In 1774, tea became a symbol of the colonies’ political transformation. The questions of 1773–1774—what to do about the Company’s shipments, how to respond to the Coercive Acts, and whether to join the Association—all involved tea. “It is Tea that has kept all America trembling for Years. It is Tea that has brought Vengeance upon Boston,” Rev. William Tennent wrote. Tea was, for James Duane, “the fatal cause of our present Misfortunes.” It symbolized Company monopoly, unrepresentative taxation, and parliamentary infringement on colonists’ constitutional rights. In Boston, destroying the Company’s tea was a way, Patriots thought, for colonists to defend their rights at a time when they had only symbolic ways to do so. Elsewhere, burning or drowning tea, even Dutch tea, showed fellow feeling with Boston in destroying its tea, especially in early 1774 when that destruction was still contested. In the summer, tea destruction became a way to form common cause with Boston and oppose the Coercive Acts, though to friends of government, it just looked like rioting.¹

Radicals’ response to the Company’s tea varied across North America and was initially confined to the four cities receiving that tea: Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston. Boston radicals banned all tea sales (English and Dutch) after January 20, 1774. This had many virtues. It made up for Patriots’ allowing English and Dutch tea into the city previously. The ban on Dutch tea pleased legal tea dealers and removed suspicion that smugglers would benefit. The ban was also practical, as English and Dutch teas were hard to differentiate. And it made the high prices, which the Tea Party worsened, impossible to discuss in the press.²

At the same time, the surviving Company tea from the William, brought to the Castle on January 3, remained a threat. If sold, the William’s tea stood to upend Boston Patriots’ claim that the Tea Party and tea boycott reflected popular will. As “An Enemy to Tea, dutied and undutied,” explained the Boston Evening Post, “if undutied Tea should be admitted,” dutied tea would inevitably be introduced as well, and this would allow the consignees to “disperse” across Massachusetts “the East India Company’s’ Tea now at the Castle.” Importers in Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Halifax, and Boston would follow, allowing the Company to make new shipments of tea to Halifax for redistribution to “different parts of America.” The ban on consuming any kind of tea neutralized these threats. While the full cargo from the William would have to travel between the castle and Boston by the main shipping channel, small amounts might be taken from Castle Island to Dorchester Neck. A ferry linked the island and the neck, and the two were nearly connected by sand bars at low tide. (See figure 1.1.) A ban on all tea made it harder to pass off parcels of this tea as “smuggled.” And long as Boston Patriots kept the populace riled up and the ban reasonably well enforced, the consignees had little incentive to hazard the tea in town. Previously, Boston Patriots had banned tea imports to choke off tea sales. Now they banned sales to choke off imports of tea.³

In South Carolina, as in Massachusetts, Patriots had not stopped dutied tea in 1772, with opposition to the Company’s tea in 1773 catalyzing efforts to ban all British tea in early 1774 and to eventually ban Dutch tea, too. The Tea Act made British tea, whether shipped by the Company or private merchants, price competitive with Dutch tea, so both had to be opposed. Opposition to Dutch tea followed to keep merchants on the same footing and prevent British tea from being sold as Dutch.

In Charleston, a January 1774 “general meeting” was supposed to finalize Carolina Patriots’ positions on non-importation and non-consumption. Patriots timed the meeting to coincide with the seating of the colonial legislature, but Lieutenant Governor Bull prorogued the legislature until March, allowing time for things to calm down. Bull had effectively forestalled Charleston Patriots from implementing the non-importation or non-consumption of dutied tea for several months. Given enough time, perhaps the tea, safely in the Exchange, might even be sold.

