Signing Patriotism

With Parliament unmovable and local committees forming, the Association became a means to mobilize the public and assert local Patriot authority rather than to strong-arm Britain. The Association prohibited colonists from buying, selling, or using any tea or British goods. It encouraged frugality and discouraged gambling, plays, and other “expensive diversions.” It limited mourning dress at funerals. Like the ban on horse races, the ban on Dutch tea did not affect merchants in Britain, though it did imply the belt-tightening that the boycott was assumed to require. More importantly, signing was, according to James Madison, “the method used among us to distinguish friends from foes.” Catharine Crary describes signing as “the most significant early touchstone” for political sympathies after March 1, 1775, forcing a “crisis of allegiance.”⁶ Yet the extent to which it changed minds or simply encouraged virtue-signaling and conformity is less clear.

Committees went door-to-door asking colonists to sign. Thus the Wilmington, North Carolina committee went out “in a body, to the several house keepers and traders in town,” ensuring the Association “was signed by all those of any note.” In Pennsylvania, the Cumberland County committee sent one hundred men to collect signatures. In Virginia, as voters and candidates looked on, copies were signed at elections. The Albemarle committee sent militia captains to collect signatures, letting residents say “yes” or “no” to men with guns. Continent-wide, over 7,000 men served on committees or in provincial congresses in the spring of 1775, a sizable number of potential door-knockers.⁷

Signatures were coerced by violence, threats, the shunning of non-signers, and the boycott of their trade. As James Parker, a Loyalist Virginia storekeeper, explained, anyone who refused to sign risked being “delivered over” to a mob. The “furious” Maine mob, which Jacob Bailey encountered, compelled “people, by force of arms, to sign the solemn league.” The governor of Georgia thought “Great Numbers have been Intimidated to Sign.” “Every body,” according to one South Carolina Loyalist, “was obliged to temporize.” Virginia merchant William Allason signed “not from any conviction, but from notions of self-preservation with peace and quietness.” Henry Hulton explained, “Many, to save themselves & families from destruction, signed to any articles that were imposed upon them.” Philadelphia merchant son James Allen admitted, “My inducement principally to join them is that a man is suspected who does not.”⁸

Signing indicated consent to be governed by Patriot authorities, not necessarily agreement with Patriot policy. It was a “statement” of “communal solidarity.” Even Congressmen James Duane (New York) and Joseph Galloway (Pennsylvania) disagreed with the Association but signed it to maintain the appearance of “consensus” and the “extraordinary unanimity” of the Continental Congress.⁹ Householders looked at a signature sheet and noticed names of people they knew, realizing the presence or absence of their names would be noticed by neighbors in turn. How can we expect them to do differently than Duane and Galloway?

This was conformity, not a “drive for unity achieved through consent.” Consider Concord, Massachusetts. The Concord town meeting had approved the Solemn League and Covenant in June 1774. Town leaders “offered” the covenant for townsmen to sign, and about 80 percent did. In September, a mass meeting forced “every person suspected of being a tory” (and not signing in June would have been suspicious) “to pass the ordeal of a trial” on the town common. “If found guilty, he was compelled to endure such punishment as an excited multitude might inflict.” The town historian called this “humbling the tories.” In November, Concord residents approved the Association unanimously in a town meeting—unanimously because the Tories were too humbled to speak. Not all Concordians agreed: revolutionaries had to extend the signing deadline three times to collect all signatures. Ultimately three Concordians refused. On the eve of battle, a government spy asked Patriot authorities whether there were many Loyalists in town. “The answer was,” he reported, “they expected there were, but not openly.” Signing campaigns worked to persuade. Colonists said they were persuaded, but such conformity was a performative kind of consensus.¹⁰

Colonists on both sides wondered whether there was a “shy Tory” effect. Had all the merchants signed, asked one Patriot? “If they have, I would ask if it is not through compulsion?” One Tory writer wrote of coerced consent, “I shall ever look upon some of those propositions as containing my tar and feathers sentiments, and no farther.”¹¹ Yet even conformity gave Patriots power. And Patriots offered those who acquiesced and signed a good deal: in exchange for public obedience, Patriots left them alone in private.

The committees’ concern for public allegiance was part of their concern to uphold their shadow governments’ honor and authority. As James Parker termed it, Congress’s Association was an “American Constitution,” which legitimated the committees. These, in circular fashion, legitimated Congress.¹² Committees responded forcefully to public defiance, concerned that colonists who refused to sign in the face of threats were rejecting the entire architecture of Patriot legitimacy. Thus the committees punished two infractions above all: slander of the committees and open noncompliance toward their diktats.

