401 Tea, Boycotts, and Revolution
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You're listening to an Airwave Media Podcast. Ben Franklin's World is a production of Colonial Williamsburg Innovation Studios. The Boston Tea Party was a crime, and if you were a witness and testified to the grand jury that you saw Liz Cobart at the Boston Tea Party, well then, Liz, your friends on the grand jury would go tell your other friends in the Sons of Liberty who would go knock that guy's teeth in the next day. Not a single witness to the Boston Tea Party was ever found.

So this sort of two-step of a paramilitary wing and the Sons of Liberty and a polite political leadership wing is really what the Boston Patriots are doing. The polite wing is the one that engages with the people in Philadelphia, and the rude wing is the one that engages with conservatives in Boston. Hello, and welcome to episode 401 of

of Ben Franklin's World, the podcast dedicated to helping you learn more about how the people and events of our early American past have shaped the present day world we live in. And I'm your host, Liz Kovart. During the early days of the American Revolution, British American colonists attempted to sway their fellow Britons in Parliament with consumer politics.

In 1768 and 1769, British Americans banded together to enact a general boycott of British goods to protest the Townshend Duties, which were a set of taxes placed on specific or enumerated goods such as paint, lead, glass, paper, and tea. Now, the boycott originated in the town of Boston, where Bostonians struggled to get the rest of the Bay Colony involved, but they did successfully persuade merchants in New York City, Philadelphia, and other ports of trade to participate in their boycott.

This boycott expired on January 1st, 1770, and Parliament repealed the Townshend duties in April 1770. Now, although this general boycott is portrayed as a success in our history books about the American Revolution, the consumer boycott of British goods had its fair share of challenges.

challenges that the colonists hoped to overcome in 1774 when they enacted another non-importation, non-exportation program to protest the Tea Act and the Coercive Acts passed by Parliament after the Boston Tea Party in December 1773. Now, why did the colonists protest the Tea Act and later the Coercive Acts? Why did they choose to protest those acts with a non-importation, non-exportation program? James Fichter is a historian and associate professor at the University of Hong Kong.

He's the author of Tea, Consumption, Politics, and Revolution, 1773 to 1776. James joins us to explore the tea crisis of 1773 and the resulting non-importation, non-exportation movement that the colonists organized after Parliament passed the course of Acts in 1774. Now, during our exploration, James reveals information about early Americans' taste for tea and the origins of the early American tea craze.

the stories we learned about the tea crisis and Boston Tea Party, and what our historical sources have to say about the reality of those events.

and details about the Continental Association and the non-importation, non-exportation program that it outlined for 1775 and 1776. But first, Happy New Year! I hope you're gearing up for a really great 2025, so why not start your new year off right by joining the Ben Franklin's World Listener Community? The Ben Franklin's World Listener Community is a Facebook group where you can connect and interact with fellow listeners,

Take deeper dives into different topics about early American history through conversations and different news articles, and post your episode requests and interview questions for our upcoming guest historians. The group is free to join. All you have to do is visit benfranklinsworld.com slash Facebook. That's benfranklinsworld.com slash Facebook. All right. Are you ready to investigate the consumer politics of the American Revolution? Let's go meet our guest historian. ♪

Our guest is a historian and an associate professor at the University of Hong Kong. He specializes in Atlantic, maritime and international history and the connections between early America, the British Empire and the world. He's the author of Tea, Consumption, Politics and Revolution, 1773 to 1776. Welcome to Ben Franklin's world, James Fichter. Thank you very much, Liz. It's my pleasure to be with you today.

Now, James, you've written a book about tea during the American Revolutionary Era, and we know that's the period when early Americans experienced the tea crisis of 1773 and held their Boston Tea Party.

So why don't we start by discussing the world of tea and what that was like by 1773? So would you tell us why early Americans enjoyed consuming tea and how much tea they were consuming by 1773? Yes. The question of why people were so interested in drinking tea is a good one because it's a trivial consumer product today. It doesn't cost very much money. You buy some when it goes out. Even if you don't like it, you keep some in the cupboard.

And so it's hard to capture the relative value and meaning that it had in the past. But when we think about our own lives and we think about things that were once rare and special and are now commonplace as the consumer world evolves, we can think back a bit. And this is the case with tea. In the late 18th century, tea was becoming increasingly cotidienne for more and more people across the British colonial and British Atlantic world and across Britain as well.

British subjects in Great Britain consumed about one and a half pounds of tea per capita per year. That's an estimate given that much of it was smuggled. And North American colonists consumed perhaps half that much. And so in consuming tea, colonists were being British. And it's useful to think of colonists as on the western fringe of this expanding empire whereby engaging in the Atlantic consumer world was really a key way

to be viable and meaningful British subjects, co-equals with your neighbors in Ireland or Scotland or London because you drank and wore and read what they did. So early Americans were consuming nearly three quarters of a pound of tea per person by 1773. That's a lot of tea.

Do we know how early Americans came to consume tea? Because it seems like tea was associated with their Britishness and ties to the British Empire. But how did the tea craze start in early America? You know, the tea craze starts a lot earlier. It starts in Britain. It's often attributed to Catherine of Braganza, although exactly how it starts is perhaps a little up in the air. It also was quite popular in the Netherlands and in other parts of continental Europe.

So I'm mistrustful of any one origin story. In working on the Boston Tea Party, I discovered that that origin story was full of lies and holes, and it made me start to wonder about a lot of other ones. But one of the things that's striking, right, is when you have a mythos about tea beginning with some elite person like Catherine of Braganza, that's a very distinctive way to start the story. It sets it out as being led by women. It sets it out as being a story that is elite down rather than bottom up.

