The Move against Prohibition in New York

A push to lift the tea ban, often with the interests of mid-Atlantic merchants who had imported Dutch tea in mind, began shortly after non-consumption was implemented. The New York committee considered whether tea selling was as bad as buying it in March 1775.² In June, Alexander McDougall wrote to Richard Henry Lee, suggesting those with leftover Dutch tea be permitted to sell their stock and use the proceeds to buy arms. This was less workable in Virginia, where merchants had imported English and Dutch tea, meaning there was less capital to free up by allowing Dutch tea to be sold, and a greater risk that British tea would be sold under Dutch cover. Lee reproached McDougall. He lamented the general want of “public virtue,” worrying that if Congress permitted “the sale and the use of what tea is on hand, may not bad men take the advantage” and import new tea as well and “thus render abortive our Association against this article, the hateful cause of the present disagreeable situation in N. America.” Perhaps he had the collapse of the 1770 boycott on his mind. Lee commended Virginia merchants to McDougall, whom he imagined were better at “public virtue” than New Yorkers—they had “large quantities of stopt Tea” but bore their “misfortune” for the “public good.” “It is more than a year now,” Lee smugly told McDougall, “since the use of Tea has been totally banished from Virginia.”³ Lee’s conceit overlooked both the reality of tea consumption in Virginia and New York merchants’ contribution to keeping British tea out by importing Dutch tea (which helped prevent colonial tea prices from rising enough to make importing British tea worth the risk).

New Yorkers argued that selling stopped tea would free up merchant capital to import arms. The New York committee of safety wanted to import £10,000 of weapons, but importers’ money was still tied up in tea, which made the purchase difficult. As tea-holder Christopher Smith explained to Congressman John Alsop, the city’s “Chief Dependence” for arms had “always” been upon the “Tea Holders,” who had imported tea from Holland, with the Patriotic aim of keeping British tea out. They now had to sell off additional tea to be able to import arms. In July 1775, New York and Philadelphia merchants petitioned Congress for dispensation to sell European tea imported before the Association.⁴ The New York provincial congress added that, though they “do not mean to encourage the future introduction of tea into the Colony,” “Sundry” merchants still had “a very Considerable quantity of Tea” on hand, which, if sold, could aid the importation of “all kinds of ammunition, of which the Colonies are in the greatest want & which are chiefly Imported by the Tea Traders.” In such a situation, “Congress,” New York merchant Peter Keteltas explained to his congressman, John Alsop, “ought not to look with so evil an Eye on those Persons whom in contempt they call Smuglers.” Alsop was sympathetic. A smuggler himself, he owned considerable stocks of stopped tea.⁵

The New York provincial congress added that the “illicit” trade in tea “undoubtedly” continued in New York. Since there was “general consumption of it throughout the Colony,” it made sense to re-authorize and tax this tea, adding revenue to the colony’s treasury. The alternative “clandestine” sales (but not so clandestine as to elude provincial congressmen) were no good for the public.⁶ Richard Henry Lee’s solution—enforcing prohibition—was not discussed.

Congress Debates Prohibition

Rumors of tea consumption reached the Continental Congress. Stories of New York merchants selling tea and mid-Atlantic merchants’ inflated reputation for reluctance in previous boycotts helped these stories spread. In Congress, Samuel Chase of Maryland denounced New York for a “breach of the association” “with Respect to Tea.” Pennsylvania delegate and merchant Thomas Willing concurred. “New York have broken it, entirely,” he said, “ninety-nine in a hundred drink tea” there. In such a climate, it was difficult for the New York Continental Congress delegation to secure permission to sell stopped tea. “[T]ea gives us real Anxiety,” the delegation wrote back to New York. We “sincerely wish to relieve our suffering” tea holders, they wrote, but chances were slim, despite a new petition, this time by Isaac Sears. In November, Congress rejected the New York and Philadelphia “tea holders” request to sell stopped tea.⁷

John Jay thought this “strange,” “frivolous” decision came about because there was “no Tea” south of Philadelphia, except “what has paid Duty,” making southerly delegates unsympathetic to the differentiation between English and Dutch tea and to the tea smugglers’ plight.⁸ However, it is more likely that Congress was unwilling to give up on prohibition so soon after it had begun.

