Reception of the Boston Tea Party

Charleston’s response to the tea is not considered as canonical or remembered with the same intensity as the Boston Tea Party—either by the American public or historians. Compared to Massachusetts Patriots, South Carolina Patriots can look “embarrassed” by how their tea party turned out. “Since the Bostonians have destroyed their Teas,” Leger and Greenwood concurred, “our People seem more dissatisfied & are now sorry they sufferd it to be landed.” And yet its landing “under the direction of the Collector,” rather than the consignees, ameliorated this. The Charleston committee claimed to be certain the landed tea would not be drunk. As Timothy explained, the people “were perfectly quiet” when the tea was landed because they “did” and “do still confidently rely, upon its remaining locked up.” If only “the Bostonians could have trusted to their own Virtue, Suffered the Tea to be Landed, & refused to purchase any part of it, as you have done in Charles Town,” South Carolina’s Henry Laurens wrote, then “the Laugh & derision would have been turned against Administration” rather than Boston.¹⁹

Charleston Patriots relied on more than virtue. The tea could be released if the customs collector auctioned off the tea. Colonists and customs officials negotiated authority at the waterfront, and so Charleston Patriots reached understandings that prevented the tea’s release, keeping it in the Exchange at least for the next several months. First, the Charleston consignees had given up their role in the tea. Second, merchants were deterred from bidding on the Company’s tea by the threat not to buy other goods from them. At the same time, merchants who had tea and did not bid on the Company tea would be able to sell their remaining supplies at inflated prices. Third, His Majesty’s collector of customs awaited instructions from London, perhaps with an off-the-books understanding to let the matter rest until then. In the interval, Charleston Patriots could shore up support for tea non-importation.²⁰

The Boston Tea Party was exceptionally violent in part because Boston Patriots could reach no such understandings with Boston consignees and customs collectors. No one had died, but, as John Adams pointed out, people could have. Other colonists, even other Patriots, objected to its general destructiveness. Because of this, the Boston Tea Party did not rally colonists to a common cause in 1773. It divided them.²¹

To be sure, some Patriots approved. “Huzzai” wrote Samuel Chandler in his journal when news of the Boston Tea Party reached him. Some colonists had tea parties of their own. Three nights after Boston, Patriots in Marshfield, Massachusetts took tea from a local ordinary and a deacon’s cellar. They brought the tea to a hilltop, placed it on a stone, prayed, and burned it. The spot is now canonized as Tea Rock Hill. In Charlestown, Massachusetts, Patriots collected tea and burned it in the town center before a crowd. John Hancock claimed, “No one Circumstance could possibly have Taken place more effectually to Unite the Colonies than” sending the Company tea, which is “universally Resented here.”²²

Yet many colonists were outraged by the destruction of the tea. The conservative Massachusetts Provincial Treasurer, Harrison Gray, thought the destruction of the tea “gross immoral” “malignant atrocious” and literally “diabolical.” Patriot elites also disapproved, including George Washington, Benjamin Franklin (who called the Tea Party “an Act of violent Injustice”), Patrick Henry, and Richard Henry Lee. Henry Laurens was not surprised “wily Cromwellians” went to extremes in Boston and preferred Charleston’s “prudent” approach. James Madison preferred Philadelphians’ “discretion.” In Philadelphia, the crowd that sent the Polly back to England voiced its approval of the Boston Tea Party, but the committee disapproved on behalf of the “substantial thinking part” of society. Conservative Peter Oliver falsely imagined that Boston was “generally condemned.” The ever-elusive silent majority would be a common conservative fallacy in the years ahead, but disapproval of the Tea Party was real.²³