And by the time of the American Revolution, tea is not a female drink to coffee being male. There's no evidence that men or women drank tea at different rates, any more than there's any evidence that the tea crisis affected American consumption levels of tea in any way over the long term. But what we can see is that by the Revolution, tea was no longer an elite product.

It was like sugar and coffee, one of these things in which it was initially high-priced and rolled out as a high-priced good, and then there would be bubbles in the price and value of this product, and it would collapse down and lower and lower echelons the social ladder could consume it.

By the imperial crisis in North America, poor houses in both Philadelphia and New York City were providing tea to the men and women who worked there. That suggests that it was hardly an elite consumer good. I've seen descriptions of other social classes that were quite low consuming tea. Slaves probably didn't drink it. I've seen some anecdotal evidence that perhaps indentured servants didn't either. But that seems to have been the class bar, which is quite low for its consumption by that time.

That's something we can see with a lot of consumer products throughout history and even throughout our own present day. I mean, just look at our fancy iPhones. In 2007, the iPhone debuted as a product for wealthier people. It was very expensive. And today, the prices of computer chips and data service have really come down enough that almost everyone can afford a smartphone of some sort today. In fact,

The government even has a program where homeless people or people who have housing insecurity can afford to have a smartphone given to them by the government.

Exactly. And tea, just structurally, there's so many easy ways to make it available. You can water it down and make weak tea. You can re-brew it. Tom Paine was famous for saving his tea leaves and re-steeping them later. And this is also the case with the quality of the tea. You can buy different qualities of tea at different price points. So there are varieties of tea that appeal to the fancy and the well-to-do, and there are cheap versions that you can drink

that you can get for much lower prices, just like with most consumer goods today. And of course, then you can also adulterate it or dilute it either by blenders can add other things to it, or you can add milk that way. So it doesn't matter how it tastes that much.

Now, before we dive into the politics of tea, especially the politics of tea in 1773, I think we should talk about tea and trade. Because even before Great Britain's Tea Act precipitated the crisis of tea in 1773, it seemed like early Americans had to navigate a fairly complex relationship between trade and British imperial politics. So, James, would you tell us more about this complex relationship?

What did early Americans need to know and what did they have to navigate in order to trade for overseas goods that they wanted to consume? Yes, early Americans struggled to get consumer goods that they wanted, struggled to get them all directly from the sources they were supposed to. British Navigation Acts were supposed to restrict supplies to North America to a few channels, mostly through Great Britain. But these were largely not followed.

And to the extent that they were, it was because the trade channels of North American commerce in some colonies tipped toward Britain. So just like Jamaica traded heavily with Britain, so did so much of South Carolina and the Chesapeake's trade go to Britain anyway.

They sold their plantation goods to merchants based in Virginia or based in Britain who acquired them and then supplied them with manufactured products. And the slave trade that they engaged in would also go through that channel. Whereas Mid-Atlantic and New England ports were more likely to trade with continental Europe, both the Netherlands, but also Spain and Portugal and Italy, as well as Great Britain, and were able to trade around Britain and trade directly to European ports in a way that

you couldn't really do so from Charleston or Norfolk. So northern ports were more able to smuggle around and southern ports were less able to. But in the smuggling, we have to remember that the North American colonists were being really British because the majority of tea consumed in Britain was smuggled, as was the majority of tea consumed in Ireland. The only question is how big that majority was.

The main focus of the Townsend Acts, which in 1767 reformed taxes, including on tea. The main focus of the Townsend Acts dealing with tea was Britain and Ireland. In particular, they were very concerned that people would export tea from Britain to Ireland to get the tax rebate and then smuggle it back in untaxed, which is just logistically a lot harder to do from Boston, but really easy to do from an Irish port like Wexford. So that was the main focus.

As a result, there were smuggling gangs around Britain that were violent and brutal. They attacked the king's officers and customs collectors when they tried to collect dues. And it wasn't until the 1780s when Pitt, the new prime minister, Pitt the Younger, was able to reform taxes and lower them to the point in Britain where legal British tea consumption could compete with a smuggle. And so that's exactly what the Tea Act and the Townsend Acts had been trying to do in the North American colonies. The difference was that

The lion's share of the tea smuggling was always happening in Britain, not the colonies, because Britain had four times the population and twice the tea consumption level on a per capita basis. So they were consuming eight times as much tea. So, of course, the main tea market was there. As long as they didn't address that problem, the North American problem was unsolvable.

And once they had addressed the British tea smuggling problem, I suspect the North American tea smuggling market would have withered away. So if Pitt had just done it 10 years sooner, it would have been a very different story.

The Navigation Acts were so important to the early American story of trade and smuggling. So for those of us who are unfamiliar with these acts, would you remind us of what the Navigation Acts were and how they impacted early Americans' ability to trade? Or I guess I should say how they were supposed to impact early Americans' ability to trade.

These are a series of laws that regulate trade within the British Empire. They're commonly said to have restricted trade to ships based in England and Scotland and to trade with the rest of the empire. They're often not very thoroughly enforced, and when they were enforced, it tended to be often at the lobbying of merchants based in England saying, hey, these New England merchants are homing in on some of our business and we don't like it, but

This gets this much older thesis of the sort of salutary neglect of colonies, the idea that Britain, though it had on-paper laws and rules before 1763, it didn't really heavily enforce them. And therefore, much of the dispute about the Stamp Act, the Townsend Acts, the Tea Act, and so forth, are disputes about this introduction of regulation in a space in which before it had been theoretically something people could do, but not something anyone actually did.

