Counting Tea Ads

Tea advertisements fall into four periods between October 1773 and June 1776, as seen in figure 7.1. Each period corresponds to a discrete political role for tea, suggesting changes were broadly significant, if not uniform. First, there is the period before the Boston Tea Party, a baseline for measuring change. Second, there is the year or so after the Boston Tea Party. Tea advertisements remained common but less frequent, and the decline varied geographically (e.g., ads disappeared in Boston but continued in Philadelphia). In the third period, beginning March 1, 1775, the Association’s non-consumption order was in effect. Almost no tea advertisements appeared in newspapers printed in any territory Patriots controlled during this period. Finally, there is the period beginning April 1776, when tea advertising returned, corresponding to Congress’s April 13, 1776 permission for limited tea sales. Advertisements had returned by the time of American independence.

Figure 7.1 depicts the changing frequency of tea ads. Gray bars show the number of tea advertisements found in a given week. The black line represents the number of weekly advertisements per newspaper examined (the rate of tea advertising). Varying survival and availability of newspapers makes the black line the better tool. If the same tea ad appeared in multiple weeks, it is counted each week it appeared, as this figure measures advertisements per newspaper examined.²

Shipping was seasonal. This partially explains the high level of ads in the fall of 1773; a wave of autumn imports arrived in October and November, unloading and departing northern ports before harbors froze over.³ A springtime import wave occasioned a spike of ads in 1774, with vendors advertising new shipments. This seasonal wave pattern occurred in nearly every colony where tea advertising was found. There was also a baseline of constant tea advertisers, usually shopkeepers in mid-Atlantic and New England market towns. The waves were not caused by an increase in the number of newspapers consulted, and there was no fall 1774 wave, as the Patriots’ signaling against tea in the summer of 1774 discouraged advertising (the extent to which it successfully discouraged sales is another question).

This figure does not represent every tea advertisement but encompasses enough newspapers to capture the print environment. It is based on the Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers database, supplemented with other newspapers. The data cover 46 newspapers printed from Nova Scotia to Georgia, including over 4,300 newspaper issues. During this period, 200 merchants or merchant firms advertised tea over 1,230 times. These data provide the first systematic examination of tea advertising in end-of-empire America.⁴

Tea advertising did not appear with the same frequency across newspapers or cities. Table 7.1 shows tea advertising by geography. Although tea ads appeared for similar periods in Philadelphia and New York, significantly more ads appeared in the latter, despite New York being a smaller city with half as many newspapers. The greater number of advertisements in New York may have been a function of the city’s tea sellers’ preference for advertising as a medium. Virginia merchants largely did not advertise tea. This was not because they eschewed tea but because trade, whether via the factor system or direct order from London, did not necessitate advertising. Norfolk was Virginia’s biggest port, but the Norfolk Intelligencer ran only one ad mentioning tea on and off for four weeks.⁵ In Baltimore and Annapolis, by contrast, tea advertising was more common.

Neither the chart nor the table counts advertisements for generic categories like “East India goods.” In 1774 such ads outnumbered tea ads and persisted even as tea ads fell away. They may have been less explicit tea advertisements. The Patriot prohibition on tea extended to these goods at different paces in different places and was not coterminous with the tea ban.⁶ Likewise, shopkeepers listed tea urns, teacups, teapots, tea tables, and teaspoons, ads that signaled tea culture, without advertising tea. Only ads which explicitly mention tea are considered here.

In 1774 many kinds of advertising announced goods and activities the Association would later ban, including British imports, certain British Caribbean products, horse racing, and other games. These did important semiotic work, announcing that the Association remained yet unimplemented. Tea was also not as widely available as is sometimes imagined. Although only some dry goods merchants advertised tea, almost all advertised coffee and sugar, which were easier to acquire. Others advertised British imports or other soon-to-be-banned goods and activities. All these ads, which far outnumbered tea ads, testified to the consumer culture of late-colonial life and the difficulty of a ban.

Cessation of Advertising

Tea advertising disappeared in different places at different times; the campaign against tea was a process. No New Hampshire tea ads survive from 1774 at all. Elsewhere, advertisements for tea continued through May 1774, ending with news of the Coercive Acts. The last tea ads appeared in Williamsburg, Virginia, Annapolis, Maryland, and Salem, Massachusetts papers in May. June saw the last known ads from eastern Connecticut (New London and Norwich). Tea ads continued in Norfolk, Virginia (more conservative than Williamsburg), Baltimore, Maryland (more conservative than Annapolis), and Charleston, South Carolina into July, with a straggling Baltimore ad by James Dagliesh and John Amos listing tea the following February (the Baltimore County committee announced Dagliesh’s “incurable emity to his country” in May 1775).⁷ The Charleston ads stopped a week after the July general meeting.

