10 
In which Sons of Liberty drink rum punch at the Golden Ball Tavern, Merchants Row, Boston (a cold evening in January 1769)
How rum brought the American colonies together and split Britain’s First Empire apart
‘May the Sons of Liberty Shine with Lustre!’1 called out Nathaniel Barber as he raised his glass. His companions raised theirs and drank with him. John Marston ladled out more rum punch. ‘All true patriots throughout the world!’ he rejoined, and the company raised their glasses again.2 It was considered ungentlemanly to propose a toast the rest of the company would not want to uphold.3 For the fifteen men gathered round the table in a Boston tavern on a cold January night in 1769, the toasts they proposed affirmed their political affiliation.4 They saw themselves as Sons of Liberty, men who were prepared to resist the British Crown’s arrogant imposition of taxation on their colony.5 A group of New York radicals had been the first to call themselves the Sons of Liberty when in 1765 a cash-strapped British metropole attempted to raise revenue from its American colonies by introducing the Stamp Act, which imposed a tax on printed paper. The New Yorkers called on others to form themselves into similar oppositional groups, and before long there were hundreds of men throughout the Thirteen Colonies calling themselves Sons of Liberty.6
The fifteen men had gathered that January evening in John Marston’s tavern, a convenient meeting place as it was situated in a small street just off the town’s busiest thoroughfare. It was en route between Benjamin Cobb’s distillery and his home at 22 Long Wharf, and merchant William Mackay frequently passed by when business took him to the wharf. The friends often called into the tavern to talk and exchange news, read the newspapers or the latest political pamphlet and occasionally dip into a book from Marston’s extensive library. On the shelves were volumes of North Briton, the journal published by the Whig John Wilkes, and all eight volumes of Addison and Steele’s Spectator, the avowed aim of which had been to promote discussion in England’s coffee houses. Indeed, the friends sipped coffee on occasion, but like most of Marston’s customers, they preferred something stronger. More often than not they drank rum punch.
That evening the punch that was flowing freely into their glasses was ladled from a fine silver bowl of which the assembled company were inordinately proud. Barber had brought it to the tavern from the offices of his insurance company, where it was kept safe.7 The names of the fifteen men were engraved around the outer rim of the bowl, but as a further inscription made clear, the vessel had been made to celebrate ‘the glorious NINETY-TWO’.8 These were the 92 members of the Massachusetts Assembly who had voted not to rescind a letter written a few months earlier questioning the right of the British Crown to tax the American colonies when they did not have representation in Parliament and were therefore unable to protest the measures.9
The men gathered round the punch bowl were typical Sons of Liberty. At least five of them had been captains in the militia. The Irishman Captain Daniel Malcolm imported wines, and Ichabod Jones traded in provisions. In contemporary documents John White and William Mackay were both referred to as gentlemen and may have been merchants.10 These men’s livelihoods depended less on imperial connections to Britain than on intercolonial networks of trade. This meant that they were more invested in maintaining the strength of the American economy than propping up the sagging fortunes of the metropole. Another of the friends, Caleb Hopkins, was a Freemason and a cousin of one of Boston’s most influential Sons of Liberty, Benjamin Edes, the publisher of the Boston Gazette. Two of his other cousins were Daniel Parker, a silversmith, and John Welsh, an ironmonger.11 They too would have had little economic reason to support the imperial system, which assigned the colonies the role of consuming British manufactures rather than making their own wares. It was men such as these, gathered around bowls of rum punch in taverns throughout the thirteen North American colonies, who fomented the dissent that was to end in the Declaration of American Independence in 1776.
