Breen, 2004, The Marketplace of Revolution, How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence

The Marketplace of
Revolution:
How Consumer Politics
Shaped American
Independence
T. H. Breen
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

the mar ketpl ace of revolution
BOOKS BY T. H. BREEN
The Character of the Good Ruler (1970)

Shaping Southern Society (1976)
Puritans and Adventurers (1980)
Myne Owne Ground, with Stephen Innes (1980)

Tobacco Culture (1985)
Imagining the Past (1990)
American Colonies in an Atlantic World, with Timothy Hall (2003)

The
Marketplace
of
Revolution
N
How Consumer Politics Shaped
American Independence
T. H. Breen
2004
Oxford New York
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Copyright © 2004 by T. H. Breen

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Breen, T. H.
The marketplace of revolution : how consumer politics shaped American
independence / by T.H. Breen.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-19-506395-3
1. United States—History—Revolution, 1775–1783—Causes. 2. United
States—History—Revolution, 1775–1783—Economic aspects. 3. Consumption
(Economics)—United States—History—18th century. I. Title.
E209 .B77 2004 973.3´1—dc22 2003023138
987654321
Printed in the United States of America

on acid-free paper
For Lady Susan
This page intentionally left blank
Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction: The Revolutionary Politics of Consumption xi
1 Tale of the Hospitable Consumer:

A Revolutionary Argument 1
Part One: An Empire of Goods

2 Inventories of Desire: The Evidence 33
3 Consumers’ New World: The Unintended Consequences
of Commercial Success 72
4 Vade Mecum: The Great Chain of Colonial Acquisition 102
5 The Corrosive Logic of Choice: Living with Goods 148
Part Two: “A Commercial Plan for

Political Salvation”
6 Strength out of Dependence: Strategies of Consumer
Resistance in an Empire of Goods 195
7 Making Lists—Taking Names: The Politicization of
Everyday Life 235
8 Bonfires of Tea: The Final Act 294
Notes 333
Index 373
Acknowledgments
M y memories of writing The Market-

place of Revolution are for the most
part extremely pleasant. To be sure,
there were moments when the muses rebelled. But such frustrations soon
passed, and now I look back on many stimulating conversations with col-
leagues and students, all of whom encouraged me to get on with the project.
I learned a lot about the implications of the argument from people who
knew how to ask good questions. They also listened to my own thoughts
about a revolutionary marketplace, noting politely when I had clearly failed
to push the analysis in a persuasive direction.
I want in particular to thank all the people who shared with me the
pleasures of a fellowship at the National Humanities Center. There were
others who offered similar support and encouragement at the Huntington
Library, where I held the Times Mirror Distinguished Research Professor-
ship. Much of the research was completed while I served as the Pitt Profes-
sor of American History and Institutions at Cambridge University. I am
particularly indebted to the university librarians who provided access to
eighteenth-century materials and to the Fellows of Trinity College who did
their best to make me feel comfortable at High Table. Later, during a crucial
period in the writing, I taught at Oxford University as the Harmsworth
Professor of American History. A Fellowship at Queen’s College that year
made a good posting even better.
I have received much welcome funding for this project from the Na-
tional Endowment for the Humanities and the Earhard Foundation. I owe
a particular debt of gratitude to the Society of Colonial Wars in the State of
Illinois. Many years ago, Ron Waud, then the governor of the Society, de-
cided to help underwrite my efforts, and at no time over almost a decade
did either he or his generous colleagues ever stop cheering me on. And, of
course, if the leaders of Northwestern University had not supported me
x n ac k n ow l e d g m e n t s
with time and resources, I might have taken even longer to complete the
present volume. Two former deans of the Weinberg College of Arts and Sci-
ences, Lawrence Dumas and Eric Sundquist, deserve special mention. Both
administrators made it clear that they saw their mission within the university
to be to promote original scholarship, in the classroom and on the printed
page. Whatever the environment at other schools may be, Northwestern com-
municates to its faculty a commitment to academic excellence. I am pleased
now to have an opportunity to repay the administration’s faith in me.
Several paragraphs in Chapter 1 originally appeared in T.H. Breen, “Nar-
rative of Commercial Life: Consumption, Ideology, and Community on
the Eve of the American Revolution,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser.,
50 (1993), 471–501 and are used here with permission of Christopher Grasso,
editor W&MQ. In some eighteenth-century quotations spelling has been
changed to conform to modern conventions.
Many individuals gave timely assistance along the way. Seven friends
volunteered—if that is the correct word—to read the manuscript from start
to finish, a labor that yielded hundreds of marginal scribbles that I have
done my very best to incorporate into the final manuscript. Hermann
Wellenreuther, Patrick Griffin, Christopher Hodson, Walter Woodward,
Ethan Shagan, Josef Barton, and Lacey Baldwin Smith have saved me from
many embarrassments and suggested wonderfully constructive ways to
sharpen the argument. Susan C. Breen read every word at every stage and
with admirable diplomacy indicated a number of problems along the way.
Others helped me to develop the interpretation, occasionally without be-
ing aware that they had done so. This vital group includes James Axtell,
Jacob Lassner, Edward Muir, James Oakes, Robert (Roy) Ritchie, Carole
Shammas, David Shi, Tina Radler, Eric Slauter, John Crowley, Russell
Maylone, Susan Stein, Graham Hood, Sir John Elliott, John Styles, Harold
Perkin, James Horn, Alan Ryan, Jason Lake, Tony Badger, Bant Breen, Sarah
Breen, Maxine Berg, Neil McKendrick, John Robertson, Edmund S. Morgan,
and Rebecca Becker. During the difficult process of checking and recheck-
ing the notes, Michael Guenther provided invaluable assistance, often tak-
ing the initiative in ways I only slowly came to appreciate. Elzbieta
Foeller-Pituch accepted the hard task of obtaining permissions for illustra-
tions, cutting gracefully through a maze of bureaucratic obstructions. Work-
ing with Sheldon Meyer has been a constant pleasure. He is a master editor
who has won the respect of every author who has had the privilege of doing
a book with him. And finally, without Susan C. Breen there would have
been no Marketplace of Revolution. A single volume cannot adequately thank
her for her unfailing support. She knows that the book is as much her cre-
ation as my own.
Introduction: The
Revolutionary Politics of
Consumption
I would be hard pressed to identify the precise

moment when simple curiosity about the
character of daily life in colonial times
became the basis for a book on the coming of the American Revolution. As
I now remember it, the inspiration occurred many years ago in the Wallace
Gallery, a museum that is part of Colonial Williamsburg. It is located quite
literally deep below the surface of the ground, indeed, in the basement of a
nineteenth-century hospital. The gallery offers visitors a rare treat. It houses
a splendid collection of manufactured goods imported into America from
Europe during the eighteenth century. These are not the things that usually
draw modern visitors to Williamsburg. Such people seem to prefer spend-
ing their time among the craftsmen who tell them how a revolutionary gen-
eration made various household items such as furniture or candles. Perhaps
these products strike tourists as more authentic, or as more American, than
do the imported articles displayed in the Wallace Gallery.
I much prefer the British goods that were shipped so long ago to the
colonial markets. In their presence, one senses immediately how a small
piece of Staffordshire pottery or a handsomely designed buckle might have
brought pleasure into the life of some obscure American consumer. By in-
troducing vibrant colors into the poorly illuminated rooms of colonial
houses, imported manufactures made the world of ordinary men and
women come alive. Within a few decades during the middle of the eigh-
teenth century, imported goods transformed monochrome spaces into
Technicolor. Walking among the display cases containing ceramics and metal
ware, textiles and prints, the visitor imagines how these things allowed people
whose names have long since been forgotten to fashion themselves in ways
that made them feel prettier, more successful, and more informed. Imported
goods reflected cosmopolitan tastes and manners, so that an American who
managed to purchase a porcelain teacup or a modest pewter bowl could
xii n introduction
fancy that he or she partook of a polite society centered in faraway places

such as London or Bath. These wonderful objects arouse suspicion today that
however much local ministers may have once railed against the corrupting
influence of luxury, they did not really discourage the members of their con-
gregations from buying goods that yielded so much personal satisfaction.
One item in particular drew my attention. A small teapot—no more
than five inches high—told a complex tale. Decorated with a soft cream
glaze, it carried a message written in brick-red lettering: “No Stamp Act.”
Some English entrepreneur during the 1760s—probably a clever potter from
the Midlands—had apparently followed a developing political crisis in the
colonies, and just in time to help the
Americans protest parliamentary
taxation without representation, he
produced an object that spoke to me
of irony and desire, of customary
markets that had suddenly become
dangerously politicized. For a brief
moment, a delicate teapot trans-
ported many thousands of miles and
sold in a local shop became a vehicle
for helping provincial consumers
protest the policies of the British Small, brightly colored teapot produced by an
government. It survived the violence enterprising English potter for colonial American
consumers who were organizing resistance to
of war and the abuses of time, re- parliamentary taxation. Courtesy of the Colonial
minding those who reflect on such Williamsburg Foundation, Wallace Gallery,
matters today that common goods Williamsburg, Virginia.
once spoke to power.
I
By all odds the American Revolution should be remembered as a relatively
minor event in the long history of the British Empire. After all, like the insur-
gencies of unhappy peoples from Ireland to India, the rebellion in colonial
America involved a staggering mismatch between the world’s most potent
military power and ordinary subjects whose ideological passions often blinded
them to the harsher realities of the contest. That the story of the Revolution
did not end in crushing disappointment invites modern Americans to re-
visit a society that so spectacularly defied experience and history. Those who
celebrate their achievement might well inquire how the colonists overcame
local jealousies and mutual ignorance, profound fear and clashing identities,
so that on the eve of independence leaders of the rebellion could speak cred-
ibly to strangers scattered over a huge geographic territory about a common
political vision.
It is easy, of course, to take popular mobilization for granted or to treat
it as an almost providential occurrence. From this perspective the rising of
introduction N xiii
colonial Americans—at least, in sufficient numbers to make good on their

challenge to British authority—acquires an almost miraculous character. It
is a narrative of freedom-loving men and women coming effortlessly to-
gether under the banner of rights, inspired at every turn by brilliant leaders
of the sort the country has not seen for a very long time. Even contempo-
raries marveled at the level of solidarity they witnessed. As the Reverend
Charles Chauncy, Boston’s most respected minister, remarked in a letter
addressed to the English philosopher Richard Price following the first meet-
ing of the Continental Congress, “I cannot but look upon it [as] an occur-
rence in our favor truly extraordinary, that so many colonies, so distant
from one another, and having each their separate interest, should unite in
sending delegates to meet in one general body upon the present occasion.”1
The Marketplace of Revolution explains popular mobilization from an
entirely different point of view. In fact, it breaks with most previous accounts
of this period, putting forward a new interpretation of what precisely was
radical about the politics of the American Revolution. Instead of assuming
the existence of political collectivities, it asks how such a dispersed popula-
tion generated a sense of trust sufficient to sustain colonial rebellion. It ex-
plores how a very large number of ordinary Americans came to the striking
conclusion that it was preferable to risk their lives and property against a
powerful British armed force than to endure further political oppression.
Mobilization on this level did not come easy. Neither luck nor provi-
dence had much to do with the story. Over a decade of continuous experimen-
tation, American colonists discovered a means to communicate aspirations
and grievances to each other through a language of shared experience. Be-
tween 1764 and 1775, they built a sense of mutuality slowly and tentatively,
and in the process of reaching out beyond familiar boundaries of class and
gender, they developed radically inclusive structures of resistance. They cre-
ated brilliant forms of collective and extra-legal political action, overcom-
ing discouraging moments of alleged betrayal to bring forth an imagined
national community unanticipated at the start of the revolutionary crisis.
Like revolutionaries throughout the world, they had to learn to trust each
other. Simply mouthing a vocabulary of rights and freedom was not suffi-
cient to persuade people that they could rely on others about whom they
knew very little. Trust was the product of mutual education. It required the
free flow of information; it could not be coerced. Although in the early days
trust proved distressingly fragile, Americans persuaded themselves by 1774
that other Americans could be counted on to do what they had actually prom-
ised to do, quite simply, to make genuine sacrifices for a common cause.
Trust-building involved more than strategic considerations. As ordi-
nary Americans affirmed their trust-worthiness through revolutionary acts
that were then quickly reported in the popular press, they discovered that
the language of rights and liberty was more than rhetoric. Within a frame-
work of local groups that came to identify with similar groups in distant
places, people translated personal sacrifice into revolutionary ideology. The
xiv n introduction
point here is that if we begin an investigation of revolution with ideology—

as many historians have done—we inevitably discount the social condi-
tions that energized these ideas for the men and women who stood to lose
the most in a conflict with Great Britain.
The purpose in concentrating attention on political mobilization is not
to insist that the revolutionary generation possessed virtues demonstrably
superior to our own. Of course, they did not. Ordinary people who denied
the sovereignty of Parliament and who united in armed resistance against
the British Empire were subject to the same doubts and failings found in
most human societies, then and now. To transform the colonists into he-
roic figures—the kinds of patriotic characters who so often appear in the
myths that modern Americans tell themselves about a revolutionary world
that we have lost—really serves only to diminish their accomplishment. If
it could somehow be demonstrated that these particular men and women
were in touch with principles and values purer than those of our own soci-
ety, they would have very little of significance to say to us. We would be
reduced to Old Testament Jeremiahs, perpetually lamenting our own fall
from political grace.
Analysis of the coming of independence is not a call to worship. It pro-
vides an opportunity to comprehend just how colonists who were by turns
frightened, bigoted, chauvinistic, ambitious, jealous, proud, and misin-
formed managed to imagine a larger political community containing people
whom they had never met and who at times must have seemed more for-
eign to their own immediate concerns than did the British. It is in the con-
text of the messy experience of everyday life that they have something to
teach a current generation which seems uncertain of its ability to construct
meaningful political solidarities. From this earlier narrative of mobiliza-
tion and resistance we learn something valuable about overcoming the di-
visions that compromise our own ability to cooperate effectively for the
general political welfare, however defined.
The Marketplace of Revolution thus provides a richer intellectual under-
standing of the capability of ordinary men and women to reform the charac-
ter of larger political structures, even ones of global dimensions. Against
staggering opposition, it is still possible to come together to create powerful
collectivities which might ameliorate the conditions of our shared civic lives.
At the commencement of the new millennium, therefore, we return to the
years before the signing of the Declaration of Independence not to reaffirm
myths about national origins but rather to discover something about our
own ability to transform political society through collective imagination.
II
A reinterpretation of the coming of the American Revolution must deal
with timing. Although it may seem obvious, we should remember that sepa-
ration from Great Britain occurred at a precise historical moment. How-
introduction N xv
ever plausible alternative dates may appear with hindsight, it did not hap-
pen during the Glorious Revolution of 1688, or at the conclusion of the
Seven Years’ War in 1763, which removed forever the threat of French en-
croachment, or, despite the spontaneous street violence associated with the
Stamp Act crisis, in 1765. No one seriously advocated independence in 1768,
even though Charles Townshend’s Revenue Acts provoked hostility through-
out the colonies. Nor, in fact, did the Tea Act of 1773 do the trick. What may
seem today as irresistible momentum carrying a colonial society toward
national independence could at any moment have been halted, diverted, or
thwarted. British administrators need not have pursued a policy so dog-
gedly confrontational. By the same token, Americans from different regions
could have followed separate paths, concluding, for example, that those who
spoke for Boston were troublesome radicals deserving whatever punish-
ments Parliament cared to mete out. Reminding ourselves of the contin-
gency of events is another way of drawing attention to the force of human
agency—real people making choices about the politics of empire—in shap-
ing the flow of activities that we lump together as the coming of the Ameri-
can Revolution.
What gave the American Revolution distinctive shape was an earlier
transformation of the Anglo-American consumer marketplace. This event,
which some historians have called a “consumer revolution,” commenced
sometime during the middle of the eighteenth century, and as modestly
wealthy families acquired ever larger quantities of British manufactures—
for the most part everyday goods that made life warmer, more comfortable,
more sanitary, or perhaps simply more enjoyable—the face of material cul-
ture changed dramatically.2 Suddenly, buyers voiced concerns about color
and texture, about fashion and etiquette, and about making the right choices
from among an expanding number of possibilities.
This was surely not a society of self-sufficient yeomen farmers. People
purchased the items they most desired at local stores; they often demanded
and received liberal credit. Each year the volume of imports increased, cre-
ating by 1750 a virtual “empire of goods.” England experienced the same
consumer revolution as did the American colonists. But there was a major
difference. In a colonial marketplace in which dependency was always an
issue, imported goods had the potential to become politicized, turning fa-
miliar imported items such as cloth and tea into symbols of imperial op-
pression.3 And since Americans from Savannah to Portsmouth purchased
the same general range of goods, they found that they were able to commu-
nicate with each other about a common experience. Whatever their differ-
ences, they were consumers in an empire that seemed determined to
compromise their rights and liberties.
The Marketplace of Revolution argues, therefore, that the colonists’
shared experience as consumers provided them with the cultural resources
needed to develop a bold new form of political protest. In this unprecedented
context, private decisions were interpreted as political acts; consumer choices
communicated personal loyalties. Goods became the foundation of trust,
xvi n introduction
for one’s willingness to sacrifice the pleasures of the market provided a re-
markably visible and effective test of allegiance.
Before this moment, no massive political movement had organized it-
self around the denial of imported goods. In other words, although it does
not receive the same acclaim from historians as does the system of checks
and balances put forward in the Constitution, the consumer boycott was a
brilliantly original American invention. As General Thomas Gage, a British
military leader who wanted to nip rebellion in the bud, exclaimed, “I never
heard of a people, who by general agreement, and without sumptuary laws
to force them, that ever denied themselves what their circumstances would
afford, and custom and habit prompted them to desire.”4 But that is pre-
cisely what the colonists did. They made goods speak to power in ways that
mid-century consumers and merchants had never anticipated.
The term boycott is, of course, an anachronism, since it first came into
the language during the nineteenth century in recognition of the activities
of an English land agent in Ireland, Charles C. Boycott. Such considerations
need not deter us. We are dealing with popular political movements that
were boycotts in all but name. Within the structures of voluntary associa-
tions formed to enforce non-importation of British manufactures, men and
women found that they could judge for themselves whether or not other
Americans were in fact fulfilling pledges of mutual support. Failure to com-
ply exposed possible enemies who publicly demonstrated by their contin-
ued purchase of imported goods that they could not be counted on during
a crisis. A strategy of political resistance centered on the marketplace quickly
transformed myriad private acts of consumption into self-conscious pub-
lic declarations of resistance. The non-importation agreements through-
out colonial America provided an effective means for distinguishing
supporters from those people who suffered humiliation as “the friends of
government.” In more positive terms, one’s relation to everyday goods be-
came a measure of patriotism. “What is true grandeur,” asked a writer in
the New-London Gazette, “but a noble patriotic resolution of sacrificing
every other consideration to the Love of our Country. And can he be a true
lover of his country . . . who would be seen strutting about the streets, clad
in foreign [British] fripperies, than to be nobly independent in the russet
grey?”5
Commercial rituals of shared sacrifice provided a means to educate
and energize a dispersed populace. These events helped participants dis-
cover the radical political implications of their own actions, even as those
same rituals demonized people who inevitably held back, uncertain and
afraid, victims of new solidarities they never quite understood. Indeed, the
boycott movement invited colonists traditionally excluded from formal
political processes—the election of representatives to colonial assemblies,
for example—to voice their opinions in a raucous, open public forum, one
that defined itself around subscription lists, voluntary associations, orga-
nized protests, destruction of goods, and incendiary newspaper exchanges.
What we encounter in colony after colony is a radically new form of poli-
introduction N xvii
tics, a politics practiced out-of-doors, in which women and the poor expe-
rienced an exhilarating surge of empowerment. Although during the two
decades following the winning of national independence—the so-called
constitutional period—well-to-do leaders had second thoughts about en-
couraging such groups to speak out, we should appreciate the powerfully
egalitarian potential of that earlier moment. The non-importers of the 1760s
and 1770s were doing more than simply obstructing the flow of British-
made goods. They were inviting the American people to reinvent an entire
political culture.
III
The book is structured around the politicization of a consumer market-
place. Chapter 1 sets forth a general argument about large-scale mobiliza-
tion, the sine qua non of a successful rebellion. Although the analysis starts
with the punch line, as it were, I aim to demonstrate not only how shared
consumer experience facilitated new forms of collective political action but
also why historians have so long downplayed the significance of imported
goods on the eve of independence.
Part I, entitled “An Empire of Goods”—chapters 2 through 5—exam-
ines in detail different aspects of the new eighteenth-century marketplace,
showing among other things how colonial Americans made sense of the
flood of imports that found its way into even the most humble provincial
households. What should become clear from this discussion is that a spec-
tacularly new material culture provided a social and economic framework—
a realm of intensely personal experience—in which people could work out
for themselves the implications of core liberal values which we now associ-
ate with modernity.
The key element in this mid-eighteenth-century transformation might
best be termed the invention of choice. This proposition may seem bizarre.
After all, making choices appears to be an expression of the human condi-
tion. From a social and political perspective, however, choice has a legiti-
mate history. British imports offered American colonists genuine
alternatives, real possibilities to fashion themselves in innovative ways. Af-
ter the 1740s they began articulating status and beauty through choice; it
affected the character of relations within family and community. Even more,
it introduced dynamic categories of comfort and taste into the lives of mid-
dling sorts of people, forcing them to recalculate the allocation of hard-
earned family resources. In this social environment, the invitation to make
choices from among competing brands, colors, and textures—decisions of
great significance to the individual—held within itself the potential for a
new kind of collective politics.
Part II, “A Commercial Plan of Political Salvation”—chapters 6 through
8—traces how this private world of personal choice became the foundation
for new political solidarities during the decade following the Stamp Act
xviii n introduction
crisis. Effective mobilization was achieved slowly, only after many disap-
pointments and alarms over real and imagined defections. By 1774 people
who had come to trust each other proclaimed their common rights and
liberties. As these final chapters remind us, the American Revolution was
the first large-scale political movement in recorded history to organize it-
self around the relation of ordinary people to manufactured consumer
goods. It was an inspired strategy. Indeed, from this perspective we can see
that national independence was in no small measure the consequence of
widespread political resistance within a new consumer marketplace, a phe-
nomenon that might best be described as the revolutionary politics of pur-
suing happiness.
introduction N xix
the mar ketpl ace of revolution

1
Tale of the Hospitable
Consumer: A Revolutionary
Argument
C olonial rebellions throughout the mod-

ern world have been acts of shared po-
litical imagination. Unless unhappy
people develop the capacity to trust other unhappy people, protest remains
a local affair easily silenced by traditional authority. Usually, however, a
moment arrives when large numbers of men and women realize for the
first time that they enjoy the support of strangers, ordinary people much
like themselves who happen to live in distant places and whom under nor-
mal circumstances they would never meet. It is an intoxicating discovery. A
common language of resistance suddenly opens to those who are most vul-
nerable to painful retribution the possibility of creating a new community.
As the conviction of solidarity grows, parochial issues and aspirations merge
imperceptibly with a compelling national agenda which only a short time
before may have been the dream of only a few. For many American colo-
nists this moment occurred late in the spring of 1774.
Before the Parliament of Great Britain enacted the Boston Port Bill,
Americans did not know for certain whether talk of political solidarity in-
volved much more than statements of good intentions. However consoling
such rhetoric may have been during earlier imperial clashes—during the
Stamp Act resistance of 1765, for example—the situation now demanded a
more tangible demonstration of support. Most people understood that fail-
ure to come together would mean that colonial Americans would find them-
selves in a situation much like the eighteenth-century Irish, a subjugated
people within the British Empire. The destruction of tea in Boston Harbor
had sparked this particular confrontation with Parliament, and while the
people of Boston understood full well that the provocation would not go
unpunished, they entertained hope that Parliament might show compas-
sion. Like other colonists from Georgia to New Hampshire, they waited.
Reports of the Tea Party crossed the Atlantic, king and ministers debated
2 n t h e m a r ket p l ace o f revo lu t i o n
how best to deal with a brazen attack on private property, and in March,
after months of uncertainty, the British response finally reached Massa-
chusetts. Its severity shocked even the most sanguine colonists. Parliament
closed the great port. All commerce ceased; hundreds of laborers lost their
jobs.1 Boston suddenly found itself a city under siege, seemingly alone and
facing a doubtful political future.
The stunning news from England immediately raised another, even
more unsettling issue. The problem was not so much occupation by the
British army or the collapse of the local economy but rather the reaction of
other Americans. No one in Boston could be sure that these distant strang-
ers would in fact come to their aid. For almost a decade men and women
scattered along the Atlantic coast had protested against British taxation;
some had rioted, others had signed petitions, and a few had written quite
eloquently about constitutional and human rights. But this time the politi-
cal stakes were much higher. Colonists in Virginia and South Carolina, New
York and Pennsylvania, could have labeled the citizens of Boston extrem-
ists, troublemakers, people unworthy of support at a moment when orga-
nized resistance could easily spark full-scale armed rebellion. That view of
the events in Massachusetts was widespread in England. As Richard Price, a
respected philosopher and friend of America, explained in his Observations
on the Nature of Civil Liberty, parliamentary leaders believed that “the mal-
contents in the Colony of Massachusetts were a small party, headed by a
few factious men, that the majority of the people would take the side of
government as soon as they saw a force among them capable of supporting
them, that, at worst, the Colonies in general would never make a common
cause with this province, and that the issue would prove, in a few months,
order, tranquility and submission.”2 On both sides of the Atlantic the fate
of Boston became a crucial trial of American solidarity.
Within weeks of the announced retaliation, an unprecedented outpour-
ing of public support revealed that the inhabitants of Boston need not have
feared political isolation. Throughout America ordinary colonists spoke up,
pledging generous assistance for a city about which they really knew very
little. Connecticut farmers sent livestock to feed the poor people of Boston.
The inhabitants of other Massachusetts villages, many of them obscure farm-
ing communities, pledged hard currency to assist those “who are suffering
by means of the Boston Port Bill.” Pennsylvania patriots promised large
shipments of grain, while South Carolinians dispatched hundreds of bar-
rels of rice. In Charleston a committee of thirteen gentlemen declared that
it had begun collecting “donations for the relief of our distressed brethren
in this town [Boston], now suffering for the common cause of all America,
under the most cruel, arbitrary and tyrannical act of the British Parliament.”3
From Georgia to New Hampshire, towns raised money, usually through
voluntary charitable subscriptions. Some efforts showed unusual imagina-
tion. A group identified in a newspaper as the “young” men of Charleston,
South Carolina, proposed staging a play entitled Busiris, King of Egypt. The
producers promised that funds gathered from the sale of tickets—small
tale of the hospitable consumer N 3
amounts of rice were accepted in lieu of cash—would go toward the relief

of Boston, and advertisements assured those unfamiliar with the plot of
Busiris that it concerned “an injured gallant people struggling against op-
pression, resigning their All to fortune, and wading through a dangerous
bloody field in search of freedom.”4
Enthusiastic and spontaneous declarations of solidarity often accom-
panied these donations. People living in distant communities who could
have remained silent chose forcefully to record their conviction that Boston’s
adversity directly affected their own political freedom. During a meeting
held on August 8, 1774, for example, the freeholders of Rowan County, North
Carolina, concluded that “The Cause of the Town of Boston is the Com-
mon Cause of the American Colonies.”5 The logic of the declaration is note-
worthy. The Carolina farmers assumed almost reflexively that they spoke
for a national community that in fact existed only in their own imagina-
tions; in response to British oppression they construed an America that
included Boston as well as Rowan County.
Everywhere people proclaimed a shared sense of political identity, re-
solving, as did the freemen and inhabitants of Baltimore County, Maryland,
“that the town of Boston is now suffering in the common cause of America.”6
The farmers of Harvard, Massachusetts, an isolated community located many
miles to the west of the great port, found the pressure of the moment almost
insupportable. As the Reverend Joseph Wheeler, moderator for the Harvard
town meeting, recorded in the official minutes, the people regarded the Bos-
ton crisis “a matter of as interesting and important a nature when viewed in
all its Consequences, not only to this Town and Province, but to America in
general, and that for ages and generations to come, as ever came under the
deliberation of this Town.”7 Like so many of their colonial contemporaries,
the people of Harvard found themselves swept up by external events. The
experience expanded their political horizons, linking local decisions for the
first time not only to an imagined concept called “America in general” but
also to future generations who presumably would praise Wheeler and his
neighbors for their brave stand in support of Boston.
The flood of public support from so many distant places heightened
Boston’s resolve. Out of fear and uncertainty had come a sense of confi-
dence about a united effort. The patriot leaders of that city had taken a
huge risk when they sanctioned the destruction of the hated tea. But by
August 1774 they had discovered that however great their current distress,
Boston would not stand alone against the empire. “Notwithstanding all the
wicked arts that have been practiced to create division and animosity among
the friends of their country,” declared “A Tradesman” in the Massachusetts
Spy, “we have the happiness to see the cause of virtuous freedom, still sup-
ported by a continental unanimity. There is scarce a town or city to be found,
but what feels for our distress, and is determined to assist us.—Every post
who rides, and almost every gentleman who journeys hither, is loaded with
such sympathizing expressions and such manly assurances, as cannot fail
to inspire us with fortitude.”8 And the Reverend Charles Chauncy declared
with pride, “I can’t help assuring you as an evidence that the Colonies con-
tinue united in supporting the common cause, that they are almost daily
sending to this town [Boston] for its relief, flour, Indian corn, beef, pork,
mutton, butter, cheese, and in a word every thing necessary for the comfort
as well as support of life.”9
From a modern perspective that takes for granted the mobilization of
the American people, impassioned declarations of shared political purpose
come as no surprise. We know that the colonists—certainly by the summer
of 1774—were on the road to national independence. Reflecting on the events
of this period, John Adams declared, “Thirteen clocks were made to strike
together,” a sentiment that historians have repeated for a very long time.10
Adams was not alone. Dr. David Ramsay, an officer in the Continental Army
and the author of the most insightful contemporary account of the Revolu-
tion, explained in 1778, “Our enemies seemed confident of the impossibil-
ity of our union; our friends doubted it; and all indifferent persons, who
judged of things present, by what has heretofore happened, considered the
expectation thereof as romantick.” Union was something of a miracle. Only
an Enlightenment God could have brought together thirteen separate poli-
ties, “frequently quarreling about boundaries, clashing in interests, differ-
ing in policy, manners, customs, forms of government, and religion, scattered
over an extensive continent, under the influence of a variety of local preju-
dices, jealousies, and aversions.”11 The Reverend Samuel McClintock of New
Hampshire came to share this growing sense of wonder. It was truly re-
markable, McClintock explained in 1784, “That people so widely separated
from one another by their situation, manners, customs, and forms of gov-
ernment, should all at once be willing to sacrifice their private interests to
the public good, and unite like a band of brothers, to make the cause of one
state, and even of one town, a common cause.”12 It is precisely this kind of
providential language about the construction of a shared sense of political
purpose that we should resist. It suggests that the discovery of a “common
cause” during the summer of 1774 was somehow inevitable, a kind of divine
blessing defying close analysis.
Like the people of Boston who were none too sure about receiving aid
from outside Massachusetts, we can easily put forward an alternative nar-
rative, a seemingly counterfactual account of these years in which there
seemed no possibility that thirteen separate colonial clocks could be made
to strike as one. Indeed, thoughtful contemporaries on both sides of the
Atlantic predicted that Americans would never unite in common cause.
Not surprisingly, the men who governed the empire took a measure of com-
fort from such intelligence, concluding on the basis of apparently reliable
testimony that profound religious, cultural, and political diversity precluded
the creation of effective union. In a 1759 account of colonial society, the
English traveler Andrew Burnaby rehearsed what was by then a familiar ar-
gument, dismissing out of hand suggestions that Americans might be con-
templating independence from Great Britain. He specifically drew attention
to “the difficulties of communication, of intercourse, [and] of correspon-
dence,” evidence which strengthened his conviction that “fire and water are
not more heterogeneous than the different colonies in North America.” Left
to their own devices, Burnaby declared, “there would soon be a civil war,
from one end of the continent to the other.”13
Thomas Pownall, a former royal governor of Massachusetts and an as-
tute student of political economy, shared Burnaby’s general assessment of
colonial society. In his widely respected Administration of the Colonies, origi-
nally published in 1764, Pownall explained precisely why the American
people could never hope to form an independent government. Their men-
tal horizons were too narrow, too much the product of local history and
culture, for them ever to cooperate with those who happened to live in other
provinces. “The different manner in which they are settled,” Pownall as-
sured readers, “the different modes under which they live, the different forms
of charters, grants, and frame of government . . . will keep the several prov-
inces and colonies perpetually independent of, and unconnected with each
other, and dependent on the mother country.”14
Americans accepted the force of this analysis. In a pamphlet intended
to persuade the British government to retain Canada following the Seven
Years’ War, Benjamin Franklin sounded a lot like Burnaby. And well he might.
At the Albany Congress of 1754 Franklin had proposed a loose confedera-
tion of mainland colonies, and to promote the spirit of cooperation, he
circulated in the provincial press his famed severed-rattlesnake cartoon,
which warned all Americans that they should “Join or Die.” But to his im-
mense frustration, even the threatening reptile failed to generate union. At
the end of the day, not a single colony endorsed Franklin’s plan to reconsti-
tute the governance of empire. Writing in 1760 Franklin seemed to have
learned from that earlier experience. The colonies, he now informed an
Anglo-American audience, “have different forms of government, different
laws, different interests, and some of them different religious persuasions
and different manners.” These conditions served powerfully to inhibit any
meaningful union, even for “their common defense and security against
their enemies.”15 The Reverend Ezra Stiles, future president of Yale College
and an admirer of Franklin, could hardly imagine a meaningful colonial
union. In his Discourse on the Christian Union, published in 1761, he sum-
marily rejected the proposition that the southern colonies had much in
common with their northern neighbors. “As to the three southern prov-
inces,” wrote Stiles, “their climate not suiting European constitutions, they
will not figure as to numbers for perhaps yet a century or more, until the
present race is hardened and get the better of a noxious region.”16 It is no
wonder, then, that another of Franklin’s correspondents, Dr. William Clarke
of Boston, announced that the British colonies would never unite until “we
are forced to it, by the Supreme Authority of the Nation,” a comment that if
nothing else demonstrated Clarke’s failure to comprehend the futility of
using state power to coerce either loyalty or identity.17
Long after Americans had forgotten the Albany Congress, they assumed
without much debate that social diversity would overwhelm the creation of
a powerful identity separate from that of Great Britain. John Adams, who
later would rhapsodize about the synchronization of thirteen clocks, ad-
vanced a particularly sober assessment of the mobilization of the American
people on the eve of independence. He, too, found it difficult to compre-
hend the mental process that had allowed virtual strangers to cooperate in
a political cause. The colonists’ separate histories seemed to have conspired
against the formation of a new nation. The American settlers, Adams ob-
served, had evolved quite different constitutions of government. But that
was not all. Ethnicity, religion, customs, manners, and habits—all these
cultural elements had set the colonists seriously at odds, and if one also
took into account the rarity of “their intercourse” and their imperfect
“knowledge of each other,” one began to appreciate that the achievement of
meaningful political solidarity “was certainly a very difficult enterprise.”18
As late as November 1774 Thomas Hutchinson—the royal governor of Mas-
sachusetts whom the Americans had forced into exile—was trying to reas-
sure colonial administrators in Great Britain that “a union of the Colonies
was utterly impracticable.” Experience had taught Hutchinson that “the
people were greatly divided among themselves in every colony, and that
there could be no doubt that all America would submit, and that they must,
and moreover would, soon.”19
These commentators cannot be faulted for failing to chart accurately
the course of late eighteenth-century history. They only seem deficient be-
cause we know that Americans did in fact manage to unite in precisely the
manner that these men claimed impossible, creating, in the words of David
Ramsay, a country “for which we would choose to live, or dare to die.”20 On
the topic of social diversity, however, they were right on the mark. Americans
who contributed food and currency in support of Boston in 1774 defined
themselves in many different ways: as members of distinct communities, as
Methodists but not as Congregationalists, as rice planters but not as growers
of wheat or as producers of tobacco, as wealthy urban merchants but not as
struggling rural farmers, or as persons of German or Scottish but not En-
glish heritage. The list of identities could be extended almost infinitely. Di-
versity characterized everyday life in all the colonies, and even in the
self-contained villages of New England, a region celebrated for homogene-
ity, travelers frequently encountered African Americans and occasionally,
in the mid-eighteenth century, Native Americans.21
Local perceptions powerfully shaped the colonists’ views of an outside
world, for, as Adams fully understood, the experience of living in a specific
place—a tightly bounded little community where shared genealogies and
historically sanctioned customs gave meaning to human existence—cross-
cut other, larger possibilities for personal identity. And so, at any given mo-
ment during the run-up to revolution, men and women were not simply
Anglicans, Quakers, or Presbyterians. They were Anglicans from the North-
ern Neck of Virginia or New York City, the Carolina Low Country or the
Maryland Eastern Shore. Colonial Presbyterians may have shared a per-
spective on church government, but a Presbyterian living outside Boston
probably did not have a lot in common with a newly arrived Scots-Irish Pres-
byterian in central Pennsylvania or North Carolina. A Quaker from Rhode
Island was not quite the same social being as a Quaker from Philadelphia.
These competing senses of self were woven into the fabric of mid-eighteenth-
century America, sometimes generating severe strains and ongoing jealou-
sies, sometimes coexisting as people of diverse interests and backgrounds went
about their normal business. It is important to remember, therefore, that the
fabrication of broader forms of political identity during this period—indeed,
the ability to imagine total strangers as a “band of brothers”—occurred against
the background of persistent diversity. The rhetoric of common cause, how-
ever defined, had constantly to struggle against feelings of distrust and suspi-
cion fueled by cultural and social difference.
Adams’s remarks—as well as those of so many of his contemporar-
ies—focus attention on another perplexing aspect of popular political mo-
bilization. It happened quite swiftly. Colonists who had previously been
strangers developed over a relatively short period of time—little more than
a decade—a self-conscious commitment to a common cause, to a set of
shared principles and strategic goals that energized resistance. Explaining
the speed of the process represents a major challenge for anyone studying
the coming of independence. At mid-century such unity struck bright, well-
informed observers as highly improbable, even impossible. By 1774, how-
ever, the unthinkable had become reflexive, something that large numbers
of Americans could imagine. By that time few questioned that the cause of
Boston was genuinely the American cause. The invention of identity was a
collective act of self-discovery that intensified over a decade of tumultuous
confrontation with Great Britain. And although it is tempting to explain
this achievement with arguments based on a shared history and environ-
ment, political mobilization on this vast scale does not seem in fact to have
owed much to the formative experiences of the seventeenth-century Euro-
pean settlers or to the mythic qualities of the free air of the New World or to
the rigorous demands of living on the frontier. The ability successfully to
imagine oneself as part of a larger political community developed precisely
because ordinary men and women working with the cultural resources at
hand willed that community into existence.
These observations suggest that a persuasive explanation of political
mobilization on the eve of the American Revolution must meet certain cri-
teria. First, it must map out in some detail the process of political imagin-
ing that allowed strangers in Britain’s mainland provinces to reach out to
each other and form new collectivities.22 Second, it must take into account
the huge number of people who in one form or another participated in this
movement. It may seem self-evident that political mobilization involved a
large segment of the population. In point of fact, however, historians some-
times treat a few articulate colonial leaders as proxies for the mass of forgot-
ten people who had to learn within their own little communities and extended
clans the meaning of political trust. Convincing these ordinary colonists to
cooperate was no easy task. Nevertheless, as we should continually remind
ourselves, it was they who sustained the possibility of winning indepen-

dence, and if frightened, sometimes deeply conservative men and women
had not found a way to translate the experiences of family and neighbor-
hood into a broader political context and a language of mutual responsibil-
ity, Boston would have received no meaningful assistance in its protest
against the policies of Great Britain.23 As a writer in the South-Carolina
Gazette noted in 1770 with considerable insight: “The greatest difficulty lies,
in setting a huge massy body in motion. To point out to mankind their real
interest, is easy enough; but to convince them of their duty, and to persuade
those who are activated by different views, and subject to different pas-
sions, to lay aside their prejudices, to give up a strong attachment to their
immediate interests, and to act in mutual concert, for the good of the whole,
is an arduous task.”24 Unless an interpretation of the coming of the Ameri-
can Revolution comprehends the political mobilization of that “huge massy
body,” it does not tell us very much at all.
II
These interpretive issues have, of course, received scholarly attention. The
most appealing explanation for the mobilization of the American people is
simply that they came to share a powerful but loosely defined bundle of
ideas about liberty and property, what might best be labeled a compelling
political ideology. When Parliament threatened to tax the colonists without
representation, they sensed almost instinctively how to respond, and, as the
familiar narrative runs, during moments of grave imperial crisis they drew
upon commonly held ideas about the abuse of power and the decay of vir-
tue to sustain popular resistance.
Recently, intellectual historians have defined the content of these popu-
lar notions with greater rigor, insisting that what was at stake in popular
mobilization was not a set of everyday notions about rights and freedom
but rather a complex political ideology that the colonists allegedly borrowed
from eighteenth-century opposition figures in England such as John
Trenchard and Thomas Gordon. Early in Sir Robert Walpole’s administra-
tion—during the 1720s—these writers began warning their readers of au-
thoritarian forces plotting to undermine Great Britain’s traditional balanced
constitution. Unless virtuous citizens came forward in the manner of a Cato
or Cincinnatus—allegedly selfless Roman republicans—to preserve the
country’s ancient liberties and unless they forswore luxury and self-indulgence,
rapacious ministers in the central government would surely gain total power
over the people, becoming virtual tyrants. Trenchard and Gordon listed the
danger signs: substitution of a standing army for local militias, state cen-
sorship of a free press, and efforts by stock-jobbers and financiers to cor-
rupt the common good in the name of private commercial gain. This
conspiratorial ideology, often labeled “republicanism” or “civic humanism,”
condemned liberal values frequently associated with individualism and
modern capitalism, and, according to some leading historians, it provided