With the legislature prorogued, Charleston Patriots formed a general committee of forty-five men. It spoke for Charleston as a city and South Carolina as a colony and, most important, coordinated the different parts of the Patriot movement. A quorum of fifteen men, most likely Charleston-area men, could act for the whole if the others were away. The increased cohesion was vital, for radicals blamed the divisions within the South Carolina Patriot movement for their situation. As the Boston committee reminded its Charleston counterpart, “By Uniting we Stood & by dividing we fell.”⁴

The committee, chaired by Christopher Gadsden, included a number of Patriotic planters; merchants; the printer Peter Timothy; and, crucially, the erstwhile East India Company consignee Roger Smith. The general committee was to (1) “diligently” watch the Exchange to prevent the sale of the Company’s tea and (2) review the resolves of the previous December against importing and using tea (about which there still seems to have been disagreement).⁵ By including Smith, the committee ensured he would not assist in the sale of the tea and enabled him to inform on the other consignees should they attempt a sale. Including large number of merchants was a practical way to help watch the Exchange. Over the next half year, the general committee took power from the colonial legislature. The committee called a “general meeting” at the Liberty Tree for March 16, 1774, to deal with tea matters left over from the December 17 meeting. The March meeting was ostensibly open to “Every Inhabitant of the Town or Country”—that is, the free white men—and claimed to represent all of South Carolina. Practically, only colonists who lived in Charleston or had the time and money to travel from the country could attend. This left the meetings dominated by plantation owners (who could stay in their townhouses), merchants, and Charleston tradesmen, while excluding poorer, backcountry settlers, who tended to be more disaffected from the Patriot cause. This meeting was less representative than New England town meetings. Yet Charleston’s meeting did include men from the towns’ lower orders. Fliers went up for a meeting of “Mechanicks” (i.e., the Sons of Liberty) to convene the night before the meeting, and the Sons organized themselves for the general meeting the next day. On March 16, the Sons of Liberty successfully persuaded the general meeting to declare that “NO TEAS” (taxed or smuggled) be imported effective April 16, 1774, and created an “Agreement” to this effect, which was circulated for signing.⁶

South Carolina merchants tried to delay. They avoided the “publick Meetings,” hoping the meeting’s resolves would bind only attendees. (As Christopher Gadsden put it, they “separated themselves from the general Interest.”) But the committee asked the merchants to sign anyway. The merchants quibbled. Some argued that smuggled (and hence untaxed) tea be allowed. Others argued that if taxed items were to be boycotted, then non-importation should include wine and coffee, a point first raised the previous December. Their points were logical (wine and coffee were taxed without colonial representation). These were also “poison pills” meant to scuttle agreement. Gadsden reassured Samuel Adams that these “overvirtuous” and “treacherous” sallies failed.⁷

In New York and Pennsylvania, the boycott of British tea dating from 1770 continued, with residents using only Dutch tea. British tea broadly had already been stopped before the Company tea ships were turned around in those ports. The New York “Association of the Sons of Liberty” declared non-consumption in December 1773 but limited the order to dutied tea, of which there was none. Mid-Atlantic colonies sustained non-importation of British tea had put them at the vanguard of tea politics in 1772. But in 1774 they did not ban Dutch tea, even as other colonies did. Bans on Dutch tea first emerged in colonies where dutied tea had previously been available: South Carolina, Massachusetts, and the Chesapeake, and those bans came fastest in Boston and Charleston, where Company tea was still on hand, an unsold, ever-present threat. New York and Philadelphia imported Dutch tea for much of 1774, even as other colonies banned it. This can make these ports seem politically laggard; yet importation of Dutch tea was crucial in helping to lower colonial tea prices, which was useful since high prices might incentivize new shipments of British tea.⁸

The ministry’s response to the Boston Tea Party, the Coercive Acts, escalated the conflict. The response encompassed four separate laws. The Boston Port Act closed the port of Boston until the destroyed tea was paid for. The Massachusetts Government Act rewrote that colony’s charter to make it more amenable to law and order. The Administration of Justice Act allowed British officials accused of crimes in the colonies to be tried in Britain (fearing unfair trials in the colonies). The Quartering Act allowed soldiers to be housed in unoccupied homes.⁹ Colonists often added to this a fifth intolerable act, the Quebec Act, which expanded Quebec’s territory and its French Catholic colonists’ privileges as far as the Ohio region. The prime minister also sent General Thomas Gage to take over as civilian governor and military commander in Massachusetts. By linking repayment for the Company’s tea in Boston to laws affecting all of the colonies, the Coercive Acts made tea a symbol of resistance to Parliament across the continent.