While the tea ban still stood, chinks in the ban on the tea trade with Europe were appearing. In September 1775, Congress set up a secret committee to import war materiel and granted the first exceptions to non-exportation to ships that returned with arms. Merchants made a strong showing on the committee. These merchants were known for their skills in smuggling goods from Europe, and Congress needed smugglers. To get gunpowder to North America, Dutch merchants disguised their gunpowder in, as mentioned, tea chests. Congress permitted limited trade with Bermuda in November 1775, allowing in salt and military supplies along a route that might also bring in tea. The secret committee dispatched Samuel Mifflin’s Peggy to Europe in December 1775, probably to purchase ammunition. The cover story included instructions to return with equal parts sail cloth, linen, and tea. The Peggy’s supercargo would have to have purchased enough of this to hide the real cargo had the HMS Viper not intercepted her a week later. Revolutionaries in Boston, New York, the Chesapeake, and elsewhere contracted with merchants for weapons from abroad, and they all needed some way to transmit payment, which meant exports abroad and increased merchant demands to free up their capital in stopped goods, including tea and British manufactures.⁹

Meanwhile, stories of tea drinking abounded. In December 1775, Congress heard “Information” that “sundry persons in” Philadelphia were selling tea. (They may have sold tea under fake labels.) Congressman McKean informed his colleagues that “many Persons in Pennsa., Maryland and Jersey sell tea and drink Tea upon a [false] Report that Congress has granted Leave so to do & he doubted Whether the Committees had Power to restrain them.” In Maryland, the provincial convention thought “all India teas” imported before March 1775 “may be sold and used without any prejudice to the cause of America” and instructed its congressional delegation to secure permission from Congress. The same day, Congress heard “Information” had emerged “against persons selling tea.” By January 1776, the Philadelphia committee asked Congress for “Directions” for “selling & drinking Tea” in the city where Congress met. One wonders how blind an eye congressmen cast upon the tea illicitly bought, sold, and drunk around them. In January, McKean pressed again to permit pre-Association tea to be sold, but Franklin and Lynch opposed him. The Maryland convention’s similar request to Congress was narrowly rejected on January 15, 1776, with New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Maryland losing 5–7. Some described efforts to loosen the ban on tea as representing Dutch-trade merchants and the “smuggler’s interest.”¹⁰ The description was accurate: the lobbyists asked to authorize Dutch tea, not British tea, and the smugglers with stopped Dutch tea on hand would have benefitted. However, this description tends to dismiss the demands for tea as coming from a narrow interest group rather than reflecting the consumer demand among the populace (for the smuggler’s interest was a function of consumers’ interests). Such a framing also overlooks the expanding group of colonies which wanted to re-authorize tea. If, as Samuel Chase complained, “ninety-nine in a hundred drink tea”—whether in New York or any other town—it can hardly be said that all the tea drinkers were smugglers. Nor can it be said that tea drinking was constrained to New York.

The ban on tea stood, but delegates slowly yielded as they recognized that pronouncements against tea were unheeded: the end of the Association in tea was not a case of congressional edict but of congressional accession to popular will. The great unstated lie of the Association—that colonists who said they would abide by it did so—became more openly admitted. New lies combatted it. The lie that Congress had permitted tea allowed for open violations of the ban. The ensuing claim that the ban was widely and openly violated played an important role in getting Congress to lift the ban. The social need to keep up the appearance of obeying prohibition collapsed when colonists realized they could stop pretending not to consume tea and pretend instead that they thought it was acceptable. They could claim to have heard the ban had ended or pretend to have “medical” needs. In so doing, they realized prohibition was hollow. Once consumption could be admitted out loud, the secrecy around consumption and the lie of prohibition could be dispensed with.¹¹

Three weeks after the Maryland proposal lost and the pro-boycott delegates considered the matter concluded, New Jersey pressed Congress to reconsider, sparking, as Richard Smith noted, renewed “Controversy.” In February, the New Jersey convention reminded Congress that “many persons have publicly sold” tea since the first false report of Congress permitting it, and now new, similar reports were trickling in. New Jersey asked for “Directions,” reminding Congress that since “People” already “sell and use it on a supposed Connivance of Congress,” permission would recognize current practice. Such tales, “often deceitful and always uncertain,” Samuel Tucker grumbled, could not be allowed to quash “established regulation.” But what could one do? The implicit message from New Jersey and other provinces was that tea could not be stopped. However rumors of congressional connivance began, New Jersey residents were willingly repeating them. Responding to a proposal to “stop” “this growing evil” of tea, more than one New Jersey delegate claimed his colleagues had “agreed in Congress that no notice should be taken of the sale or use of East-India Teas in the Eastern Colonies” at all.¹²

Seeing the extent of the rot, on February 13, 1776, Congress scaled back enforcement in the largest city under its control, urging the Philadelphia committee of inspection to halt “censures on the venders, and users of Tea, till farther orders from Congress.” Now Congress was conniving to let tea be sold, for violators no longer risked being blacklisted. March was when Henry, McClallen and Henry advertised for tea in the New York Gazette, suggesting the connivance of Albany Patriots, too.¹³