Tea ads continued to August 1774 in Providence, though William McKim’s February 1775 ad in the Providence Gazette was a lone straggler. Most Boston merchants stopped advertising tea in January 1774, as they had agreed to stop selling tea then. Still, huckster Benjamin Davis and shopkeeper Gilbert Deblois continued to advertise, the latter until September. Boston merchants were wary of a boycott unless other towns joined, and other the summer, 137 Boston merchants petitioned against the Solemn League and Covenant, which was a dead letter. Samuel Adams thought the League was almost “totally” opposed by importers.⁸ Deblois and Davis risked nothing by advertising tea that they did not already risk with their politics. Deblois had opposed the 1768 non-importation agreement, helped the defense of Captain Preston (of the Boston “Massacre”), and served as an agent for British transports in Boston in 1774. Davis rented his store to British troops in October 1774 and volunteered for the Associated Loyalists militia company in 1775. Both were addressers to Governor Hutchinson, signing the public letter expressing “satisfaction” with his governance. “Addresser” became an epithet for Loyalist. Politically informed readers would have known Deblois’s and Davis’s politics. But these two did not pitch tea as a good to be consumed out of Loyalism. They pitched it as a consumer good, and their readers were politically diverse. In September, the Suffolk Resolves silenced their ads, solidified Boston Patriotism, and pushed Congress toward Continent-wide non-importation.⁹

Tea advertising continued elsewhere, as the ban on Dutch tea sales only took effect in March 1775. Tea ads in Newport, Rhode Island (known for its Tories), lasted through December 1774. Tea ads continued into February in New Haven and Hartford, and into March in Philadelphia and New York. Late advertisers probably rushed to offload stock as the ban on sales drew near. In Georgia, tea ads appeared into June 1775. Georgia joined the Association in July. Tea advertising in 1774 follows no one pattern. Even radicals could not agree on whether tea sales and advertising should stop before the Association came into force.¹⁰

So, what do the tea ads mean? Advertisements are instances of speech, not proof of sales. Even in cases where the end of tea advertising can be linked to a political event, the disappearance of advertising does not mean tea went unsold. Wallace, Davidson, and Johnson sold tea in Annapolis long after the ads stopped there. Patriots policed speech better than they policed behavior.

One must not over-interpret the absence of advertising. Sometimes newspaper issues do not survive. Sometimes tea ads stopped because the merchant ran out of tea, the advertiser ran out of space, or the paper stopped printing. But in larger towns where multiple advertisers and perhaps multiple papers listed tea for sale, it is easier to determine whether the start or stop of advertising reflects one merchant’s circumstances or tea’s role in the public sphere.

Advertisements cannot be equated to sales, and neither ads nor sales can be easily equated to politics. Neither New Hampshire nor Nova Scotia saw much tea advertising in 1774, yet we know that tea was sold in both colonies that year and that, despite this similarity, the two colonies would take divergent political paths. The sole ad in either colony—run by merchant Andrew Wallace in the Nova Scotia Gazette from late June to late July 1774—appeared while Halifax merchants debated tea reshipped from New Hampshire.¹¹ There is no indication whether Halifax’s debate over the New Hampshire tea affected Wallace’s sales. Tea ads were similarly rare in Virginia because Virginians got their tea in other ways.

Yet advertisements are deeply useful. They inform our understanding of political events in new ways. They name a much larger group of potential tea sellers than the small coterie of merchants usually discussed by scholars. This group of advertisers hints at a larger group of tea sellers and—a larger group still—their customers.

Type of Advertising

There were two main types of advertisements listing tea: the litany and the “classified.” Both discussed tea’s consumability without quite proving consumption. Dry goods merchants favored the litany, setting tea among hundreds of items for sale. In these lists, tea was buried in small print, after the “fine Spirits” and before the coffee, one good among many. The South Carolina firm Parker and Hutchings expended dozens of lines listing household goods, with “Tallow and Bees Wax; Tea, Coffee, Chocolate; Loaf and Muscovado Sugar” toward the end.¹² The ad ran for nine weeks. (See figure 7.2.) Readers had to search to find things in these catalog-like ads. Nonetheless, advertisers did not leave tea in heedlessly; they removed tea when they ran out, or it became too impolitic to list by name. Grocers in market towns used litanies to impress readers with the breadth of their wares. Most readers lived in these towns’ commercial peripheries; these ads signaled the advertiser was the merchant to see when going to market. Tea and British manufactures were part of the implicit “everything” that the grocer seemed to sell. Their appearance testified to the continued consumability of such goods.

Other advertisements broke goods out for special mention: first billing in boldfaced type, or last in capitals. Smith and Richards of New York headlined their litany advertisement with an illustration of the sign above their shop: a “Tea canister and two sugar loaves” (see figure 7.3). Samuel Gordon of Charleston advertised “JUST OPENED, A CHEST of fine-flavoured HYSON TEA” (see figure 7.4). Some listed tea last: “He has also some very good Hyson TEA, which he will sell low,” concluded Philip Marchinton’s notice in the Pennsylvania Packet. These ads were more like twentieth-century classifieds than modern newspaper advertisements. Such advertisers drew attention to specific products. In April 1774, William Donaldson of Charleston gave a dense paragraph of wares (“Souchong Tea” slipped in between the forks and the coffee), but broke out other goods. Then in May he broke out “Souchong Tea at 60s. the Pound” instead.¹³ (See figures 7.5 and 7.6.)