Colonists responded to the destruction of the tea in many ways: support, opposition, ambivalence, and indifference. Connecticut Reverend Israel Holly noted “the divided sentiments among us” on the matter. Judging from the resolves they passed in the weeks after the Boston Tea Party, New England towns did not reach a consensus. Watertown and Montague, Massachusetts, supported the destruction of the tea; Freetown and Marshfield, Massachusetts opposed it. Littleton, Massachusetts was so divided it abolished its committee of correspondence altogether. Yet most town resolves made no mention of the destruction of the tea. These resolves opposed the Tea Act and/or urged a tea boycott. Some scholars read these positions as endorsements of the Tea Party. But town resolves were lengthy lists of positions the towns agreed upon. If they had wanted to explicitly endorse destroying the tea, they could have done so by simply adding another resolve to their list. Instead, their silence spoke to their division on the matter. Bostonians were divided, too. Merchant John Rowe, the owner of the tea ship Eleanor (but not a recipient of the tea), served on various Patriot committees concerned with the tea. He noted, “The affair of Destroying the Tea makes Great Noise in the Town.” It was “a Disastrous Affair & some People are much Alarmed,” one way or another.²⁴

Marshfield’s Resolves condemned Boston’s destruction of the tea, demanded the perpetrators be arrested, and implied opposition to the little Marshfield tea party. But then fifty Marshfield Patriots repudiated these resolves in the Massachusetts Spy. In this tit-for-tat Marshfield foreshadowed the crisis of authority that many colonies would face as men on each side claimed men on the other no longer spoke for them. It also pointed to the appeal of uniting and expanding one side of the dispute and imposing one faction’s views upon the other, rather than even trying to speak for the whole across a widening political spectrum. The Boston Tea Party’s canonization in later years (and the little canonizations that went with it, like Marshfield’s Tea Rock Hill) was an example of winners writing history. They reimagined a deeply contested event into an uncontested one, making one faction’s views appear to be a consensus. The idea that colonists broadly supported the destruction of the tea is a myth.²⁵

Colonists across North America disagreed about the virtues of destroying the Company’s tea. It should not be surprising that an attack on property would alarm well-to-do and middling Patriots, or that, since the American Revolution divided colonists, the event that sparked it divided them, too.²⁶ Destroying the tea was popular politics, in the sense that it involved the lower orders, but this does not necessarily mean that it was “popular” in the sense of having broad approval from the populace. When Timothy described Patriots as the “popular” side, his was a deliberate and common Patriot obfuscation of these two senses of the word.

Two signs of the continued divisiveness of the Tea Party were Patriots’ attempts (1) to argue that it could have been worse and (2) to blame others. If the tea on the Dartmouth, Eleanor, and Beaver had not been destroyed, the customs officers’ unloading of it, backed by troops and opposed by an angry crowd, would have led to “bloodshed.” And in any case, Bostonians only had to go to such extremes because, as Boston printer John Boyle explained, the consignees had “frustrated” the efforts of “The People … to preserve the property of the East-India Company, and return it safely to London.” As the Continental Congress explained nearly a year later, the tea was destroyed “because Governor [Thomas] Hutchinson would not suffer it to be returned.” Customs officials came in for blame as well. Boston committeemen said much the same in their letter to the Philadelphia and New York committees, making no mention of the option of storing the tea. But to deny the Tea Party was their fault was to concede that it was blameworthy.²⁷

History and Memory

The dominance of the Boston Tea Party in historical memory obscures the various ways Patriots approached the tea in other cities and the various ways colonists responded to Boston Patriots. Reactions to both mapped poorly onto later political categories like Patriot or Loyalist. Destroying the tea engendered varying measures of support, opposition, division, ambivalence, and indifference. Tea was not always the most important issue in the winter of 1773–1774. Connecticuters were more likely to care about their colony’s Western expansion than the tea in Boston Harbor. Virginians were exercised about Dunmore’s War, and colonists everywhere were concerned about renewed war with Native Americans.²⁸ The meanings and prominence colonists gave tea and the Tea Party were contingent on future events and varied locally, making the through line, from the Boston Tea Party to independence, a misleading overlay of priorities belonging to a later time.