The Coercive Acts had myriad consequences. One overlooked consequence was the inflammation of tea politics in Boston and Charleston. The acts made the unsold Company tea even more hated. Worse, by not providing a way for the tea to be reshipped to England, the acts left the Company’s tea trapped in these ports, providing an existential motivation for Boston and Charleston Patriots. These Patriots had to maintain a level of radicalization sufficient to keep the tea from being sold, lest sales undermine a now-much-higher-stakes cause.

Boston port closed on June 1, 1774, putting thousands out of work and threatening them with starvation. Whiggish colonists across the continent united against ministerial policy. They fasted and prayed. They sent food. They advocated for a boycott of Britain. And, as George Washington and Benjamin Franklin, they overcame doubts about the Boston Tea Party. Patriots in many colonies responded to the Coercive Acts with more tea parties. Because the Port Act was seen as a way to compel tea duties to be paid in the future, the protest of tea became a way to object to taxation without representation and to the Coercive Acts. As the symbolic value of tea protests grew, colonists became less picky about what tea they burned. Patriots tried to forbid all tea importation and burn whatever tea they had as a sign of opposition to Parliament and solidarity with Boston.¹⁰

Patriots proposed banning imports and exports with Britain and the consumption of British goods. Stopping tea imports symbolically supported broader non-importation, and destroying tea supported broader non-consumption. Such symbolism grew in value as provincial Patriots struggled to unite around non-importation. They needed to unite, since there was no sense in one colony boycotting unless neighboring colonies joined; otherwise the boycott would merely divert business elsewhere. Thus the need for a Continental Congress to form a common response to the Coercive Acts.

A ban on tea in the colonies was far from certain. Various attempts at encouraging non-importation and non-consumption stalled in the summer of 1774. The Boston committee of correspondence tried and failed to get merchants to countermand fall orders, which might be landed in Salem to get around the Port Act, but merchants quibbled; it was too late, the goods were needed, it would not effectively punish Britain, the capital was already committed. So the committee circulated a Solemn League and Covenant with a rapid non-importation deadline of October 1 among inland towns in June 1774. The committee hoped to leverage support of outlying towns to pressure Boston to join. But only seven towns took up the Covenant. Others agreed to a boycott in principle but objected to this one: they needed time to prepare, and Boston would have to join first.¹¹

Non-importation faced an uncertain future in Philadelphia, too. News of the Port Act reached Philadelphia on May 14. But on May 20, a meeting of Philadelphia merchants and lawyers decided to wait on other colonies before acting. Questions emerged. Non-importation affected merchants importing from Britain, not Europe, so some dry goods merchants wondered why should they “risque their whole property, while others are totally excepted from any risque”? Others worried a trade stoppage might create mass unemployment. Why make Philadelphia as poor as Boston? Letting Congress decide about non-importation also suited Philadelphia and New York conservatives, who mistakenly hoped the body would kill the idea entirely.¹²

The Port Act was front-page news in Charleston by June 3, and the Charleston committee sought to gather support from the province with a general meeting, to sit on July 6. Gadsden lamented the colony’s laggardness in banning tea. The “overhasty breaking through and forsaking the first Resolutions [respecting tea] without previously Consulting or so much as acquainting our Committee therewith disgusted many,” he wrote, and was the “principal and most successful” means to “deter us from Farther Engagements.” But the Port Act had unified Charleston Patriots once again. While some questioned the wisdom of non-importation and non-exportation, Timothy informed the Boston committee that “even the Merchants now seem generally inclined to a Non-Importation” of British goods. The Charleston committee thought that “the people here in general” supported non-importation but that non-export remained more difficult. The July 6 gathering met at the Exchange, the same place Carolinians had met the previous December and where the South Carolina Provincial Congress would meet in 1775. Its Great Hall was an amenable meeting spot, and it sat above the customs warehouse storing the London’s tea. Both sides of the non-importation issue ultimately agreed to permit the colony’s congressional delegates to vote as needed on non-importation and non-exportation to reach inter-colonial agreement in Congress. It is unclear whether the presence of so much Company tea affected this.¹³

