Drink (29 page)

The next European country to take to tea was France, where it was drunk by the aristocracy, and where Marie de Rabutin-Chantal is credited as being the first to take it mixed with milk. From France it came to England with the Restoration. Initially, it was ridiculously costly. In 1687 the cheapest sort was twenty-five shillings per pound— rather more than a barrel of beer. However, in that age, a high price was an incentive to the upper classes, and in the same decades that England’s poor were debasing themselves with drams of gin, a daily dish of tea became a ritual for its wealthy inhabitants. They devised ceremonies around its consumption, which were presided over by women, for tea drinking usually took place in private houses in mixed company, and just as women had acted as cupbearers and peace weavers in mead halls, so they played the same role with tea-pots and dishes of fragrant
bohea.
The rituals invented for tea were satirized by Alexander Pope in his mock-heroic poem the
Rape of the Lock
(1716):

After a fashion, tea provided a gateway for female entry into the British Enlightenment. In 1742, Eliza Haywood, best-selling novelist and social commentator, launched a periodical named
The Tea-Table,
which she followed up with
The Female Spectator
(1744-46). Both titles were intended for the expanding circle of educated women in London. Tea featured frequently in their pages, often ironically. According to the
Female Spectator
it was “the utter Destruction of all Oeconomy, the Bane of good Housewifry, and the Source of Idleness, by engrossing those Hours which ought to be employed in an honest and prudent Endeavour.”

Tea drinking took some time to spread from the houses of the wealthy to the country at large. The official price of tea was kept at an artificial height by the East India Company, which held a monopoly on its importation, and by heavy duties. However, smugglers took up the slack, and most British tea lovers obtained their supplies on the black market. In contrast to the civilized image the leaf enjoyed among its aficionados, the men who smuggled it were notoriously brutal. In 1747, for instance, a group of Dorset tea contrabandistas known as the Hawkhurst Gang carried out an armed raid on the Poole customs house to reclaim sixty tons of confiscated tea, tortured to death two customs officials who had been sent to investigate them, and killed a poor laborer they suspected of stealing two small bags of tea from one of their caches. The high price of bohea created a market for fakes. Smuggled tea was often cut with leaves from other plants before being offered to the consumer. This problem was common enough to lead to legislation prohibiting the practice, and in 1777, concerned that England was losing its hedgerows, Parliament outlawed so-called
British tea,
the pseudonym for an amalgam of ash, hawthorne and elder leaves, and sheep dung that was sold throughout the nation as a patriotic alternative to the Chinese variety.

Tea did not become acceptable without a struggle. Its detractors attacked both the infusion itself and the people who consumed it. “Were they the sons of tea-sippers who won the fields of Crécy and Agincourt, or dyed the Danube’s streams with Gallic blood?” asked Joseph Hanway, a contemporary skeptic, in a 1756 pamphlet aimed at bringing Britons to their senses. Hanway, who pioneered the use of umbrellas in London, was of the opinion that tea would be the ruin of Great Britain. It had already destroyed people’s looks: “Men seem to have lost their stature and comeliness, and women their beauty. I am not young, but, methinks, there is not quite so much beauty in this land as there was. Your very chambermaids have lost their bloom, I suppose, by sipping tea.” It was also a leading cause of infant mortality: “The careless spending of time among servants, who are charged with the care of infants, is often fatal: The nurse frequently destroys the child! the poor infant, being left neglected, expires whilst she is sipping her tea!”

Hanway’s views were challenged in print by Dr. Samuel Johnson, representing the Enlightenment, who confessed to being a “hardened and shameless tea-drinker, who has, for twenty years, diluted his meals only with the infusion of this fascinating plant.” Johnson confined himself to tea drinking, as he felt he could not regulate his intake of anything stronger: “I can’t drink a little . . . therefore I never touch it.” He did, however, live in the Anchor Brewery in Southwark for a number of years and reckoned alcohol to be life’s “second greatest pleasure,” an opinion shared by James Boswell, his Scottish biographer. Boswell’s drinking habits were perhaps more typical of the age and are illustrated by the bottle count in his diary for an evening’s drinking with a handful of compatriots in Edinburgh, “the Athens of the North.” Together they managed thirty-three pints of Scotch claret, two bottles of old hock and two of port, with a few shots each of brandy and gin on the side. So much alcohol in one sitting had inevitable consequences for the Scotch philosophers, who, had they consulted Dr. Johnson’s
Dictionary
(1755), could have chosen between
Fuddled, Fuzzled, Inebriated, Muddled, Tipsy,
or plain
Drunk
to describe their condition.

Although tea affected the daily drinking habits of Britons far more than coffee had—indeed, it came to replace beer for breakfast—its similar failure to inspire, in the sense of intoxicate, meant that the poetick juice of former ages remained the stimulant of choice for enlightened minds. This preference was not limited to the literati who shaped the movement but was also apparent in the middle classes. London was graced with a number of tea gardens, where its population repaired on evenings and weekends to listen to music, enjoy the walks, and to eat and drink. According to an early practitioner of the science of statistics, these entertainment complexes sold more alcohol than infusions. He calculated that on an average Sunday, nearly 200,000 Londoners visited its tea gardens, and “the returning situation of those persons [was] as follows: sober, 50,000; in high glee, 90,000; drunkish, 30,000; staggering tipsy 10,000, muzzy, 15,000, dead drunk, 5,000.”

The national penchant for at least mild inebriation during their leisure hours was, after all, consistent with the core philosophy of the British Enlightenment—the pursuit of happiness. As Locke had phrased it in 1717: “The business of men is to be happy in this world by the enjoyment of the things of nature subservient to life, health, ease, and pleasure, and by the comfortable hopes of another life when this is ended.”