In the instructions Henry Drax left for the overseer of his Barbados sugar plantation before he went on a trip to England in 1679, he warned him to make sure ‘that at any time [the Stiller] have occasion to be absent or a Sleep that he Certainly keep the Still house door Locked and the Key in his pocket’.12 Drax did not want the rum to be stolen by the slaves, who he knew would siphon off the liquor to sell to tavern keepers in Bridgetown if they were given the slightest opportunity. While his father had served rum at his dining table, Henry Drax would have seen it as a drink more suitable for fortifying slaves against the perpetual Barbadian damp. In his instructions he stipulated that the overseer should be sure to give the slaves a dram every morning in wet weather and ‘at other times as you shall see convenient’.13 Although Drax himself preferred fine wines and Madeira, he noted with some satisfaction that the still house ‘brings in very Considerable profit with little charge’.14 Indeed, while the planters originally distilled rum as a sideline to sugar-making, by 1700 they were producing 600,000 gallons a year and it accounted for 19 per cent of the value of Barbadian exports.15
British merchants were the first to transform rum from a local Caribbean drink into a global trading commodity. Both the French and the Spanish saw it as an unwelcome competitor with home-produced liquors and outlawed either its production or its entry into their home ports. But the British discovered that it was popular with African slave traders and that it made an excellent cargo for Irish provisions ships returning from the New World. The Navigation Acts stipulated that even sugar bound for Ireland had to first pass through British customs. But in the 1730s, restrictions on rum were lifted and ships that would otherwise have sailed home empty now brought hundreds of thousands of gallons of the liquor to Ireland’s southern ports. The bountiful flow of cheap rum established liquor consumption among Ireland’s peasantry, especially in the hinterland of the southern ports, where whiskey had less of a hold on popular drinking habits. By the 1760s, the Irish drank twice as much rum as the English. It was not until the 1780s that whiskey rose to ascendancy and pushed rum into second place as the Irishman’s favourite tipple.17
In the Americas, the continental colonies were the region’s most enthusiastic consumers, and in the 1670s, they began to distil their own. Captain John Turner of Salem was among the pioneers in the American manufacture of the liquor. The sons of a Suffolk shoemaker who had come to New England as part of Winthrop’s Great Migration, John and his brother Habakkuk established themselves in the intercolonial shipping trade. They took New England fish, lumber, shingles and ships’ stores to the West Indies and exchanged them for sugar, rum and molasses. A relative owned a sugar plantation in Barbados, and perhaps it was through this connection that John Turner acquired the knowledge of how to distil his own liquor. Although the rum Turner made seems to have been rather rough stuff, its manufacture propelled him to a position of wealth and respectability. Throughout the 1670s, he served as a Salem selectman, and he built a fine house across the street from his warehouses.18 If he had lived a hundred years later, he would surely have joined the Sons of Liberty.
On the eve of the War of Independence, there were 140 rum distilleries in colonial America, concentrated around Massachusetts, the hub for the West Indies trade. American slave traders found it a useful commodity, as they had few other goods to barter for slaves in West Africa.19 A triangular trade now emerged in American rum, West African slaves and West Indian molasses. But less than 10 per cent of the rum brewed in America found its way onto the global market: lacking its depth of flavour, it could not compete with the West Indian product.20 Its real economic importance lay in stimulating trade between the thirteen continental American colonies.
Until the 1720s, the different colonies did not trade much with each other. But once Massachusetts began producing rum, it found eager buyers in Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, Quebec, Prince Edward Island, New York, Maryland, Virginia, the Carolinas and Georgia. New England rum became the tipple of choice among America’s fishermen and lumberjacks, washerwomen, farmers and workmen. Just as the sugar planters used rum to inoculate their slaves against the damp, American labourers administered themselves fortifying doses of the liquor.21 Derived from sugar, it was one of the most calorific of all spirits and was a cheap and agreeable way to give themselves an injection of energy. Indeed, the American working man’s use of rum bore some resemblance to the English labourer’s reliance on heavily sugared tea.22 This may account for the discrepancy between the English, whose annual consumption of distilled spirits amounted to only 0.6 gallons per member of the population, and the heavy-drinking Americans, who consumed enough rum for everyone in the Thirteen Colonies to have drunk four gallons a year.23
In the same way that in Britain the elite worried about the democratisation of tea-drinking, the New England Puritan elite were perturbed by the fact that the cheap, home-produced rum allowed workmen access to a regular drop of comfort. When the poorer section of society had been confined to other home-brewed alcoholic products, their drinking habits had not impacted on America’s balance of trade. But the molasses needed to manufacture rum had to be bought with hard currency or traded for goods. How much would America be forced to pay, worried commentators in the newspapers, in order to satisfy the masses’ growing desire for imported luxuries? For some, the workman’s thirst for rum recalled the fall of Rome, when the populace had lost their virtuous simplicity and fallen prey to sin and extravagance. Vocal Puritan leaders warned that New England’s carefully harnessed reserves would be squandered in the pursuit of imported fripperies and drunkenness. The authorities were, however, reluctant to place too much of a curb on the rum trade as it brought in welcome tax revenue.24 Ironically, a colony founded on a commitment to suppress intemperance had become the centre of New World rum production.