Some tea sellers did not advertise—it was understood they stocked tea. This applied to some dry goods merchants. Innkeepers, tavernkeepers, and coffeehouse owners were also understood to carry tea; therefore, few (only eight) advertised it. John Adams’s innkeeper had not advertised tea, but Adams still tried ordering it anyway. Occasionally, when announcing a new inn, a tavernkeeper mentioned he stocked tea, as Duncan Carmichael did upon opening the Red House between Baltimore Town and Philadelphia, but it rarely needed mentioning. Likewise, two apothecaries advertised tea among their balms and elixirs. But apothecaries usually did not need to list it; tea’s purported medicinal properties mean it might be assumed.¹⁴

Advertising as Speech

What did tea advertisements say? Most spoke generically to tea’s consumability. What advertisers meant to say about tea origins is less clear. Mid-Atlantic advertisers did not mention from whence their tea came, but perhaps the ubiquity of Dutch tea implied an answer. Boston advertisers avoided discussing their tea’s origin, perhaps because it was so contentious, or perhaps so they could sell to either side. Charleston advertisers commonly noted teas came from England. In July, Zephaniah Kingsley described his tea as “from London.”¹⁵ Was this an embrace of the idea of consuming British tea, or truth in advertising meant to help consumers make informed choices? It is unclear. Tea prices and varieties, like hyson or bohea, implied certain consumers but were rarely given. Most ads were simply for tea.

Advertisements do not prove tea was sold any more than news of tea protests prove tea was all burned. Ads were speech: statements that tea was for sale, often by merchants who left little other writing behind. Because Patriots policed political speech, most advertisements avoided acknowledging the politicization of tea, leaving ads an area of ostensibly commercial discourse where word of consumption might continue.

Printers ran anti-tea editorials and celebrated tea protests while taking tea advertisers’ money, simultaneously voicing Patriots’ and tea-sellers’ discourses. One issue of the Newport Mercury ran a letter against the “slavery” that the “East-India company’s tea” would bring and also Hezekiah Dayton’s tea ad. The same issue of Purdie and Dixon’s Virginia Gazette informed readers of the Coercive Acts and “very fine Hyson tea.” The Georgia Gazette announced a “subscription for the Relief of the Suffers in Boston” and Gershon Cohen’s tea. The Pennsylvania Packet ran the Cumberland County committee’s version of the Greenwich tea party and carried Richard Bache’s tea ad.¹⁶ The committee spoke to the firebrands. Bache spoke to consumers. These were rival systems of meaning, which, in their juxtaposition, recapture the ambivalence toward boycotts often missed if we look only at Patriotic press releases.

In 1774, not all printers imposed ideological conformity on their pages; fewer did so on paid advertising. Printers had politics, but moderate papers still ran radical content (and vice versa), and Patriot newspapers ran tea advertisements. Patriot Solomon Southwick of the Newport Mercury buried his press and fled the British occupation, allegedly claiming the paper “should die, or be free.”¹⁷ But in 1774, Newport had many who were less Patriotic, and Southwick catered to readers and advertisers by printing much that was inconsistent with a hard Patriot stance. William Bradford hosted in his home the meeting which decided how to oppose the East India Company’s shipment to Philadelphia in 1773. His Pennsylvania Journal took a strong editorial line against tea, published John Dickinson’s denunciation of the 1773 tea scheme and the broadsides from “Committee on Tarring and Feathering,” which threatened pilots who brought the Polly upriver. He served in two battles in the Patriot militia and published the journals of Congress. But he was also a businessman. He ran the London Coffee House, which had a mercantile clientele, and sold marine insurance. He took money to run tea ads from John Mitchell and Richard Bache in the Pennsylvania Journal. Nor were these small ad buys; between May 1774 and March 1775 their ads appeared most weeks. The ultra Benjamin Edes—Patriot, Son of Liberty, member of the Loyal Nine, probable participant in the Boston Tea Party, and publisher of the radical Boston Gazette—printed Loyalist Benjamin Davis’s tea advertisement in May 1774. Even when they might censor or distort news and opinion about tea, Whig printers Ebenezer Watson (Connecticut Courant), John Carter (Providence Gazette), John Holt (New York Journal), John Dunlap (Pennsylvania Packet), William Goddard (Maryland Journal), John Dixon (Virginia Gazette), Peter Timothy (South Carolina Gazette), and Charles Crouch (South Carolina Gazette and Country Journal) by and large did not censor tea ads. They ran these ads as long as they were politically permissible in their respective colonies.¹⁸ Business constrained how politically exclusive these publishers could be.

These printers were not hypocrites. In 1774, printers’ openness to advertising goods that Patriots wanted to boycott reflected the unclear and contested edges of acceptability and Patriot power. In 1775 and 1776, printers were more circumspect, and papers’ division into Loyalist (often “Royal”) gazettes and Patriotic “American” gazettes reflected who held local control. But in 1774, discourse and consumption were only partially politicized, and advertisements remained separate from but parallel to political debate. A good part of the colonial political news of 1774 revolved around consuming and banning goods: the tea parties and the calls for non-importation, non-consumption, and, ultimately, compliance with the Association. This gave the presence or absence of advertisements for tea and British manufactures a capacity to speak to politics even when advertisers did not try to.