In July 1775, the mariner John Hopkins drank “Damnation to America” in Savannah and found himself tarred and feathered, carted about, and threatened with a hanging unless he drank “Damnation to all Tories and Success to American Liberty.” The problem was not Hopkins’s Loyalism, but how he went about it: he “behaved disrespectfully” toward Patriots. Had he simply kept his mouth shut, Patriots probably would have left him alone. The Connecticut General Assembly focused on colonists who “contravene or defame … the Resolves of the Hon^le Continental Congress or the Acts of the Gen^al Assembly,” especially people accused of calling Congress “Rebels & Traitors” (which was true on its face, but amounted to revolutionary lèse-majesté), who claimed they “would not pay Obedience,” or who attacked the assembly as “unconstitutional and oppressive.” Patriots punished “speech crimes” with tar and feathers in the spring and summer of 1775 in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, and South Carolina. As the New York provincial congress explained, “Although this Congress have a tender regard for freedom of speech, the rights of conscience, and personal liberty,” anyone denying its authority would be disarmed and possibly confined at his own expense. A “fellow was lately tarred and feathered for treating one [of] our county committees with disre[s]pect,” the future constitutional thinker James Madison, then on the Orange County committee, bragged to the printer of the Pennsylvania Journal. Thankfully, thought Madison, Virginia was not a place where a minority of colonists could speak their minds and enjoy protection from the majority. They could not “insult the whole colony and Continent with impunity!” As Nantucketer Kezia Coffin noted of Patriots, “It is liberty which they pretend they are fighting for, yet don’t allow others liberty to think as they please.”¹³

Finally, after a decade of boycott attempts, Patriots brought in a broad-based boycott with real teeth. They enforced it. In many historical accounts, just as the boycott takes effect, the Association falls victim to a bait and switch: attention turns to the battles at Lexington and Concord and the questions of allegiance they raised. The Association had been in effect for less than two months when the war began. What happened to the Association’s provisions for tea drinking (or sheep breeding or gambling or slave trading) after that? Such provisions had divergent lives and deaths.¹⁴

Material acts—joining militias, buying gunpowder, supplying troops, and perhaps signing defense associations (agreements to support the defense of the revolutionary colonial governments)—became new ways to support the common cause. Statements (such as being an “addresser,” signing the Continental Association, swearing for rebel or loyal governments in test oaths, or proclaiming independence) were also ways to show allegiance; but in these it was the signing itself that mattered. After Lexington and Concord, tea was still forbidden. But private non-consumption was only loosely linked either to material military acts or public signings. Colonists increasingly disregarded the boycott (see chapter 11), and Congress wrestled with this disregard (see chapter 12). Congress’s and the public’s priority had, understandably, shifted to the war. When, on March 14, 1776, Congress ordered the Association Test administered, the concern was that public disapproval of Congress might link to Loyalist armed action. Non-signers were to be disarmed, and their guns given to signers.¹⁵ Meanwhile, the boycott was fast shrinking from sight: Congress did not disarm tea drinkers or the users of British goods. It ordered the Association Test while on the verge of repealing the tea ban.

Non-signers to the Continental Association of 1774, the Association Test of 1776, and other documents included Loyalists, sects that were either pacifist or prohibited the swearing of oaths (Quakers, Mennonites, Moravians, Dunkards, Jews, and some Freewill Baptists), and the ornery. Customs clerk William Eddis, who refused to sign, argued non-signers were the real “victims.” Non-signers stood up to Patriot power and brought terror down on their heads. Many fled. By late 1775, wealthy Loyalists took “French leave,” and announcements of colonists leaving for Britain frequently appeared in colonial papers as Patriots hounded Loyalists out.¹⁶

During the war, Patriots listed, tracked, and proscribed non-signers to a degree they never did for tea drinkers or theatergoers because, in wartime, non-signers might go from being “a traitor in thought but not in deed,” as Thomas Jefferson put it, to taking up arms against Congress. When the Maryland convention threw off the proprietary power of the colony in July 1775, it issued a new association and ordered lists of non-associators to be kept. In December, the Maryland convention reviewed the lists, telling non-associators to sign by April 10, 1776, lest they be disarmed and perhaps forced to give bond against supporting ministerial troops. Similar lists were compiled in Connecticut, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, and South Carolina, making it easier to disarm, punitively tax, and sometimes imprison non-signers.¹⁷

In such oaths it was military allegiance, not commercial activity, that concerned Patriots. Consider Myer Pollock. Edmund Burke later said that “because he had imported tea contrary to the command of the Americans, he was stripped of all he was worth and driven” from Rhode Island. It was a good story. But there is no other indication Pollock had anything to do with tea. He remained in Rhode Island after Patriots ended their tea ban, which makes it hard to see how they could have expelled him for violating it. Revolutionary authorities did suspect him of being “Inimical to the United Colonies in America” in 1776 and asked him to swear an oath of loyalty. Considering the Jewish prohibition against swearing oaths, revolutionaries came up with an affirmation, a sort of not-quite-an-oath oath, which Pollock found a way to sign. This declaration did not mention tea, British trade, or sumptuary codes. Rather, signatories promised not to “directly nor indirectly afford Assistance” to the “Fleets and Armies” of Britain and that they would “assist in the Defence of the United Colonies.” Non-associators mattered because they might aid British troops, not because they might trade with the enemy (a practice that had been previously tolerated).¹⁸

Committees emphasized declaring loyalty, not proving it since, while committees had “police powers” and watched some merchants, they lacked police.¹⁹ Despite Seabury’s fears, committees did not go door to door looking into colonists’ tea canisters. Routine, warrantless, and arbitrary searches would have alienated the populace. Instead, Patriots relied on individuals to police themselves: hence their concern with virtue (or, for the more skeptical, virtue signaling) and enforcement theater.