The destruction of the tea in Boston was influential: news of it reached Philadelphia on December 24, just as events there crescendoed, pushing radicals on.²⁹ Patriots lionized the Philadelphia case and ignored Charleston’s. Subsequent events gave Boston’s actions even more importance. Parliament singled out Boston and Massachusetts for punishment in the Coercive Acts, even though tea had been refused in other colonies. Further tea protests in support of Boston after the Coercive Acts became known have been read as support for the Tea Party itself, which was not always true. Tea, by then, had already acquired other meanings. Colonists could rally around Boston in 1774 by burning tea because of the Coercive Acts and despite the Tea Party.

Such complications are forgotten because the Boston Tea Party itself was soon forgotten. The Massachusetts provincial congress did make December 15, 1774, a day of thanksgiving. The next day was the first anniversary of the destruction of the tea, and this thanksgiving hinted at the Tea Party. But Patriots could not celebrate the destruction of the tea—a criminal act—on a holy day. Instead they gave thanks for the common cause “throughout the continent” supporting Boston, and hoped God would restore “harmony and union” between the colonies and Britain. Sermons from this thanksgiving day examined the broader imperial crisis, not the destruction of the tea. By this time, revolutionary attention was moving from tea to gunpowder and militia drills. By 1776 the December 15 commemoration was subsumed by Evacuation Day and the Fourth of July. As Al Young has reminded us, by the end of the American Revolution the Boston Tea Party was no longer commemorated even in Boston. There were no monuments to it. Nor, indeed, was the event even called the “Boston Tea Party” until the 1830s, when it was resurrected in a new wave of historical remembering.³⁰ At the time, colonists called it “the destruction of the tea.”

Yet the Tea Party (a term of convenience that is hard to give up) remained part of private and family history. Perhaps some wrote themselves into the event or misremembered the actions of others as their own, and families recalled progenitors in the best light. The family of William Russell, who claimed to have been a Tea Partier, recalled, perhaps with embellishment, that when he came home from Boston Harbor, he dusted the remaining bits of tea off his shoes into the fire and emptied his tea canister, writing “COFFEE” on one side and “NO TEA” on the other. Samuel Fenno claimed that after destroying the tea he abstained from tea for the rest of his life—remarkable given that his son made a living buying tea in China. Claims of permanent abstention reveal an anachronistic sense of the Tea Party’s meaning: jumping from protest against the Company’s tea to general abolition and extending that abolition over time. In 1773 it was unclear whether other dutied tea would be boycotted, let alone smuggled tea or tea imported into the independent United States. These participants described their roles in destroying the tea as though it were already the “Boston Tea Party” as remembered in the 1830s—a virtuous past seeding an American national present. But the destruction of the tea was a British colonial protest against Parliament, taxes and monopoly, and, for the “rascally” sort who “Convened in the Dark high charged with Liquor,” fun.³¹

Famous Last Words

One example of this gap between history and memory is the story of Pennsylvania Sargent Robert Dixon. Dixon served in the invasion of Quebec. In November 1775, outside the Quebec City walls, a cannonball shot off his leg, fatally wounding him. According to one captain’s journal, a doctor operated, and “advis’d him to drink tea.” “I would not if it would Save my life,” were the “Noble spirit’d” soldier’s alleged words. He died not long thereafter. John Joseph Henry told another version, claiming the wounded Dixon was carried to the house of an “English gentleman” where the doctor saw him, and the “lady of the house” offered tea. “No, madam,” Dixon replied, “it is the ruin of my country.”³²

This story was about nobility in death, but surely Nathan Hale’s purported, “I only regret that I have but one life to give for my country” was a better exit line. At least nine fellow soldiers noted Dixon’s death in their journals. None heard what he said firsthand. They noted his death because it was interesting, perhaps writing for an audience back home. Such anecdotes had to be ben trovato, not necessarily true. Colonial soldiers, like other Britons, also collected interesting “last words.” Dixon’s last words, set in Quebec, evoked General James Wolfe’s then-famous “I die happy” (upon hearing the French were retreating from Quebec in 1759). Yet of the nine accounts, only the two diaries above mentioned tea. One of the other accounts noted Dixon, an early casualty, died with “great composure and resignation.” Yet another noted the “agonies” of his injury and amputation.³³