So the Navigation Acts tend to be protested in that context. We keep talking about smuggling, and we know the Navigation Acts were an attempt by the British government in part to ensure that Americans paid their taxes on any goods they imported from overseas.

And typically, if you were doing this legally, to trade overseas, you would have had to have a British ship go into a foreign port and then stop back in a British port, usually in the UK, pay their tax, and then those goods would be carried to an American port or a Caribbean port where they were sold and the tax price was just included in the sale price.

But the Tea Act of 1773 seemed to really throw a wrench into this system. And I wonder if you would tell us about the Tea Act of 1773 and the crisis it precipitated by actually making tea cheaper for early American colonists.

That's a very good point. The Navigation Act's for regulatory purposes. For regulatory purposes, getting goods in and out of Britain makes it easier to tax. Well, here's the Tea Act as a way to sort of begin to change that.

The Tea Act had two elements to it. It renewed an old tax cut from the Townshend Acts that cut the tax on tea such that legally imported and taxed tea would be roughly competitive with a smuggled tea, or at least it was hoped it would be. But the other element of it was that the English East India Company could ship tea to the colonies without having to sell it first. So not ship tea directly, the tea would be brought from China directly

to London, where it would be warehoused. But then from the London warehouse, a separate ship would bring tea to North America. And rather than the old system, which was that the tea would be auctioned in London. Previously, the company was required to auction all tea in London. Middlemen would buy it at auction. And of course, this was the mechanism that enabled the tax on the tea to be collected. And then the tea would be exported to North America. This made it

uncompetitive, not simply because of the tax structure, but also because it added an extra layer of middlemen.

who would mark up the price. So here the East India Company was able to ship tea directly to North America, which they did in 1773, to Boston, Philadelphia, to New York, and to Charleston, with the idea being that the wholesalers they'd contracted with in those cities would be selling the tea at a price the company had set. You must sell the tea at this floor price the company has set for a fixed commission, and this effectively put competition on the London wholesalers, who were still able to buy tea at auction,

and ship it to North America, and they did throughout 1774. They would therefore not be able to mark up nearly as much. And this, it was hoped, would further push out smuggled tea. Now, what about the tea consignees? We've heard in other episodes that the Tea Act may have made English East India Company tea cheaper, but it also seemed to limit who could sell tea in the British American colonies. So what about these tea consignees?

They didn't. That's Patriot propaganda anyway. So a common complaint was that the consignees were going to somehow monopolize this. But I looked at a map and it turns out that you can't from Boston get to Maine very easily without putting your stuff on a boat and sailing there. And likewise from New York to Albany or anywhere else. So what this really means is that they had designated wholesalers. Now, in fairness to the Patriots who objected to the system, they didn't really understand the full system the company was implementing because they

They weren't privy to the internal details of the company's plans. But the company's plans were structured so that the consignees only got paid when they sold off the tea and they were not allowed to raise the price. So therefore, the only thing they can do to get paid is to sell the tea as quickly as possible. So the consignees aren't retailers monopolizing the retail market. They're wholesalers and they're going to sell to other

other wholesalers in order to offload as quickly as possible. Even within cities like New York or Boston, they were incentivized to offload the tea as quickly as possible, get paid their fixed commission from the company, and then let the other people ship it all around between Boston and Portsmouth or between New York and Albany or within New York or whatever. But this wasn't widely known or understood. And so the fact that they would sell to other wholesalers and other retailers was simply overlooked and they were described as monopolizing it.

But of course, also, the consignees have no monopoly because even in the legal tea system, the company's still auctioning tea in London. If you're a Virginia merchant, the company didn't ship any tea to the Chesapeake, which is one of the most significant economic regions in the parts of North America that will rebel. And why not? Because those merchants order their stuff directly from London anyway. So the tea that came in to the Chesapeake in 1774 was legally imported.

shipped by merchants who were sending it from Scotland or England to Virginia and Maryland to tobacco planters in exchange for their tobacco leaves. So that had nothing to do with the consignees. Those ships were all turned around. Well, turned around or they stopped talking about them, one or the other. Except for one that did, the TD gets hold on one of them. For the others, the ones they talk about, they got turned around.

That seems like a pretty big research find, because so often when we read about the Boston Tea Party, one of the claims that the revolutionaries made was that if you were just a merchant, you're not going to be able to sell tea unless Parliament or the East India Company designates you as one of its tea consignees.

But it sounds like from your research, what you really found is this wasn't the case at all, that what the Tea Act did was designated a wholesaler in a big port city, say New York City, and then that wholesaler would have sold to another wholesaler in a smaller city or port like Albany, New York. And then that smaller wholesaler in Albany would have sold to individual merchants who would have retailed the tea in smaller towns along the upper Hudson River Valley or the Mohawk River Valley.

Yeah, and if you're in Albany or New York City and you don't like it, write to London and get another order from a guy who's buying it from the auction in London, which is perfectly legal and which documentably actually happened in 1774. But the key to revolution isn't to tell the truth. The key to revolution is not to achieve consensus. The key to revolution is to enact rapid and drastic change

And things like laborious truth-telling and consensus-building can get in the way of that. So a lot of the rhetoric that's going on around there is because it's politically useful to say these things.

It also seems like this misinformation about T-Consignees, who they were and what they could sell, may have also been bound up in early Americans' identity as British Americans, British Americans who drank tea. And a lot of scholars have said, and you also make this case in your book, Tea, that tea became a big symbol or hallmark of British and British American identity. So, James, how were the revolutionaries able to turn their fellow colonists against tea?

when tea really made them feel British and like a true part of the British Empire. Yeah, let me start with a little mini example from 74. It can give you a sense of the shift in what's going on. I think tea is a symbol of how people participate in the consumer world as normal British people. And then it becomes a political symbol. It is so briefly in 74, 75, and then that collapses again by independence and tea is once again a normal consumer good by 76.