disgruntled Americans from colonial Georgia to New Hampshire with a
consistent package of “assumptions, beliefs, and ideas—the articulated world
view—that lay behind the manifest events of the time.”25
The ideological interpretation has stimulated a fruitful debate among
historians of political thought, some of whom have concluded that Lockean
liberalism and reformed Protestantism contributed as fully to the colonists’
“articulated world view” as did the civic humanism of writers such as
Trenchard and Gordon.26 Whatever the precise character of popular political
ideas may have been, the intellectual explanation for mobilization—indeed,
for the creation of a broadly shared political identity—evades hard issues. It
does not, for example, effectively address questions of diversity, process, or
timing. As we have already noted, communication among scattered colonists
developed over a period of little more than a decade. It involved imagination
and mutual discovery. Only after a series of crises provoked by an increas-
ingly aggressive Parliament did Americans manage to achieve the degree of
mutual trust required to sustain a successful bid for independence.
Intellectual historians seem to take for granted a key element in popu-
lar political mobilization, an ability to reach out across boundaries of space
and class to establish a larger, more formidable solidarity. Moreover, the
presence of certain ideas in a society, no matter how widely or passionately
held, does not necessarily generate specific forms of political resistance. It
is one thing to believe that corrupt placemen controlled the British Empire
and quite another to translate that conviction into a broadly shared strat-
egy for collective protest. And finally, ideological historians tend to reify
assumptions and beliefs, assigning extraordinary powers of motivation to
abstract ideas without first demonstrating how these ideas provided an
emotional link between the experiences of everyday life in diverse commu-
nities and families and the larger collectivity of Americans who actually
achieved independence from Great Britain.27 The goal is not to drain a popu-
lar resistance movement of intellectual content. The colonists understood
why they challenged traditional authority and risked their lives. But to trans-
form local grumbling into full-scale rebellion they had first to assure them-
selves that in an emergency distant strangers would come to their support.
Abstract principles—the stuff of popular political ideology—made sense
within a framework of trust, a vast web of assumed reciprocities that re-
quired time and patience to negotiate.
One can appreciate the appeal of the ideological interpretation. After
all, studies of the material experience of everyday life in colonial America
have yielded even less insight into the dynamics of political mobilization.
No doubt, various free, white Americans believed that they had in some
measure been wronged by economic practices that paid them less than they
thought they deserved for their labor or crops. But however irritating these
issues may have been, they do not appear to have shaped significantly ei-
ther the character or intensity of political commitment beyond the bound-
aries of the local community. Loyalists and patriots came from all social
and economic backgrounds.28 What passed for class consciousness in the

colonies was more likely to divide people than to generate a meaningful
sense of solidarity. It is not that pocketbook concerns did not count for
something in colonial America; they surely did. But they did not count for
something in any systematic way. We must conclude, therefore, that it would
have been very hard for Americans to have forged the kind of mutual trust
that political mobilization requires solely on the basis of perceived eco-
nomic grievance.
For the ordinary colonist, of course, the challenge of sorting out his or
her relationship to the material culture involved more than a calculation of
narrow work-related interests. Historians have begun to appreciate that dur-
ing this period Americans of all sorts struggled to incorporate a flood of
British manufactured goods into their daily lives. How they interpreted these
artifacts—often small personal items promising beauty, comfort, and status—
figures centrally in the construction of an entirely new explanation of revo-
lutionary mobilization. What needs to be stressed at this point in the
discussion of consumer politics is that the literature of material culture in
colonial America tends to treat the purchase of these goods as evidence of
the extension from Europe to the American mainland provinces of the con-
ditions of a “polite” society, or as essential elements in defining new bour-
geois rules of etiquette, or as aspects of a much larger story of the rise of
middle-class gentility.29
Without question, as Americans acquired these goods, they also ac-
quired knowledge of how polite, tasteful middle-class people in London as
well as Boston, Charleston, and Philadelphia were expected to use them.
We know that the rituals of self-presentation changed dramatically during
the last half of the eighteenth century. The problem that these studies raise
for the analysis of political mobilization is that the spread of gentility and
refinement—indeed, all the major attributes of middle-class society—did
not in any clear way depend on the Revolution. Even if the colonists had
failed utterly in their bid for independence, they presumably would still
have worried about how to appear in public without committing an em-
barrassing faux pas. From the perspective of the history of gentility, goods
were largely devoid of political meaning, and efforts to link the private plea-
sures of possession to large-scale mobilization would seem a non-starter.30
III
Considering the apparent divorce between politics and material culture, it
comes as something of a surprise to discover that the colonists themselves
took a quite different view of the politics of the relationship. For them the
goods of the new marketplace invited an imaginative response that among
other things helped explain the sudden change in imperial policy that had
occurred following the conclusion of the Seven Years’ War. Americans spun
out an inventive story that might be called the “Tale of the Hospitable Con-
sumer.” It was a profoundly anthropological project, one that effectively

linked the interpretation of a new consumer marketplace to collective poli-
tics. Although the exact origins of popular explanations are difficult to iso-
late, we can with reasonable confidence begin the investigation of the new
commercial narrative in the early 1760s. It was during this period that colo-
nists first focused attention on why British authorities had redefined the
rules that had governed the empire for as long as anyone could remember.
In this context, the Sugar Act of 1764 seemed so precipitate, so destructive
to the normal flow of trade, so ill-conceived that it defied easy explanation.
But Americans accepted the interpretive challenge, probing connections
between parliamentary oppression and the consumption of British goods.
The first version of the story appeared in Boston. Although the author
of the anonymous pamphlet of 1764 entitled Considerations upon the Act of
Parliament did not proclaim a full-blown conspiracy, he suggested that
Americans themselves somehow bore responsibility for deteriorating rela-
tions with England. During the Seven Years’ War, the colonists not only had
lived too well but had done so too publicly. Their opulent consumption of
British manufactures strongly impressed “the gentlemen of the army and
others, at present and lately residing in the maritime towns.” These genial
outsiders learned that Americans “spend full as much [on] the luxurious
British imports, as prudence will countenance, and often much more.”31
The next year, the consumer interpretation of parliamentary taxation
took on fuller definition. John Dickinson, a respected Pennsylvania lawyer,
traced the imperial crisis in part to a stunning misinterpretation in Great
Britain of American buying habits. “We are informed,” Dickinson noted in
The Late Regulations, “that an opinion has been industriously propagated
in Great-Britain, that the colonies are wallowing in wealth and luxury.” That
conclusion, he insisted, represented a pernicious misreading of colonial
culture. Whatever English scribblers might claim, the streets of America
were not paved with gold, and in any case, impoverished colonists could
not possibly pay new taxes. During the Seven Years’ War, European visitors
had witnessed an abnormally prosperous economy, artificially fueled by
large military expenditures. Americans, Dickinson claimed, were ordinarily
and mostly quite poor. British observers had been misled because the colo-
nists, “having a number of strangers among us,” were too generous and
hospitable for their own good. The Americans had “indulged themselves in
many uncommon expences.” This “imprudent excess of kindness” was sim-
ply an ill-conceived attempt to impress British visitors.32
Like Dickinson, Benjamin Franklin could not tolerate what he came to
see as gross British misrepresentations of colonial American culture. Few
polemicists could match Josiah Tucker, dean of Gloucester, for his ability to
irritate Franklin. Tucker achieved a modest reputation as a political econo-
mist, and although some of his writings anticipated the work of Adam Smith,
he was known chiefly in America during this period as an outspoken de-
fender of Parliament’s colonial policy. In one particularly provocative piece
published in 1766 entitled A Letter from a Merchant in London to His Nephew
in North America, the dean belittled American protests against taxation with-
out representation. “Remember, my young Man,” explained Tucker’s imagi-
nary merchant, “the several Expostulations I had with your deceased Father
on the prodigious Increase of American Luxury. And what was his Reply?
Why, that an Increase of Luxury was an inseparable Attendant of an In-
crease of Riches; And that, if I expected to continue my North American
Trade, I must suit my Cargo to the Taste of my Customers; and not to my
own old-fashioned Notions of the Parsimony of former Days, when America
was a poor Country.”
The entire patronizing performance angered Franklin, who was then
living in London. In the margins of his personal copy of Tucker’s Letter, the
American scribbled comments such as “This is wickedly false,” “An abso-
lute Falsehood,” and “A Fib, Mr Dean.” When he came to the passage abrad-
ing the colonists for high living, however, Franklin adopted a more moderate
tone. “This should be a Caution to Americans how they indulge for the
future in British Luxuries,” he jotted on the edge of the page. “The People
who have made you poor by their worthless, I mean useless Commodities,
would now make you poorer by Taxing you,” warned Franklin, but as he
did so, he admitted that the colonists themselves bore some of the blame
for Tucker’s condescending analysis. After all, he concluded, echoing a cen-
tral theme of the tale of the misunderstood American consumer, “The
Luxury of your Tables, which could be known to the English only by your
hospitable entertaining, is by these grateful Guests now made a Charge
against you, & given as a Reason for taxing you.”33
Other American writers soon took up the consumer narrative, adding
innovative elements of their own. In 1768 an anonymous New York pam-
phleteer situated Anglo-American consumer experience within a larger his-
torical framework. Readers of The Power and Grandeur of Great-Britain—one
of the more impressive political discussions of this period—learned that
the original New World settlers had overcome “a thousand discouragements”
and only recently had managed to establish themselves as “a numerous
people.” Whatever hardships they endured, the struggling colonists had
contributed generously to English prosperity. As loyal consumers on a dis-
tant shore, they purchased “merchandize of an almost infinite variety, num-
berless useful and useless articles [that] are now yearly furnished to three
millions of people.” The profits of this trade inevitably flowed back to En-
gland. Even during the mid-century wars against France, commercial rev-
enues increased. For the privilege of obtaining these goods, uncomplaining
colonists ransacked “the seas and the wilds of America . . . to make payment
for them, and the improved lands are cultivated chiefly for the same pur-
pose.” Like other colonial authors, the New Yorker described the Seven Years’
War as the crucial moment in the development of an empire of goods. In its
aftermath, Britain turned the ingenuity of American consumers into a jus-
tification for parliamentary taxation, based on the reports of visitors “who
saw a great display of luxury, arising from the wealth, which many had sud-
denly acquired during the war.”34
At this point, the author added a sociological dimension to an evolving

consumer explanation of political crisis. It was not so much that the re-
ports of extravagant American market behavior had been erroneous. Rather,
the colonists were parvenu consumers who had failed to master the eti-
quette of a polite society. “It is an old observation,” the pamphleteer con-
fessed, “that those who suddenly plunge into unexpected riches, in
ostentation greatly exceed those who either derive them from their ances-
tors, or have gradually acquired them by the ordinary course of business.”
Contemporary imperial policy, therefore, was the product of shoddy cul-
tural anthropology. The British refused to appreciate that, despite their su-
perficial glamour, eighteenth-century Americans remained provincial
bumpkins too poor to pay parliamentary taxes and too untutored to dis-
play their wealth tastefully.35
In 1768 William Hicks of Philadelphia heightened the conspiratorial
element in the developing narrative. It was no accident, he announced, that
ordinary English people accepted inflated estimates of colonial prosperity
as truth, for, as he could testify, unnamed sources had made it their busi-
ness to disseminate distorted reports of economic conditions in colonial
America. Hicks protested that “the estimates of our wealth which have been
received from ignorant or prejudiced persons, are, in every calculation,
grossly erroneous. These misrepresentations, which have been so industri-
ously propagated, are very possibly the offspring of political invention, as
they form the best apology for imposing upon us burthens to which we are
altogether unequal.” This interpretive framework—what was becoming for
Hicks a consumer conspiracy—carried extremely sinister implications for
the colonists’ happiness within a commercial empire. Boldly linking con-
sumption and politics, Hicks asked American readers to remember exactly
how Parliament had first reacted to the false reports of colonial wealth.
Had that body not immediately imposed new taxes? Were not these rev-
enue acts an ominous hint of future assaults on American rights? The plot
was self-evident. The British wanted to keep the Americans poor, marginal
consumers just able to pay the rising taxes but never “suffered to riot in a
superfluity of wealth.” Industrious colonists could surrender their dreams
of the good life, in other words, their just expectations of sharing the splen-
did material culture of Britain. “Whatever advantages may hereafter present
themselves, from an increased population, or a more extended trade,” la-
mented Hicks, “we shall never be able to cultivate them to any valuable
purpose; for, howmuch soever we may possess the ability of acquiring wealth
and independence, the partial views of our selfish brethren, supported by
the sovereignty of Parliament, will most effectually prevent our enjoying
such invaluable acquisitions.”36
Narratives of commercial misunderstanding—by this time a fluid as-
semblage of popular notions about consumption and politics—resonated
through the colonial newspapers, indicating that the tale of the naively hos-
pitable American consumer and the insensitive British visitors, of luxury and
poverty in a rapidly changing provincial economy, had become a staple of
popular culture on the eve of independence. Writing for the New-London

Gazette, “Incutius Americanus” reminded readers that the Seven Years’ War
had been responsible for “an insatiable itch for merchandizing; and the folly
and extravagance of the people in imitating the customs and dress of foreign-
ers.” Self-indulgence had been the colonists’ undoing. “Our extravagant dress
and luxury had this fatal effect . . . that Europeans concluded we were a people
abounding with wealth, and well able to furnish largely for defraying the na-
tional debt.”37 The Boston Evening-Post noted that the British belief in “our
being in affluent and flourishing circumstances, was grounded upon a mis-
take or the misrepresentation of travellers or others.”38 By 1771 the argument
for disjuncture between appearance and reality had become standard fare in
the colonial journals. “A Friend of the Colony of Connecticut” explained in
the New-Haven Post-Boy that “a large consumption of unnecessary foreign
articles . . . has given us the false and deceitful appearance of riches, in build-
ings, at our tables, and on our bodies. Which has attracted the attention if not
raised the envy of our neighbors, and perhaps had its influence in making the
late grievous unconstitutional revenue acts.”39
Even as the challenge to British authority intensified and the possibil-
ity of armed conflict loomed, Americans still maintained that the imperial
crisis was somehow related to their own enthusiastic participation in a new
Anglo-American marketplace. One striking example appeared in 1774. The
Reverend Ebenezer Baldwin of Danbury, Connecticut, published a short
sermon explicitly directed to ordinary farmers living in isolated communi-
ties, who were therefore “not under the best advantages for information
from the news papers and other pieces wrote upon the controversy.” How
had it come to pass, Baldwin asked this rural audience, that Americans were
contemplating armed resistance against the British Empire? For answers
one needed to look no further back in time than the Seven Years’ War. “As
America was much the seat of the last war,” Baldwin recounted, “the troops
sent here from the mother country, opened a much freer communication
between Great Britain and the Colonies, [and] the state of the colonies was
much more attended to in England, than it had been in times past.”
Sustained contact and conversation with British visitors during this
period seemed to present a real possibility for them to learn how colonial
American culture actually worked. In fact, however, familiarity generated
only superficial observations. The outsiders failed singularly to appreciate
just how much the social dynamics of America differed from those of En-
gland. “In a country like this,” Baldwin reminded the farmers, “where prop-
erty is so equally divided, every one will be disposed to rival his neighbor in
goodness of dress, sumptuousness of furniture, &c. All our little earnings
therefore went to Britain to purchase mainly the superfluities of life.” Baldwin
should be credited with a highly original insight. Economic leveling in the
colonies stimulated status competition; consumer goods were the primary
means by which men and women sorted themselves out in an open society.
“Hence the common people here make a show, much above what they do
in England,” Baldwin asserted. Here was the source of a profound cultural
misunderstanding. “The luxury and superfluities in which even the lower

ranks of people here indulge themselves,” the Connecticut preacher ex-
plained, “being reported in England by the officers and soldiers upon their
return, excited in the people there a very exalted idea of the riches of this
country, and the abilities of the inhabitants to bear taxes. The ministry [in
Great Britain] soon conceived hopes that a large revenue might be raised
from America.”40 Whatever their former excesses as consumers may have
been, Baldwin thought that Americans could still save the political situa-
tion. All they had to do was reform their buying habits, putting aside the
imported goods that had made them seem richer than they were. The mo-
ment had arrived for the “lower ranks” of provincial society to appreciate
that their private decisions in the consumer marketplace had helped to pre-
cipitate and could influence the greatest political event of their lives.
Versions of this commercial narrative enjoyed strong popular appeal
even on the eve of independence. In 1774, for example, “A Citizen of Phila-
delphia” submitted a story of ingenuous American consumers to several
urban newspapers. This form of the evolving story was both more elabo-
rate and less sophisticated. To be sure, the writer recounted, the Seven Years’
War brought British troops to America. These men had not been average
soldiers, however, for, as “A Citizen” explained, the officers came from
England’s upper class, “many of them sons of the best families.” But the tale
included an innovative element. Other eminent Englishmen who might
today be described as amateur anthropologists accompanied the military
to the New World. It was an extraordinary group. “Gentlemen on their travels
extended their routes to America,”“A Citizen” assured colonial readers, “and
even Peers of the realm landed on our shores.” Sudden attention from such
distinguished personages flattered the grateful Americans, who worked hard
to make a favorable impression on their elite guests. They really outdid them-
selves. “A Citizen” recaptured their effusive hospitality: “We lavished the
fruits of our industry, in social banquets—We displayed a parade of wealth,
beyond the bounds of moderation and prudence; and suffered our guests
to depart, with high ideas of our riches.” As the prodigal Americans soon
learned, these socially prominent officers and gentlemen lost no time in-
forming well-connected friends in England about the affluent consumers
they had encountered in the colonies. Perhaps these reporters meant no
harm; perhaps they did not consciously engage in conspiracy. There was no
disputing, however, that as England “was oppressed with a heavy load of
debt, . . . how natural then was it for Parliament to hunt out fresh resources?”41
The narrative of consumer display survived the Revolution, receiving yet
another reformulation in David Ramsay’s History of the American Revolu-
tion. Published in 1789, this impressively researched account of the War for
Independence strove to avoid the shrill partisan tone that marred so many
early patriot histories. Like other Americans who reviewed the conflict with
Great Britain, the South Carolina physician and army veteran found it diffi-
cult to understand why Parliament decided to tax the colonists in the first
place. He located the answer in Britain’s willingness to accept “exaggerated
accounts” of the visible prosperity of the American people. “It was said,”
Ramsay explained, “that the American planters lived in affluence, and with
inconsiderable taxes, while the inhabitants of Great-Britain were borne
down.” The source of this serious misunderstanding seems to have been
British soldiers serving in America. “Their observations were founded on
what they had seen in cities, and at a time when large sums were spent by
government, in support of fleets and armies, and when American commodi-
ties were in great demand.” Generous colonists spared no expense in wel-
coming their British allies during the long struggle against France. “To treat
with attention those, who came to fight for them,” Ramsay asserted, “and also
to gratify their own pride, the colonists had made a parade of their riches by
frequently and sumptuously entertaining the gentlemen of the British army.”
The failure of these strangers to comprehend the realities of everyday life in
America was probably predictable. After all, these officers, “judging from what
they saw, without considering the general state of the country, concurred in
representing the colonists, as very able to contribute, largely, towards defray-
ing the common expenses of the empire.”42
What may have been the final rendering of the tale of the misunder-
stood consumer appeared in Jeremy Belknap’s History of New-Hampshire.
Despite its somewhat parochial title, Belknap’s splendid study offered a well-
researched and wide-ranging interpretation of the coming of the American
Revolution. The second volume, published originally in 1791, expanded on
Ramsay’s account of effusive colonial hospitality during the Seven Years’
War. “The military gentlemen of Britain,” Belknap observed, “who had served
here in the war, and on whom a profusion of grateful attention had been
bestowed, carried home reports of our wealth.” Although he apparently
found no evidence of “Peers of the realm,” Belknap insisted that the British
visitors were not the only ones responsible for creating confusion in En-
gland about American affluence. Colonial travelers in Europe also bore some
of the blame. “The sons of our merchants and planters, who went to En-
gland for their education,” Belknap wrote, “exhibited specimens of prodi-
gality which confirmed the idea.” But however inappropriate the students’
behavior may have been, the fact remained that the great contest against
France had transformed the appearance of provincial society. Too many
American consumers suddenly acquired too many British manufactures.
“During the war,” the historian concluded, “there had been a great influx of
money; and at the conclusion of it, British goods were largely imported; by
which means, the cash went back again with a rapid circulation.”43
These various versions of the consumer narrative joined other more
familiar, sometimes competing discourses that Americans invented to ex-
plain to themselves why relations with Great Britain had soured so sud-
denly. Although such other tales circulated widely throughout the colonies
during this period—for example, stories of pervasive political corruption in
England—this largely overlooked account of eager, misunderstood colo-
nial consumers possesses unusual interest. It represents an imaginative, of-
ten entirely plausible response to two distinct crises in the Anglo-American
world of the mid-eighteenth century. The colonists had to accommodate

not only the demands of a new consumer marketplace that inundated the
homes of free men and women with alluring imported manufactures, but
also an aggressive Parliament that threatened to destroy a delicate commer-
cial system that made it possible for Americans to pay for these goods.
The consumer narrative that enjoyed such popularity for over two de-
cades effectively linked these separate challenges. For one thing, it established
a shared chronology, a sense of timing that helped to explain why the Ameri-
can Revolution occurred at one historical moment rather than another. Com-
mercial change accelerated during the Seven Years’ War, setting the stage for a
cultural misinterpretation so profound that the Americans could never again
persuade Parliament that they were in fact impoverished. The account turned
on the consumption of English manufactures by ordinary Americans who
were overly hospitable, remarkably self-indulgent, and socially insecure. Ver-
sions of the story came from all regions of the continent, from different classes
and backgrounds, from people who seemed in retrospect to have felt a little
guilty that their own excesses had broadcast such confusing signals. The nar-
rative of consumer life insisted that it was not the goods themselves that un-
dermined American liberty but rather their misuse; not the acquisition but
the vulgarity. And most important, it suggests how for the members of a revo-
lutionary generation the experience of participating in an exciting new mate-
rial culture may have been connected to political mobilization.
It is not surprising that references to the hospitable consumer quickly
disappeared from popular accounts of the coming of the American Revolu-
tion. An event so fundamental to how the people of a struggling new republic
defined themselves as a culture and society seemed to require heroic explana-
tions that stressed the colonists’ deep commitment to principle, God’s special
affection for the new nation, and the remarkable capacity of democratic in-
stitutions to protect individual rights and liberties. During the nineteenth
century, these various interpretive strands were woven into a compelling
patriotic interpretation of national independence. Stories of colonial con-
sumers falling all over themselves in an effort to impress upper-class visi-
tors from Great Britain flew in the face of the egalitarian rhetoric that in
Jacksonian America heralded the arrival of the common man.
The overly eager colonial consumer went missing from the pages of
history for other reasons. The dominant figure in this particular narrative
ran afoul of an even more compelling mythology. The self-sufficient farmer
is a romantic character that still exercises great influence over how Ameri-
cans distinguish themselves from the members of other cultures, presum-
ably those less committed to free enterprise and individualism. Although
Thomas Jefferson was surely not the first writer to champion the self-suffi-
cient yeoman, he gave this legendary cultivator a powerful boost, and as
Americans enshrined the small independent agrarian—a virtuous freeholder
who stood apart from the allegedly corrupting influence of commercial
capitalism—the notion of revolutionary consumers as somehow centrally
involved in the protests against British rule must have seemed increasingly
bizarre. In more recent times, the concept of self-sufficiency has attracted

ideological support, from the right as well as the left, with some commen-
tators extravagantly praising economic self-sufficiency and others labeling
consumption a vacuous, wasteful activity that somehow embodies the more
objectionable features of modern capitalism. Neither perspective has much
tolerance for eighteenth-century colonists who shamelessly lived beyond
their means.44
Although economic historians have not celebrated the myth of self-
sufficiency, they too have made it even harder to appreciate the social and
political importance of consumption in the period before the Revolution.
For a long time scholars in this field concentrated almost wholly on prob-
lems associated with production. The organization and recruitment of a
colonial labor force, the rates of return on capital, and the costs of dispos-
ing American exports on a world market have seemed far more enticing
than has the merchandising of European goods in the New World. The so-
called staple model reflects this interpretive prejudice. It currently provides
the most sophisticated framework for analyzing how eighteenth-century
Americans situated themselves in a world export market, showing among
other things how they calculated profits and losses within a commercial
system designed fundamentally to supply European buyers with staples such
as tobacco, rice, and naval stores.45
Only within the last several decades have economic historians begun
to take more seriously the significance of the growing demand for manu-
factured goods not only in defining broad market relations but also in pro-
viding powerful incentives for increasing worker productivity. They have
established that even eighteenth-century households enjoying modest in-
come levels apparently found ways to purchase new articles. As Jan de Vries,
a leading economic historian, was able to document persuasively, in early
modern Europe demand for these goods stimulated supply, and peasant
behavior suggests that willingness to work harder was a function of per-
sonal desire. Ordinary men and women decided to participate aggressively
in an economic system that suddenly offered them—and not just a few aris-
tocratic buyers—the pleasures of a richer material culture. Indeed, accord-
ing to de Vries, production strategies were “integrally related to consumption
decisions.”46 Agricultural families in the Netherlands and England responded
creatively to opportunities presented by an expanding system of exchange,
adding, whenever possible, “new goods to their range of consumption.”47
American historians have come to similar conclusions about the char-
acter of the eighteenth-century economy. Like their counterparts in Eu-
rope, colonial farmers and planters seem to have accommodated themselves
as quickly as possible to the imperatives of a burgeoning world market that
offered a broad range of consumer goods in exchange for agricultural sur-
plus. After surveying the colonial marketplace of the eighteenth century,
economic historians John McCusker and Russell Menard concluded, “The
colonial populace participated in the economy by both producing and con-
suming, by getting and spending.”48 To describe this complex international
system as “pre-industrial”—as critics of modern capitalism have done—

only compounds the general interpretive confusion. The term is not meant
to point out the obvious absence of factories in colonial America but rather
to convince modern readers that pre-industrial Americans somehow re-
sisted the encroachment of commercial capitalism and, in the process, man-
aged to preserve a system of communal values fundamentally at odds with
economic individualism. The merits of this proposition will be considered
in another section. It is sufficient here simply to observe that pre-industrial
economies are not usually associated with large-scale consumption.
And finally, we must remind ourselves that focus on production at the
expense of consumption raises an additional problem for the study of politi-
cal mobilization. Within colonial American society, production was inevita-
bly a divisive category. Each staple had its own calendar, its own marketing
system, its own technical vocabulary, and its own way of organizing labor.49
Separate work experiences reinforced local cultural difference, and if, for ex-
ample, the American Revolution had depended on the ability of the great
planters of the Chesapeake colonies to communicate with New England hus-
bandmen about difficulties of marketing tobacco, or on discussions between
Carolina rice planters and Pennsylvania wheat farmers about the morality of
unfree labor, it is unlikely that independence would ever have been achieved,
at least not in the unified form that we have come to take for granted.
IV
Reflections on “getting and spending” in late colonial America encourage a
quite different interpretation of the “Tale of the Hospitable Consumer.” The
provincials who so generously entertained British visitors during the Seven
Years’ War made a strikingly original contribution to the history of orga-
nized political protest. Everyone who has studied the American Revolution
knows something about the destruction of tea in Boston Harbor. But gen-
eral accounts of the coming of independence often ignore the massive non-
importation movement that had commenced a decade earlier and had
gradually broadened and intensified, so that by 1773 the experience of being
a consumer in Britain’s great empire of goods provided a powerful link
between everyday life and political mobilization. Later Americans who trans-
lated republican theory into a viable constitutional government usually re-
ceive high marks for political invention. And well they should. The so-called
Founding Fathers not only put republican government on a firm footing—
something that classical theorists had thought impossible—but also bril-
liantly recast an ancient debate about the balance of power. But the colonists
who are the object of our attention deserve similar credit for advancing a
genuinely innovative strategy for promoting communication and mutual trust
among so many persons of different regions and backgrounds. Although a
few isolated boycotts may have taken place in other countries before this pe-
riod, the Americans were the first to appreciate the extraordinary capacity of
ordinary consumer goods—in this case, durables and semi-durables—to bring

strangers together in common cause. It was a spectacularly successful new
form of political action. The colonists’ creative political engagement with
commercial capitalism made the American Revolution a truly modern event.
Consumer protest swept colonial society in three waves, each crest break-
ing with greater force. Americans first employed non-importation to oppose
the Stamp Act during the winter of 1765–66. Since the British quickly retreated
from this form of taxation, the colonists did not have sufficient time to orga-
nize a large-scale boycott, and as a result of inexperience and unreliable com-
munication, the initial early effort to politicize the marketplace seemed
somewhat tentative, a number of local experiments rather than an example
of coordinated resistance. The strategy had much to recommend it, however,
and few doubted that if the British again taxed the colonists without repre-
sentation, Americans would disrupt the flow of commerce. The second ma-
jor imperial crisis arrived sooner than most contemporaries anticipated.
Passage of the so-called Townshend Acts in 1767 sparked enthusiastic renewal
of non-importation, as colonists from Boston to Charleston intensified pres-
sure on local merchants to close the American market to British exports. Al-
though the boycott did not operate as effectively as many participants had
hoped, it successfully mobilized large numbers of ordinary consumers in a
popular movement that expanded their political horizons.
In 1770 Britain’s rulers tried once again to mollify the colonists. With
repeal of most Townshend duties, the entire American boycott lost mo-
mentum, and for a brief moment it appeared as if cooler heads on both
sides of the Atlantic would prevail. Tranquility was short-lived. The Tea Act
of 1773 again focused American attention on the politics of consumption,
and during this final phase of non-violent protest ever larger numbers of
colonists expressed their political solidarity with other Americans by re-
jecting British goods. By this time, they fully understood what Samuel Adams
meant when he warned the Virginian Arthur Lee that the cause of liberty
depended on the ability of the American people to free themselves from
“the Baubles of Britain.”50
Over a decade of ever more serious confrontations with Parliament, the
boycott had become the distinguishing mark of colonial protest, what cul-
tural anthropologists would call its signature. Within this provincial society a
consumer market defined political resistance. The protests of 1774, however,
differed strikingly from those of the Stamp Act period. The early boycotts
demanded the non-importation of common consumer articles. During this
phase, the colonists put pressure on local merchants to proscribe the sale of
British exports, to keep the desired goods off the streets, as it were. But fol-
lowing the closing of Boston Harbor, ordinary Americans realized that they
could not safely delegate the policing of the marketplace to a professional
group whose very livelihood depended on continued consumption. During
the final months before the battles of Lexington and Concord, non-consump-
tion replaced non-importation, and revolutionary consumers took charge of
their own market behavior.
The centrality of the boycott to the coming of the American Revolution

should put to rest lingering doubts about late colonial self-sufficiency. Only a
people thoroughly involved in a complex market economy could possibly
have appreciated the capacity of consumer goods to mobilize strangers in
political protest. Appeals for non-importation certainly did not represent a
rejection of eighteenth-century commercial capitalism. Indeed, even as they
organized ever more effective boycotts of British goods, colonists called for
investment in American manufacturing. They wanted the “Baubles” that
made daily life more comfortable. The problem, alas, was that the best, most
desirable items came from Great Britain, and their purchase carried heavy
political burdens in the form of unconstitutional taxes and regulations.
V
In the absence of consumer desire, rejection of British goods would have
had no political sting. The boycotts worked so effectively as a vehicle for
large-scale mobilization precisely because they linked two separate eigh-
teenth-century revolutions, one economic, the other political.51 The first of
these predated the clash with Parliament by at least three decades. Importa-
tion of British manufactures took off sometime during the 1740s. The allur-
ing marketplace for cloth, ceramics, and metal goods presented colonists
with an unprecedented range of choices. The process of self-fashioning sud-
denly became more challenging as Americans selected from among com-
peting colors, textures, and weights. Shopkeepers offered easy credit, and
eager consumers took the bait. In fact, however bitterly Americans com-
plained about the alleged misrepresentation of their buying habits, it seems
likely that the British visitors during the Seven Years’ War accurately de-
scribed the material culture that they had encountered in the New World.
The boycott movement presupposed this broad experience of defining self
within a social environment of accelerating consumption.
Growing reliance on imported consumer goods at mid-century height-
ened the colonists’ shared sense of identity with Great Britain. They had
many reasons, of course, to celebrate their Britishness, not the least of which
was Britain’s military successes against the French. Historians sometimes
describe these eighteenth-century expressions of provincial loyalty as “co-
lonial nationalism” or as “British nationalism.”52 Within this mental frame-
work American farmers and planters could claim a limited measure of
legislative autonomy without thereby threatening their standing within the
larger imperial structure. To be sure, personal relations within small com-
munities remained the primary source of social meaning for most colo-
nists. But beyond the local level, Americans generally subscribed to what
might be called a semiotic order of empire, a system of political symbols that
included the Hanoverian monarchy, the balanced constitution, and the com-
mon law. Indeed, it was possible for mid-eighteenth-century Americans to
imagine themselves in a genuine partnership with England that provided
all subjects with commercial prosperity, military security, and individual

liberty.53 For ordinary people, the palpable experience of participating in
an expanding Anglo-American consumer market bolstered these often in-
choate feelings of identity. Even colonists of modest means copied British
fashions, following as best they could at a distance of several thousand miles
what the people of London were currently acquiring.
Nothing about the colonial American experience with British exports
distinguished it at mid-century significantly from that of Scotland or Ire-
land, parts of the British Empire that participated just as enthusiastically in
the new consumer market. The Scots provide a particularly instructive com-
parison on how an economically and politically dependent people accom-
modated themselves to a sudden flood of English manufactured goods. Like
some Americans discussed later in this volume, Scottish writers initially
greeted the explosion of consumer opportunities with dismay. William
Mackintosh remembered, for example, that at the beginning of the century
a visit to a friend’s house early in the day would result in an offer of a “Morn-
ing Drought.” But by 1729 expectations and customs had changed, and
Mackintosh, who obviously enjoyed a good whiskey, lamented, “I am now
ask’d if I have yet had my Tea.” It was not unusual for members of his gen-
eration to blame such silliness on the Union of 1707, which had promised
general commercial prosperity in exchange for the surrender of national
sovereignty.54
But others, including most of the brilliant political economists identi-
fied with the Scottish Enlightenment, viewed the challenge of the consumer
marketplace more positively. They wove material progress into a four-stage
evolutionary theory that explained the development of modern society from
the dawn of time to the modern commercial age. Rather than rejecting the
new consumer goods, they associated them with the rise of civility and po-
liteness, key indices of human advancement. As one historian of eighteenth-
century Scotland observed, “It was the historic achievement of the Scots to
have created a philosophical and literary culture of great complexity which
was designed to explain the metaphysical, moral, political, religious and
historical foundations on which commercial civilization itself was founded
and would teach men and women how to live virtuous and happy lives.”55
Abundant English goods sparked in Scotland a “revolution in manners” rather
than political upheaval, and instead of resisting commercial intrusion, enter-
prising landowners and improving lairds tried to increase agricultural pro-
ductivity so that they could more readily participate in the world of English
fashion.56 Consumer goods also transformed the material culture of Ascen-
dancy Ireland, where per capita consumption rose at least 50 percent dur-
ing the eighteenth century. Jonathan Swift and other so-called Irish patriots
railed against public displays of imported luxury items, which they attrib-
uted largely to “Irish women,” but however much English manufactures
made the Protestants of Ireland love what they “ought to hate,” these goods
only occasionally acquired symbolic importance in Irish opposition to
London’s firm political hand.57
Colonial Americans took a different course. Indeed, during the 1760s

and 1770s something unprecedented occurred in Britain’s mainland colo-
nies. In response to parliamentary taxation, Americans managed to politi-
cize common consumer goods and, by so doing, suddenly invested
manufactured items with radically new symbolic meaning. Had it not been
for a crisis in the imperial constitution, the story of American consumer
experience could well have paralleled Scotland’s, becoming little more than
a narrative of manners and politeness. In this particular provincial setting,
however, the very commodities that were everywhere beginning to trans-
form traditional social relations provided a language for popular political
resistance. British imports became political emblems, markers of semiotic
change.58 As an anonymous South Carolina writer recounted in 1769, Ameri-
cans had once looked upon Great Britain as the source of valued manufac-
tured goods, and because of this historic connection they called England
“by the endearing epithet, mother.” During that earlier period of mutual
respect and cooperation, “we went to the merchants’ stores with pleasure,
and purchased there the manufactures of Great-Britain, with no grudging
hand,” but unhappily Parliament had chosen to disrupt the era of good
feelings, and “now, we look upon her wares, in a manner as poison to us . . .
[which] must be used very sparingly, and with the utmost caution.59 Such a
profound shift in the perception of everyday material culture—an entire
visual environment of transformed meanings—served in the words of one
economist to awake “the public citizen who slumbers within the private
consumer.”60
It is important to establish that we are documenting a key moment in
the history of liberal thought. Within the framework of the new consumer
market, Americans worked out a genuinely radical political ideology, an
achievement for which they seldom receive proper credit. They managed to
situate a complex discourse about rights and liberties, virtue and power,
within a familiar material culture. The goods themselves did not generate
these ideas. Concepts long associated with John Locke and his many stu-
dents were already present in this provincial society, the product of local
histories and intellectual borrowing, and by the 1760s colonists everywhere
took for granted certain assumptions about constitutional government,
common law, and the contractual origins of social and political authority.
What they did not know, however, was whether other Americans shared
these beliefs or, if they professed to do so, shared them with the same sin-
cerity. This element of doubt might be called the problem of the distant
stranger.61 One knows the person is out there, but not whether he or she
shares a bundle of core values passionately enough to be counted as an ally.
The point is that the successful mobilization of ordinary people re-
quired communication of conviction, a credible means of voicing the in-
tensity of personal commitment. In this context, the language and experience
of the consumer marketplace helped strangers persuade each other—and
perhaps themselves as well—that they were worthy of trust.62 Indeed, Ameri-
cans found that they had repeatedly to demonstrate ideological zeal through
organized public sacrifice, through the denial of the “Baubles of Britain.” By