Advertisers

Tea advertisers varied. They included wholesalers: Anthony Bleecker of New York, Christopher Champlin of Newport, Roger Smith, George Heriot, and Daniel Tucker in Charleston. Most wholesalers did not advertise tea, even though they probably carried it. The largest group of tea advertisers were minor grocers (John and William Leary of New York and Frederick Bull of Hartford). Some were not merchants at all. Others are impossible to identify and forgotten to history, hardly the politically involved merchants from this period with whom we are familiar.¹⁹

The variety of colonists offering tea for sale suggests “merchant” is a limited category for understanding them. Printers Isaiah Thomas (Patriot) and James Rivington (Loyalist) used their newspapers to advertise their own tea. New Yorker Thomas William Moore’s notices advertised the “private sale” of tea during his real estate auctions. Elnathan Camp offered a “Five Dollars reward” for the return of a stolen barrel with 177 pounds of tea in it. The milliner Margaret Hunter listed tea in the Virginia Gazette among the lace and fabric she sold in her Williamsburg shop, and when Mr. Hoar advertised his concert in the New York Journal, he noted tea would be served. In Pennsylvania, Walter Hall, advertising for the return of stolen silver, concluded his ad, “N.B. Choice Green Tea … to be sold.”²⁰ These ads spoke to tea’s enduring consumability, even if the advertisers were neither prominent nor merchants. They announced tea because readers would not normally assume they had any.

Tea advertisers included prominent colonial families: the Wantons of Rhode Island (Loyalists), the Delanceys of New York (Loyalists), the Wadsworths of Connecticut (Patriots), and colonial officials like New Yorker Abraham de Peyster (Loyalist). Patriotic merchant-politicians advertising tea included Richard Bache (Philadelphia), Stephen Higginson (Salem), and Samuel Allyne Otis (Boston). Patriotic merchants advertising tea included George Woolsey (Baltimore), and Abraham Duryee (New York). Connecticut tea advertiser Jesse Leavenworth served in the war on the American side. Tea advertiser Thomas Achincloss later signed a Loyalist counter-association in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Archibald Cunningham joined the Loyal North British Volunteers in Boston in 1775. Charleston’s Brian Cape was a noted Loyalist.²¹ The only thing these men had in common was that tea was not their primary endeavor, so they had to advertise it; they were slave traders, merchants, and grandees who speculated in tea. They formed no coherent social or political group. Tea advertiser was not a social class, and tea was incidental to their standing.

The protests about East India Company and other tea in 1773 and 1774 directly targeted between forty and forty-five tea importers, including the various Company consignees and private importers of English tea like Thomas Williams in Maryland. These men are the “usual suspects” in most late-colonial stories about tea, stories which make colonial resistance to tea seems widespread and monolithic. This is what Patriots, who wrote the first edition of those stories, wanted. If we only look at people who got in trouble over tea, we will think tea was troublesome. But if we note the hundreds of people who did not get in trouble over tea, we see a very different story. Some importers of dutied tea and many importers of Dutch tea continued unmolested, as did most tea retailers and advertisers. Advertisers, as a category, most closely tracks retailers rather than importers. Of the over 200 individuals advertising tea in this period, the only ones who faced direct action did so because they imported tea: Thomas Williams (Peggy Stewart), Zephaniah Kingsley (Britannia), and William Donaldson (Magna Charta). Meanwhile, hundreds of others advertised tea for sale without the consequences Williams faced, meaning Williams’s experience cannot be representative of tea merchants as a whole. For every importer like Williams, there was a James Nicholson, the importer of dutied tea to Chestertown on the Geddes, who never advertised what he did and skated by; and several Frederick Bulls, minor retailers who advertised tea with little or no consequence. Moreover, it seems likely that most tea sellers did not advertise at all. While twenty tea sellers advertised in the Boston papers in the last quarter of 1773, the town’s post-Tea Party gathering of tea sellers counted one hundred among their number, suggesting another eighty tea vendors who did not advertise.²² Most of these sellers were likely minor vendors, who were an important part of retail networks, further suggesting that a focus on the troubles of a few dozen importers overlooked the varied experiences of hundreds of retailers, whose experiences can be better understood by an analysis of local advertisers rather than of in-hot-water importers, for advertisers’ announcement that tea was for sale implied that area merchants were still allowed to sell it.

Tea advertisers were many things: Patriots and Loyalists, big importers and small retailers. They were not demographically representative of colonists. Nor were Patriot and Tory essayists, who were well-off and educated elites. The contest between politicians and advertisers was a context between two different groups of elites over who spoke to the people’s concerns. Novanglus (John Adams) debated ideas with his Tory opponent Massachusettensis (Daniel Leonard and Jonathan Sewall). Meanwhile, tea advertisers Zephaniah Kingsley (Charleston) and Anthony Bleecker (New York) advertised things. The contest between politicians and advertisers came down to what would happen when Patriots began to offer the public ideas about things.²³

Competing Discourses

Advertisers’ first approach to the boycott movement was to ignore it. Patriots argued that tea ought to be political, but advertisers did not write essays back arguing that tea ought not be politicized. Such essays would have implicitly conceded tea’s politicization. Instead, demonstrating the power of the dictum, “show don’t tell,” tea advertisements demonstrated tea was not exclusively political, without taking a stance on whether it ought to be. Advertisers advanced a consumerist understanding of tea. Ads portrayed tea as just another consumer good. There was more business in speaking of tea as something anyone (even Patriots) could drink than speaking of it as a political symbol. Tea advertisements and anti-tea essays thus appeared side-by-side in the same newspapers but in separate “lanes” that rarely interacted.