You can see the shift to it being political in '74 when the Geddes arise in Chestertown, Maryland with cargo including some tea. And this is often called the Chestertown Tea Party. It's apocryphal, there's no evidence the tea party actually occurred. It was invented by 19th century historians who wanted a good story to tell. But we know the ship brought the tea in. I found an advertisement from one of the merchants, a merchant in another Baltimore town offering goods from the Geddes, including East India goods, and I suspect that included tea.

And then the Patriots in Chestertown start to say, they make a lot of talk about how strong they're being against tea. And if you read their writing carefully, they're saying they're opposing new tea imports. They're not saying they've opposed the old ship. But they blur the difference. So it looks like what they're doing is more patriotic than it is. Because between the Geddes' release of the tea and the Patriots' first meeting to decide what to do with it,

which included, I think, one of the merchants involved in buying the tea was a patriot in the town, news of the coercive acts appeared. And this suddenly made the politics of tea untenable, and therefore they had to say they were against it, even though it was too late. So there's a lot of sort of papering over what's going on in order to make it look like they're doing the right thing when, according to their own rules, when they're not.

But that's how politicians operate. That's normal political behavior. In fact, some people would say that's political leadership because the public at large clearly wasn't quite on board with a consumer boycott yet. And so you need to lead them there. And one of the best ways to do it is to claim it's already in place, even though it's not. So that's what they were doing. That's what they were doing in the Boston Tea Party too. Because in the Boston Tea Party, tea from three ships was destroyed, but four ships brought tea to Boston and the tea from the fourth ship

survive, and they drank it. But you can't say that the tea from the fourth ship survived if you're a patriot in December 1773 or in January 1774 in Boston because it is catastrophic to the intercolonial patriotic movement.

Paul Revere leaves Boston the day after the Boston Tea Party with a lovely letter from the Boston Committee of Correspondence to Philadelphia announcing the destruction of the tea that is deliberately written to give Philadelphia the impression that the tea on the fourth ship was also lost. They say that the ship was lost on the back of Cape Cod, but they leave open exactly what happened with the cargo while implying it was destroyed.

The Philadelphians, they read it, they believe it. The day after Paul Revere arrives in Philadelphia, Christmas Day, the T-ship from Philadelphia arrives and they stick with Boston and send the T-ship back. Had Philadelphians heard that Bostonians had failed to turn around all the T-ships and had allowed T from one of the ships to be landed and that it was in Massachusetts and potentially available for sale, that risked intercolonial trust.

because then it required Philadelphians to believe that Massachusettsans could be good enough and virtuous enough not to consume the tea. When Boston had had perhaps the hardest time of any colony in the earlier 1770 tea protests in actually keeping the tea out, if you look at Philadelphia, New York, legal tea importation goes down to zero in the 1770 tea protests and never recovers. Boston's tea importation goes down to 48,000 pounds and...

So there was not a real belief that Boston could necessarily adhere to it, which is why they needed to destroy the T. And when they hadn't destroyed the T, put about the story they had. So then Charleston, South Carolina also has a T ship importing T, and they also failed to turn that ship around. And that T has also landed. It's impounded by the customs collector in Charleston, as eventually is the T in Boston. And the Boston committee even has a gall...

as a sign of just how thoroughly they had succeeded in this. They wrote from the Boston Committee to Charleston telling them how naughty Charleston was for letting the tea be impounded by the customs officers, even though that's exactly what Boston had done. Because Boston knew that story wasn't known, they could get away with that kind of chiding of South Carolina. And the story wasn't widely known.

But the survival of the tea meant that Bostonians in particular had to be especially severe. So Boston goes severely against tea in 1774 because if there begins to be a consumer tea market anywhere in Massachusetts, it's possible the tea from that last tea ship can be landed and sold. And if news of that got out, it would completely undermine the patriot movement. There was no Continental Congress yet.

to serve as a central organizing node, the organizing node of the Patriot movement before Congress was Boston. And if Boston was seen as being both the enactor of the Boston Tea Party, the victim of the Boston Port Act, and the drinker of a whole lot of tea anyway, it would have really undermined other colonies' willingness to support them in any kind of meaningful solidarity that was required to go ahead.

It sounds like the American Revolution politicized tea in a way that may have also turned British American colonists away from the accoutrements of tea, you know, the tea sets, the tea tables and other imported goods that supported their consumption of tea in British ways. So would you tell us how British Americans further turned away from British tea culture during the tea crisis?

Yes, but also that's very tenuous. If you think about any revolution of great significance, because it achieves rapid change, the meaning of symbols change rapidly too. And T is meaningful mostly as a symbol. So yes, there's the T Act and it's the practical matter of the T tax, but even there, because

becomes this principled focal point about the issue of taxation and representation, and therefore a symbol for taxation and representation writ large, right? And then once the Tea Party happens, people begin to have copycat Tea Parties in sympathy with Boston, or just because it's a fun thing to do, right, as Princeton undergrads have one in early 74.

But a lot of people don't, and a lot of people are divided on it. When the Boston Port Act happens and the other coercive acts are known, then people generally do a lot of politically symbolic acts to demonstrate their fellow feeling with Boston. They have days of fasting and prayer. They begin to boycott tea as a symbol of their support for Boston, both personally and communally, and then begin to destroy tea cargos and turn tea ships around across the colonies.