transmitting news of local boycotts to distant colonists, they proved them-
selves true patriots, “Sons of Liberty,” and plausible members of a larger imag-
ined community. As in religious structures, participation in public rituals
could be interpreted and communicated as authentic evidence of belief. This
close connection between ideology and the forms of protest, between inter-
pretation and strategies of resistance, helps explain why leaders of a colonial
rebellion insisted that patriotism required the rejection of British imports.
Action had to accompany principle. It is not hard to find examples of Ameri-
cans grounding political ideas in the rhetoric of consumer sacrifice. In a speech
published in 1774, the South Carolinian Christopher Gadsden drew attention
to a powerful emotional link between ideology and behavior. The people of
South Carolina—and those in other colonies who happened to read Gadsden’s
printed text in the newspapers—claimed that they loved freedom. But how
much? How intense was their commitment? Would they be willing in order
to advance the liberty of other Americans whom they had never met to “forego
the elegancies and luxuries of life” if by so doing they liberated “posterity”
from political slavery “to the end of time?” Like other Americans of his gen-
eration, Gadsden declared it self-evident that “a non-importation agreement
will . . . prove a means of restoring our liberty.”63
The rituals of non-consumption did more than simply transmit from
region to region, city to city, the seal of ideological conviction. They
radicalized American political culture on the eve of independence in ways
that no one at the time could have foreseen. The unintended results of the
boycotts were perhaps more significant—and the least appreciated aspect
of consumer mobilization. Colonial politics had long been an aspect of
public life restricted to white male property owners, and although this group
of potential voters was surprisingly large by contemporary European stan-
dards, it represented at mid-century only a fraction of the free adult popu-
lation. Moreover, before the Revolution, no one seriously advocated a more
open and inclusive system.64 The boycott movement, however, shifted the
basis of political participation, not in legislative elections or in choosing
town officials but rather in the extra-legal structures established through-
out America to discourage the purchase of British manufactures.
In this extraordinary political environment it quickly became appar-
ent that if efforts to restrict the sale of imported goods were to have any
chance of success, they would need the support of all consumers, women as
well as men, poorer sorts as well as wealthy lawyers and merchants. Focus-
ing attention almost exclusively on formal electoral politics, on the response
of the various colonial legislatures to the demands of royal governors and
British administrators, for example, obscures the development of a new
kind of popular politics, one that encouraged ordinary consumers—pre-
cisely because they were consumers—to take a public stand on the most
pressing issues of the day.
The Anglo-American consumer economy of the eighteenth century was
in many ways strikingly egalitarian. Anyone with money could purchase
what he or she desired. From the very beginning, women played a central
role in the expansive world of goods, and after 1764 it became absolutely
essential to enlist their enthusiastic participation in the boycotts. To be sure,
market sacrifice was more difficult for women than for men. As wives and
mothers, they had families to clothe and not a lot of free time to devote to
spinning and weaving. It was certainly much easier for them to purchase im-
ported British fabric from the local shopkeepers. Whatever inconvenience
the non-importation movement may have presented, however, the invitation
to redefine private household decisions as public political acts seemed an
exciting prospect for women of all classes and backgrounds. They sensed that
they had gained a measure of real power in the public sphere. As three women
writing in the Boston Gazette in 1767 observed, the traditional rhetoric of poli-
tics had changed, “The Ladies of America having been diverse Times addressed
as Persons of Consequence, in the present œconomical Regulations.”65
The creation of so many committees to enforce the boycotts also raised
hard questions about the constitution of political authority in a liberal so-
ciety. These were for the most part voluntary bodies functioning outside
the structures of formal government, and during the early stages of the
protest against parliamentary taxation the colonists expected the merchant
community to organize the non-importation effort. By the late 1760s, how-
ever, ordinary men and women were taking a more active role in control-
ling the consumer market, and as they came forward in ever larger numbers
they triggered a far-reaching debate about democratic procedure. How could
a movement that claimed to speak for the “people” demonstrate persua-
sively that it did in fact enjoy popular support? Elections sponsored by co-
lonial officials were out of the question. Crown appointees would never
have sanctioned such potentially treasonable organizations.
The answer turned out to be the simple but ultimately deeply radical
act of signing subscription rolls. Signing one’s name to subscription lists
was not in itself a new phenomenon; documents of this sort had a long
history in England and colonial America. In this context, however, ex-
pressions of support for economic resistance of British policy amounted to
a plebiscite, a bold, even courageous recording of the popular will. People
who were ineligible to vote in colony elections affixed their names and marks
on papers carried from house to house or posted in public gathering places.
Numbers, of course, mattered, for the lists of signatures collected in Charles-
ton, New York, and Boston legitimated the rhetoric of protest leaders who
insisted that they spoke for the “people.” As anyone who has ever signed a
petition knows, adding one’s name to a list that will be scrutinized by friends
and neighbors is not an act lightly taken. Indeed, it amounts to a declara-
tion of ideological commitment, and for ordinary people, who were sel-
dom asked to sign political documents, participation in the subscription
drives—in communal pledges of self-denial—facilitated the transition from
private unhappiness to public resistance. With a stroke of the pen they ex-
changed the comfort of anonymity for identification with the common good.
After 1773 such lists circulated in small country towns and at rural county
courthouses, as new converts joined the boycott movement in the name of
the rights and liberties of the American people. Their decision to sign a
piece of paper gave the non-consumption movement a transforming force
that no one could have predicted during the Stamp Act crisis. Signers be-
came enforcers, and the first major order of the Continental Congress of
1774 was the establishment of the Association, a huge network of local
committees charged with halting once and for all the purchase of England’s
“Baubles.” Comparisons with other eighteenth-century revolutions im-
mediately suggest themselves. Citizen groups in America did not assassi-
nate prominent loyalists. Nor did they incite angry farmers to destroy the
homes of the ruling gentry. In this distinctively bourgeois rebellion, the
ideological police ferreted out hidden canisters of tea and suspicious pieces
of cloth.
Out of these collective experiences colonial Americans forged new po-
litical identities. The process was always about to come undone, but the
people who joined the boycott movement gradually expanded their per-
sonal horizons. In the rhetoric accompanying non-importation, one en-
counters ever bolder self-descriptions as organizers and participants
addressed their “Brethren of the Continent” and announced in local state-
ments that they spoke in the authentic “voice of all America” or for the
“whole body of the people.” If these sentiments were not yet the stuff of
full-blown nationalism, they forcefully reveal that the process of mobiliza-
tion involved a rethinking of political self-identity, something that occurred
well before the winning of national independence.66 Put another way, the
spirit of nationalism was as much a cause as a result of revolution.
By the same token, the discovery of solidarity and the fabrication of
mutual trust created deep divisions as former friends and neighbors who
refused to aid the boycotts and who thereby exposed their ideological un-
soundness found themselves reviled in public as “enemies of America.” The
formation of a larger imagined community forced men and women to draw
boundaries, to construct mechanisms capable of distinguishing them from
those who were not full members of the new community, and in this pain-
ful sorting out of us and them, a person’s relation to the imported con-
sumer goods determined where others marked the line of exclusion. By
1773 the mere possession of British imports signaled possible disloyalty to
the common cause. As one writer who called himself “A Consistent Patriot”
explained in the Massachusetts Spy, “The importation and use of Tea, ab-
stractedly considered, may be innocent; and he who in ordinary times, has
an inclination to import or use it, has a right to the protection of the laws.”
But, of course, no one considered consumption abstractly. Only enemies of
the people now used tea, for “when the importation is connected with the
ruin of government, its trade—and what is infinitely more valuable, its lib-
erty;—when it is designed for that purpose and will infallibly have that
effect, we ought to consider and treat it as we would THE PLAGUE.”67
VI
An argument about popular mobilization on the eve of independence raises
an obvious question about method, about a plan of attack. Where exactly
does one look for revolution? For radical politics? What counts for evi-
dence? These are issues of some importance since this book explores the
everyday experiences of ordinary people—the kinds of men and women
who joined in revolutionary protests—during a period of accelerating so-
cial and economic change. It focuses on how these Americans struggled
first to comprehend a consumer-oriented market and then, during the 1760s
and 1770s, to resist the powerful empire that for half a century had brought
beauty and comfort, pleasure and convenience, into their lives. Although the
“Tale of the Hospitable Consumer” includes the testimony of wealthy and
privileged persons, it concerns itself for the most part with persons of more
modest means who were caught up in two separate revolutions, one com-
mercial, the other political.
This interpretation of the coming of the American Revolution owes
less to modern theorists than to Samuel Johnson, the famed eighteenth-
century writer who on a journey to the Western Islands of Scotland asked
how largely invisible men and women on the margins of empire made sense
of their lives. How, in fact, did they participate in history? His reflections
were as relevant for the American colonists as for the Scottish crofters. “It
must be remembered,” Johnson observed, “that life consists not of a series
of illustrious actions, or elegant enjoyments.” For most people, the chal-
lenge of surviving from day to day was more difficult, more problematic, a
seizing of little joys along the way. “The greater part of our time passes in
compliance with necessities,” he reflected, “in the performance of daily du-
ties, in the removal of small inconveniences, in the procurement of petty
pleasures.” Indeed, such prosaic activities suggested to Johnson a generali-
zation about human society: “The true state of every nation is the state of
common life.” Although Johnson expressed only passing interest in Ameri-
can affairs, he understood that those who fail to take proper account of the
“small inconveniences” and “petty pleasures” of life can never persuasively
explain great events.
The manners of a people are not to be found in the schools of learning, or the palaces
of greatness, where the national character is obscured or obliterated by travel or in-
struction, by philosophy or vanity; nor is public happiness to be estimated by the
assemblies of the gay, or the banquets of the rich. The great mass of nations is neither
rich nor gay: they whose aggregate constitutes the people, are found in the streets, and
the villages, in the shops and farms.68
Where best to locate the “true state of common life” has, of course,
presented historians of the American Revolution with a difficult problem.
Much of what we have learned about the imperial crisis and the colonists’
reaction to it comes from carefully crafted pamphlets that learned men,
many of them lawyers, prepared in defense of American rights and liber-
ties. These rich discussions of constitutional law, republican theory, and
ancient history—together with the scores of sermons that have survived—

provide useful insights into the various strands of political ideology that
colonial writers wove together in coherent explanations of why the British
Parliament at this particular moment in time decided to oppress the Ameri-
can people by taxing them without consent. But as valuable as these formal
essays may be in reconstructing assumptions about law and power, they
seldom spoke directly to the everyday experiences of colonists in local com-
munities, in other words, to ordinary men and women for whom political
mobilization meant linking consumption to resistance and who often in a
messy, provisional way worked out the implications of their political ideas
within the context of heated debates over non-importation.
These creative conversations about trust and identity took place largely
in the colonial newspapers. Anonymous contributors to the weekly jour-
nals engaged each other as well as their many readers in far-reaching dis-
cussions about political mobilization in the marketplace. The papers
captured the tensions and uncertainties of the day. Angry letters condemn-
ing luxury and debt often appeared next to alluring advertisements for the
latest British goods. Appeals for ever more rigorous local enforcement of
the boycott frequently accompanied reports of the failure of other colonists
to hold the line against importation. It was in this popular forum that
Americans most passionately stated their expectations, shared doubts and
fears, and called upon all consumers to demonstrate true political virtue by
denying themselves the “Baubles of Britain.” The arguments were not aimed
at a professional class or at university graduates. The target audience was
always that large group of Americans who wanted material pleasure as well as
political rights and who struggled as long as they could to have both. As Silas
Deane of Connecticut wrote in 1776, almost all free colonists had “some Edu-
cation,” and even “the very poorest” consulted “Gazettes & political publica-
tions, which they read, observe upon and debate in a Circle of their
Neighbors.”69 During this period Isaiah Thomas, editor of the Massachusetts
Spy, learned a lesson about reaching the people who one day would fight the
British: “Common sense in common language is necessary to influence one
class of citizens, as much as learning and elegance of composition are to pro-
duce an effect upon another.”70 Like other American editors with newspapers
to sell, Thomas put his money on the appeal of common sense.
VII
The next section of this book, “An Empire of Goods,” sets the stage for the
revolutionary boycotts, reviewing in Chapter 2 the various kinds of evi-
dence that document the huge quantities of British imports that suddenly
inundated American ports sometime after 1740. Chapter 3 shows how im-
perial policy makers and British writers on trade tried to make sense of this
vast consumer market. An unintended result of this popular commercial
literature was a growing conviction throughout the colonies that the Ameri-
cans actually sustained British prosperity, indeed, that without their con-
tinuing purchases the English economy would suffer grievous harm. Chap-
ter 4 takes a close look at the marketing of consumer goods, a complex
system linking British manufacturers to colonial buyers. Bold new forms of
advertising and generous access to credit energized this remarkable mer-
chandising network. The final chapter in this section probes cultural mean-
ings in the American colonies, arguing that the availability of so many British
imports profoundly influenced ongoing debates about morality and gen-
der, about luxury and class, and, most significant, about the importance of
allowing people to make whatever choices happened to strike their fancy.
What we encounter long before Thomas Jefferson penned the Declara-
tion of Independence is ordinary Americans busily pursuing happiness, a
personal quest for comfort and pleasure that assumed that all free colonists
had a right to spend their money however they pleased. As one New England
writer explained in a passage comparing religion and consumption at mid-
century—a statement that reflects the kind of popular thinking that Isaiah
Thomas came to see as “common sense”—“Religion, like Trade, ought to be
free. It is best dealing at an open market; by that means we have a more rea-
sonable choice, and at a more reasonable rate. . . . Why should not every man
chuse for himself in spirituals, as well as in temporals, and buy those wares he
likes best, or thinks he has most need of, seeing he must pay for them.”71 Only
with hindsight can we appreciate that this private world of consumer desire
held within itself the potential to redefine popular politics.
Part One
N An Empire
of Goods
2
Inventories of Desire:
The Evidence
A n interpretive journey to the frontiers of

the empire of goods might best begin
by joining Dr. Alexander Hamilton on a
personal adventure that started inauspiciously on May 30, 1744. That par-
ticular day was so inclement that Hamilton and his African American slave
Dromo elected to take the Patapscoe road out of Annapolis rather than to
risk crossing the Chesapeake Bay by
boat. The weather as well as their spirits
improved as they made their way north.
The tour eventually carried the two men
as far as Maine, then still a part of Mas-
sachusetts Bay. Hamilton, a Scottish-
born physician in his early thirties and
no relation to the more famous secre-
tary of the Treasury, claimed that he
traveled “for health and recreation.”
Hamilton kept a journal—entitled
the Itinerarium—in which he recorded
impressions of the ordinary and not so
ordinary Americans encountered along
the colonial roads. Other British gentle-
men of the period produced similar
works—Samuel Johnson’s account of the
Scottish Highlands, for example—and
Mid-eighteenth-century self-caricature of Dr. like these eighteenth-century imperial
Alexander Hamilton. He commented extensively— writers, Hamilton wanted to entertain
usually, negatively—on the manners of colonial
Americans he encountered on his travels.
as well as to inform, blending erudition
Courtesy of the Maryland Historical Society, and wit in a manuscript designed ulti-
Baltimore, Maryland. mately to win the admiration of readers
34 n a n e m p i re o f g o o d s
of his own class and background. Most entries in the Itinerarium ridiculed
well-meaning provincials who seemed intent on dazzling Hamilton with
their learning or converting him to evangelical Protestantism. The doctor
pronounced the learning shallow, the religion repugnant. Only an occa-
sional exchange with cultivated men and women in Boston, Philadelphia,
and New York saved the enterprise from utter disaster.
After staying some days in New York City, Hamilton and a new ac-
quaintance, the Reverend John Milne of New Jersey, decided that they would
like to see Albany. The two men engaged a sailing vessel for the voyage up
the Hudson River. Unhappily for them, they had to share quarters with a
group of hard-drinking Dutch speakers who seemed not the least impressed
by the accomplishments of the Scottish physician. On June 23, contrary
winds forced the little ship to drop anchor, and since spending any more
time with the Dutch passengers was more than Hamilton and Milne could
endure, they went ashore “near a small log cottage on the west side of the
river inhabited by one Stanespring and his family.”
The travelers did not quite know what to make of Stanespring’s world.
The seven children who rushed out to greet the strangers initially seemed
“wild and rustick.” Hamilton claimed that it was the sight of his “laced hat
and sword” that eventually quieted these ill-mannered boys and girls. What
other family members made of the self-styled aristocrat and his clerical friend
is not clear. They apparently believed that proper gentlemen might enjoy a
basket of fresh blackberries. It may have been while the Stanesprings were out
gathering fruit that the visitors decided to assess the quality of material life
on this frontier farm. Like early-twentieth-century anthropologists, they sup-
posed that they had discovered a primitive, even Edenic culture.
What they found in the “small log cabin” disturbed the two men. The
consumer market had already violated paradise. Milne pointed out that
these poor people living on the edge of civilization “showed an inclination
to finery.” Indeed, as he explored the house, he kept discovering “superflu-
ous things.” The New Jersey minister expressed surprise at a “looking glass
with a painted frame.” And then, as they poked among the family’s belong-
ings, other tell-tale signs of a weakness for luxury drew the visitors’ atten-
tion: “half a dozen pewter spoons and as many plates, old and wore out but
bright and clean, a set of stone [stoneware] tea dishes, and a tea pot.” Such
goods, Milne announced, were not only superfluous but also “too splendid
for such a cottage.”
In case Hamilton did not understand just where the Stanesprings had
gone wrong, Milne launched into a short lecture on practical morality,
sounding much like other mid-century well-to-do Americans who railed
against other people’s alleged luxury.1 The hospitable husband and wife, he
explained, ought immediately to sell the offending articles and from the
money they received should “buy wool to make yarn.” One suspects that
Milne was reacting to the Stanespring children, who must have appeared
before the inquisitive strangers in garments made of imported British fab-
inventories of desire N 35
ric. As for the mirror, “a little water in a wooden pail might serve.” The
family could certainly do without the pewter spoons and ceramic plates,
for “wooden plates and spoons would be as good for use and, when clean,
would be almost as ornamental.” The “tea equipage” had no place in this
humble household. Milne allowed only one concession to a consumer mar-
ket. The Stanesprings owned a musket, which as any sensible person knew
“was as usefull a piece of furniture as any in the cottage.” In a show of pro-
vincial noblesse oblige Hamilton and Milne distributed “a handful of copper
halfpence” among the children. The visitors also bought a pail of milk, which
they carried back to the boat, an incidental purchase that surely helped
fund another trip to the local store.2
What is most curious about the tone of the Reverend Mr. Milne’s analysis
is how modern it sounds. Historians today sometimes seem surprised—
occasionally disappointed—when they encounter eighteenth-century colo-
nists buying painted mirrors, pewter spoons, and colorful stoneware, not
to mention the combs and ribbons that Milne would no doubt have uncov-
ered had he probed the Stanesprings’ household more thoroughly.3 As we
look over his shoulder, we find ourselves trying to make sense of the family’s
behavior. Were they exceptional? Perhaps most American farmers of the
period really did make do with wooden plates and wooden pails full of
water. Without condemning the search for greater material comfort, we
might ask how many British imports actually reached colonial Americans
before the Revolution.
Evidence of consumer behavior falls into six major categories. First,
travelers and government officials described the colonists’ changing mar-
ket behavior. The value of these reports should be obvious. It would be
hard to make a case for the existence of a new consumer culture without
showing that contemporaries were fully aware of the effect of imported
goods on the lives of people such as the Stanesprings. Second, if we want to
interrogate the British imports themselves, especially the colorful plates and
tea services that shocked the Reverend Mr. Milne, we turn to modern mu-
seums where these articles still proudly document an expanding world of
goods. Third, since we know that some possessions were thrown away, vic-
tims of accidents and hard usage that often befell the most cherished items
of everyday life, we consult archaeologists who help us interpret the physi-
cal remains of eighteenth-century comfort and pleasure. Fourth, when colo-
nists died, these manufactures sometimes showed up in probate records.
Fifth, customs officers monitored the flow of exports through English and
Scottish ports. And sixth, colonial newspapers carried long, detailed adver-
tisements announcing the availability of the latest British imports. No single
source, of course, captures the full dimensions of the consumer market.
The detective must examine each one separately, noting as the investiga-
tion unfolds the possible biases, exaggerations, and misrepresentations that
complicate the interpretive task.
II
Contemporaries had a lot to say about economic change. Colonial gover-
nors had no choice in the matter. British administrators in London expected
them from time to time to respond to official questionnaires about the state
of local affairs. Since the governors never had adequate staff to gather the
relevant data, the answers were necessarily impressionistic. A series of re-
ports submitted by the governors of New York testify to a sudden mid-
century take off of an American consumer market. The documents discussed
many different aspects of imperial commerce, but the manufacture and trade
of cloth was a continuing concern throughout the period. In 1705, Gover-
nor Lord Cornbury surveyed the New York economy, noting that the colo-
nists were eagerly trying to find new sources of income so that they could
afford the British imports they desperately desired. Cornbury warned his
superiors in London that entrepreneurs in Connecticut and Long Island
appeared to be on the verge of “setting up a Woollen Manufacture.” Indeed,
the governor claimed to have seen “Serge made upon Long Island that any
man may wear.”4
Although these manufacturing activities were in their infancy, Cornbury
regarded them as a serious threat. If Americans really did find ways to fulfill
basic consumer needs, they might soon decide that Great Britain did not
have much to offer. “I declare my opinion to be,” the governor announced,
“that all these Colloneys, which are but twigs belonging to the Main Tree
[England] ought to be Kept entirely dependent upon & subservient to En-
gland.” Cornbury and other crown officials sensed that they would have no
end of trouble maintaining royal authority if the Americans conflated eco-
nomic and political equality.
On this point the governor should be credited with developing an in-
genious argument. “If they are suffered to goe on in the notions they have,”
he continued, “that as they are Englishmen, soe they may set up the same
manufactures here as people may do in England,” the colonists would surely
start thinking of political independence. “For the consequence will be that
if once they can see they can cloath themselves, not only comfortably but
handsomely too, without the help of England, they who are already not
very fond of submitting to Government would soon think of putting in
Execution designs they had long harbored in their breasts.” Cornbury must
have known that his rhetoric might sound hyperbolic to London bureau-
crats. He ended his statement, therefore, with the curious declaration that
“this will not seem strange when you consider what sort of people this Coun-
try is inhabited by.”5 Not until the eve of revolution would Americans fully
appreciate the link that Cornbury made between consumer demand and
colonial politics.
In 1705 crown officials in New York still perceived the most pressing
commercial challenge to be how best to supply Americans with basic Brit-
ish goods while at the same time helping them develop the means to fi-
nance this trade. When Governor Robert Hunter completed the Board of
Trade questionnaire in 1715, he echoed much that Cornbury had written.

“The Planters and poorer sort of Country people” still wore clothing “of
their own manufacture.” To be sure, what they wove in their homes was
mostly coarse material, but whatever its character, the production of so much
cloth threatened to make major inroads into a consumer market that prop-
erly belonged to English workers. “I know [of] no way to prevent it,” Hunter
confessed, “than by encouraging them to go on [with] some manufactures
that may be useful to England & beneficial to themselves, for few that are
able to go to the expense of English manufacture do wear home spun, and
a law to oblige such as are not able to go to the expense to do it, under
penalties, would be equivalent to a law to compel them to go naked.”6 Hunter
repeated Cornbury’s central assumption about American buyers. The colo-
nists wanted English goods; they certainly knew the difference between finer
imported fabrics and the heavy “home spun” material that only their rela-
tive poverty forced them to accept.
In 1723 Cadwallader Colden, a member of the governor’s council in
New York, reported to the Board of Trade that conditions had not changed
much since Hunter’s time. But instead of stressing the dangers of colonial
manufacturing to British workers, Colden emphasized pent-up consumer
demand. Ordinary people in New York still could not figure out how to
cover the cost of what they dreamed of ordering from England. “It is evi-
dent,” Colden explained, “that the whole Industry, Frugality & Trade of this
Province is employed to ballance the Trade with England & to pay for the
goods they yearly import from thence, & therefore it is undoubtedly the
Interest of Britain to encourage the Trade of this Province as much as pos-
sible.” If New Yorkers could participate more productively in the imperial
marketplace, they would be able to buy even more British goods. As Colden
informed London administrators, “if the people here could remit by any
method more money or Goods to England[,] they would proportionably
consume more of the English Manufactures.” Commercial opportunity
knocked, if only the members of the Board of Trade would listen. After all,
British officials were in a position to tap the central values of the Protestant
ethic—industry and frugality—to bring colonial consumers more firmly
under their control. But Colden was not optimistic that his advice would
make much difference, for, as he explained, “It may be that many in En-
gland are not so well informed what their Colonys are able to produce.”7
If we jump forward to 1774, we immediately sense an extraordinary
change. It is as if we have entered a new consumer society. New Yorkers of
all classes seem by this time to have been fully integrated into a vast Anglo-
American marketplace. In an extensive analysis of the local economy, Gov-
ernor William Tryon declared flatly that “more than Eleven Twelfths of the
Inhabitants of this Province both in the necessary and ornamental parts of
their Dress are cloathed in British Manufactures, except [for] Linen from
Ireland and Hats and Shoes manufactured here.” Even in an impressionis-
tic account, the 90 percent figure is arresting. But cloth for garments was
only part of the story of the visual transformation of New York. “The same
proportion of Houses are in like manner furnished with British Manufac-

tures, except Cabinet & Joiner’s work, which is Generally made here.” In-
stead of complaining about frustrated consumer demand, Tryon expressed
considerable amazement at the vast range and qualities of goods that the
merchants offered for sale. Like so many other commentators, the royal
governor of New York simply listed general categories of imports, for by
the 1770s, it was impossible for any single observer to provide more than a
rough summary of British goods found in the colonies. “Besides the Ar-
ticles necessary for cloathing and Furniture,” the governor reported, “there
are imported from Great Britain, large Quantities of all kinds of East India
Goods . . . Ironmongery, Arms, Gunpowder, Lead, Tin, Sheet Copper, Drugs,
Brimstone, Grindstones, Coals, Chalk, Sail Cloth, Cordage, Paints, Malt Li-
quors & Cheese.” The task of putting together a complete inventory soon
overwhelmed Tryon, and he concluded, “There are indeed few articles the
British Market affords, but what are in some proportion imported here.”8
The governors of other mainland colonies recorded a similar transfor-
mation in consumer behavior. During the early decades of the century, they
too reported that the fulfillment of American demand seemed to have run
against two serious obstacles. First, if these crown officials are to be be-
lieved, British imperial administrators were a little slow to appreciate the
intensity of colonial desire. And second, even if English manufacturers had
shipped tons of imports across the Atlantic, it was not clear before the 1740s
that ordinary Americans could have afforded the items they claimed most
to want. In 1733 Governor Samuel Ogle of Maryland, for example, observed
that “The Inhab[ita]nts still supply themselves with what Manufactures are
needful for them f[ro]m G:Britain only, so far as they can possibly find
means to purchase the same.” Ogle added, “the exceeding Poverty of the
People in general, occasion’d by the low price of Tobaco, hath driven the
poor Familys to make some few course Woollens & Linnens, to cloath them-
selves, without which they must go naked.” Nothing in this statement indi-
cates that the small farmers of Maryland aspired to self-sufficiency, at least
not in regard to the garments they wore.9
As in New York, the consumer trade in Maryland apparently soon heated
up.10 It did so in other American colonies as well. The precise moment at
which the consumer market took off varied from region to region, but the
comments of the governors suggest that it occurred sometime during the
middle third of the century. In the late 1740s Governor James Glen encoun-
tered a robust market for consumer goods in South Carolina. In a detailed
analysis of the local economy, Glen declared his intention “to show how far
we contribute to the Prosperity of our Mother Country by the Consump-
tion of such Commodities and Manufactures as she produces or supplies
us with.” What he found shocked the governor. Sounding a little like the
Reverend Mr. Milne, Glen censured a popular material culture. “I cannot
help expressing my surprise and Concern,” he wrote, “to Find that there are
annually imported into this Province, considerable quantities of Fine
Flanders Laces, the Finest Dutch Linens, and French Cambricks, Chints,
Hyson Tea, and other East India Goods, Silks, Gold and Silver Lace, &c.”11
The locals in South Carolina were living beyond their means, and they were
doing it in style.
Earlier in the century governors had complained that colonists could
not find adequate sources of income to pay for the imports they so clearly
desired. Now suddenly in the 1740s the argument shifted. The British goods
created poverty. “By these means,” Glen insisted, “we are kept in low cir-
cumstances.” It does not seem to have occurred to Glen that what he re-
garded as inappropriate consumption contributed to the “Prosperity of the
Mother Country” as much as did the other less flashy forms of buying. The
governor set about providing an inventory of the imported articles. He made
an energetic try at mastering the flow of goods—listing “Cloth of every
Kind, from Cambrick to Osnabrigs”—but the task was too difficult. “I am
enabled to say thus much,” he asserted, “that in general the Quantity seems
to be too great, and the Quality of them too fine, and ill calculated for the
circumstances of an Infant Colony.” And lest anyone in London conclude
that Glen was responsible for the explosion of desire, he added smugly, “I
have always endeavored to correct and restrain the vices of Extravagance
and Luxury by my own example.”12
Governors of other colonies alerted the Board of Trade to the colonists’
growing mid-century dependence on British imports. They usually man-
aged to avoid Glen’s didactic tone, but it was clear that an ever expanding
assortment of manufactured goods was reaching American ports. Gover-
nor Jonathan Law of Connecticut dutifully answered the Board’s question-
naire, noting that “our inhabitants take annually of the British manufactures
all Sorts of woolen cloath, Silks, Scythes, naills, glass, pewter, brass, fire-
arms & all Sorts of cutlery ware, the quantity we cannot ascertain.”13 A much
more detailed accounting came in 1763 from Virginia, a colony that had
forged closer ties with the mother country than had Connecticut. Francis
Fauquier, the lieutenant governor of Virginia, explained to colonial admin-
istrators in London that “The Inhabitants of Virginia import from Great
Britain, woollen Goods and Linnens of all Sorts for their Clothing and the
Furniture of their Houses.” Fauquier, who apparently had a trained eye for
textiles, mentioned an impressive array of woven goods from “Negro Cot-
tons and plains” to “Silks of all kinds.” Anyone could see how this rising tide
of consumption affected the very appearance of ordinary white Virginians.
“These Imports,” insisted the lieutenant governor, “daily increase, the com-
mon planters usualy dressing themselves in the Manufactures of Great Brit-
ain altogether.” The amounts of goods shipped to Virginia from England
and Scotland exceeded Fauquier’s descriptive abilities, and, like so many other
governors of this period, he simply threw up his hands. “It is next to impos-
sible to ascertain the Quantities imported, the Entries being always made
in this manner (viz.) Sundry European Goods by 10, 15 or 20 Cocquets as it
happens. But the Quantity is now so great and increases so fast, that it is
now almost beyond a Doubt that it exceeds in Value the Tobacco exported.”14
The mainland colonies also attracted a number of European travelers,

some of whom proved astute observers of eighteenth-century American
society. Their comments in diaries and letters immediately strike us as more
lively and spontaneous than those recorded by the governors. Like the for-
mal bureaucratic reports, however, the personal accounts reinforce a sense
that people at the time were fully conscious of the extraordinary impact
that consumer goods had had on the character of American society. How
much the travelers actually knew about colonial life before they sailed for
the New World is almost impossible to discern. Whatever their preparation
may have been, they seem to have assumed that in comparison with con-
temporary England and Germany the colonists would appear less cosmo-
politan, perhaps even a little out of touch with contemporary Continental
fashions.
Rusticity of manners was most assuredly not what the travelers en-
countered. Rather, they discovered striking similarities with the world they
had left behind. Indeed, in some respects American consumers seemed quite
capable of holding their own with
their European counterparts. That
was certainly Gottlieb Mittelberger’s
opinion. He traveled to Pennsylvania
in 1750 to assess the possibilities for a
new German settlement. In his pub-
lished account, Mittelberger informed
prospective migrants that in terms of
material comfort the region repre-
sented no real sacrifice. The consumer
marketplace was well developed, pro-
viding colonists with manufactures
such as “fine china vessels, Dutch and
English cloth, leather, linen cloth, fab-
rics, silks, damask, velvet, etc.” The
Samuel Abbot offered customers in Boston a large “etc.” was a nice rhetorical touch. In-
selection of imported consumer goods as well as stead of suggesting that Mittelberger
convenient credit. Boston Gazette, 29 June 1761.
Courtesy of the Massachusetts Historical Society, had grown tired of the inventory, it
Boston, Massachusetts. invited eager German readers to en-
gage their imaginations. Whatever
they might demand at home, they could surely find in America. “Already it
is really possible to obtain all the things one can get in Europe in Pennsyl-
vania, since so many merchant ships arrive there every year.”
Mittelberger apparently expected the colonists to dress in a distinctive
manner, in other words, to look like Americans. Perhaps he anticipated they
would wear homespun. Whatever he may have thought, the people he actu-
ally encountered in the Philadelphia region strongly resembled eighteenth-
century Europeans. “Throughout Pennsylvania,” wrote Mittelberger, “both
men and women dress according to the English fashion.” The women proved
to be particularly accomplished consumers, appearing in public in the lat-
est London styles. In this section of his account, Mittelberger provided Ger-
mans with an almost sensuous celebration of imported fabrics, capturing
in loving detail an alluring range of fibers and textures.
Women do not wear hoop skirts, but everything they do wear is very fine, nice, and
costly. . . . Skirts can be parted in front. Under them women usually wear handsomely
sewn petticoats trimmed with ribbon. But the outer long skirts have to reach down to
the shoes, and are made of cotton, chintz, and other rich and beautiful material. All
the women wear fine white aprons every day, on their shoes generally large silver buck-
les, round their throats fine strings of beads, in their ears costly rings with fine stones,
and on their heads fine white bonnets embroidered with flowers and trimmed with
lace and streamers. Their gloves are made of velvet, silk and similar kinds of material,
also generally trimmed with silver or gold lace, or beautifully embroidered. Their neck-
erchiefs are made either of velvet or of pure silk, and are likewise richly embroidered.
Mittelberger warned that if “our women” saw the colonial bonnets, “they
would at once want to have them for themselves.” If, in comparison to the
women, the men of Pennsylvania were less splendidly dressed, they still in-
sisted on apparel “made of excellent English cloth or similar material.” And
Mittelberger explicitly observed that “this applies to farmers as well as to
the other ranks.”15
In 1759 the Reverend Jonathan Boucher took up residence in Port Royal,
Virginia, a small tobacco community on the Rappahannock River. Boucher
had just come from the north of England, and soon after his arrival the
young man wrote a series of letters to an old teacher, describing his initial
impressions of his new home. Like Mittelberger, the clergyman seemed sur-
prised by the splendor of the colonists’ apparel. Indeed, Boucher felt a little
awkward in the company of these well-dressed Virginians. “I assure you,”
he explained in remarks specifically directed to his teacher’s wife, “the com-
mon Planter’s Daughters here go every Day in finer Cloaths than I have
seen content you for a Summer’s Sunday.” His friends had sent Boucher off
to the New World with a “Sattin Wastecoat,” a garment suitable for almost
all social gatherings in provincial England. But in the American colonies,
he discovered, “I’m noth’g amongst the Lace and Lac’d fellows that are here.
Nay, so much does their Taste run after dress that they tell me I may see in
Virginia more brilliant Assemblies than I ever c’d in the North of Engl’d,
and except Royal Ones p’rhaps in any Part of it.”16
Boucher eventually moved to Annapolis, where he accepted a comfort-
able living as rector of St. Anne’s Parish. It was in Maryland’s capital that
Boucher made the acquaintance of another ambitious Englishman who had
recently traveled to America in search of new opportunities. During the
several years that William Eddis lived in Annapolis, he penned a series of
epistolary essays, later published as a little book, shrewdly depicting the
customs of the local society. Like his friend Boucher, Eddis sensed immedi-
ately how much this colonial community depended on British manufac-
tures. In a piece dated December 24, 1771, Eddis declared that “The quick
importation of fashions from the mother country is really astonishing. I
am almost inclined to believe that a new fashion is adopted earlier by the
polished and affluent American than by many opulent persons in the great
metropolis [London].” No doubt, he exaggerated the speed at which con-

sumer news was disseminated throughout the empire, but probably not all
that much. Later, after he had learned more about the Maryland economy,
Eddis concluded, “At present, it is evident that almost every article of use or
ornament is to be obtained on much more reasonable terms from the mother
country than from artisans settled on this side [of] the Atlantic. It is also as
certain that goods of every kind produced or manufactured in England are
greatly superior to the produce or manufactures of this continent.”
There was no doubt whatsoever in Eddis’s mind that the people of
Maryland, even those who lived in the rural countryside, were willing to
work hard to obtain British goods. He explained exactly how consumer
desire had taken hold of the colonial imagination. In fact, the acquisition of
British goods served as an index of change itself, as the key element in a
narrative of material progress. “To supply the real and imaginary necessi-
ties of those by whose persevering efforts and penetrating genius immense
uncultivated tracts became flourishing establishments,” Eddis recounted,
“storekeepers of various denominations were encouraged to pursue the path
which industry had pointed out. Warehouses were accordingly erected, and
woolens, linens, and implements of husbandry were first presented to the
view of the laborious planter. As wealth and population increased, wants
were created, and many considerable demands, in consequence, took place
for the various elegancies as well as necessaries of life.”17
Boucher, Eddis, and Mittelberger—as well as other less articulate com-
mentators—remained outsiders. At the end of the day, all of them returned
to Europe. Because they situated their observations about American con-
sumers within a comparative framework, the element of surprise in these
accounts comes from the discovery that in terms of material culture the
colonists looked a lot like the inhabitants of the Old World. The Americans
may have been overly inquisitive or politically rebarbative, but at least most
of them dressed like proper English people.
One did not have to cross the Atlantic, however, to appreciate the growth
of consumer demand. Colonists who had little direct contact with Conti-
nental societies were conscious of how much the recent importation of com-
mon British goods altered the fundamental appearance of everyday life. No
one seemed more amazed by the acceleration of change than John Wayles,
a trusted Virginia agent for Farell and Jones, English tobacco merchants.
Wayles also happened to be Thomas Jefferson’s father-in-law. During the
summer of 1766 he experienced unusual difficulty collecting debts owed to
his employers. Strained credit relations, not to mention the bankruptcy of
several leading planters, sparked a sudden awareness of how much con-
sumer demand had transformed Chesapeake society. Reflecting on condi-
tions only a quarter century earlier, Wayles observed that personal income
as well as expenditures had risen very fast, so that “Within these 25 Years
£1000 due to a Merchant was looked upon as a Sum imense and never to be
got over. Ten times that sum is now spoke of with Indifference & thought
no great burthen on some Estates.” But Virginians heard the sirens of the
good life, and instead of moderating their purchase of British imports, they
ordered ever more exciting and colorful manufactures. “In 1740,” Wayles
explained, “I don’t remember to have seen such a thing as a turkey Carpet
in the Country except a small thing in a bed chamber, Now nothing are so
common as Turkey or Wilton Carpetts, the whole Furniture of the Roomes
Elegant & every appearance of Opulence.”18
New Yorkers also commented on the mid-eighteenth-century flood of
consumer goods. Like Wayles and the others, they were certainly aware that
these imports had somehow altered the character of provincial society. The
editors of the Independent Reflector, an experimental newspaper that en-
joyed a brief run in 1753, insisted that “Our extraordinary Success during
the late War [King George’s War], has given Rise to a Method of living un-
known to our frugal Ancestors.”19 A major contributor to this journal, Wil-
liam Smith, accepted the notion that imperial war stimulated colonial
consumption, but in his analysis the socially transforming conflict was the
Seven Years’ War rather than King George’s War. As this respected jurist
explained in his 1762 history of New York, “In the city of New-York, through
our intercourse with the Europeans, we follow the London fashions; though,
by the time we adopt them, they become disused in England. Our afflu-
ence, during the late war, introduced a degree of luxury in tables, dress, and
furniture, with which we were before unacquainted.” The sudden surge of
buying apparently made Smith a little uneasy, for instead of praising New
Yorkers for their show of finery, he observed that “we are not so gay a people
as our neighbours in Boston, and several of the southern colonies.”20
The Reverend Jared Eliot shared Smith’s ambivalence about a rapidly
changing consumer culture. Eliot lived in Connecticut and produced during
the middle decades of the century a number of well-informed essays pro-
moting agricultural improvement. Like other Americans of this period, he
worried that excessive reliance on British manufactures might undermine
the strength of the local economy. But such concerns did not blind Eliot to
the highly visible signs of general prosperity. However much Connecticut
farmers needed to learn about scientific cultivation, they were living better.
They were purchasing more imported goods. And this remarkable develop-
ment had occurred within living memory. “The Country may be considered
as Improving & Advancing very much,” Eliot noted in 1749; “there is now a
great deal of Silver & Gold in the Country; we have better Houses, publick &
Private, richer Furniture, better Food and Cloathing; better Bridges & High-
ways, fatter Cattel and finer Horses, and Lands bear a higher Price.”21
The personalities thus far encountered, governors and travelers as well
as colonists, testified to the creation of a new consumer society. They bore
witness to a change in the character of provincial material culture that had
taken place within the span of their own lives, and the very speed of the
transformation of the provincial marketplace sparked a range of responses:
astonishment and anticipation, curiosity and fear. Americans such as Eliot
and Wayles seem to have been bright, reflective, and responsible observers.
They certainly had no reason to fabricate a commercial phenomenon of
this type. And they were by no means the only commentators who noted a
sudden intensification of consumer activity throughout colonial society.
Many contemporaries whom we shall consider in more detail in a later sec-
tion adopted a much shriller tone than did Eliot and Walyes, insisting among
other things that the acquisition of so many British manufactures encour-
aged a debilitating and universal love of luxury. Soon colonists from New
Hampshire to Georgia, they warned, would follow the ancient Romans down
the fatal path to effeminacy and idleness. The strident moral condemna-
tion of imported goods is itself a significant aspect of our investigation.
The noisy complaints about sin and pride in the marketplace represent
strong evidence that the governors and travelers probably knew what they
were writing about. At mid-century a lot of people in different regions would
appear to have discovered the comforts and pleasures of consumption.
For the detective of material culture, however, our informants raise as
many questions as they answer. Their comments about the centrality of
imported cloth remind us that first-person reports of the flood of con-
sumer goods were highly impressionistic. Assessing the accuracy of traveler
accounts represents a particularly difficult methodological challenge. They
recorded what they claimed to have seen in colonial America, often stylish
young persons dressed remarkably like well-to-do Europeans. But we do
not know what these contemporaries failed to observe. Perhaps, in their
eagerness to tell readers about “Lac’d fellows,” they ignored many ordinary
colonists who wore homespun garments. Or perhaps, because they only
had eyes for the cosmopolitan gentry, they systematically overestimated the
effect of so many consumer goods on how humble men and women fash-
ioned themselves or experienced everyday society.
We must also consider the possibility that our witnesses exaggerated
the pace of change. After all, if one searches hard enough in the records of
almost any society, one will find someone grumbling about how much the
world has changed in only a single generation. Without additional support
from other eighteenth-century sources, arguments affirming the rapid cre-
ation of a broad-based consumer society in colonial America—indeed, one
that affected the great majority of the provincial population—remain sug-
gestive rather than persuasive.
III
We have other interpretive options. We can subpoena the physical evidence,
real teapots and fabric, and test them against the letters and reports of con-
temporaries. After all, the imported articles that so many observers believed
had transformed the visual landscape of eighteenth-century America have
not disappeared. The survivors of this early consumer marketplace have be-
come the objects of desire for modern collectors. Many have found their way
into museums, where they offer colorful and alluring testimony that some-
time before the Revolution the colonial material culture took on a very dif-
ferent appearance, and no one strolling amongst the ordered rooms that usu-
ally distinguish time periods in modern galleries can fail to appreciate the
contrast between sparsely furnished, often starkly ornamented seventeenth-
century exhibits and the brighter eighteenth-century reconstructions that
challenge viewers to comprehend competing styles and complex textures.22
These objects bring us directly into contact with a late colonial world
that may be less distant from our own than we sometimes imagine. The
variety of imported ceramics is a case in point. The rich holdings of muse-
ums document how an Anglo-American market responded to an accelerat-
ing demand for ever harder, more beautiful, and technically more
sophisticated items, most of them products of the new and ambitious pot-
teries of the English Midlands. Indeed, anyone who today examines collec-
tions in different parts of the country—certainly along the eastern
coast—experiences a form of visual déjà vu. One encounters the same de-
signs, the same manufactures, the same selection of bowls, cups, and plates.
However little New Englanders may have had in common with Chesapeake
planters, they seem to have accumulated goods of almost identical shape
and color.
In the more imaginatively planned exhibits such as the Wallace Gallery
in Colonial Williamsburg, one can almost literally journey through con-
sumer time. One starts with the often crudely painted earthenware pieces
of the early 1700s. The viewer then moves to the more dazzling stoneware
goods of the middle years of the century which were fired at much higher
temperatures so that they could accommodate very hot liquids. These pieces
are an example of technological innovation helping to sustain a consumer
fad, in this case drinking tea. Finally, the time traveler confronts the late
colonial porcelain items, some of which were transported to America from
Asia, others manufactured by brilliant English entrepreneurs such as Josiah
Wedgwood. We note the increasing frequency of matched sets, evidence
not only of the determination of provincial Americans to obtain the finest,
most fashionable imports but also of their ability to keep informed about
new and fluid European styles. Other categories of possessions communi-
cate the same general market development. These visual presentations seem
to confirm the impressions of eighteenth-century commentators. Like the
reports filed by governors and visitors, displays found in modern museums
suggest that a major change in the character of consumer culture occurred
sometime during the middle decades of the eighteenth century. The quan-
tity of goods is as significant as is quality for this argument. As one histo-
rian of early American material culture explained, “many more beautiful
things” have survived from the eighteenth century than from the seven-
teenth, “as if America’s aesthetic sensibilities were suddenly awakening in
those years.”23
Period rooms—either in restored old homes or in twenty-first-century
galleries—remind us of an unintended consequence of heightened con-
sumer activity. The acquisition of so many ceramic goods created a major
problem for the colonist. These purchases had to be kept in a safe place, at
the very least out of the reach of curious children and pets. For this purpose
the closed chests found in seventeenth-century homes might have func-
tioned well enough. But eighteenth-century consumers also wanted to dis-
play their imported treasures, showing visitors that their hosts could afford
fine English plates and bowls. No doubt, it was this kind of thinking that
contributed to the “Tale of the Hospitable Consumer.” The answer to the
problem of display and storage was a new piece of case furniture commonly
known as the formal cupboard. Often colonial craftsmen constructed these
to fit neatly into the corners of rooms where food was served. Before the
1740s cupboards remained relatively rare. After that time, however, their
number and geographic distribution expanded rapidly, a dramatic indica-
tion that even in modest households British manufactures were making
demands of their own on provincial consumers. One of them was Mrs.
George Gilmer, wife of Williamsburg’s
apothecary. As her husband explained in
a letter to a Bristol merchant, “Mrs. Gil-
mer is perfectly satisfied with your con-
duct about her China and desires you will
take your own time. I have just finished
a closet for her to put it in as agreed on
before you left us.”24
The Gilmers’ highly visible acquisi-
tions may well have impressed Virginians
who dined with the local apothecary and
his family. While we can guess at their
reaction, we do not know for sure what
they thought. It is certain, however, that
the dinner guests encountered many
more British goods in the Gilmer home
than we normally see in the modern col-
lections of colonial objects. To under-
stand the biases of museums—that is, if
we are attempting to reconstruct the full-
ness of an eighteenth-century consumer
society—we should think in terms of
what might be called “the risk of sur-
vival.” When we find ourselves in a beau-
tifully appointed period room of the
1740s or 1750s, we should ask ourselves
The corner cupboard appeared for the first
what goods were most at risk of surviv-
time in ordinary American households during
the mid-eighteenth century. This invention ing to our own times and, therefore, of
provided colonial consumers a way to display being incorporated into the historic dis-
colorful imported goods in relative safety. plays that allegedly tell us what it was re-
Painted Corner Cupboard, Accomack County,
Virginia, Yellow Pine, 1750–1760. Collection of the
ally like to live in colonial times.
Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts, The solution to this actuarial prob-
Winston-Salem, North Carolina. lem seems to be that the more expensive
the original purchase—the more money the colonist actually spent—the