Dixon’s last words were said to be about incipient American nationalism. According to Henry, Dixon refused tea because of his principles about taxation without representation, “ideas and feelings” which he shared with his “countrymen.” “Hence it was, that no male or female, knowing their rights, if possessed of the least spark of patriotism, would deign to taste of that delightful beverage.” Henry made opposing tea a way to be American, but this was probably spurious. Henry was an embellisher who dictated his memoir thirty-six years later, and then to his daughter, whom he was trying to impress. Henry and Dixon had served together from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and Henry may also have found it useful to make Dixon a Lancaster war hero to counter the county’s reputation for revolutionary ambivalence and pacifism.³⁴

If Dixon did think tea was the “ruin of my country,” what country was that? What country did an Anglo from German-speaking Lancaster fighting a colonial civil war in French-speaking Quebec represent? Pennsylvania? America? Britain? What were the relationships between these places? Rhode Islander William Humphrey, who also served at Quebec, described his as the “Provincial” side, not the American one. Sometimes he called opposing troops “English,” but he also thought Provincials at Quebec “died in a glorious cause” each and every one “worthy of bearing the name of Englishman.” Indeed, some men born in Britain fought on the Provincial side. Taken prisoner after the New Year’s Eve raid on Quebec, some of these “old country” men changed sides and enlisted in the King’s service. Later, some of these same men deserted the King. Meanwhile, Rhode Islander James Frost privateered the St. Lawrence River on behalf of the Crown. Both sides jockeyed for the support of the French-speaking habitants. (With many habitants wary not of “Britons” or “Americans” but of their old enemy, les Bostonnais.) Imputing, as Henry did, latter-day American nationalism to 1775 misses the ambiguous and sometimes quite different loyalties and motives at play.³⁵

If anything, the war detracted from tea’s symbolic appeal. Destroying and boycotting tea could, in 1774, be seen as symbolic self-defense against unjust laws, like the Tea Act and Coercive Acts. But warfare provided literal forms of self-defense, which crowded out boycotts as ways to support the common cause. Among symbolic acts, militarily inflected ones, like commemorating the fallen (especially General Richard Montgomery, martyred at Quebec), had a potency that non-consumption could not match.³⁶ Perhaps the tea in Dixon’s story implied rebels would keep their principles until death, but it was also just odd: in a story about Dixon giving up his life, a real sacrifice, renouncing tea was a distraction.

Dixon’s story hinted at the other things tea could be. Tea could be tyranny, but also a medical aid (when the doctor carried it), a domestic refinement (when served by the lady), “delightful” (according to Henry), and possibly consumed (since it was available). The province of Quebec did not implement the Association. When Continental troops took Montreal, tea and British goods remained available. Merchant David Salisbury Franks retailed tea to Anglophone and Francophone residents of the city—“Enslow the baker” and Madame Sanguinet—selling larger amounts to other merchants, who presumably sold it retail, in all just over one hundred pounds of tea in the first two months of Patriot rule. Franks was also paymaster general for Continental forces in Montreal. There is no evidence he sold Continental soldiers tea, though his ledger is incomplete. Continentals taken prisoner after the raid on Quebec differed on whether to drink tea. Jeremiah Greenman accepted a present of “Sugar & tea & some money” from the Loyalist (and fellow Newporter) Frost. Henry Dearborn described fellow prisoners receiving port, sugar, and “several pounds of tea,” but returning the tea “as the majority thought that it would have been imprudent for us to have drank it.” John Joseph Henry recalled sick prisoners collected alms to buy tea. Henry bought tea, too, despite claiming no Patriot would “deign to taste” it.³⁷

Popular myths that the destruction of the tea was universally acclaimed or that colonists turned away from tea to coffee in the Tea Party do not help our understanding. A trend in American historical writing to emphasize the Revolution’s popularity and downplay Loyalists, a trend only recently arrested, has exacerbated these myths, allowing the Tea Party’s association with the Revolution (which entailed, among other things, a civil war) to seem consensual.