Almost no T ships are turned around or have their cargoes really destroyed outside of the company's ships. There's only two others where it happens at all before the coercive acts are known. Once the coercive acts are known, then T takes this larger symbolic value. But Congress takes a while to meet. They announce their association, which is this big boycott of Britain.

And no imports to Britain, no consumption of British goods, no exports to Britain, no more slave trade, a ban on tea altogether, whether it's British or not. Why? Because tea broadly now is a symbol, so it doesn't matter even if it's Dutch, they'll still ban it. But the ban on all tea does not take effect until March 1st, 1775.

That's only 49 days before warfare begins. And once open warfare is happening, warfare is a way better symbol and a way better practical way to express your political views than what you drink in a cup. So the symbolic meaning of the boycott collapses in 1775 completely. And we miss this because in all our histories of the revolution, it's boycott this, boycott that, and then boom, switch to Lexington and Concord.

And we never find out what happened to the boycotts. They collapsed and they petered out. And so many boycotts then and now do. Boycotts are really hard to implement, really hard to sustain. To maintain the momentum and interest month after month is very difficult. And when there's more compelling things to do, join the Continental Army, contribute to the Continental cause financially, commemorative events for fallen Continental leaders like General Montgomery who dies in

New Year's Eve, it's the Battle of Quebec in '75. Those are way more potent and laden symbolic acts than whether you drink tea. And so then Congress ends up revoking its tea ban on the reasoning that all that politicization has fallen apart. They explicitly both ban tea and then when they unban it, they say, "No one's been listening to our ban, "but we think that the people that aren't listening to it "don't mean anything political by it." They're not trying to make statements of their British loyalism.

They're just drinking tea because it's a nice thing to do. So they don't have this sort of Martinet drill sergeant attitude. Rather, they just re-legalize it, for want of a better word, just to be practical.

Now, before we dive into the particulars of the Continental Association, which is what this non-importation, non-exportation movement was called, we should really do two things. First, we should talk about the messaging of the tea crisis and the Boston Tea Party. And two, we should take a moment for our episode sponsor. So let's first thank our episode sponsor, and then we'll talk about the messaging of the tea crisis and the Boston Tea Party.

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From the way you describe and talk about this period and event, James, it seems like Bostonians played a really large role in shaping the way that we view tea and the Tea Party today. It sounds like the information we grew up with about the Boston Tea Party may not actually be true. That, you know, stories like the Bostonians destroyed all the tea and that Parliament restricted who could sell tea by appointing tea consignees. Well, that information sounds like it's inaccurate and false from the research you have.

So did Bostonians just shape the entire record and story of the tea crisis? Or did other colonies also have a chance to add to this story and play a role in shaping this period and really our historical memory of this event?

Most colonies had different views and different responses to the tea than Boston. Simply on the matter of these India Company tea ships in 73, Boston was the outlier, the only colony where violence happened. New York and Philadelphia turned the ships around, which is something Boston failed to do. And pound for pound, the Bostonians took about 90,000 pounds of tea that they destroyed. But New York and Philadelphia took 212,000 pounds of tea each came into their cities. They turned them around and sent them back.

That's four times the amount of tea went to Mid-Atlantic than Boston. And then Charleston took a sizable amount too, 70,000 pounds. Between Charleston and Boston, almost as much tea was consumed as destroyed from the East India Company in 73.

And Boston was seen as an outlier and it was kind of offensive that they were so violent about the tea. There was much divided sentiment in many colonies in Connecticut, Massachusetts and elsewhere about this. People felt that Boston was aggressive and excessive. Both local colonists did this and notable people, Ben Franklin, George Washington, Henry Lawrence.

The Lees in Virginia, Patrick Henry, all thought this was too much. Of course, the Penns did as well as the sensible Philadelphians. And this was a key moment because before the Boston Tea Party, Boston had had many other riotous acts. The Liberty Riots were on the ship in 1768. There was, of course, the Boston Massacre.

and many other of these events. So it was a focal point of revolutionary action. But this was a point where people in other cities really said, Boston's gone too far. And the British government messed up because the politics that Boston and patriots had been using generally was a kind of victim politics. Here's this evil government oppressing us and we are good Britons who are standing up for our principles. And this would be the focal point of their Guy Fawkes Day celebrations in places like Charleston, for example.

But here was a point where the government could say that it was Boston that was overstepping and it was good law-abiding citizens of the British Empire who were victims of evil Bostonian demagogues. But the British government didn't do that because Lord North does not want to play victim politics. He's wanting to go be the boss. So that's what he did. He missed the opportunity and the Port Act then turned around and recast Boston as victims again.

So the Port Act causes all the other colonists to forget the ways that they felt that Boston had been going too far or had been excessive and been unappealing. And while the goal of the Port Act had been explicitly to divide Bostonians from other colonists, it had the reverse effect of unifying them when, in fact, the Sydney Company had written North in February of 74 and asked if the customs collector, North was also in charge of the treasury,

could just release the tea, the East India Company's tea that was held in Charleston and just sell it. And that would kind of solve the whole problem. The governor in South Carolina even said he thought it might sell. But rather than have a go and letting the tea in from these other colonies where the resistance to tea was a lot less, they decided to press hardest on the point where the tea was most thoroughly resisted. Weirdly enough, the New York tea ship

had a layover in Antigua. There was a storm, it was partially damaged, had a layover. If the captain had just said, I don't think I can carry on safely in this ship, I need to unload my cargo, whoops, the tea tax would have to have been paid right then and there in the Caribbean, and the legally imported tea could then have been shipped up by normal West India merchants, and there would have been no way to stop it. So there was a serious lack of creative thinking on the part of British government officials.