They did not seek out violators, but committees still dealt with the few who came to their attention. Their light-touch policy forgave and forgot even flagrant violators as long as they recognized committee authority. This was not naïveté. Ruthlessness would not win hearts and minds to a cause claiming to oppose tyranny. The appearance of magnanimity was just as important as boycott efficacy for public relations. Public infractions were dealt with harshly. Private violations were largely ignored. Prohibition was thus rhetorical: Patriots said tea was prohibited, and colonists agreed to say so. This worked because the war reduced the boycott’s relative value as a symbol and a means of resisting Britain.

Enforcement and Merchants

To the extent that Patriots did inspect, they focused on merchants. This was more efficient and less invasive than household inspections. When focusing on merchants the Philadelphia committee emphasized non-importation (by checking cargo manifests) rather than non-consumption (which would require inspecting accounts and ledgers). The Baltimore committee prepared a form for masters of vessels to “make Oath on the Holy Evangels” not to import goods. The Sons of Liberty inspected warehouses, books, and stores to monitor compliance with non-importation, but only enough to convince merchants they were watching.²⁰

In some places, enforcement was more intensive. Virginia merchants were required to get certificates proving they had signed the Virginia Association, and later some Virginia committees checked daybooks and accounts for price gouging. At first, merchants “generally refused,” as factor James Robinson explained from Falmouth in January 1775. Port Royal merchants justified their refusal in print. But merchants who refused inspection were considered violators until proven innocent, and eventually the committee forced the merchants to give up their books. Inspections of merchant books occurred in Dunmore and Charlotte counties, Virginia as well. In Norwich, Connecticut, the committee required merchants to display their products’ certificates of origin.²¹

Virginia Patriots had a unique opportunity to bring merchants into the Association when several hundred Virginia merchants gathered in Williamsburg in early November 1774. Patriots, led by Peyton Randolph and other congressional delegates, got the merchants to sign. They were aided by Burgess Archibald Cary, who organized an “Occasional Committee.” Norfolk merchant Henry Fleming described

a pole erected upon the parade in Wmsburg when I was there with a Brush a Bag of Feathers & a Tar Barrel at its foot by order of the Burgesses to intimidate such as would dare to broach a sentiment contrary to what is calld the liberties of America, Hanging, Drowning, Ducking, Taring & Feathering, Beating to death & Gouging was threatened … many us[e]d very ill …

unless they signed. Randolph and others intervened, though whether they genuinely disapproved or used the occasion to appear magnanimous is less clear. (See figure 10.1.) Because Patriots allowed only signatories to the Association to continue exporting until September 1775, merchants also had a financial reason to sign and perhaps adhere to the Association. A muddle of principles, threats, and inducements motivated merchants across the colonies to sign. Since part of conforming is pretending to agree, Virginia merchants claimed to sign “voluntarily and generally” (i.e., unanimously).²²

Patriots singled out itinerant merchants as uniquely subversive to the Associational order. In Westmorland, Virginia, the committee required “itinerant or casual vendor of goods” to have certificates proving they were imported before the Association began.²³ This focus was strongest in New England, where peddlers were caught carrying tea. Traveling merchants presented a unique problem for geographically structured committees. Peddlers came and went quickly, meaning even the men they caught selling tea had probably gotten away with it in other towns already. As peddlers were not members of the communities to which they sold, social pressure was less able to constrain them.

By the time Captain Edward Clark was caught “purchasing and selling Tea” in September 1775, he had passed through eight Massachusetts towns undetected, leaving a web of colonists violating non-consumption. Clark confessed to buying twenty pounds of tea. He had sold five and a half pounds to “sundry persons,” used some himself, and lodged the rest with an associate, with plans to deliver it to others. The committees ordered “all persons who are lovers of their Country … break off … dealings with him” and published the order in the Gazette.²⁴

Eleazer Bradshaw had smuggled tea from Albany to Eastern Massachusetts. This journey allowed him to pass through and potentially sell tea in at least twenty towns in western and central Massachusetts before he was caught. This was surely tempting, for Western Massachusetts towns were slow to take up the Association. In Eastern Massachusetts, “[S]undry persons” complained “sundry times” about his selling tea to the Weston committee (suggesting it took a while for anything to be done). Eventually, the Waltham committee, and the Newtown, Watertown, Weston, and Sudbury committees got dragged into his case. His central and western Massachusetts customers, if any, escaped unscathed. In October 1775, Bradshaw defied the five eastern Massachusetts committees, swore he would “do as he tho[ugh]t fit,” and promised “the death of any person that should molest him.” The committees shunned him, hoping “Tea Merchants may be treated as their Merits deserve.”²⁵

Committees also caught and proscribed a Waltham baker, David Townsend, who had acquired and dealt six pounds of tea from Bradshaw. He sold it to a doctor’s wife in Newtown (who had asked him to procure it) and unnamed others but, perhaps having more ties in Waltham than Bradshaw, said he was “heartily sorry.” Massachusettsans in Montague, Shrewsbury, Leominster, and Lancaster were also caught buying tea from peddlers, suggesting the limits of prohibition’s ability to change consumer behavior.²⁶