Removed from memory and nation-building, it is easier to see the destruction of the tea as just the destruction of some tea. Colonial consumers liked tea and could not agree on whether to stop drinking it. This division was why the tea had to be destroyed.

Tea: The “Invincible Temptation”

Colonists drank tea. By the early 1770s, colonists of almost all classes, save slaves (and possibly indentured servants), consumed it. Housemaids, laundresses, and other domestics drank tea, sometimes borrowing against future pay to buy it. “[E]ven the very paupers” drank tea twice a day, wrote one contemporary. Philadelphia and New York poorhouses provided tea. Inventories of colonial wealth reveal even relatively poor colonists had tea equipage. Tea was drunk in cities and in country towns. Mohawk and Delaware Indians drank it, and some Native Americans had imported teacups. Tea was part of daily meals in middling homes and at the upper echelons of society. At Rhode Island College (later Brown University), the steward provided “tea, coffee, and chocolate” for breakfast and supper.³⁸

Tea was a mass consumer good, consumed by at least one-quarter of the free adult population daily and a broader swath less often. Other scholars have estimated colonial tea consumption at between 0.5 and 0.75 pounds per capita per year.³⁹ These are estimates because most tea in the colonies was smuggled and, therefore, unrecorded.

In their thirst for tea, colonists were very British, for tea was also a mass consumer good in Britain. Inmates at English poorhouses bought tea with their earnings, and the working poor considered tea a necessity. Different classes consumed tea differently, but all social classes in Britain consumed tea by the 1770s. This can be seen in the statistical data and in the mid-century boom of upper-class writers moaning that the lower classes were reaching above their station by drinking tea. Consumption levels in England reached 1.4 pounds per capita per year in the 1770s.⁴⁰

What did tea mean in the colonies? T. H. Breen argues that the wide distribution of tea and other consumer imports in late colonial North America made these items usable in consumer protests. Colonists who were barred from voting might still be consumers and could participate in politics as consumers. In tea there was the potential for a political movement of consumers who refused to consume.⁴¹

Growing tea consumption made tea protests possible, but tea’s popularity also suggested consumers were unlikely to give it up. The breadth of tea consumption made a boycott hard to organize: it had to be broad and sustained to be meaningful, and it had to be stronger than consumers’ desire for tea. This was why Patriots made sure the Boston Tea Party of 1773 was not a boycott: tea was too popular to boycott.⁴²

Writers opposing the destruction of the tea pointed this out. If colonists disliked tea, they could avoid it. As Virginia Attorney General John Randolph noted, “If a Commodity which is not approved of be brought to Market, no One will purchase it,” leaving little to fear from the tea being landed if it were truly “not approved of.” But, as Robert Carter Nicholas asked in reply: “why should we expect to find a larger Portion of public Virtue amongst” Bostonians than anyone else? “Many … would have refrained from buying, but other probably could not.” Boston Patriots had to destroy the tea because they could not trust other Bostonians to boycott it. Similarly, Massachusetts Patriot James Otis worried New Englanders generally would refuse to “renounce” tea—and that Patriots would have to do it for them. Organizing against the Polly, Benjamin Rush worried that if the tea were landed, “it will find its way amongst us.” So Philadelphia Patriots sought to stop the tea’s landing rather than stop its sale. A desire to buy dutied tea was assumed to encompass most colonies. As one candidate for the Virginia provincial convention explained, the assumption in Boston was that if the tea were landed, it would be “sold” somewhere: “if not in New England, to the other colonies in America.”⁴³

In Boston, Charleston, and Philadelphia in December 1773, Patriots, having railed in the press against tea for months, had to stop the Company’s tea to save face. If colonists bought and drank that tea after Patriots had argued so vociferously against it, Patriots would appear to have little hold on the broader populace. As Samuel Adams explained, “Our credit is at stake.”⁴⁴