Now, earlier you mentioned that after the Boston Tea Party, Great Britain passed the Intolerable Acts, which Great Britain actually passed them as the Coercive Acts. But here in the colonies, we referred to them as the Intolerable Acts because these acts closed the port of Boston, dictated how the government of Massachusetts could meet. They made provisions about who could be tried for capital crimes in the colonies versus elsewhere in the admiralty courts. And British American colonists everywhere seem to worry, at least this is a story that we're told,

The colonists seemed to worry that if Parliament could impose such harsh penalties on Boston and Massachusetts for their acts of protest, then they could also impose harsh penalties against their colonies for acts of protests. So the course of acts really play a role in Virginia's Committee of Correspondence calling for a Continental Congress to meet in September and October 1774. And during this Continental Congress, they decided on a general boycott of British goods. So James...

Would you tell us about the meeting of the First Continental Congress and its decision to issue the Continental Association, which is this agreement of non-importation, non-exportation of British goods?

Yes. I mean, first on the coercive acts, there's a couple points there. One, the Port Act doesn't close the Port of Boston simply. It closes the Port of Boston until the East India Company is reimbursed for its losses. So all Boston has to do is pay the 9,000 pounds in damages and it's sorted. But that's explicitly designed by government as a means to achieve fealty and submission and correctly interpreted by patriots as that. And they deliberately choose not to pay.

Those huge amounts of food and supplies are collected as charitable aid to Boston. If that had just been sold at auction and the money had been used, it would have easily paid the Port Act bill probably twice over to get the Port of Boston opened.

So that's the first thing. And the Master's Government Act also, almost all of the clauses, I think 21 of the 24 clauses are about the courts, actually. They're about making the legal system less democratic because it was unknown outside of Boston, but Boston was run more or less by an organized criminal semi-terrorist organization, the Sons of Liberty. The Sons of Liberty were on the grand jury. The grand jury was an elected position that you held for the year.

the Boston Tea Party was a crime, and if you were a witness and testified to the grand jury that you saw Liz Cobart at the Boston Tea Party, well then, Liz, your friends on the grand jury would go tell your other friends in the Sons of Liberty who would go knock that guy's teeth in the next day. So no one testified before the grand jury. Not a single witness to the Boston Tea Party was ever found, which is the best demonstration of omerita I can possibly think of. So this sort of two-step process

of a paramilitary wing in the Sons of Liberty and a polite political leadership wing is really what the Boston Patriots are doing. The polite wing is the one that engages with the people in Philadelphia, and the rude wing is the one that engages with conservatives in Boston.

But the British government doesn't have things like police or RICO statutes or any, we would think, of 20th century way to engage with organized crime. So the old scholarship that talks about this as a smuggling interest and all of that is, I think, in many ways trying to articulate this issue of it's an organized criminal conspiracy. And of course, all revolutions are organized criminal conspiracies because overthrowing governments is always illegal, according to the government that's getting overthrown.

But that's part of what made it a revolution.

So about the Congress in '74. So they're debating what to do. They implement a ban on imports of tea and all goods from Britain. And the biggest cargo of stuff from Britain isn't, of course, tea, it's manufactured cloth because the American Revolution was not a sure thing in '78, '74. The Industrial Revolution was. That was in full swing and the amount of manufactured cloth that Manchester mills are putting out

is extensive. And so this is a serious economic choice not to import British manufacturers and not to sell goods to Britain. And then in addition, they say they're going to ban tea. And this is really, at this point, a symbolic thing. The tea is symbolic of these larger actions. Then Congress announces its boycott, which it announces on October 20th of 1774. And it's this sort of very weird mutual self-legitimization that goes on.

Congress's delegates are selected by the individual colonies, by either the colonial legislatures in some cases, but usually by colonial conventions. And Congress makes no mention of the colonies in implementing the association. It mentions local authorities. So then Congress says, you know, we ask the local authorities to form local patriot associations of observation and inspection to enforce this, which happened.

So Congress then seeks to derive legitimacy for its boycott from the local authorities, who in turn derive their legitimacy from Congress. So people start going door to door saying, I have a piece of paper, would you please sign saying you agree to this boycott?

And everyone can see on the piece of paper that their neighbors, the people they sit next to in church, the people that buy things from them, their names are on the list or that they're not. And they know that the presence or absence of their names will be noted in turn. The men that you go to militia muster with every quarter will see it or not see it. The women that you meet for quilting will see it or not see it. All the social and economic engagements that people have around their communities.

And so what happens is people are really giving consent to two things when they sign the boycott. They're consenting to the boycott and they're consenting to the Patriots' power to demand a boycott. The way the boycott ends is in '75, a whole lot of people get caught drinking tea. And they all say one of two things. They either say, "Darn you, you horrible Patriots. "I'll do what I want, you can't tell me what to do." Or they say,

oh, I drank tea unintentionally, which is totally weird. Like, how do you unintentionally drink tea? But what they mean is that they didn't intend any greater political meaning by it. It was just something they did merely for their own personal interest. It wasn't because they were trying to make a statement about politics.

So common people are trying to detach this second consent. They consent to patriots being in charge, but they don't necessarily agree that they're gonna actually abide by the boycott. They agree to give patriots the respect of saying, "Yes, we will boycott," as long as the patriots are smart enough to not actually check. And most of the time, the patriots are smart enough not to check. Harvard undergraduates also had a riot about tea, and they did this on March 1st, '75, the day the tea boycott began.

when the patriotic students threw a fit in dining hall that the conservative students were still drinking tea. It offended them in what a later historian, I love this phrase, referred to as their sensitive patriotism.