A few advertisers acknowledged this contest. Between January 1774 and April 1775, roughly sixty advertisements (in addition to those above) acknowledged tea’s politics by signaling compliance with those politics. Some listed groceries with the addenda, “NB: No tea,” at the bottom (see figure 7.7). One pledged not to sell tea. Others hawked literature opposed to tea drinking. Such compliance theater was not necessarily actually compliance. Some advertisers who claimed to no longer sell tea probably sold it anyway. But “no tea” ads perpetuated a myth useful for Patriots, of tea’s unavailability. Such ads were unusual; most advertisers dropped tea from their merchandise lists without comment. Two-thirds of no-tea ads appeared in Massachusetts. The remainder appeared in other colonies, usually when the Association took effect.²⁴

Then there was shopkeeper William Beadle’s advert. Beadle had migrated from England to North America and settled in Wethersfield, Connecticut. His neighbors knew him as a man of “strict honor and integrity” who dabbled in dark and ambiguous humor and improved himself with theology and Shakespeare. Was he joking at the expense of the Boston tea partiers or the drinkers deprived of their tea when he advertised his “Best Bohea Tea” in March 1774, “Such as Fishes never drink!!”? (See figure 7.8.) The reference to the Boston Tea Party was clear: jokes about fish drinking tea were commonplace. Peter Oliver joked (or perhaps even alleged) that some Bostonians abstained from eating local fish “because they had drank of the East India Tea.” The further implications of Beadle’s joke were also vague. Was he offering Dutch tea? Or was he drawing attention to Connecticut not having a tea boycott? The space for such ambiguity was important: the boundaries of political correctness were inchoate, and Beadle’s humor helped negotiate their drawing. Patriots were not always powerful enough to be defied—as opposed to ignored—by tea advertisers in 1774. Tea advertising remained common in Connecticut, and Beadle bore little burden for his cheek: he placed generic advertisements for tea throughout the spring and summer of 1774 and early 1775.²⁵

Jokes about selling tea cut in various directions. Beadle joked in a different advertisement about the risibly misogynistic Patriotic trope of women unable to resist tea. Another author wrote in to the Massachusetts Gazette, pretending to be a Newport tea importer. Though “T” supported internal taxation and tea sales, he insisted he was a Patriot. To prove it, he denounced “Tea as a Vile, Rotten, Stinking, Lousy, Rascally, Poisonous Drug, fit only for fine ladies and Dutchesses.” The letter mocked the pretend-Patriotism of importers and advertisers (many of whom did claim to be Patriots) and Newport merchants.²⁶ It took more than florid language to be a good Patriot, and T’s letter mocked the idea that Patriotism was merely a word game. And yet, Patriots did favor expressive language.

Patriots generally did not comment on tea advertisements. Roger Martyn, a Woonsocket, Rhode Islander, was one exception. Martyn complained to the Newport Mercury that the paper advertised tea. This made the publisher an “accessory” to the advertiser’s “unjustifiable views.” Martyn asked the printer to publish his letter (which the printer did) so that tea sellers “may consider their ways, repent, and amend,” and the printer could avoid sharing “their guilt.” Martyn’s letter appeared on December 19, 1774, the last issue of the Newport Mercury to carry a tea ad before the ban and was reprinted as far as Virginia. Irascible Charles Lee likewise noticed that James Rivington, the popular and popular-to-hate New York printer, advertised tea. Rivington’s paper circulated widely enough that Lee thought “every body” in Annapolis, “as I dare say they are” in Philadelphia, “is astonish’d that the miscreant Rivington is suffer’d to heap insult upon insult on the Congress with impunity. He has now advertis’d tea to be sold—for God’s sake, as the committee of New York is so profound [asleep w]hy does not your Committee” in Philadelphia “wake ’em?”²⁷

Ads and News

Patriots gamed the news to support their cause. This came from several sources. First, Patriots made the news more easily than law-abiding colonists did because change and disruption were inherently more newsworthy than continuity and stability. Thus the destruction of private shipments of dutied tea on the Fortune (in Boston) and the London (in New York) in March and April 1774 were reported in many newspapers. If we assume these protests somehow spoke for colonists who did not attend, we can easily miss the safe landing of tea in Charleston in February and March. These events, not widely celebrated by Patriots, suggested that some colonists were willing to let tea land.

Patriots also made the news in that they wrote press releases forming part of the budding newspaper campaign against tea. Annapolis Patriots declared support for a colony-wide association on May 25. Baltimore Patriots declared for some form of non-importation on May 31. Inhabitants of other Maryland counties met and announced similar views in the press. A meeting in the “upper part” of Frederick County approved a boycott and pledged to “not, after this day, drink any Tea, not suffer the same to be used in their Families.” On June 22, a provincial congress announced Maryland-wide non-importation—effective at a later date, to be determined by an inter-colonial congress.²⁸ Similar news announcements appeared in print weekly, making tea seem broadly opposed. Change, in the form of a new boycott, committee, or resolve was news. Continuity (no boycott, committee, or resolve) was not.

These resolves did not indicate a broad, popular boycott. Households subscribed to the Association only at the end of the year. Frederick County Patriots’ resolve was a promise about future tea drinking, not a claim about past abstention. It was unclear whether it bound the Patriots who attended the meeting or everyone. Resolves advocated for tea’s politicization and boycott and, as part of that advocacy, depicted tea as more politicized and boycotted than it was.

