Conclusion

Tea and politics took many turns between 1773 and 1776. The connection between the tea protests of 1773 and American independence in 1776 was indirect. The popular memory of 1773 was re-written multiple times. Consider the case of Loyalist shopkeeper and tea seller John Hook. Hook found himself in trouble with the Bedford, Virginia County committee in June 1775 not because he had sold tea, but for saying that “the Bostonians did not behave well in Destroying the Tea” and that they deserved to “get well flog’d.” Worse, he distributed Loyalist pamphlets, and his failure to sign the Association left him a Tory. A year and a half later, by which time Virginia had declared independence from Britain, a magistrate led a “mob association” to attack his house and take him “dead or alive,” “Law or no law.” They charged him with treason, jailed him, and forbade him to sell goods until he answered the charges. “I should have known,” Hook wrote. “I am truly sorry for” having “given offence.” But while the Tea Party was now “universally” seen “throughout this whole Continent” as being for “American Liberty,” it had not been then. At the time, many colonists abhorred the Tea Party. Hook explained that back when he had wished the Bostonians “a scurging for destroying the Tea,” the destruction of the tea “was generally condemned,” but it has “since been justified by the representatives of America,” remade A Good Thing. Hook’s opinion of Boston mattered to Patriots because of what it implied about his Loyalism. In the winter of 1776–1777, his allegiance was to a foreign power with which Virginia was at war. Hook resolved the matter by signing a “Certificate of Fidelity” to the Virginia assembly, which made his opinions about Boston irrelevant. Hook’s opinion matters to us because it suggests public memory can change. After signing his loyalty oath, Hook was free to sell tea (if he had any) to the people of Bedford County. Tea’s past destruction was to be lauded while its present consumption resumed.¹

Most Patriots had preferred to return the Company’s tea, not destroy it. In 1773, Philadelphia, Patriots forced the ship carrying the Company’s tea to turn around. This was the most widely approved-of response. Paul Revere brought news of the Boston Tea Party to Philadelphia on December 24. That news was celebrated, and the Polly, with the Company’s tea, was sighted the next day. But Philadelphia Patriots did not destroy that tea. Even the Boston committee of correspondence conceded (or felt it had to pretend) that the destruction of the tea was lamentable, blaming the consignees, the governor, and customs officers for preventing the tea from returning and forcing Patriots to destroy it. News from Charleston may have encouraged Philadelphians to return their tea. Details of Charleston’s December 3 meeting, including the report that Charleston Patriots preferred to send their tea back, reached Philadelphia by December 22.² Pound for pound, most of the Company’s tea was safely returned, with no risk that impounded tea might be released or, as John Adams noted of the Boston Tea Party, that someone might get too rough. When the tea ship Nancy reached New York in April 1774, that city’s Patriots could have destroyed the Company’s tea on board, as they did a private shipment of dutied tea reaching New York at the same time. But they sent the Nancy back. The destruction of the tea in Boston may have been done by “the people,” but it was not that popular.³

Many across the continent, even prominent Patriots, agreed with Hook that Bostonians “did not behave well” in destroying the tea, leaving an unexploited opening for Lord North and the ministry to pit colonists or Patriots against one another. In defending their actions, Boston Patriots’ could not acknowledge Charleston’s successful alternative—letting customs officers lock the tea up—without acknowledging their own double failure: their violence in response to tea on the Dartmouth, Eleanor, and Beaver and their lack of a response to the tea from the William. There was a high risk that any Company tea stored in Boston would eventually be sold, which was why Patriots downplayed news of the William’s tea. Maintaining a perpetual boycott on Company tea was impractical, because, unlike New York and Charleston, the Boston consignees were not reconciled to the Patriot committees. Unlike Leger and Greenwood, the Clarkes and Hutchinsons had imported dutied tea extensively during the last boycott and could be expected to do so again.⁴

News that the William had wrecked off Cape Cod reached Boston on the evening of December 15, 1773. The next day a notice appeared in the Massachusetts Gazette informing that the crew and “most of the Cargo” were “saved.” The Boston Tea Party occurred on December 16, timed to destroy the tea on the Dartmouth, Beaver, and Eleanor before customs collectors could seize it, but also in the knowledge that even as this tea was being destroyed, tea from the William was likely safe and, for the time being, out of reach. The Boston Tea Party was incomplete from its inception, and Boston Patriots likely knew the William’s tea might undo their work. They initially hoped Cape “Indians” would destroy the William’s tea, but it was soon stored and landed in the castle.⁵

The debate over the destruction of the tea drew attention away from the tea that survived. Yet this surviving tea was important. It was part of why Boston Patriots remained implacably hostile to the Boston consignees in early 1774. To prevent them from bringing suit in court or landing the remaining tea, Patriots hounded them out of Boston.