So they got very offended about what other people were doing that had nothing to do with them. And the Harvard faculty heard about this and were really upset that undergraduates thought that they were allowed to have an opinion about anything because this was the 18th century. So they asked the conservative students if it would be okay if they could just have tea quietly in their room so it wouldn't hurt anyone's feelings.

And the conservative students said, yes, we're fine doing that. And the faculty said, great, that's what we're going to do as long as all of you know your role in this and it's to not riot. And the faculty was quite radical in terms of the revolution. They generally supported the revolution. The president was a patriot. There are many stories about Harvardians pointing the British Army the wrong way on the way to Lexington.

But this is a moment when the question of what tea drinking is supposed to mean in terms of either authority or political symbolism diverge, right? And in the case where the authority is not political authority, but just the faculty of the university, therefore, it's no, you're not questioning our authority. And if you want this to mean something politically, you do it on your own time when it doesn't have anything to do with us. So eventually, the rest of what will become the United States catches up to that view.

So it sounds like the Continental Association, this boycott of British goods to really show Great Britain the economic power of America, wasn't really successful. It sounds like people signed the Continental Association, which was really a form of consent to the authority of the local committees of safety and therefore the Continental Congress. But Americans didn't really stop consuming British goods. So this boycott wasn't successful.

It's both a failure and a lie. It's not successful at all. So in terms of asserting economic power, it's wildly successful in creating common cause. Because even if people don't abide by the association and drink tea, they still give lip service to the idea they're not supposed to. That's what matters. Creating the common agreement about right and wrong that you're then violating rather than just that there is no view of what is right and wrong here.

So in terms of actual economic effect, it's hilarious. The stated purpose was to affect the 70-74 election, and that had happened before the boycott was announced, so whoops. But secondly, it wouldn't have really had an effect anyway. North America had a population of 2 million free people, and Britain had 8 million, so which is going to have the economic influence on the other?

Secondly, the way it worked is that the boycotts were post-dated. So they implemented early ban on importing British goods. But they left open the allowance to continue to export goods to Britain for another year. Exports didn't stop until September of 75, which meant that Virginians were still selling their tobacco to London well after the Battle of Bunker Hill in full accordance with the Continental Association and in an economic relationship that thoroughly profited

everyone involved. So the logic of how that non-export ban was supposed to punish anyone, whether or not Virginians consume British tea or British manufactured cloth, the big thing would have been Virginia tobacco. And that they did not bring an early end to because it mattered too much for their own bottom lines. And that's the story after the revolution, right? The colonies, when they become the U.S., reenter the British economic orbit because there's nowhere else to go.

You noted that with the outbreak of the American War for Independence in April 1775, there was a shift away from consumer politics and a shift towards the politics of revolution and war. Would you tell us more about this shift to revolution and war and whether it left any space for consumer politics to continue while the war was going on?

There was definitely a role for consumer politics. The question becomes the much more complicated and nuanced one, how much of a role and how it mattered for different people. There are plenty of people who cared a lot about the symbolic meaning of tea and stuck to it. Even after the ban on tea ended, they still, out of some sense of principle, continued to do it.

At the same time, I came across a wonderful book, The Journal of Dr. Elihu Ashley, which is a diary of a doctor in Deerfield, Massachusetts. And it's a Jane Austen novel. He's dating, he's deciding whom he's going to marry. And it's from 73 to 75. So he describes going out with his mates and having a glass of flip on some nights and having tea other nights. And when the ban on tea happens, he and his mates drink tea a lot less, but not never.

So it's a lot like prohibition in the 20th century. American alcohol consumption meaningfully and substantively went down in the 1920s. But it certainly didn't end in the 1920s, and alcohol smuggling was widespread. So in Ashley's case, he's serious about the ban. He notes a loyalist invited him to tea after the ban was in place in his diary, and the loyalist's invitation to tea is set up as a way to announce political feeling, and he's very upset by this.

But when he gets married later in the year, he serves tea at his wedding, even though the ban is still in place. Why? Because hopefully you only have one of these weddings and you want it to be nice, you want it to be special. And at a time when tea is scarce and even more scarce because it's banned, isn't it all the more special to serve it? So it becomes a bit of a trick to sort of ban it fully and

And he's as flawed and human as any other character. So he's in that way, both representative and vaguely not at the same time. I take him as a good example of that way that people negotiated their own private little choices about how to do that.

James, you've done a lot of research on this tea crisis moment of the 18th century. Of all the research you've uncovered, what is the one thing you'd like us to walk away from this conversation better understanding about the tea crisis and the revolutionary politics that happened after the tea crisis?

The thing that struck me the most was how many times I thought I knew what was happening. Because like you said, it's a story we've known since we were in grade school. I thought when I saw the Disney Johnny Tremaine movie, I think it stuck in my head. It was just there. And then I sort of started to write this. And this was initially part of another book. And I thought, well, this is an easy thing to write up because I already know what happened. I just have to find some primary sources to fill in the story.

and they didn't fit, and it just kept on getting messier. And time and again, there was this obvious gap between what politicians were saying and what people were doing, and that that gap was politically self-serving, but also part of a necessary way for politicians to lead and move a public toward a movement that they wanted to achieve seemed increasingly obvious.

So much of what we think we know about the, especially the early emergence of the American Revolution, the imperial crisis, our storyline is written by politicians. Either the politicians in parliament or the politicians who would eventually end up in Congress. And it's not written by common people. And when you look at the storylines written by common people that want to live everyday lives,

As we know in social history and any other genre of social history and any other time and place, the common people who wanted to live everyday lives often had very different concerns. They were more concerned about the price of tea and whether they could afford it rather than whether it was to be banned.