Worse, the abundant and affordable Company tea shipments came during high prices and shortages. Smugglers and legal importers anticipated these shipments by reducing their purchases. As the London firm Hayley and Hopkins explained:

The India Company are just shiping a large Quantity of Tea for America upon their own Account, for which reason the Merchants here have unanimously agreed not to execute any orders for that article this Fall, as when the Companys Quantity arrives, Tea must be cheaper in America than in England, and you’ll be able to supply yourself cheaper than we can ship it. what you order of that article is therefore ommited, which we hope you’ll approve.⁴⁵

Supplies fell and prices rose in November and December 1773 in anticipation of the Company’s tea flooding the market, which shortage made Company tea even more appealing. One report to the Company’s directors exaggerated that “there was no tea then to be bought” in Boston in November 1773. Reverend Samuel Cooper, an influential figure in the Boston Patriotic movement, worried a large supply of tea from the Company, at a time of high tea prices, would be an “almost invincible Temptation” for tea sellers. Nicholas also noted the “Temptation of purchasing [Company tea] at Half Price,” compared to what tea had recently sold for.⁴⁶ Consumers, having endured a shortage, might like buying more for less.

This shortage led to a paradox: Patriots were both against tea and against it being expensive. In December 1773, “AN OLD PROPHET” advised readers in the Pennsylvania Gazette “TO USE NO TEA.” Then he argued that the real problem was how expensive tea was, which only mattered if people used it. If “any Person should give to the Sellers more than the usual Price for Tea, he ought to be held up as a mortal Enemy to American Freedom” for bidding up the price. A committee confirmed that prices for bohea tea were high and announced that Patriots had pressured retailers not to exceed six and a half shillings a pound (Pennsylvania currency, which was about 3/11 sterling). This was an admonition against further price increases, but not a price cut. Philadelphia wholesale prices had risen 50 percent over 1773, from 4 to 6 shillings per pound, but the margin between 6/ and 6/6 still left retailers profit.⁴⁷ The committee blamed engrossers for the shortage, but the admonition to “USE NO TEA” failed to lower demand enough to bring the price back down. (See figure C.1.)

Locking up, destroying, and sending back the Company’s tea worsened shortages and prices, risking the Patriots’ position with a people yet to support the boycott fully. Patriots needed to appear to address high prices. Price controls did not end shortages, but they deflected blame and made Patriots look like they were doing something. Thus Worcester Patriots denounced merchants for importing tea and for charging “extortion[ate]” prices in March 1774, even as the Patriots’ own discouraging attitude toward importation worsened prices. The Little Compton, Rhode Island town meeting reacted to rising bohea prices more straightforwardly by refusing to buy from anyone who charged the new price. It is sometimes thought that because Patriots used price controls they did not fully understand supply and demand. Yet ideas of supply and demand were well established enough for a provincial rector like Samuel Seabury to note that non-importation would raise prices. Price controls, rationing, and “virtue”—the logic of the moral economy—let the Patriots appear heroes, lest the logic of the market economy condemn them.⁴⁸

Drinking the Company’s Tea

The biggest myth about the Boston Tea Party is that it destroyed all the tea the Company sent to Boston. The William’s tea was salvaged from Cape Cod and brought to Castle William, on an island just two miles from town. Jurisdictional quibbles had prevented officials from storing the tea from the Dartmouth, Eleanor, and Beaver at the castle. After the tea on those vessels was destroyed, saving the William’s tea became easier. One of the Boston consignees, Jonathan Clarke, rode out to the cape to oversee salvage. He took the key decision to send the William’s tea to Castle Island rather than to Boston proper, informing the other Boston consignees from Cape Cod on December 31, 1773. The castle was an obvious refuge; the other consignees were already holed up there to escape the Boston mob.⁴⁹

On January 1, 1774, the consignees informed Boston customs officers that they would not bring the tea to town or report it at the custom house, as legally required, since it was “utterly out of our power to receive and Sell said Teas.” His Majesty’s Customs should take whatever “steps” were needed, they added.⁵⁰