The Coercive Acts heightened the all-or-nothing conflict between Boston Patriots and the Boston consignees. Either Boston would defy Parliament or: the destroyed tea would be paid for; the William’s tea would be landed; new dutied tea would be allowed in; Parliamentary supremacy would be accepted; and the Tea Act, Coercive Acts, the American Board of Customs, and various trade regulations would function. Payment became a performance of obeisance. For North, the principle mattered more than the money, just as the principle of committee authority embedded in the Association would matter more than any little bit of tea that got through. If average colonists were happier to sign the Association than Boston Patriots were to accept the Coercive Acts, it was because average colonists were less principled.

The Port Act helped Patriots rally colonists to a common cause and made the destruction of tea worth copying. The excess and the incompleteness of the Boston Tea Party were forgotten, as was the response to the Company’s tea in Charleston and Philadelphia. One sign of how quickly popular memory forgot other cities’ role in the tea can be seen in John Leacock’s The First Book of the American Chronicles of the Times. Leacock was a member of the Philadelphia Sons of Liberty, the body which helped send the Polly back.⁶ His story featured tea prominently, even beginning with the Boston Tea Party. Leacock omitted the Philadelphia Sons of Liberty, ignored the Philadelphia mass meeting that forced the captain of the Polly to turn around (a meeting he probably attended himself), and wrote out Philadelphia generally. Leacock did not once mention the fate of the Company’s tea from the William or the London, let alone the Nancy or the Polly. Whereas there had once been many responses to the Company’s tea with many possible outcomes, there was now just one: the Company sent its tea, Bostonians destroyed it, and Parliament passed the Coercive Acts.

In its post-Coercive Acts symbolism, destroying tea acquired a political “truth” detached from what had actually happened. It symbolized the common cause and resistance to what Patriots saw as a dangerous new constitutional settlement. The Acts made the Boston Tea Party seem heroic and justified, a stance reiterated in other tea parties and in the press. In case, as with the Peggy Stewart, locals went so far as to burn the ship itself, Patriots lied and claimed the ship owner did it “voluntarily,” a lie that worked because readers wanted to believe it. Granular local realities—that colonists did not burn all their tea, that they sometimes showed up to tea parties to steal it, and that the alleged destruction of some tea supplies, like in York, Maine, may never have happened at all—these were sacrificed to the greater political truth of unity against Parliament. Imbued with a kernel of truth and facing an audience wanting to believe it, Patriot propaganda thrived.

Meanwhile, the old distinctions that defined how tea was consumed daily faded away. It did not matter whether tea was black or green, bohea or souchong, cheap or expensive, dutied or smuggled, owned directly by the Company or by private English merchants. As a symbol, tea became generic, abstracted from the idiosyncrasies of actual use. This made it easier to pledge to boycott tea (the abstraction) while secreting a small cache for Lovefeasts, courtship, or medicine.

The Association was both the apotheosis of the anti-tea movement and the start of its collapse. Its story of resistance to ministerial oppression let colonists be the protagonists in their own narratives and centered political action in the colonies. It ended imports of tea and other goods from England, thereby ending opportunities for most harborside tea parties. This left the Association as the most visible totem of resistance to the ministry. Dutch tea imports, which were also supposed to stop, were harder to police, less often protested, and may have continued. The Association allowed colonists to publicly say they would not consume tea and banned goods, which, ironically, freed them to continue consuming them in private.

