crew. In foreign ports, provincial merchant captains also bought tea for personal use.¹⁹

Tea was an imperfect marker of allegiance. Salemite James Jeffry worked as a mail carrier out of Quebec, where no association was signed. He traveled between Montreal and Massachusetts as non-consumption began. His social engagements were a political mash-up: Patriot sympathizers, Loyal Britons, and Quebequois. He took tea in Montreal and Willsboro, New York. He reached Ticonderoga in April with the Loyalist Major Andrew Skene, taking tea with Captain Delaplace, his wife, and Skene’s sisters at the fort, and taking tea again in Salem with a Mrs. Cabot in May. Two months later, on his return, he found Ticonderoga under rebel control and drank chocolate with Benedict Arnold on Lake Champlain. He spent the summer and fall in Quebec City, drinking tea with the Anglophone establishment until General Carleton expelled him for refusing to defend the city.²⁰

Tea Consumption in Patriot Lands

Colonists bought and drank tea in Patriot-controlled areas, too. The gap between professed and real adherence to the Association was greatest when merchants thought Patriots were not looking, though how much tea colonists consumed remains unclear.

Norfolk, Virginia merchant Neil Jamieson sold tea on his own account, despite a run-in with Patriots over tea in 1774. He was also resident partner for the Glasgow firm John Glassford and Company. Glassford kept stores in Southern Maryland and Eastern Virginia. Between September 1775 and March 1776, Glassford sold over ninety pounds of tea in forty-eight sales to at least thirty-three buyers. These sales were mostly in Maryland but also in Boyd’s Hole and Norfolk, Virginia. This included sales to Glassford subsidiary stores in Bladensburg and Colchester and to another firm. Some retail buyers paid cash; most bought on credit: tea fit into debit and credit relationships that stood for years. Glassford sold to all, and so the ledger entry for Dr. James Huie’s pound of hyson in September 1775 sat silently on the page next to the Stafford County, Virginia committee’s order of gunflints the following spring. Among the tea buyers was the “Sheriff of Charles County (W. Homson),” who bought two pounds of green tea on January 30, 1776.²¹

In Guilford, North Carolina, John Tate sold tea, and the Byrne general store in Bladen County took payments for tea previously bought. Richard Bennehan and William Johnston’s Little River Store inventories show they got rid of four pounds of tea between March 1775 and March 1776. Johnston was active in North Carolina Patriot politics.²²

In Scarsdale, New York, Benjamin Cornell booked four sales in March 1775. In Lloyd’s Neck, Abner Osborn bought tea from the Patriotic merchant James Lloyd II. In Frederickstown (present-day Patterson), one merchant sold tea to eight men between July 1775 and January 1776, most during the autumn, when farmers bartered crops for supplies. In New York City, John Taylor’s daybook shows nearly thirty retail sales between March and August 1775, much of it smuggled onto pilot boats for sale along the Hudson River. Taylor risked exposure when selling to each of his sixteen buyers. They risked, perhaps without knowing it, being recorded in a merchant’s book. In August 1775, the Westchester committee declared “all persons who shall sell or buy any Tea in this County, and all boatmen and others who shall buy any Tea at New-York or elsewhere … contemners of the Resolutions of the Continental Congress,” and set a deadline of August 25 for enforcement, suggesting the ban was not well enforced previously.²³ Taylor’s last sale of tea was on August 22 to the Bishop.

Sales continued in Newport, where merchants had violated the previous non-importation agreement. Philadelphia was a hotbed of tea sales and consumption, too, despite hosting Congress. Though new to the city, Loyalist Samuel Curwen had no trouble finding tea there in May.²⁴

At home, colonists violated the ban circumspectly. In Pennsylvania, Patriot Susanna Wright explained in a commonplace book, “I have public sp[ir]it. enough never to taste one drop of what [tea] has p[ai]d. The Duty.” But for Dutch tea, “I must venture to use it as the Mahometans do Wine, not openly but in a manner to elude scandal & not to give Offence.” Tea could be disguised as “Monongoheley Balsam” or other tisanes. A memoirist recalled her father, a minor Virginia merchant, declared for the Patriot side. He was coming home one day, “laughing and saying … ‘Well, now, take notice one and all of you, that I have joined the Association (against tea), and you must drink no more of it.’ ” He added, “at least,” do not drink it “in my sight.” The family “banished the teapot from the table.” But they “saw no good to come in spiting ourselves” by actually giving it up, so “we used to sip a little, now and then, by ourselves.” Sometimes mother even served tea in front of father. She poured it “from a coffee pot, to which, of course, he could make no objection.”²⁵

In Salem, North Carolina, the Moravian Brother Bonn likewise suggested “Brethren and Sisters should be careful about buying and drinking tea,” not because tea was bad, but to “not give occasion for criticism to travelers or visitors.” In New Jersey, Reading Beatty hoped his sister and her husband would keep up appearances. Does she “drink Tea yet?,” he wrote his brother-in-law Enoch Green. “I hope not,” for “if she does, and you allow her, you will perhaps fall under the denomination of a Tory.” Reading was not bothered about their tea but about their getting caught. He recalled Enoch’s mother. If she were alive, she “would have had a whole Chest laid up in Store against a rainy Day”—she knew how to ride out a boycott.²⁶

Violating the boycott could later become a jaunty triumph. Thus the apocryphal story of the wily Vermont widow, Lucretia Houghton, who, years later, was said to have discussed prohibition with a young visitor. Lucretia “had been a warm patriot in Revolutionary times, but such a devoted tea drinker that for many months she said, she used to set her tea table down cellar, lest folks should see her drink it.”