While enforcement of the tea ban weakened, the rationale vanished. The King proclaimed rebellious ports shut, effective at the end of March 1776. Continuing a trade boycott while the Royal Navy blockaded the colonies would not impress London with the efficacy of the boycott. It would impress London with the efficacy of the British blockade and deny colonists vital supplies to little point. So, on April 6, Congress defied the King and declared its ports open. There were two exceptions: Patriotic colonies remained closed to British goods and all tea. Practically, this was not a big change in what trade Congress permitted, but it was a massive shift in the purpose of non-importation: non-import was no longer expected to affect the British economy since the blockade would have the same effect; rather, it avoided trading with the enemy in wartime. And with the conflict no longer about tea but instead with Britain, the question of Dutch tea came into sharper relief. The same day Congress reaffirmed the boycott on Britain, John Jay, Robert Morris, and Thomas McKean were asked “to bring in a resolution for disposing of and using the Tea now in these colonies.” They pled the tea merchants’ case: merchants had imported Dutch tea to undermine the East India Company but could not sell it before the Association took hold; now good, Patriotic tea vendors faced ruin. Merchants should, they urged, be permitted to sell tea imported before non-importation took effect (December 1, 1774), provided it was not British. As explained in the press, “zealous friends to the American cause” had smuggled in “large quantities” of Dutch tea in 1774. This not only enriched themselves but “counteract[ed] the plan … to sell tea in these colonies subject to a duty.” With tea stopped, Adams’s honest smugglers were “great sufferers,” and Congress would give them relief. On April 13, 1776, Congress permitted tea be “sold and used” again, and published notice of this in the Pennsylvania Gazette four days later.¹⁴

Here, for once, the debate about whether the Patriot leadership acted out of openly stated ideological reasons or unstated economic ones evaporates: Congress meant what it said, and it said it was helping tea merchants. This shift had practical effects: Congress helped tea smugglers because they could smuggle gunpowder. After the King declared rebel ports shut, Congress relied on the “much-maligned” merchant-smugglers for supplies. Whether directly from Europe or indirectly via the Caribbean, arms sailed on the same routes, capital, and connections as tea.¹⁵

Two pretenses stood: only tea imported before December 1, 1774, was allowed, and this tea would not be from Britain. As one tea merchant commented in his journal, “Should be glad if Congress would inform me which way they are to distinguish between that which payed duty and that which has not; or whether the stock of Tea which I have now on had has paid duty or not unless I inform on myself.” The commenter, John Weatherburn, was Patriot enough—he joined a toy militia for Baltimore’s posher Patriots. Congress now reasoned that the three months between non-importation (December 1, 1774) and non-consumption (March 1, 1775) had been “too short.” Congress now argued the lag had been intended to allow “all India tea” smuggled in before December 1774 to be “sold and consumed.” (The congressional record from 1774 does not reflect this.) Allowing merchants who had smuggled tea before December 1774 to sell unsold stock was now said to fulfill the original plan. That tea, and only that tea, could “be sold and used.” All tea imported from the East India Company, from Britain, or which had paid duty remained banned, and “future importation” of any tea—smuggled or otherwise—remained “prohibited.” Underscoring this, the final resolve emphasized the continued “desire of Congress to exclude all teas.” Congress urged local committees of inspection to remain vigilant and ensure no new tea was imported.¹⁶ The one way new tea could be imported was if it were part of a prize cargo.

Despite ostensibly banning new tea imports, Congress was understood to allow them. This was partly because of the contemporary debate over independence, one argument for which was the need to trade and form military alliances with foreign powers. In this context, “A Virginian” wondered in print whether an alliance and trade agreement with France would allow the French to take North American produce and “furnish us with teas” and other consumer goods. The author worried that the trade agreement “will not be made soon enough,” not that French tea would be forbidden.¹⁷ It made sense to allow such tea in, as stopping it had no economic or symbolic value in the struggle against Parliament or Britain. The assumption that such tea was allowed was so thoroughly shared that Congress forgot to repeal its formal ban on tea imports. Instead, new tea masqueraded as old, or as tea taken in prize, just as legal tea had masqueraded as smuggled in 1770, and just as Richard Henry Lee had worried.

Merchants immediately took advantage of the exception for prizes. James Hunter’s Virginia merchant firm listed “Goods most in demand in Virginia,” including various British manufactures and East India goods, among them hyson tea. The firm explained that “All Goods of British Manufacture” needed a falsified “Certificate of their being Prize Goods” to prevent seizure. New tea imports were still illegal when Dutch merchant Jean de Neufville supplied Newporter Christopher Champlin with tea in Newport in 1779 or 1780. De Neufville, who was important as a lender to and supplier for the rebel cause and a key intermediary in negotiating relations with the Dutch, traded with other North American merchants, including Anthony Bleecker, which gave him ample opportunity to ship to tea. Champlin also imported tea from Gothenburg in 1780, following the old smuggling routes that had brought tea from Sweden and the Netherlands in the 1760s. The tea ban still formally stood when the first American merchantmen sailed to China in 1783 and after. It never was repealed, which means, if one takes the Continental Congress’s resolves as standing law, tea imports are still forbidden to this day—that they were never actually stopped is a sign of how thoroughly the ban has been forgotten. Congress acceded to popular will: the people were drinking tea despite what the Association said, and in 1776 congressional “decriminalization” of tea gave consumers a wink and a nod to buy and drink as they wished.¹⁸