James Thatcher, a Massachusetts military surgeon, begrudgingly acknowledged this. His journal was published in the 1820s, which was probably when, before his first entry, he added an explanation of the coming of the revolution, including the destruction of the tea. Thatcher explained that news of the “Boston Vindictive Port Bill” caused “merely the name of tea” to become “associated with ministerial grievances, and tea drinking is almost tantamount to an open avowal of toryism.” Men “who are anxious to avoid the odious epithet of enemies to their country, strictly prohibit the use of tea in their families.” This was how people wanted to remember the event, but then Thatcher added that others “secretly steal indulgence in their favorite East India beverage” anyway.⁷

Signing the Association worked as a sort of test oath. Yet Patriots enforced actual non-consumption lightly. This is apparent once we realize that much of Patriotic writing about tea was propaganda. This came in the form of press releases and news stories portraying events in a certain light; in the form of claims about tea’s medical dangers and jibes to the effeminacy of tea drinkers; in the form of exhortations not to drink tea; and in the form of rumors promising that the tea in the Charleston Exchange was unusable. But talk is cheap, and it is unclear how many colonists believed it. Even the Patriot colonists who convinced themselves or sincerely believed that tea was unhealthy in 1774 forgot these medical dangers by 1776. Perhaps we should focus more on the hundreds of advertisers who put their money where their mouth was in 1774 and paid to announce that they had tea in their shops while suffering little to no repercussion, or on the falling tea prices of that year, which suggest importers risked their capital and credit to bring in more tea. We might consider the tea holders who, in 1775, lobbied Congress for permission to sell their supplies; the colonists who asked for “medical” exemptions from the tea ban; and the vendors who sold tea under the table, along with the thousands of colonists who bought it. Overlooking all this consumption helped make the Association appear successful.

The war robbed non-importation and non-consumption of meaning. Many of the items captured from British forces were British goods, and they were all—guns, produce, and tea—useful. The war, especially the Battle of Bunker Hill, also made the suggestion that Dartmouth repeal the tea tax as a conciliatory measure laughably too little, too late. Both sides had moved on.⁸ Military service was a better tool than non-consumption for James Thatcher and Robert Dixon to oppose the ministry.

Congress gave up its prohibition on tea in April 1776. Americans—led as always by the good examples of their congressmen—rushed to buy some. Non-consumption failed because it became irrelevant to the resistance, and the end of the tea ban fit into the broader preparation for declaring independence. The tea ban was not formally ended, but Congress created two categories of permitted tea: Dutch tea imported by 1774, and tea taken as prize, categories which were interpreted broadly. After the war, many Loyalists disappeared into the background of American life, as did tea and British goods.⁹

The through-line for tea in the Revolution, the underlying logic that gave it various political meanings—and eventually none—was its significance as a consumer good. Late colonial tea smuggling, the Townshend Acts, and the Company’s shipment of tea in 1773 were recognitions of the small but growing consumer demand for tea in the colonies. Only because colonists consumed tea was it an object of taxation and regulation. Even the Boston Tea Party was not an anti-tea moment per se: it destroyed some tea so that, hopefully, in future years tea could come without unjust taxation and East India Company monopoly. The “virtuous” destruction of tea often implied the existence of less-virtuous colonists who would drink it. Tea prohibition and propaganda were premised on tea being part of how the public participated in the Atlantic consumer world. So, too, was the voyage of the first American tea ship to China a decade later. In all this, merchants, advertisers, and consumers spoke more to public wants about tea than politicians. When South Carolina politicians sold their Company tea, they acknowledged public desire for it.

Later generations added to the myths around the tea protests. One such addition was probably the song in the epigraph at the start of this book, allegedly sung before the Boston Tea Party. It claimed King George would “force our girls and wives” to drink tea. This was laughable, for in 1773, Bostonians decried North and the ministry, not the King. The song was probably written well after the Boston Tea Party (its sourcing is unclear). But with time, it was easy to re-remember the Boston Tea Party as a protest against a King trying to force colonists’ wives to drink tea, even if it was as apocryphal as prima nocta. Family genealogists “discovered” ancestors who participated in the Boston Tea Party. Some surely participated, but verifying participation in a criminal conspiracy that silenced witnesses, avoided record-keeping, and used laborers who could skip town has proven difficult. Chestertown, Maryland town historians “discovered” their town’s little piece of the American pageant, just as John Joseph Henry “remembered” Sargent Robert Dixon’s last words. Americans invented traditions which glorified these protests and gave them latter-day meanings. Yet for people in 1776 and 1777, the protests against rising prices and the lack of imported goods mattered just as much, perhaps more as the protests against tea had.

The fleetingness of tea’s ban recalls the fleetingness of some other consumer movements centering on symbolic actions, such as renaming sauerkraut as liberty cabbage in 1917 and French fries as freedom fries in 2003; neither stuck. Not every boycott or every prohibition fails, but the inadequacy of the prohibition on tea recalls the inadequacy of others: the prohibition of alcohol in the 1920s failed to end alcohol consumption; the drug war that began in the late twentieth century failed to eliminate marijuana. Patriots’ great virtue was in how quickly they realized the futility and ridiculousness of their efforts.

