What was advertised in a colonial American newspaper 250 years ago this week?
“The above teas were imported before the East India Company’s teas arrived, or it was known that they would send any here on their own account.”
A week after colonizers in Boston dumped tea into the harbor in an event now known as the Boston Tea Party, Cyrus Baldwin continued to advertise “CHOICE Bohea and Souchong Teas, best Hyson ditto.” His advertisement on the December 23, 1773, edition of the Massachusetts Spy, like his advertisement that ran in the Boston Evening-Post three days earlier, concluded with a nota bene declaring that the “teas were imported before the East India Company’s teas arrived, or it was known that they would send any here on their own account.” That previous advertisement ran below a “NOTIFICATION” that called on “all the Dealers in, and Venders of Teas” to attend a meeting on December 21 for the purpose of “determining on suitable Measures to be adopted, and to cooperate with a great number of respectable Inhabitants of this Province, express’d by a Vote of their late Assembly to suppress the Use of that detested Article.” Those who attended did not reach any final decisions. Instead, a notice dated December appeared in the Massachusetts Spy, advising the “Traders in TEA … that their meeting stands Adjourned to THIS Evening at 5 o’clock, at the Royal-Exchange Tavern.”
In addition to that brief notice, the December 23 edition of the Massachusetts Spy, the first published since the Boston Tea Party, included several articles and editorials about tea. Among the local news in the first column on the first page, readers learned that East India Company’s tea commissioners remained at Castle William on an island in the harbor. Mixing news and editorial, this update stated, “Their obstinacy has rendered them infinitely more obnoxious to their countrymen than even the Stamp-Masters were.”
Elsewhere on the first page, a letter to the printer, Isaiah Thomas, signed by “A WOMAN,” objected to the recitation “a great number of arguments used to persuade the ladies to leave off the use of [tea].” The correspondent inquired, “If Tea has been really known to be a baneful weed, a poisonous draught, &c. why were not these arguments used against the use of it in former times, before it was thought a political evil?” She also noted that “gentlemen as well as ladies” enjoyed drinking tea and derived benefits to their health from doing so. However, she did not make these arguments to justify continuing to consume the beverage. Instead, she wished to be presented with a rationale for boycotting tea “such as will convince persons who are capable of using their reason,” whether male or female. To that end, she recommended that “the gentlemen who are fully acquainted with all the political reasons for discarding the use of Tea … to publish a full and plain narrative of fact, so that we might see how it comes to pass that the use of Tea is a political evil in this country.” If men were to instruct women “in all they know” about the political implications of drinking tea “it would be a much more probable method to make us leave off the use of it than the calling it hard names, and telling us scare-crow stories about it.” Women participated in politics through their decisions in the marketplace. When treated as capable of understanding rational arguments, the correspondent suggested, women would join with men in more effective and powerful resistance to Parliament’s abuses.
Three other letters to the printer expressed outrage over tea, while a news article offered an overview of the town meetings that occurred in the days before colonizers disguised as Indians boarded three ships and destroyed the tea they carried. Another article described that event: “A number of brave and resolute men, determined to do all in their power to save their country from the ruin which their enemies had plotted, emptied every chest of tea on board the three ships … without the least damage done to the ships or any other property.” According to this article, “The masters and owners are well pleased that their ships are thus cleared; and the people are almost universally congratulating each other on this happy event.”
Among the advertisements, Baldwin was not the only shopkeeper who promoted tea in the December 23 edition of the Massachusetts Spy, though he alone inserted an explanation about when he acquired the tea in hopes of convincing the community that he could sell it in good conscious and prospective customers that they could purchase and drink it in good conscious. Even as many colonizers in Boston and other towns called for a boycott of tea, many retailers and consumers did not immediately cease buying and selling the popular beverage.