“ ‘Oh,’ said I, ‘you were not as good a patriot as my mother; she would not drink it on any account, but substituted sage and balm.’ ”

“ ‘More fool she!’ said the old lady, ‘though I did cheat sometimes and drink Evanroot tea, but I would have my comfortable tea with my husband in the evening, and nobody was the wiser.’ ”²⁷ The story cannot be taken as fact, but its assumption (that people violated the Association) and its framing as an amusing (not embarrassing) anecdote are telling.

Tea marked special occasions. Elihu Ashley enjoyed tea with his brothers, sisters, and friends as part of his wedding in November 1775 and had a separate drink of tea with his brother to mark the occasion a couple days prior. This tea, like the tea served at the Moravian Lovefeast or the medical permits discussed previously, may have seemed more acceptable because of the distinctive meaning attached to it and its limited use.²⁸

Then there were the permitted sales in the days before prohibition began. The ban on retail tea sales and home consumption began on the same date, March 1, 1775, a flaw (or a feature?) of the Association. Colonists could buy tea in February and drink tea in private in March. In Boston, Caleb Loring bought four pounds of tea (enough to last a household for years) four days before the ban on home consumption began. Why buy, if not to drink it? At their Millstone, New Jersey store, provincial congressman Abraham Van Neste and his partner Frederick Van Liew recorded forty-eight tea sales in February 1775. Similar spikes in sales occurred before the Association began in other colonies.²⁹ Patriots imagined that political virtue would prevent home consumption. So, were colonists like Loring virtuous and stupid (spending money on tea they did not drink) or naughty and smart?

Merchants knew which; thus, tea advertisements continued right up until prohibition began. William Beadle’s ad joking that tea was addictive appeared in the Connecticut Courant until late February 1775. Here was an implicit invitation to drink tea during the ban. Other ads in the Pennsylvania Journal, Wöchentliche Pennsylvanische Staatsbote, New York Gazette, Providence Gazette, and Maryland Journal offered tea for sale weeks before non-consumption began.³⁰

Most tea ads stopped during prohibition, but not all. Frederick Bull advertised for “TEA! (I ask pardon)” several times between May and July in the Hartford Connecticut Courant. The ad acknowledged the ban while violating it. Patriot John Mitchell advertised tea in the Pennsylvania Journal in March. Other advertisers during the ban included the New York firm of Shaw and Long, which sold banned tea and apparently felt no need to hide it. New Yorkers Remsen and Peters advertised tea as well.³¹ None suffered for these invitations to violate the Association, which seem as egregious as they were unremarked upon.

Various merchants were left with unsold tea as the Association began. Some lobbied Congress to lift the ban. Patriots forgave merchants who repented (sincerely or not) for selling tea, sometimes allowing repentant sellers to keep their tea until prohibition ended. Patriots trusted these merchants’ promises not to sell. Jacobus Low’s troubles with committees in New York disappeared with a simple promise not to sell any more tea rather than with open destruction of his stock.³² Simon Tufts was not forced to burn his tea and sold it again soon thereafter, though his customer burned what he had bought. Holding tea put a tremendous burden on merchants’ virtue. Tea was desired, forbidden, and ever-present, an untenable situation for all.

Wholesale Violations

Wholesale tea trading continued, too. The New York firm Shaw and Long acquired 1,454 pounds of tea in the fall of 1774. During the Association, they bought another 3,000 pounds and sold 2,700. This tea came from other New Yorkers, like Loyalists Hugh & Alexander Wallace. There is no indication Shaw and Long were Loyalists themselves. Rather, they were connected to the Wallaces through the city’s Irish business community.³³

Shaw and Long sold to merchants in other towns: four barrels of tea leaves to Albany committeeman Robert McClallen and additional tea to the Quackenbush and Ten Eyck families. Most of Shaw and Long’s tea, nineteen barrels, went to Newport, an even more egregious town, where local merchants sold it on commission. There Samuel Bours sold fifteen barrels, representing thousands of pounds of product.³⁴