greater the odds of its appearing today in a restored room. Porcelain always
had a better chance of inclusion in modern collections than did the cheaper
pieces of stoneware and earthenware. Special plates depicting colorful or
romantic scenes, for example, were probably hung on walls as ornaments
or placed in cupboards as markers of conspicuous consumption soon after
their arrival in the household. The colonists who acquired these fine ob-
jects and who handed them down to their children and their children’s chil-
dren normally ate off cheaper, more utilitarian ware, much of which no
doubt met with unhappy accidents or was given away after showing evi-
dence of abuse. For this reason, everyday goods of all sorts are generally
underrepresented in museum displays.
This bias in the presentation of a lost material culture is especially a prob-
lem with eighteenth-century cloth. Textiles suffered far more from heavy us-
age than did ceramics or metal articles.
Garments faded, decayed, went out of
style, and became permanently soiled, all
of which helps explain why they were
likely—more at risk—to end in the trash
pit or be recycled in the manufacture of
paper rather than handed down from gen-
eration to generation. One has a far greater
chance of viewing a Staffordshire teapot
or a Wedgwood plate today than of en-
countering an imported piece of eigh-
teenth-century linen or cotton fabric.
Unless we calculate the odds of survival,
we might be tempted to generalize about
the character of the consumer market-
place from what we see in museums. And
since cloth seems to have been relatively
rare, it would appear on the basis of this
evidence alone not only that contempo-
raries such as Walyes and Mittelberger
greatly exaggerated the importance of
imported textiles but also that colonists
only went shopping for British manufac-
tures when they wanted a very special item
that they could not possibly produce for
themselves.
Evidence encountered in modern mu-
seums can distort our understanding of Edward Wigglesworth’s newspaper advertise-
the consumer marketplace in other sig- ment revealed the extraordinary range of choices
nificant ways. It should come as no surprise, available to colonial American consumers of
imported English cloth. Boston Gazette, 29 June
for example, that even the most thought- 1761. Courtesy of the Massachusetts Historical
ful presentations of eighteenth-century Society.
material culture devote most attention to the possessions of the well-to-do,

in other words, to goods once owned by the elite families who entertained
inquisitive visitors such as Boucher and Eddis. In terms of risk, we are far
more likely to discover in an interpretation of colonial life an article associ-
ated with a Byrd or a Carter than with an obscure farmer such as Stanespring.
Another, even more subtle bias in reconstructions of eighteenth-century
material culture is the systematic overemphasis of articles originally pro-
duced in the colonies. The celebration of American artisans—the furniture
makers of Philadelphia or the silversmiths of Boston seem to head the honor
roll—has served to deflect public interest away from British manufactures,
many of them of higher quality than those of colonial origin. In fact, con-
centration on the work of local craftsmen only obscures our appreciation
of the stunning impact that imported goods made on the character of do-
mestic landscapes throughout the colonies.25
IV
From museums, we move to trash. No matter how much British Americans
may have cherished certain consumer items, they inevitably faced a day
when the objects of original desire had to be discarded. Most articles sim-
ply broke and could not be repaired. Each shattered possession probably
represented a small domestic tragedy. Whatever personal event marked its
end as a beautiful or useful artifact, it usually found its way to the family
trash pit, an unsightly hole dug in the ground not far from the main house.
Over the years the pit gradually filled up with everything from frag-
ments of teacups and rusty bits of metal to the bones of various animals
that once graced the dinner table. And in time someone covered the pit, out
of concern as much for safety as sanitation, a decision that unwittingly trans-
formed a jumble of refuse into a record of early American consumer habits
that now requires a trained archaeologist to interpret. From these sources
such scholars have unlocked a great deal of detailed information about the
material culture of the mid-eighteenth century, some of which can be found
in no other surviving colonial record. After all, the garbage pits of the past
were remarkably democratic; every colonial family had one, rich and poor,
rural and urban, white and black.
Archaeologists add an important dimension to our understanding of
the social and geographic distribution of British manufactured goods. Dig-
ging in the Chesapeake soil, for example, they find many of the same items—
albeit in less than perfect condition—that we encountered in the period
rooms of the museums. Almost every research site reveals a broad selection
of imported ceramics, and archaeologists working in different regions re-
port that over the course of the eighteenth century colonists acquired not
only more British pottery but also items of higher quality.26 While the shards
of pottery, especially the ubiquitous fragments of clay pipes, survived well
in the ground, and therefore have become the archaeologist’s major source
of knowledge about the human landscape of late colonial society, other

categories of imported goods are regularly unearthed, too. Long-abandoned
wells and trash pits served to preserve damaged bottles, broken tools, splin-
ters of glassware, and dozens of personal objects, all of them reminders of
the demands that even poor-to-middling householders once made on the
Anglo-American consumer market. The soil has also yielded a few surprises.
A large amount of imported ceramics, some pieces originally quite costly,
clearly came into the possession of slaves. We can only speculate on the life
cycle of a Staffordshire bowl. Perhaps masters retired slightly damaged ob-
jects from the main dining room and gave them to the bondsmen and
women whose hard labor had made it possible to purchase fashionable
matched sets of imported ware in the first place.27
Among other findings, archaeological research suggests that rural
Americans may have depended on articles manufactured in Great Britain
as heavily as did their more urban neighbors. Of the many sites that have
been recently interpreted, few reveal the impact of the flood of British goods
more dramatically than Fort Massachusetts, a defensive post constructed
in 1744 on the colony’s far western frontier. The structure was part of a so-
called line of forts, designed to halt incursions into New England by French
and Indian forces. For almost a decade this isolated log fortification housed
about two hundred members of the colonial militia, local farmers, for the
most part, who served several months and then went home. These men—
as well as a few women and children—struggled valiantly against boredom.
While in residence, they purchased supplies from stores owned by the pow-
erful Williams family on the Connecticut River, and although the transpor-
tation costs were high, the colonial soldiers seem to have been able to obtain
most of what they desired. And then disaster struck. A small army of French
and Indian troops directed by Rigaud de Vaudrieul overran Fort Massa-
chusetts, taking most of the Americans prisoner. After the debacle, govern-
ment authorities in Boston decided to decommission an outpost that had
proved incapable of discouraging surprise attacks. By 1754 the living quar-
ters and major buildings of the fort had already fallen into sad disrepair.
What the militiamen left behind now engages our curiosity. The Ameri-
can soldiers ate, drank, and entertained themselves, waiting more or less
patiently for replacements to relieve them from an impossible assignment.
When the nineteenth-century historian Francis Parkman visited Fort Mas-
sachusetts, he could find almost no sign of the military structure. It is “now
a meadow by the banks of the Hoosac [River],” Parkman wrote. “Then [dur-
ing the late 1740s] it was a rough clearing, encumbered with the stumps and
refuse of the primeval forest; whole living hosts stood grimly around it, and
spread, untouched by the axe, up the sides of the neighboring Saddleback
Mountain.”28
A fort built at the edge of a “primeval forest” would appear an extremely
unpromising spot to unearth evidence of a robust Atlantic consumer mar-
ketplace. That is certainly what a team of archaeologists thought when it be-
gan excavating the Hoosac River site that Parkman had surveyed a century
earlier. But what the carefully sifted soil offered amazed everyone. Research-
ers uncovered metal, glass, and ceramics “astonishing in their refinement.”
The colonial militiamen, people who were not by any standard wealthy,
discarded fancy metal buttons, shoe and knee buckles, and a brass snuff-
box. We can now state with confidence that these soldiers smoked pipes
manufactured by “the Robert Tippet firm in Bristol, England,” drank im-
ported wine in British “baluster-stemmed wine glasses,” sipped tea from
British white saltglaze cups, ate with British “two-tined forks,” “spatulate
knives,” and pewter spoons, fired British guns, kept records on British pa-
per, wrote with British ink, wore clothes made from British cloth. It is no
wonder that the leading interpreter of Fort Massachusetts concluded, “We
find that there is hardly any difference between the material culture of the
Line of Forts, way out in the boondocks, and that of central London in the
mid-eighteenth century. You could take a print of Hogarth, such as his Rake’s
Progress series, and find a great many of the artifacts from the forts in some-
thing like his Rose Tavern, a great bawdy house in contemporary London.”29
Excavations in other colonies have yielded remarkably parallel results,
indicating that a well-developed consumer economy supplied basically the
same types of goods to buyers in Virginia and Georgia as in New England.
According to James Deetz, who oversaw archaeological investigations at a
large Virginia plantation known as Flowerdew Hundred, “It is no surprise
that virtually all of the ceramics found at Flowerdew Hundred are of En-
glish origin (German stonewares being the sole significant exception), and
that they are almost identical to those found on sites from New England to
the Deep South.”30 A similar collection of manufactured items appeared in
the trash pits and dirt-filled cellars of Kingsmill, another Virginia planta-
tion that has been the subject of especially painstaking analysis.31
Like the other types of evidence that we have evaluated—contempo-
rary observations and museum displays—archaeological reports provide a
slightly distorted perspective on a changing mid-eighteenth-century cul-
tural landscape. To be sure, the quantity of imported goods seems to have
increased markedly over earlier levels of colonial consumption. Neverthe-
less, data obtained from field excavations tend to underestimate consumer
activity in at least two ways, one far more significant than the other. As we
have discovered, contemporary governors and visitors called attention to
the Americans’ growing reliance on textiles produced in the mother coun-
try. One commentator estimated that as much as “Eleven Twelfths of the
Inhabitants . . . are cloathed in British manufactures.”32 Even if we discount
this highly impressionistic figure, we still have to account for a huge amount
of imported fabric. And for this challenge, the archaeological research is of
little assistance. Unlike fragments of teacups and pieces of glass bottles, cloth
quickly disintegrates in the moist ground. Another research anomaly is the
relation between pewter and ceramics, both imported artifacts. If one re-
lied solely on probate inventories—the next category of consumer evidence
we shall examine—one might conclude that the colonists owned almost as
many pewter pieces as ceramic items. The archaeologists, however, find al-
most no pewter in the trash pits. The solution to the puzzle seems to be that
colonists purchased large quantities of pewter and ceramics, but since pew-
ter was more durable, intrinsically more valuable, and capable of being re-
cycled, it was less at risk to be buried with the broken dishes.
V
Only someone unfamiliar with colonial probate records could state with-
out a sense of irony that death is a great equalizer. If nothing else, the rich
leave behind a lot more stuff than do their less affluent neighbors. And it all
must be evaluated. Let us consider a single case. Late in the autumn of 1741
York County officials toured the home of John Pasteur, a recently deceased
member of their Virginia community who in terms of material wealth had
done quite well for himself. The visitors went from room to room, compil-
ing a detailed inventory of Pasteur’s many possessions. One can easily imag-
ine how the appraisers conducted their business. Item after item had to be
examined, handled, passed from person to person, its character and quality
debated until the probate officers arrived at a fair assessment. In this man-
ner, the men recorded a “small brass Kettle,” some dishes of no particular
distinction, an interesting “Tea Table,” and a large selection of sheets and
pillows. The “looking Glass” had special value, as did the “2 China bowls,”
the “8 pictures in frames,” and the impressive assemblage of Pasteur’s cloth-
ing, including “1 German Serge Waistct.,”“1 black Cloth Coat waistcoat and
2 pr. Breeches.” The inventory mentioned a few books by title and a huge
amount of pottery, some of it labeled simply as “Earthen,” an indication
probably of its common quality. Other goods had obvious utility: a choco-
late pot, a coffeepot, a basin, plates, wine and beer glasses, mugs, bowls,
teaspoons, and, finally, four chamber pots.33
Appraisals of this type occurred thousands of times throughout late
colonial America. Each fully inventoried estate yielded a list of goods, many
of them describing objects encountered in other eighteenth-century sources.
As modern historians have discovered, however, the probate records present
unusually difficult interpretive problems. For one thing, not all estates were
inventoried, and the process of translating the possessions of the deceased
into a specific monetary value varied considerably from colony to colony,
even from town to town. Moreover, the records raise hard issues associated
with the analysis of class and gender. The estates of richer colonists, for
example, were much more likely to be inventoried than were those of the
lower orders. The records contain a disproportionately large number of
older, white males.34 We should also remember that these lists are like still
photographs; they capture a specific moment in time. But for people like
Pasteur, the accumulation of consumer goods was a lifelong process. Per-
sonal possessions came and went; they were given away or discarded. We must
consider the possibility that the decedent may have owned a lot more objects
when he was younger. Perhaps the person who died had helped establish
children in independent households, donating sheets, tableware, and fur-

niture. Certainly, the inventories underrepresented the acquisition of cloth.
We know only of garments and linen cataloged during the final inventory.
Such technical concerns need not detain us. The scholars who have
analyzed this extraordinarily rich vein of information have taken these
methodological problems into account. For our purposes, the lists provide
another perspective on the development of a provincial consumer society.
We now know that John Pasteur’s estate—and for our purposes he was cho-
sen at random—was not particularly exceptional. Historians who quantify
probate data have firmly demonstrated a broad increase after the 1730s in
the ownership of personal amenities, in other words, the incidence of im-
ported items such as linen and tableware that are used to assess long-term
improvements in the general standard of living. This research provides no
compelling evidence that colonists felt hesitant about participating in the
Anglo-American marketplace. The same categories of British manufactures
show up in rural as well as urban inventories. To be sure, less well-to-do
families may have substituted cheaper goods for more expensive ones—
decorative stoneware for porcelain, for instance—but whatever the quality
of the artifacts, they almost always came originally from industrial centers
in Great Britain. More to the point, the estate inventories strongly support
those contemporaries such as John Wayles who believed that the cultural
landscape of colonial America changed perceptibly during the middle de-
cades of the eighteenth century.35
The most ambitious investigations of colonial probate records rely on
Chesapeake archives. Drawing upon thousands of inventories compiled
between the middle of the seventeenth century and the eve of the American
Revolution, these studies reveal striking shifts in consumer behavior. Dur-
ing the early period—for these purposes the years before 1716—the plant-
ers of Virginia and Maryland managed to obtain certain luxury goods such
as fine ceramics, clocks, and silver plate, but the number of these articles
appearing in the inventories did not show much increase over several de-
cades. Ordinary farmers lived a fairly constrained material existence. Some
inventories for the early years do not even mention basic items such as knives
and forks. Sometime after the 1730s, however, patterns of consumption in
the Chesapeake colonies changed swiftly as manufactured goods inundated
the households of people of all classes. No one disputes the far-reaching
impact of this transformation on ordinary men and women. Scholars work-
ing with probate records have characterized the broad rise in consumer
spending as “rapid and unprecedented.” Another researcher claimed, “By
the middle of the eighteenth century, the range of domestic props that
gentlefolk found desirable exploded.” The members of less well-to-do fami-
lies followed along behind their social betters, adding a “touch of elegance”
to their lives. These people aggressively entered the consumer market, de-
manding amenities that richer neighbors now took for granted. Soon there-
after, the tell-tale signs of consumer desire began appearing even in very
modest inventories.36
The probate records of eighteenth-century New England tell a similar

story. Although the surviving inventories for this region do not indicate an
explosive moment when people of different classes suddenly entered a mar-
ket for imported British goods, they do document a steady increase in the
variety and value of items owned at the time of death. The New England
economy experienced a gradual rise in household prosperity during this
period, and by the middle decades of the century families of modest in-
come levels were purchasing manufactured articles, many of them connected
to the tea service, which was itself a recent innovation. Even in rural com-
munities one discovers evidence of New Englanders adding knives and forks
as well as many kinds of imported tableware. To be sure, these consumer
items first appeared in major port cities such as Boston and Salem, but they
were soon taken up by farmers living in more rural settings such as Worces-
ter County. Moreover, within a particular geographic area, the analysis of
probate inventories over time indicates that the ability to acquire high-qual-
ity ceramics such as porcelain teacups spread quickly from elite to less af-
fluent families. One of the more thorough quantitative studies argues that
the probate evidence from eighteenth-century New England reveals “a radi-
cally altered life-style among the modestly propertied.”37
VI
Newspapers heralded the arrival of a vast new consumer culture. Creatures
of the marketplace, they carried messages about exciting goods of every
sort. Mordecai Yarnall could hardly have survived in business without them.
In September 1752 he informed potential consumers that his fall shipment
of dry goods had arrived from England. Anyone interested in viewing the
selection was welcome to visit his store, located “at the sign of the Hand-
saw, in Second-street, near Black-horse-alley.” Yarnall’s modest, one-col-
umn advertisement appeared on the third page of the Pennsylvania Gazette. A
small woodcut—perhaps a picture of a sailing vessel—might have enhanced
the visual impact of Yarnall’s notice, but he apparently chose to devote the
space entirely to an item-by-item enumeration of articles “just imported in
the last ships from London.” He provided no prices; no article received spe-
cial descriptive treatment. Indeed, Yarnall’s advertisement seems more like
a shipping invoice or routine shelf inventory than an effective means of
generating consumer desire.
But such a reading would probably misinterpret the text. Yarnall un-
derstood colonial merchandising strategies better than we. The advertise-
ment invites the imagination to contemplate variety. His list sparked
excitement precisely because it held out the possibility of consumer choice.
The newspaper notice surveyed the imported goods, starting with an im-
pressive selection of fabrics: linens, cambrics, lawns, muslins, taffetas, silks,
and calicoes. By employing the plural form—linens, not linen—Yarnall
suggested that his range of imports was in fact much greater than a single
advertisement could ever communicate. He managed to conjure up differ-

ent colors, weights, and qualities. Yarnall then moved to “silver watches,”
“shoe and knee buckles,” and “cutlery.” After mentioning over fifty items of
European origin, the Philadelphia merchant concluded abruptly, promis-
ing customers that they would find in his store “sundry other goods, too
tedious to mention.”38 Yarnall’s list—like those of hundreds of other small
eighteenth-century merchants from New Hampshire to Georgia—reveals
an extraordinary assortment of goods at the moment of presentation. They
have not yet been chipped, broken, or discarded; their owners have not re-
cently died. The cloth has not yet been transformed into shirts or dresses.
These are goods in transit, items about to become personal possessions.
And in the aggregate, they provide powerfully persuasive evidence of the
creation of a new consumer society.
Provincial newspapers such as the Pennsylvania Gazette served the needs
of an expanding commercial empire.39 In 1720 only three journals were pub-
lished in colonial America. By 1760 the number had risen to twenty-two. These
weekly papers regularly reprinted essays and other news items, many of which
had originally appeared in the British press. From time to time, they repro-
duced royal proclamations. Editors sometimes ran pieces written by local
authors—poems or letters, for example—but for the most part printers
avoided controversial topics, especially anything having to do with disagree-
ments between royal governors and colonial assemblies. Involvement in such
partisan matters threatened lucrative printing contracts that struggling print-
ers needed to remain solvent. Editorial neutrality coupled with out-of-date
European stories gave the American weeklies a bland quality, and one sus-
pects that if they had not carried shipping news and other commercial corre-
spondence, they would have had a hard time selling subscriptions.40
As dry-goods merchants such as Yarnall well understood, colonists
looked to the journals for intelligence about consumer opportunities, in
his case, for a listing of what had been “just imported in the last ships from
London.” Pressruns seem to have averaged about a thousand copies, but the
actual readership—in other words, the statistic of greatest interest to po-
tential advertisers—was much larger. Papers were passed around in taverns
and coffeehouses.41 William Parks, a publisher of the Virginia Gazette, ap-
preciated the journal’s commercial capabilities. In October 1736 he estab-
lished his rates for advertising, pledging “as these Papers will circulate (as
speedily as possible) not only all over This, but also the Neighboring Colo-
nies, and will probably be read by some Thousands of People, it is very
likely they may have the desir’d Effect.”42 For colonial printers, newspaper
advertising represented a substantial source of income. One man just es-
tablishing himself in the trade informed Benjamin Franklin, “I get but few
Advertisements yet, which are the Life of a Paper.”43 Franklin, of course,
appreciated such business matters, and his Pennsylvania Gazette always con-
tained a large number of consumer announcements.
Colonial advertisements can be divided into three broad categories, two
of which require only passing comment. Some notices had nothing to do
with imported consumer goods, for example, appeals for the capture of a
runaway servant or descriptions of land or farm animals for sale. Another
category included declarations by colonial artisans—silversmiths, joiners,
and the like—offering their services to the public. By far the largest group
of advertisements, however, was of the type Yarnall placed in the Philadel-
phia journal. During the middle third of the eighteenth century—in other
words, during a period of increasing importation of British manufactures—
the size, location, and appearance of the merchant notices changed remark-
ably. Before the 1750s advertisements were generally small, one-column texts,
but after mid-century it was not uncommon to encounter two-column
spreads, announcing newly arrived consumer goods. To be sure, the core copy
still consisted of a long list of items, often running into the hundreds, but by
mid-century advertisers began to pay greater attention to layout, ornamental
borders, and creative variations in type size. And as the number of advertisers
in any given issue of a colonial newspaper multiplied, these design features
helped to distinguish one merchant’s wares from those of his or her competi-
tors, some of whom now specialized in particular kinds of British imports,
such as jewelry or medicines.44 By the eve of revolution, one occasionally saw
advertisements for sundry dry goods filling an entire page.45 Moreover, in a
few journals the commercial notices migrated forward, appearing ever more
frequently in the left-hand column of the front page. After 1760 the total space
assigned to advertising generally equaled or exceeded that given over to the
news of the day, and some publishers issued special supplements that were
overwhelmingly devoted to commercial notices.46
Colonial newspaper advertising presents the possibility of construct-
ing what might be called an “index of consumer choice.” This measure of
change holds immense significance for an interpretation of the politicization
of everyday goods during the American Revolution. After all, what ulti-
mately separated the modern period from traditional history was the abil-
ity of ordinary men and women to establish a meaningful and distinct sense
of self through the exercise of individual choice, a process of ever more
egalitarian self-fashioning that was itself the foundation of a late eighteenth-
century liberal society. We shall return to the relation between market ex-
perience and political ideology. It is sufficient here to observe that
examination of imported goods advertised in the major provincial news-
papers between the 1720s and the 1770s provided strong evidence of a mid-
century take-off in the number of different British manufactures sold in
the colonies. We should accept immediately that an inevitable fuzziness at-
tends the construction of an “index of consumer choice.” Advertisers listed
hundreds of goods, identifying them by color, size, and quality. But all too
frequently the announcements for imported items contained bundling
phrases such as “a large Assortment,” “goods of all sorts,” or simply a string
of “etc., etc., etc.” These space-saving conventions served systematically to
conceal the number of goods that were in fact on offer at a merchant’s shop.
Even a conservative enumeration of durable or semi-durable goods—
in other words, an advertising count that excludes imported foodstuffs and
beverages such as wine and beer—

yields impressive results. A survey
of New York City newspapers re-
vealed, for example, that during the
1720s and 1730s local merchants sel-
dom mentioned more than five or
six British goods in any given issue.
By the 1770s, however, it was not
uncommon during some busy
months for New York journals to
list between 350 and 1,000 separate
imported consumer items per issue.
In New York City—as in the other
provincial commercial centers—
imported fabrics made up over half
of all advertised British goods. The
extraordinary quantity of cloth
listed in the newspapers suggests
why historians of consumer culture
cannot rely on a single source such
Customers who visited John Leverett’s store on as archaeological site reports, since
Boston’s town dock knew in advance that they would in that particular set of records they
encounter a wide selection of the latest imported would find little to document what
English goods. Boston Gazette, 29 June 1761. Courtesy
of the Massachusetts Historical Society. was clearly the major category of
Anglo-American trade. The trend
was much the same in other news-
papers. In 1733 the South-Carolina Gazette of Charleston mentioned about
fifty British goods per issue. By 1773 the number had risen to about four
hundred. Since many of the colony’s wealthiest rice planters ordered goods
directly from England, the newspaper figure underestimated the number
of consumer choices being made in this region. In 1736 the Boston Evening-
Post carried advertisements each week for about ten manufactured items;
by 1773 the June issues mentioned over five hundred British goods. The
Pennsylvania Gazette averages between 1733 and 1773 jumped from ten per
issue to around four hundred.
As the number of advertised items expanded—the really significant
jump occurred during the 1750s—the descriptive categories for consumer
goods became much more elaborate. It is hard to tell whether colonial mer-
chants were responding to domestic demand for greater variety or were
employing the new products to entice men and women into their shops.
Whatever the case may have been, we can document how the lexicon of the
consumer marketplace became more complex, challenging both buyers and
sellers to keep up with a changing commercial vocabulary.
A few examples suggest how difficult it may have been for ordinary
colonists just to keep up with the fluid language of commerce. During the
1740s New York advertisers simply offered “paper.” By the 1760s, however,
they listed seventeen varieties of paper distinguished by size, function, and

quality. Someone entering a store could now request products such as “Demy
Paper,”“Post Paper,”“Writing Paper,”“Vellum Paper,” or “Foolscap.” An an-
nouncement for “satin” appeared in the New-York Mercury in 1733, but it
was not until 1763 that the consumer could select from among eight differ-
ent kinds of satins. Color seems to have been the most important attribute.
Merchants stocked satin in black, blue, crimson, green, pink, red, white,
yellow, and spotted. The same escalation of choice transformed the market
for carpets. No carpets of any sort were mentioned in the New York adver-
tisements before the early 1750s, but by the 1760s stores offered carpets la-
beled Axminster, Milton, Persian, Scotch, Turkey, Weston, and Wilton, an
indication if nothing else that colonists had acquired a discerning eye for
regional patterns and weaves.
The trade in other kinds of imported goods developed in much the
same way. Before mid-century the New York newspapers seldom listed
gloves. During the 1750s general all-
purpose categories of gloves began
to appear: “Men’s Colored Gloves,”
“Men’s Gloves,”“Women’s Gloves,”
and “Women’s Worsted Gloves.” A
decade later customers confronted
over thirty-five choices, including
purple gloves, flowered gloves, or-
ange gloves, white gloves, rough
gloves, chamois gloves, buff gloves,
“Maid’s Black Gloves,” “Maid’s
Lamb Gloves,” and a curious line
in “Men’s Dog Skin Gloves.” In 1773
New York advertisers distinguished Samuel Hughes, who had come to appreciate the
importance of fashion in the American marketplace,
among forty-four different types of featured goods “Lately Imported.” Boston Gazette,
dishes, offering potential custom- 29 June 1761. Courtesy of the Massachusetts Historical
ers everything in this line from Society.
“Queen’s Ware” to “Coarse Ware.”
Fashionable colonists were tempted by gold watches during the 1730s, by
silver watches during the 1750s, and by “toy watches” during the 1770s.
After mid-century various strange and alarming home cures began to
appear more frequently in provincial newspapers. By 1773 at least twenty-
two different remedies imported from Great Britain were advertised in the
New York journals. Of all the goods listed in the weekly publications, only
these informed consumers what to expect if they actually purchased a cer-
tain pill, powder, or tonic. One could demand “Ormskirk,” for example, a
product which declared itself a “Certain Cure for the Bite of a Mad Dog,”
adding that “No family should be without it in the house, tho it costs
16s[hillings].” Chemists offered “Ladies’ Balsam for Nervous Disorders” and
“Greenock’s Tincture for Teeth and Gums.” Advertisers apparently took for
granted the efficacy of “Jesuit’s Drops” and “Godfrey’s Cordial.” “Keyser’s
Genuine Pills” merited a fuller explanation in the June 14, 1774, issue of the
New-York Mercury. According to James Rivington, this miraculous medi-
cine, which had “just arrived from London,” guaranteed “the most effectual
Cure of the Secret Disease. EVERY PERSON by taking these PILLS, and
conforming to the printed directions, may become THEIR OWN DOC-
TOR, in the most private and personal manner.” The afflicted person who
turned to Keyser’s Pills could take a measure of confidence from the testi-
monial that the product has cured “thirty-seven thousand soldiers and poor
persons, of both sexes . . . as is certified by some of the most eminent physi-
cians and surgeons upon Earth.” Keyser’s Pills appeared in other major pro-
vincial cities at roughly the same time they arrived in the New York market.
But wherever American consumers lived, they had to be careful. One adver-
tisement warned those who relied on “Dr. Hill’s very celebrated Medicines”
that the public should be on the alert for “counterfeit” offerings. The only
way the prudent New Yorker could be assured of results—specifically relief
from “Scurvy, Headaches, Low Spirits, Vapours, and Melancholy”—was to
demand a container of the “Essence of Water Dock,” prepared by Dr. Hill
and “by him autographed.”47
In less busy commercial centers such as New Haven, Annapolis, and
Portsmouth, newspapers did not contain as many consumer possibilities as
one found in Boston, Philadelphia, or New York. But even in the smaller
provincial cities, the number of items advertised rose impressively after mid-
century. Throughout colonial America the lists of colorful and exciting goods
that appeared in the journals assumed the existence of a commercial pub-
lic, anonymous men and women who had learned to distinguish among
goods of different origin and quality. Consumption was thus an active pro-
cess; it implied creative engagement. The advertisements invited anyone
with money or credit to enter into an open conversation. No announce-
ment spoke only to the rich or well-born; anyone could imagine himself or
herself acquiring something in this marketplace, if not directly from shops
such as the one owned by Mordecai Yarnall, then through other less repu-
table means we will discuss at greater length in another section. Many goods
listed in the advertisements would eventually be given away or resold, and
as the index of choice expanded, so too the dreams of possession flour-
ished. Choice was not just a commercial fact; it was also a state of mind.
Newspaper advertising revealed an important characteristic of the new
consumer marketplace not found in other sources. The same choices ap-
peared in all regions of colonial America at roughly the same time. Journal
announcements published in Boston, Charleston, Philadelphia, and New
York were almost indistinguishable. They listed identical categories, and
even though the absolute number of artifacts grew sharply after mid-cen-
tury, the actual market selection as well as the wording of the advertise-
ments themselves seems virtually interchangeable. In Charleston and
Williamsburg one encounters local newspaper notices for special items such
as “Negro Cloth,” but even in the southern colonies the range of choice
paralleled that in the North. This development meant that as the colonial
import markets expanded, they also experienced remarkable congruence.

Consumer choice and regional standardization went hand-in-hand in this
eighteenth-century empire of goods, so that whatever elements distinguished
the different areas of colonial America—one thinks of different agricultural
staples and labor systems—consumer experience does not seem to have been
one of them. Several explanations for product standardization immediately
spring to mind. Wherever they lived, American merchants placed orders with
known groups of British suppliers, and it would have been highly surprising
to discover lines of cloth or pottery in Charleston that were not also available
in Boston or New York. In an effort to achieve greater efficiency in produc-
tion, the manufacturers themselves adopted standardized tools and proce-
dures, so that white saltglaze cups or maid’s lamb gloves made in one English
location looked pretty much like those made in another. Moreover, competi-
tors followed each other closely, copying each other’s designs.48
VII
The detective of an eighteenth-century consumer culture stumbles finally
upon the richest source of them all: British customs records, the product of
sedulous, overworked British bureaucrats. In 1696 William Culliford ac-
cepted an impossible assignment. The commissioners for “managing and
causing to be Leavied and Collected his Majesty’s Custom’s Subsidies and
other Duty’s” appointed Culliford to the newly created post of Inspector-
General of Imports and Exports. Official instructions spelled out his pri-
mary responsibility, keeping “a particular, distinct, and true account of the
importations and exportations of all commodities into and out of this king-
dom.” Culliford may not have viewed himself as a pioneer in what became
known as “political arithmetic,” but, in point of fact, collecting data of this
sort for the purpose of informing government policy had no real precedent.
These imposing registers represented a bold attempt to bring quantitative
precision to the nation’s balance of trade. Assisted by a small staff, Culliford
began systematically to gather statistics on the foreign commerce of England
and Wales—Scotland was not added to the project until much later—and as
the figures poured into the London offices of the inspector-general, clerks
dutifully entered the sums into massive ledgers, a separate volume for each
year. And for this enterprise, Culliford treated the mainland American colo-
nies no differently from the Baltic Ports or Russia; they were all busy com-
mercial entrepôts where customers and producers generated numbers whose
meaning scholars are still debating three centuries later.49
Culliford wanted the ledgers to reflect actual market values. For several
years he translated units of commerce—yards and dozens, for example—
into current prices, an extremely difficult task since trade figures varied
regionally and seasonally. Although the challenge of collecting accurate in-
formation nearly overwhelmed Culliford’s assistants, they managed remark-
ably well to record significant market fluctuations. At least, they did so while
Culliford remained as inspector-general. After he retired from service early

in the eighteenth century, his successors—many of whom regarded the post
as a sinecure—compromised Culliford’s grand scheme. While they still com-
piled detailed intelligence on the quantities of imports and exports, they
no longer bothered with changing prices. Indeed, for the entire eighteenth
century, the registers described the flow of imperial commerce in terms of
numbers frozen in 1702.50
Such recording practices have discouraged many people attempting to
make sense of the British customs ledgers, contemporary interpreters as
well as modern. The obstacles have, of course, seemed quite formidable.
Various inspectors-general not only ignored current market values but also
failed to take into account the impact of smuggling on gross trade balances.
And that was not the end of it. Overworked clerks sometimes entered in-
correct figures, merchants occasionally misled crown officials about the
quantities of goods transported to distant ports, and Scottish trade statis-
tics remained spotty until the middle of the eighteenth century.51 Never-
theless, as it turns out, none of these problems seriously undermines the
usefulness of the customs registers for the study of colonial American con-
sumption of durable and semi-durable goods. The 1702 prices have been
recalculated to reflect real eighteenth-century market conditions. Moreover,
we now know much more about Scottish trade with the mainland colo-
nies—a particularly important piece of information for anyone reconstruct-
ing Chesapeake commerce—and in belated fulfillment of Culliford’s original
ambitions, it is possible to provide fairly precise monetary figures for the
British manufactures exported to the American provinces.52
What the Customs House registers do provide, therefore, is powerfully
compelling evidence of a sharp mid-century expansion of consumer de-
mand throughout the colonies. During the mid-1740s Great Britain exported
to the mainland American ports merchandise valued at £871,658. By the
1760s this figure had risen by roughly 130 percent, and during the extraor-
dinary year of 1771 when well-organized boycotts of British manufactures
collapsed, thus opening colonial markets to a sudden flood of goods, the
annual total reached a pre-revolutionary high of £4,576,944.53 The inspec-
tor-general’s reports divided the mainland colonies into six separate dis-
tricts—New England, New York, Pennsylvania, the Chesapeake (Virginia
and Maryland), Carolina, and Georgia—and although all regions experi-
enced striking advances in the consumption of British exports between the
1740s and 1760s, some rose much faster than others. Pennsylvania, for ex-
ample, recorded a spectacular jump of almost 380 percent during this pe-
riod. By comparison, New England’s doubling of British exports seemed
modest. Other trends are of interest. During the 1740s a lion’s share of the
exports went to Maryland and Virginia. These colonies alone received al-
most 43 percent of the British goods shipped to the mainland colonies. By
the 1760s, however, their share had dropped to about 30 percent of the
American total, a clear indication of the rapid economic development of
the other regional markets such as Pennsylvania, New York, and Carolina.54
From a British perspective the customs volumes tell a somewhat differ-

