Introduction
The Boston Tea Party was not, despite what you may have read, unanimously acclaimed; even some Patriots were appalled. The ensuing Patriot boycott and prohibition on tea did not endure; both ended before Congress declared independence. The Tea Party did not turn Americans away from drinking tea. In 1800, the average American drank a least as much tea as his predecessor in 1770. The Tea Party did little to create US national identity; that process took decades. Giving up British material culture—“unbecoming British”—took just as long. Tea boycotts were disagreements among fellow Britons; they were incredibly porous and did little to alter consumption.1
This should not be surprising. In the eighteenth century, trade between states did not automatically end when they were at war, nor did consumers easily make market decisions on political grounds. In the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763), Philadelphia, New York, and Rhode Island merchants traded with enemy French ports, enriching themselves and providing colonial consumers with cheap rum and sugar.2 The British state struggled to stop this trade, for many merchants and colonists saw this as business, not treason. Politicizing trade and consumption was difficult in 1760. So, too, in 1774.
Yet tea mattered deeply in the Revolution. Destroying it was the Patriots’ way to protest taxation without representation, the East India Company’s monopoly, and parliamentary infringement on colonists’ British rights. After the destruction of the tea in Boston in 1773, destroying tea could signal support for the Tea Party. When, in 1774, Parliament’s Coercive Acts punished Boston and mandated the East India Company be reimbursed for the destroyed tea, burning tea showed solidarity with Boston and resistance to Parliament. Congress’s Continental Association banned tea imports (and all imports from Great Britain and Ireland) beginning December 1, 1774, banned consumption of said goods after March 1, 1775, and banned exports to Britain, Ireland, and the British Caribbean after September 10, 1775. Patriots claimed the Association bound all colonists, whether they signed it or not.3 Hanging, drowning, and burning tea symbolized conformity to the Association, support for Congress, and acceptance of Patriot legitimacy. The Association was the most important expression of pre-war support for the Patriot cause and America’s founding attempt at prohibition. This was one set of ways tea mattered.
Like Prohibition 150 years later, the tea ban was a failure. It failed because of another way tea mattered: as a drink for North America’s growing consumer classes. Because of this, Patriots enforced their ban on tea in word more than deed. Merchants sold tea under the counter, and colonists drank it in private. The boycott fizzled out. When Congress re-authorized tea in April 1776, it reasoned that because so many colonists ignored prohibition the ban was meaningless. Like the colonial officials who had tried enforcing the ban on trade with French Caribbean fifteen years earlier, Patriots found colonists had a greater appetite for consumption than politics.
Tea was no less symbolically important for this, and tea’s central, symbolic role in the Continental Association linked to other issues, such as how Patriots mobilized the populace and controlled the distribution of information. Signing the Association functioned like a test oath, even as Patriots policed actual consumer compliance lightly. Checking whether colonists lived up to their claims about not consuming tea and British manufactures would have alienated the populace. By contrast, news of tea protests, emphasizing popular enthusiasm, printed in Patriotic newspapers, and distributed in the new Patriotic postal system, could build support for the “common” cause. The Association was signed in a public performance designed to mobilize the public. Tea burnings were often reenacted a second time in print. Even if townsfolk did not burn all their tea and no one in power ever heard of their protest, the spectacle acted out Patriotism and built a sense of shared experience. But one must read Patriotic accounts of these events with care.4
Tea protests were not signs of American “national consciousness,” as Timothy Breen argues.5 Abstention did not make US citizens. Breen, one of the most influential scholars on the intersection of consumption and politics in the American Revolution, brings new insights to the study of consumer politics. His work, however, relies heavily on examples of colonists denouncing tea and other consumer goods. These denunciations usually occurred only when a colonist was caught. But is being caught evidence of the ban’s enforcement? Or of its violation? Breen does not say, but the few who were caught imply a larger body of consumers who were not. Breen also relies on Patriotic newspaper reports without any awareness that Patriots, like other political actors, presented self-serving accounts of events to the public. Tea renouncements and Patriotic essays were public speech about non-consumption, precisely the ideological content from which Breen attempted to distance himself. Much of this speech used the idea of virtue to connect private non-consumption to the public good, but the evidence that colonists were virtuous enough to affect the public weal is lacking. Breen provides little evidence for what colonists did about the things they supposedly boycotted—not a single merchant’s papers are consulted, nor are diaries used to show how colonists behaved during non-consumption. Yet appreciating the gulf between public pledges and private commercial and consumer behavior is fundamental to any understanding of the revolutionary era boycotts or the Association.
