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

“Pointing out the names of several persons concerned in destroying the Tea.”

Two months after what has become known as the Boston Tea Party, tea continued to occupy the minds of colonizers in that port city and beyond.  In the February 17, 1774, edition of the Massachusetts Spy, Joseph P. Palmer once again ran his advertisement for “GRANADA RUM” with a nota bene that emphatically proclaimed, “NO TEA.”  Immediately above it, Jeremiah Cronin placed a notice in which he attempted to disassociate himself from any sort of political position concerning the recent dumping of tea into the harbor, hoping to reduce unwanted and, he claimed, unwarranted attention.

Cronin reported that on a morning early in February he discovered that “an Advertisement appeared posted up at the North-End of this town, signifying that I the subscriber, have been active in taking minutes, and pointing out the names of several persons concerned in destroying the Tea, and tarring and feathering.”  He likely feared the ire of patriots who believed that he undermined their cause and planned to inform on them to the authorities.  Yet, Cronin declared, he had no such intentions!  “I hereby beg leave to inform the Public,” he pleaded, “that so far from being active and busy on any such occasions, I have neither directly or indirectly concerned myself with public affairs.”  Instead, he promised, “I have always kept myself within doors when any disturbance happened in the town.”  Just as he did not want patriots looking too closely at him, Cronin aimed to avoid trouble with the authorities and the loyalists who supported them.  He ran his advertisement to declare his neutrality.  To buttress his effort to convince the public that was the case, he appended a declaration by a justice of the peace, Joseph Gardner, who affirmed that Cronin “made solemn oath to the whole of the above declaration.”

The politics of tea also received attention in the upper left corner of the page that carried Cronin’s notice and Palmer’s advertisement.  The “POETS CORNER” for that issue featured “A Lady’s Adieu to her TEA-TABLE.”  Perhaps written by a woman, perhaps not, the poem said “FArewel [to] the tea board and its equipage” and the “many a joyous moment” of “Hearing the girls tattle” and “the old maids talk scandal” while drinking “hyson, congo, and best double fine” tea.  “No more shall I dish out the once lov’d liquor,” the lady asserted, considering tea “now detestable.”  Consuming tea was no longer a diversion or a treat, but instead a vice: “Its use will fasten slavish chains upon my country, / And Liberty’s the goddess I would choose / To reign triumphant in AMERICA.”  The lady’s “Adieu to her TEA-TABLE” suggested, even more forcefully than Palmer’s proclamation of “NO TEA,” that Cronin might not much longer have the luxury of taking a neutral position in “public affairs.”  When it came down to tea or liberty, when decisions about consumption had political meaning, when neighbors and acquaintances observed decisions that fellow colonizers made in the marketplace, Cronin would find it increasingly difficult to avoid taking a side in the trouble that was brewing.