This looked like a resignation, and at least one contemporary writer reported that the “gentleman Consignees refused to receive” the tea at the castle. But it was actually a feint, as it allowed customs officers to determine it “our Duty to take possession of said tea” when the tea arrived on January 3 without having to wait the standard twenty days to seize it for non-payment of duty. (One way we know it was a feint is that throughout 1774 the consignees, not the customs commissioners, corresponded with the Company about the tea. Despite myriad claims they had resigned, none of the consignees in any of the cities receiving the tea were truly done with it until the tea was gone—sold, send back, or destroyed. As long as the tea lingered, their reputations as merchants necessitated they do the best they could by it.)⁵¹

Before making any final determination, Collector Richard Harrison and Comptroller Robert Hallowell sent the surveyor and searcher out to the castle to inspect the tea. They found fifty-four chests and one barrel of tea out of the original fifty-eight chests sent. Deeming the tea “unsafe in the Kings Store in this Town,” and fearing the tea would be “destroyed was it to come up the Harbour,” customs officers looked for a way to secure it. They first asked Admiral John Montagu to provide protection, then asked Governor Hutchinson and Lieutenant Colonel Leslie, who commanded the regiment at the castle, to store the tea at the castle. The castle offered one of the most secure points in the entire colony. The governor and the colonel agreed, coming to a jurisdictional compromise whereby customs personnel got “the Key of the Room in which it [the tea] is Lodged at the Castle.” There it stayed, protected by the army and navy and “in the Custody of the Officers of the Customs for the Security of the Duty thereon,” the very outcome the Boston Tea Party was meant to avoid. (See figure 1.1.)⁵²

The Boston Tea Party was a forceful refusal of Parliamentary authority. It was also initial and partial, occurring after news reached Boston that “most of the Cargo” had been saved from the William. By tossing the remaining tea into the harbor, Boston Patriots sent a message for Patriots on the Cape to do the same and drowned out news that some of the tea had survived with news that the rest had not.⁵³

The Boston committee had two public relations problems: hiding news of the salvage of the William’s tea and maintaining the right legal distance from the destruction of the Dartmouth’s, Eleanor’s, and Beaver’s tea. Thus, in their letter to the New York and Philadelphia committee (carried by Paul Revere), Boston Patriots pretended they did not know the “people” who “immersed” the tea. They added that the William has been “cast on Shore on the back of Cape Cod,” omitting that any of the cargo was saved while implying but never saying that the William’s tea might be lost. News that the Company’s tea had reached dry land in Massachusetts risked enervating the Patriot movement in New York and Philadelphia, where other tea ships were daily expected. It risked implying the destruction of the tea was ineffective and creating a precedent for storing tea elsewhere.⁵⁴

The idea that the William’s tea was lost spread from Philadelphia to Charleston, where Peter Timothy informed readers of the South Carolina Gazette that “none” of the William’s tea was landed. The Boston Tea Party was so effective in obscuring the fact that a customs collector had seized the Company’s tea that Boston Patriots could chide Charleston Patriots for permitting the same thing. “How great therefore was our Chagrin,” the Boston committee wrote of the landing of the London’s tea, to hear that the “Grand Cause was neglected, & your best Intentions render’d abortive?” The New York Sons of Liberty wrote similarly.⁵⁵

News of the safe storage of the William’s tea did appear in some newspapers. Writers speculated on what this meant. One Boston writer claimed that because Jonathan Clarke had aided the salvage, storage in Castle William was part of the “original design” to sell it. He promised that “watchfulness will be kept upon this tea.” The New-York Journal noted the tea “seems to be a matter of consideration, among the consignees” at the castle, wondering, “What shall be done with it?”⁵⁶ But the legal details of its storage remained unclear, and the entire story was largely buried. It received nowhere near the attention that the destruction of the tea did, one reason most people today have never heard of it.