Tea’s Return

Congressmen, like other colonists, loved tea. Relieved of the obligation to maintain a virtuous face, they began drinking it and sending it home immediately, some even before they declared independence. Caesar Rodney, who had enforced the Association as a member of the committee of observation and inspection in Kent County, Delaware, in 1775 between stints in Congress, sent a pound of “Green-Tea” to his brother and sister-in-law as soon as Congress permitted. “Tell Betsey to taste it,” he told Thomas Rodney in May 1776, “and if She likes it, I will Send her a pound by the next post.” He promised to send along another “ten or twelve” pounds of “Good Bohea Tea” by water, for even though tea prices were “most abominable high,” he “Could not do without.” In September 1776, John Adams sent a “Pound of Green Tea” to his wife Abigail. “I flattered my self, you would have the poor Relief of a dish of good Tea,” he wrote, a balm amid her worries about smallpox inoculations for the children. Learning the tea had been delivered to Samuel Adams’s wife, Elizabeth, instead, he urged Abigail “send a Card to Mrs. S.A., and let her know the Cannister was intended for You,” though he suspected the other Mrs. Adams might not give it up. “[V]exed” by the awkwardness of the situation, John bought and sent “another Cannister” at what seemed the “amazingly dear” price of 40 shillings “Lawfull Money” a pound, to be sure Abigail got any.¹⁹

Nor were congressmen any more abstemious in their official duties. Arriving in Continental-occupied Montreal, the congressional commission sent to persuade Canadians to join their cause in 1776, which included Benjamin Franklin, Charles Carroll, and Samuel Chase, took tea en route on Lake George and Lake Champlain and was greeted upon arrival in Montreal by “a large assemblage” of French women, with whom the congressmen set down to tea. (Apparently, Henry, McClallen and Henry were right to have eyed the town’s supply.²⁰)

Tea’s social role—as a shared drink and a beverage good hosts provided guests—re-emerged in topsy-turvy ways. When the Connecticut brig Defence put in at Plymouth in June, Abigail Adams spent the afternoon aboard at tea. By contrast, Rhode Island had a sheriff exile Thomas Vernon and other Loyalists who refused the test oath to the farm of Stephen Keech in Glocester, Rhode Island. They enjoyed tea daily in June and July 1776, supplied by Keech as host, and paid for by the now-State of Rhode Island as a necessary expense. These political prisoners drank tea at state expense on the fourth of July.²¹

Virginians were just as tea mad. James Hunter, whose firm had tried to break into tea smuggling a few years earlier, was trading tea in bulk in 1776. When he learned that tea could once again be “indulged,” Virginian Landon Carter had guests over to celebrate. “Not one of them could be satisfied but with two dishes,” he wrote. The ten of them found it so “inebriating” they got nearly “drunk with it.”²² A tea party was, once again, just that.

Meanwhile, tea’s medical role could be openly reaffirmed. It is unclear whether, in 1775, Robert Dixon’s surgeon carried banned tea across the Maine wilderness to treat wounded soldiers in Quebec. But in 1776, Nathaniel Shaw ordered chocolate, coffee, and a bit of tea when laying in orders for the “Hospitle for the Sik” of the Continental fleet.²³

The rapidity with which tea reappeared in shops and taverns reaffirms that some tea had been held aside, not burned. There was not enough time for tea appearing in April and May to be imported after Congress re-authorized it. William Barrell began booking tea sales again in Philadelphia on April 24. Charles Willson Peale took the stage boat from Philadelphia to Wilmington with his family on April 17, 1776, four days after Patriots lifted the ban. They went ashore in Chester, Pennsylvania and had “Coffee & tea at a Tavern.” Peale bought tea in Philadelphia three times in May. Abraham Van Neste sold tea in New Jersey by June 1. By then, the Patriot and tea speculator Isaac Sears had already sold tea in New York. Sears’s ideological credentials were impeccable: member of the New York committee of correspondence; the committees of 51, 60, and 100; and the New York provincial congress, Sears commanded the sloop that policed non-importation in New York Harbor. He also led the mob that destroyed James Rivington’s press. Sears had obtained thirty-nine chests of tea and had already sold ten by May.²⁴ Sears was no hypocrite; tea’s politics had changed.

Tea advertising resurfaced as well. In June, the Patriotic Benjamin Andrews (brother to the John Andrews mentioned in previous chapters) offered tea in Boston, only a few months after Loyalist John Grozart had. Andrews had fled Boston after the Battles of Lexington and Concord, returning after the Continental Army retook the city, at which point it was Grozart’s turn to flee, in his case to Nova Scotia. Both Grozart and Andrews had owned tea in 1775. The difference was when they sold it openly.²⁵

Between April and June 1776, fifteen advertisers in four separate colonies took out twenty-eight discrete tea ads. These spanned eight newspapers. The return of tea advertising was hardly universal, and not every merchant holding tea advertised it. But the ads were as widely distributed as the papers they ran in, and they announced the end of the ban wherever they went. Seeing a Philadelphia advertiser list tea in the Pennsylvania Packet, a New Jersey reader might check whether local vendors had stock. (See table 12.1.)