In fact, the commercialisation of American drinking habits fostered beneficial internal trading links. Traditionally the countryside had supplied the towns with beer and cider; now barrels of rum and brandy made the return journey and other foodstuffs followed in their wake.25 The Southern colonies began importing northern-grown Indian corn and wheat as well as rum, and sent back supplies of rice, limes, turtles and yams. New England began to rely on the Middle Colonies for its bread flour and grains. Moreover, Americans developed nuanced tastes for regional specialities: New York State produced the best beef, North Carolina the best pork and Philadelphia the best beer. As the Thirteen Colonies evolved into a network of co-operating units, it is no wonder that eighteenth-century Americans were the best-fed and tallest people on the globe.26
Note the row of small barrels labelled rum behind the bar of this country tavern in America.
Taverns were at the heart of their local communities. Visiting Philadelphia in 1744, William Black observed that it was possible to ‘learn more of the constitution of the place, their trade and manner of living, in one hour’ spent in a local tavern than ‘I could [in]… a week’s sauntering up and down the City’.27 The Boston minister Benjamin Wadsworth complained that it was common practice for every bargain or payment to be solemnised by a visit to a tavern to ‘swallow strong drink’.28 The militia mustered at the tavern and concluded a morning of drills with a drink. Local court hearings were often held in a separate room in a tavern, and while waiting to be called into the court chamber, many a witness violated the 1645 law stipulating that only a single half-pint of wine should be served to any one customer at a time.29 On court days, everyone in the area would congregate to pick up the latest news and gossip.
John Adams, the snooty Harvard graduate who was to become America’s second president, bemoaned the fact that in order to win an election it was necessary to ‘mix with the crowd in a tavern’.30 Indeed, he noted with resentment that tavern keepers were exceptionally well placed to gain political office because they spent the whole day drinking drams with their potential electorate.31 The practice of distributing free liquor to voters was facilitated by the fact that taverns were frequently polling stations. Most of their regular patrons were entitled to vote, as the opportunity America afforded to own property had greatly extended the franchise.32
Taverns were places where men picked up news. The German physician John David Schoepf complained that strangers were plied with constant questions, and Daniel Fisher described how he was quizzed by the landlord of a country tavern as soon as he discovered that Fisher had come ‘from the metropolis (and the assembly now sitting)’. The man positively ‘gaped after news’, but once ‘I had answered all his interrogations, and he had picked what intelligence out of me he was able… he vanished’.33 Taverns were also the site where men formed opinions about what they had heard. They stocked newspapers and the latest political pamphlets, and it was here that groups of like-minded men formed societies and clubs that met to debate, pontificate and gossip over a bowl of rum punch–as the Sons of Liberty would in 1769. A ‘Mrs Amy Prudent’ pointed out to the American Weekly Mercury that when the Meridional Club–of which her husband was a member–‘got together over a flowing bowl of fresh limes’, they were more fluent than ever their wives were ‘over a dish of tea’.34 A French visitor to Annapolis enjoyed the ‘large and agreeable company at my tavern. Where we had nothing but feasting and Drinking, after the King’s health, the Virginia Assembly and then Damnation to the Stamp Act, and a great Deal to that purpose in wine, we scarce used to go to bed sober.’35
In 1692, the self-governing colony of Massachusetts had been made a Crown colony. A royally appointed governor and a layer of Crown-appointed officials were placed in authority over the elected American assemblymen. Resentment over royal interference with the colony’s independence grew as alien governors distributed patronage to their own men, appointing members of the judiciary, vetoing legislation, and on occasion dismissing the Assembly. In the eighteenth century, taverns became forums in which discontent with this system of government was expressed. Here rum and sociability fostered the growing awareness that the colonists belonged to an American community with its own interests and political grievances.36
British Whig politics found a receptive audience in Massachusetts among men like the fifteen Sons of Liberty who had gathered in John Marston’s tavern. The Whigs asserted the public’s right to criticise and censure government actions and called for checks on the abuse of power. They cast themselves as defenders of the constitution in opposition to the king’s ministers, who indulged in bribery and distributed pensions and offices as favours. In 1763, in issue number 45 of his journal North Briton, John Wilkes had gone so far as to attack King George III himself as a threat to Magna Carta and 500 years of representative government.37 Whig rhetoric resonated in a colony that had been founded as ‘a self-conscious alternative to English corruption’, especially now that it was felt that the corrupt politics of the old country was being forced upon it.38 While royal officers were seen as corrupt and self-seeking, the elected members of the Massachusetts Assembly were cast in the role of ‘guardians of the public interest’.39 Engraved on the Sons of Liberty’s silver punch bowl were representations of Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights flanked by flags and topped by a liberty cap with the central inscription ‘No. 45 Wilks and liberty’.40
