And a Bottle of Rum, Revised and Updated

by Wayne Curtis

  The British islands’ planters watched balefully as northern merchants sailed past. As a further affront, New England traders who called at the British islands often refused to accept molasses in trade, knowing they could do better elsewhere. This did not escape notice of mercantilists in England. The general theory of colonies at the time was that they existed for the sole purpose of enriching the mother country. And yet here were colonial ships sailing to French ports to purchase molasses to make rum that would likely be traded for other non-British goods. How did England benefit from all this? This was easy to answer: It didn’t.

  British mercantilists and irritated planters—notably those from Barbados and Antigua—trudged to Parliament and agitated for laws to remedy their situation. The first weapon they suggested was too large and blunt: the outright banning of trade with the French islands. This failed, so instead they asked for heavy tariffs to be imposed on all French sugar products shipped to the northern colonies. Parliament went along and passed the Molasses Act of 1733.

  This act did not please the North American merchants. It permitted the northern colonies to continue to ship outbound loads of grain, timber, and horses to non-British markets, but the sugar or molasses they returned with were slapped with hefty duties. This made French molasses far more expensive than British molasses. (Imports of all French-made rum were banned under the act.) New England rum was, in effect, sacrificed to appease the politically powerful British sugar planters. Some fifty thousand white British island residents would benefit at the expense of a half-million northern colonists.

  The North American colonists had a choice: They could openly rebel against the assault on this vital colonial industry, or they could simply ignore it and continue business as usual. They chose the latter path: The Molasses Act was the fifty-five-mile per hour speed limit of the era. Molasses continued to flow north into the colonies from the French islands, and New England rum was distilled, consumed, and traded. Duties collected on all molasses imported into the northern colonies in 1735—two years after the act was passed—amounted to the unprincely sum of £2. During the entire three-decade period in which the act was on the books, the Crown collected just £13,702 on a half-million gallons of officially imported foreign molasses. Meanwhile, the French molasses trade was abetted by corrupt British customs officers, who could convert it to British molasses through the alchemy of paperwork. Although these extralegal measures made molasses slightly more costly, avoidance of the act wasn’t nearly as expensive as compliance. The New England rum trade continued to flourish. And the planters of the British sugar islands continued to fume.

  The Seven Years War (called the French and Indian War in North America), which pitted European countries in elaborate conflicts among one another between 1756 and 1763, is often regarded as the first of the great world wars. Longtime foes England and France were especially bitter enemies, and their enmity carried over into the colonies. This had an impact on New England’s traditional West Indian trade, since traders were now fearful that their ships might be seized in French harbors. Instead of sailing directly to the French islands, New England traders now headed for free-trade ports like the Dutch colony of St. Eustatius and the Spanish port of Monte Cristi. This inconvenience didn’t last long. The powerful British navy quickly overran the poorly defended French and added Martinique and Guadeloupe to the constellation of British-controlled West Indian islands.

  This was good news for the northern traders. Merchants could now, under generous terms of surrender extended by the British, trade legally with French suppliers and avoid both high tariffs and the hassles of smuggling. The celebration was short-lived, however. The war drew to a close, and the islands were returned to France under the Treaty of Paris. (This was in part the doing of the British sugar barons. The last thing they wanted was a flood of new sugar into London markets driving down prices, so they encouraged negotiators to give back the islands and keep control of Canada, widely considered the lesser prize.) The New England ship captains, watching from afar, figured that in a few months they could return to the smuggling trade with their old French partners.

  It was not to be. To understand why, consider England’s mood. The country had just concluded a long and pricey war that had drained the treasury and now found itself saddled with the added expense of managing the vast new territories in Canada. What’s more, England believed, no doubt rightly, that North American colonists were the prime beneficiaries of the war, since the threat of French invasion from the north had been vanquished, opening up the possibility of expanded westward settlement. And the British were still peeved about the colonial smuggling that had helped the French finance their army. The newly installed British prime minister, George Grenville, concluded that England’s global finances needed revamping and that the northern colonies should pay more of the freight. England discarded the ineffectual Molasses Act, and replaced it with the Sugar Act.

  While the old Molasses Act was an attempt to restrict trade among the New World colonies, the new imperial law was designed chiefly to raise revenues. In fact, the new law actually lowered colonial tariffs on imported molasses, from six pence to three pence per gallon, with the English figuring they could make up on volume what they lost in price. In contrast to its lassitude on the Molasses Act, England enforced the Sugar Act with uncommon zeal. The admiralty courts were given authority to prosecute offenders. The navy was given orders to pursue violators on the high seas. The Crown diverted twenty-seven navy ships to the task of enforcement. And British customs officers who failed to demonstrate sufficient vigor were abruptly dismissed. After decades of turning a blind eye to New England smuggling, England set about clamping down.

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  In late September 1763, news of the Sugar Act began to circulate through the colonies. It traveled along the coast by schooner and scow, and into the backlands by horseback. It was carried by newspapers and pamphlets. And it whipped like wildfire through the taverns in the Republic of Rum—first prompting lively banter, then forging a comity of purpose. The Crown had announced that it would, in effect, apply a tourniquet to the lifeblood of the colonies.