Tea’s final act in American politics would be as a symbol of economic independence. In 1784, the Empress of China was the first US merchant vessel to reach China. Its voyage from New York was marked with newspaper essays, thirteen-gun salutes, and poems. In “On the First American Ship That explored the Rout to China and the East-Indies after the Revolution,” Philip Freneau waxed about the vessel’s sailing “without the leave of Britain’s king.”¹⁰ In finally getting for America the sort of tea previously sourced from Britain and Europe, the Empress of China’s voyage reminds us of tea’s enduring commercial appeal.

The history and the popular memory of tea in the Revolution diverged. The simplified version of the latter was easy enough: Britain imposed tea taxes on America, Bostonians vigorously opposed it, and when Parliament cracked down the colonies united to throw off the British yoke. This left out the detours, the almost-might-have-beens, and the actually-were: how differently Charleston, Philadelphia, and Boston responded to the Company’s tea, how much British tea Bostonians had been drinking, and the likelihood that, had the tea from the Dartmouth, Eleanor, and Beaver been landed, it would have been drunk. It left out how close Boston came to paying for the tea and how the end of a meaningful difference between English and Dutch tea shifted New York and Philadelphia from being the most virtuous (having almost no British tea at all) to the least (being awash in Dutch), even as those Dutch importations lowered prices and kept British tea out. It usually forgot how the Association was violated and ignored the Association’s end. It forgot that tea from the William and the London was landed and ultimately consumed. Both vessels belied the neat little story that the Company’s tea met its end at the bottom of Boston Harbor and that Americans drank coffee and Britons drank tea because Parliament taxed America. Tea’s fast-changing role was mirrored by the rapid changes that terms like Association, Patriot, and Tory underwent between 1773 and 1776.

It is tempting to impose an artificially American reading of the events from Tea Party to independence, to write America as being made in Boston Harbor, but we know the thirteen colonies were not yet distinct from the rest. The question of which colonies would join or not join the rebellion was contested. Tea crisscrossed the rebellion’s lines. Continental soldiers marched into Quebec, a province that had not joined the Association but seemed, for a time, that it might rebel. Quebec had tea and British goods (especially for the fur trading industry). Nova Scotians received cargoes of tea originally destined for Massachusetts and New Hampshire and tried to re-sell some of them back to New England. Other Nova Scotians protested that very same tea. Massachusettsans shipped tea to Barbados and Grenada and back again, and the East India Company’s tea destined for New York stood a fair chance to be landed in Antigua or Halifax instead. In the journey of unbecoming British, tea protests were a funny way to start.

The original East India Company consignees were hardly representative of tea sellers, but the way tea politics passed some of them by is indicative of the way the Revolution moved on from tea. To be sure, in Boston, the Hutchinsons and their in-laws, the Clarkes, left. But they left because of more than tea—the Hutchinsons’ father was hated for his governorship. Thomas Hutchinson Jr. had been appointed a mandamus councillor in 1774 (though he did not take the oath of office) and was an addressor of Gage, and both the Hutchinsons and the Clarkes were prominent Loyalists. Massachusetts Patriots banished both Hutchinsons as well as Richard and Jonathan Clarke in a general banishment order, claiming they had “left this state … and joined the enemies thereof.” Yet Massachusetts Patriots let another Boston consignee, Benjamin Faneuil, live out his days in the state; perhaps he was too elderly to be offensive (he died in 1785 at age eighty-four).

Abraham Lott, treasurer of the Colony of New York, served on the committee of 51 and lived out his days in the United States. Benjamin Booth served on the same committee. New Yorker Henry White was friendly to the Crown but tried to avoid trouble from Patriots. He departed New York, returning once the city was safely in British hands. In Philadelphia, consignees Thomas Wharton Sr. and Henry Drinker were arrested in 1777 on vague charges. The arrests stemmed from the Patriot reoccupation of Philadelphia following the evacuation of British troops. Wharton’s and Drinker’s arrests related to their roles as leading Quakers as much as to their old roles in the tea. They were sent into internal exile in Virginia but returned the next year. Abel James, Drinker’s partner, avoided arrest. Wharton’s health soon faded. James and Drinker stayed on in post-war Philadelphia.