Bours had been caught selling tea in March 1775. He confessed and was forgiven. Committeeman William Ellery lamented Bours did not name names, and that the committee was “not so firm and severe as I could have wished,” but thought it “hath had a good effect” and “gave a home-blow to the baneful herb.” Unbeknownst to Ellery, Bours was selling tea again by summer (if he ever really stopped), this time for Shaw and Long. Bours’s records do not survive. Shaw and Long’s books are the only evidence that Bours sold their tea, and the Newport committee was blissfully unaware of them. Without them, we would be led, as Ellery, to see Bours’s story as an example of effective enforcement. Bours repented, but probably to get the committee off his back so he could go back to selling tea, not because he had a change of heart. If he took any lesson from his encounter with the committee, it was probably not to keep records.³⁵

Other Newport merchants’ books survive, suggesting extensive prohibition tea trade in Rhode Island. Thomas Vernon sold tea in bulk: twenty, forty, one hundred pounds at a time. He sold it by the hogshead to Stephen Smith in Bristol and John Glazier in East Greenwich, by the cask to John Hadwen, and to others by the pound. Hadwen retailed tea in 1775, and in early 1776 bought two casks from Vernon, probably hoping to move up the supply chain.³⁶

Bours was not the only seller who kept selling after being caught. In April, the Calvert County, Maryland committee declared merchant Alexander Ogg “enemy to the cause of America” for price gouging. Despite censure, he did well enough to restock tea from Wallace, Davidson, and Johnson in Annapolis that August.³⁷ The committees may even have inadvertently helped him, signaling to buyers that he was transgressive enough to sell banned goods. Ogg’s order survives in his suppliers’ books, not in his own: merchants under suspicion keep few records. If Jamieson, Bours, and Ogg successfully sold tea even as Patriots watched, what did unwatched merchants do?

The documents cited here hint at clandestine traffic extending beyond their pages. Shaw and Long’s wholesale trades equated to hundreds of retail transactions—but the end buyers are mysteries. Their records point to larger suppliers like the Wallaces. Who else served this role? Where did these suppliers get tea? Not from Britain—New York imported almost no tea from there. Whom else did they supply? Shaw and Long’s sales in Albany and Newport hinted at broader trading networks. Philadelphia has its own tea trading network, as evinced by tea discussions between Philadelphian John Pringle and Patriotic Baltimore merchant George Woolsey. Philadelphians Willing and Taylor bought tea from New York Patriot Anthony Bleecker. When they complained it was “Musty & unmerchantable” (implying tea was otherwise “merchantable”), Bleecker tried to settle with his supplier without, crucially, divulging who his supplier was.³⁸ There is more mystery than revelation here: thousands of pounds of tea changing hands, with its origin, destination, and the broader trade remaining murky, as the names of the thousands of other men and women involved in it.

Bleecker’s letters suggest tea may have been imported during prohibition. In May, he ordered twelve chests via St. Eustatius from Amsterdam merchant Jean de Neufville. It is unclear whether de Neufville sent them. Bleecker was more concerned about quality than security, asking the tea be “sent in the original packages” despite British and Patriot patrols. Bleecker discussed the tea trade openly in his letters. Bleecker could discuss violating the Association in his correspondence more easily than Loyalists could (who knew the committees would read their mail), though one imagines Bleecker sent this letter by private conveyance.³⁹

Contrast Bleecker’s treatment with the Prince Gorham affair. Gorham arrived in Barnstable, Massachusetts with, it was rumored, tea. The county’s past reticence to police tea and its rather conservative population gave this rumor weight. “Our Committee take no Notice of it,” complained Nathaniel Freeman, asking whether, if Massachusetts Patriots ignored this, would “one man has not as good [a] right as another to break through the resolves of Congress”? He hoped the colony’s revolutionary leadership would “put a stop to the disorderly Spirit prevailing or there will be no end to the growing strength of the Tories in this County.” Several days later Freeman heard passengers on Gorham’s vessel report Gorham carrying “a large quantity of tea.” “[I]f there is a Resolve of Congress against emporting this Article it ought to be adhered to or Rescinded this affair I fancy will make much Noise if worked out of Sight.” Massachusetts Patriots summoned Gorham. They also ordered the Barnstable sheriff to seize the tea. But though “he had made all due search and inquiry” for it, he found none, nor evidence that any had been imported.⁴⁰ It is unclear whether Gorham had imported tea. Yet Patriots’ understandable sense that certain people merited watching seems to have let others, like Bleecker, skate by.

The best evidence tea was shipped to the colonies in 1775 comes from imperial customs collectors. On February 1, 1775, Francis Welsh, a customs officer in Philadelphia, attempted to seize the Isabella in the Delaware River. She was in from Dunkirk with various goods, including thirty pounds of tea “done up in Bundles” for easy retail. The smugglers fought off the collectors and, in the conventional interpretation, the Chester County sheriffs were too Patriotic to help officers of the Crown. This allowed the smugglers to escape with the tea. Two days later, customs authorities in Philadelphia warned about another vessel with “Tea and War-like Stores from Holland” that had tried to land near Philadelphia and was trying Newport next. Importing tea was forbidden by Patriot authorities. Yet it was His Majesty’s Customs Collectors—a handful of understaffed, over-harassed, and ineffective men—not the Philadelphia committee, who intercepted the Isabella. In March 1775, the Admiralty added that the Prosperity was sailing “from Dunkirk to North America” with more tea.⁴¹

As imperial customs offices ceased to function, Patriots began to take over their role. In December 1774, individual shipmasters presented themselves to Baltimore customs officials and the Baltimore committee, swearing to the latter that they had brought no tea. By March 1775, the committee kept records of incoming and outgoing ships and formalized an oath for all masters of incoming vessels to take, swearing their cargoes were Association-compliant.⁴² It is unclear if they were any more effective at policing trade than imperial customs officers had been.

