What was advertised in a colonial American newspaper 250 years ago today?

“NO TEA.”

More than a month after colonizers disguised as Indians dumped tea into Boston Harbor to protest the duties imposed by Parliament in the Tea Act, the subject of purchasing and consuming tea continued to animate conversations around town and in the public prints.  On January 27, 1774, the Massachusetts Spy published a letter from “DEBORAH DOUBTFUL,” who may have been a concerned woman or, in the spirit of Benjamin Franklin’s Silence Dogood, may have been a man masquerading as a woman.  The message mattered more than the messenger.  In this case, Deborah Doubtful issued a warning to anyone who sold or purchased tea.

The writer claimed that colonizers in Boston “hear and read so much of indulging the sale of undutied teas through comparatively a small number of the citizens countenance the use of any tea.”  That disparity prompted “a number of the female friends to liberty” to “agree to enquire into the number of those who still continue the use of that detestable drug.”  Terminology for tea had shifted.  Rather than a pleasure to imbibe, it became something worse than any of the patent medicines so widely advertised in early American newspapers.  Deborah Doubtful warned that unless those who still consumed tea “very speedily reform,” her committee would “resolve to take such measures with them, as will perhaps cause them to repent their love to their country runs so low in so trying a season.”  Those measure could include public shaming, but both men and women sometimes resorted to other forms of protest.

Deborah Doubtful made it clear that colonizers needed to be very careful about what they chose to sell or drink.  “Dealers in Dutch tea are informed form the same society,” she cautioned, “that a strict watch will be kept over them, and the smugglers exposed as they deserve.”  Her committee extended their purview beyond just those teas imported from Britain and subject to the Tea Act, refusing to accept smuggled tea as an alternative.  “The only sure way to avoid being imposed upon by dutied tea,” Deborah Doubtful proclaimed, “being to oppose the trade in all tea.”  That the author so obviously used a pseudonym put readers on notice that anyone, both men and women, could participate in surveillance of their friends and neighbors, report them to a committee composed of “friends of liberty,” and cause problems for them as result of the choices they made in the marketplace.

Joseph P. Palmer did not need to read Deborah Doubtful’s letter to reach that conclusion.  He already arrived there when he submitted his advertisement for “GRENADA RUM” and various groceries to the printing office.  It concluded with a list of “Cheese, Coffee, Chocolate, &c. as usual,” but something was missing.  In a nota bene, centered and in a larger font to make it all the more visible, Palmer declared “NO TEA.”  Merchants, shopkeepers, grocers, and other who carried coffee and chocolate usually stocked tea as well, but given the climate in Boston at the time, including Deborah Doubtful’s letter and other items about tea in that issue of the Massachusetts Spy, Palmer stayed away from the problematic commodity.  He may have done so as a matter of his own political principles, but that might not have been his only motivation.  At that moment, conducting business and remaining in the good graces of the community meant going along with prohibitions on selling and drinking tea.