Histories of the Association usually ignore how non-consumption worked on the ground. Without this, how can we say that non-consumption “mobilized people”? Mobilized whom? To do what? To what degree? To what end? The Patriot wish that non-consumption were popular is not proof that it was. If such mobilization created a “national consciousness,” why would that be an American one? The road from destroying the tea to the “making of America” or declaring independence was indirect, and the bonds of identity and ideology that would unite Americans were only just begun. Here, Breen “assumes the nation before the fact.” The emergent United States was contested and changing. It included twelve colonies in 1774 and added Georgia and parts of Quebec in 1775, while declining to aid rebels in Nova Scotia and remaining strikingly friendly to Bermuda. It excluded Boston in 1775, lost Quebec and New York City in 1776, and omitted Florida for a generation. It is not the America we know. Late colonial tea politics played out among fellow Britons and were played out before US independence.6
The Association constituted economic policy, with the boycott often seen as a way to coerce Britain economically. For merchants, the most important provisions of the Association were its bans on trade with Britain, Ireland, and the British West Indies, and its ban on the slave trade. This, and the anti-merchant tone of some Patriot rhetoric, has led some scholars to see a farmer-versus-merchant or plantation-owner-versus-merchant dynamic in the Association.7 In this reading, farmers and plantation owners used the Association to claw back wealth from merchants.
Patriot enforcement of the Association certainly focused on merchants. But Patriots made compliance in merchants’ self-interest. Surviving committee records suggest that Patriots generally did not inspect merchants’ books without suspicion or cause. A merchant’s ledger might contain embarrassing information about other Patriots and was best kept shut. Committees rarely sought out individual consumers for violations. Congress and the committees never admitted to turning a blind eye, which would have sapped the motivation of the true believers who boycotted sincerely. Yet few, if any, of the colonists to whom merchants recorded selling banned tea in 1775 were caught because Patriots rarely looked.8 Patriots talked against tea but enabled those merchants to continue selling what they had on hand. The main barrier to selling tea was limited supply, not Patriotic action against retailers or lack of colonial demand.
This is to say that non-importation was an “effectual security” against non-consumption (the logic behind the Boston Tea Party), despite Congress’s claim that it was the other way around.9 Congress flattered colonists by saying it relied on their virtue, and could point to its own success blocking new imports as “proof” that colonists were virtuous non-consumers.
The Association banned all tea (no matter when or from whence it arrived), making it a totem. It banned most other goods by place and time: woolens were not banned, just British and Irish ones imported after December 1, 1774. The Association thus allowed a version of some of the most-consumed imports (cloth, sugar, coffee, and rum) to be imported and sold.10 Looking at a merchant’s ledger, it is impossible to tell whether the “coffee” or “merchandise” consumers bought complied with the Association (or with British trade regulations). Only tea was banned, no matter when and whence it came.
Consider, by way of contrast, Madeira wine, which one imagines could have been a bigger part of boycott politics. British merchants dominated the Madeira trade. Parliament taxed colonial wine imports. And the Association banned wine imported from the “Wine Islands.” Madeira was a distinct type of wine, meaning that a ban on wine from the island of Madeira was, in effect, a ban on Madeira as a commodity. Boycotting Madeira could have become a symbolically straightforward way to engage in consumer politics. It was not. For non-consumption applied only to wine imported after December 1, 1774. Colonists could drink Madeira still on hand, which was convenient since colonists preferred to buy Madeira young and age it themselves. So they could drink older wine they had already aged and wait out the Association as they aged their youngest purchases. In October 1775, Thomas Jefferson settled his bills upon leaving Philadelphia after the Second Continental Congress. This included paying his Madeira tab, which he accrued while non-consumption was in effect. Jefferson was scrupulous about the Association and took care not to consume tea and other banned goods during the ban. But there was no contradiction here, as this particular Madeira was permitted.11
No one at consumer protests smashed bottles of Madeira, discarded their sugar canisters, or burned British-made woolens; such goods were allowed for sale and use, if already imported. They may also have been too valuable to destroy. And the articles of the rich: fine clothes, furniture, chariots, and paintings, these baubles of Britain were put away in response to Patriots’ sumptuary orders, not burned. Tea was the lone good to which non-consumption applied without exception. Its boycott became a sign of support for the Association as a whole, and tea and the tea canister became street protest icons in a way that Madeira, rum, sugar, and coffee could not be (it was hard to tell banned and permitted coffee apart just by looking). Even tea was often set aside, not destroyed. This is not quite the boycott we had imagined.