As 1774 dawned, the story of the East India Company’s tea in North America was not over. Undestroyed Company tea loomed over Boston and Charleston—ready to be landed, sold, and drunk, unraveling the Patriot myth that colonists did not want it. It was not the Tea Party alone that shaped the coming year. It was the interaction between the lingering uncertainty of the surviving tea and the potency and urgency of destroying tea that affected colonial politics. The ongoing choice between selling or destroying the remaining Company tea set up a series of all-or-nothing choices in 1774 to repudiate or validate the Tea Party. This affected subsequent tea protests, responses to the Port Act, and the emergent tea boycott. The political turn against tea was a Patriot triumph, but as a vanguard of revolutionary action it required constant vigilance because it was fragile, tentative, partial, and ultimately temporary.

Patriots did well to be concerned, since most of the William’s tea was drunk. Some of the 10,000 pounds of tea on the William was consumed on Cape Cod in 1774 (where the ship wrecked); most was sold in Boston in 1775, drunk by Massachusetts Loyalists and British soldiers and sailors defending them. (And lest the reader imagine that these consumers do not “count,” recall that in 1773 Patriots were concerned with keeping Company tea away from everyone, whatever their politics.) The 70,000 pounds of tea from the London, locked up in Charleston, was also drunk. South Carolina Patriots sold it off in 1776 and 1777 to help fund the state. This was a far cry from the idea that only Tories drank tea. In both locations, war upended the peacetime constraints that had prevented the teas from being sold, just as it would upend the logic of non-consumption under the Association.⁵⁷

Colonists destroyed 90,000 pounds of Company tea in Boston Harbor, but between Boston and Charleston they drank nearly as much. Meanwhile, most of it, the 423,556 pounds sent on the Polly and Nancy to Philadelphia and New York, went back to England, even as large amounts of smuggled tea continued to come into those ports. The Boston Tea Party was significant—it catalyzed the Revolution—but it was not, on its own, representative of what happened to the other tea, or of what it meant.

The stories described above remind us that events did not always proceed as the canonical understanding of Boston Tea Party would have us imagine. The full story was more complex. Authority on the waterfront was still negotiated in 1774. Tea prices affected (and revealed of success of) consumer politics and boycotts, but not always in straightforward ways. Merchant compliance with Patriot demands could derive from ideology or coercion, but also self-interest. Public pronouncements and newspaper coverage of protests and boycotts were often propagandistic, but merchants’ advertisements and account books belied this rhetoric. As such, the response to tea was contingent upon local choices, choices that could and did unfold differently in different cases, sometimes even preserving tea cargoes.

Colonists, Patriot and Tory, were united in consumerism, and merchants were the men who best spoke to that consumption. In 1774, 1775, and 1776, politicians had a lot to say about consumption. Patriots banned the import, sale, and consumption of tea and British consumer goods, and sought to leverage colonial non-importation, non-consumption, and non-exportation in their feud with Parliament. Parliamentarians, in turn, restricted the colonies’ trade with the rest of the world. The fight with Parliament would go on for years after the Declaration of Independence, but even before independence, Patriots relented on tea; they lifted the ban on April 13, 1776, conceding that colonists saw and treated tea as a consumer good, not a political symbol. After independence, Americans’ tea consumption grew with their affluence.

The story of tea was not simply one of Patriots dashing it from Tory lips. Despite the propaganda, colonists from all political perspectives sometimes bought, sold, and consumed tea after the Tea Party. Colonial attitudes toward tea, 1773–1776, changed over time (because of the Coercive Acts, the Association, the war, and other events). They varied by political camp and by geography. The distinction between smuggled and legal tea complicated these attitudes further. Yet all these complications were ultimately overwhelmed by a desire to continue consuming, one of the many things colonists shared with one another and with Britons in 1776, even if they could not seem to share the same country any longer. In politicizing consumption Patriots got, as in so many other areas, more than they bargained for, as consumers, like other categories of colonists, had notions of their own.⁵⁸