In South Carolina, Peter Leger remained in Charleston until his death in the 1780s, having made his peace with Patriots. Carolina consignee Roger Smith went from serving on Patriotic committees to taking up a post in the new state treasury. Despite rumors he was a “Ministerial Agent,” William Greenwood took an oath to the American cause and served in the rebel forces. He later served in a Loyalist militia during the British occupation of Charleston, fleeing when the British evacuated in 1782. Military service, not tea, made him a Loyalist. If Patriots found some of these men irredeemably odious, it had more to do with their taking up arms for the King, their fleeing to British lines, or their Quaker reticence to declare any allegiance at all than it did with the Company’s tea.¹¹

In the Years That Followed

Where available, tea was a normal drink in revolutionary America. Thus, the week after independence, Englishman Nicholas Cresswell, then in Alexandria, Virginia, could complain in his diary, “This cursed Independence has given me great uneasiness,” even as on July 14 he “Drank tea” at committeeman “Mr. [James] Kirk’s.” Politics, but not tea, was the difference between the men. Cresswell noted elsewhere in his diary: “(Mem. Never to enter into Political disputes with Mr. Kirk. He has rebellious principles.)” Foreign visitors to Philadelphia remarked on Americans’ continued tea consumption in 1777. Now a prisoner, Baroness de Riedesel, wife of the Hessian general surrendering with General John Burgoyne at Saratoga, found that Americans refused to sell food to her and her daughters. “[Y]ou come out of your land to kill us,” they grumbled, and “it is, therefore, our turn to torment you.” Yet the Baroness found even this implacability melted with a bribe of tea. Rachel Graydon made the dangerous journey across the front, from Patriot-controlled Pennsylvania to British-occupied New York, to see her son, an American POW, and to plead with General Howe for his release. By the time the general would see her, she had already thrown “one or two tea-drinkings, at which the rebel clan”—prisoners and Whig sympathizers in the city—attended. In 1778, Grace Galloway, seeking to prevent her family property from being confiscated because of her Loyalist husband, invited the Patriot leader Thomas McKean to discuss the matter—over tea. American prisoners of war in London (who might have more reason than most to make some emotive connection, however faint, with home) asked for monetary relief so that they might buy tea. American General Charles Lee, a prisoner aboard the HMS Centurion, invited Cresswell to chat over tea. One lieutenant in Rochambeau’s army thought Americans’ “favorite drink seems to be tea.” George Washington took it daily while at the Constitutional Convention.¹² Distaste for tea had nothing to do with the creation of a uniquely American identity, even at this, the most anti-British (or at least counter-British) moment in American formation.

The fiction continued that the tea sold after 1776 had been “honestly smuggled” before the Association—but only because tea had become so innocuous that Congress forgot to revisit the issue. In the meantime, the United States signed commercial treaties with European powers, and new tea from Europe reached the United States. The latter began to lay excise taxes. Massachusetts taxed wine, rum, brandy, wheeled carriages, and tea—6 pence on every pound of bohea—with tavernkeepers and tea retailers required to buy licenses. This license regime increased costs for consumers but generated revenue for the state. In 1781, Beverly, Massachusetts resident Joseph Baker paid £50 for a tea seller’s license, valid for one year. (See figure 13.1.) By 1783, the discussion about tea assumed a nation awash in tea and demanding more. Congress not only forgot to finish lifting the prohibition on tea, it also jumped right to taxing it.¹³

Tea’s return did not signal an end to hardship. After 1776, tea, as coffee, was scarce and dear. Homemade brews—made of paucity, not politics—could substitute for both. But tea could be all the more fine in a homespun age. As tea lost its role in non-consumption, its role as a consumer good shone—and access to tea, not the boycott of it, became the issue that upset the Americans rioting in late 1776 for tea to be distributed at a just price. Patriots, as Loyalists, had other ways to show their allegiance. When Patriots arrested the Mayor of Albany, Abraham Cornelius Cuyler, it was for his celebration of the King’s birthday (June 4), not for the tea sent to him a few days prior. Similarly, with no sense of impropriety, Thomas Jefferson could sip tea poured by his slave Richard while drafting the Declaration of Independence. As vital as tea and tea politics had been, Jefferson did not mention tea or the East India Company in that document’s list of grievances against the King.¹⁴ Once more, tea was a consumer good, not a political symbol. For colonists, Patriot, Tory, and otherwise, consumption was the pursuit of happiness.