Individual merchant violators of the Association, especially violators of non-importation, did get in trouble. Andrew Sprowle led the Virginia Meeting of Merchants, a sort of chamber of commerce, in signing the Continental Association in November 1774. In December 1775, he was caught ordering goods from Britain. Patriots discovered this from reading his mail, a procedure they reserved for persons they already suspected. Sprowle had attracted suspicion by quartering Governor Dunmore’s troops. His “unfriendly disposition” when answering the Norfolk County committee’s queries left him shunned in August 1775.12 Thus, broader suspicion that he opposed the common cause drew attention to violations of the Association, not the other way around.
Merchants had economic reasons to comply with the Association. The ban on exports to Britain started eight months after the ban on imports, holding merchants’ future sales of goods in Britain hostage to their present compliance with non-importation in the colonies. Non-importation from Britain and Ireland, in turn, was easily enforced—local customs ledgers recorded all legal arrivals, and Patriots inspected these books. This motivated merchants. When John Norton’s Virginia arrived in Yorktown with tea in November 1774, Patriots threw the tea overboard; then, for a real punishment, they prevented Norton’s agents from loading tobacco for the return. Norton, who lived in London, begged for forgiveness and thereby secured tobacco cargoes for subsequent ships. His motivation was financial. Delaying non-exportation allowed Virginia merchants to collect large amounts of tobacco this way, effectively collecting debt from the colony’s plantation owners.13 The Association did not curtail New England and mid-Atlantic colonies’ substantial trade with Continental Europe and the non-British Caribbean. And it allowed South Carolina’s rice exports to continue. All these trades were far larger than the tea trade. A merchant who imported tea and other banned goods risked these other businesses being boycotted.
War and Parliament’s 1775 trade restrictions affected non-consumption under the Association. The Continental Association might have ended up being more forcefully anti-merchant or more broadly enforced, but less than two months after non-consumption began, war replaced the boycott at the center of Patriot attention. Restrictions on consumption remained in force after the Battles of Lexington and Concord. However, they were no longer core symbols of resistance or indicators of what Patriots planned to do next. Defense associations, wherein one publicly pledged to defend the King or Congress with arms, mattered more. Militia musters displaced tea parties. Guns and powder horns eclipsed tea canisters as symbols, allowing colonists to turn tea back into an apolitical consumer good. Jane Merritt describes this as tea’s repatriation, but sometimes just ignoring the politics of tea and British goods was enough to ensure they remained an important part of post-revolutionary US consumer culture.14 Patriot press releases continued to talk of non-consumption, particularly of tea, but a considerable space existed between what Patriots said about tea in the press and what colonists did about it.
In 1775, support for Congress mattered more than support for the boycott. This is not surprising. But the way wartime politics severed the link between the consumer politics of 1774 and independence in 1776 is easily missed. The wartime politics of 1775 saved the Patriot movement. The consumer protests of 1774 were, on their own, fraught and probably insufficient. Boycotts are difficult to sustain. A prior boycott had collapsed in 1770, setting the Patriot cause back considerably. Such a collapse happened in 1775, too. Had that collapse been in peacetime, when the boycott was the primary form of resistance to the British government, it would have implied Patriot acquiescence. Instead, the war was a stronger and more direct way to resist Parliament and fight for the common cause, and it let non-consumption collapse almost unnoticed.
War elevated merchants’ political value. Merchants had been smuggling in arms and ammunition since late 1774. After the Battles of Lexington and Concord, smuggling became vital to the cause. Weeks after non-exportation began, Congress’s Secret Committee allowed exemptions to its trade regulations for merchants returning from Europe with arms, a smuggling business that overlapped significantly with the tea trade. Smugglers brought foodstuffs (especially salt for preserving meat) and other goods past Royal Navy patrols. These importers ameliorated shortages and price spikes that threatened Patriot popularity.15
Congress had secured merchants’ non-importation by offering them continued exports to Britain until September 1775. Once this “carrot” expired, Parliament helped perpetuate (or perhaps took the blame for) non-importation by passing the Prohibitory Act in December 1775. This act withdrew the King’s protection from all shipping belonging to the thirteen colonies, making any colonial vessel a lawful prize to British privateers and helping a weak Congress enforce its own ban on imports from Britain.
Finally, the congressional reauthorization of tea consumption also allowed new tea to be brought into the colonies, provided it was British tea taken as prize, a loophole allowing merchants to explain away any tea kept in East India Company crates. The allowance for seized goods likely provided cover for a significant smuggling trade between British-occupied New York City and upstate New York, beginning in late 1776. By this time, riots about tea and food centered not on eschewing but demanding them. Rioters objected to shortages and high prices and demanded more consumer goods 16
Beyond consumer politics, the Association was an act of political economy, and here Patriots worked to ensure that tea did not become a symbol of their own economic misrule. There was a risk of this, since non-consumption and non-importation threatened colonists’ standard and cost of living. Patriots responded by regulating prices, but the worry that escalating tea prices might backfire on Patriots was a through-line from late 1773 to late 1776.