It was also unclear how Maryland Patriots’ meetings were constituted. “Meeting” evoked the New England town meeting, a formal institution of governance. Maryland meetings were informal. Yet what New Englander, reading of a Maryland county meeting, knew this? The upper part of Frederick County was not a political unit in 1774. What geographic and property qualifications determined who could attend? How was the meeting advertised? Who came? Who spoke? Who voted? Who determined this? We do not know. The meeting claimed to include “about 800 of the principal inhabitants,” but there is no evidence others felt (or did not feel) bound by it afterward. Patriots claimed the populace broadly supported their policies. But that claim is not, by itself, evidence of support. The road from Patriot claims of colonial support to colonial compliance with Patriot orders was long and twisted. On one level, the meeting was just some guys from Fredrick County who, in claiming to speak for everyone, manufactured consent.²⁹

Conservative writers contested the legitimacy of such meetings. Writing in New York, James Rivington pointed to the committee that had sent Captain Lockyer’s tea back. “What is the Committee of Observation? By whom were they appointed? And what authority had they to order Capt. Chambers or any body else to attend them …? Who says … the sense of the city was asked, relatively, either to sending away Capt Lockyer, or the destruction of the tea aboard the London?” The resolutions of “the people” came from a gathering of perhaps less than one-twentieth of population. How could they speak or represent all?³⁰

Rivington’s attacks might be dismissed because of their partisanship. Pro-Patriot readers, who increasingly saw Rivington as a conservative hack, might see these queries as signs of Rivington’s illegitimacy, not their own. And yet Rivington’s queries highlighted the tenuous, contested, and inchoate legitimacy of committees and conventions operating outside of government in 1774. Public discontent was real, but it was not universal.

On the back pages of Maryland’s newspapers, a contrary consumerist tea discourse persisted for a few weeks. Tea advertisements appeared in the Baltimore Maryland Journal and the Annapolis Maryland Gazette, often in the same issues that reported on anti-tea resolutions. Thomas Williams and Co. listed “green congo, and bohea tea” “from London” in Annapolis in May 1774. Thomas Hyde advertised “fine hyson tea” at his Annapolis store in the Maryland Gazette in March, April, and May 1774. In late May and early June, Christopher Johnson offered tea in Baltimore, and Thomas Brook Hodgkin offered “East India” goods from the Geddes in Annapolis. William O’Brien advertised tea in Baltimore in July. The Baltimore committee supported a boycott in principle but had not implemented one, though looking busy with committee work obscured this. These ads and the resolves against tea testified to inconvenient truths: that not all merchant and advertisers were bound by committee resolves, and that there was still tea to boycott.³¹

Boston merchant and Son of Liberty, Harbottle Dorr Jr., indexed Boston newspapers throughout the imperial crisis. His index is sometimes taken as a general handlist of newspaper content, but Dorr’s indexing, like Patriot writing, reflected political choices. Dorr focused on the Patriotic Boston Gazette to the near exclusion of other Boston papers, cherry-picked Patriot news from other colonies (like tea burnings), and ignored conservative news even from his own town, such as Bostonians’ efforts to pay for the East India Company tea. Dorr’s index shows what Sons of Liberty wanted readers to glean from colonial newspapers: that tea was widely hated and the Tea Party widely supported. But it does not show how colonists read newspapers. Notably, Dorr omitted tea advertising.³² Dorr ignored tea’s commercial value to focus on its politics, even though, as a shopkeeper, Dorr knew that commercial value well.

Unlike Rivington or Dorr, eighteenth-century advertisers did not persuade or exhort. Unlike modern advertisers, they did not create demand or desire. Their ads were often grocery lists—items for sale, perhaps graded “best” or “fine.” Advertisers did not push their wares with the zeal that newspaper polemicists pushed their ideas. To further a political goal, anti-tea news and essays told the public tea was or should be disused. They projected a sense that tea was already broadly opposed, which was only sometimes true. Such essays and news cannot be taken at face value. By contrast, advertisements told a simple truth: that tea was available and that advertisers had not been shut down. The Cumberland committee’s version of the Greenwich tea party and Richard Bache’s tea ad appeared in the same newspaper. Not only did they have divergent systems of meaning, but the news was much less reliable than the advertisement. The Cumberland committee pretended not to know how tea in its possession was destroyed and feigned outrage at the Greenwich tea party. Bache, lacking special claims, testified weekly to what was: tea for sale. We, as scholars, must read Patriotic news and editorials with greater care. Advertisements reflected reality; news was propaganda.

In South Carolina, the lie of tea news and the truth of tea advertising were starkly contradictory. The Carolina arrived from London on March 14, 1774. According to Peter Timothy, Patriotic editor of the South Carolina Gazette, the captain “very judiciously refused to bring out what Teas were offered to be shipped by him.” But wishing did not make it so. Bonneau and Wilson began advertising “teas” among their goods on April 4, “a Great Part of which arrived in the Carolina.” Radcliffe and Shepheard also advertised tea brought “by the Carolina, from London” in April. They faced no repercussions. The Union arrived from London on April 23, 1774. According to the Gazette, it arrived “WITHOUT ANY TEA!” as per the South Carolina committee’s non-importation order, which banned tea from being imported from Britain after April 15. Yet, on April 26, Zephaniah Kingsley began advertising tea “just imported in the Union, Capt Coombes, from London.” Samuel Douglass & Company began advertising the same in the Georgia Gazette a few weeks later. Kingsley’s ads ran until mid-July. Timothy’s news may have been fake, but the ads debunking its claims never directly challenged Patriots or their authority—which was why they could continue.³³