It is not surprising that merchants like Bleecker tried to import tea. Perhaps some succeeded, as rumors suggested. A “Mr. Adams” was caught with a barrel of imported tea leaves on Long Island in January 1776. In mid-March, the Virginia Gazette reported tea being shipped from Holland to St. Eustatius “to be disposed of to the North American vessels, which are continually passing that way.”⁴³ At the very least, tea smuggling was popularly understood to be ongoing.

Thinking about Merchant Ledgers

Why did merchants record tea sales? There were good reasons not to. Selling forbidden goods was risky enough, but a paper trail was riskier, particularly as committees inspected some merchant books. Circumspect customers might avoid black marketeers who kept records, and most merchants who sold illicit goods probably did not record such sales. Yet even after the Norfolk, Virginia committee sought to inspect books, Glassford & Co sold tea in Norfolk and recorded it in their ledger. Keeping books was a bureaucratic necessity for larger firms. Recordkeeping allowed merchants of any size to track stock and balance books. Two main types of records survive. One is daybooks. These chronologically list each day’s transactions and were proof of sale in commercial disputes, an important reason for merchants to retain them. The other is ledgers, which tracked debits and credits. These list each customer’s account individually, tracking purchases made on loans and subsequent repayments in cash or barter, allowing a merchant to know who owed what. Most buyers bought tea on credit—three-quarters of the Glassford tea sales were on credit—to be paid off months or years later. Without tracking debt, merchants would be giving their goods away. In deciding whether to record illicit sales, merchants had to balance their need to hide what they did against their need to get paid.

There were ways around this. Cash sales were one. Ledgers tracked debt, not transactions; there was no need to record cash sales in debt ledgers. But the shortage of circulating currency prevented most buyers from paying cash. Glassford’s Bladensburg Journal records only three out of fourteen tea sales in cash; for two of them, the buyer is unnamed. Cash commanded discretion but only for the few who could afford it.⁴⁴

Another solution was to book the debt but hide what was sold. Ledgers that were detailed in February 1775 suddenly in March 1775 speak in terms of “merchandise” and “sundries” instead of specific goods. A merchant who extended a £10 credit to a customer to buy “merchandise” could track the loan while hiding whether he sold banned goods or evaded price controls. “Sundries” and “merchandise” also appeared in public advertisements, perhaps as a wink and a nod that they sold more than they could admit. William Beadle, who advertised tea right up until March 1, listed many items in an April ad and closed by offering “2 or 3 Hundred other Articles, which I Sell so Cheap that I cannot afford to Pay the Printer for telling you their Names; therefor would be glad you would Please to come and Buy them without my Advertising them at large.”⁴⁵ This was a wordy way to save words in an ad that charged by the line. Perhaps it hinted at banned goods.

Most surviving merchant records do not show tea sales during the ban. Twenty-three show tea sales out of roughly one hundred prohibition-era merchants whose accounts were examined. It is difficult to determine how many of the remaining merchants would have recorded tea sales were the ban not in place. Still, this number represents a decline in recorded tea sales since some of the ledgers recording no sales during the ban recorded sales just before the ban took effect or right after it ended. The decline in recorded tea sales can be attributed both to compliance with the ban and to selling tea off-books, but these explanations are in tension. The more of this decline we attribute to selling tea off-books, the less we can attribute to non-consumption.⁴⁶

Even if the drop in recorded tea sales was matched by a drop in actual tea sales, such a drop does not prove compliance with the ban. Sales could stop because the merchant obeyed, or because a merchant had difficulty obtaining credit or supplies. The question, how many merchants did not sell tea because of the ban, is impossible to answer. The best we can do here is make an educated guess: perhaps another twenty out of the one hundred would have sold tea, give or take another ten.

Tea prices allow us to look beyond the limits of the few surviving records. In 1775, New York and Philadelphia wholesale prices remained not far from 1773 levels (see figure C.1). In 1775 the Association diminished demand for tea enough to match supply. The high tea prices of 1774 had been potentially embarrassing for Patriots, hinting at popular demand for tea and the possibility that the boycotts might be disastrous. The Association did not stop the tea trade, but partial compliance kept prices steady, which was itself an achievement. The black marketeers of 1775 probably would have charged more for tea if they could have—we know that Ogg, for instance, gouged customers for other goods. The fact that they did not suggests they may not have been able to. The struggles over rising prices for tea and other imports would begin again in the second half of 1776, as the British blockade and Patriot monetary policies took hold.⁴⁷

Although there was no upward or downward trend in tea prices in 1775, there was considerable regional variance: prices in Savannah and Newport were consistently higher than in New York, suggesting Shaw and Long’s arbitrage, buying tea cheaply in New York and selling it at a markup in Newport, was good business. (See figures C.1 and C.2.)