This book breaks new ground in several areas, bringing in new sources, new locations and events, and new interpretations of old ones. It reveals the survival and ultimate consumption of the East India Company’s tea in Boston and Charleston and their importance in the politics of 1774. It eschews a Boston-centered frame that can overdetermine events. It analyses tea advertisements, tea prices, and merchant ledgers to reconsider the relationship between merchants and the Association. It reveals both the continuation of tea consumption during the tea ban and the importance of the war in ending non-consumption. In many histories of the Revolution, we read that the Association takes effect, and then our attention turns to the fighting at Lexington and Concord without finding out what happened to the Association. Only in the last decade has anyone noticed that the tea ban ended at all.
This book is also intimately connected to two recent books. It concurs strongly with the analysis in Jane Merritt’s The Trouble with Tea: The Politics of Consumption in the Eighteenth-Century Global Economy. Merritt’s book appeared after the early drafts of this one were complete. Merritt was the first to note how the tea ban ended, an analysis this book develops. Both books agree that in 1773–1776, tea consumerism triumphed over politics. Whereas Merritt examines a century, this book thoroughly examines the years 1773–1776. The second book is Mary Beth Norton’s 1774: The Long Year of Revolution, which examines the period between the East India Company’s tea shipments and the Battle of Lexington. 1774 and Tea agree on the political importance of tea, with this book also examining how tea politics played out in wartime.17
Colonists did not uniformly aspire to make tea a political symbol. In 1774, Patriots struggled to politicize tea, a product that retained an apolitical consumer value. In seeing tea bonfires as the mass participation of consumers who refused to consume, it is easy to take Patriot assertions that anti-tea rallies “spoke” for the people at face value. Tea rallies were acts of “conspicuous non-consumption,” which is to say they were performances. Ignoring the performative aspect occludes colonists’ ambivalence toward politics and makes it easy to overlook the coercion that helped some to agree that Patriots and Sons of Liberty spoke for “the People.” Tea was an important symbol, and rhetoric about tea must be taken seriously on its own terms and also examined critically, lest one mistake Patriots’ wish for a ban for the actual deed.18
Careful chronology is also vital. The period from the Boston Tea Party to the Declaration of Independence was revolutionary. It is easy to blur the rapid political changes pertaining to tea between 1773 and 1776 into a single, monolithic, anti-tea moment. Worse, one could equate the political significance of tea in 1773–1776 with its significance in earlier periods of the imperial crisis.19 But Bostonians who drank tea on the night of the Tea Party could not be “defiant” of Patriot authority (as one prominent historian of the Association has claimed) because Boston Patriots had not yet banned tea. It is also easy to blur geographical differences, creating a pan-Continental image of a period when colonies were different. This risks an anachronistic teleology toward independence inappropriate for events in 1774 or 1775. It sacrifices local differences and changes over time for a static, undifferentiated sense of Patriot opposition to tea. It accounts poorly for the politicization of tea and, worse, completely ignores the process by which tea ceased to be political. Tea changed twice in the Revolution—first into a political good, then back to a non-political one.20
Boston was not the only city to have a tea party in 1773. Others, like Charleston, South Carolina’s, were just as important. The East India Company’s tea survived both tea parties, and it is time to re-examine them (chapter 1). Tea protests and smuggling had a history in the colonies before 1773 (chapter 2). In 1774, tea politics took many turns, summarized in chapter 3. One of these turns was the attempt to reimburse the East India Company for its losses in Boston Harbor (chapter 4). This failed. In the second half of 1774, Patriots turned to stopping legal tea importation (chapter 5) and discouraging tea consumption (chapter 6). Patriot print sources—committee press releases, essays, news of protests carefully reworked by Patriotic editors—flooded the public sphere. For non-consumption to work, for colonists to feel they truly shared a common cause and worked in concert with people hundreds of miles away, the Revolution had to be publicized.21 Oddly enough, a useful antidote to this is the advertisements for tea that often appeared in the very newspapers that denounced the drink (chapter 7). Patriotic propagandists continued to attack tea, alleging that it harmed human health, that it was being forced upon the colonies by the King (chapter 8), and that it was a womanish drink (chapter 9)—the suggestion being that if women were strong enough to give up tea, any man who could not stop was a wimp. Yet even formal prohibition of tea consumption (March 1, 1775 to April 13, 1776) was lightly enforced (chapter 10) and widely violated (chapter 11), leaving Congress to effectively repeal the ban (chapter 12).