15 REVOLUTION

IV. However peaceably your Colonies have submitted
to your Government, shewn their Affection to your
Interest, and patiently borne their Grievances, you
are to suppose them always inclined to revolt, and
treat them accordingly. Quarter Troops among them,
who by their Insolence may provoke the rising of
Mobs, and by their Bullets and Bayonets suppress
them. By this Means, like the Husband who uses his
Wife ill from Suspicion, you may in Time convert your
Suspicions into Realities.

In 1762, Benjamin Franklin returned to Pennsylvania after a five-year stay in London. In contrast to his first visit, when he had worked as a jobbing printer and had been teased for being a water-drinking American, this time he had traveled as the official representative of the Pennsylvania Assembly to petition the king on its behalf. He was, moreover, a celebrated Enlightenment figure, an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society, whose experiments with electricity had won him fame throughout Europe. The petition he had been appointed to present related to taxes imposed on Pennsylvania to support the cost of the Seven Years’ War, which were considered by the Pennsylvania Assembly to be inequitable.

This was not the only point of difference between Britain and its American settlements to have emerged during the
French and Indian War,
as it was known in the colonies, whose prosecution had also aggravated preexisting disagreements. One of the principal causes of friction arose from the rum and molasses trade between New England and the French sugar islands. In 1731, an import duty had been imposed by the British on both substances. Despite the volume of the trade, very little duty was collected prior to the outbreak of the war, and during the initial years of the conflict, both French and British colonists kept up their mutually profitable, but doubly illegal,
²⁵
commerce. Rather, however, than continuing their business in a clandestine manner, they took advantage of a wartime convention that allowed combatants to communicate with each other via flags of truce. The convention was intended to facilitate, among other matters, the exchange of prisoners of war. Any ship traveling under a flag of truce was deemed inviolable. A single prisoner of war was enough to earn a flag, and some “prisoners” made a good living voyaging to and fro between the French Caribbean and British mainland colonies. Permits to wear flags of truce were granted by colonial governors, who either sold them by auction or at a fixed price. Only Virginia paid any respect to the sanctity of the institution—indeed, caused a scandal among other colonies when its governor refused a bribe of four hundred pounds to grant a questionable permit.

So successful was this trade that basic foodstuffs from New England were cheaper and easier to find in French Haiti than British Jamaica. Faced with a dearth of rations, the Royal Navy elected to enforce the spirit of the law by breaking it. They sailed into Monte Christi, nominally a neutral port in the Spanish part of Hispaniola, and carried away as prizes all the ships that it contained, including a number of colonial vessels. Although the Admiralty court in London later ordered that some owners be compensated, the raid signaled a change in policy: Royal Naval ships took over the flags-of-truce trade, and smugglers had their vessels sunk or confiscated. In Salem alone, in the last three years of the war, over two hundred boats were taken by the British. These measures had the twin consequences of alienating the owners of the ships and the merchants who traded in them, and of causing a shortage of rum in the colonies, thus pushing up the price of this popular fluid.

There was worse to come after the war had ended. Global domination, and the defense of America, had been an expensive exercise. The wise heads in Parliament decided that the grateful colonists would leap at the chance to contribute via duty on imported goods. To this end, they introduced a Sugar Act in 1764, which lowered the rate of duty on molasses, but raised the standards of enforcement by entrusting them to the Royal Navy. Any vessel of less than fifty tons “loitering” within six miles of the coast was deemed to be smuggling and therefore fair game for British warships. Moreover, if the charge could be made to stick in a British Admiralty court, shares in the value of the vessel and its contents were awarded to the officers and crew of its captor. This final provision was considered by the colonists as an invitation to Royal Navy captains to arrest any boat they came across, on the off chance that it carried contraband and so constituted a serious threat to their maritime trade.

The Sugar Act contained a further irritation—it imposed a duty on imported wines, including Madeira, the favorite tipple of the wealthier class of planters. Madeira, the Canary Islands, and the Azores had hitherto been important markets for American produce, and the new duty effectively destroyed the trade. Moreover, while the colonists had been promised in compensation that they would be permitted to import direct from Portugal and Spain, the concession had been sabotaged by London wine merchants. In consequence, they were required to pay more for their imported wines, at the same time as being denied direct access to markets for their own goods. By 1764, Franklin was back in London, once again as representative of the Pennsylvania Assembly, with instructions to remedy this injustice. Despite spirited lobbying, and an eloquent series of letters to the press, the British merchants proved to have greater influence in Parliament, and the restrictions remained. Such discrimination rankled the colonists, who were reminded of it every time they raised a glass of Madeira to their lips or stared at the unsold goods in their warehouses.

The importance of the issue is apparent in the 1765 edition of
Poor Richard’s Almanac,
in which Franklin’s alter ego provided “a few plain Instructions . . .
First,
for making good Wine of our own wild Grapes.
Secondly,
for raising Madeira Wine in [this] Province.
Thirdly,
for the Improvement of our Corn Spirits, so as they may be preferable to Rum. And this seems very material; for as we raise more Corn than the English West-India Islands can take off, and since we cannot now well sell it to the foreign Islands, what can we do with the Overplus better, than to turn it into Spirit, and thereby lessen the Demand for West-India Rum, which our Grain will not pay for?”

Colonial tempers were further inflamed by passage of the Stamp Act in 1765, which, like the Sugar Act, was intended to defray the expense of the late war by raising revenue in the Americas. According to its provisions, most official and semiofficial documents, including contracts, liquor licenses, newspapers, and calendars were all required to be stamped, at a cost, before issue. Opposition to the act was universal, and sufficient to provoke a demonstration of unity among the colonists. In November 1765, a Stamp Act Congress was convened in New York to protest the legislation. It was attended by the representatives of no fewer than nine colonies, who adopted a
Declaration of Rights and Grievances
against the British crown.