Responding to the Coercive Acts, Patriots outside Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston entered into tea politics. In several colonies, Patriots marked June 1, 1774, as a solemn day. The Virginia House of Burgesses voted its sympathy with Boston by declaring June 1 a day of “Fasting, Humiliation and Prayer.” In response, Governor Dunmore dissolved the House. House members met at Raleigh Tavern and “recommend[ed] it strongly” not to import tea. They agreed to consume no East India goods personally until the Coercive Acts were repealed. Fredericksburg inhabitants also agreed to neither use nor sell tea. The moderate Loyalist Robert Beverley III agreed that the ministry acted “tyrannically & oppressively [sic] in the Measures they are pursuing,” even though the “Bostonians certainly acted imprudently and unjustly in the Destruction of the Tea.” That summer, Chesapeake radicals began destroying regular, dutied tea and turning around tea ships. When Virginia delegates reassembled as an (illegal) Virginia convention in August, they passed the Virginia Association, also known as the Virginia Non-Importation Agreement, which forbade the importation or use of “tea of any kind” and began non-importation of British goods on November 1, 1774. They also recommended an immediate end to tea consumption and selected delegates to an inter-colonial congress. Virginia’s congressional delegation proposed its association as a model for Congress.¹⁴

It was unclear what significance this congress would have or what, if anything, it would decide on. It was even unclear whether Congress would become a lawmaking body. As Congressman John Routledge pointed out, Congress had “no legal authority.” “Congress” in 1774 meant a meeting or gathering, not a legislature. No colonial legislature was called a congress. Prior congresses—the Albany Congress of 1754 and the Stamp Act Congress of 1765—recommended measures to colonial legislatures and issued declarations; they did not make law, which might have been why some conservatives misjudged the potential of this congress. Few congressmen were elected by properly constituted legislatures. Most, as in Virginia, were chosen by provincial conventions. Though some colonial legislatures subsequently validated conventions’ decisions, it was unclear in the summer of 1774 how authoritative and legitimate the colonies’ conventions and the inter-colonial congress would be. The legitimacy of these bodies was deeply contested. The conventions and Congress, largely lacking conservative voices, were more radical than the colonial legislatures or the populace as a whole and fundamentally unable to represent the spectrum of colonial opinion. Though Joseph Galloway (a moderate in 1774, later a Loyalist) attended the Continental Congress, men like Virginia Attorney General John Randolph, who thought conventions unconstitutional, did not. And many colonies—Quebec, Nova Scotia, Bermuda, the Bahamas, Georgia, the Floridas, and the entire British Caribbean—were unrepresented. By dividing radical colonists from the rest, it was easier for Patriots to unite this rump as though it were a whole. Conservatives’ absence made Patriot action easier. There were other layers of irony here: Patriots worried that their colonial charters were not secure from Parliament, but conventions and congresses, by circumventing elected legislatures, damaged those charters, too, a point Gage made, in vain, to the Massachusetts provincial congress.¹⁵ Meanwhile, by largely failing to attend these conventions, conservatives accelerated the radicalization they abhorred.