ent although equally impressive story about the expansion of the American
consumer market. By 1773 the colonists purchased almost 26 percent of all
domestically produced goods that were exported out of the mother coun-
try. This was a very significant development. At the beginning of the cen-
tury the colonists received only 5.7 percent of England’s total exports. Traders
carried most of their merchandise to the Continent.55 But as the focus of
the market shifted to the New World, American consumers acquired greater
importance for British manufacturers, major merchant houses, and impe-
rial planners. Certain categories of goods poured into the mainland prov-
inces. It is estimated, for example, that by mid-century the colonists
purchased about half of the ironware, earthenware, silk goods, printed cot-
ton and linen, and flannels that English merchants sold abroad. Indeed,
American buyers accounted for almost three-quarters of all nails that Brit-
ish manufacturers exported during this period of commercial expansion.56
However impressive these aggregate trade statistics may appear, they
take on even greater significance when interpreted in the context of a grow-
ing colonial population. Long before the Revolution, Franklin observed how
rapidly the American population seemed to be expanding. In a brilliantly
imaginative essay that greatly influenced Thomas Malthus, the famed Brit-
ish demographer, Franklin posited that because the colonists married
younger than did contemporary Europeans, they produced more children.
Franklin calculated that the total population was doubling approximately
every twenty-five years, a performance which Malthus later announced was
probably “without parallel in history.” The rate of increase may have been
even greater than Malthus understood. Franklin only considered natural
increase. He excluded “strangers,” presumably the thousands of Scots-Irish
and Germans who were then flooding into the middle colonies.57 Although
the provincial governments did not systematically collect census data, they
did generate various lists that today make it possible to estimate with rea-
sonable confidence the total population of the American mainland colo-
nies. The actual growth rate turns out to be very close to Franklin’s original
guess. Between 1700 and 1770 the colonial population, black as well as white,
increased by more than eightfold, from roughly 250,888 to 2,148,076. Be-
tween 1740 and 1770—the period of greatest concern for the development
of a consumer society—the population grew an astonishing 137 percent.58
Within this demographic context, rising per capita consumption of
British exports actually exceeded the rate of population increase. By any
standard, this was a truly remarkable market performance. Although inter-
national wars sometimes interrupted the flow of Atlantic commerce, we
now know from the inspector-general’s ledgers that ever more Americans
were purchasing ever more goods from the mother country. Between 1720
and 1770 per capita consumption of British exports grew nearly 50 percent;
even more startling, the rate of increase seems to have been accelerating
during the period 1750 to 1770. The most striking numbers came from the
middle colonies. The Carolinians also recorded a major surge of buying,
but even New Englanders posted a 25 percent leap in per capita consumption
of British exports.59 One historian has calculated that the per capita income
of colonial Americans in the late 1760s was about £12, and while we should
recognize that this figure represents a very rough estimate, it suggests that
every man, woman, and child in this society spent about 10 percent of annual
income on the “Baubles of Britain.”60 If nothing else, this stunning reliance
on imported goods reveals widespread prosperity among the white colonists.
Franklin certainly believed that rising personal wealth accounted for the ex-
traordinary quantities of consumer goods that were reaching provincial
America. In 1766 he visited a leading professor in Germany, Gottfried
Achenwall, and after the two men had discussed the amazing growth of con-
sumption in Pennsylvania, the German observed, “Even if [domestic] manu-
facturing increases, it cannot keep pace with the increase of population and
the demand for goods [comparing 1725 to 1757]. . . . Four times the popula-
tion uses much more than four times, really seventeen times more goods,
because the population grows more rapidly in wealth than in numbers.”61
Although the Customs House ledgers fail to break down the various
categories of British exports as finely as did the colonial newspaper adver-
tisements, they still provide strong testimony to the expanding range of
consumer choices that confronted the provincial shopper in mid-century.
To be sure, the great registers ignored attributes such as color and pattern.
They did, however, list scores of different articles, including many encoun-
tered in other eighteenth-century sources.62 Some categories were more sur-
prising. The inspector-general’s staff carefully noted, for example, the “Bugle
great” and “Beads Amber” bound for New York, both items representing
only a single pound sterling in Great Britain’s total annual export. They
included as well the “Alphabets” and “Human Hair” that merchants trans-
ported to Pennsylvania. The lists averaged about one hundred separate cat-
egories of exported goods. One entry in particular reminds us of how
difficult it must have been for the clerks to monitor a fast-growing world
market. After recording general types of cloth, metalware, and pottery, they
seemed almost relieved to describe the remaining sundries simply as “Goods,
several sorts,” a wonderfully all-purpose label that must have incorporated
new products and curiosities as they first made their journey across the
Atlantic.63 As one economic historian explained, “The process of industri-
alization in England from the second quarter of the eighteenth century was
to an important extent a response to colonial demands for nails, axes, fire-
arms, buckets, coaches, clocks, saddles, handkerchiefs, buttons, cordage, and
a thousand other things.”64
The annual summaries of the inspector-general confirmed the preemi-
nence of textiles in Britain’s colonial trade. Various kinds of finished cloth
made up over half of all manufactured goods transported to the American
mainland during the eighteenth century. Of these, woolens represented by
far the largest share, but the colonists also purchased huge quantities of
fabric which the customs clerks listed only as silk, cotton, or linen. In addi-
tion, the ledgers mentioned a constantly expanding supply of calico, satin,
gingham, damask, and taffeta. Some fabric came originally from Conti-
nental markets in Russia and Germany, usually coarse linens, and were then
transhipped to the colonies. Increasingly, however, the textiles exported to
America had been produced in Great Britain. Whatever their source, the
same basic range of textiles seems to have been carried to all regions of the
mainland. In other words, the registers provide no persuasive evidence that
consumer experience in Charleston or Williamsburg differed significantly
from that of Boston, or for that matter, New York or Philadelphia.
The ledgers suggest that the royal governors who reported that the colo-
nists regularly dressed in British cloth knew what they were writing about.
Although ordinary Americans may have spun some fibers into thread and
then woven this material into cloth, their domestic activities hardly dented
a robust trade in British cloth that literally affected how the colonists pre-
sented themselves in public.65 Imported textiles became the badge of eigh-
teenth-century empire. As the anonymous author of a 1753 pamphlet
published in Boston exclaimed about British cloth, “our Beds, our Tables
and our Bodies are covered with it.”66 And in time, of course, it came to
signify their political and economic dependence on the mother country,
something that they were slow to appreciate and even slower to protest. In
1769 a writer who styled himself “A Son of Liberty” informed readers of the
Connecticut Journal, and New-Haven Post-Boy that “one Half, if not Two-
Thirds, of all the Woollen Cloths worn in English America, are imported
from Great-Britain.” Could the colonists ever overcome this “Subjection,”
he asked, and then, answering his own question, responded, “We may then
project, resolve, vapour and threaten, as much as we please; ’tis all in vain,
and we make but a ridiculous Figure, while we are dependent upon Great-
Britain for a warm Coat to save us from Freezing in the Winter.”67
But as “A Son of Liberty” understood, the colonists loved their “Subjec-
tion” so long as it carried no obvious political disabilities. The newspapers
that often fulminated against luxury in dress also advertised products that
protected and preserved imported cloth. “Fine Crown Soap,” for example,
was just what the colonist needed for washing “fine Linens, Muslins, Laces,
Silks, Chinces, [and] Calicoes.”68 And John Atkins, who had just arrived
from Dublin, sensed immediately how the importation of so much cloth
had created an opportunity for a new service industry. He set himself up as
a “Dry-Scourer”—really America’s first dry cleaner—and promised “if em-
ployed, [to] take out all Spots, Stains and Filth, to the greatest Perfection,
and most reasonable Rates, out of all kinds of Men or Womens Apparel.”
Atkins was especially confident of his ability to “Clean Scarlet Cloaks and
Dye them also.”69
Since the history of eighteenth-century consumption involves the mak-
ing of choices in an expansive new marketplace, it is important to stress the
almost unique relation in colonial America between popular consumer de-
mand and demographic structure. In a population growing as rapidly as
did that of Britain’s mainland provinces, about half of the people alive at
any given moment were necessarily children under the age of sixteen. No
doubt, these boys and girls engaged in consumer activities insomuch as

they wore garments made of imported cloth, ate from British plates, and
worked the fields with British tools. But the decision to purchase one item
rather than another, to give preference to a certain color or weight, remained
largely the prerogative of adults. The swift transformation of imperial com-
merce put pressure on parents to learn how to hold their own as consum-
ers, discovering as much as they could about current prices, opportunities
for credit, and relative qualities of competing products. In this unprec-
edented commercial environment, mid-eighteenth-century parents found
themselves teaching their children how to be successful consumers, a task
which for earlier generations would have been of pressing concern only to
gentry families. The population figures also included large numbers of slaves,
dependent workers who, like the children, used imported British goods but
did not have a significant voice in their actual selection.
What considerations of age and race suggest—and these were major
factors differentiating the American consumer society from that develop-
ing in contemporary Britain—was that a surprisingly small percentage of
the total colonial population, perhaps no more than 30 percent in 1770,
controlled the acquisition of imported manufactures.70 These people ener-
gized the entire consumer market. Many were persons of modest means,
members of a large and growing middle class, who associated their own
freedom and prosperity with improvement in their standard of living. If we
consider only the members of this group, then the per capita figure for con-
sumption of British goods was really much higher than the aggregate popu-
lation statistics revealed, a remarkable phenomenon since those numbers
were already very high.
Culliford’s grand project sparks one final observation about the broader
social implications of eighteenth-century export statistics. After the 1740s
competition among British manufacturers translated into lower consumer
prices.71 This long-term trend allowed colonial buyers to acquire ever more
goods over time for the same amount of money. In other words, greater
efficiencies in merchandising, production, and transportation meant that
ordinary Americans enjoyed more choices in the marketplace. Since some
items such as teacups and saucers were generally more durable than others,
they did not have to be replaced very often, and if they remained in fashion
they could be handed down to children. The same conditions pertained for
tools and cutlery, indeed, for most metal articles. But other goods, espe-
cially imported textiles, obviously wore out. Nevertheless, even within this
large category of consumer spending, one quickly met basic needs. A fam-
ily could only own so many linen napkins, for example, before problems of
storage eroded the pleasures of possession.72 As we have seen, neither lower
prices nor fulfillment of demand lessened consumer activity during the
period before the American Revolution. Rather, provincial buyers redirected
their expenditures, purchasing more and more articles which an earlier gen-
eration of Americans might reasonably have defined as luxuries or, in poorer
households, substituting new cheaper products for expensive ones.73
VIII
The eighteenth-century Anglo-American world compiled its inventories of
desire from many different perspectives. Sometimes ordinary men and
women showed no awareness that they were creating records of consumer
life. They unthinkingly threw shattered dishes and broken knives into the
nearest trash pit. Personal correspondence was more self-conscious about
changing consumer behavior. It testified to a new world that appeared to
contemporaries even newer because of the acquisition of so many imported
goods. Other lists represented more formal and official attempts to gain
insight into the great transatlantic flow of British manufactures. But what-
ever the character of the sources, whatever the intentions of their makers,
the six major categories of evidence support a common set of conclusions.
For a very long period, perhaps for the entire first century of European
settlement in mainland America, the colonists led relatively simple lives.
They attended to necessities. Only the wealthy acquired luxury goods from
the mother country. English visitors would surely have regarded the mate-
rial culture of these insecure plantations as stark, dull, and, by cosmopoli-
tan standards, primitive.74 But at some moment during the middle of the
eighteenth century, free Americans entered a new era, a distinct colonial
period as different in terms of material culture from the years of initial
conquest as our times are from the late nineteenth century. Indeed, the trans-
formation of the colonists’ standard of living came so rapidly that people at
the time commented on the speed of change. For them, the domestic land-
scape of everyday life seemed to have taken on an unfamiliar appearance.
It was not consumption itself that so impressed contemporaries or set
them apart from earlier generations. The rich and well-born had been buy-
ing imported goods from distant lands for as long as societies have kept
records. Rather, what was new about the mid-eighteenth-century consumer
marketplace was the range of choices that it offered and the ability of ordi-
nary men and women to participate. Some persons, of course, purchased
more goods than their poorer neighbors. They also had the means to ac-
quire better, more expensive items. But almost everyone had an opportu-
nity to become a consumer.75
And wherever they lived, American consumers confronted not only an
accelerating quantity of exports from Great Britain but also an ever greater
selection—colors, textures, and patterns—at cheaper rates. The experience
of shoppers in the Carolinas and the Chesapeake was not significantly dif-
ferent from that of New Yorkers or New Englanders. All of them had to
learn an unfamiliar vocabulary—queen’s ware, not china; Wilton carpets,
not rugs; maid’s lamb gloves, not gloves—that defined an expanding con-
sumer culture. In this sense, the Anglo-American market standardized ev-
eryday experience, and even though southern planters did not know—or,
for that matter, did not much care—that they were choosing from among
the same range of British goods as were northern or middle-colony farm-
ers, no one could deny that they were all being incorporated into a great
Anglo-American commercial empire in remarkably similar ways.
With so many consumers demanding so many British goods, one can-

not avoid asking why Americans did not produce competing items of their
own. They certainly seemed to possess the basic natural resources needed
to sustain commercial potteries or glass houses. The same could be said of
the manufacture of cloth and paper. Many political commentators on the
eve of revolution advocated just these kinds of projects. One of them, an
author who published a piece in the 1767 Connecticut Courant, explained,
“The way then to get redress for our wrongs is to render ourselves unprof-
itable to Great Britain, by industry. We must begin sooner or later, the in-
crease of the inhabitants of this country being so great as to put it out of the
powers of Great Britain to cloath us a century hence.”76
However much sense plans for domestic manufacturing made in theory,
they never achieved the intended results. Many obstacles presented them-
selves. The primary one, however, was an utter lack of enthusiasm by ordi-
nary colonists. By their own lights, they had transferred to America not to
become mere laborers but rather to establish themselves as independent yeo-
men farmers. Working in urban areas for wages held almost no appeal. On
this point colonists of an entrepreneurial turn of mind agreed. During the
1730s Cadwallader Colden, an astute commentator on economic and politi-
cal affairs, despaired of recruiting an adequate labor force for New York. Some
of his colleagues had apparently counseled the importation of large numbers
of slaves, but Colden declared the scheme too expensive. The obvious alter-
native did not seem all that promising. However much New York needed free
white workers, the migrants stubbornly refused to cooperate:
The hopes of having land of their own & becoming independent of Landlords is what
chiefly induces people into America & they think they have never answer’d the design of
their coming till they have purchased land which as soon as possible they do & begin to
improve ev’n before they are able to maintain themselves. This they never fail to do
notwithstanding that they every day & every where see the miserable state in which
these new Settlers live & that they cannot get in many years the tenth part by their labour
on their own lands what they can by wages if they would work for others.77
Other frustrated planners echoed Colden’s complaint. In 1762 William

Smith, colonial New York’s most talented historian, blamed the abundance
of inexpensive land for the Americans’ inability to compete successfully with
the British manufactures. “It is much owing to the disproportion between
the number of our inhabitants,” claimed Smith, “and the vast tracts remain-
ing still to be settled, that we have not, as yet, entered upon scarce any other
manufactures than such as are indispensably necessary for our home
convenience.”78
Widespread unwillingness to work for employers drove up the cost of
free labor, making it even harder for persons willing to risk capital in
manufacturing ventures to flourish even in local markets. Importing in-
dentured servants from Europe did not provide a satisfactory answer. New
York’s Governor Henry Moore informed the Board of Trade in 1767 that no
sooner did servants fulfill the conditions of their contracts than “they im-
mediately quit their masters.” They insisted on independence in America.
[They] get a small tract of Land, in settling which for the first three or four years they
lead miserable lives, and in the most abject Poverty; but all this is patiently borne and
submitted to with the greatest cheerfulness, the satisfaction of being Landholders
smooths every difficulty, & makes them prefer this manner of living to that comfort-
able subsistence which they could procure for themselves and their families by work-
ing at the Trades in which they were brought up.79
The words “cheerfulness” and “satisfaction” remind us of the industrious

members of the Stanespring family whom Alexander Hamilton met on his
trip to Albany, happy peasants who somehow managed to purchase the very
items that others expected them to produce for themselves.
One of Benjamin Franklin’s most endearing talents was his ability to
restate commonplace beliefs in unexpectedly amusing and positive ways.
On the matter of America’s recalcitrant labor force, he turned weakness—if
not outright resistance—into a virtue. In 1760 he assured British manufac-
turers that their many colonial customers would never become competi-
tors; or if they did so, it would not be for a very long time. The reason was
simple. “Manufactures are founded in poverty,” Franklin observed. “It is
the multitude of poor without land in a country, and who must work for
others at low wages or starve, that enables undertakers to carry on a manu-
facture.” This rhetoric was not exactly flattering, but perhaps Franklin had
learned how to appeal to hard-nosed eighteenth-century businessmen. In
America such conditions were sadly absent, for “no man who can have a
piece of land of his own, sufficient by his labour to subsist his family in
plenty, is poor enough to be a manufacturer or work for a master. Hence
while there is land enough in America for our people, there can never be
manufactures to any amount or value.”80
As Franklin noted with characteristic irony, from time to time English
workers who possessed advanced industrial training actually moved to
America. It was only to be expected, he observed, that members of this small,
highly skilled group would quickly set up in the colonies as “brasiers, cuttlers,
and pewterers,” but when they reached the New World a curious transfor-
mation occurred. They gradually dropped “the working part of their busi-
ness, and import[ed] their respective goods from England, whence they can
have them cheaper and better. . . . They continue their shops indeed, in the
same way of dealing, but become sellers of brasiery, cutlery, pewter, hats &c.
brought from England, instead of makers of those goods.”81 For most mi-
grants, therefore, the trip to America took them back to the land, to hus-
bandry; for a few, the journey turned skilled workers into shopkeepers.
Thomas Jefferson and others of his agrarian mentality praised this phe-
nomenon. They wanted to keep industrial wage earners out of America as
long as possible, thus preserving the yeoman republic from poverty and
corruption and allowing free farmers—and a few industrious merchants—
to consume foreign imports without thereby compromising their sense of
personal independence.82
Not surprisingly, when colonial Americans attempted to produce con-
sumer goods of British quality, they almost always came up short. To be
sure, they turned out beautiful furniture and silverware. But in the main
categories of imported items regularly advertised in the provincial newspa-

pers, colonial craftsmen clearly failed local buyers. Indeed, to take one ob-
vious article, British potteries in the Midlands were able to manufacture
various lines of stoneware, creamware, and china and transport them to
major English commercial centers, usually by canal or turnpike, where they
were crated and shipped to America, then unpacked, displayed in colonial
stores, and ultimately sold at prices as low as or lower than those of rival
domestic ceramics. The British artifacts were not only more finely executed,
more colorfully decorated, and more fashionably conceived, they were also
widely affordable. It did not matter that the American potters had abun-
dant supplies of clay and forests of trees to turn into charcoal for their kilns.
Except for the cheapest earthenware, they simply could not compete.83
Colonial experiments in glassmaking yielded no more satisfactory re-
sults. In 1768 William Franklin, royal governor of New Jersey and Benjamin’s
son, reported to Lord Hillsborough that “A Glass House was erected about
Twenty Years ago in Salem County, which makes Bottles, and a very coarse
Green Glass for Windows, used only in some of the Houses of the poorer
Sort of People.”84 It was this unimpressive record of industrial achievement
that discouraged writers such as John Dickinson during the protests of the
1760s. In his Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania, he admitted that colo-
nial attempts to produce paper and glass had come to nothing. Since Ameri-
can consumers regarded quality goods as “requisite for the comfort of life,”
and since they could not begin to fulfill their own demand, they inevitably
found themselves caught in an impossible market situation, for “the seller
has a plain advantage, and the buyer must pay the duty.”85
Although Americans made some cloth, they regarded it as inferior to
the fabrics exported to the colonies from Great Britain. In New England the
production of homespun seems to have supplemented the larger consumer
market.86 But these efforts never amounted to much. In Connecticut the
problem was cost of labor. As “A Well-Wisher to His Country” explained in
1767, “More especially this appears to be very much the Case with Spinners,
to the great Discouragement of domestic Manufactures. For the Farmers
who are able to raise the Wool and Flax, for their own use and to spare
others, are discouraged trying to make any more Cloth than what their Fami-
lies can spin; which in many Instances is not half so much as they have
Occasion to consume.”87 Whenever possible, ordinary people purchased yard
goods from local merchants. As Governor William Pitkin of Connecticut
reported to the members of the Board of Trade in 1766, “The Inhabitants of
this Colony are chiefly Employ’d in subduing and Improving Land, [and]
do nothing more at the Woolen & Linen Manufactures than to supply the
Deficiencies of what our produce Enables us to purchase of Great Britain.”
The homespun that one encountered in Connecticut on the eve of inde-
pendence was “principally of the Courser Sort for Labourers & Servants
which is done by particular Families for their Necessary Use.”88 Other sources
from the period support Pitkin’s assessment. Studies of probate inventories
indicate that fewer than half of the households in late eighteenth-century
Massachusetts owned spinning wheels, an artifact which modern interpret-

ers of early America and antique dealers seem to have transformed into an
ubiquitous symbol of domestic enterprise. Even more telling was the fact
that only one in ten New England families had looms.89
Cloth production may have been more common in New York. Accord-
ing to Governor Moore, in New York City projectors experimented with
Innovative advertisers learned quickly how to catch the attention of potential customers.
Magdalen Devine included a small woodcut in her newspaper announcement, depicting
several new textile patterns and designs to be found in her Philadelphia shop. Pennsylvania
Gazette, 1 August 1765. Courtesy of the Northwestern University Library, Evanston, Illinois.
the manufacture of linen and woolens, but while these activities provided
for “several poor families,” the overall results were disappointing. A notable
exception was the “Custom” of making “Coarse Cloths in private families
[which] prevails throughout the whole province, and almost in every House
a sufficient quantity is manufactured for the use of the Family, without the
least design of sending any of it to market.” “Swarms” of children, Moore
reported, were “set to work as soon as they are able to Spin and Card, and as
every family is furnished with a Loom, the Itinerant Weavers who travel
about the Country, put the finishing hand to the Work.” But most consum-
ers had no more interest in “Coarse Cloths” than they had in coarse glass,
and if Moore is to be believed, even at the height of the Stamp Act protests,
when Americans often boasted of their ability to dress themselves fully in
homespun fabric, the patriots “never cloathed themselves with the work of
their own hands.” These New Yorkers did what they had done for at least a
generation; they “bought English Cloth for themselves and their families.”90
IX
None of these examples will definitively dispel the enduring myth of early
American self-sufficiency. We want to believe that the colonists were some-
how different from those of us who find ourselves living in a modern com-
mercialized world. We insist that these hearty yeomen somehow stood apart
from the economic forces that so radically transformed the face of eigh-
teenth-century British and Dutch society.91 No doubt, ordinary farmers as-
pired to economic independence. And for most white men and women,
most of the time, it was possible to maintain a healthy sense of their own
personal freedom in the marketplace. Like other people in other cultures
who have worked the soil for a living, they worried about feeding and hous-
ing their families, about making it through a hard winter, and about the
need to set aside enough seed for next year’s crops. They helped out neigh-
bors; favors were exchanged on the community level without anyone de-
manding monetary compensation. No one questions that such practices
defined human relations, especially in the northern and middle colonies.92
But arguments that celebrate—even implicitly—the colonists’ self-suf-
ficiency cannot possibly comprehend the massive mid-century importa-
tion of British goods.93 The ground holds too many shards; the archives
yield too many detailed lists. However much Americans during the run-up
to revolution may have advocated turning their backs on consumer oppor-
tunity, they knew firsthand how much the new goods had affected the char-
acter of their lives. As “A Friend of This Colony” announced in a newspaper
in 1767, “since the floods of English goods have been poured in upon us . . .
family œconomy is at an end.”94
The revolutionary generation’s attempts to organize large-scale con-
sumer boycotts were so difficult precisely because earlier Americans had so
enthusiastically endorsed British manufactures. People of humble means
were just as concerned as elite Americans with the articles that were adver-
tised in the local journals. William Roberts, for example, arrived in Maryland
as an indentured servant, but unlike Benjamin Franklin, Roberts discovered
that ambition and diligence did not ensure personal success in America. As a
free person, he struggled to make a living in “plantation work,” which in his
case meant growing a little tobacco. During one fleeting moment in 1767 when
his prospects seemed to improve, this poor farmer decided “to go to house
keepin.” Recognizing the constraints of his meager resources, Roberts pru-
dently listed what he anticipated would be his basic needs.
Roberts’s private inventory of desire reveals just how thoroughly ordi-
nary Americans had been incorporated into an empire of goods. Roberts
wanted “a Bed tick, bolster and two pillows, one Rugg, two Blankets and a
pair of Sheats, one four gallon Pott and a Eight Gallon one, a dozen of
pewter Plates, four dishes of different sizes, a gallon Bason and a half one,
four tinn pans, two half ones and two of a Gallon, half a dozen of knifes
and forks, a Pint pewter pott and a quart pott, a Couple of candelssticks,
Six Pewter spoons, a grid Iron, Box Iron, he[a]ters, and a frying Pann, one
Handsaw, a Adge, a drawing knife, a Broad Axe, Narrow Axe, one Inch Au-
ger and a half Inch, a gouge, [and] half a dozen of Gimblets of all Sizes.”
Roberts concluded that if he managed to acquire all “these things” from
Great Britain, he surely would be able to “make my plows.”95
Other poor people in provincial society apparently welcomed the chance
to fashion themselves in exciting new ways. Consider the colorful descrip-
tion of two female servants that appeared in a Virginia newspaper. One
woman was attired in “fine Pink coloured Worsted Stockings” along with a
brown petticoat, a checked apron, and a striped bed gown, while the other
wore a black hat, “an old red Silk Handkerchief round her Neck, an old
dirty blue Stuff Gown, with check Linen Cuffs, old Stays, a black and white
strip’d Country Cloth Petticoat, an old blue quilted ditto, a check Linen
Apron and a brown Linen Shift.”96 We shall never know, of course, what the
two women or the recently freed Roberts thought of the concept of self-
sufficiency. They certainly desired personal independence in America. They
also wanted to be comfortable and appealing, prosaic goals perhaps, but
dreams easily fulfilled by the consumer marketplace of the mid-eighteenth
century.
3
Consumers’ New World:
The Unintended
Consequences of
Commercial Success
E ighteenth-century writers seemed uncer-

tain how best to describe Britain’s relation
to its many overseas possessions. Only
tepidly did they employ the concept of “empire,” since for them it carried
uncomfortable intellectual baggage from ancient history. The traditional us-
age suggested that control over distant colonies and expansion into new re-
gions depended on military might. But the notion that Great Britain was a
modern-day Rome, dispatching powerful legions to conquer the world, did
not sit well with a people who celebrated liberty and rights, the blessings of
living under a balanced constitution. From the perspective of free modern
subjects, what appeared to distinguish Britain’s empire from that of Roman
times was commerce, a continuing source of prosperity and stability.
The problem with this line of thought was that commerce itself re-
quired precise definition. After all, the English had engaged in large-scale
trade for many centuries, certainly long before they laid claim to having an
empire. The innovative element in the eighteenth-century discourse was
not long-distance trade but rather a commerce organized around an ex-
panding market for British manufactured goods. In this sense, Great Brit-
ain broke with the past by creating something genuinely new, an empire of
consumer colonies.1
The rapid growth of a consumer-oriented economy sparked curiosity
on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. Americans looked at eighteenth-cen-
tury England with new eyes, admiring its cosmopolitan culture. In turn,
the English assessed with heightened intensity the role of the colonies in a
burgeoning world system. Few contemporaries had given the changing char-
acter of Britain’s empire more thought than Edmund Burke. His reflections
on Atlantic trade informed a dramatic speech he gave before the House of
Commons on March 22, 1775. In support of his “Resolutions for Concilia-
tion with the Colonies,” Burke delivered a long, brilliantly constructed set
consumers’ new world N 73
piece that represented one final attempt to avoid armed conflict. He was
not sanguine about the prospects for peace. Lord North’s majority clearly
intended to force the issue of parliamentary supremacy. “Clouds indeed,
and darkness, rest upon the future,” Burke observed, sensing how critical
the situation had become and fearing perhaps that neither reason nor rheto-
ric would save the day. “We are therefore called upon, as it were by a supe-
rior warning voice, again to attend to America,” Burke explained. “To attend
to the whole of it together; and to review the subject with an unusual de-
gree of care and calmness.”2
Burke invited Parliament to consider the nation’s own best commer-
cial interests. A firm stand on constitutional principle might mollify En-
glishmen who associated American
rights with political anarchy, but such
a course would almost certainly destroy
the colonial trade that for at least a cen-
tury had promoted general prosperity
throughout the empire. Burke re-
minded Lord North’s followers of the
wisdom to be found in the great ledgers
stored in the offices of the inspector-
general, the same volumes we encoun-
tered in the previous chapter. Anyone
who bothered to compare the customs
records for 1704 with those of 1772 could
see immediately that the continued
health of the entire economy depended
on the export of domestic manufac-
tures. According to Burke, the value of
“the whole trade of England” in 1704
was about the same amount as the “Ex-
port trade to the colonies alone in 1772.”
Edmund Burke understood the growing Burke did not explain how he calculated
importance for Great Britain of the American these numbers. Such details probably
consumer market better than did most other
members of Parliament. Print in possession of
did not much matter. After all, as with
the Lewis Walpole Library, Farmington, all statistics, it was the interpretation
Connecticut. that commanded attention. “The trade
with America alone,” Burke announced,
“is now within less than £500,000 of being equal to what this great com-
mercial nation, England, carried on at the beginning of this century with
the whole world!”3
Burke had spoken in the House of Commons often enough to sense
the limits of statistical arguments. Audiences soon grew tired of figures.
Burke required another, more personal device to dramatize the commer-
cial transformation of the British Empire. And for that purpose he turned
to a colleague in Parliament, Lord Bathurst (1684–1775), a long-lived Tory
peer who happened to be the father of the current lord chancellor. The
senior Bathurst had enjoyed a distinguished political career in his own right
and over the first three-quarters of the eighteenth century had witnessed
what Burke termed the “growth of our national prosperity.” The man’s adult
experience conveniently bridged the span between 1704 and 1772, the dates
of the two customs registers that Burke had so carefully reviewed. In this
context Bathurst suddenly became a representative figure for a great com-
mercial empire. After all, he had seen “all the stages” of Britain’s progress,
and for the sake of Burke’s presentation in 1775, it seemed safe to assume
that in 1704 Bathurst had been old enough “acta parentum jam legere, et
quae sit poterit cognoscere virtus [to read the acts of his forebears and to
recognize what virtue is able to accomplish].” Considering that the lord
would then have been twenty years of age, he would have had to be a very
dull lad indeed not to have comprehended “such things.”4
For pure theater it was an arresting moment. Burke projected before
the members of Parliament a kind of rhetorical holograph, a virtual Bathurst
just setting out in 1704 on a long public career. Unlike most young people,
however, Burke’s imagined Bathurst had known from the very start what
the future would bring. He comprehended the history of the entire eigh-
teenth century before it ever occurred. How did he come to possess such
prescience? What was his secret? The answer was that during the reign of
Queen Anne, Bathurst had had a conversation with an angel of commerce,
an annoyingly loquacious spirit intent in 1704 on telling the youthful noble-
man how important the American colonies would be for the next sixty-
eight years of English economic development.
One might have expected divine messengers of this sort to carry more
weighty news, perhaps hints about the Second Coming, but apparently com-
mercial intelligence in Great Britain was heady stuff. In any case, the young
Bathurst listened politely as the angel drew back the curtain of time, expos-
ing him to “the rising glories of his country.” Gazing at least four genera-
tions into the future, the young man properly focused attention on the
“commercial grandeur of England.” While he contemplated the nation’s
splendid prospects, the angel pointed to “a little speck” on the globe. As
Bathurst struggled to grasp the meaning of the speck, the angel proclaimed
impatiently, “Young man, there is America.” Lest that revelation cool his
interest, the spirit of commerce laid out the course of eighteenth-century
British history.
[T]here is America—which at this day serves for little more than to amuse you with
stories of savage men, and uncouth manners; yet shall, before you taste of death, show
itself equal to the whole of that commerce which now attracts the envy of the world.
Whatever England has been growing to by a progressive increase of improvement,
brought in by varieties of people, by succession of civilizing conquests and civilizing
settlements in a series of seventeen hundred years, you shall see as much added to her
by America in the course of a single life!
If such a conversation had actually taken place in 1704, Burke won-

dered, would Bathurst have believed the angel of commerce? Probably not,
the speaker concluded. The vision was too grand for the “credulity of youth.”
It was fortunate, therefore, that the real Bathurst, a gentleman known to the
members of Parliament, had lived to see the fulfillment of the prophecy. No
one in 1775 could doubt how much American trade had contributed to the
rising glory of eighteenth-century England.5
Although it persuaded Lord Bathurst, the angel apparently made little
impression on a parliamentary majority bent on punishing the colonists.
The House of Commons handily defeated the conciliatory motions. Burke’s
entire speech might well have been forgotten had it not been for a felicitous
phrase that he employed to describe an earlier, less confrontational period
of imperial history. Before the British government insisted on taxing Ameri-
cans, it had encouraged a policy of “salutary neglect.”6 The words took on a
life of their own, and in the process, created some confusion about the char-
acter of the empire that Burke was trying to save. Today, the phrase seems
to recall an era of political and economic laissez-faire.7 By allowing the dis-
tant provinces the freedom to develop within a loose framework of author-
ity, Parliament allegedly encouraged the colonists to think of themselves as
something different, indeed, as Americans. Such a reading of the speech
misses the central thrust of Burke’s argument. By “salutary neglect” he in-
tended only to suggest that eighteenth-century Americans had managed to
escape intolerable interference by the representatives of an ancien régime.
British soldiers had never enforced colonial law; rapacious governors had
not ridden roughshod over the local populace. The absence of coercion,
however, did not mean that Americans were free to do as they pleased or
that they defined their own interests as separate from those of Great Brit-
ain. The point was that commerce brought most Americans into a closer,
more harmonious relationship with the mother country than could naked
coercion. Salutary neglect was a velvet policy that bound scattered villages
and plantations to a great imperial structure; it reaffirmed the colonists’
fundamental Englishness without the threat of force. And with each pass-
ing decade, the commercial ties became stronger. American trade “swelled
out on every side,” Burke exclaimed. “It filled all its proper channels to the
brim. It overflowed with a rich redundance . . . breaking its banks on the
right and on the left.” Sustaining the flood of commerce depended little
upon the formal actions of the British government. Thousands of merchants
and manufacturers—autonomous agents striving to advance their own pri-
vate interests—almost unwittingly benefited the entire empire, so that, in
Burke’s words, “When we speak of the commerce with our colonies, fiction
lags after truth; invention is unfruitful, and imagination cold and barren.”8
Like many British contemporaries, Burke’s angel of commerce cel-
ebrated the birth of “an empire of goods,” a phrase that more accurately
captures a mid-century world of trade than does “salutary neglect.” The
empire of goods was a vast commercial system driven largely by a phenom-
enon that William Douglass, a Boston physician, cleverly termed a “Gallop-
ing Consumption.”9 The new conditions forced the crown’s widely dispersed
subjects on both sides of the Atlantic to situate themselves within a larger
conceptual framework, where mutual imagining, the product of rumor and
exaggeration, fantasy and fact, spawned new perceptions of empire. People

in the mother country had to decide just how distant provincials fit into an
evolving political and commercial order. For Americans, the interpretive
challenge was even more basic. They had to establish exactly what it meant
for colonists to call themselves British.
II
Accounts of the colonial period often depict America’s England as some-
how frozen in amber, as a monolithic, unchanging “world we have lost,”
populated by dashing Elizabethan courtiers and persecuting bishops. To be
sure, such a society had once dispatched thousands of Puritans and adven-
turers across the Atlantic. As colonists born in America as well as later mi-
grants from the British Isles understood quite well, however, the mother
country of 1700 or 1740 bore little resemblance to the late medieval regime
of the Tudors and early Stuarts.10 Meanings of empire that had made sense
at an earlier moment no longer did so. Ordinary eighteenth-century white
colonists suddenly became conscious that their England was not the En-
gland of their fathers. As subjects of an empire of goods, they faced eco-
nomic and political challenges unknown during the seventeenth century.
And, of course, many people who had come from other European coun-
tries had no memory of English folkways. The Scots-Irish and German
migrants who moved in large numbers to eighteenth-century America ac-
commodated to the demands of a commercial New World as best they could,
relying as much as possible on their own ethnic resources.
Interpretation took place, therefore, within a specific context. It was
the metropolitan core of the British Empire, not the struggling New World
settlements, that first experienced the intellectual, religious, and political
changes now associated with the development of modernity.11 After a long
civil war that briefly transformed England into a republic, after enduring
many other domestic risings and rebellions, and after establishing once and
for all the sovereignty of Parliament in the British constitution, the mother
country emerged from the Glorious Revolution of 1688 stronger and more
self-confident than it had been when its sons and daughters first traveled to
the American shore. A troubled court society had brought forth a mighty
fiscal-military state. No doubt, a good many fox-hunting country gentlemen
weathered the change; the landed oligarchy preserved its political dominance
for a very long time. And, although they surrendered many prerogatives so
dear to the Stuarts, the Hanoverian monarchs remained central figures in
any analysis of the political structure of the empire. What was different in
the eighteenth century was that these familiar characters now shared the
historical stage with an articulate and powerful middle class, and when co-
lonial Americans took the measure of the mother country, they confronted
a vibrant consumer economy, a complex state bureaucracy, a proliferation
of new manufacturing centers, and a political culture comfortable with its
own exuberant nationalism. Dynamism, growth, and power suddenly ap-

peared the most appropriate terms with which to describe a not-so-tradi-
tional England of the mid-eighteenth century.12
Colonial Americans, of course, viewed these developments from afar.
Distance alone deprived them of detailed information about many aspects
of the English situation. Many were probably unaware, for example, of the
stubborn survival of the Tories in some county communities until well into
the Georgian era. Nor, for that matter, did ordinary Americans seem to know
much about how the remarkable growth of provincial towns was changing
the human landscape of Great Britain.13 The army and navy were different
matters. Perhaps more than any other element of change, Britain’s military
strength directly shaped how provincials imagined themselves within a new
Anglo-American world. During the long eighteenth century, the British not
only waged almost constant warfare against France and Spain but also usu-
ally emerged victorious. In other words, they were remarkably good at de-
fending their expanding commercial and political interests.14 Americans
came to appreciate the imperial government for what it was, “the supreme
example in the western world of a State organized for effective war-mak-
ing.”15 It had not always been so. As recently as the 1660s the Dutch navy
had presented a formidable threat to the commerce of its imperial rival.
Dutch ships appearing in the James River threw the rulers of Virginia into a
panic, and they wrote to London claiming that poor planters and unhappy
white servants might rise up and join the enemy forces.16 But less than a
century later, British forces demonstrated convincingly that they could hold
their own against ambitious and powerful Continental rivals.
England’s spectacular military success depended only marginally on
the brilliance and courage of the fighting men. Rather, unlike its great Eu-
ropean adversaries, the nation had learned how to pay for large-scale war
without bankrupting its citizens and, thereby, without sparking the kinds
of internal unrest—peasant rebellions against taxation, for example—that
destabilized other ancien régime monarchies. Although the process of
strengthening and integrating local tax gathering had begun to accelerate
during the late seventeenth century—changes thought necessary for the
creation of modern bureaucratic states—it was not until Great Britain ex-
perienced a far-reaching “financial revolution” during the early decades of
the eighteenth century that it found itself able effectively to defend and
govern a worldwide colonial empire. In a word, British rulers discovered
the secret of fighting on credit. Along with innovative banking and finan-
cial institutions such as the Bank of England, legions of new collectors and
inspectors appeared throughout the realm. These busy new figures in the
English countryside served as constant reminders of the establishment of
“an impressively powerful central state apparatus.”17
Economic and military transformation fed what for the mid-century
American colonists would surely have been another arresting feature of the
age, a sudden burst of British nationalism. Perhaps the Britons of this period
did not experience what we might recognize as the advent of a full-blown
nationalism, certainly not of the type of romantic nationalism that one

encounters in nineteenth-century European states such as Germany. What-
ever label one employs, however, it now seems apparent that sometime dur-
ing the 1740s English men and women of all social classes began to express
a sentiment that might be described variously as a dramatic surge of na-
tional consciousness, a rise of defiant patriotism, or a greatly heightened
affirmation of national identity. To be sure, during the period of the Ar-
mada English people took intense pride in the defeat of the hated Spanish,
and distinguished Elizabethan writers celebrated the blessings of being
English. The Georgian experience was quite different. Even if the eighteenth-
century development represented an intensification of an imaginative
project with ancient roots, it nevertheless involved a much broader per-
centage of the population. It was now sustained and amplified by a new
commercial press that brought stories of imperial might to urban coffee-
houses and country taverns.18
Why a sudden intensification of “Britishness” occurred precisely at this
particular moment remains unclear.19 If the social foundations of a height-
ened sense of national identity are in doubt, however, no one questions the
character of the swelling patriotic movement in the mother country. Ordi-
nary people—laboring men and women as well as members of a self-confi-
dent middling group—who bellowed out the words to the newly composed
“Rule, Britannia” and who responded positively to the emotional appeal of
“God Save the King” gave voice to the common aspirations of a militantly
Protestant culture. Or, stated negatively, they proclaimed their utter con-
tempt for Catholicism and their rejection of everything associated with
contemporary France. It is probably true, as some have suggested, that En-
glish aristocrats initially greeted the spread of popular nationalism with
muted enthusiasm.20 But in time, even members of the traditional ruling
class came to appreciate the symbolic value of John Bull in mobilizing a
population in support of war and monarchy. For most English people—
the very men and women whom Americans would have encountered as
travelers—the expression of national identity seems to have been quite genu-
ine. Indeed, by noisy participation in patriotic rituals, the middling and
working classes thrust themselves into a public sphere of imperial politics.21
In their reevaluation of the metropolitan culture, colonial Americans
would almost certainly have taken note of the activities of a new social group
in Great Britain, the so-called middle class. Whether the men and women
who made up the “middling sort” actually represented a self-conscious class
or were merely a loose amalgam of economically successful people busy
thrusting their way into the public sphere is not, for our interests, of critical
significance. We might pause, however, to address another interpretive prob-
lem. Since the middle class allegedly has been on the rise throughout re-
corded history—much like the perpetual growth of religious toleration or
representative government—it may seem misguided to situate its arrival so
confidently in mid-eighteenth-century England. But, on closer reflection,
the issue turns out not to be all that arbitrary. While no one denies the
Between 1761 and 1763 Francis Hayman executed four historical canvases commemorating
recent British military successes throughout the world. The Triumph of Britannia, now known
only through this Simon F. Ravenet engraving (1763), depicts sea nymphs bearing the portraits
of victorious British admirals. They follow in the wake of Britannia, who is seated majestically
in Neptune’s chariot. Thousands of ordinary Londoners saw Hayman’s mid-century celebra-
tion of British nationalism. Courtesy of the Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection,
New Haven, Connecticut.
existence of other middle classes in the development of other nations—the

