Tea & American History

As might be expected, English immigrants to America brought "tea time" with them. The Dutch introduced tea into North America as early as the seventeenth century and its consumption became more widespread in the following century, particularly among the upper class. Tea parties, with their silver teapots and porcelain tea service, became the symbol of social success, occasions at which the elite families of Philadelphia and Boston would meet. Soon, however, tea became more popular in less affluent circles, becoming a universal sign of good manners and hospitality.

In New York, the Chatham Street pump was thought to provide the best water for tea. "Tea-water men" hawked it loudly through the streets of the city. In the early eighteenth century, Puritans drank bitter tea with butter and salt, whereas most New Englanders preferred green tea from China, scented with saffron, iris root or gardenia petals. Such habits waned over the decades, but tea continued to be a popular beverage. By the end of the eighteenth century, a third of the colonies' population drank tea twice a day. Tea was the third-ranking colonial import during the 1750s, behind textiles and manufactured goods.

When England found itself financially strapped by the French and Indian War, it levied a heavy tax on tea. Throughout the colonies, the tea tax provoked violent, patriotic reaction and calls for a boycott. An alarmed East India Company had the tax lowered, but this was not enough to cool tempers. On December 16, 1773, patriots from Saint Andrew's Masonic lodge in Boston dressed up as Mohawk Indians and boarded three of the company's ships. They threw 340 chests of tea into the harbor. The incident became ironically known as the "Boston Tea Party," and unleashed English reprisals. But such action merely triggered other parties, ultimately leading to the battle of Bunker Hill and the Declaration of Independence in 1776. Tea had indeed started a revolution.

In the late eighteenth century, the young American fleet entered the tea trade by going straight to the source: China. Imports of tea rose spectacularly from 600 tons in 1790 to ten times that amount in 1825, [due in large part from these upstart Americans getting into the trade]. Numerous New England fortunes were built on this trade, money that was subsequently invested in local textile mills. In the face of the wave of new immigrants from Europe and Asia, the affluent classes in New England clung to the time-honored English traditions. Tea, along with hunting, became a social ritual designed to indicate membership in a privileged group. At the same time, tea became highly prized by the grand southern planters and during America's Civil War, "blockade runners" supplied plantations with tea worth its weight in gold.