Yet the biggest variance was often in the price one merchant would charge different people for the same tea. In Maryland, in January 1776, Glassford & Co sold bohea to five different buyers at varying prices (all on credit and in Maryland currency), some paying double what others did. Perhaps the price fell for damaged tea and rose for customers in arrears on their debt. By contrast, Glassford gave good prices (if not always their best) to buyers who paid in barter or pounds sterling.

Specialized teas had greater variance. Regular green tea varied between 8 shillings in Maryland and 10 shillings in Rhode Island, while hyson varied between 10 shillings sterling in Maryland and 23 in Georgia. With smaller supplies, their prices reflected shortages sooner, providing new, if smaller, arbitrage opportunities. By contrast, in British Boston hyson prices remained steady at 15 shillings a pound, despite the shortage of other goods.⁴⁸

Merchant ledgers whisper a secret truth about tea and British goods: colonists surreptitiously consumed them. The recorded evidence of thousands of colonists buying tea and British goods during the ban created a new category of information that had to be guarded. These secrets were strikingly well kept. Almost none of the transactions in the ledgers discussed here were known to the committees charged with investigating them, though some committees may not have looked too closely.

These hidden truths speak to other lies: the lies of tea sales not booked in ledgers and the lies of colonists who went about with prohibition on their lips and tea in their stomachs. These lies have value. They tell us the social imaginings of colonists: their belief that they needed to pretend to obey the ban shows their belief in the power of the Patriot committees and the social importance of the pretense of non-consumption, even as continued consumption eroded that pretense.

Counter-Associations

The Association signaled allegiance to the Patriot cause; counter-associations signaled allegiance to the government. For Loyalists, the Association and tea riots were not resistance but things to be resisted. In response to Patriot demands that colonists support the boycott and sign the Continental Association, Loyalists formed their own associations. Retreating to British-defended Boston, Timothy Ruggles announced a loyalist counter-association in the press.⁴⁹ Signatories agreed to defend each other against the “banditti” who would deprive them of their rights and privileges, “the free exercise, and enjoyment of our undoubted right to Liberty, in eating, drinking, buying, selling, communing and acting what, with whom and as we please.” Ruggles appealed to Massachusettsans who deplored the Tea Party and the with-us-or-against-us divisiveness of the Association. But potential signatories, spread out across the land and threatened with violence, remained silent. Before Lexington and Concord, General Gage struggled to get even Loyal Bostonians to sign a counter-association: whenever he asked them to sign, they put him off.⁵⁰

Beverley Robinson of Westchester, New York, formed an association, raising and commanding the Loyal American militia regiment. Robinson valued this sort of militia for the way they left men “free to speak their sentiments.” New York’s Dutchess County declared an association drawn from Ruggles’s text. Ruggles’s counter-association and those from Westchester, Dutchess, and Marshfield defended colonists’ freedoms to speak, buy, and sell. But such counter-associations were rare. Most counter-associations were about defense and in response to military events.⁵¹ They might implicitly protest on behalf of Loyalists’ freedoms, but practically they extended little beyond defending Loyalists’ persons and expressing loyalty to the Crown.

Governor John Wentworth of New Hampshire armed an association for “Constitutional Liberty” and “wholesome Laws of the Land” against “Mobs” on January 17, 1775. The Portsmouth Loyalist Protective Association included tea importer Edward Parry and his landlord. Its fifty-nine members were professionals, merchants, and relations or connections of the governor. Their immediate impetus was the danger posed by the 400 Portsmouth men who had stormed Fort William and Mary on December 14, 1774, and taken the arms inside. The Protective Association was probably insufficient. The night after it was formed, Patriots held their tea bonfire in Portsmouth.⁵²

In South Carolina, a group of backcountry of “Nonassociators” defied the provincial congress (in which the backcountry was not represented). This counter-association was more concerned with opposing armed struggle against Britain than preserving the freedom to consume. Similar efforts occurred in North Carolina. In Georgia, Governor James Wright circulated papers to record colonists’ disagreement with radicals’ resolves. Men in Westchester, New York declared their “abhorrence of all unlawful Congresses and Committees.” In Queens County, 136 people signed a resolve denouncing Congress and the Association. Other rural New York counties ignored the Association without forming a counter one.⁵³