Itinerants—portraitists, preachers, dancing masters, and language teachers—roved the countryside, but chapmen especially frustrated rural New England elites. These peddlers cut in on local shopkeepers’ business. Peddlers operated from taverns or public houses, doing a burst of trade, then moving on. They did not pay upkeep for a country store which, in a small town, might see little trade. Shopkeepers had been trying to keep peddlers out of their communities since the early eighteenth century with little luck. For local merchants abiding by the Association, the arrival of chapmen with banned goods must have been galling. Some committees attempted, as the Newmarket, New Hampshire one did, to restrict “any Hawker, Pedler, or Petty Chapman” from entering its domains, threatening the innkeepers who harbored them. Newmarket followed the New Hampshire convention’s recommendation to enforce standing laws against chapmen, and offered to punish “according to Law” any peddler who closed a sale. This suggests the law against itinerants had not been well enforced previously. The Epsom, New Hampshire, committee threatened to tar and feather chapmen selling imported goods. Massachusetts had a similar law to New Hampshire’s. But, as the provincial congress lamented in February 1775, it “cannot at present be effectually carried into execution,” so travelers were “going from Town to Town selling East India Goods and Teas” and British manufactures. Provincial Patriots recommended town committees “be very violent and industrious” in policing hawkers and “make a thorough and careful search” of their bags when they arrive. If the committees “find any India Teas or European Manufactures” they should prevent the chapmen from selling them.²⁷ Notably, most of the tea sellers described above sold tea after this order was issued.

Regular merchants were also caught violating the Association. Isaiah Worrell admitted to selling tea to “sundry persons and at sundry times.” He had sold tea “imprudently” and “inadvertently” (by which he meant he had sold it negligently and meant nothing political by it, not that he had sold it accidentally). The “I didn’t mean it” defense was common, an extension of the “accidental” tea importations of 1774. Ebenezer Withington claimed inadvertency when he collected tea washed ashore from the Boston Tea Party. Salemite John Cook, who brought the salvaged East India Company tea to Castle William, pled “mere Inadvertence” and “ignorance,” as did several Truro residents who bought some of the salvaged tea. Philip Vickers Fithian saw Mrs. Carter inadvertently pour tea for her husband. Inadvertency was mentioned only when someone was caught. Worrell was “sincerely sorry” and promised to abide by the Association in the future. He added that he had “no other motive … but my own interest, in getting off my hands about 30 or 40 pounds of said Tea”—by which he meant that he sought to profit, not defy the committee, by selling it. Worrell had not spoken ill of Congress. He was just a small, selfish merchant. How many others were there like Worrell?²⁸

A theater emerged: if violators recognized Patriot authority and asked forgiveness, they could be absolved. Thus, in October 1775, Providence merchant Nathan Angell was caught selling tea. The committee published his promise to “deliver up” all he had and to obey the Association. “I earnestly ask the forgiveness of the community,” Angell pleaded. Such declarations performed committee mercy, power and, occasionally, wrath. But one should not assume they indicated the internal thoughts of committeemen, Angell, or townsfolk. The committee also demanded that anyone else who had tea give it up, suspecting from “frequent complaints from the country” that other people were selling tea, which belied the idea that the community disapproved.²⁹

Merchants’ defiance was dealt with firmly. The Scituate, Massachusetts committee asked the “refractory shopkeepers,” Charles Curtis and Frederick Henderson, to adhere to the Association. “I shall not adhere to it,” Curtis replied. “I don’t know any Congress,” Henderson added. So the committee ordered the town to break off contact with them. The Ulster County committee proscribed Jacobus Low of Kingston, New York as the sole vendor not to sign the Association. He “declared he had, and would sell Tea.” Low retorted that committee members used tea, too. “It was reported by one of the members of the Committee, … that he had purchased Tea at my house. [Committee Chairman] Johannes Sleght continued drinking Tea after the 1st of March, in direct violation of the Association; and John Beekman did confess at the meeting, that he had a quantity of Tea, and intended that it should be made use of in his family, contrary to the Association.” The committee’s charges, Low concluded, were hypocritical “chicanery.” The committee denounced Low’s “absolutely false” claims and the “wickedness of his heart.” Seeing their “characters” “impeached,” they compelled him to sign the Association and to appear on June 6, 1775, before the committee of the Town of Kingston and accept its authority. Likewise, Staten Island’s Loyalism—the island resisted “obedience” to Congress in 1775—led several New Jersey committees to boycott the island. When the Staten Islander Peter Waglom tried to sell tea in Dover New Jersey, he found himself a “publick enemy” in Dover. This was not simply because he sold tea but because of the Loyalism that selling it from Staten Island implied.³⁰