  At first, the colonists did not direct their venom at Parliament, but at the West Indian planters whose fingerprints were all over the Sugar Act. The islands had suffered deeply during the Seven Years War, because trade dropped off as traders stayed at home. To jump-start the island economies, planters worked to expand their rum trade. This could be done in two ways: eliminating exports from the French and Dutch colonies and squeezing the New England rum industry by raising the cost of molasses. As a letter writer to the Providence Gazette noted in 1764, “in the present declining State of the Sugar-Islands, nothing could tend more effectually to restore the West India Trade from Ruin, than putting a Stop to the further Distillation of Rum in the British Colonies of North America.” Two weeks later, another of the paper’s correspondents lamented: “The Northern Colonies are to be made the Dupes, Hewers of Wood, and Drawers of Water to a few West-India planters!”

  The Sugar Act of 1764 met with wide disapproval in the north. In Massachusetts (where a paltry 3 percent of imported molasses came from the British islands the year before the Sugar Act was passed), the governor wrote that the news of the Sugar Act “caused greater alarm…than the taking of Fort William Henry did in 1757.” (The bellicose French had captured this Champlain Valley fort just northwest of western Massachusetts.) Rhode Island had imported some fourteen thousand hogsheads of molasses annually before the Sugar Act, less than 20 percent of it from the British islands. A customs officer noted that “everybody with us wears a most heavy Countenance, things being in a much worse way than when the war continued.” The act even brought despair to Philadelphia, where a prominent merchant lamented that “nothing but ruine seems to hang over our heads.”

  A handful of colonial rum distillers went out of business under the burden of the newly enforced tarif
fs. But most managed to bump along, absorbing higher expenses and the increased costs of smuggling. Yet throughout the colonies, from major metropolises to upriver towns, the Sugar Act was viewed as a great injustice. It was clear that the “rich, proud, and overbearing Planters of the West Indies,” were behind it, and the clamor to act grew from whispers to a din.

  The assemblies of Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, and Pennsylvania took their complaints directly to Parliament. They drew up petitions and circulated pamphlets, including one published in Boston in 1764 with a comprehensive title: Reasons Against the Renewal of the Sugar Act as It Will Be Prejudicial to the Trade Not Only of the Northern Colonies But to Those of Great Britain Also.

  The most damning argument in favor of repealing the Sugar Act, as the pamphlet’s title suggested, was that the loss of New England’s trade with foreign islands would boomerang and cause economic hardship to old England. Without cheap molasses, the thriving New England distilleries would be shuttered. Without income from rum, the newly impoverished northern colonies would purchase fewer manufactured goods from England. The northern colonies would begin manufacturing their own goods, further spoiling profits of British manufacturers and merchants. This argument found an unusually attentive audience among English manufacturers, who were already casting a wary eye abroad. English hat manufacturers, for instance, were grousing about the expanded production in New York, where enterprising hatmakers had an endless supply of beaver pelts for fashionable felt hats.

  Against the odds, the arguments of the colonials eventually prevailed. The English Parliament revised the Sugar Act in 1766, and the tariffs on foreign molasses dropped to one penny per gallon, or so low that smuggling was more expensive than obeying the law. The Sugar Act had been watered down before any open resistance or rebellion surfaced. No one died over efforts to control molasses or rum. The dispute had been resolved with quiet but determined politicking.

  In the process, however, a colonial Rubicon had been crossed. The resistance to the Sugar Act marked the first time the North American colonies, which were administered as separate entities, had effectively joined together to resist British meddling. Resistance went from amorphous to organized. In 1763, a letter writer to the Boston Post called for the creation of a new committee “to open a correspondence with the principal merchants in all our sister colonies, endeavoring to promote a union, and a coalition of all their councils.” This network was soon established, laying the foundation for the influential Committees of Correspondence that would play such a central role leading up to the Revolution.

  England feared that the colonial success in rolling back the Sugar Act would be viewed as a wholesale victory for the colonists and embolden them further. So the Crown was quick to assert its right to impose other taxes. In one of history’s more striking instances of political tone deafness, England replaced the Sugar Act with new taxes on imported tea, a product chosen in part to help out the financially troubled and politically well-connected East India Company. Worse yet, the English passed an even more reviled bit of legislation: the Stamp Act, which put an onerous tax on all printed matter, from newspapers to liquor licenses to legal papers to almanacs. While the Sugar Act chiefly affected the New England colonies—the center of rum production—the Stamp Act antagonized all colonists, forging an even more encompassing coalition. And so was born “No taxation without representation.”

  When the British officials moved to enforce the Stamp Act, the colonies were primed to resist. Colonists launched a boycott of British goods. The tea went into Boston harbor. Paul Revere set off on his ride. In Lexington, a shot was heard ’round the world. And the thirteen North American colonies declared as one their independence from England and took up arms to defend it. The scattered colonial militias became an army of resistance.

  The war had begun.