In 1733, the British had introduced the Molasses Act, which imposed a tax of 6d a gallon on imports of molasses produced outside the British Empire. This was to prevent the American distillers from sourcing their molasses from the French sugar islands, which lacked their own rum industry and sold off their molasses at 4d a gallon, undercutting Barbados molasses, which cost between 9d and 10d. The Act was introduced as a result of pressure from West Indian planters, who were organised into a formidable lobby group. They claimed that trade in molasses with a foreign power was against the national interest. In fact, what they objected to was that supplies of French molasses made New Englanders independent of the British planters and therefore able to charge more for their goods on the sugar islands. Indignation was felt throughout the thirteen mainland colonies at this blatant act of favouring one colony’s interests over another. However, it provoked little reaction other than indignation, as the measure was ineffective. New England distillers evaded British patrols and smuggled in French molasses. Often they paid the customs officials to simply look the other way.41
But in 1764, the British provoked the wrath of the Americans by reforming the terms of the Act. Throughout the Seven Years War (1756–63), a good many New England merchants had carried on a semi-clandestine trade with the French, which did the Americans’ reputation in London no good. Although the French were expelled from mainland America during the war, increasing hostility from the Native Americans meant that a large force of British soldiers was stationed in the colonies and a squadron of 26 ships and more than 3,000 men was kept offshore. With a massive war debt to pay off, Prime Minister George Grenville was determined that the disloyal Americans should shoulder some of the cost for paying for this expensive military force.42 The 1764 Sugar Act reduced the duty on non-British molasses to 3d a gallon, while at the same time it was announced that the collection of the tax would now be enforced. This transformed what had been an ineffective attempt at prohibition into a revenue-collecting exercise.43 Matters were made worse when in 1767 Charles Townshend as Chancellor of the Exchequer sought to raise government revenues through the Tariff Act, which imposed taxes on the import of paper, paint, glass and tea. Included in this legislation was a reiteration of the British customs officers’ right to use writs of assistance (akin to an British general warrant) to search for goods that they suspected had been smuggled in without paying the necessary duties.44
For the men whose names were engraved on the silver punch bowl, the dispute over taxation was more than theoretical. Engraved below ‘No. 45 Wilks and liberty’ was a representation of a torn page labelled ‘General Warrants’.45 The tearing-up of such documents was not merely symbolic. At least one of the group, Captain Daniel Malcolm, had several violent run-ins with British customs officers. On 24 September, the Deputy Collector of Customs, William Sheafe, arrived at his house with a writ of assistance authorising him to search Malcolm’s house. He had received an anonymous tip that Malcolm was storing pipes of wine in his cellar on which he had not paid duties. He was almost certainly right. Malcolm routinely smuggled wine in from schooners that anchored out of sight of the customs officers. But the hot-headed Irishman, armed with a pistol in each hand and a sword at his side, refused Sheafe entry, threatening to ‘blow his brains out’ if he tried to force his way in. Sheafe returned later that day with a search warrant signed by a judge, only to retreat again when met by a crowd of 200 men and boys surrounding the house. They told him that they would not allow him to search the cellars until he named his informant. The stand-off was brought to an end by the Attorney and Solicitor General, who, to the customs officer’s annoyance, refused to uphold the writ of assistance, arguing that it was invalid in the American colonies. The charges were dropped.46
Captain Malcolm died, aged 44, in October 1769. His memorial plaque in the Old North Church states that he was ‘buried 10 feet deep, safe from British bullets’. But when British soldiers occupied Boston during the War of Independence, they used his gravestone for target practice. The stone with its defiant inscription stating that he was ‘a true Son of Liberty. An enemy to oppression and one of the foremost in opposing the revenue acts on America’ is still pockmarked with bullet holes.47
The British government succeeded in provoking a constitutional crisis with the very same colonies that had been vital to securing Britain’s success in the Seven Years War. Just as Britain emerged as the globe’s foremost imperial power, its desperate attempts to overcome the financial crisis the war had precipitated led to the dissolution of its empire. The injustice of unrepresentative taxation galvanised the Thirteen Colonies into political co-operation and protest against the motherland.48 Looking back on events, John Adams remarked that ‘molasses was an essential ingredient in American Independence’.49
The colonists began a boycott of British imports. Some commentators castigated their fellow Americans, pointing out that by becoming dependent on imported luxuries, they had made themselves easy targets for the British, who sought to extract revenue by taxing their vices. But the majority were outraged that Parliament appeared to be trying to deny colonists the accoutrements necessary to gentility. The protection of their right to consume united merchants, planters, farmers and artisans. The Townshend Acts were eventually repealed, apart from the duty on tea, which was retained to demonstrate to the colonists that Parliament had a right to levy taxes. This is why tea rather than molasses became the commodity that brought to a head the Americans’ refusal to tolerate taxation without representation. In December 1773, three Bostonians disguised as Amerindians boarded British vessels waiting to unload their cargo of tea and threw it in the harbour.