Netherlands, for example—the British situation argues strongly for the in-
vention of a distinct middle class in Georgian England. Educated, profes-
sional, and prosperous people with no claim to inherited privilege
established, for the first time in the history of the mother country, a “polite
and commercial” society. They articulated a claim to respected standing in
the class structure in dramatically visible new ways. Not surprisingly, those
who have studied the phenomenon claim that “the vigour, wealth, and nu-
merical strength of the ‘middle sort’ . . . [was] the most important social
feature of the age.”22
This burgeoning middle class industriously copied the manners of its
betters, fashioning self in ever more colorful and elaborate ways, celebrat-
ing consumer fads, purchasing the novels now marketed in large numbers,
and populating the trendy spas and resort towns. Perhaps most remark-
able, even as it redefined the character of English popular culture, the new
middling group never seriously challenged the traditional landed oligarchy
for the right to rule the nation.23 And it was those men and women who
most often entertained visiting Americans. The colonists abroad encoun-
tered English families headed by lawyers, merchants, and doctors, who regu-
larly proclaimed that the freest nation in the world was also the most
prosperous. For the provincials, it was an exciting and convincing display.
As any colonist would also have soon discovered, the members of this
self-confident middle class of England energized an impressive new con-
sumer marketplace. Economic historians are quick to insist that mid-eigh-
teenth-century England had not yet entered an industrial revolution. Still,
even without the benefit of major technological breakthroughs, small manu-
facturing centers managed to turn out consumer items in unprecedented
quantities, and those alluring goods—the simple sundries of daily life—
flowed from specialized production sites to scattered stores along the newly
constructed canals and turnpikes. Prosperous English men and women,
much like their American counterparts, bought what they had seen adver-
tised in an expanding commercial press. And, significantly, people of more
modest means also participated in that vibrant marketplace.
In some works published in Great Britain during this period, authors
wove industrial geography into a narrative of national pride. They mapped
out splendid tours of major manufacturing centers. The readers of The Ad-
vantages of the Revolution Illustrated, by a View of the Present State of Great
Britain learned, for example, “Another undeniable Instance of the Advan-
tage which has accrued to this Nation by the [Glorious] Revolution is the
vast Increase and flourishing Condition of our Manufactures; and if Indus-
try is a Characteristic of Liberty, I may venture to affirm that no Country in
Europe can at this Day produce such glorious Proof of being in Possession
of this valuable Blessing as Great Britain.” The domestic traveler could wit-
ness “the admirable Progress of the Silk Manufacture in and about Spital-
fields, which, within 60 Years, from almost nothing, is now, by the Ingenuity,
Application and Expense of the Master-weavers, become the greatest and
best in Europe.” In the North of England “the Woollen Manufactures are
wonderfully multiplied, improved and enlarged,” and no one could dispute
that Manchester’s recent history revealed “How advantageous the Cotton
Manufacture is to this Nation.” The industrial route through England took
the tourist to the metal works of Birmingham and Sheffield, the brass found-
ries of Bristol, the tin-plate factories in Monmouthshire, and the great por-
celain potteries “at Chelsea, May-fair, Brentford, Worcester, Bristol, Bow, &c.”24
Visiting colonists occasionally really did follow the manufacturing tour.
During the early 1770s one struggling Maryland merchant traveled Britain’s
new industrial countryside in search of bargains. Joshua Johnson believed
that he could purchase goods directly from producers and thereby avoid Lon-
don wholesalers who drove up the cost of doing business. But the scattered
centers, each identified with a different specialty, did not fulfill Johnson’s ex-
pectations. “I have been to many of the manufacturing towns . . . ,” he wrote

in 1772, “amongst which the following were the most capital, Gloucester,
Tewkesbury, Bromsgrove, Birmingham, Coventry, and Woodstock.” When he
arrived in one of these cities, Johnson looked for huge warehouses filled with
articles ready to be shipped to America. But, as he soon discovered,
it was quite the reverse and the business [is] conducted as follows. The agents who
reside in these towns employ the poor men and their families for ten or a dozen miles
round them. . . . [T]hey deliver them as much iron etc. as they can work up in a week
which is returned on Saturday night when they are paid for their labour, which is
hardly sufficient to find them milk and bread, much more meat. In all light work I
find the women and children preferred, the men being more inactive and much ad-
dicted to drunkenness. . . . The agents, as soon as they collect a load, send it immedi-
ately to their principal or correspondent in London, Bristol, etc.25
Although Johnson found the human misery in the new industrial towns
revolting, he revealed something extraordinarily significant about the eigh-
teenth-century consumer economy. The “Baubles of Britain” came not from
factories in any modern sense. They represented the work of thousands of
separate individuals, each turning out a few yards of cloth or beating a few
pieces of metal into the desired shape, and what was so remarkable was that
these poor, often displaced men and women could produce such a huge
quantity of articles. A putting-out system had been recorded in England as
early as the sixteenth century. What was new was the intensity and quantity
of production. A generation before the so-called Industrial Revolution,
English manufacturers found ways—some of them oppressive—to meet
the sudden demands of a world market.
Perhaps describing the sudden economic transformation of England
as a “consumer revolution” overstates the pace of change. Nevertheless, one
authority in the field argues persuasively that “more men and women than
ever before in human history enjoyed the experience of acquiring material
possessions. Objects which for centuries had been the privileged posses-
sions of the rich came, within the space of a few generations, to be within
the reach of a larger part of society than ever before.”26 Josiah Tucker, dean
of Gloucester during the late eighteenth century, would have readily ac-
cepted this assessment of the changing character of English material cul-
ture. People of all classes, declared Tucker in 1757,“have better Conveniences
in their Houses, and affect to have more in Quantity of clean, neat Furni-
ture, and a greater Variety (such as Carpets, Screens, Window Curtains,
Chamber Bells, polished Brass Locks, Fenders, &c., &c.) (Things hardly
known Abroad among Persons of such a Rank) than are to be found in any
other Country in Europe, Holland excepted.” In fact, Tucker believed “that
almost the whole Body of the People of Great Britain may be considered
either as the Customers to, or the Manufacturers for each other: A very happy
Circumstance this.”27 What Tucker reported about the buying habits of the
English, others said about the colonial Americans. Like their counterparts
in the mother country, they had tasted comfort and luxury and increas-
ingly called it happiness.
By mid-century, therefore, provincial Americans confronted what must

have seemed a radically “new” British consciousness. It radiated outward
from the metropolitan center, providing officials of a powerful, prosper-
ous, and dynamic state with an effective vocabulary for mobilizing popular
patriotism.28 It was in this fluid, uncertain context that colonists on the
periphery attempted to construct their own imagined identity within the
empire. Although the process of defining identity had begun as soon as
European settlers arrived in the New World, the conversation across the
Atlantic Ocean changed dramatically at mid-century. Again, with due re-
spect to Edmund Burke—and to the many colonial historians who have
echoed the phrase—“salutary neglect” fails utterly to describe the complexity
of the changing American situation. Although the number of crown offi-
cials in the colonies was always small, Britain aggressively intruded itself
into the colonial world of the mid-eighteenth century: the metropolitan
center spoke insistently through the flow of consumer goods that trans-
formed the American marketplace, through the Red Coats who came to
fight the French and Indians along the northern frontier, through celebrity
itinerants such as the Reverend George Whitefield, who brought English
evangelical rhetoric to anxious dissenters, and, for most literate colonists,
through a commercial press that depicted the mother country in the most
alluring terms, indeed, as the most polite and progressive society the world
had ever seen.29 As one American pamphleteer proudly announced, “Brit-
ain seems now to have attained to a degree of wealth, power, and eminence,
which half a century ago, the most sanguine of her patriots could hardly
have made the object of their warmest wishes.”30
III
Within the imaginative structure of a powerful and prosperous empire, dis-
tant colonists not only spent a lot of time taking stock of contemporary En-
glish society, they also wondered what the English might think of them. It
was not always a rewarding exercise. Provincial Americans worried that the
English generally held them in low regard. Indeed, they came to suspect that
from the perspective of a cosmopolitan capital such as London the colonists
might appear an inferior class of people, perhaps like the Scots or the Irish, a
bit uncivilized.31 It was always possible, of course, to find Englishmen writing
about the New World in precisely such unflattering terms, and in response to
real or alleged slights, Americans occasionally compensated for their own
feelings of cultural inferiority by poking fun at the English.
The provincials liked to tell stories, for example, of how little the En-
glish actually knew about the character of colonial society.32 One such per-
son was the Reverend John Barnard, a Harvard graduate who became the
Congregational minister for Marblehead, Massachusetts. Born in 1681,
Barnard survived to celebrate his eighty-ninth birthday. In a pithy autobi-
ography completed in 1766 he enthusiastically chronicled the commercial
progress of his local community. Indeed, during the years of his ministry,
Marblehead had transformed itself from a rough fishing village into a pros-
perous trading center.33 As a young man Barnard had visited England, and
although he remembered a series of largely positive experiences, he enjoyed
relating the story of an “aged gentlewoman” who sought him out one evening
after a church meeting. “She asked me if all the people of my country were
white, as she saw I was,” Barnard recollected, “for being styled in the general
West Indians, she thought we were all black, as she supposed the Indians to
be.” Barnard set the woman straight on matters of race and geography, but,
as he quickly discovered, she was just warming to the interrogation. “She
asked me how long I had been in the kingdom,” he wrote. “When I told her
a few months, she said she was surprised to think how I could learn their
language in so little time; ‘Methinks,’ said she, ‘you speak as plain English as
I do.’” The traveler from America assured his questioner that “all my coun-
try people, being English, spake the same language I did,” and over the course
of a long career in Marblehead, he found that Americans accepted his re-
port of an embarrassing moment in England as entirely plausible.34
The incident probably amused revolutionary New Englanders, who
protested that they possessed the same rights as persons who happened to
have been born in England.35 One of them, James Otis, a brilliant lawyer
and popular leader of the Boston town meeting, announced that govern-
ment officials in the mother country knew next to nothing about the Ameri-
can colonies. In a trenchant political pamphlet entitled The Rights of the
British Colonies Asserted and Proved (1764), Otis insisted that an important
English imperial administrator who had recently died was uncertain whether
Jamaica “lay in the Mediterranean, the Baltic, or in the moon.” Otis assured
American readers that the man described New England as an “island,” con-
sisting of “two provinces and two colonies, and according to the undoubted
bounds of their charters, contain[ed] more land than there is in the three
kingdoms.”36 Again, by pointing out these alleged “geographical blunders”
Otis drew attention to his own generation’s suspicion that no one in En-
gland cared enough about the American colonies to learn the difference
between imagined islands and a real continent.
However credible such tales of gross ignorance seemed to the Ameri-
cans, they really got it all wrong. Of course, many contemporary English au-
thors described everyone who had had the ill fortune to be born outside the
realm as inferior, but it was most certainly not the case that people living in
the mother country ignored the possessions that Great Britain had acquired
throughout the world. Rather, they thought about them within a mental frame-
work in which precise cultural and social detail did not count for much. Con-
temporary English men and women who made “geographical blunders”
perceived the American colonies as a vast, somewhat ill-defined field of com-
mercial opportunity. To be sure, scholars and jurists sometimes discussed the
status of the British colonies within an obscure language of international law,
and in learned treatises they drew upon noted European authorities such as
Hugo Grotius and Samuel Pufendorf to describe and defend an empire that
by the early eighteenth century had come to rival those of France and Spain.37
Whether the British system more closely resembled the empires of ancient
Rome or Greece—a subject of contemporary scholarly debate—did not seem
particularly compelling for the likes of Josiah Wedgwood, a marketing ge-
nius who regarded Americans as potential consumers of goods manufac-
tured in England. In a 1766 letter Wedgwood asked a business associate,
“What do you think of sending Mr. Pitt [the British prime minister] upon
Crockery ware to America[?] A Quantity might certainly be sold there now
& some advantage made of the American prejudice in favour of that great
Man.”38 The new empire of goods provoked entrepreneurial imagination.
Indeed, when Wedgwood contemplated the possibilities of American trade,
he could hardly contain his enthusiasm. “I am rejoyced to know that you
have shipped off the Green and Gold [china],” he reported to a colleague.
“May the winds and seas be propitious and the invaluable Cargo be wafted
in safety to their destined Market, for the emolument of our American Breth-
ren and friends. . . . The demand for this said Cream colour, Alias Ivory still
increases. It is really amazing how rapidly the use of it has spread almost
over the whole globe, and how universally it is liked.”39
Since the end of the seventeenth century, English authors who explored
what would today be called “economic behavior” had marveled at the fluid-
ity of an entirely new business climate. These commentators tried to make
sense of the swirl of goods and capital as it moved from merchant to mer-
chant, from country to country, propelled along its way by innumerable
anonymous transactions, each reflecting the private and selfish interests of
specific agents but in totality generating a transfer of commodities and
money so massive that it quickly rendered obsolete traditional modes of
explanation.40 Many writers did not sharply distinguish between domestic
and foreign markets. They keenly appreciated that rising popular demand
within England was initially responsible for the accelerating velocity of eco-
nomic activity. As Daniel Defoe, a shrewd observer of the great circulation
of goods as well as an early novelist, declared in The Complete English Trades-
man, “in all these manufactures, however remote one from another, every
town in England uses something, not only of one or other, but of all the
rest: every sort of goods is wanted everywhere; and where they make one
sort of goods and sell them all over England, they at the same time want
other goods from almost every other part.” Defoe pointed to Norwich as an
example of how trade redefined the relationship between previously iso-
lated communities. The weavers of Norwich produced woollens, but how-
ever prosperous they seemed, these people depended on external sources of
raw materials and coal—in other words, on resources that connected re-
gions of the kingdom to each other in unprecedented ways. “From Lon-
don,” Defoe noted, “the goods go chiefly to the great towns, and from thence
again to the smaller markets, and from those to the meanest villages; so
that all the manufacturers of England, and most of them also of foreign
countries, are to be found in the meanest village, and in the remotest cor-
ner of the whole island of Britain; and are to be bought, as it were, at

everyone’s door.”41
Within this global frame of analysis, the colonies became an entirely
plausible extension of a burgeoning domestic commerce. As the velocity of
internal trade accelerated, British manufactured goods simply broke free of
locally defined circuits and were carried to distant colonial ports by the
centrifugal force of trade. John Campbell, a popular writer whom Samuel
Johnson once described as “the richest author that ever grazed the com-
mon of literature,” explained in his Political Survey of Britain that “in our
days the value, utility, and importance of the colonies in respect to this
Island have been by the evidence of facts put beyond all dispute. The Brit-
ish inhabitants in them draw some of the necessaries and many of the con-
veniences of life from hence. The supplying them with these is a new and
very great source of industry, which by affording employment to multi-
tudes, cannot but have an effect in augmenting the numbers as well as con-
tributing to the ease and happiness of our people at home.”42 As English
markets became saturated, merchants and manufacturers who viewed the
empire much as Wedgwood did, sought out new colonial buyers, anticipat-
ing huge profits in the fulfillment of growing provincial demand.43
Richard Rolt commented extensively on this buoyant commercial out-
look. His testimony is especially interesting because Rolt was a figure of a
new eighteenth-century “public sphere,” an imagined discursive space in
which authors without traditional court patronage spoke to and for the
members of a rising English middle class.44 In other words, like Campbell,
Rolt made a career within a highly commercialized society; to survive he
had to sell whatever he produced, be it popular songs, light opera, superfi-
cial histories, or in this case A New Dictionary of Trade and Commerce (1756).
And perhaps not surprisingly, he recycled commonplace observations, as if
by some rhetorical alchemy the density of platitudes might yield timeless
wisdom. In A New Dictionary, Rolt claimed that alleged authorities such as
Pufendorf had conjectured that “England was weakened by planting the
several colonies in America; and that it would have been more advanta-
geous, to have employed the colonists at home, in manufactures, and in the
herring fishery.” On matters of world trade, however, the German philoso-
pher clearly did not know what he was talking about. According to Rolt,
Pufendorf should have considered “that the commodities and manufac-
tures of a country have a certain limit, beyond which it is impossible they
should extend, without an alteration of circumstances; or, when they are
carried so high, as that no markets are to be found, domestic industry can
proceed no further.” The opening of a new American market had allowed
Great Britain to avoid an anticipated “stagnation in trade,” for, as Rolt re-
minded his readers, “the colonists established there take off much greater
quantities of the national commodities and manufactures than if they had
remained at home.”45 It is important to remember that these were very re-
cent developments—current events, as it were—and not changes that had
occurred in some dim Elizabethan past. Rolt was trying as best he could to
explain to contemporaries a situation that had no precedent. Another En-

glish writer, who signed his work “B. G., Esq.,” expressed the same point in
more direct prose: “[T]he principal Cornucopia of Great-Britain’s Wealth,
are its Colonies in America, which furnish the most profitable Succour to
their Mother Country, and which must every Year increase.”46
According to a chorus of admirers, the British commercial empire, un-
like those of its major European competitors, had acquired the characteris-
tics of a splendidly ordered Newtonian system. It struck contemporaries as
being natural, rational, and, most worthy of praise, balanced.47 Like the
famed balanced constitution—crown, lords, and commoners—which En-
glishmen and many French visitors endlessly described as a source of lib-
erty and prosperity, the empire of goods gained strength from equipoise.
The interests of the colonies complemented those of the metropolitan core;
the producers of raw staples became the consumers of articles manufac-
tured in other places. As Rolt observed, “commerce is that tie by which the
several, and even the remotest, parts of the British empire, are connected,
and kept together.”48 Everyone benefited from the circulation of trade as
goods moved through the arteries of commerce. Malachy Postlethwayt,
whose massive volumes describing the state of commerce achieved wide-
spread popularity, explained in the Universal Dictionary of Trade and Com-
merce: “Our manufactures are prodigiously increased, chiefly by the demand
for them in the plantations, where they at least take off one half, and supply
us with many valuable commodities for exportation, which is as great an
emolument to the mother-kingdom as to the plantations themselves.”49
Like other writers of the period, Benjamin Franklin applauded the el-
egance of the system’s design. He consciously adopted what he perceived as
the British perspective on commerce. Living at the time in London and try-
ing to pass himself off in the public journals as an authentic Englishman,
Franklin analyzed the state of imperial trade with almost scientific detach-
ment. Why, he asked readers of a metropolitan paper, had Spain been unable
to challenge successfully the productivity of British manufacturers? “The Rea-
sons are various,” Franklin acknowledged, but the central explanation for
Spain’s industrial stupor was the failure of its rulers to recognize that,
[a] Manufacture is Part of a great System of Commerce, which takes in Conveniencies
of various Kinds, Methods of providing Materials of all sorts, Machines for expediting
and facilitating Labour, all the Channels of Correspondence for vending the Wares,
the Credit and Confidence necessary to found and support this Correspondence, the
mutual Aid of different Artizans, and a thousand other Particulars, which Time, and
long Experience, have gradually established. A Part of such a System cannot support
itself without the Whole.50
Thomas Pownall, an acquaintance of Franklin’s who had been elected

a member of Parliament, echoed this conventional wisdom. In his influen-
tial 1764 essay entitled The Administration of the Colonies, Pownall inquired—
as perhaps did some of his political colleagues—of what use were the colonies
to England? What function did they serve? Not unexpectedly, the answer
was that they complemented the English economy. They helped maintain a
proper balance between producer and consumer. Indeed, as Pownall ar-

gued, however troublesome the American provinces may have appeared in
1764, Parliament should resist the temptation to tinker with a commercial
system that had evolved over the course of the eighteenth century, for “In
the establishing [of] colonies, a nation creates people whose labour, being
applied to new objects of produce and manufacture, opens new channels
of commerce, by which they not only live in ease and affluence within them-
selves, but, while they are labouring under and for the mother country . . .
become an increasing nation, of appropriated and good customers to the
mother country. These not only increase our manufactures, encrease our
exports, but extend our commerce; and if duly administered, extend the
nation, its powers, and its dominions, to wherever these people extend their
settlements.”51
English newspapers and the popular press carried many examples of
this kind of commercial analysis. To rehearse the general argument in all its
variant forms would serve no useful purpose. One instance, however, mer-
its special attention. During the early 1720s John Trenchard and Thomas
Gordon produced a series of journal essays known collectively as “Cato’s
political letters.” The authors excoriated the policies of Robert Walpole, the
leading cabinet member during this period, for undermining Britain’s bal-
anced constitution, for corrupting popular liberties, and for abusing the
freedom of the press. Although Trenchard and Gordon remained marginal
figures within England, they enjoyed a broad following in the American
colonies, where their shrill, almost conspiratorial commentary found a sym-
pathetic audience.52 But on the topic of England’s commercial system, the
two writers sounded remarkably complacent, repeating notions about im-
perial trade that few readers would have found objectionable. They ener-
getically promoted commercial growth. In one “letter” (1721) provocatively
entitled “Arts and Sciences the Effects of Civil Liberty only, and ever de-
stroyed or oppressed by Tyranny,” Trenchard and Gordon declared—again,
with an eye on Britain’s imperial rivals—that Spain and Portugal only weak-
ened their domestic economies by sending colonists to the New World. How
much superior the balanced British system appeared.
[Spain and Portugal] lost their people by sending them away to dig in the mines; and
we, by making the manufactures which they want, and the instruments which they
use, multiply ours. By this means every man that they send out of their country is a
loss to it, because the reason and produce of their labour goes to enrich rival nations;
whereas every man that we send to our plantations, adds to the number of our inhab-
itants here at home, by maintaining so many of them employed in so many manufac-
tures which they take off there; besides so many artificers in shipping, and all the
numerous traders and agents concerned in managing and venting the produce of the
plantations, when it is brought hither, and in bringing it hither. So that the English
planters in America, besides maintaining themselves and ten times as many Negroes,
maintain likewise great numbers of our countrymen in England.53
Whatever other lessons the American colonists may have taken from “Cato’s
political letters,” they did not learn from these pages to distrust mercantile
capitalism or to cherish economic self-sufficiency.
Much of the self-congratulatory rhetoric about commerce ignored the

fact that the British system had developed within a complex statutory frame-
work known as the Navigation Acts. These trade regulations reflected the
kind of mercantile—or more precisely, in this case, protectionist—think-
ing that Adam Smith excoriated in his Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of
the Wealth of Nations (1776). During the middle decades of the seventeenth
century, Parliament approved legislation designed primarily to prevent other
European nations—most notably the Dutch—from trading with the Ameri-
can colonies. The major Navigation Acts of the 1660s contained two essen-
tial features. First, Parliament ruled that merchants could transport certain
enumerated commodities—tobacco and naval stores, for example—only
to the mother country on English ships manned largely by English sailors.
The idea was not only to prohibit the Dutch from trading in American wa-
ters but also to encourage the training of common seamen whom the navy
could press into military service during times of war. Second, the Naviga-
tion Acts denied the colonists direct access to European markets. All Conti-
nental goods they purchased had to pass through an English port before
being dispatched to the New World, a cumbersome procedure that added
greatly to the cost of these items and effectively discouraged Americans from
forming strong commercial ties outside the British Empire. Although the
colonists initially attempted to circumvent these restrictions on free trade,
they soon discovered that obeying the laws brought more profit than did
the alternative.54
Whatever ends the economic planners of the seventeenth century may
have had in mind, they certainly did not have much to say about the signifi-
cance of the colonies as a privileged market for the manufactures of the
mother country. A hundred years later, however, English writers increas-
ingly justified the Navigation Acts in terms of American consumer demand.
British merchants found themselves in control of what has been described
as a huge “free-trade zone.”55 In other words, they were free to trade English
goods anywhere in the empire without having to worry about European
competitors. They enjoyed a commercial monopoly. This was ordinarily a
term of opprobrium in English politics, but since the American demand
for British exports was so lucrative, commentators usually took the high
road, stressing the extraordinary advantages to be derived from an empire
of consumer colonies. As an anonymous author in the Gentleman’s Maga-
zine proclaimed, “We [the people of England] reap from our Colonies the
compleat Benefit of Subjects, of free and rich Subjects, not by Taxes and
Tribute, but by Means of our Act of Navigation.” The protectionist legisla-
tion had paid off in a wholly unexpected manner. It guaranteed that Ameri-
can wealth “terminates here in the Purchase of our costly Manufactures.”56
The Navigation Acts encouraged a kind of contractual view of the func-
tion of commerce in the empire. Since the colonists never actually voted on
trade legislation, their role in this relationship was at best tenuous. For the
English, however, the system implied a certain rough reciprocity. On their
part, the people of the mother country generously provided good govern-
ment in the colonies as well as defense from foreign enemies such as the
French. In return for these considerations, the Americans agreed—at least
implicitly—to respect England’s commercial monopoly. They were the con-
sumers of goods, not manufacturers; they were Britain’s customers, not its
competitors. Thomas Pownall reduced this line of thinking to a few blunt
propositions: “As it is the right, so it becomes the duty of the mother coun-
try to nourish and cultivate, to protect and govern the colonies: which nur-
ture and government should precisely direct its care to two essential points.
1st, That all the profits of the produce and manufactures of these colonies
center finally in the mother country: and 2dly, That the colonies continue
to be the sole and proper customers of the mother country.”57
To be sure, the contractual defense of the commercial empire sparked
dissent. Adam Smith, for example, protested that commentators such as
Pownall exaggerated the economic value to the mother country of a pro-
tected American market. In Wealth of Nations, Smith observed, “A great
empire has been established for the sole purpose of raising up a nation of
customers who should be obliged to buy from the shops of our different
producers, all the goods with which these could supply them. For the sake
of that little enhancement of price which this monopoly might afford our
producers, the home-consumers have been burdened with the whole ex-
pense of maintaining and defending that empire.”58 But Smith’s was a soli-
tary voice, and a late-sounding one at that. At mid-century informed English
opinion firmly believed that the Navigation Acts benefited all the crown’s
subjects, even those who lived in America.
But at the end of the day, celebration of balance and reciprocity within a
new British empire—what Rolt enthusiastically termed “mutual benefit . . .
[and] mutual dependence”—approached intellectual dishonesty, something
that the system’s many apologists must surely have understood.59 The ulti-
mate justification for protectionist legislation was always the greater pros-
perity of the mother country. Notions of commercial reciprocity dissolved
rather swiftly when they came into conflict with English economic inter-
ests, and however much the popular authors of the period lavished praise
on a monopolistic system of trade, their loyalties remained thoroughly
English. Campbell, for example, revealed how easily people who wrote about
imperial commerce could abandon notions of “mutual dependence.” When
summarizing the dramatic effects of the Americans’ growing consumer de-
sire on the British economy, he insisted that “it is incontestibly evident, that
they [the colonists] have contributed greatly to increase our industry, and of
course our riches, to extend the commerce, to augment the naval power, and
consequently to maintain the grandeur and support the prosperity of the
mother country.”60 No one reading Campbell’s analysis could seriously doubt
that “our riches” meant English riches. Even Pownall, who fancied himself a
friend of the colonies, merged the language of trade and empire in a way that
drew attention to the possessive adjective “our.” The American provinces, he
concluded, “not only increase our manufactures, encrease our exports, but
extend our commerce; and if duly administered, extend the nation, its pow-
ers, and its dominions, to wherever these people extend their settlements.”61
The tone of this mid-eighteenth-century commercial literature strikes
the modern reader as blunt to the point of insensitivity. In their desire to
assure England’s expanding middle class that the British Empire worked
almost providentially to fulfill the economic and political ambitions of what
Adam Smith famously called “a nation of shopkeepers,” popular writers
risked insulting all those American consumers who had in fact infused the
entire system with new energy. One example was particularly revealing. In
1748 Robert Dodsley published Preceptor: Containing a General Course of
Education. By the standards of the day this two-volume work was an ex-
tremely successful venture, reappearing in several new editions over the next
quarter century. Dodsley was no hack writer. He enjoyed a modest reputa-
tion as a poet and dramatist; he was a patron of Samuel Johnson. Moreover,
he founded a highly regarded London bookstore. We can assume, there-
fore, that his views “On Trade and Commerce”—a long section in Precep-
tor—reflected informed opinion in the mother country.
Dodsley began by urging readers to view the colonists with a kinder
eye. He found it inexcusable that “even People of better Figure” regularly
expressed “Disdain and Contempt for their Countrymen in those Parts, as
if their Interests were as far removed from them as their Persons.” Such an
attitude, Dodsley argued, merely signaled that so-called educated men and
women did not fully comprehend how radically the Americans had trans-
formed the face of eighteenth-century England. Consumption of British
goods in a colony such as Virginia translated directly into domestic em-
ployment. America was the great marketplace. Sounding a lot like the vari-
ous royal governors who attempted to list all the British goods carried to
the New World, Dodsley explained that consumer demand in Virginia,
must be supplied from those Handicrafts and Mechanics that have most Hands in
their Service, such as Weavers, Shoemakers, Hatters, Ironmongers, Turners, Joiners,
Taylors, Cutlers, Smiths, Bakers, Brewers, Ropemakers, Hosiers, and indeed all Me-
chanics in England. . . . These Commodities sent thither, besides Linen, Silks, India
Goods, Wine, and other foreign Manufactures, are, Cloth, coarse and fine Serges, Stuffs,
Bays, Hats, and all Sorts of Haberdashers Ware; Hoes, Bills, Axes, Nails, Adzes, and
other Iron Ware; Cloaths ready made, Knives, Biscuit, Flour, Stockings, Shoes, Caps
for Servants, and in short, every Thing that is made in England.62
The lesson of Virginia repeated itself in each separate American colony.

If the provincials stopped buying manufactured goods, English society as a
whole would suffer. One did not have to like the colonists—something
Barnard and Otis discovered—but at least one should treat them with civil-
ity. This is the point in Dodsley’s analysis of the empire of goods where
condescension betrayed arrogance, and appeals to mutuality and under-
standing rang hollow. For however much English readers believed that Vir-
ginians “live exactly as we do,” they also knew that the purpose of the new
consumer colonies was to serve the mother country, in other words, “to
take off the Commodities and Manufactures, to employ the People, to in-
crease the Shipping, and to extend the Trade of this Nation.” Dodsley may
not have intended to treat the provincials with disdain, but he informed
them in no uncertain terms that it was their lot to “undergo all the Drudg-
ery and Labour” so that middle-class Englishmen—the “we” of this ac-
count—might “draw from thence annually immense Profits, in which the
People of the Plantations have no Share whatsoever. Such are the Preroga-
tives of a Mother-Country, and such and so great the Benefits she reaps by
being so!”63
IV
To a remarkable degree eighteenth-century Americans agreed with the likes
of Dodsley. Even colonists unfamiliar with the works of Campbell and Rolt—
in other words, the great majority of the population—would have charac-
terized the economic and political arguments that the English writers put
forward as accurate. After all, this commercial literature generally packaged
platitudes about trade as insights, and any modestly informed provincial
would have accepted it as an article of faith that the British Empire owed
much of its military strength and recent prosperity to commerce. Other
empires, they thought, had not been so fortunate. Those systems had co-
erced obedience, exploiting natives and settlers for short-term returns. But
blessedly, eighteenth-century Great Britain was different, perhaps, in the
long history of mighty empires, unique, for it nurtured loyalty by inviting
colonists to participate in trade. As an anonymous author in the New-York
Mercury insisted, colonial Americans believed that the mother country “had
laid the Foundation of the greatest Empire that ever existed: An Empire the
more glorious, as it was not to be founded on the Ruin and Destruction of
our own Species, but what is in the highest Degree laudable, the cultivating
and peopling [of] an immense Wilderness.” It is no wonder, then, that this
writer concluded, “We think ourselves at present the happiest people (with
respect to government) of any people under the sun, and really are so.” Eigh-
teenth-century Americans found themselves in a truly splendid situation,
for England not only protected freedom and property but also generously
allowed the colonists “so much trade as the wisdom of the nation has tho’t
proper to permit, as consistent with the interest of the whole.”64
Grateful provincials sometimes outdid themselves, claiming that com-
merce in itself was a positive social good. It sparked innovation as well as
hard work. Indeed, within an empire of trade people discovered that by at-
tending to their own personal well-being they promoted the general welfare.
At least in theory, that is how commerce affected social behavior. Sounding
much like his English counterparts, Amicus Reipublica—a Boston pamphle-
teer writing in 1731—announced that “Trade or Commerce, is an Engine of
State, to draw men in to business, for the advancing and ennobling of the
Rich, for the support of the Poor, for the strengthening and fortifying of the
State.” As his authority on this point, he cited not contemporary English
authors but rather Solomon of the Old Testament, a prescient patriarch

who apparently appreciated the benefits of “free and liberal Commerce.” In
case New England readers did not fully grasp the central proposition, Am-
icus Reipublica insisted “That Trade or Commerce is principally necessary to
a Peoples [sic] flourishing in the World.” It gave direction to diligence, for, in
the author’s cascading logic, “Labour will not be improved to any consider-
able degree of Wealth, without the advantage & encouragement of a profit-
able Commerce. In all Labour there is profit, because none will Labour, but
with a fore-sight of Profit, for Profit is the final Cause of Labour . . . so
Commerce is the Cause of Profit by Labour.”65 In 1753 the Independent Re-
flector pushed the economic analysis, insisting that commerce was the fun-
damental key to social progress. Provincial New York, it seemed, had “just
emerged from the rude unpolished Condition of an Infant Colony.” The
future looked promising, however, for within an empire that secured lib-
erty and property, “Commerce stretches forth its golden Arms to our Mer-
chants; and our Situation is so pre-eminently advantageous for Navigation,
that I am persuaded it will be our own Faults, if we do not extend and
increase our Trade beyond our Neighbours and Competitors.”66
Again, like popular English writers of the day, Americans commended
the new British commercial system—the foundation of a free and happy
empire—as balanced, natural, and rational. What is more, they also knew
their proper place within this intricate structure. They were consumers. That
was their major function in the grand design, a condition that they seem to
have found not the slightest bit demeaning. It had not always been so. The
first settlers struggled merely to survive. But the logic of historical develop-
ment transformed them into eager and knowledgeable consumers, in other
words, into people who worked the fields and plantations of the New World
so that they could purchase the manufactured articles that in turn sustained
England’s prosperity. As George Mason, an extremely well read Virginian,
explained to his less studious neighbor George Washington, “Our supply-
ing our Mother-Country with gross Materials, & taking her Manufactures
in Return is the true Chain of Connection between us; these are the Bands,
which, if not broken by Oppressions, must long hold us together, by
maintain[in]g a constant Reciprocation of Interest.”67
In his highly influential Letters from a Pennsylvania Farmer (1768), John
Dickinson explained exactly how such “a constant Reciprocation” had de-
veloped. Long ago—certainly before commerce had become so significant
in shaping human affairs—colonies were established “by warlike nations to
keep their enemies in awe; to relieve their country, over-burthened with
inhabitants; or to discharge a number of discontented and troublesome
citizens.” But within a period of living memory, the entire justification for
colonies had changed, at least within Great Britain. Dickinson postulated
that “in more modern ages, the spirit of violence being in some measure . . .
sheathed in commerce, colonies have been settled by the nations of Europe
for purposes of trade. These purposes were to be attained, by the colonies
raising for their mother country those things which she did not produce
herself; and by supplying themselves from her with things they wanted. These
were the national objects, in the commencement of our colonies, and have
been uniformly so in their promotion.”68 The Letters were published, of
course, during a moment of intense imperial crisis, but however great their
anger at parliamentary taxation, Dickinson and Mason could still appreci-
ate how in theory colonial commerce was supposed to operate, a self-sus-
taining balance of the interests of buyers and sellers, of consumers and
producers. And in point of fact, the imperial system had worked almost as
smoothly as Dickinson claimed. For the most part, mid-century Americans
obeyed the Navigation Acts, and while smugglers have captured the imagi-
nation of some modern historians, most merchants carried American staples
to the mother country and English manufactures to the colonies in British
ships manned by British crews.69
V
Within a standard imperial rhetoric celebrating the glories of commerce,
the Americans stressed several themes that figured only marginally in En-
glish writings. Perhaps as a way to rationalize their obvious dependence on
the manufactures of the mother country, the colonists attempted to trans-
form necessity into a virtue. Whatever the motive, Americans depicted con-
sumption within the empire as in some measure a demonstration of loyalty
to Great Britain. To be sure, buying English goods could expose the colo-
nists to serious debt, and it was a constant challenge for the Americans to
raise enough money to participate in this new eighteenth-century market-
place. Nevertheless, a commercial empire providing so many military and
political benefits certainly merited personal sacrifice; American consump-
tion—even when it clearly compromised one’s own economic interests—
became, in fact, a seal of imperial patriotism.
This is exactly what the Reverend Jared Eliot, a Connecticut minister
who badgered ordinary New England farmers into adopting more efficient
agricultural techniques, argued in an essay on “Field-Husbandry” published
in 1759. Eliot advised local cultivators to experiment with the production of
silk, an endeavor that Americans had been contemplating with no practical
results ever since the English first arrived in the New World. Why, Eliot’s
readers must have wondered, had he bothered to revive such an unpromis-
ing enterprise? Anticipating the force of popular skepticism, the minister
observed, “We labour under such difficulties to make returns for goods
imported [from England], that many have tho’t it would be best that we
should make our own clothes, and by this means lessen our importation,
which, indeed, would be better than to run into an endless and irrecover-
able debt.” But self-reliance of this sort created a major ethical problem—at
least, it did for Eliot. Within the British commercial system, colonial pro-
duction of cloth “would make us less useful to England, from whom we
derive; and from whom we have receiv’d such favours and assistance.” No
truly patriotic farmer, Eliot insisted, would knowingly set himself up as a

competitor to the weavers of the mother country. Silk, however, was an-
other matter. By producing this valuable material, the Americans might even
“increase our importation.” According to Eliot’s calculations, “the same cost,
labour, and time” the farmers currently expended to obtain one yard of
English cloth might, if rechanneled into the production of a saleable item
like silk, “procure two yards of the same sort of cloth.” For the loyal colo-
nist, more income meant more consumption.70
The minister employed the same curious patriotic logic to develop a
highly original attack on slave labor. Eliot objected to slavery not on moral
grounds, as did contemporary Quakers, but rather because unfree workers
were by definition limited consumers and, as such, failed to advance the
greater commercial welfare of the British Empire. “As slaves spend but little,”
he explained, presumably to an American audience that extended beyond
the boundaries of New England, “there will not be a proportionable de-
mand for English goods.” Freedom was not only intrinsically good, it also
strengthened the entire economy. “People of a free condition,” reasoned Eliot,
“live at an higher rate, spend more, and consequently their demand for
goods will be larger: If these free people raise, and export, so much, as to pay
for them, they will be so much more useful, to the mother country.”71
At least one provincial writer regarded arguments in favor of the patri-
otic imperial consumer as utterly fatuous. If nothing else, William Douglass’s
fierce determination to counter this line of thinking suggests just how popu-
lar it had become in the colonies. Douglass, a Scottish doctor living in Bos-
ton, complained in his ill-tempered history of the “British Settlements” that
“Encouraging of a great Consumption of British Goods by Luxury and ex-
travagant Equipage in our Colonies, is thought by some wrong-headed Men
to be a Benefit to the Mother Country.” Such a claim, Douglass asserted,
amounted to little more than self-serving twaddle. Indeed, it was “a grand
Mistake.” Patriotic consumption was one thing, foolish luxury quite an-
other. “Industry and Frugality in all Subservients is requisite,” he told Ameri-
can readers, who probably did not appreciate being labeled “Subservients.”
“Otherways they [the provincials] cannot long afford to continue this Con-
sumption reckoned a Benefit to Great-Britain.”72 Eliot would not have taken
issue with this proposition. After all, bankrupt colonists could not do much
to advance the interests of the empire.
However the colonists construed loyalty to the British Empire—and
the impulse to define consumption as a form of patriotism seems to have
been the product of a peculiar and unprecedented set of historical condi-
tions—they shared with English writers a conviction that commerce im-
plied reciprocity. A lot of Americans repeated this commonplace, but none
warmed more enthusiastically to the task than Stephen Watts, one of four
finalists in Philadelphia for the 1766 “Mr. Sargent’s Prize-Medal.” Each con-
testant spoke to an assigned topic, “The Reciprocal Advantages of a Per-
petual Union Between Great-Britain and Her American Colonies.” Ignoring
altogether the question of imperial patriotism, Watts—about whom almost
nothing is known—concentrated on the expectation of profit. Empire was

not a matter of emotional identity; it was a business relationship, best ana-
lyzed in terms of costs and benefits. “I hope therefore to make it appear,”
Watts explained, “that a reciprocal emolument will arise from a perpetual
union between Britain and her American Colonies.” Emolument here meant,
of course, return on investment. The mother country could anticipate a great
enlargement of “her trade and commerce,” thus guaranteeing that it would
“become still more rich and powerful.” The colonists’ side of the imperial
bargain was the assurance of military protection and, perhaps more interest-
ing in this context, the prospect of being “supplied with the conveniences of
life at a cheaper rate, and of a better quality than if manufactured by them-
selves.” According to Watts, even though “it is from Great-Britain, that the
Colonies import almost every thing, requisite for cloathing, agriculture, and
other uses,” the empire was still for the Americans a very good deal.73
However appealing the prospect of better goods at lower prices, Watts’s
argument for commercial reciprocity failed to address what was for many
colonists the most difficult issue. The partners in this commercial relation-
ship were not by any stretch of the imagination equals, and because of the
obvious disparity in power, Americans sometimes found it hard to explain
exactly how over time they proposed to uphold their side of the imperial
compact. How could they pretend that claims to “mutual dependence” meant
anything other than their own commercial inferiority and, by extension,
their political vulnerability? Although the possibility of a continuously ex-
panding colonial consumption appeared the most persuasive response, the
discourse of commercial mutuality—unlike that of commercial patri-
otism—expressed itself in the language of American generosity rather than
obligation, of common expectations in the imperial marketplace rather than
on blind colonial obedience. From the perspective of profitable trade-offs,
it seemed prudent for the uncertain provincial partner to remind the En-
glish not only that the Americans purchased huge quantities of manufac-
tures but also that they would surely be wanting more in the future. Rising
consumption was not so much a proof of imperial patriotism as it was an
indication of the colonies’ potential economic leverage within a developing
commercial system.
John Dickinson made this point in a pamphlet entitled The Late Regu-
lations Respecting the British Colonies (1765). Somewhat disingenuously, he
observed that “The American continental colonies are inhabited by persons
of small fortunes who are so closely employed in subduing a wild country,
for their subsistence . . . that they have not time nor any temptation to apply
themselves to manufactures.” Necessity, not patriotism, kept these diligent
frontiersmen from making the items that they obtained from England. It
required no great insight to see that these imported goods exceeded any-
thing the colonists could produce “in workmanship and cheapness.”
Dickinson, of course, invented a population of American “subsistence” farm-
ers to lay claim to genuine commercial reciprocity. “Hence arises the im-
portance of the colonies to Great-Britain,” he wrote. “Her prosperity depends
on her commerce; her commerce on her manufactures; her manufactures