There was no coordination among counter-associations, which did not communicate with each other and hence did not achieve the Continental, or even colony-wide, scope of Patriot organizations. Conservatives’ lack of organization was ironic, given that they stood for the ordered whole, which the rebels fractured, but conservatives and moderates were suspicious of associations, committees, and congresses. They were illegal, unconstitutional bodies. How could one uphold law and order in a lawless, disorderly way? Marshfield counter-associators could not accept they had formed an association, objecting to the word association and expressing “detestation and abhorrence of all assemblies and combinations of men (by whatever specious name they may call themselves)” who oppose the “Government of Great Britain.” On March 16, 1775, Sir John Johnson, Guy Johnson, and other Tryon County leaders in New York signed a declaration against the Association. Likewise, in North Carolina, a group of 539 “sundry Inhabitants” (not associators) denounced associations as “dangerous” to “good Government” and bad for the public weal but formed no counter-group. An Association of Nonassociators would be nonsensical, and few Loyalists saw the point of, in their view, stooping to the rebels’ level.⁵⁴

Loyalists saw themselves as an oppressed minority suffering from “the multitude,” as William Eddis put it, while contradictorily hoping to be part of the silent majority, the “many” whom Eddis also thought shared his views.⁵⁵ Perhaps many colonists did not care to obey the Association; perhaps many disliked politics, but time and again, Loyalists mistook apolitical colonists for anti-Patriots. In 1774, tea had been the basis for grand stands against Parliament. But as the banal violations of prohibition in 1775 suggest, using banned goods was not equivalently grand grounds for making a statement of loyalty to the King. The tea buyers and sellers described above generally did not sign counter-associations. Most colonists who bought banned goods avoided attention. The silent majority was not Loyalists but consumers and the politically indifferent.

The Failure of Tea as a Loyalist Symbol

Tea had marginal value as a Loyalist symbol. General Gage sent two spies to survey the road between Boston and Worcester in February 1775. The men were badly disguised. They stayed in known Loyalist taverns and gave themselves away as they went, which led to their being run out of Marlborough and discovered in nearly every other town. Friendly landlords discerned who they were and offered them “either tea or coffee” to hint at their politics. “We immediately found out with whom we were,” Ensign D’Bernicre explained, chuffed at working it out. Asking “what he could give us for breakfast … tea or any thing else we chose,” “that … was an open confession” the publican was a “friend to government.” Others also gave tea drinking a Loyalist gloss. The New Yorker Benjamin Booth assured fellow Company tea importer James Drinker that “tea is bought, sold and drank as usual, in defiance of Congress and Committees” after the Association took effect. In exile in London, Elisha Hutchinson received word of his wife, still in the colonies, who “braves it out; by the last accounts from her in Sept. [1775] she is President of a Club composed of 8 ladies. They meet over a tea table once or twice a week, in opposition to the Rebells.”⁵⁶

The boycott could have created a way for Loyalists, particularly through consumption of British manufactures and tea, to express their sentiments, just as in non-consumption it gave Patriots a way to express theirs. Tea drinking, done to express Loyalism, would defy Patriot authority. This was what happened when Captain William Ward and several other men invited Elihu Ashley to tea shortly after the Association came into force. At first thinking it a joke, Ashley finally sat down and “found it to be Tea in reality. I drank none of it,” he wrote, as his host revealed himself to be a “High Torey.” This was risky for Ward, as there was more defiance and danger in drinking tea in New England than in boycotting it in defiance of a Parliament thousands of miles away.⁵⁷

Yet tea drinking did not have to signal Loyalism. Ashley would have tea at his own wedding half a year later—not out of Loyalism, but because it was nice. To make tea a Loyal symbol, Ward had to imbue it with politics, and there were more direct ways to express one’s Loyalism.

Loyalists rarely made tea central to resisting Patriots. William Aitchison, a Scots factor and Tory with a Virginia wife, explained in December 1775 that “Tea is now entirely disused in our Familys,” despite tea on hand and his wish to continue it. Mary Rothery recalled of relatively Loyalist Norfolk, Virginia, that “Few people would permit Tea to be drank in their Houses,” suggesting most tea drinkers had propitiated Patriots. When others, such as Frances Martin, described serving tea to Mr. and Mrs. Benjamin Hatley Foote, it was without any sense of resisting Patriot power.⁵⁸

Loyalists rarely thought in terms of resistance. Some were reluctant to separate themselves from the politically indifferent. “Resistance” also made little sense to others who saw themselves upholding legitimate order against a Patriot junto. They were supposed to be the mainstream, not the rebels. But, as Loyalists stayed still, the world transformed around them, making them dissenters for the establishment, an impossible position. The best way to undermine Patriot dominance would have been to use Loyalist associations, the same kind of organization that had undermined the empire. But the counter-associations were reluctant shambles. For Loyalists, Patriot-style politics were the problem. This was partly an aesthetic objection. The public display—the mobs, the militias, the street politics, and the showy investment of everyday consumer choices with political meaning (surely many wondered whether anyone’s little bit of tea made a difference)—was off-putting. Loyalists did not drink tea “in opposition” to the rebels with the same public display, political savvy, and verve as Patriots burned tea in opposition to Parliament. While Ashley’s fellow militiaman treated tea drinking politically, he drank it just as privately as a thousand less-political consumers.⁵⁹

