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Asia-Pacific in the Making of the Americas: Toward a Global History

Edenton Ladies Tea Party, 1775

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The Tea Act, in Which the East India Company Comes to America
They certainly cried out three years later, however, with the passage of the Tea Act in May 1773, which for the first time in the history of English settlement in the Americas allowed the East India Company to directly import tea into the colonies, bypassing American merchants altogether. The merchants reacted, as they generally did to all navigation legislation. But what is different here, and what caused the Tea Act to become the spark of the Revolution, was the outburst of popular protest across all classes and across all colonial regions. Merchants, their wives, their maids, grocers, farmers, artisans, sailors—in Georgia, in Philadelphia, in Boston, and even outlying coastal regions such as Sudbury, Massachusetts, and Edenton, North Carolina. It was the unity and magnitude of the emotional response by ALL colonists that makes the reaction to the Tea Act different than any other American protest.
Comparatively few colonists had called up such images of despotism and slavery about the previous laws; they did not provoke meetings of thousands of people as did this act. Popular protest and raucous, overflowing town meetings had been part of colonial American public life from the beginning, with mobs sometimes reaching 200 to 300 people of diverse socio-economic backgrounds.[12] But the scale and diversity of participants in the meetings over the East India Company tea ships, in several towns of several colonies, were unprecedented. Four meetings were held in Boston in late 1773 of over a thousand people (Nov. 29, Nov. 30, Dec. 14, and Dec. 16), and there were others throughout the colonies during that fall of over 500 people each. In Philadelphia eight thousand people assembled when the tea ships sailed into the harbor (Dec. 25, 1773), the largest single meeting in colonial American history. Among a sizeable lineup of villains in the colonial imagination in the decade preceding the Revolution, Chinese tea holds the distinction of having been the only commodity to ever be attacked, the only commodity suspected of subversion. We need to ask “why tea.”
A 1774 cartoon copied by Paul Revere and circulating on both sides of the Atlantic helps us see more clearly what was going on. Paul Revere copied it from the English original, and it was reprinted in number of American newspapers. Here Prime Minister Lord North pours tea down the throat of America, portrayed as a supine Native American, vulnerable to sexual violation by notorious womanizer Lord Sandwich. Chief Justice Mansfield holds down America's arms. The oppressive Boston Port Bill sticks out of Lord North's pocket. Americans would be reduced to dependent consumers, as opposed to Manly merchants. And what was worse, they would be consuming a soporific substance produced by a despotized people. With the help of tea, Americans worst nightmare happens here – effeminacy, loss of mastery, tyrannized by despotic rulers, and loss of their identity as white Englishmen. The whole tea affair was tainted with elements of Eastern despotism and slavery, as Americans recalled repeatedly in an ardent conversation in the press in the months following the passage of the Tea Act.
Beguiling Chinese tea, from the perspective of most Americans, served as an agent for tyrants, but it also became a metaphor linking the impending oppression of American colonists with Eastern enslavement. Gradually tea came under fire from all quarters, and interestingly, not just East India Company tea, but all Chinese tea, as if the Chinese rather than the English were threatening American bodies. The Boston Gazette reported on December 20, four days after the Tea Party:
We are positively informed that the patriotic inhabitants of Lexington, at a late meeting, unanimously resolved against the use of Bohea Tea of all sorts, Dutch or English importation; and to manifest the sincerity of their resolution, they bro’t together every ounce contained in the town, and committed it to one common bonfire."
The writer added that Charlestown was in the process of following this “illustrious example,” but as is made clear in contemporary newspaper accounts, many towns, clubs, and individuals made public shows of destroying tea, all tea, both before and after Boston’s bold act. By sipping tea, English people could actually become Chinese, prone to indolent Chinese habits, which would ultimately promote the need for a despotic system of government, just as it had everywhere in Asia. More masculine officers would of necessity be sent to America to subjugate and enchain an enthralled, feminized people under the spell of a tainted Eastern potion. This image, and the anxieties that inspired it, were at the forefront of the Patriot mind in 1773.
The last speech given to the crowd of thousands at the Old South Meeting House in Boston on the evening of December 16^th was by Dr. Thomas Young, a physician. Its exact content is unfortunately lost to us, but a report from an observer stated that Young spoke for about 15 to 20 minutes on “the ill Effects of Tea on the Constitution,” interrupted by “the People often shouting and clapping him.” According to the observer, Dr. Young stated he had confidence “in the Virtue of his Countrymen in refraining from the Use of it.” Chinese tea, not Parliamentary legislation, threatened the patriotic Anglo-American “Body,” and abstinence of this alluring Chinese “apple” was necessary to the manly virtue of Americans.[13]
Samuel Adams, however, was more pessimistic than Dr. Young about the ability of Americans to resist Chinese enthrallment. The anonymous observer noted in his account that Adams had previously said he “could not trust the private Virtue of his Countrymen in refraining from the Use of it.” So the tea, and only the tea, was destroyed the evening of December 16, a symbolic statement about bodily liberty that was so powerful it could unleash the widespread armed clashes and rhetorical masterpieces that followed, retrospectively known today as the American Revolution.
The direct importation into America of Chinese tea by the imperious East India Company had such potent symbolic and ideological weight that it touched more Americans than most other pre-Revolutionary incidents and helped unleash the collective energy necessary for all classes of colonists to work together over vast distances, pool disparate resources, and overcome prejudices in soliciting help from long-standing enemies. The “Destruction of the Tea” was not merely the last straw or the final moment of maturation in an ongoing resistance movement. Rather, it was a trigger with specific cultural content. It represented a shared fear of having the colonial body force-fed an intoxicating Eastern potion by a mother-turned- Leviathan, of succumbing to a primitive and gendered form of bodily exploitation rather than rising to manly mastery in the communion of costly and potentially treacherous Chinese commodities.
The war with Britain is history. It is not surprising, given the role played by tea as one of the instigating forces at the outset, that before the peace treaty concluding the American Revolution was even signed a decade later, American merchants were readying ships to send to China, the world’s only source of tea.

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^{[12] See St. George, Conversing, pp. 242-68; Benjamin Carp, Rebels Rising: Cities and the American Revolution, Oxford. 2007.
[13] The account of this observer, unsigned and titled “Proceedings of ye Body respecting the Tea,” was found in the Sewell Papers in the Public Archives of Canada, Ottowa. A later note on the account compares the handwriting to that of a certain “Coleman,” perhaps a cousin of Judge Samuel Sewell. See L.F.S. Upton, “Proceedings of Ye Body Respecting the Tea,” in “Notes and Documents,” William and Mary Quarterly 22, no. 2 (April 1965): 287-300, p. 293, 298-300. For an in-depth treatment of Dr. Young, and his espousing bodily health as a revolutionary cause against tyrannical rulers, see Pauline Maier, “Reason and Revolution: The Radicalism of Dr. Thomas Young,” American Quarterly, 28, no. 2 (Summer 1976): 229-49.}