on the markets for them; and the most constant and advantageous markets
are afforded by the colonies.”74
Americans such as Dickinson always sounded somewhat defensive, even
querulous, when advancing arguments for genuine commercial reciproc-
ity. Their tone seemed to betray a secret suspicion that the consumer’s plea
for mutual respect might not make a deep inpression on the English. Ear-
lier in the eighteenth century, for example, a Boston newspaper assured its
anxious subscribers that Americans would certainly be more highly esteemed
within the empire “if they at Home were rightly inform’d of the Value and
Benefit this Country is to the Trade and Manufactories of Great Britain.” In
an attempt to prove that the colonies really counted for something in the
larger imperial scheme, that they deserved respect, this anonymous author
did what so many other American writers did during this period; he trans-
formed himself into a commercial booster for the underappreciated Ameri-
cans. “It is supposed,” he announced, “that this Country pays to Britain for
the manufacturies [sic] consumed here upwards of Two Hundred Thousand
Pounds a Year Sterling; a pretty Customer, for an Infant Colony.”75 The not
so subtle message, of course, was that if “an Infant Colony” like Massachu-
setts could perform so impressively, then a mature one might creditably
present itself as indispensable to the continuing prosperity of the mother
country. Genuine commercial reciprocity was on the imperial horizon. The
inaugural issue of Andrew Bradford’s American Magazine (Philadelphia),
one of the first periodicals published in the colonies, declared as a matter of
fact in 1741 that England owed its recent economic success to the colonial
demand for manufactured goods, and then, as if heroic consumption were
not a sufficient contribution to the triumph of the empire, added defiantly
that it is “likely to be much more so.”76
As one might anticipate, Benjamin Franklin played masterfully on the
theme of infinite consumer promise. In his ingenious demographic essay
entitled “The Increase of Mankind” (1751), he too held out the growth of co-
lonial demand as the proper index to the Americans’ standing within the
British Empire. If the upward trend continued—and he had no doubt that it
would—then the very concept of “mutual dependence” might take on new
meaning. At mid-century true commercial parity was still a possibility, a prom-
ise, rather than a reality. But for future Americans, Franklin believed, con-
sumption would be the way to ensure British respect. “In Proportion to the
Increase of the Colonies,” he observed, “a vast Demand is growing for British
Manufactures, a glorious Market wholly in the Power of Britain, in which
Foreigners cannot interfere, which will increase in a short Time even beyond
her Power of supplying, tho’ her whole Trade should be to her Colonies.”77
As part of this mid-century assemblage of assumptions and beliefs about
commerce in the empire, Americans insisted that trade could not possibly
flourish unless consumers and producers, buyers and sellers, experienced
in their everyday lives maximum political freedom. The notion that com-
merce required liberty did not originate with the colonists. English writers
often praised Britain’s famed balanced constitution as a source of general

economic prosperity. Trade despised tyranny; arbitrary rule invited cor-
rupt officials to interrupt the smooth flow of goods and staples. And, of
course, the crucial incentive in making money—in putting capital at risk—
was the knowledge that the law protected private property. “Industry hath
its foundation on liberty,” Rolt observed in his New Dictionary of Trade and
Commerce, “and those men, who either are actual slaves, or have reason to
believe their freedom precarious, will never succeed in trade; which thrives
and flourishes most in climates of liberty and ease.”78 Rolt merely repeated
what contemporaries would have identified as cliché.
However common the language of trade and freedom, it resonated par-
ticularly strongly in the colonies. In his Observations on the Importance of the
Northern Colonies (1750), Archibald Kennedy, a Scotsman who moved to
America in the late seventeenth century and became an important figure in
the political affairs of New York, affirmed as a given that where people “are
numerous and free, they will push what they think is for their Interest, and all
restraining Laws they have no Hand in contriving or making of will be thought
Oppression; especially such Laws, as according to the Conceptions we have
of English Liberty.”79 Some years later, Dickinson repeated the point in his
popular Letters, claiming that “all history” demonstrated that “trade and free-
dom are nearly related to each other.”80 Even Americans who wrote letters to
the local newspapers took it for granted that commerce would fail if deprived
of liberty. An excellent example of what became a reflexive colonial belief was
provided by a Connecticut author who identified himself in print only as “X.”
He began his piece with a totally unobjectionable observation:
The experience of every age, and nation from the remotest knowledge, down to the
present-day, join in asserting this fact; that no nation, ever became rich or poor, but in
proportion to the increase, or decrease of their trade, and what is of vastly more con-
sequence, commerce; [it] has thro’ every period, gone hand in hand with liberty; rose,
flourish’d and declin’d together.81
Although mid-century Americans appreciated the many benefits that

flowed from imperial commerce—after all, they fancied themselves as the
freest and most prosperous European colonists in the New World—they
frequently grumbled that they found it much harder to participate fully in
this so-called balanced system of trade than it did their English partners.
British manufacturers, the colonists claimed, could count on American con-
sumer demand; all they had to do was fill colonial orders. But for the pro-
vincial consumers, the purchase of huge quantities of British exports put
them at such an economic disadvantage that they occasionally questioned
the logic of mutual dependence and mutual benefits. The problem resulted
from a chronic imbalance of payments. Since the English never spent as
much on American products as Americans spent on British manufactures,
the colonists had to scramble to find additional sources of cash to cover a
serious shortfall in the Anglo-American consumer trade. Colonial merchants
responded to the challenge with great initiative, opening up new markets,
which in fact helped generate the specie needed to pay for all the cloth,
ceramics, and metal items that Americans received from the mother coun-
try. The provincials, no doubt, underestimated the business risks confront-
ing English merchants and manufacturers. Bankruptcies were not infrequent;
even major London commercial houses felt extremely vulnerable to sud-
den calls on credit.
Nevertheless, from the colonial perspective, it seemed that Americans
had to work ever harder just to maintain a fiction of commercial reciprocity
within the empire. “Our importation of dry goods from England is so vastly
great,” explained William Smith, a leading political figure in New York City,
“that we are obliged to betake ourselves to all possible arts to make remit-
tances to the British.” The busy merchants in his colony imported “cotton
from St. Thomas’s and Surinam; lime-juice and Nicaragua wood from
Curacao; and logwood from the bay, &c.,” and yet, no matter how cunningly
they schemed to finance the consumer trade, they always seemed to come up
short. The demand for British manufactures, Smith insisted, “drains us of all
the silver and gold we can collect.”82 Like Smith, Archibald Kennedy thought
that commercial reforms might reduce some of the structural tensions within
the empire, but he did not sound optimistic. “In Debt we are,” he announced
in 1750, “and in Debt we must be, for those vast Importations from Europe;
and as we increase, so will our Debts without, from the present Prospect of
Things, ever being able to make suitable Returns.” At the end of the day, it was
possible to imagine the Americans becoming “Bankrupts.”83
It was not that the colonists rejected the basic protectionist assump-
tions that underlay the British mercantile system. Rather, they insisted that
commercial reciprocity implied a kind of pragmatic fair play, for, as seemed
obvious to them, it made little sense in the long run to encourage colonial
consumption unless the provincials could expect realistically to pay for what
they had purchased. A short essay first published in the New-York Mercury
in 1764 betrayed what might be called a general feeling of ambivalent grati-
tude; that is, the colonists were at once thankful to be part of a great com-
mercial empire and worried about their economic ability to hold their own.
“We are not a rich people,” this anonymous writer observed, “[but] we en-
joy advantages equal to the richest and most opulent, having the neces-
saries of life in great abundance; and though, in order to procure one of
them (to wit, Cloathing) and many conveniencies, we are obliged to send
abroad all the cash we acquire, and as fast as we acquire it.” Just as his tone
suggested the possibility of genuine anger, the American author retreated,
protesting that even as the colonists sent their money to England, they rec-
ognized that the mother country “secures to us every thing else that is valu-
able in life, [and thus] we have no reason to repine.”84
VI
By the middle of the eighteenth century, Americans had cobbled together
various assumptions and beliefs about imperial commerce. The mental pro-
cess followed no clear logic. The colonists borrowed concepts from Euro-
pean sources, what we might today call “macro” explanations for economic
behavior. They also recast ideas about consumption and trade in light of
local experience. Whatever their intellectual merits, these shared notions
provided a framework that helped colonists make sense of a radical and
sudden transformation of the character of the Atlantic trade. For them, the
interpretation of imperial commerce spilled over into other topics, into dis-
cussions of liberty and patriotism, into the meaning of reciprocity between
colonies and mother country.85
In fact, commerce provided Americans with a fluid language of impe-
rial identity as well as a persuasive means for negotiating change. However
difficult it may have been for some Americans to accommodate to new
market conditions, they made no attempt—at least not on the level of pub-
lic rhetoric—to restore an earlier, simpler age. The challenge for ordinary
colonists was not how best to resist the imperatives of the mercantile sys-
tem but rather how most effectively to gain a measure of control over a
huge consumer-driven marketplace that had no historical precedent. They
sometimes analyzed their situation with a tough-mindedness that a later
age would associate with modernity. None had fewer illusions about the
nature of eighteenth-century commercial society than a Pennsylvania es-
sayist known only as “Colonus.” He contrasted the intense religiosity of the
Middle Ages with the more enlightened Anglo-American world of the eigh-
teenth century. “But now,” concluded Colonus, “religious, or indeed any
other principles are little regarded, any where, but as they can be made in-
struments, directly or indirectly, to promote trade; commercial principles
alone, seem to be uppermost every where. All the states of Europe, in short
all the world, appear at this time to be made after trade. . . . [It is] the only
means to acquire wealth.”86
Unlike shrill warnings about the spread of political corruption—the
type of conspiratorial rhetoric found in the writings of Trenchard and Gor-
don—the commercial discourse that we have examined provided colonists
with a more positive sense of themselves within an exciting, expanding,
and mighty empire of goods. The commercial assumptions of the day cer-
tainly did not persuade Americans that they were the hapless victims of
dark market forces beyond their control. Indeed, these arguments sanc-
tioned an active engagement with a world of trade, for within this new sys-
tem consumption presented itself as an opportunity enthusiastically to be
embraced.
It is not surprising, therefore, that provincials who shared these assump-
tions and beliefs came gradually to regard themselves as indispensable to
the genuine interests of the mother country. The British respected the colo-
nists—at least in theory—precisely because the Americans had demon-
strated themselves to be loyal consumers. And thus, by demanding so many
manufactured articles, they inevitably reinforced a growing feeling of em-
powerment within a commercial empire. Their market decisions really did
matter. To be sure, reciprocity brought the colonists comfort and pleasure.
But, as they fully appreciated, it also ensured the continuing prosperity of

the ordinary people of England.
Even during this earlier period, it is not hard to appreciate that com-
monplace notions about reciprocity provided the colonists with potent in-
tellectual resources that could under certain political conditions generate
resistance rather than encourage accommodation. The literature of con-
sumption flattered the Americans; it reminded them how much strength
they had within a new, rapidly growing empire of goods. The colonists were
bound to conclude that if, in fact, American consumption played such a
significant role in the prosperity of the mother country, then any interrup-
tion of that trade was likely to discomfort England’s rulers.
At mid-century no colonist pushed the logic of consumer patriotism
and reciprocity in this subversive direction. But for Americans who had
come to believe that trade without liberty represented a form of slavery,
who insisted that an empire that impoverished, even bankrupted, its own
best customers betrayed their trust, and who interpreted the concept of
commercial balance as truly guaranteeing “mutual benefits” and “mutual
dependence,” the manufactures of England had a high potential at moments
of stress to become politicized. Reciprocity betrayed required explanation.
“It was the interest of Great-Britain to encourage our dissipation and ex-
travagance,” David Ramsay insisted in 1778, “for the two-fold purpose of
increasing the sale of her manufactures, and of perpetuating our subordina-
tion. In vain we sought to check the growth of luxury, by sumptuary laws;
every wholesome restraint of this kind was sure to meet with the royal nega-
tive: While the whole force of example was employed to induce us to copy
the dissipated manners of the country from which we sprung.”87
Ramsay’s reflections on the empire of goods came after the decision for
independence had been made. Before the final break, however, we obtain a
sense of the significance of the issue of mutual dependence. The townsmen
of Harvard, Massachusetts, called an emergency meeting on February 18,
1773. A political crisis loomed; they feared violence. According to their mod-
erator, the Reverend Joseph Wheeler, they insisted “That any Disputes with
our Parent Country is what we take no pleasure in, and would be glad [they]
might be avoided if possible consistent with fidelity to ourselves and man-
kind in general.” At this crucial moment, the farmers of Harvard also
poignantly reminded the British Parliament to remember—before it was
too late—that “our Forefathers’ coming into the Wilderness, in leaving His
Majesty’s Dominions and Encreasing the Commerce of Great Brittain [sic]
has tended more to the Emolument of the Mother Country than if they had
remained in their native land; and that the profit which Great Brittain an-
nually receives from us in the way of trade is more than we receive from
them.”88 A few months later these same colonists voted to send aid to their
neighbors in Boston, who had just destroyed the famed shipment of tea.
Within the empire of goods, these Americans reluctantly concluded that
they were no longer receiving value for money.
Only a people who had come to take “galloping consumption” for

granted could fully have comprehended the revolutionary implications of
an organized disruption of the imperial market. As we shall discover, Ameri-
cans like the writer who signed his essay Colonus would turn the language
of commerce on its head, reminding an unhappy generation, “When there-
fore the Americans consider their situation, in all its circumstance, and know
themselves to be the best customers Great-Britain has, for her wares: When,
instead of that protection, they reasonably expected from her, as a return
for the custom they find themselves most grievously oppressed . . . [w]hat
more natural, more justifiable method could they pursue, than to resolve to
set about manufacturing themselves and not to import a farthing of British
goods they can possibly do without?”89
4
Vade Mecum: The Great
Chain of Colonial
Acquisition
A vade mecum is a small guidebook whose

Latin name might best be translated “go
with me.” For many centuries merchants
carried such manuals along unfamiliar roads to distant places where strang-
ers calculated weights and measures according to local custom. In 1731 the
Reverend Thomas Prince, a Boston minister, produced the first vade mecum
for a region of colonial America. Despite its ambitious title—The Vade
Mecum for America—the publication seems to have been intended only for
“Traders and Travellers” eager to do business in New England.
Prince provided tables for computing interest and values, a directory
of major towns, a description of principal roads, a list of Britain’s kings and
queens, and, most unexpectedly for a Congregational stronghold, a sched-
ule for the General Meetings of the Baptists and Quakers. In a short intro-
duction, Prince trumpeted the “great Usefulness” of his handbook for “the
British Provinces in AMERICA.” In fact, the entrepreneurial minister noted
that a work that could be easily fitted into a jacket pocket had been “long
desired.” For Prince, the initial pressrun represented only a start. In future
editions he planned to improve the guide by reaching out to other main-
land British provinces. As he explained, “[We] should with Pleasure have
Proceeded to South-Carolina, if we cou’d have gotten due Intelligence.”1
Prince never produced a second edition. His failure, however, should
not discourage us from attempting to do so. In fact, the original project
invites us to reimagine the muddy, often impassible country roads that tested
the resolve of so many mid-eighteenth-century commercial travelers. As
darkness overtook them, they may have consulted a vade mecum, hoping
desperately to reach an inn or ordinary before nightfall. Perhaps over a rum
drink late in the evening they asked local farmers how selling imported
goods to Baptists or Quakers differed from dealings with Congregational-
ists. These were conversations within and about a new consumer market-
vade mecum N 103
Frontispiece of “The DEALERS Pocket Companion,” a vade mecum for commercial travelers
published on the eve of American independence. Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library,
Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island.
place. They occurred in rural settings, in stores, in the offices of country

merchants. Such exchanges—themselves provincial expressions of an em-
pire of goods—represented the human face of a great chain of acquisition
stretching from the new manufacturing centers of the mother country to
eager colonial consumers. We are concerned in our own vade mecum with
more than informative lists of names and places. Eighteenth-century ped-
dlers and traders—as well as the less peripatetic storekeepers—converted
the dreams of colonial consumers into reality, into objects that they could
actually see, smell, and touch. As brokers of material change on this inti-
mate level, they bid us to compose a vade mecum sensitive to the cultural
nuances of an expanding consumer market. Unlike the second edition that
Prince once planned, our guidebook will reconstruct a complex and inno-
vative system of merchandising, exploring different sites of distribution
throughout the Atlantic World as we follow the “Baubles of Britain” from

bustling ports to rural villages, from stores to consumers, and sometimes
even from legitimate buyers to gangs of thieves. It will introduce a world of
easy credit and clever advertising, of chain stores and massive public auc-
tions, of largely anonymous men and women in search of what one con-
temporary felicitously called “cheap bargains.”2 Our new guide to colonial
merchandising depicts an eighteenth-century colonial society strikingly
more modern than the one that we may have expected.
The guide adds another key piece to the overall argument. We have
reviewed evidence that testifies to the quantity of British manufactures
shipped to America at mid-century. We have also seen that the “consumer
colonies” forced themselves onto the consciousness of policy makers and
commercial writers, thus sparking a radical reappraisal of the relation of
commerce to empire. But a central element in the analysis is still missing.
We need to know more about how the new consumer market actually oper-
ated, about the availability of imported goods. The reason should be obvi-
ous. If most Americans could not in fact have purchased what they desired,
or if inadequate personal resources or primitive marketing conditions ob-
structed the flow of goods into modest households scattered from New
Hampshire to Georgia, then it will be very hard for us to link colonial con-
sumers to the political rebels who later demanded independence.
II
Our discussion of distribution and merchandising begins—a bit arbitrarily
perhaps—not with the merchant houses of Boston, Charleston, and Phila-
delphia but rather at the other end of the great chain of acquisition, where
we encounter the burglars and shoplifters who understood as well as any of
their contemporaries the wonderful new opportunities presented by an
empire of goods. Throughout history, persons of a larcenous turn of mind
have responded imaginatively to economic change. For such people, inno-
vative technologies redefine the possibilities of crime. It does not romanti-
cize wrongdoing to observe that thieves—like established storekeepers and
their regular customers—closely monitor evolving popular tastes in mate-
rial culture. They know as well as honest businessmen what a community
values; they develop a keen eye for quality and authenticity, even if, for rea-
sons of their own, they do not participate in legitimate channels of distri-
bution. As one legal casebook entitled Pleas of the Crown (1788) explained,
England’s “increase of commerce, opulence, and luxury” had spawned a
“variety of temptations to fraud and rapine.”3 Not surprisingly, the robbers
of late-colonial America accommodated themselves to the sudden flood of
British manufactured goods, demonstrating once again that men and
women on the margins of society fully appreciate how the mainstream de-
fines desire in a consumer marketplace.
vade mecum N 105
An announcement of a “Burglary” in Connecticut suggests that colonial thieves kept up with

the latest fashions in imported goods. Connecticut Courant, 27 January 1772. Connecticut
Historical Society, Hartford, Connecticut.
Thomas Dwyer was the colonial shopkeeper’s nightmare. An Irishman

who found himself in Massachusetts Bay, Dwyer possessed equal measures
of cunning and charm, and during the late 1730s he often visited Boston
stores, striking up conversations with proprietors while carefully assessing
the different yard goods on offer. Even though some colonists later depicted
him as a “strolling Fellow,” nothing about his physical appearance initially
seems to have put obliging clerks on their guard. A newspaper described
him as “a lusty full fac’d Fellow of pale Complection, having long strait
black Hair.” Dwyer took advantage of the storekeeper’s eagerness to please,
developing a distinctive mode of criminal operation that earned him the
disarming sobriquet “Velvet Merchant.” According to one account, Dwyer
entered local shops “under the Pretense of buying; but while he was in-
specting or bargaining for [certain goods] . . . improv’d any Opportunity
that presented [itself] to convey what lay most convenient for his Purpose
under his great Coat or into his Pocket, and then, after usual Compliments,
walk off with his Booty.”
Predictably, the Velvet Merchant always demanded quality goods. Even
his victims marveled at Dwyer’s audacity. On one occasion, he purloined
an entire bolt of black velvet—the best cloth in town—but instead of flee-
ing the scene of the crime, as any prudent thief would have done, Dwyer
“carry’d it to a Taylor’s in Town, in order to make a Suit of Clothes for

himself, and insist’d upon being present while it was cut up, lest any of it
shou’d be cabbag’d.” At this time “cabbage” meant to pilfer or to appropri-
ate surreptitiously, a fraud almost always associated with tailors who ap-
parently secreted away odd bits of fabric while making garments. Perhaps if
the Velvet Merchant had been of a more trusting character he would have
avoided arrest. When he came before the magistrates of Suffolk County in
1738, charged with theft, it was reported that “A Variety of Goods were found
in his Custody.” The inventory of loot included “Sundry Handkerchiefs,
sundry Pieces or Remnants of Garlick, sundry Remnants of Persian, a Piece
of Blue Stuff, Buttons, Pins, a new pair of Leather Breeches, etc.” Dwyer
protested that he had purchased “most of them,” but a stream of shopkeep-
ers came forward to identify items that had recently gone missing. The court
sent the culprit to the Boston jail, a building unable to hold such a clever
prevaricator, and within days the Velvet Merchant broke out with eight other
men, including “John Baker, (an Indian) and a Negro Fellow named Jocco.”
Even then, the editor of the local newspaper found reports of Dwyer’s infa-
mous greatcoat amusing. This talented Irishman, the journal observed, “tho’
in nothing else worthy [of] our Imitation, yet is certainly a Pattern of Fru-
gality and good Husbandry, if we may depend upon what is affirmed in the
Advertisements for apprehending him, where, after his Person is described,
’tis said, He had on when he went away, a dark blue Coat, about TWENTY
FIVE Years of Age.”4
John Williams, another careful student of consumer society, died young.
In a short account of his life composed on the eve of execution in 1767
when he was only nineteen, Williams explained to those who might learn
from his own misadventures that he had come originally from a “middling
Family” in Bilesford, a small village located a few miles outside Derby, En-
gland. Whatever support his parents may have provided—and this did not
include, in Williams’s opinion, a proper “Education”— he found himself “a
Vagabond in the Streets.” Things swiftly went from bad to worse. As a boy
of only twelve he traveled the low road to London, “thieving all the Way,”
and after a series of personal disappointments, in crime and love, the quick-
witted teenager decided it was time for a fresh start in the colonies. Once
again Williams misjudged the situation. Without prospects in legitimate
trade, he became a “strolling Fellow”— much like Thomas Dwyer—and had
since then “been constantly strolling, in all Parts from New Hampshire to
Georgia, robbing, stealing, pilfering, when ever Opportunity offer’d.”
Although he would not have described himself in precisely these terms,
Williams was an articulate representative of a burgeoning commercial em-
pire, just as were the British soldiers and itinerant ministers who traveled
the same roads. Passing himself off to strangers as an honest peddler, Wil-
liams knew full well that the colonists were so eager to acquire British im-
ports that they would never scruple to challenge his credentials. In his pack
he carried an impressive assortment of “Needles, Pins, Garters, Buckles,
Laces, Fans, &c.. acquired by stealing.” By his own admission, Williams took
vade mecum N 107
advantage of “Country Girls.” A “Present” usually won their confidence,

and while they were contemplating his selection of goods, Williams recon-
noitered the house for “any Thing valuable that he could conveniently carry
off.” The next step required only a demonstration of charm. Williams would
request lodging, informing his hosts during the course of the evening that
he intended to depart well before dawn. As the family slept, Williams made
off with small items. Sometimes his victims pursued him, but, ever lucky,
he always escaped, pushing north through Virginia, Pennsylvania, and New
Jersey. In Albany he ran off with “the Wife of an honest Man.” But New York
City proved Williams’s undoing. Arrested for theft and sentenced to the
gallows, the young man entertained local authorities to the end. “A Vein of
Humour and Pleasantry runs thro’ his whole Account,” noted one minister,
but then, realizing the danger of turning a seductive peddler into a popular
hero, he added, “Yet at the last he [Williams] says, that since he must enter
into Eternity, he is sorry for his Misdeeds.”5 Like the curious “Country Girls,”
the Derby peddler had simply wanted to share in a new material culture
that he could never quite afford.
If contemporary mid-century accounts are to be believed, John Mor-
rison and his confederates terrorized consumers throughout the Philadel-
phia area. The gang of robbers came into existence sometime during the
winter of 1750, an event made strikingly manifest “by the unusual Frequency
of Robberies, Thefts, and Burglaries.” Morrison, a recent arrival from Ire-
land, seems to have masterminded the group’s criminal activities. He had
come to America seven years earlier as an indentured servant. After obtain-
ing his freedom, Morrison began appearing in the streets of Philadelphia as
an urban peddler, “selling Limes and Onions from House to House.” This
modest business provided a convenient cover for his real interests. As the
good citizens of the city soon discovered, his hawking of limes and onions
“gave him an Opportunity of observing how the Windows and Doors were
fastened, where he purposed to make his Attempts; and of pilfering out of
Entries, &c. when he had knock’d and no body appear’d.” Morrison re-
cruited several associates, most of them former servants. Each person
brought a specific skill to the gang. Several specialized in fencing stolen
goods; others actually participated in the break-ins. None was more valu-
able than Elizabeth Robinson. Months later, after her arrest, Morrison de-
clared—a backhanded compliment from an Irish male—that “she was as
true-hearted a Woman as ever lived, tho’ an English Woman, and was better
than any two Men for his Work, being able to go up and down a Chimney
very dextrously.” Robinson also seduced one of her accomplices, a piece of
sexual gossip used against her at the trial.
The members of the Morrison gang might have escaped detection if they
had been able to keep quiet. But success went to their heads; they talked a
little too freely in local taverns. The display of consumer objects that one
would never have expected a former servant to own raised suspicion. The
entire scheme came undone after magistrates questioned Francis McCoy, an
Irish Protestant, about stolen goods. Although he protested his innocence,
authorities decided to arrest the man, and as McCoy was “taking off his
Shoes to put on the Irons, a stolen Necklace was found in one of them,
[and] he was struck dumb, being exceedingly confounded.” Suddenly, faced
with the possibility of capital punishment, other accomplices decided to
confess, or, as we might say, to turn state’s evidence. To be sure, one of the
confederates claimed hotly that he had actually purchased the many fine
objects found hidden in the gang’s hideout. When the arresting officers asked
him exactly how much he had paid for these items, he mentioned amazing
bargain rates, so low indeed “as render’d it very suspicious.” A law-abiding
person would surely have known how much fine cloth and metal goods
should cost in a proper store. The magistrates who policed an expanding
commercial society certainly did.
What gang members had to say in court confirmed the worst fears of
the good people of Philadelphia. At first, Morrison had been content to
steal only “Turkies and Ducks.” One thing led to another, however, and soon
the group began breaking into shops and houses, taking “some Wearing
Apparel, two Silver Spoons and a Silver Tea-Tongs.” As the local authorities
reported, “At length scarce a Night pass’d without an Attempt on one or
more Houses, and some of the Robberies were attended with Circumstances
that show’d a Boldness and Dexterity in the Actors, really surprizing.” The
busy criminals even had to obtain a special bag to carry their ever larger
hauls of “Booty.”
What most seemed to impress local authorities—other than the sugges-
tions of lewd sex—was how well informed Morrison and his friends were
about consumer fashion. Early on, the leader had insisted that the gang con-
centrate whenever possible only on “the best Shop Goods.” A pamphlet pub-
lished soon after three of the robbers had been hanged recounted in unusual
detail the various items that Morrison and the others had taken. Sections of
this publication read almost like contemporary newspaper advertisements, a
predictable phenomenon since some of these objects had only recently mi-
grated from the shelves of local stores to back-of-the-tavern fencing opera-
tions. Morrison remembered, for example, having “robb’d Mr. R— — d’s House
of two Silk Gowns, two other Gowns, three fine Aprons, a Tea Chest, some
Cambrick Handkerchiefs and other Things, which one of his Companions
carried to New-York for Sale.” The criminal’s narrative included teakettles,
pewter basins, silver utensils, a wide selection of cloth, a pair of stays, a calico
gown, a silk waistcoat, and a scarlet long cloak. “Mrs. G—— h’s House” yielded
“a Camblet Cloak, a Pot of Butter, a blue Cloth Jacket, a pair of black Silk
Stockings, two pair of Pumps.” These goods found a ready market in Lancaster,
Pennsylvania, some miles outside Philadelphia.
In the end a colonial court saw no option other than executing such
hardened criminals. When he heard the sentence, Morrison “rav’d and swore
and curs’d.” On the way to the gallows, a great procession of townspeople
accompanied the condemned thieves, who were ghoulishly forced to drag
empty coffins along the path. Clergymen offered soothing words. At the
last moment, the governor of Pennsylvania pardoned one member of the
vade mecum N 109
gang. Poor Elizabeth Robinson was not so favored, even though she thought
that she had been saved when the rope broke. The hangman repeated the
operation, and on the second attempt she died. So too did McCoy and
Morrison. Before Morrison’s execution, he offered an apology for the group’s
activities. “To support our selves in Idleness, and maintain our expensive
Vices, we plundered the Honest and Industrious; we robbed even the Poor of
their Little, which they had gained with hard Labour, and hoped to enjoy
with Comfort.”6 It would have been improper form, of course, for Morrison
at that moment to have expressed satisfaction at having distributed so many
consumer goods at low prices to ordinary people who hoped—like the
members of the gang themselves—to acquire the newest material comforts
of the age.
Like John Morrison, Isaac Frasier was a good judge of the latest British
imports. He almost always worked alone, however, and for several years
during the 1760s this troubled young
man traveled the main roads of New
England, from Salem to New Haven,
breaking into stores and houses. At the
time of his execution in 1768 Frasier’s life
seems to have spun out of control. He sim-
ply moved from place to place, in a fre-
netic search for imported goods. Frasier
himself expressed surprise that he had
fallen so far so fast. He had been born in
1740 to a hardworking Rhode Island fam-
ily, and his major handicap was poverty.
His father died during the famous
Louisbourg campaign of 1745—the New
Englanders’ great victory over the French
in Canada—and although his mother
tried to provide the rudiments of educa-
tion, Frasier later confessed, “I was learned
no more than just to know my letters, and
write my name, which I have since entirely
forgot.” Apprenticed to an extremely
unpleasant shoemaker, Frasier struggled
to master a legitimate trade, but at age The “Boldness and Dexterity” of the Morrison
gang frightened the hard-working consumers
sixteen he decided that he could no longer of mid-century Philadelphia. Courtesy of the
tolerate his overbearing employer. He Rosenbach Museum and Library, Philadelphia,
ran away to join the army, a mistake, Pennsylvania.
since military service seems only to have
schooled him in the techniques of breaking and entering. Lacking both
money and a home, Frasier sensed that if he did not quickly reform his
behavior he would come to an unhappy end.
Love appeared to hold the solution. When a woman in rural Connecti-
cut agreed to marry Frasier, he resolved to take up farming. But since he
brought no material resources to the union, not even elementary agricul-

tural tools, he knew that he would be forced to open an account at the local
store. His desire to provide his new wife with the basic comforts of domes-
tic life proved his undoing. As Frasier explained, “Our attention was then
employed in procuring necessary articles for house-keeping. Now my reso-
lution taken at my first coming to this place failed me, and Satan overpow-
ered my feeble fortitude.” Driven by an “avaricious temper,” Frasier wanted
to become a consumer without the burden of payment. He stole from “the
shop of one Trueman Hinman” consumer goods valued at almost £80, a
sum so large that one wonders how Frasier carted all the loot back to the
farm. Not surprisingly, he was detected in the act, and although he man-
aged to escape punishment by making restitution to the owner, he alien-
ated the object of his affection. Without prospect of marriage, Frasier “gave
a rein to my covetous disposition, being extremely desirous to be rich.”
From that moment, Frasier’s ill-fated life became an unceasing journey
of acquisition, a kind of commercial pilgrim’s progress without promise of
redemption. Whereas other people of his generation organized autobiog-
raphies around major events—the birth of children or participation in a
crucial battle—Frasier narrated his story largely in terms of the quality and
quantity of the goods that he stole. At times the pace of his movement seemed
almost frenzied, a nervous motion with no certain goal. “I then went to
Boston,” Frasier observed in a typical passage, “stealing at several places on
the road. From Boston, I returned to Middletown, in Connecticut, where I
committed four burglaries in one night, viz. Widow Wetmore’s house, of £3
or 4 cash, a merchant’s shop of 2 or 3 dozen handkerchiefs, a watch, a gun,
and several other articles. A taylor’s shop of a new coat. A shoe-maker’s of 3
pair of shoes and a calf-skin, and went off undiscovered, and sold the ef-
fects.” Then he traveled to New York, before returning to Norwalk, Con-
necticut, “where I broke Mr. Gould Hoit’s store and robbed it of 2 pieces of
velvet, 2 pieces chintz, some silk handkerchiefs and sundry other articles, to
the amount of £50 and was not detected.”
Frasier’s narrative of crime contains scores of passages just like these. It
presented a tale of an eighteenth-century consumer gone bad. Like the honest
people of New England, Frasier knew the value of ribbons and breeches,
knee buckles and beaver hats, coats and stockings. Indeed, even confront-
ing execution for his many robberies, Frasier took a kind of perverse pride
in his accomplishments, drawing the reader’s attention to “feats worthy of
notice.” The man who recorded Frasier’s life story—probably a local minis-
ter—explained that “the articles taken from each store, are particularly
mentioned at his [Frasier’s] desire, that the owners may know the articles
taken by him, in order to exculpate others.”7 It was a generous gesture on
the eve of execution, but one suspects that a more pressing consideration
was Frasier’s insistence on receiving proper credit for a notable career.
People like Frasier expose an underworld of consumer life.8 That other
colonists took these crimes seriously is revealed not only by the crowds that
attended the executions but also by the popularity of the published confes-
vade mecum N 111
sions.9 Like modern swindlers and thieves who have found a niche on the
Internet, mid-eighteenth-century burglars seized upon opportunities pre-
sented by the empire of goods. They understood the new fashions, the new
language of desire, and although fencing was not an accepted form of mer-
chandising, it brought fashionable objects to men and women who could
not otherwise have participated in this alluring material culture. But, of
course, most people never dealt with these shady figures, giving their cus-
tom instead to honest merchants and peddlers, factors and chapmen. It is
to their experience as consumers that we now turn our attention.
III
For representatives of the provincial underworld as well as for legitimate
buyers of imported goods, the great chain of acquisition most likely began
in a major colonial port such as Charleston, Boston, Philadelphia, or New
York. During the eighteenth century these urban centers came to symbol-
ize America’s growing commercial prosperity within the British Empire,
and colonists described long-distance trade as a divine blessing. In God’s
Marvellous Kindness, for example, a sermon of thanksgiving delivered in
1745, the Reverend Jared Eliot reminded a congregation that King Solomon
himself had advocated “the Eastern Trade.” Exchange with various remote
nations helped explain ancient Israel’s “Power and Wealth.” And so it would
for Britain’s mainland colonists. They bore witness to the wisdom of the
Old Testament. “It may be laid down as a Rule,” exclaimed Eliot, “that ordi-
narily no Kingdom, State or Province will ever advance to any considerable
Degree of temporal Greatness, Polity, Power and Influence, without Trade
and Navigation.”10
The story was much the same from South Carolina to New England.
Provincial ports bustled with activity. Ships arrived from metropolitan cen-
ters such as Bristol, London, and Liverpool carrying cargoes of manufac-
tured goods. Other vessels anchored in American harbors were bound for
the West Indies or for lesser colonial markets, key destinations in an in-
creasingly complex commercial system that struggled to find ways to pay
for the flood of new consumer goods. In 1774 a foreign visitor recounted
the scene that greeted him along the “majestic Delaware,” the river that served
as Philadelphia’s commercial highway to the ocean. “The voice of industry
perpetually resounds along the shore,” he wrote, “and every wharf within
my view is surrounded with groves of masts, and heaped with commodities
of every kind, from almost every quarter of the globe.”11
Considering the economic importance of the major port cities, it is not
surprising that during the middle decades of the eighteenth century Ameri-
can artists began turning out prints depicting the various urban waterfronts.
Works of this sort were common in England, and some sold an impressive
number of copies. One of the first people to appreciate the need for colo-
nial prospects was Thomas Penn, the proprietor of Pennsylvania. He wanted
Like those who lived in other colonial
American ports, the people of
Charleston took pride in the rising
volume of commerce connecting them
to metropolitan centers such as Bristol,
London, and Liverpool. Watercolor,
Charleston Harbor by Bishop Roberts, ca.
1740. Courtesy of the Colonial
Williamsburg Foundation.
Imperial commerce dominated this popular
eighteenth-century prospect of Boston. “A
Northeast View of Boston,” ca. 1723, attributed to
William Burgis. Courtesy of the Peabody Essex
Museum, Salem, Massachusetts.
his English friends to view for themselves the flourishing capital of the colony
that bore his family’s name. In 1750 he wrote to Richard Peters, his agent in
America, demanding “a perspective view of the City.” Peters showed little
initial enthusiasm for the project, noting that “Philadelphia will make a
most miserable Perspective for want of steeples.” But Penn was not to be
put off, and after several false starts by others, George Heap produced an
illustration that pleased the proprietor. A few years earlier a man known as
B. Roberts completed a handsome prospect of Charleston. William Burgis
performed the same service for New York City and Boston.12
Although Peters had a point about the missing steeples in Philadelphia,
he overstated their importance in the composition of a colonial prospect. In
other ports church spires—many of them financed by new eighteenth-century
mercantile wealth—dominated the horizon, but in all the visual interpreta-
tions of American cities the artists focused the viewer’s attention on the para-
mount importance of commerce, indeed, on the centrality of “the groves of
masts.”13 The prints captured the energy of mercantile life, depicting the ar-
rival and departure of huge oceangoing transports, the off-loading of British
goods onto smaller vessels, and the density of the docks and warehouses. In
Burgis’s prospect of New York, for example, the foreground ships formed a
wall of hulls and sails so thick that it almost completely obscured the city
itself. Roberts provided more precise architectural detail for Charleston, but
like Burgis and Heap he celebrated the explosion of maritime commerce. In
his print, dozens of sailors can be seen rowing small boats among the larger
vessels anchored along the waterfront. The message was, of course, not hard
to comprehend. Without long-distance Atlantic trade, American ports such
George Heap’s “An East Prospect of the City of Philadelphia, under the Direction of Nicholas
Skull (London, 1 September 1754),” reflected the rising importance of imperial commerce to the
life of the community. Detail of larger print reproduced with permission of the Historical Society
of Pennsylvania.
vade mecum N 115
as Charleston could not have emerged from their former “rude unpolished
Condition.” Commerce brought civilization. It sustained the steeples and
the warehouses; it made America worthy of British attention.
Nestled among the more prominent structures of the port cities—per-
haps on crowded streets just beyond the docks—one would have encoun-
tered the stores that linked ordinary consumers to the great British merchant
houses which had originally transported the manufactured goods to
America. However modest these shops may have appeared in comparison
to the soaring church spires, they were no less important in the lives of the
colonists. It was in these stores that honest people as well as lowlifes such as
the Velvet Merchant personally experienced the new Atlantic economy. In
all the major port cities newspaper advertisements invited potential buyers
to examine the inventories of the large retail businesses, many of them owned
by women.14 Each establishment offered a slightly different range of stock.
The majority of colonial storekeepers, however, never bothered with no-
tices in the local journals. A survey conducted in 1771 revealed that Boston,
a city of about sixteen thousand people, supported over five hundred sepa-
rate shops. Several smaller port towns in Massachusetts also reported sur-
prisingly large numbers. Although Salem had a population only half that of
Boston, it listed 172 stores, while nearby Charleston, a modest farm com-
munity, boasted of ninety-nine retail outlets.15
Stores in New England and the middle colonies—we shall examine mer-
chandising in the Chesapeake in a later section—generally received their
stock of dry goods from large American wholesale merchants who main-
tained close commercial ties with British correspondents. Although the ma-
jority of these suppliers worked out of London, some of the more specialized
British firms—those concentrat-
ing on metal goods, for example—
often routed American orders
through western English ports
such as Bristol.16 Colonial whole-
salers preferred what they de-
scribed as “sundry merchandize,”
in other words, assortments of dif-
ferent kinds of British goods from
ceramics to cloth. Putting together
a proper bundle of consumer
items was no easy task, since it re-
quired English exporters to main-
tain direct contact with various
manufacturers scattered through-
out the country.
British exporters tried to an-
ticipate the colonial markets, knowing in advance that most shipments would
depart England in two great waves governed by prevailing weather systems,
one in January, the second in mid- to late summer.17 They also had to attend
to specific American requests, a challenge that sometimes strained relations

