The Boston Tea Party of December 16, 1773 when colonists dumped British East India Company tea into Boston Harbor is often cited as a turning point in America’s love affair with coffee. However, historians reveal that coffee’s influence on American culture began much earlier.
As the United States marks its 250th anniversary it’s time to explore the rich history of coffee in America, from its early arrival on the Mayflower to its role as a catalyst for revolutionary ideas in colonial coffeehouses.
The Early Days of Coffee in America
Coffee’s journey in America began with the Europeans who brought it across the Atlantic. Historian Michelle Craig McDonald author of Coffee Nation: How One Commodity Transformed the Early United States notes that the first documented use of a mortar and pestle to grind coffee beans was on the Mayflower in 1620. Many of the Mayflower’s passengers had come from Amsterdam a major coffee trading center in Western Europe at the time.
The first coffeehouse in the colonies opened in Boston in 1676 a century before the U.S. declared independence. Some taverns even sold coffee earlier than that, indicating the beverage’s growing popularity.
The Boston Tea Party: A Turning Point or Not?
While the Boston Tea Party is often seen as a pivotal moment when Americans switched from tea to coffee, historians argue that coffee was already widely consumed before this event. On that fateful night, colonists boarded three ships and threw overboard more than 92,000 pounds of tea, protesting the British government’s Tea Act of 1773.
John Adams before becoming the second U.S. president, wrote to his wife Abigail Adams in July 1774 about his newfound appreciation for coffee. After asking for tea and being refused, he wrote, “No sir, said she, we have renounced all Tea in this Place. I cant make Tea, but I’le make you Coffee.” Adams went on to say that he had drunk coffee every afternoon since and had borne it very well.
However, McDonald argues that colonists had been drinking coffee all along. She studied advertisements from the 1760s and ’70s and found that coffee was more broadly available than tea, even before the Boston Tea Party. The price of coffee was significantly lower, making it more accessible to drinkers.
The Role of Smuggling
Joyce Chaplin a professor of early American history at Harvard University notes that smuggling was rampant during this time. “There is a vast amount of smuggling,” she says. “So they’re not paying formal duties on tea that they get from the Dutch. They’re probably not paying formal duties on coffee from the French Caribbean.” This makes it difficult to definitively compare tea and coffee consumption during this period.
Chaplin also points out that people who loudly proclaimed a new appreciation for coffee over tea weren’t always doing what they said. It could have been political pandering. “I do not drink tea that comes via the East India Company,” she posits someone of the era saying. “But, you know, other sources are fine. Ditto for the coffee.”
Coffeehouses: Hubs for Revolutionary Ideas
In the colonial era, coffeehouses were hotbeds for seditious thought and planning acts of revolution. Mark Pendergrast author of Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World says that coffeehouses were famous for being places where people thought and plotted things.
The Green Dragon coffeehouse in Boston served as one of the locations for planning the Boston Tea Party. Years earlier, the Old London Coffeehouse in Philadelphia was a meeting place for strategizing responses to another British tax, the Stamp Act of 1765.
In Britain, coffeehouses were nicknamed “penny universities” because for a penny, you could go and learn a whole lot by sitting around in a coffeehouse and discussing everything. The same attitude traveled across the Atlantic. Early American coffeehouses would commonly have city business directories, libraries of newspapers, and currency exchange information. People could get maritime insurance there or buy things at auction.
“There’s a reason why coffeehouses become places of colonial protest … in the 1760s, in the 1770s, and it’s because it is the place where traders and merchants tended to gather,” historian McDonald says. “That’s where they heard about the economics of the day.”
The Dark Side of Coffee’s History
While coffee played a significant role in fueling revolutionary ideas, it also had a dark side. The plantations that supplied the crop ran on the labor of enslaved people. By 1790 half of the world’s coffee was being grown in the French colony of Saint-Domingue in what is today Haiti where slaves were routinely mistreated, raped, and murdered.
The Declaration of Independence signed in 1776 is infamous for its contradiction. It proclaimed that “all men are created equal,” but failed to acknowledge the hundreds of thousands of enslaved people living in America at the time. Coffee carried a similar contradiction, as the beverage that fueled conversations inspiring America’s fight for independence depended on enslavement.
“Coffee had this paradoxical effect, that it did promote revolutionary thought,” Pendergrast says. “But it was also grown by slaves.”