Yet Loyalism’s true importance lay in political not commercial matters. Such was the case of Breed Batchelder, who, unlike Low, did not sign the Association. He refused to “comply” with the Packersfield (present-day Nelson), New Hampshire committee’s terms and “sine a covenant,” arguing such associations were “Aganst the law.” He also warned Packersfield Patriots that signers risked the Crown’s wrath. Batchelder was an influential man in Packersfield. He was a founding father of the town, a substantial landowner holding thousands of acres, having initiated settlement there in 1767. The settlement’s first town meeting had been held in his home in 1772, and after the settlement was incorporated in 1774, Batchelder moderated town meetings. He also ran an inn and commanded the town militia. At this time, the town had less than 200 souls.³¹

He was not on the town’s committees in 1775. Not wanting to take up arms against his King, he failed to march with his company to Massachusetts after news of the Battles of Lexington and Concord. The committee claimed he “refused to have anything to do with his Company,” but, unarmed, he followed it to Massachusetts a few days later and assumed command in Cambridge for a while before leaving. Some of his men left, too, perhaps with his encouragement. Batchelder, still untouchable, sold tea after his return.³²

Only after committees from other towns began complaining in early 1776 did Packersfield move against him. The committee of nearby Marlborough, New Hampshire pursued Batchelder on word he had “a quantity of Tea.” A Marlborough committeeman caught up to him in Fitzwilliam, where Batchelder tried to evade committeemen from both towns. He fled on horseback with three bags of tea, only to be pursued, fighting off and wounding one committeeman with a club, before being forced to turn around by another. Then he hid one bag “in the Brush a little out of the road” and tried to pretend someone had stolen it. The Fitzwilliam committee complained Batchelder was “bringing in a Large quantity of India Tea and freely offering it for Sale” in their town, at which he was at least partly successful, as one of his customers, Frederick Reed, quickly “Retaild the most of it [the tea] out.” He told the committee he “would b[u]y more if he could get it” and threatened anyone who dared “Examine or disturb” him. For such overt denial of Patriot authority, the Fitzwilliam committee deemed Reed and Batchelder “Enemical.” The Packersfield committee complained of Batchelder’s “bad behueyer [behavior],” including (but not limited to) the “Distorbance” and “trouble” caused by his buying a “lardg” amount of tea and “paddeling it out” throughout the country, and his desultory role in the militia. Despite (or because of) word that he “Damned the Comitteys” and threatened to “kill” anyone who arrested him, they were unable to get rid of him until 1777.³³

Complaints about Batchelder’s tea sales emerged shortly before the tea ban ended. They mattered, even after the ban was lifted, as part of his ongoing denial of the revolutionary order and local authority, which was the real “bad behavior.” The Packersfield committee struggled to isolate him in town. Chasing down his tea sales would only create an embarrassing record of local purchases. So the committee gave no indication of where he got his tea or who else bought large parcels, and left no record of who consumed it. Given the back and forth between Batchelder and the committee in 1776, his tea sales likely “disturbed” the town because they offended some while appealing to others.

Consumer Enforcement: “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”

Like merchants caught selling, consumers caught buying or drinking tea could publicly confess their guilt and be reaccepted, or defy the committee and be proscribed. Travers Nash of Prince William County, Virginia, confessed in the Virginia Gazette “that once since the beginning of last March I made use of tea, contrary to the continental association, for which I am sincerely sorry, and ask pardon of the public.” The committee recommended no further action against him. In Farmington, Connecticut, Martha and Solomon Cowles made up for serving tea by apologizing in the papers and naming the drinkers. Marblehead resident Thomas Lilly confessed in the Essex Gazette that his buying tea was an “open Violation” of the Association. (See figure 10.2) He “voluntar[il]y” burned his tea, named his supplier, and asked forgiveness; his letter was printed with an endorsement from the committee.³⁴

Conversely, a Pittsylvania, Virginia committee heard a complaint that John Pigg had “violated the association, by drinking, and making use of in his family, the detestable East India TEA.” “Pigg had taken uncommon pains in order to defeat the intention of the said association” by speaking against it. Pigg refused to appear before the committee, ignored its authority, and declared he would “do as he pleased.” The committee declared him “a traitor to his country, and inimical to American liberty” and urged others to “break off intercourse and connection” with him.³⁵ Yet most colonists when called out gave in.

The accusation of tea drinking became a useful tool in neighborly politics and feuds. Benjamin Stiles was the only man referred to the Connecticut General Assembly for tea drinking. As one local explained: “Stiles was a bad man.” When pressed whether “yo have some little prejudice against Sd. Stiles,” his accuser explained, “I have no Little Prejudice against him but a Great one.”³⁶

Other accusations served colony-level politics. William Ellery accused Rhode Island Congressman Stephen Hopkins of tea drinking. “Such examples [of tea drinking] are pernicious,” Ellery explained to the Rhode Island attorney general, Henry Marchant. “If a delegate of the Congress, who associated, under the ties of honor, virtue, and love of his country, not to use that poisonous plant after the 1st of March, doth drink it, what will not others do?” Ellery opposed the Wanton-Hopkins faction in Rhode Island politics in favor of Hopkins’s rival, Samuel Ward. When Ward died in 1776, Ellery took Ward’s place in Congress. The evidence against Hopkins was thin: one man had told him that another had told him that Hopkins “drank tea at the Governor’s.”³⁷