Congress met from September 5 to October 26, 1774. On October 20, it promulgated its Continental Association—a non-import, non-export, and non-consumption agreement. Non-importation of tea and British and Irish goods was set to begin December 1, 1774—moved back from November to allow importing merchants to receive the last of their fall goods. The tenth article of the Association added a further grace period until February 1, prior to which importers could buy back seized cargoes, mirroring how customs officials dealt with interdicted goods. As Patrick Henry explained, “We don’t mean to hurt even our Rascalls,” “if We have any.” Non-importation banned some British Caribbean goods but allowed rum and some sugar from the British West Indies—a major loophole, though one which did not benefit merchants based in Britain. Non-consumption of English goods and Dutch tea was to begin on March 1, 1775 (to give merchants time to sell off goods imported before December 1). Non-consumption of British tea would begin immediately. Non-exportation to Britain, Ireland, and the British Caribbean would begin September 10, 1775. These provisions were to stay in place until the Coercive Acts, the tea tax, and all other duties on colonial commerce were repealed.¹⁶

Supposedly, non-importation would pressure merchants in Britain, who would then pressure Parliament. Some colonists thought trade with Britain was unnecessary: “we can do much better without it than they Can,” explained the Worcester committee, though coastal towns may have been less sanguine. As Lieutenant Governor Bull explained, colonists hoped to bring Britain around “by their sufferings.” Some hoped the boycott would influence the outcome of the 1774 parliamentary election. It did not. (The election was completed before the Association was implemented.)¹⁷ Such thinking over-estimated colonial trade’s value to British merchants and those merchants’ political influence.

Congress sacrificed the economic effects of the boycott for inter-colonial political expediency. To be economically viable, the Association would have to inflict more pain on Britain than North America. Yet the delay in non-export allowed tobacco to be supplied to Britain and food and wood to be supplied the British Caribbean for nearly a year. Non-import was supposed to deprive British merchants of a market. Yet colonial merchants placed their 1775 orders in late 1774, robbing non-import of its punch. The size of the free colonial population (roughly one-quarter of Britain’s) also meant that the colonies had never been the main market for British merchants. Instead, by limiting exports to Britain in 1775 to merchants who had already complied with non-import in 1774, the Association ensured local merchants heeded non-import to maintain their access the export market. Thus customs records show thirty vessels departing Annapolis in June 1775, compared to twenty-four departures the previous June, with all the arrivals from Britain in June 1775 carefully “in ballast” to be Associationally compliant and to take on exports. Delayed non-export bought colonial merchants’ and planters’ support of the Association. The Association reflected North American political needs more than transatlantic economic ones.¹⁸

Patriots also thought their past protests and boycotts had been reasonably effective: the Stamp Act protests of 1765 seemed to have gotten the Stamp Act repealed, and the Townshend Act boycott, though it eventually collapsed, appeared to have gotten some taxes repealed, though not the tax on tea. Thus the appeal of a new boycott in 1774, as a means to affect change through political mobilization. Patriots outside Congress also continued to campaign for a boycott, as in Massachusetts Patriots’ Suffolk Resolves, which declared an immediate cessation of trade with Britain, “especially of East-India Teas,” and disobedience to the Massachusetts Government Act.¹⁹

Across the continent local revolutionary committees formed to enforce the Association. This was a radical departure from how previous congresses had worked, driven by Patriots’ desire to improve upon previous non-importation attempts and ensure this boycott did not collapse because of non-compliance. The Association seemed voluntary: committees asked individual householders to sign. But signatures were coerced, and non-signers were punished, often by being proscribed and having their businesses shunned. This effectively changed the Association from a private agreement between signatories into a law that ruled everyone. The transfer of power from chartered colonial legislatures to revolutionary conventions, committees, and congresses was the real revolution of 1774. Tea became a symbol of this, burning it a way for colonists to oppose the ministry, the Tea Act, the Port Act, and the other Coercive Acts, and also a way to support Boston, the Association, the “common cause,” and Patriot authorities.²⁰