The advertisements were heaviest in New York and Philadelphia, affirming that traders in those cities had large stocks. The Philadelphia advertisements helpfully directed Adams and other congressmen to shops where they could find tea for their families. Some advertisers were Patriotic: Abraham Brinkerhoff was a member of the committee of 100. On the other hand, Alexander McAulay was probably a Tory.²⁶ Only three of these advertisers had also advertised tea before the ban: Rapalje, Garrigues, and Leary, suggesting some had acquired black market tea during the ban, perhaps on speculation prohibition would end.

War Erodes the Association

Congress authorized tea consumption to allow previously imported Dutch tea to be sold. But it also allowed new tea to come in as prize. Rebels had been looting their opponents since the war began. Prize-taking deprived ministerial troops of sustenance and provided Continental troops with supplies. Parliament’s Trade Act constricted colonial shipping, and its Prohibitory Act declared colonial vessels legitimate prizes for British privateers and naval forces. Colonists’ making prizes of British shipping was an important riposte that might broaden the economic reach of the conflict (by depriving the British Caribbean of food and fuel), while eschewing confrontation with the stronger vessels of the Royal Navy.

And yet neither side had a coherent and effective form of economic warfare. While Continental and colonial (later state) navies took some prizes, privateers (licensed private raiders) took most prizes on the rebel side. This prize-taking enabled a form of trading with the enemy, since by definition legitimate prizes (1) came from Britain or non-Associating colonies, from which the Association banned goods, (2) were owned by local non-Associators with whom colonists were not supposed to trade, or (3) included banned cargoes, like British manufactures and tea. ²⁷

Using goods taken from the enemy was a triumph. Patriots reveled in using British-sourced ships, guns, blankets, and food. Henry Knox famously transported British cannons taken from Fort Ticonderoga to Boston, forcing His Majesty’s troops to withdraw from the city. When Ethan Allen’s Green Mountain Boys took Fort Ticonderoga, they looted the nearby estate of William Friend, commander of one of His Majesty’s sloops on Lake Champlain. They took wine, sugar, rum, feather beds, sheets, and twenty-eight pounds of “Bohe Tea.”²⁸ The rest of the tea in the area probably met a similar fate, including tea in the fort (which Captain Delaplace had recently served to James Jeffry) and at nearby Skenesborough House. Allen’s men were no more abstemious about British tea than Knox was about British cannon—and why should they be? The only real difference between taking British tea and British guns, flour, nails and coal was that there was more of the latter. In the context of so many other seized British goods, some often quite mundane, British tea was normalized.

In late 1775 Captain Manly, commanding the Lee, captured the Little Hannah and brought the vessel into Beverly, Massachusetts. The Little Hannah had sailed from Antigua with provisions for the Royal Navy. Her two small cannons and her powder were valuable, and her liquor and tropical produce considered a necessity. Beverly townsfolk and various ships’ crew looted the brig before Continental agent William Bartlett could inventory it. Bartlett forwarded what bit of Little Hannah’s supplies he could get hold of to George Washington, including a barrel of tea, which Washington noted, had “two Canisters only” in it. Looters seem to have taken the rest. Ever careful about his public image, Washington returned the canisters without using them, but what happened to them when they got back to Beverly is unclear.²⁹

The Little Hannah was one of two cargoes Manly took in quick succession. The other, the Nancy, carried 2,000 muskets plus ammunition and ordinance for British troops in Boston. The Little Hannah and Nancy captures were celebrated in woodcut and song, and Washington placed Manly in charge of his fleet. Other cargoes of tea arrived. The Sukey, in from Cork, Ireland, was taken with beef, butter, potatoes, and “2 large Canisters of Tea.” In September 1776, the privateer Hawke, owned by Rhode Island Governor Nicholas Cooke and merchant John Brown captured the Thomas en route from London to Quebec with blankets, wine, and, among other things, tea. Newburyport man Enoch Hale captured the Friends, a “courageous” act that yielded tea.³⁰

Tea was a rarely noted part of these captures. Washington was the only one we know of who expressed any sense that the Little Hannah’s tea should be held back. Published summaries of the Little Hannah’s cargo rarely mentioned tea (though newspapers relished printing lists of looted goods), and songs celebrating Manly never did. When Sailor Ashley Bowen directly compared the Boston Tea Party to Manly’s taking the Nancy, referring to Manly having “another sort of tea at Cape Ann,” he probably had no idea that his fellow North Shore residents were actually having tea. The Sukey was another noted capture in which the tea escaped note. The Essex Journal relished the loss to the Sukey’s owner (Lewis Gray, son to Tory, and former colonial treasurer, Harrison Gray). A painting even commemorated the capture (but not the tea).³¹