Ellery was even more opposed to Governor Wanton. Wanton’s family had been prominent in Newport trade and politics for generations. Newport, then the seat of colonial government, was conservative. Rhode Island and imperial customs officials, naval patrols, merchants, and others added up to what Patriots called the “Newport Junto.” To oppose Wanton was to oppose this conservativism. In early 1774, Tories were so strong in Newport that Connecticuters gossiped “a Whig dared not open his mouth in favor of liberty” there.³⁸

But Newport was moving in the Patriot’s direction. It resolved against dutied tea in January 1774 and established a committee of inspection that included Ellery, Ward, and the governor’s son, Col. Joseph Wanton Jr. It is unclear how seriously the Wantons took this duty: Two members of the colonel’s family—John and Peter Wanton—advertised tea of unknown origin in 1774. Ellery and others attacked the Wantons for their Toryism, causing the younger Wanton to lose the 1774 elections. In 1775, Ellery complained that Governor Wanton continued to serve tea to his guests that March, though Patriots had convinced the governor’s son to give up tea, “He was very much afraid … that he should be posted, and his father turned out.” Eventually, the younger Wanton appeared at a meeting of the very same committee of which he had been a member the previous year, “promising that we would not drink tea, nor suffer it to be used in our families.” Ellery pushed on, publishing a broadside accusing Governor Wanton of being a Tory. In May, upset at Wanton’s refusal to support raising troops after the Battles of Lexington and Concord, the Assembly expelled its Tory members and governed without Governor Wanton.³⁹

Ellery also wanted to “shake” Providence County into action. Newport Patriots had learned that “John Jenck[e]s of Providence drinks tea.” Jenckes was a Patriot official on the Providence committee that enforced prohibition. He also represented Providence in the Rhode Island General Assembly. There is no real evidence that Jenckes drank tea, or that Providence Patriots bothered investigating. For Ellery shaking Providence Patriots was the point, whether or not the charge was true.⁴⁰

The most clear-eyed understanding that the politics of tea drinking was more about power than practice came from the Harvard faculty. Patriotic Harvard students tried to enforce the Association upon their classmates. A fight broke out between two sides over breakfast on March 1, 1775. The conventional reading is Josiah Quincy’s: tea drinking was a performance of Loyalism. “Tories among the students were in the practice of bringing ‘India tea’ into commons, and drinking it, to show their loyalty,” he wrote. This “gave great offense” to Patriots and their “sensitive patriotism.”

Harvard’s president and various faculty members were Patriots, and had they been on a revolutionary committee, they may have ruled differently. But on campus, they pursued a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy that protected their authority at the Association’s expense. Admonishing “both sides as imprudent,” the faculty gave no opinion on tea drinking, but took a firm stance against students enforcing anything. Power to regulate “the Hall belongs exclusively to … Government of the College,” not student protestors, who had no authority to act. Given that the populace found tea “disagreeable,” the faculty hoped to avoid “grief” by asking students not to bring tea into the Hall or drink it publicly. As students who “carried Tea into the Hall declare that the drinking of it in the Hall is a matter of trifling consequence with them,” the faculty “advised” the tea drinkers to drink it in private to preserve “harmony … peace & happiness” in the college.⁴¹ Pace Quincy, these students did not subscribe to a gloss in which they drank tea to show Loyalism. They drank tea because they liked it, even if “sensitive” Patriotic snowflakes thought it was all about them.

Press Censorship

Collecting signatures for the Association was part of a campaign to persuade colonists to conform to Patriots’ views. Many did so willingly, but it is difficult to believe that printed affirmations of public conformity represented private opinions or actions, whether they concerned tea or other goods. This was partly because Patriots’ growing control of the press made it difficult for contrary information to appear in print. In 1775, Patriotic propaganda, censorship, and control of a large majority of North American presses helped ensure only certain information about the Association appeared in print. In print tea drinkers were either (1) inadvertent or apologetic tea drinkers who had promised to stop, or (2) recalcitrant ones who had not. The special permission granted to Harvard’s tea drinkers did not appear in print, which was why it could happen. Manuscript sources hint that what colonists meant, and did not mean, with banned goods was more nuanced than the bounds of public rhetoric would allow. In 1774, newspapers printed the thank-you notes local committees received for the relief they sent to Boston to build up the common cause. The public signings, stories of tea burnings, stories of tea’s health effects, and stories that gendered tea were all part of Patriots’ campaign to persuade colonists to support the Association. This campaign focused most intently on the powers of committees and Congress, but control of the press also helped enforce the Association (by naming and shaming violators) and affected discussions about tea.⁴² Tea burnings got more press than efforts to end prohibition. Tea advertising similarly vanished even if tea did not. Tea’s supposed ill effects on health were printed widely, but readers still treated tea as a medicine. The revolution was not all propaganda and performance, but propaganda and performance were necessary to create a common cause.