When the Magna Charta arrived in June, three merchants, Zephaniah Kingsley, George Thomson, and Parker & Hutchings were advertising (other) teas. In November, Kingsley would have to destroy his tea imported on the Britannia. But in June Kingsley advertised tea expressly “from London” just fine.³⁴

Merchants James Wakefield and William Donaldson imported tea on the Magna Charta, not expecting this tea to be any more politicized than previous cargoes. Patriots put words in Donaldson’s mouth, optimistically claiming in a July 4 press release that he had “refused to receive” the tea. But Donaldson advertised the tea on July 8, as he had advertised tea in April and May. Yet the turn against tea at the July 6–8 general meeting gave him pause. Donaldson edited his advertisement, and on July 15 it ran again, with tea omitted. A few days later, when a mob attacked Captain Maitland for landing the tea, it left Donaldson alone. Donaldson made no mention of his dropping tea from his advertising. He probably wanted to avoid attention (see figures 7.9 and 7.10). Wakefield’s advertisement, appearing on July 12, also omitted tea. The remaining Charleston tea advertisements stopped. Advertisers censored themselves.³⁵

Where and when they continued in 1774 and early 1775, tea advertisements suggest merchants thought advertising was worth the risk. These ads were risks: public statements, readable by all, whatever the merchant’s or printer’s or consumer’s politics. Tea ads did not give tea political significance; they described tea as a consumer good. Tea advertising’s continuation reminds us of Patriots’ lagging ability to shut down this alternate understanding of tea. It implies Patriots lacked even the handful of activists needed to cow advertisers and tea sellers in New York, Pennsylvania, and other market colonies. Even in South Carolina and Maryland, tea advertising lasted longer than the resolves against tea would suggest. Advertisers gave their names. What more did the Sons of Liberty need to pull down their shops?

Newspapers’ Double Valence: The Political World

A press and type were significant capital costs. Once bought, printers wanted to maximize their use. In addition to newspapers, printers printed anything else they could: stationery (the Caroline County committee recorded its proceedings in a notebook bought from printer Alexander Purdie in Williamsburg), almanacs, psalters, pamphlets, broadsides, ballads, sermons, and books. Printers also sold printed matter imported from London. Colonial legislatures contracted to print government acts, other documents, and paper money. Printers bound books, owned paper mills, ran post offices, vended dry goods, or sold medicine (the printer-apothecary was a common English combination).³⁶ Printers maximized newspapers’ readers and advertisers by running political and commercial news and ads. Notably, it was usually the advertiser, not the printer, who retracted ads.

Newspapers were at the core of a political discourse that extended beyond their pages because they reprinted other media, putting a broader range of content alongside advertising. Newspapers serialized political essays, some of which were sold as stand-alone pamphlets. In the newspaper, these essays had rejoinders or assents that were usually absent from the pamphlet. Newspapers also reprinted ephemera. A Mechanic’s Philadelphia broadside against the East India Company’s tea first appeared out of doors for passersby to see on December 4, 1773. The printers of the Pennsylvania Gazette ran it, giving it a new audience: more-distant colonists who could read it indoors in homes, taverns, and coffeehouses. They also gave the notice a new context; it shared an issue with Mason and Dorsey’s ad for smuggled tea. A handbill about the recent tarring and feathering of John Malcom was so vulnerable to being torn down, its text warned that if “any Person should be so hardy as to tear this down, they may expect my severest Resentment.” Edes and Gill extended the handbill’s life by running it in their radical Boston Gazette. They also sharpened its political context. It appeared on the same page as: a few lines directed at tea consignee Benjamin Faneuil, the Salem town meeting’s claim to stop the sale of dutied tea there, a veiled threat that Bostonians might walk out to see the consignees at Castle Island if the harbor froze over enough, and no tea ads.³⁷

Printers’ most important political functions were running local Patriot press releases and re-running stories from out-of-colony newspapers. These combined to distribute Patriotic news across North America. This was not a perfect or systematic effort. Printers did not reprint every handbill or essay. Newspapers were sometimes irregular, as was the mail. Even when a paper was regularly printed, arrived on time, and was promptly read, news traveled with a weeks-long lag. Nevertheless, newspapers linked readers across their circulation areas and interfaced with a larger oral culture.

Larger papers (and, therefore, the ads they carried) had substantial reach. The South Carolina Gazette was read from North Carolina to the Floridas. Roger Smith, George Heriot, and Daniel Tucker’s advertisement for tea lodged “at a store in George-Town” South Carolina thus reached thousands beyond George Town.³⁸ Rivington’s New York Gazetteer spanned the colonies and reached Britain and France, carrying twenty-nine tea ads in 1774. North American German-language prints, catering to a readership widely but thinly distributed across the continent, had particularly broad distribution. The most widely circulated colonial newspaper may have been Henry Miller (Heinrich Muller)’s Wöchentliche Pennsylvanische Staatsbote. His tea advertisers included Anglophone merchants Attmore and Hellings and Mason and Dorsey, who also advertised in Philadelphia’s Anglophone papers (Muller translated advertisements into German free of charge). Miller’s tea advertisers also included Freehauf und Wyntoop, Christoph Becker, and Jacob Schallus, among others, German merchants who did not advertise in the Anglo press, suggesting a category of merchants whose boycott-related activities have been overlooked.³⁹

Rivington’s and Miller’s papers carried tea ads until early 1775, reaching colonies where local tea advertising had already ended. Mid-Atlantic advertising was thus performed before a broadly North American audience.⁴⁰ German-speaking colonists are sometimes seen as having been slow to join the cause, but why should Germans in, say, North Carolina, participate in that colony’s early non-consumption campaign when they could see Philadelphia merchants—Anglo and German—were still offering tea and English goods? One of the many reasons for Carolina Germans’ reticence may be that, as readers of the Staatsbote and its advertisements, they were better informed about the progress of non-importation and non-consumption across the continent than their Anglophone neighbors relying on the local Gazette.