Loyalists’ failing would be tea’s saving grace. Tea only faintly symbolized Tory resistance. After Lexington, Loyalists followed their Patriot cousins in emphasizing preparations for war, not consumer choices. Forming militias, stocking gunpowder, and declaring for the King were more important than drinking tea or killing sheep. Loyalists were shunned, proscribed, and disarmed, bigger problems than being deprived of tea or British fabrics. Lamenting their condition after the war, they complained of being attained of treason, stripped of their property, tarred and feathered, beaten, and forced to flee for their lives without benefit of trial or common law. When Loyalists tallied up their financial losses and sufferings and sought recompense from the British state, tea was hardly mentioned. Loyalists wanting a symbol for King and Parliament could do as Loyalists in Shawangunk, New York did. They replied to the Association not with a tea barrel but a seventy-six-foot mast with a royal standard on it.⁶⁰

Nor was tea the best way to goad Patriots. As Samuel Johnson noted, patriots had complained that Parliament was trying to make them slaves, but Loyalists knew what really infuriated Patriots was the charge that their own work was fit for “Negroes.” “[D]amn them all,” Virginia merchant Andrew Leckie said of Virginia’s congressmen. When committeemen asked him to sign the Association, Leckie turned to “a Negro Boy” and joked, “Piss Jack, turn about my Boy and sign.” The committee, angered by the idea that the Association was fit for Jack, forced Leckie to publish a self-criticism in the newspaper, wherein Leckie apologized for being “so unguarded and imprudent” as to tell a “Negro” slave to sign the Association, which was “indecent” and “contemptuous.” In Delaware, Tories took a Patriot constable down a peg by getting a black man to whip him. In Connecticut, Benjamin Stiles was accused of insulting congressmen as “good for nothing Dogs” and, worse, compared them to “his Negro Jeff.” This, more than the accusation of tea drinking, was what got him a trial in the colonial legislature. (Stiles had a point: his slave Jeffrey later joined the Continental Army and won his freedom).⁶¹ In general, destroying tea was a better way for Patriots to thumb their noses at Parliament than drinking it was a way for Loyalists to thumb their noses at Congress.

A Loyalist did not have to drink tea because she was Loyalist. She might, like everyone else, drink tea because she liked it. Elizabeth Drinker was the sort of woman who should have found tea politically and symbolically meaningful. Tea had been central to her family’s fortunes. In her diary she noted the Patriots hounding her husband over the Company’s tea in 1773, and the Patriots closing her brother-in-law’s shop in 1776. But she never remarked on the Association’s effect on her personal life or gave any sense she was defying it. In 1774, when tea was still allowed, she recorded that the family had gone out riding and “came home all together after Tea.” When the Patriots banned tea, she recorded just as prosaically that “Sarah Mitchel and Molly Strench, drank Tea with us,” among her regular outings and visits, and added in October 1775, “I drank Tea at Uncle Jerviss” in her diary. She gave no sense that these were politically meaningful acts. Rather, she noted these visits for their social value. Her family probably drank tea at home too, but she did not bother marking this in her diary because these were not special gatherings. Other times during the Association she had coffee. She was careful that “having tea” meant tea. When William Brown visited, she wrote “drank tea with us,” in her diary, only to cross out “tea” and write in “coffee” instead.⁶² For Elizabeth, tea was part of normal life. It maintained custom and routine (a sentiment at the heart of conservatism), but she gave no sign it was tied up in an active expression of Loyalism.

Briton Janet Schaw lamented finding no “dish of Tea” for a month in Brunswick, North Carolina (her stay overlapped with the Association taking effect). She had had tea in Scotland, on the voyage to the New World, on Antigua and St. Kitts, and would have it later in Portugal; by comparison, the Patriot fetishization of tea seemed absurd. Schaw took her first dish in the colonies at the North Carolina estate of Joseph Eagles, a plantation owner’s son just back from an Anglicizing adolescence in Britain, his home an oasis from the Patriots around her.⁶³ But Schaw gave no sense that tea meant defiance—she and Eagles admitted no Patriot writ to defy. Rather, tea signified normalcy—she drank tea because that is what people did.

A coherent meaning to tea is hard to find because tea drinkers were not a coherent behavioral or social group. There was no distinct class of Loyalist tea drinkers. Loyalist and Patriotic merchants were intermixed, as Patriots and Loyalists generally, by business partnerships, marriages, commerce, and community. These links had doomed Patriot tea politics for a decade. The firm Amory Taylor and Rogers was Loyal enough to stay on in Boston in 1775, but it worked with William Barrell, a confirmed Patriot, in Philadelphia. Tea wholesaler Thomas Vernon of Newport was exiled for Loyalism in 1776. His siblings included the noted Patriots Samuel and William Vernon, who had imported Swedish tea in late 1774. Their sister, Elizabeth, married Elnathan Hammond. Hammond bought tea from his brother-in-law, Thomas, and retailed it to others, including two of Hammond’s own sons. One of these sons, John Arnold Hammond, was taken prisoner by the British and died in captivity.⁶⁴ The step-uncle, Thomas, exiled for his Loyalism, and the step-nephew, John Arnold, who died for the Patriot cause, were part of the same tea-trading network.