The British attempted to demonstrate the Crown’s authority by closing Boston harbour, but instead provoked a conflict that developed into a revolution. The other mainland colonies stood with Massachusetts in opposition to the government’s high-handed treatment. John Adams overheard farmers in Shrewsbury, who were fearful that the government would soon impose a cattle tax, concluding, ‘We had better rebel now… If we put it off… they will get a strong party among us and plague us a deal more than they can now.’50 When British troops marched on Lexington and Concord in April 1775 in order to confiscate the military stores the American militia had stockpiled there, Paul Revere, the maker of the Sons of Liberty’s silver punch bowl, set off on his legendary ride to warn the colonists. The exchange of fire at Concord that fateful day triggered the American War of Independence.
The Atlantic trading world of the First British Empire encouraged the symbiotic growth of the various colonies, which were bound together by a web of commerce. It was a system that benefited the Americans, allowing them to profit from a roaring trade in salt fish, provisions and naval goods in the West Indies, where they bought molasses that they distilled into rum and exchanged for slaves, all the while benefiting from the protection of the British navy. During the Seven Years War, however, they discovered that being a colony in this metropole-centred empire had its costs. Britain saw its colonies as subsidiaries or extensions of its landed estate: Barbados was where it happened to grow its sugar, Carolina its rice. It favoured one colony over another according to its own interests and felt entitled to extract revenue from the colonies when and how it saw fit.
America’s thirteen mainland colonies were distinctively different from British settlements in the rest of the Empire. In the West Indies, the downtrodden slaves were in no position to stage an effective rebellion, while the sugar planters, with an effective lobby in Westminster, felt that their voices were heard. Besides, like the East India Company merchants and officials who lived in British outposts in the East Indies, most saw Britain as their home and intended to return one day. Many of the inhabitants of the North American colonies, on the other hand, were by now third-or fourth-generation Americans with their own distinctive identity and the means to express it. The free land that had attracted settlers meant that a far larger proportion of the population than in Britain owned property and were enfranchised. The need to protect their settlements against hostile Native Americans meant that most freemen were members of armed and well-trained militias. Thus, American colonists had a well-developed sense of entitlement and the power to protest effectively when they were provoked. When the British decided to draw a line and demonstrate their authority to what they considered to be a bunch of colonial upstarts, they were given something of a shock.
At the beginning of the eighteenth century, Britain was still an integral part of the European economy, with the Continent absorbing 85 per cent of its exports and sending it 68 per cent of its imports.51 Yet by 1800, the country had turned its back on Europe to look outwards to its empire; the Americas, Africa and Asia now absorbed 70 per cent of its exports.52 In return for a flood of British manufactures, the Empire sent Britain cargoes of pepper, calicoes, rice, sugar and tea, which encouraged industriousness among its population, stimulated industry and provided foodstuffs to sustain its working people. The loss of the thirteen mainland American colonies was a blow to Britain’s pride, but its economy was able to withstand their loss because trading links were re-established after 1783. Indeed, economic ties between the two countries can be said to have strengthened, and for the first eighty years of its existence, the United States remained an important member of Britain’s informal commercial empire.53
Britain may have lost territory in the Americas, but its war with France had spilled over onto the Indian subcontinent, and here it gained substantial victories that secured its position in the East. India took over America’s dominant role in the Second British Empire, which emerged in the nineteenth century.