Tea was a small part of the goods taken from British vessels and stores, but there were enough such captures for this to add up. In the first two years of the war, over 700 British merchant vessels were captured, and privateers spread out to the Caribbean and beyond. Precise information about these cargoes does not exist, but vessels supplying British consumers carried some tea often enough. Colonists found this tea unremarkable. Prize-taking subverted the logic of the boycott by providing banned goods, making British manufactures, or British tea, acceptable. Armed victories (Allen’s at Ticonderoga, Manly’s at sea) supplanted boycotts as a focus of colonial celebration. Tea did not make victory less honorable; victory made tea less forbidden. When Congress authorized tea to be taken as a prize, it validated this standing practice. Such prizetaking was so pronounced that in January 1776, the London Public Advertiser joked that provincial ships would soon cruise against the East India Company’s China fleet, so “that they will still drink Tea Duty free.”³²

War was not merely a new, more dramatic theater for abstaining from tea and British goods, as the tales about Robert Dixon dying before Quebec at the beginning of this book might suggest. War was a way to get banned goods. Soldiers could buy tea in Montreal, or Montreal tea could be evacuated to and advertised in Albany. Seizures of Loyalist properties might yield tea, such as the 336 pounds of tea recovered from a raid on Abraham Van Buskirk’s property in January 1777 or the 600 pounds of tea found in a Paramus, New Jersey field that May. Raids on Loyalist property by land, like privateering at sea, had obvious appeal: revolutionary leaders could defray war costs, and individual soldiers or seamen might get some small share of the booty. These were valuable finds. The State of New York sold Van Buskirk’s tea to the men who captured it (one pound of tea per man). The Paramus tea was carefully handed over to George Washington’s quartermaster for distribution. Defying Britain changed from not using British goods to using British goods on American terms. Legitimacy by capture also informed how Patriot authorities rationalized selling and profiting from the massive East India Company tea shipment from the London, sent in 1773, still in the cellar under the Exchange.³³ Patriots began selling it in 1776.

The Company’s Charleston Tea

One consequence of the end of tea prohibition was the sale of the East India Company’s tea in Charleston. In July 1776, Patriot debate about this tea centered on who would profit from it. South Carolina’s President Rutledge sought congressional permission for the state of South Carolina to sell it, but some congressmen wanted to use the money for Continental purposes, or to reimburse Americans whose properties in England might be seized. South Carolina congressional delegates argued the tea had become the King’s property when customs officers seized it in 1773; after independence, it became the state’s, not Congress’s, just as Crown lands and the King’s forts now belonged to the state, not Congress. South Carolina’s congressional delegation convinced their fellow congressmen of this, urging their state’s assembly to sell the tea “immediately,” and “apply the profits” to South Carolina’s budget before Congress changed its mind. They chided Rutledge for asking; it was better to seek forgiveness than permission.³⁴

The South Carolina legislature authorized the sale on September 27, 1776. Ads for the “Publick Teas” sale appeared in the South Carolina and American General Gazette in early October; the first sale took place on October 14 and sales continued into 1777, with the last payment to the state treasury made at the end of that year. (See figure 12.1.) Buyers were limited to twelve pounds each, enough for a small retailer, and prices for all grades of tea were fixed to prevent merchants from buying up the stock and re-selling it at a markup. Impressively, South Carolina Patriots allowed the original tea consignees from 1773, Roger Smith, Peter Leger, and William Greenwood, along with George A. Hall, a South Carolina State Congressman and the new US customs collector for Charleston, to conduct the sales.³⁵

The State of South Carolina received 61,603 South Carolina pounds from tea sales, as valued in 1776 currency. This was a small contribution to the state budget. The sales in the last quarter of 1776 covered only 3 percent of the state’s expenditure for that period. Funds raised by loans, taxes, the South Carolina Insurance Company, or by issuing paper money, were far greater, but the money raised by selling tea in the last quarter of 1776 was enough to fund expenditure on one of the smaller militia regiments (like the Sixth) for that period. In 1777, the tea money was roughly enough to fund the fortification of Charleston. More importantly, funds generated by selling assets rather than printing money did not contribute to the debasement of the state’s currency and the resulting hyperinflation. It took 5,245 South Carolina pounds to buy in May 1780 what 100 pounds had bought in January 1777, which suggests just how desperate the state was for revenue. As such, the tea sales had the fingerprints of the state’s leading Patriots: the state president, the congressional delegation, and the attorney general, along with Colonel Charles Pinckney and the majority of the state legislature, not to mention the covetous, if spurned, members of much of the Continental Congress. All favored selling the East India Company’s tea. In 1776 and 1777, the East India Company’s tea helped Patriots pay for the war.³⁶