Writing in April 1774, South Carolina plantation owner Henry Laurens anticipated and initially recoiled from the consequences of extra-legal rule. Voluntary agreements were fine. But the resolve that “no Tea shall be Imported” necessarily involved imposing the resolution on others. “What right have we to Resolve that no Tea Shall be Imported, bought, or Sold? The desired End, might have been obtained, by a Resolution, that We will not Import, buy, or Sell. Restrain our Selves, but make no attempt to lay violent & illegall prohibitions on our fellow Subjects.” A voluntary association is “acceptable & pleasing,” but a resolve acting as law “Sounds a general alarm & Serves to Arm those who are Inimical to the freedom of America.” Laurens denounced the Coercive Acts as “Violent, Arbitrary, & unjust,” but wondered what his fellow Carolinians were up to. “Surely some Judas has been working among you.” Indeed, the original agreement, proposed at the previous December’s meeting, asked each signatory to sign for “him or herself” only—here, men could not even bind their wives, much less all society. John Greenough, who salvaged the Company’s tea from the William, likewise asked how could “private Persons and Societies” determine “what is lawfull prudent just and right for a Man to say and do and what is not?” To concede to the rule of “Indian Liberty Sons” would be “Liberties destroyd.”²¹ But Greenough had a financial interest in the tea and Laurens, then in London, was out of step with his fellow Carolinians, who did not pursue polite voluntarism, but imposed non-importation and non-consumption on others. Revolutions are not made by consensus.

Laurens did point to a major shift in Patriot thinking. Previous non-importation agreements had failed because, the reasoning went, they lacked teeth. Patriots would not make the same mistake again. The decision to impose non-importation by force was a deliberate toughening.

Tea politics in 1774 were very different from tea politics in 1775. In 1774, Patriots labored to politicize and mobilize the population, and tea helped with this. Politicizing tea and mobilizing people against it (as a stand-in for the ministry) was a slow and incomplete process. Tea remained widely advertised through 1774, often in the same newspapers that carried anti-tea essays or resolutions not to drink it. In 1775, with the Association up and running, tea non-consumption became a test of colonial obedience to Patriot rule, but an increasingly shallow one as war and its preparations took center stage after April 1775.

Patriots shifted their attention to control of gunpowder instead of tea. The struggle had begun in September 1774 when Governor Gage saved the powder stored in Somerville, Massachusetts, and relocated it. This Powder Alarm drew thousands of militiamen from across southern New England to Boston. In December, Patriots from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, seized powder from Fort William and Mary. Gage tried to take powder at Salem in February 1775 and sent troops to Concord to capture colonists’ gunpowder in April, resulting in the Battles of Lexington and Concord on April 19. The next day (and unaware of the fighting in Massachusetts), Virginia Governor Dunmore seized the gunpowder from the Williamsburg magazine, sparking militia activity and unrest there. South Carolina Patriots seized powder in Charleston on April 21. As news of the fighting of Lexington and Concord spread, so did seizures of powder, a more practical and urgent way to support (and show support for) the Patriot cause than burning tea. Other questions colonists asked in 1775—whether and how to fight a war, whether to become independent, what form of government the new states should take—had little to do with tea, and tea faded from public consciousness.²²

In response to the boycott, Parliament passed a series of acts restricting colonial trade. These escalated the conflict and confirmed colonial fears that the Coercive Acts were a model for future laws. North was sure a boycott “could never last.” Yet, rather than letting the boycott fail, he punished the offenders. If the colonies “refused to trade with Great Britain, Great Britain would take care they should trade no where else.”²³ The New England Restraining Act of early 1775 forbade New England to trade abroad except with England, Ireland, and the West Indies. The Trade Act (April 1775) extended these restraints to Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Maryland, Virginia, and South Carolina. The Prohibitory Act (December 1775) banned all trade in the rebellious colonies and authorized naval and privateering vessels to capture their shipping. A response to the fighting, including the colonial endurance at Bunker Hill and the congressional invasion of Canada, it came into effect on January 1, 1776. The act transformed the politics of colonial consumption: if Parliament banned British trade with the colonies, to continue non-importation was to obey Parliament’s ban. Congress repealed its tea ban a few months later.