Newspaper content was read locally in public. Clubs, circulating libraries, taverns, and inns took newspapers. Philadelphia’s London Coffee House stocked papers from Rhode Island, South Carolina, Ireland, and England, as well as the proprietor’s Pennsylvania Journal. This embedded print in a public, oral experience. Nicholas Cresswell “went to the Tavern to hear”—not to read—“the Resolves of the Continental Congress.” Reading aloud spread news, included the illiterate, and sparked discussion. Taverns and coffeehouses also served as mail and newspaper distribution and collection centers.⁴¹

In taverns and coffeehouses, colonists responded to tea and boycott news. The Charleston Pope’s Day celebration was thus performed once on the ground, a second time in the press, and a third time as it was cheered in a tavern. Tea could be drunk or renounced there too, for, despite their names, taverns and coffeehouses did serve tea. Even Boston Son of Liberty John Marston’s tavern kept a tea service.⁴² Public tea consumption in such spaces was performative, as John Adams discovered.

Different taverns were for different sorts: travelers, workingmen, politicos, and merchants. In New York, there were Loyalist and Patriot taverns. Taverns served as voting places, army recruiting posts, militia muster points, and perhaps rallying points for the Boston Tea Party, as the epigraph at the start of this book suggests. Charleston taverns hosted half a dozen clubs. In coffeehouses and taverns (the difference between these two blurred), colonists could consume tea and newspapers in a way that linked consumer, mercantile, and political sociability. The “pastry-cook” Francisco Morelli advertised his new “coffee-room,” promising posh Charlestonians “Tea or Coffee” and “every News-Paper that can be procured.” In New York, Thomas William Moore auctioned tea and land in a public house. At the public house, colonists could drink tea, read the newspaper carrying Moore’s adverts, and bid on lots of bohea. In and outside such venues, newspaper advertisements were part of how colonists debated, performed, read, wrote, and spoke about tea.⁴³

Newspapers’ Double Valence: The Commercial World

Advertisements were an unmissable part of the newspaper reading experience. Parliamentary debates and colonial news were important, but they came in long, undifferentiated columns of small print. For ads, Printers jumbled typefaces, capitalizations, lines and borders, manicules—the ☞ symbol—majuscules (large starting letters), and clip-art style illustrations. When Ebenezer Watson ran William Beadle’s tea ad in the Connecticut Courant (see figure 7.8), he included three type sizes and two fonts and played with capitalization, italics, and manicules. The ad Peter Timothy set on the front page of the South Carolina Gazette announced “HYSON TEA” in the largest font outside the masthead (see figures 7.4 and 7.11). Even litany ads were more visually varied than long blocks of news. In a culture where newspapers were pored over carefully and saved for future reference, advertisements were seen.⁴⁴

Advertising took up more column inches than any other component of the colonial newspaper, usually one and a half out of a standard four pages, but sometimes more than half the total page space. Sometimes the front page of the Boston Gazette was entirely given to ads. Timothy routinely placed “New Advertisements” on the front page of the South Carolina Gazette, perhaps reasoning readers were more interested in this than his news, which he pushed to the inside pages. In 1773, he included two- or four-page supplements, comprising mostly ads. Advertising declined during the war, making up only 25 to 30 percent of page space. This reflected paper shortages (which reduced page size, newspaper frequency, and supplements). Even at this reduced level, advertising, paid for weekly or monthly, provided printers with vital cash flow, as they faced recurring costs for ink and paper but collected subscriptions annually. Printers were not dependent on tea advertisers for their livelihoods. The most common advertisements were for real estate, not dry goods. Yet printers did not want to lose any ads prematurely, even as most printers also sought to ingratiate themselves with Patriots. And so they ran ads for things like tea, English goods, and racing, which were all in the midst of being banned, as long as their advertisers would pay. The presence and absence of these ads speak directly to the coming and going of the Association.⁴⁵

Many advertisements containing vital and timely commercial information functioned like business-to-business classifieds. Gordon’s ad did not explain where his store was; his customers knew where to find him. But his ad did indicate the goods he stocked. Charleston advertisers often indicated which ship had carried their goods (which, when cross-referenced with the shipping list indicated when it arrived) and whence it came. This was useful for distant planters considering a new order of goods from town.

Readers sought this sort of news, and some papers announced a specialization in commercial news by calling themselves Advertisers. Timothy did not just happen to run an ad on his front cover—the abundance of advertising was one reason readers bought Timothy’s Gazette at all. Timothy’s Patriotic reporting was another reason. Newspapers printed parallel political and commercial discourses because newspapers had political and commercial appeal. This disjuncture was at the heart of the newspaper reading experience in 1774, a disjuncture that emerged forcefully in the anti-tea propaganda that printers ran alongside their tea ads.