This became an issue in 1775, 76. The war made consumer goods hard to get. And suddenly, it seemed like the patriots might be in trouble for making consumer life harder for average everyday colonists. Life wasn't nasty, brutish, and short in the 18th century, but it wasn't great yet either. And so every cup of tea you could get, every extra bolt of cloth was nice. So I guess my takeaway would be to mind the gap

between what the politicians are saying and what the common people are doing. And it's amazing how much of what we talk about, about the revolution, leans on the first. Almost everything we use that talks about ideas are written by politicians or adopted by politicians in a meaningful way. And even a lot of the stuff that we use that talks about things in other ways struggles to integrate everyday life and ideas together. That I think is really the big problem.

Let's move into the time warp. This is the segment of the show where we ask you a hypothetical history question about what might have happened if something had occurred differently or if someone had acted differently. James, what if the Boston Tea Party and the other tea protests had really led to a significant reduction in tea consumption among British American colonists? If the colonists had truly given up their tea in protest of the Tea Act, how might this have altered the course of the American Revolution?

It would have affected it, not a whit. I think the East India Company would have been fine and the British government would have chugged on merrily ahead. But I think what is so striking about thinking about the counterfactual around that isn't just what would have happened if the patriots had actually managed to get people to stop drinking tea, but what would have happened if people had realized how much patriots hadn't? And that would have really let the cat out of the bag.

In researching this, it took a long time to realize that both the Boston and Charleston tea cargo survived. And I was emailing back and forth with Mary Beth Norton about this. Her book, 7074, came out and she was also writing on the survival of the Boston cargo a bit in her earlier William & Mary Quarterly article.

And we were sort of discussing, what about this Charleston cargo? Did it survive? And she said, you know, here's a newspaper quote that says that it was rotting away in the Charleston Exchange. Here's this evidence and that. We both couldn't find any evidence for years about what had happened. And it was striking how much misinformation and deliberate disinformation was put out there to distract people from seeing the evidence in the newspapers as it turned out that the tea was ultimately auctioned and sold.

So what are you researching and writing about now, James? Are you still looking at trade goods and their intersections with early American and imperial politics? I am. I'm looking at trade humans. I'm looking at the slave trade and the American Revolution. I'm working on a project on that. I did an earlier project on the tobacco boycott, and now I'm looking at the slave trade ban and the ways in which perhaps it was as beneficial for the slave traders as it was for the patriots in the end.

In a lot of these boycotts, there seemed to be ways to get the merchants on board in a way that was not immediately obvious, but that everyone got their bread buttered in the end. And so I suspect that something like this may have happened with the slave trade as well. And where is the best place for us to reach you and ask questions if we do have more questions about the Tea Crisis of 1773?

That's a great question. So I have a website, jamesfichter.com, and that's where you can find out more about my book, Tea. And of course, you can email me at fichter at hku.hk, where you're welcome to ask me any questions you have. James Fichter, thank you for taking us through the tea crisis of 1773, the role that consumer politics played in that crisis, and how these views and actions shaped the American Revolution. Thank you. It's my pleasure and honor.

Much of what we know about the American Revolution focuses on what revolutionary politicians said, not how everyday people really acted.

This is the thought that James Fichter wants us to take away from our conversation. Like James, more and more historians are now minding the gap between what politicians said and how everyday people acted during the American Revolution. And this is something that I saw in my research as well. People survived the American Revolution and its war for independence by acting in ways that were best for their families and best for their communities at different times.

So as John Burgoyne and his army were marching down the Hudson River Valley, a lot of people greeted that army with offers of assistance. Not because they weren't revolutionaries or didn't believe in the revolutionary cause, but because as everyday people without an army behind them, this was the best way to protect their families, to protect their property, and to survive this encounter by getting that army to march on as quickly as possible.

Likewise, James notes that many Americans signed the Continental Association really to keep those local committees of safety out of their homes and out of their businesses. They signed even when they might have disagreed with the path of the revolution or they had no intention of stopping their tea consumption. This makes the politicians who took prominent stances for the revolutionary cause or in support of the British government outliers. Most people tried to go on with their lives as normally as possible until they couldn't.

Only when their personal, social, and economic situations forced them to, did they take a stand or take some action. Another takeaway I think we should consider is how complicated mass movements are to enact and coordinate. People are complicated, and so are their reasons for participating in movements like a boycott.

Some participants will be steadfast in their participation, adhering to the letter of the agreement. Others will be some-of-the-time participants, and they'll participate in the movement when it suits them and cheat or abandon the movement when it works best for their interests. And still other people won't participate at all.

So was the non-importation, non-exportation movement of 1773 to 1775 successful? Rather than look at this movement as an all-or-nothing event, perhaps we should look at it for what it was. A good attempt at trying to organize 13 disparate colonies into collective and coordinated action. Now, did the movement fully succeed in obtaining all of its objectives? No.

But was it successful in getting a large number of people to participate and in creating a common cause for the American Revolution as it turned into war? It absolutely was. Look for more information about James, his book, Tea, plus notes, links, and a transcript for everything we talked about today on the show notes page. benfranklinsworld.com slash 401.

Friends tell friends about their favorite podcasts. So if you enjoy Ben Franklin's world, please tell your friends and family about it. Production assistance for this podcast comes from Morgan McCullough. Breakmaster Cylinder composed our custom theme music. This podcast is part of the Airwave Media Podcast Network. To discover and listen to their other podcasts, visit airwavemedia.com.

Finally, how did you first learn about the Boston Tea Party or your favorite person or event of the American Revolution? I'm really curious to know. Liz at benfranklinsworld.com. Ben Franklin's World is a production of Colonial Williamsburg Innovation Studios. ♪♪♪