Tea Price Controls and Tea Riots

Tea prices rose even before wartime inflation set in, partly because of the shortages of supply brought on by Patriot action. To check “exorbitant prices,” Patriot authorities set tea prices. Congress capped the price for bohea, the most widely commoditized and consumed variety, at three-fourths of a dollar a pound on April 13, 1776. This spoke to the needs of most common consumers to receive supplies of tea and affordable prices. Congress let local and state committees regulate other types of tea, which, due to their smaller markets, might require tailoring to local conditions. The Philadelphia committee of inspection set the price of “the best Green Tea” at 32 shillings 6 pence a pound. The New York committee set prices for congo, souchong, and hyson, and the State of New York took care to sell Van Buskirk’s tea at the Continental price. A Patriot-fixed price further endorsed tea as no Tory thing to buy, a point Attmore and Hellings’s advertisement implied when it offered “Tea at the price limited by Congress.”³⁷ These fixed prices picked up on the just price theory enshrined in the Association (which had barred vendors from raising prices as a result of non-importation), but they may not have had much effect on the black market.

The new set price for bohea came to 3s 4½d sterling, substantially lower than what merchants in Newport and Savannah had been charging during prohibition and lower than what merchants elsewhere soon tried to charge.³⁸ Colonists described price increases in moral terms, seeing them as evidence of merchants taking advantage rather than the consequence of their own demand and a dwindling supply. Similarly, Patriots were unwilling to admit that cutting supplies (by destroying tea and stopping new imports) affected price. The fundamental conflict over tea in 1776 was thus between, on the one hand, consumers’ demand for cheap and plentiful tea and other imported goods (expressed in revolutionary just-price language) and, on the other hand, the shortages caused by revolutionary action and British blockades.

Price controls were not always successful. In May, Isaac Sears complained that New York merchants were charging so much that it pushed New Haven merchants away from the controlled price. Sears averred that he sold tea at the fixed price but worried that speculators would re-sell it on the black market for triple the value. In April, the Albany committee, faced with shortages, set prices for tea, coffee, molasses, sugar, rum, and salt. Within a month, the Albany committee found before it a merchant accused of overcharging for tea. He was found guilty and held up “to the public view as an Enemy to his Country.” Another merchant charged the set price but added two shillings “for his trouble in weighing.” The committee ordered him to be boycotted and punished several others for not supplying Albany’s tea addiction cheaply enough.³⁹

Congressman and merchant John Alsop was called before the New York City committee for offering tea wholesale at the set retail price and demanding half the money in specie (vendors were required to accept paper money). In explaining how retailers could profit in such a situation, Alsop also recommended they overcharge. Alsop was let off on the grounds that though he offered tea for sale under these terms, the committee could not prove a transaction had occurred. Mangil Minthorne, a New York shopkeeper with a captaincy in the militia, admitted overcharging. He was proscribed, but restored, and his commission returned by June 1776. Andrew Gautier confessed to demanding payment in specie but was pardoned because besides this, he was a good Associator. Gautier and Alsop’s demands for specie also pointed to the currency problem. Merchants importing tea might have to buy it with hard money. If so, they understandably wanted to be paid in hard money, especially as the rapid printing of Continental and state currencies debased those monies.⁴⁰

The most egregious case of price gouging in New York was Jonathan Lawrence’s. Lawrence was a provincial congressman and commissioner overseeing works at Fort Constitution, intended to command access to the upper Hudson. The New Windsor committee found that Lawrence’s wife was overcharging for tea and that Mr. Lawrence had been using the fort to store the family’s horde of it. Other merchants not part of the Patriot movement were also caught up in the scandal. In September, responding to this wave of price gouging scandals, the New York State Congress formed a committee to investigate “abuses committed in withholding of Tea” and selling it “at higher prices than that limited by Congress.”⁴¹

Barbara Clark Smith has documented over thirty food riots in 1776–1779 and found tea well-represented among them. In August 1776, a “committee of ladies” in Fishkill, New York forced Jacobus Lefferts to open his store and sell them his tea at “the Continental price.” Perhaps he resisted too much; in the end, they confiscated the tea and sold it themselves (at the Continental price), with the proceeds going to the local revolutionary committee. That same month, the women of Kingston, New York went as far as to demand tea from the revolutionary committee as a condition of their husbands’ and sons’ continued military service: Tea could be more popular than Patriotism.⁴²

In response to this and other incidents, in October 1776, the New York State Congress declared the tea holders’ practices “unjustifiable and mercenary” and ordered local committees to seize stocks of tea over twenty-five pounds and sell them at the fixed price. The goal was to break up wholesale lots and get tea to consumers. As in South Carolina, buyers were limited to twelve pounds each—enough for a small shop, while preventing wholesalers from flipping large stocks on the black market. The committees followed through, even going after the tea supplies of merchants who were passing through. Connecticut merchant John Thomas needed an order from the New York State Congress to prevent the Kingston committee from redistributing the 2,000-pound supply he was transshipping through the state.⁴³