Colonial presses had once published all sides of an issue, but they were heavily censored by 1775. Printers who ran conservative content were politically suspect, relegating such content to a few die-hard Tory printers, whom mobs targeted. When South Carolina printer Robert Wells ran pieces in defense of the Company’s tea in 1773, JUNIUS BRUTUS attacked them as “cloven foot” work and suggested Wells be quiet. Such a stance was “looked upon, even by the most zealous assertors of the liberty of the press … as an insult,” he explained. But at least Wells could print them. In 1775 one correspondent wrote, “It is but very lately that a Tory writer dare appear, or that a Printer could be prevailed on to publish any thing on the side of Government.” When Samuel Loudon was contracted to print a reply to Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, a mob forced him to surrender the printing plates, 1,500 impressions, and the manuscript, which was burned. Patriots warned New York printers: “if you print … anything against the rights and liberties of America … death and destruction, ruin and perdition, shall be your portion.” This was hardly a basis for free debate and information. No more Loyalist tracts were printed in New York until the British occupation. In December 1776, the Philadelphia committee forbade the printers of the Germantowner Zeitung from printing anything.⁴³

It was common to publicly destroy Tory newspapers and copies of parliamentary acts. At Charleston’s Pope Day celebration, the devil had held a copy of James Rivington’s New York Gazetteer. The Ulster County, New York committee burned Samuel Seabury’s Free Thoughts. In Providence, they burned two Tory newspapers with their tea.⁴⁴

Rivington’s Gazetteer became a particular totem of political identification. “As to my being a Tory it was all a Joke,” Charles Beatty explained, “I only used to take Rivington’s papers.” Committees in at least twenty communities from Rhode Island to South Carolina called for boycotts of his Gazetteer, and it was burned as a “dirty, scandalous and traitorous” rag. It is unclear how this affected readership—there seemed to have been plenty of copies to burn. Patriots also pressed Rivington’s advertisers. Connecticut Patriots urged fellow “Friends of America” to avoid Rivington and his advertisers. A New Jersey mob hung Rivington in effigy in April 1775. The following month, another mob ransacked his shop. Later that year, a third mob wrecked his press and took his type.⁴⁵

The attack on conservative printers was an important step in the revolution. With the start of armed combat, it had military necessity, and with the push for independence, political necessity. But its utility dates back earlier, to the Association. The 1770 non-importation agreement collapsed partly because the conservative press had published evidence proving Bostonians who claimed not to be importing from Britain in fact were. Non-importation was more effective in 1775 than in 1770, partly because Patriots “learned the lessons” of 1770: to make the Association binding on all, enforce it more, and keep its inadequacies out of the press.

Suppressing Loyalist writing was construed as protecting freedom, since a free press was the Patriots’ right, not their opponents’. Loyalist writers were imagined to be paid ministerial stooges who neither deserved, nor could be trusted with, a platform. According to the South Carolina Gazette, it was “no Loss of Liberty, that court-minions can complain of, when they are silenced. No man has a right to say a word, which may lame the liberties of his country.” The Newport committee explained, in boycotting Rivington, that a free press meant the right to print “liberal sentiments,” not “wrong sentiments.” The “press of freedom” allowed “rights which all men are entitled to, of speaking their sentiments,” but, as the Philadelphia committee explained in 1775, “raising jealousies among the people” or “counteracting” the revolutionary leadership’s “virtuous exertions against … oppression” was “licentiousness” that deserved “punishment.” “Philadelphius” argued that “censure” of Congress be suppressed from print. As historian Arthur Schlesinger explained, “liberty of speech belonged solely to those who spoke the speech of liberty.”⁴⁶

British officials censored, too. Governor Dunmore denounced the Norfolk Intelligencer’s “poisoning the minds of the people,” seized the press, and began a new paper. But Patriots censored more because there were more presses under their control.⁴⁷

There were two conceptions of the press. One was the free press, which printed only Patriotic writings and was, Robert Martin argues, “violently exclusionary.” Then there was the open press, which printed all views, a tradition that continued in Britain (British papers ran Patriotic content, even as Patriot presses excluded Tory views). Under the “free” press, contesting ideas were neither possible nor desirable. No “fair” contest could be had, explained John Holt of the New York Journal, since Tory presses were biased and full of lies. This kind of censorship risked a “tyranny within,” Myles Cooper lamented. In January 1776, Congress pulled radical Patriots back, instructing them to consider Tory writers misinformed, not evil. By then, most printers had become Patriots or fled.⁴⁸ This was not an environment where nuance about boycotts (or much else) could thrive.

Policing the Mail

News and mail were intricately linked. Newspapers came by mail and ran news received by mail; some postmasters printed newspapers. The Virginia Gazette was printed “at the POST OFFICE.” The Gazette also published correspondence exposing an order from Britain by Andrew Sprowle, contrary to the Association, thereby making an example of the man who had once led Virginia’s merchant community. By controlling mail and the press, Patriots controlled the metapolitics of speech—who could speak to whom and with what constraints and legitimacy.⁴⁹

