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"James R. Fichter"
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Tea
In Tea ,
James R. Fichter reveals that despite the so-called Boston Tea
Party in 1773, two large shipments of tea from the East India
Company survived and were ultimately drunk in North
America. Their survival shaped the politics of the years
ahead, impeded efforts to reimburse the company for the tea lost in
Boston Harbor, and hinted at the enduring potency of consumerism in
revolutionary politics.
Tea protests were widespread in 1774, but so were tea
advertisements and tea sales, Fichter argues. The protests were
noisy and sometimes misleading performances, not clear signs that
tea consumption was unpopular. Revolutionaries vilified tea in
their propaganda and prohibited the importation and consumption of
tea and British goods. Yet merchant ledgers reveal these goods were
still widely sold and consumed in 1775. Colonists supported
Patriots more than they abided by non-consumption. When Congress
ended its prohibition against tea in 1776, it reasoned that the ban
was too widely violated to enforce. War was a more effective means
than boycott for resisting Parliament, after all, and as rebel arms
advanced, Patriots seized tea and other goods Britons left behind.
By 1776, protesters sought tea and, objecting to its high price,
redistributed rather than destroyed it. Yet as Fichter demonstrates
in Tea , by then the commodity was not a symbol of the
British state, but of American consumerism.
eBook
Collecting Debts
In November 1774, as many as 500 of Virginia's merchants gathered at a meeting of merchants and signed the Continental Association, agreeing to its ban on imports from Britain, on exports to Britain, and on the consumption of British goods. [...]Woody Holton, in the most important analysis of the Virginia nonexportation movement in a generation, argues that planters used nonexport to increase the price of their tobacco at merchants' expense. Had Dunmore attended the session in Williamsburg with a successful Indian war to his credit, or had he simply not sent Foy so that Nelson could have dismissed the burgesses earlier, the congressmen would have had a smaller audience of burgesses and, in all likelihood, a smaller gathering of merchants, too.9 THE MEETING OF MERCHANTS-a sort of Chamber of Commerce-had been created in 1769 to organize for the Townshend Act boycotts. William Állason arrived on 25 October and left on the twenty-ninth, finding the meeting \"so inconsiderable, & the prospect of doing Business there so distant\" that he did not want to spend \"what little money I had a chance of receiving\" from debtors on lodging.
Journal Article
The Palimpsest Captive
This essay considers the American encounter with Islam in the Early Republic though the lenses of Americans' stories about the 1806 destruction of the Essex, a New England merchantman trading in the Red Sea, and the subsequent captivity and conversion of the ship's boy, John Poll, at the hands of the alleged \"pirate\" Sayyid Muhammad ʿAqil. James R. Fichter traces the shifting, sometimes contradictory features of these stories, demonstrating how changing trade and military relations between the United States and Barbary led to them being interpreted in different ways over time. This essay broadens the geography of scholarship of the early national encounter with Islam beyond North Africa to the Indian Ocean.
Journal Article
Tea Drinkers
Just as Americans drank alcohol during the Prohibition of the 1920s, so colonists drank tea and consumed British goods during the prohibition of 1775. Records show thousands of colonists buying, selling, and drinking tea in private, despite public declarations of abstinence. The Harvard students from the previous chapter are one example. Ledgers, correspondence, and diaries reveal tea’s secret life during the ban and the lives of the colonists who consumed it. Published announcements from the committees that tea consumption had ceased were for show.
Tea consumption continued openly in areas beyond Patriot control and secretly in Patriot areas. Merchants wholesaled
Book Chapter
Propaganda
Patriots attacked tea with satire, public ritual, excoriation, and misinformation. Whatever its purported rationales, such propaganda served political ends. Sometimes Patriots even lied to each other. In February 1774, one Virginia Patriot urged disuse of tea following the example of “the Northward.” However, as Customs Commissioner Benjamin Hallowell explained, “people to the Southward have been taught by the Sons of Liberty here [in Boston], to believe that no Tea has been imported from England” despite Boston being the center of legal tea importation and consumption continuing in many colonies. In 1769, one writer had mocked the anti-tea invectives in the
Book Chapter
The Drink of 1776
The tea ban fit uneasily in an Association that banned other goods based on where they came from, not what they were. In wartime, trade with Europe was more necessary than ever—to get arms and ammunition, manufactured goods, and other supplies. Since tea could be smuggled in from Europe without affecting the Association’s anti-parliamentary posture, the boycotts on tea and Britain might be separated. Merchants with capital tied up in unsellable tea chaffed at the tea ban. They did not debate this in the newspapers; they lobbied Congress, arguing that allowing them to sell existing tea supplies would free
Book Chapter
Tea Politics
In 1774, tea became a symbol of the colonies’ political transformation. The questions of 1773–1774–what to do about the Company’s shipments, how to respond to the Coercive Acts, and whether to join the Association–all involved tea. “It is Tea that has kept all America trembling for Years. It is Tea that has brought Vengeance upon Boston,” Rev. William Tennent wrote. Tea was, for James Duane, “the fatal cause of our present Misfortunes.” It symbolized Company monopoly, unrepresentative taxation, and parliamentary infringement on colonists’ constitutional rights. In Boston, destroying the Company’s tea was a way, Patriots thought, for
Book Chapter
Paying for the Tea
Some colonists thought the Boston Tea Party was excessive and the tea should be paid for, preferably by someone else. Governor Hutchinson assumed wealthy radicals like John Hancock would pay. Failing that, Hutchinson sought others. Massachusetts Chief Justice Peter Oliver claimed some colonists thought “justice demanded Indemnification to the owners of the Tea.” Provincial Treasurer Harrison Gray noted “the sober thinking part of the town” “disclaimed” the destruction of the tea, though Boston town and Massachusetts colonial governments took “no steps” to “show their dislike.” In London, Benjamin Franklin recommended the colonial government pay, lest Parliament be “compulsive.” Others in
Book Chapter