Meanwhile, mobs took direct action against tea hoarders and price gougers, seizing and redistributing tea at the set price with little direction from revolutionary authorities. On November 18, 1776, the Kingston committee chairman, Johannes Sleght, lamented that the countyfolk “are now daily alarmed,” with “streets filled with mobs” hunting for “that detestable article called tea,” probably Thomas’s supply. (The state congress had allowed Thomas to proceed with his tea, but it was unclear whether the people of Kingston would.) Tea was, for Sleght, detestable not because it was a sign of taxation without representation, monopoly, or tyranny but because the people had gone mad for it: whenever they found any, the people “divided or distributed” it among themselves. Seizing goods to secure a just price was the most popular form of direct action in England.. In France it was called taxation populaire. Nor was it unusual in America.⁴⁴

Tea remained a focus of direct action in 1777 (but not after, perhaps because adequate supplies were finally had). The women of Poughkeepsie, New York thrice forced Peter Messier to sell them tea that year. In New Windsor, a mob seized a tea shipment and sold it to themselves, claiming the owners overcharged. This was probably an excuse to take the tea (there is no indication that the owners even offered the tea for sale in New Windsor at all, and every reason to expect the cargo was just passing through). A correspondent relayed the story to the tea’s absent owner, James Caldwell: A wagoner had “put up at Mr. Shults’s tavern” and “called for tea for his supper.” The innkeeper had none, to which the wagoner replied that some was coming. Townsfolk overheard. Now thirty “women! in this place have risen in a mob, and are now selling a box of tea of yours at 6s per lb.” Caldwell had obtained the tea in Philadelphia, where it seems to have been obtained by capture. But Caldwell paid a “very high price” for the tea, and the New Windsor sale forced him to take a major loss.⁴⁵ The writer suggested taking special precautions with such an article next time.

Patriotic New Yorkers faced many difficulties in 1776. New York City, their main port, was under British control after September of that year, which made getting supplies upstate difficult. That fall, Albany faced severe shortages. All but one of Smith’s food riots involving tea between 1776 and 1779 were in New York State. Smugglers may have carried tea from occupied New York City over British lines in exchange for food and fuel, but it is unclear how much since shortages in British New York forced Tryon to cap the price of tea there as well in 1777.⁴⁶

High tea prices (and failed price controls) were not confined to New York. During prohibition, the Wilmington-New Hanover committee had seized British cargoes and fixed prices for imports in North Carolina.⁴⁷ Post-Association, prices were high inland. In May 1776, Moravians noted that “tea, coffee and sugar” for use in Lovefeasts were “very expensive.” This was hard for a people used to buns and tea at church. The following year, tea was sold in the state only at an “impossible price.”⁴⁸

When Norton & Sons received word that Virginians had also begun openly “to drink tea again,” they learned it was “selling very High.” Charles Willson Peale found tea prices skyrocketing despite Patriots’ efforts to control them, and John Adams made similar observations. In Salem, Massachusetts, residents objected to high tea prices in December 1776. Tea was one of several necessities, along with sugar and bread, which became dear during the war—partly because of the British blockade, but also because of the Association, which had first cut supply, and particularly because of the Americans’ taste for printing money. In 1777 a crowd of Boston women seized Thomas Boylston’s coffee because he charged beyond the “regulated Price.” In 1779, Philadelphians protested weekly increases in prices of “rum, sugar, flour, coffee and tea,” and formed a committee to investigate the cause. The same year, a Williamsburg, Virginia committee set various prices, including on tea. Rumors of hoarding and artificial scarcity abounded.⁴⁹

After 1776, Patriots no longer saw tea as a counter-revolutionary political symbol, but as a consumer good to be seized and redistributed to the people. Ironically, these episodes of redistribution had grown from earlier tea parties—as acts of commercial enforcement, protests against high prices, and expressing a sense that proper modes of consumption and sale signaled revolutionary economic and consumer propriety. Now consumption could be about equality: that merchants not raise prices and hoard goods so much that only the rich could consume, but rather that everyone was entitled to some small taste of the Atlantic commercial world. This contrasted starkly with the anti-tea tone of the riots and committees of 1774–1775. The tea protests of 1776 and after still constituted an “enforcement of patriotism,” but tea had lost its old symbolic value. Merchants were never happy when rioters came to their doors—but food rioters were arguing on the premise that tea was a consumer necessity, not a political symbol. In the spirit of 1776, consumers had taken the tea sellers’ logic further: now consumers, not merchants, governed tea discourse. American tea drinkers demanded large amounts at low prices and seized tea stocks. Everyone could be customers. And woe to the merchant or revolutionary official who got in their way. To tea colonists applied that most revolutionary and American formulation: the customer is always right.