Nor was Telfair, for all his Patriotism, above selling to Loyalists. Georgia Loyalism is tricky: a Loyalist in 1775 was not necessarily the same as one in 1776 or 1779.⁶⁵ Yet while an ideological gap separated Telfair and his buyers, trading tea did not, suggesting the ban was not that meaningful.

A tea seller could serve both sides. Christopher Champlin had contracts to supply the Royal Navy at Newport, but Champlin needed supplies from a base of Patriot farmers to do it. Until 1775 he pleased both sides, keeping his politics and tea sales quiet and evading the distinction between Patriot and Tory. He ignored the 1767 boycott and joined the 1770 one but was embarrassed to admit it to his British correspondents. The purser of HMS Rose ordered tea from him in February 1775. That year, Champlin sold tea and had Loyal friends and relatives. Yet he ultimately supported the Patriots and fled Newport when British troops arrived.⁶⁶

The poet Hannah Griffitts captures this ambiguity. Rather than siding with Tories or Patriots, she attacked politicians in general. The tea ban was “wicked,” and she declared a pox on both houses. Neither “King, nor Parliament nor North,” “Nor Congress, nor Committee Muster/ With all their Malice, noise & Bluster / Sur will not dare—to hinder me / From getting fresh Recruits of Tea.” She also wrote an anti-ministerial poem, “Beware the Ides of March,” urging people to “give up Tea.” Griffitts was of many minds: she ultimately became a Loyalist but was sympathetic to the issues Patriots raised. She spoke to the nebulous feelings that many people, not just Quakers like herself, felt: to being not on one side or the other, but sometimes both and neither at the same time.⁶⁷

The Hollow Ban

Some colonists embraced the ban. On the first day of prohibition, Christopher Marshall noted in his diary, “departed these parts … to the joy and satisfaction of the lovers of freedom, that baneful and detested weed, East India TEA, whose return is never desired … by the true sons of American liberty.” As a pharmacist, the Philadelphian Marshall could have dispensed tea, but he was active in Patriot politics and took virtue to heart. He did not dispense tea, stuck to coffee, balm, and sage for himself, and wrote in his remembrancer of having “coffee,” not tea, with Congressmen Ward, Gadsden, and the Adamses.⁶⁸ The propaganda theater that began the last chapter encouraged average colonists to do likewise. Patriots believed colonists who declared for the Association and did not enforce the ban heavily. This created a safe space for tea consumers. Inspection committees did not catch the sales described earlier. The claim that private consumption had stopped was propaganda; the Association could not distinguish between true believers, like Marshall, and Bours, who was just pretending.

The war replaced the boycott as a practical and symbolic way to resist Britain, making the consumption of banned goods easier. In March 1775, the Association’s ban on tea, British trade, and cockfighting had value in protests, moral economies, and ways for colonists to signal conformity to a common cause. But, as the war, various test oaths, and independence became stronger ways to express these meanings, the ban on tea seemed as trifling as a cockfight.

Colonists liked tea. Merchants smuggled it past Crown customs collectors and broke Patriot non-importation and non-consumption orders to get it. Neither Parliament nor Congress could stop this. Following the example of the Crown customs collectors they deposed, Patriots largely confined their interdiction to non-importation, ignoring the sale and home consumption of banned goods. It was easier for committees to rule if they were not obnoxious.

The economic importance of the boycott declined as the hope of strong-arming British merchants faded, and as Parliament closed more colonial ports. Since Britain would keep these ports closed whether non-importation continued, the latter became moot. Patriots made various political-economic trade-offs with the Association. They made exceptions to non-importation for strategic goods: salt (to preserve meats) and saltpeter (to make gunpowder). Congress continued to permit the importation of British Caribbean rum and sugar, important trade lines. Conversely, it kept the ban on imported woolens from Britain. Tea was not so economically crucial. It did not have to be acquired, as English woolens, by trading with the enemy. Nor was it as important as sugar. Merchants lobbied against the tea ban, but once denied, they could smuggle in new tea quietly. Loyal merchants’ intercepted letters show them contemplating what goods might sell (to British soldiers, Dunmore’s slave army, or maybe, once the King’s troops won, to the general public). British tea is not among these.⁶⁹ The conflict over tea quieted; business continued; tea became, once more, a politically insignificant mid-level trade good. At the height of the ban, all the meaning Patriots had invested in tea evaporated. Colonists responded to the Association with all the tea buying and drinking above, but as consumers, not Loyalists. This left Congress to repeal the ban.