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  In February 1775, two months before the battles at Lexington and Concord, a group of British soldiers approached Salem from Boston. Their plan was to seize munitions stored in Salem that might eventually be used against them. At a bridge just outside town, an impassioned group of colonists gathered in front of the advancing troops and stood their ground, barring the way and taunting the British for being cowards, “lobster coats,” and “red-jackets.” In the heat of the encounter, a man named Joseph Whicher, the foreman of a local rum distillery, pushed to the front of the crowd and challenged the troops to attack him. One British soldier obliged by lunging forward with a bayonet, nicking the colonist’s chest and drawing blood.

  It was the first blood spilled in a long and bloody war.

  It’s no coincidence that distillers and rum merchants were in the forefront of the political and armed resistance. As we’ve seen, taverns had become de facto community centers, virtual petri dishes for the breeding of a discontent that taverners learned to channel. About ninety taverns were licensed in Boston in 1769; of these, twenty license holders were members of the Sons of Liberty, the rebel group behind the Boston Tea Party. Tavern keepers had allies among the wealthy merchant-distillers, who were among those with the most to lose if the English overseers were to dictate terms of their trade. Of Boston’s twenty-eight distillers and wine merchants, only seven remained loyal to the Crown, while nearly half were involved with the Sons of Liberty. As historian David Conroy notes, “The manufacturers and importers of the most controversial commodity in the province and the colonial world stood at the very helm of the resistance movement.”

  In backing this rebellion, the tavern keepers and, more so, the distillers put their livelihoods at risk. As British troops blockaded the harbors against colonial trade, West Indian rum and molasses dried up. One colonial estimated that distillers in the city of Boston alone lost £6,000 in income each week. As a result, rum was increasingly unavailable—unless one had connections to the British military, which continued to import goods from the West Indies though British-held New York and other ports.

  This would prove to be not a small matter for the Continental Army. Rum was currency, and its disappearance made it even more difficult for the Continental Congress to fund an army. (Continental specie was in a state of constant crisis and distrusted by local farmers and merchants.) In one small example of rum’s role in the American Revolution, prominent New Hampshire politician John Langdon donated to the state some 150 hogsheads of rum to raise a militia. That militia defeated the British forces advancing from Canada under General John Burgoyne and dashed their strategy of dividing the colonies and conquering each half in turn. So at this turning point in the war, rum put the militia in motion.

  On a more practical level, rum was a provision of war, as essential in the field as black powder or barrels of salt pork. In November 1775, the Continental Congress in Philadelphia established rules for the newly formed American Continental Navy and followed the British model in issuing a “halfpint of rum per man every day, and a discretionary allowance for extra duty and in time of engagement.” Foot soldiers were also to get rum, to be distributed by mess officers. In 1778, one observer suggested that “the moment your army enters an enemy’s country, you must seize on all the brewers of beer and spirituous liquor in your neighborhood…that the army may never stand in need of a beverage which it cannot do without.”

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  As the six-year war dragged on, from the late 1770s into the 1780s, rum became increasingly hard to come by, which undermined the morale and effectiveness of the struggling troops. In December 1778, even before the lashing snows and rains had begun at the winter encampment at Valley Forge, a soldier lamented in his diary that rum was always in short supply, and was sorely needed. The poorly clothed and ill-fed troops slowly starved and lost their feet to frostbite. General George Washington sent out imploring appeals for supplies, noting that critical absence of vegetables, salt, vinegar (a poor substitute for vegetables), and drink: “…beer
or cyder seldom comes within the verge of the camp,” he wrote, “and rum in much too small quantities.”

  The lack of rum even had small consequences on the battlefields. In 1780, the colonial forces under Brigadier General Horatio Gates positioned themselves to attack a British encampment under General Charles Cornwallis in South Carolina. Then the commanders made an unfortunate discovery: Their rum casks were dry. The mess officers, bizarrely, decided to pass out quantities of raw molasses, apparently unaware of its properties as a laxative. The following day, instead of girding for battle, the men scrambled into the bushes grabbing their guts. The British took advantage and routed the colonials.

  A year later in South Carolina, at the Battle of Eutaw Springs, colonial troops surprised a British encampment in an early morning raid. The redcoats fled with breakfast uneaten. The hungry and ill-disciplined colonial troops found quantities of food and rum, and wasted little time in availing themselves of both. The British merely waited for the rum to take effect and then counterattacked, driving the colonials back into the forest in disarray.

  Among those who suffered from the molasses shortages was Captain Isaac Hall, the Medford militia captain who might have tippled with Paul Revere. Hall provisioned the Continental Army with rum as best he could, accepting debased currency in exchange. His rum business scarcely survived a flood in 1777, which wiped out his stocks of molasses. Sales continued to falter as the war dragged on and molasses remained scarce. In 1787, Isaac sold the distillery to his brother, Ebenezer, and quit the business. (By 1830, Hall’s was the only distillery to produce rum in once-redolent Medford. Under various owners, the distillery managed to continue producing traditional New England rum until 1905, when it was finally shuttered.)