Both sides weaponized the mail, further constraining public discourse. Lord Dartmouth intercepted Patriot letters. In early 1774, the Boston committee of correspondence proposed a Patriot-controlled post, which printer William Goddard began. Printers were central in setting up this new postal system. The stated purposes were (1) securing committees’ correspondence against ministerial interdiction, and (2) denying revenue to the ministry. Should the Patriot post replace the imperial one, it had the unstated benefit of (3) denying conservatives secure communication. A Continental mail service operated (but was not dominant) in New England and the middle colonies by mid-to-late 1774. However, the King’s riders still carried most mail until after the Battle of Lexington, after which local committees stopped and examined the post. In Hartford, Patriots removed General Gage’s letters and about 300 copies of Rivington’s Gazetteer from the mail and burned them. Writing from Philadelphia in May, Samuel Curwen warned a correspondent in Nantucket that the old post was “stopped,” with the new one only taking “franked” letters, “the contents of which must be known to one of the Committee.” By the end of 1775, Patriots had shut down the “Parliamentary Post” in all thirteen colonies. Meanwhile, the British government opened all mail to or from those colonies by official post. By the end of the year, the ministry began shutting packet services, ordering governors to correspond with Whitehall via the navy. Alarmed colonists increasingly sent letters privately.⁵⁰

The value of controlling information can be seen in the news about the Battles of Lexington and Concord. The Massachusetts provincial congress claimed Gage’s troops fired first and “slaughtered the unarmed, the sick, the helpless.” Lexington militiamen swore depositions to the same, hoping to sway the newspaper-reading public in London. By contrast, General Gage suggested colonists fired first. Who fired first remains unknown. Yet of the two sides, Gage struggled to distribute his version of events. Gage’s account was printed in Boston, which he controlled, and in only one other city in North America. He had sent notices to neighboring governors via gentlemen riders, but Patriots intercepted them. Meanwhile, committees of correspondence ensured their version of the Battles of Lexington and Concord reached as many presses as possible, and that colonists as far away as the Carolinas thought redcoats shot first.⁵¹

Propaganda

Some of this persuasion campaign involved outright propaganda. At the Boston Gazette, Patriots manipulated the news. When John Adams visited, he found two Patriots hard at work, “a curious employment, cooking up paragraphs, articles, occurrences, etc., working the political engine.” In such cases, truth did not always matter. “Throw something into the press to convince the people,” William Ellery urged Henry Marchant, “of the danger we are in from a Tory administration, and don’t be afraid of seasoning it highly. People who have weak appetites must be warmed.” In December 1773, Charles Thomson stirred up Philadelphia about the Company’s’ tea. His handbills were “to kindle a flame of resentment.” “I do not think it unworthy the cause sometimes to borrow aid from the passions,” he added.⁵²

Sometimes Patriots lied outright, as with the Peggy Stewart. The Continental Congress’s Address to the People of Great Britain pretended the East India Company could have brought suit for its lost tea in Boston, a claim the Massachusetts delegation knew was false. Virginia Patriots burned down Norfolk, the colony’s largest mercantile town and a Tory enclave, and successfully blamed Governor Dunmore’s troops. This was a key atrocity pushing colonists to independence. Perhaps it would have been worth asking, why would Dunmore burn a Loyalist town? The lie worked, and colonists, along with generations of US historians, spent the next two centuries falsely believing Dunmore had done it.⁵³

Colonists believed what they wanted, and propaganda gave readers an explanation of events that did not challenge their views. The prevalence of rumors made this easier. As Ambrose Serle, secretary to Lord Howe, lamented from British-occupied New York, the times were “fertile Soil for Lying: So many Fals[e]hoods are told on both Sides, [that] one does not know whom to believe.” Thus one of the central claims made in the Patriot press about the Tea Act was that it was intended to set the precedent of tax payment, but that precedent had been sent, as colonists had been paying taxes on tea since 1770. Some Patriot writers made the lesser claim that the Tea Act would improve imperial tax revenue and, therefore, fund a larger imperial bureaucracy. But admitting that colonists were already paying tea taxes was inconvenient. It was easier for Patriots to flatter colonists that they had been more virtuous than they were. Similarly, the Patriot press described crowds as orderly even when they were not. The Massachusetts Spy could reassure readers that the East India Company tea sent to South Carolina had been “entirely destroyed.” Boston Patriots could overstate Halifax Patriotism and invent a tea party, claiming that, on September 22, 1775, a British tea ship reached Halifax, whereupon “liberty boys immediately committed it to the sea.” As Nova Scotia historian John Brebner notes, Patriots told themselves “what they wanted to believe about Nova Scotia.” For their part, Loyalists could murmur both that colonists were abused for drinking tea and that Patriots drank it extensively. Overall, Patriots’ pretenses flattered readers’ sensibilities and helped the common cause seem proper.⁵⁴

In 1775, Patriots enforced the ban on tea consumption. Enforcing a ban on something presupposes its commission. So, what did these violations of the Association mean? Does enforcement indicate prohibition’s success, or does it indicate the difficulty of getting colonists to comply? Examinations of the boycotts have ignored these questions.

The printed material generated about enforcement is especially bad at answering them, because those prints were part of an effort to encourage colonists to conform to the Association. Genre constrained what such performative texts could say. They were too politic to say the quiet part out loud. To understand colonists’ unguarded thoughts and actions, one must examine less public sources: tea sellers’ records and colonists’ diaries and letters.