among the various parties involved in transatlantic trade. American whole-
salers, for example, occasionally set a limit on the prices that they were will-
ing to pay for certain English goods. Such instructions—written months
before they reached London or Bristol—could effectively cut English mer-
chants off from their normal suppliers. In 1759 a correspondent complained
to James Beekman, then New York City’s leading wholesale merchant, “I
find your limitations in the price of China ware is almost intirely a prohibi-
tion of Sending any.”18 At other times, the problem was the low quality of
the articles on offer, or simply their availability. One English firm apolo-
gized for a selection of hats that did not meet American expectations. The
hats, it explained, were not “so fine as [we] could have wished . . . Owing to
the wickedness of our Jurnimen [Journeymen] in not doing their work as it
should be.”19 Bad weather as well as political conflicts in distant places could
interrupt the normal flow of commerce. The partnership of Pomeroys and
Hodgkin confessed to Beekman in 1757 that “troubles in the country where
our saxon linnens are made have rendered them very scarce.”20
Whatever the obstacles, both sides in these exchanges worked hard to
avoid conflict. The almost insatiable demand in the colonies for these sun-
dry goods helped to reduce tensions. After all, the British houses generally
received a handsome commission for their services.21 During the middle
decades of the eighteenth century, relations between American wholesale
merchants and their English correspondents were usually stable and, in-
deed, frequently cordial. The British firm of Peach and Pierce could hardly
have been more polite about an overdue American bill. “We must with Jus-
tice Acknowledge your Punctuality in remitting [funds] and it is with
Chearfullness we Submit to waite the time when it will suit you to remit
farther and hope it will be more to your Advantage than at Present.”22 One
way or another, Anglo-American businessmen learned whom they could
trust, who offered the best-quality manufactures at the lowest prices, and
who provided liberal terms of credit.
We should be alert, of course, to the possibility that commercial genial-
ity concealed real insecurity. Although American wholesalers frequently
described British trading partners as friends, they must have recognized
the potential in these relationships for disappointment, even betrayal.23 The
cheerful rhetoric served only to mask the logic of capitalism. During the
long decade before independence, aggressive London exporters apparently
decided that they could obtain even higher rates of return from the Ameri-
can market by going around the established colonial wholesale firms and
dealing directly with retail businesses. In 1768 Francis Bernard, royal gover-
nor of Massachusetts, informed Lord Shelburne that the character of trans-
atlantic trade had changed substantially in recent years. In former times,
Bernard claimed, American merchants were “importers and Dealers by
wholesale & by no means retailers.” This traditional arrangement pleased
all parties, and the London houses promised their Boston contacts “a rea-
vade mecum N 117
sonable profit.” Suddenly, however, a different set of commercial under-

standings had come into play. “For some Years past the London Merchants
for the sake of advancing their Profits have got into dealing immediately
with the Retailers, and have thereby abolished the Distinction of Merchants
at Boston: so that at present every Merchant is a Shopkeeper & every Shop-
keeper is a Merchant. Hence instead of dealing with Respectable and Cred-
itable Houses, the London Merchants are engaged in a great Number of
little Shops.”24
We should probably not place too much interpretive weight on Bernard’s
observations. His strongest political allies included large wholesale mer-
chants such as Thomas Hutchinson and his sons. Nevertheless, although
Bernard may have exaggerated the structural shift in merchandising, he
clearly appreciated the vulnerability of American wholesale firms within
the great chain of acquisition. The wholesalers resented any suggestion that
they were mere retailers. The character of one’s business distinguished the
owner’s place in society; function as well as size translated into claims of
class. John Hancock, the famed signer of the Declaration of Independence
and leading Boston merchant, complained when an English export firm
injured his professional pride. “I look on myself [as] a Man of Capital,” he
thundered, “& am not to be put on a footing with every twopenny Shop-
keeper that addresses you.”25
The large colonial merchants—those who dominated the commerce of
the major northern ports—faced an even more daunting set of problems
with their own customers, usually small retailers. They not only had to sup-
ply the shopkeepers with the kinds of goods that ordinary buyers demanded,
but they also had to provide generous credit. During the best of times, re-
ceiving timely payment for the British imports proved exceedingly diffi-
cult. The retailers complicated matters by constantly haggling over prices.26
The colonial economy also suffered from a chronic shortage of hard cur-
rency, and since the British export firms demanded returns in specie or the
equivalent in the form of negotiable bills of exchange, the American whole-
sale merchants were hard put to obtain sufficient cash to sustain the trade.
The stores often collected payment in regional agricultural products such
as livestock, which the wholesale merchants then sold in the West Indies for
hard money. This secondary trade helps explain the prominence in con-
temporary urban prospects of ships bound for the Caribbean. Currency
pressures sparked other highly innovative strategies, especially in the north-
ern colonies. Often American wholesale merchants supplied their British
correspondents not only with raw materials—whale oil and naval stores,
for example—but also with the vessels that actually carried these products
to market. This so-called invisible commerce in colonial-made ships—it is
not clear that government officials understood the nature of the arrange-
ment—helped balance the books. At the end of the day, however, it was
always a struggle for the Americans to meet their obligations as consumers,
and over the years their debts to the English export firms steadily mounted.27
IV
Country stores played a huge role in the rapid expansion of the new con-
sumer marketplace. If this statement seems hyperbolic, it is perhaps be-
cause Frederick Jackson Turner, the influential historian of the American
West, has instructed us to imagine the frontier as an exceptional space in-
habited largely by self-reliant men and women. The development of global
merchandising has no place in this familiar story that we tell ourselves about
our own past. During the middle decades of the eighteenth century, how-
ever, a different account resonated among the colonists. It stressed the cen-
trality of consumer opportunity in bringing what contemporaries called
civilization to inland towns and small villages. William Eddis, an astute
English observer who traveled to Maryland, advanced a quite different ver-
sion of the frontier thesis in which storekeepers played a dominant role.
“To supply the real and imaginary necessities of those by whose persever-
ing efforts and penetrating genius immense uncultivated tracts became
flourishing establishments,” Eddis explained, “storekeepers . . . were encour-
aged to pursue the path which industry had pointed out. Warehouses were
accordingly erected, and woollens, linens, and implements of husbandry
were first presented to the view of the laborious planter.” Opportunity to
purchase manufactured goods excited ever greater demand. Frontier retail-
ers became the agents of social change. “As wealth and population increased,”
wrote Eddis, “wants were created, and many considerable demands, in con-
sequence, took place for the various elegancies as well as necessaries of life.”28
Eddis told a tale of market accommodation, rather than resistance; of
expanding communication, rather than isolation. People living in the more
inaccessible areas of Connecticut would have understood this perspective.
Like Thomas Prince, who published the Vade Mecum for America, they some-
times measured progress in terms of the construction of serviceable roads.
One florid petition sent to the colonial magistrates by the townsmen of
Kensington and Southington in 1762 complained that existing highways were
“attended with bad mountains, miry swamps, steep hills and ledges together
with many turnings and crooks which render it exceedingly difficult travel-
ling and costly carting or transporting the produce of the country to s[ai]d
river [Connecticut River].” Lest obtuse legislators miss the point, the sign-
ers noted that “as there is great increase of inhabitants[,] so consequently of
traveling, trade and business . . . [we are] retarded for want of convenient
roads.”29
Few contemporaries seemed quite certain how best to describe the small
retail businesses that sprang up along the back roads of empire. According
to Sarah Kemble Knight (her pen name was simply Madam Night), an En-
glish visitor who traveled from Boston to New York City early in the cen-
tury, the colonists “gave the title of merchant to every trader.”30 Some decades
later another visitor, Nicholas Cresswell, observed that “what they call stores
in this country are Shops in England.”31 Whatever name one employed, how-
ever, the village stores that transformed the social landscape of late colonial
vade mecum N 119
America depended on passable roads to link them to the larger port cities
where their owners exchanged local products for imported British articles.
The Connecticut petitioners who complained that mountains, swamps, and
ledges hindered the flow of commerce, for example, relied on suppliers in
Boston and New York. Fisher Gay of Farmington, the village’s most success-
ful shopkeeper, obtained his inventory from New York, while his competi-
tors, John Patterson and Samuel Cowles, who defined themselves as “traders
in company,” transported goods such as cloth, hosiery, gloves, and books from
Boston.32 Similar merchandising networks became common throughout the
northern and middle colonies. Country merchants in New Jersey looked ei-
ther to New York or Philadelphia for popular consumer items. In western
Pennsylvania and the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia the desired manufac-
tured goods generally came from Philadelphia or, after mid-century, from
one of the newer commercial centers such as Baltimore or Falmouth.33
Commercial relationships along the entire chain of acquisition tended
to replicate themselves. The country dealers looked upon their urban Ameri-
can suppliers much as the great city merchants viewed the British export
firms that had assembled the original cargoes. Each link in these expanding
networks sustained expectations of reciprocity, which achieved a certain
legitimacy through a commercial language of shared interests and mutual
respect. Everyone knew, of course, that the new merchandising system
spawned little fish as well as large ones, but a fiction of rough equality in-
formed the new consumer marketplace. Thomas Hancock, the Boston
wholesale merchant, understood these assumptions as well as any of his
competitors. He encouraged village shopkeepers, many of whom ordered
only small amounts of dry goods during a single year. “I shall be Glad to
Supply you with any Sort of Goods,” Hancock assured one correspondent,
“and upon as Good Terms as any body, whenever you may have occasion.”34
Moreover, the wholesaler listened carefully to their grousing about quality
and quantity, about color and style. When some country merchants
grumbled about the poor selection of paper they had received, Hancock
immediately informed his London contact: “[I] must Request you always
to procure for me the other sort [of paper] which please my Country Chaps
much better then [sic] what you now Sent.”35 The firm of Jackson and
Bromfield in Newburyport, Massachusetts, sounded as if it were being tyr-
annized by the shopkeepers who were in fact their customers. The partners
wrote to a large Bristol house, announcing, “[Y]ou’ll please to put up [a
cargo] of good quality & cheap as can possibly be afforded, for our Busi-
ness has got to such a Pass that every petty Shopkeeper will set himself up a
Judge of English Goods.”36 And to make matters worse, carefully nurtured
relations could suddenly turn sour, for however hard the wholesalers tried
to please the small retailers, they often found that displays of attention could
not ensure loyalty. Just as the major London export merchants sought to
bypass the American wholesale firms, the small country shopkeepers at-
tempted from time to time to circumvent their suppliers in New York or
Boston by dealing directly with English companies.37
News of the arrival of large trunks filled with imported goods drew curious American
consumers to local shops. Colonial trunk. Courtesy of the East Hampton Historical Society,
East Hampton, New York.
Moreover, although the language of merchandising may occasionally

have sounded solicitous, the settling of accounts strained goodwill. Bills
had to be paid. Urban merchants demanded compensation for the “small
parcels of European goods” dispatched to the many inland communities.38
As we have seen, this side of the business presented a severe challenge, for
village shopkeepers seldom could obtain sufficient hard currency to cover
their obligations. From their customers—almost of all of whom were mid-
dling farmers—they accepted agricultural products in lieu of cash. No one
liked these arrangements. Local exchanges seemed to take on the character
of an elaborate barter economy. But in this instance appearances were de-
ceptive. The proprietors of the small stores knew as well as the farmers who
gave them their business the full market value in currency of each cow or
bushel of grain offered in payment for the flood of British manufactures.
Often calculations became extremely complex, a reminder that only an ex-
tremely robust colonial market for British imports could have justified such
difficult financial arrangements. One visitor explained the bargaining pro-
cess as practiced in Connecticut stores. The shopkeepers rated
their goods according to the time and specie they pay in: viz. Pay, money, pay as money,
and trusting. Pay is grain, pork, beef, &c. at the prices set by the General Court that
year. Money is pieces of eight, rials, or Boston or Bay shillings (as they call them) or
good hard money, as sometimes silver coin is termed by them; also wampum, viz.
Indian beads, which serve for change. Pay as money is provisions, as aforesaid one-
third cheaper than the Assembly or General Court sets it. And Trust as they and the
merchant agree for time.39
vade mecum N 121
In New England, the consumer economy sparked important structural

transformations that further complicated the great chain of acquisitions.
During any single year, for example, the owner of a family farm might safely
sell off only one or two head of cattle. Other animals were needed for breed-
ing or to feed dependents. At some appointed time—usually in the au-
tumn—drovers would sweep through the countryside, picking up a few
cows from each village and then driving the entire herd to Boston or New
York, where the cattle supplied shoemakers with leather or naval contrac-
tors with salted meat for the British fleet. On the eve of independence, a
new group of middlemen appeared in the towns that formed a ring around
Boston. These entrepreneurs intercepted the cattle drives and then, after
butchering the animals, sold meat and leather to the artisans and contrac-
tors of the city, an innovation that raised prices and greatly annoyed Boston’s
shoemakers.40 Other market strategies depended on the nearly insatiable
needs of the Caribbean sugar planters. In 1731 Governor Joseph Talcott of
Connecticut informed the Board of Trade, “Horses and lumber are exported
from hence to the West Indies, for which we receive in exchange, sugar, salt,
molasses and rum. What provisions we can spare, and some small quantity
of tar and turpentine, are sent to Boston and New York, and Rhode Island,
for which we receive European goods.”41 Country traders sometimes packed
local pork in barrels and carted it off, together with the corn and wheat
they had taken in, to the cities. Long Island shopkeepers sent whale oil, and
even the hides of small game that their customers had killed.42
V
Our vade mecum of mid-eighteenth-century colonial merchandising must
take into account the strikingly different networks of exchange that devel-
oped in the Chesapeake, a region that included Maryland, Virginia, and much
of northern North Carolina. Tobacco provided the engine driving this pro-
vincial economy. To be sure, during the previous century the price that the
American staple fetched on the European market fluctuated wildly, and boom
times often gave way to depressions so severe that impoverished workers and
desperate servants sometimes rose up in rebellion against crown authorities
in Virginia.43 As income from tobacco gradually improved, however, political
tranquility replaced chronic unrest. Not surprisingly, the examples of an
opulent material culture that draw modern tourists to Williamsburg and
the surrounding area—a style of life expressed most powerfully by the Pal-
ladian mansions constructed by the great Tidewater planters—date from
this period.
Providing a persuasive explanation for the extraordinary social trans-
formation of the Chesapeake colonies has attracted a number of able schol-
ars.44 Although the topic remains contested, it seems clear that the prosperity
and stability of the region resulted from a number of separate factors: the
growth of an unfree African labor force, the establishment of a govern-

ment-controlled system of tobacco warehouses, which carefully monitored
the quality of the crops exported to Great Britain and the Continent, and
the sale by enterprising Scottish merchants of huge amounts of Chesapeake
tobacco on the French market.45 At mid-century growers in Virginia and
Maryland still complained about the prices their crops fetched on the world
market, but a steady demand for tobacco throughout Europe meant that
those with access to land and slaves could make an acceptable return, which
was, of course, the ticket to participation in the new empire of goods. In
this commercial environment, the major Scottish syndicates—John
Glassford and Co., William Cuninghame and Co., and Speirs, Bowman,
and Co., for example—did quite well for themselves. In fact, the leading
partners in these companies came to be known as “tobacco lords” or “to-
bacco aristocrats,” and one can still visit the impressive estates around
Glasgow that they financed from profits in the Virginia trade.46 The larger
point is that, unlike the small farmers of New England, the Chesapeake
planters were fully integrated into a complex Atlantic economy from the
very beginning of settlement. For them, the question was never whether to
resist the marketplace but rather how best to take advantage of the oppor-
tunities that this commercial system presented.47 And, for most eighteenth-
century tobacco planters, the possibility of obtaining British manufactures
proved most alluring.48
Long before aggressive Scottish firms acquired a dominant share of the
Chesapeake tobacco, elite Tidewater planters had consigned their crops di-
rectly to London merchants. For a commission, these agents not only sold
the tobacco but also filled orders for specific English goods. Moreover, they
performed quasi-banking services, arranging for shipping, negotiating for
insurance, and dealing with customs officials.49 These commercial relations
often lasted for several decades, taking on a highly personal character. The
great planters—those possessing hundreds of slaves and immense tracts of
land—sometimes referred to the consignment merchants as “friends.” The
Americans trusted these distant businessmen, most of whom they knew
only through commercial correspondence, to sell their tobacco at the best
price and to purchase British manufactures at bargain rates. Although the
annual consignment trade represented no more than a third of the total
Chesapeake crop, it has received extremely close analysis. The reason is not
hard to discern. The most familiar names of eighteenth-century Virginia—
George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and William Byrd II, for example—
relied on the consignment system to furnish their splendid homes and dress
their families in the latest London fashions. After the 1730s the demand for
consumer goods among the local gentry rose sharply. In fact, these gentle-
men regularly ran up huge debts to their English representatives, a painful
reminder of their dependence on relative strangers who were more con-
cerned about maintaining their own solvency than about underwriting
planter extravagance.50
vade mecum N 123
Elite spending on imported goods only partially explained the dramatic

mid-century surge in consumer activity in the Chesapeake. A striking change
in marketing strategy suddenly afforded thousands of less affluent planters
access to British manufactures. The plan owed everything to the Scots. Sens-
ing that they would have a hard time breaking the great planters of their
traditional reliance on the London consignment merchants, the Glasgow
firms decided to focus their operations directly on the smaller producers,
growers who often owned only a couple of slaves and a few acres of arable
land but who nevertheless accounted for over two-thirds of the tobacco
produced in Virginia and Maryland. After 1740 Glasgow houses opened
scores of American stores—often called “Scotch stores”— staffed by em-
ployees hired in Britain. These resident factors collected small parcels of
tobacco and, in return, supplied the less affluent planters of the region with
a variety of imported goods.
The stores represented a brilliant innovation. As a contemporary ob-
served, the factors opened up the Atlantic economy to “the common People
. . . who make up the Bulk of the Planters.”51 By any standard, the explosion
of business sites along the navigable rivers of the Chesapeake was impres-
sive. Even personnel who operated the stores could hardly keep up with the
rapid expansion. In 1742 Francis Jerdone exclaimed that “there are 25 stores
within 18 miles round [in lower Hanover County, Virginia] which is 13 more
than at Mr. Johnson’s death [in 1740] and 4 or 5 more expected next year.”52
The Glasgow companies established separate chains of stores, and their
American agents communicated regularly among themselves about the pros-
pects for future harvests and about the prices they would have to offer the
local planters for tobacco. But what seemed most to concern the storekeep-
ers was competition from other Scots, for no sooner did one firm set up for
business than another would open its doors. By 1739 the rivalry had be-
come so intense that one harried factor complained, “[T]his river at present
is so crowded with stores that its very difficult to make a purchase [of to-
bacco], and every year grows worse & worse.”53
The dramatic quickening of the consumer marketplace in the Chesa-
peake was more a function of generous credit allowances than of the con-
venient location of the new Scottish stores. In modern terminology, the
small planters discovered that they could buy now, pay later, and this liber-
ating invitation brought them to the shops in droves. Long-term credit
greatly expanded the working capital of the smaller producers, allowing
them to enjoy desirable British imports many months before they had to
settle accounts.54 The system also worked to the storekeeper’s advantage,
for the planters were far more likely to sell their tobacco to those factors
who had treated them most generously. A broad selection of manufactured
goods helped cement these local relationships. John Mair, a Scotsman who
in 1736 published Book-Keeping Modernized or Merchant-Accounts by Double
Entry, According to the Italian Form, counseled his countrymen on how best
to conduct business in the Chesapeake. “These merchants or storekeepers
generally sell their goods on trust, or time,” Mair explained, “and receive
payment, not in cash, but in tobacco, as the planters can get it ready.” Such
a colonial venture required precise planning. “Before a merchant opens a
store in this retail way,” he continued, “it is his interest to have it well pro-
vided with all sorts of commodities proper for clothing and family-use;
and the greater variety he has, the better; for where-ever planters find they
can be best suited and served, thither they commonly resort, and there dis-
pose of their tobacco.”55 Such advice was well placed. Like other commer-
cial relations in the great chain of acquisition, these market arrangements
from the very first had the potential quickly to come unraveled. After all,
however canny the Scots may have been in their daily operations, they re-
mained Scots, outsiders in a provincial society, and when consumer desire
itself became a contentious political topic, it was easy for the planters to
blame the foreigners for a number of ills not of their own making.
The moment of crisis did not occur until the eve of independence. In-
deed, the Scots spent considerable time and energy ingratiating themselves
to their Chesapeake customers. The remarkably complete papers of one lead-
ing firm—William Cuninghame and Company—document how closely the
Glasgow merchants attended to the operation of the new stores. In the au-
tumn of 1767 a Cuninghame partner in Scotland wrote to a factor who had
just arrived in Virginia. “I suppose by this time you have got your store fixed
out,” the employer observed, “which I daresay the assortment of goods will
encourage as it will be a very complete one after you have received the whole
[cargo] intended from here and some cutlery.” Bennet Price, the Virginia fac-
tor, had to act fast, however, for the company expected him to recruit a large
number of local customers “before Martin Pickett opens [his] store in the
spring after which your endeavour will be attended with double trouble.”
Of course, as veterans of this competitive business climate, the Scottish
merchants instructed Price exactly how to avoid “double trouble.” First, he
had swiftly to judge the character of the small tobacco planters, erring as
much as possible on the side of generosity. “If a man be good it is not mate-
rial if he cannot pay you any thing next year,” explained the Glasgow corre-
spondent. “By selling goods to such men you no doubt increase your debts,
but at the same time, you will extend your influence.” Second, the novice
factor should remember that Cuninghame authorized him to order what-
ever goods he needed to win the battle of the stores. Quantity made no
matter. As Price’s contact noted, “I daresay from the quality of the goods
and the moderate prices they are charged, you will be enabled to give gen-
eral satisfaction to all your old customers and to engage a good many new
ones.” To achieve this target, the Scottish employer counseled, “Try if you
can to hook in some of the River people.”56 And finally, Price should learn
basic merchandising tricks. Company representatives had discovered, for
example, that neat shelving and regular rotation of stock made a favorable
impression on customers. Another inexperienced factor was told to “take
care to have all your goods in the store in proper order, which greatly con-
tributes to make them sell well. The oftener they are taken down and new
[ones] tried, so much the better.”57
vade mecum N 125
Presented with the possibility of good profits—often as much as a 6

percent return on investment—indigenous Chesapeake merchants soon
joined the field. One man who had originally migrated to Maryland as a
footman for a local gentry family captured the entrepreneurial spirit that
burst forth suddenly at mid-century, and in an effort to launch a small re-
tail business, he begged English relatives to ship him “some knives, some
buckles and butens and any thing you think proper, for I can make money
here.” Of course, for an American just getting started, it helped to possess
independent capital. Annapolis shipbuilders and tanners usually had more
personal resources than did former footmen, and they took advantage of
rising consumer demand. Between 1745 and 1753 the number of dry-goods
stores in Annapolis jumped from three to twelve.58 Other merchants living
in Norfolk, Virginia, were soon drawn into this lucrative trade. Unlike their
Scottish competitors, who concentrated on tobacco, the colonial business-
men also purchased wheat and flour, Chesapeake products that after 1750
did well in southern Europe and underwrote the cargoes of British goods
transported back to Virginia.59
In Charleston, South Carolina, where the demand for British manufac-
tures was even greater than in other parts of colonial America, the majority
of the local merchants maintained accounts with the leading London firms.
For a commission, established houses exchanged Carolina rice and indigo for
parcels of dry goods.60 Robert Pringle, who started his career as a factor for a
London West Indian merchant, provides insight into the South Carolina con-
sumer market. He operated a modestly successful business in Charleston. His
commercial letterbook has a querulous quality, as if he could never quite per-
suade himself that British correspondents rightly understood the character
of local demand. In an order dispatched in 1738, Pringle told them exactly
how things worked. “This province,” he lectured, “takes off yearly a great
Quantity of all manner of dry goods from Europe & Ports in England that
are chiefly supply’d from London, Bristol, Topsham, & Liverpool & our man-
ner of Trade in Dry goods is by giving the Planters Credit from Crop to Crop.”
Worried that the London merchants would attempt to fob him off with goods
inappropriate for the Charleston market, Pringle provided them with a de-
tailed list of “Goods proper for So Carolina.”
Vizt. Course Cloths & Heavies, Camblets of all sorts & Colours & Silk Camblets, Linnen
& Cotton Checks, Huckaback [a rough linen fabric often for towels] for Tables & Nap-
kins, Diapers & Damask for ditto. Sheeting Linnen. Bagg & Gulix [fine linen for good
shirts] & Holland Cambricks. Gun Powder. A Large Quantity 3/4 & 7/8 Garlix low
pric’d. Brown Osnaburggs, Dowlas [coarse linen] & Russian Linnen. Indian Trading
Guns with two Sights & Gun Flints. . . . White, Blue, & Green plains for Negro Cloathing.
Sagathy & Duroys & worsted Damask, Ship & Duffill Blanketting. Ruggs for Negroes
Beds. Bed Blanketts fine. Strouds blue & Red. Felt hatts for men & Boys. Course Wor-
sted stockings for Negroes. Course Leather Shoes. . . . China Ware and Punch Bowls.
Earthen Ware in crates.
The catalogue contained many other imports; indeed, almost nothing

seemed unlikely to sell in South Carolina, even the surprising last item,
“Cheshire cheese.” The problem was that London correspondents never

fulfilled Pringle’s expectations. The calicoes were “very Old and Unfash-
ionable.” Other items did not strike him as “fresh and Good in quality.” The
Italian gauze came in the wrong color. The velvet “happens not to be a Right
Sort for this Place,” and when he opened a crate of ceramics, he discovered
“You omitted in the China Ware to send Dishes as well as plates.”61 Reading
between the lines of Pringle’s letters, we sense that the Charleston consum-
ers were just as fussy about their purchases as were those of the Chesapeake
and New England.
The small but widely scattered planters of North Carolina presented
the new retailers with another inviting consumer market. After all, the
colony’s royal governor, William Tryon, reported as late as 1767 that he had
not heard “of a Piece of Woollen or Linnen Cloth being ever sold [in North
Carolina] that was the Manufacture of this Province.”62 Tryon probably ex-
aggerated the colony’s dependence on external trade. No one, however, ques-
tioned the rising demand in this region for British imports. The problem
plaguing store owners throughout North Carolina was poor roads. Because
the colony lacked deep rivers penetrating far into the interior, many goods
had to be laboriously transported overland. Like the eager farmers of Con-
necticut, the merchants of North Carolina as well as their customers asked
the colonial government to improve the highways as well as the naviga-
tional facilities along the coast. By the third quarter of the eighteenth cen-
tury, Scottish stores had begun to appear along the colony’s border with
Virginia, and manufactured articles flowed to the Moravian settlements in
the Piedmont along the Great Wagon Road, a vital commercial link con-
necting communities such as Salem, Salisbury, and Bethabara with Phila-
delphia to the north and Charleston to the south.63
One other change in how imported goods reached colonial consumers
merits attention. Although much of the merchandise that appeared in small
retail outlets throughout the South came directly from Great Britain, store-
keepers turned increasingly for their stock to suppliers sailing out of major
American ports like Boston and Philadelphia.64 Successful colonial mer-
chants such as Boston’s Thomas Hancock supported a fleet of small vessels
called coasters which carried British manufactures to correspondents lo-
cated as far away as Charleston, South Carolina. Perhaps not surprisingly,
Robert Pringle seemed no more pleased with the goods he received from
Hancock than he did with those coming from London. During the spring
of 1742 Pringle accepted a consignment of ribbons from his Boston corre-
spondent, but after four months without recording a single order, he de-
clared that “they happen to be in no manner of Demand here at present, &
are entirely unsaleable, The Town being very full of them. I have try’d most
of the Shopkeepers for them, but Cannot dispose of them or no part at any
Rate.” The following year Pringle complained that he could find no market
for Hancock’s axes or iron pots; still unhappy about the earlier shipment,
he added, “[A]lso a Good part of your Ribbons still unsold.”65 Misunder-
standings of this sort should not obscure the broader importance of an
vade mecum N 127
expanding coastal consumer trade. It not only offered an alternative system

of distribution but also established a new form of communication linking
Americans with other Americans. No one imagined the tiny coasting ves-
sels as having much political significance, at least not at mid-century. But
they carried messages from other colonies, and quite unwittingly commer-
cial innovation opened the possibility for later discussions about resisting
king and Parliament.
Reviewing how the empire of goods opened up so many new channels
of trade, we can understand perhaps why one business historian of an ear-
lier generation described the flow of British imports in almost lyrical lan-
guage. “In our mind’s eye,” he declared, “. . . we may watch cottons from
India and nails from England creeping slowly round the coast and up the
waterways, over pack-horse trails, past the furthest villages, and so at last
into the hands of frontiersmen.”66 In such matters, one tries not to exagger-
ate the degree of change or project back onto a “world we have lost” a dy-
namic commercial economy that in fact had not yet come into being. No
doubt, stores operated by the likes of Robert Pringle and Bennet Price would
strike us as a little sleepy. Nevertheless, however we characterize these mar-
keting developments, we can assert with confidence that during this period
colonial Americans experienced a greatly expanded access to British goods.
VI
The formal commercial ledgers that chronicled how merchants interacted
with other merchants—suppliers with shopkeepers—can carry us only so
far in the construction of a new vade mecum designed as a guide to the
highly personal character of eighteenth-century merchandising. What usu-
ally goes missing from such accounts is the actual consumer. But it was, in
fact, during conversations between buyers and sellers—what we might call
the culture of doing business—that ordinary men and women negotiated
market expectations with storekeepers eager to make a sale. These were the
crucial exchanges in the new consumer marketplace.
To paraphrase the poet Carl Sandburg, in the life histories of obscure
Americans the consumer revolution came to the mainland colonies on little
cat’s feet. The market drew energy from countless small transactions. A re-
view of some account books that have survived in New England suggests
that consumers typically made quite modest purchases. In these volumes,
the columns of carefully entered sums indicate that colonists generally en-
tered a village store looking for specific items—an ivory comb, some pins, a
piece of cloth, for example—and the charge for these goods seldom ex-
ceeded several shillings.
Allen MacLean served such people. He operated a general dry-goods
store in Hartford, Connecticut, and maintained a precise record of all sales
from 1741 to 1746—in other words, the period when the consumer economy
was beginning to transform the material face of the Anglo-American world.
We know the names of those who came to MacLean’s shop; we witness what
they purchased. Most customers demanded the same range of household
goods. They took home shoe buckles and snuffboxes, knee buckles and pen
knives, iron kettles and writing paper. MacLean sold a lot of cheaper fab-
rics. The most expensive items on offer seem to have been books, and on
one particularly memorable day he received the immense sum of three and
a half pounds for a “large Bible.” And on May 10, 1742, we read that one
Elizabeth Loveland indulged herself by buying a pair of gloves, some rib-
bon, a girdle, garters, and a fan, the entire bundle costing her just under
two and a half pounds.67
How much attention MacLean gave to what we might call innovative
merchandising techniques is impossible to ascertain. No doubt, he realized
that he should familiarize himself with his customers’ idiosyncratic needs.
Unlike some storekeepers in Philadelphia, however, MacLean does not ap-
pear to have tried to lure customers into his shop with offers of free coffee
A handbill distributed by William Coats, a general merchant in Philadelphia, depicts the

actual layout of a colonial store. Courtesy of the Library Company of Philadelphia.
vade mecum N 129
and food.68 Nor does the Hartford merchant seem to have constructed a
special glass window “such as are commonly used in large Towns and Cities
by Milliners, Stationers, Watch-Makers, &c. in order to expose their Mer-
chandise for Sale, to the View of Passengers, passing and repassing the
Streets.” On one of his trips MacLean may well have seen one of these new
display windows designed to entice strolling shoppers. It probably would
not have surprised him to learn that a New York grand jury condemned
these windows as unwarranted “Incroachments” on the city’s streets.69
Whatever MacLean’s retail skills may have been, he could be certain
that visitors such as Elizabeth Loveland would scrutinize his behavior. Un-
like modern Western economies in which no one cares much about the
character of the clerks who fetch goods and ring up the bill, early modern
American society judged its shopkeepers in highly moral terms. As “Agricola”
informed the subscribers of the Boston Evening-Post, colonial consumers
expected “Merchants and Shopkeepers” to make “Use of Conscience.”70 In
1732 an irate citizen warned readers of the South-Carolina Gazette that “there
are a great many Retailers, who falsely imagine that being Historical (the
modern Phrase for Lying) is much for their advantage; and some of them
have a Saying, That ’tis a Pity Lying is a Sin, it is so useful in Trade.” The
writer demanded “fair Dealing.”71
Accounts of actual shopping during this period are extremely rare. The
fullest description of such activities came from the pen of Madam Knight,
an English traveler who seems to have found the simple colonists a source
of amusement. However condescending she may have been, Knight re-
counted in detail a conversation that occurred in a general store in New
Haven, Connecticut. She reported that the first question the shopkeeper
asked his potential customer concerned the intended method of payment.
This opening query may sound insulting, but the retailer was not suggest-
ing that the person standing before him lacked the resources required to
make a purchase. At issue was the medium to be employed, for example,
Spanish, Massachusetts, or Native American money. Some consumers ar-
rived with agricultural products; others expected to negotiate on credit.
Once the shopkeeper had this information, he could quote the appropriate
prices for the various goods on display. A so-called sixpenny knife might
cost as much as twelve pence if the customer offered pork or beef instead of
specie. The proprietor preferred hard money, of course, especially silver coin,
and gave the best deals to buyers who reduced his operating cost.
Having learned the basic conventions of retail trade in New Haven,
Knight pounced on an American customer with the fervor of a modern
anthropologist doing fieldwork. “In comes a tall country fellow, with his
alfogeos [saddlebags] full of tobacco,” she recounted. To her horror, Knight
discovered the tobacco was for “chewing and spitting,” and during his con-
versation with the storekeeper he shocked the English woman by occasion-
ally leaving “a small shovelful of dirt on the floor.” After remaining silent
for some minutes, “staring round him like a cat,” he blurted out, “Have you
any ribbons for hatbands to sell, I pray?” Trying his best to accommodate
the man, the proprietor presented what he regarded as a likely choice. The
buyer rejected the ribbon out of hand, exclaiming, “It’s confounded gay.”
Only then did the real customer enter the building. The man’s wife imme-
diately approved the “gay” ribbon and then inquired about “hood silk.” The
storekeeper brought out cloth that pleased her. Finally, she asked, “Have
you any thread silk to sew it with?” Satisfied with the thread, the couple
paid for the items and departed.
Knight apparently witnessed other transactions. Before dropping the
topic, she observed of American consumers that “they generally stand after
they come in a great while speechless, and sometimes don’t say a word till
they are asked what they want, which I impute to the awe they stand in of
the merchants, whom they are constantly almost indebted to.”72 Had she
been an anthropologist, Knight might have explored structures of market
dependency or commented on consumer gender roles. After all, in contrast
to her husband’s spitting and stammering, the country wife seemed confi-
dent and knowledgeable about the imported goods on offer. A factor in
Maryland warned that storekeepers ignored women at their peril. “You know
the influence of the Wives upon their Husbands,” he wrote, “& it is but a
trifle that wins ’em over, they must be taken notice of or there will be noth-
ing done with them.”73 But such questions would have ruined Knight’s fun,
and without further comment she left New Haven in search of other colo-
nial peasants.
Many colonial storekeepers would probably have dismissed Knight’s
conclusions. They would have been particularly skeptical about their al-
leged ability to command deference. As they well knew, customers made
demands. If they did not find what they wanted, they turned to competi-
tors. Proprietors had to entice buyers into their shops, a process that began
when they ordered their stock. Northern stores wanted summer goods to
arrive in late spring, the season for lighter linens and also for general house-
hold articles. One Philadelphia merchant instructed a British correspon-
dent, “[T]he spring is the best time for iron mongery, cutleryware, furniture
for furnishing houses, and all other brass and iron work.”74 Southern mer-
chants expected the summer imports to reach the colonies in February or
March.75 A second merchandising season occurred in mid-autumn.76 The
winter market emphasized heavier cloth, usually woollens. When a ship-
ment arrived, the storekeeper could anticipate a sudden spurt of business,
but within a month or two much of the new inventory had been sold. Be-
cause of the cyclic character of the consumer market, storekeepers regu-
larly suffered periods of greatly reduced commercial activity. In 1742 one
struggling Philadelphia retailer complained to his patron Thomas Penn, “I
have not sold any thing to speak on for this month past and sitt several days
together without having one Person to ask a question . . . in short, I am
almost dull & stupid.”77
During peak months, therefore, storekeepers tried to leave as little to
chance as possible. They learned from hard experience that quality as well
as variety could determine success or failure in this competitive market-
vade mecum N 131
place. Cutting corners invited disaster. Well-informed buyers recognized

inferior goods when they spotted them in the local shops. Moreover, they
expected to be offered a selection of weights and colors. Henry Callister, a
Maryland factor, quickly assessed the challenges confronting the colonial
retailer, explaining in 1749 to his Scottish employer that he needed British
imports “suited to the situation of the Store and Fancy of the Customers.”78
In other words, Callister had to take account of ordinary planters who sim-
ply wanted to look around the store. Such people reacted to the stimulus of
the actual goods, and if they had a mind at that moment to treat them-
selves, they might well seem to behave in a whimsical and unpredictable
manner. In 1725 one Philadelphia retailer informed a British correspondent
in a wonderful abuse of the language that American consumers wanted
goods “more nice” than did English buyers. The message coming out of the
colonies, in fact, was that “the people here will have everything the newest
and best of their kind.”79 Another ambitious factor who operated a tobacco
store in Falmouth, Virginia, understood the concern about attracting inde-
pendent-minded men and women who could, of course, take their busi-
ness elsewhere. He insisted on having a “good assortment in order to keep
my customers to myself without allowing them to go to my neighbors for
trifles.”80 A South Carolina merchant reminded a supplier that a store that
did not offer the latest fashions would not long remain in business. After
all, he took for granted that “fresh assortments of those things [would]
Constantly [be] coming in by every Ship from London.”81
As a result of such pressures, prudent storekeepers had to anticipate
the capriciousness of some buyers while at the same time maintaining a
stock of basic goods—iron ware or cutlery, for example—for which there
was always a steady demand. Thomas Hancock of Boston developed a mar-
keting strategy designed to minimize the risk of customer dissatisfaction.
Everyone expected him to carry hosiery; it was a feature of his standard
inventory. But within this general category, he promoted variety. When or-
dering stockings from Britain, he asked for “a Suitable Sortment for this
Country & I believe [this] will answer here next Spring if the hose be fresh
& Good and the Colours well Sorted.”82 The firm of James and Drinker in
Philadelphia would not even consider dealing with an English supplier who
was not thoroughly acquainted “with the Patterns and colours best suited
to this Market.”83
Storekeepers found it almost impossible to fool customers. If the items
on offer had no appeal, if they did not compare well in terms of color and
pattern with those found in other shops, they did not sell. Hancock had to
discount entire bundles of hose because they “were very badly sorted for
sale here, & much moth-eaten and I believe had they laid much longer [I]
should not have been able to have sold them at any price. I tried the whole
town; no body would look at them.”84 Philadelphia book dealers had some-
thing of the same experience. They were greatly annoyed whenever British
correspondents sent them “rum books,” so called because volumes that found
no buyers in England were dumped on the Jamaica market in exchange for
rum. As one storekeeper noted sarcastically, a title dealing with the technical
details of military gunnery did not excite many readers in the mainland colo-
nies. Indeed, this sort of book “moves very slowly here, except it be some
Thing of an extraordinary Character.”85 Customers were just as demanding
in the South. When the Scottish chains situated a new outlet not far from an
older, more established store, they deliberately ordered inventories different
from those found at the original location. They took this precaution after
discovering that the local planters “imagine that one store made out of an-
other must be made up of Remnants or refused Goods.”86 If nothing else, the
attention paid to such marketing details suggests that colonial consumers
had already come to appreciate the value of comparison shopping.
Everyday language struggled to keep pace with change in this consumer
marketplace. Ordinary buyers—the men and women studied by Madam
Knight—knew what they wanted. At least, they could picture it in their
imaginations. The problem was actually describing the objects of desire to
the storekeeper. He found himself regularly passing local definitions up the
chain of acquisition, no doubt well aware of the high probability for mis-
understanding. Each item generated a special market vocabulary. By the
mid-eighteenth century fabrics and ceramics—two of the more popular
British exports—came in a variety of colors, shapes, and designs. Confronted
with an unprecedented range of choice, one frustrated English firm begged
an American merchant to use words with greater precision. General orders
for pieces of china, for example, only created confusion. One had “to de-
scribe them by round or long common Dishes for Meat, Soup Dishes, or
deep Sallad or Pudding Dishes, [for] otherwise [we are] at a Loss to know
what [you want].”87
Provincial storekeepers tried as best they could to facilitate these trans-
atlantic negotiations. Customers spoke in an insistent but vague voice; British
manufacturers offered an expanding, often unpredictable selection of goods.
The solution to the problem of description seemed to be pattern books.
These convenient listings allowed Americans to review manufacturer’s
samples and then place orders with confidence that they might actually
receive what they wanted. In 1756 a representative of a major English export
firm explained to a Philadelphia merchant: “There is no way to send goods
with any certainty of sale but by sending Patterns of the several colours in
vogue with you in the several kinds of stuff ordered . . . & the number of
pieces of every colour writ against each of the patterns.”88 The marketplace
encouraged a kind of interactive process unprecedented in the history of
merchandising. In this particular example, the colors were already “in
vogue”; they were distinctive Philadelphia colors. But now, aided by the
pattern books, Philadelphia buyers could match color with pattern, local
taste with British fashion.
Shopkeepers occasionally referred to the samples as “pattern cards.”
Competing cloth manufacturers put together cards reflecting their own
offerings, and British export houses would then provide American corre-
spondents with as many as four different pattern books. This innovation
vade mecum N 133
helped focus consumer desire. Jackson and Bromfield, dry-goods merchants

in Newburyport, Massachusetts, thought that sample books could even
stimulate new demand. The American might come into a store looking for
a particular article but then, seeing examples of colorful patterns, order
something entirely different. “We wou’d be glad you’d send us,” they wrote,
“the patterns of Silks & Silk mixtures, you mentioned in your last [letter],
as it may be the means of our finding a Vent for what we might otherwise
not be acquainted with.”89 Thomas Hancock regarded the pattern books as
a marvelous invention. For him they invited constructive discussions about
wallpaper. “Pray Send me Some Patterns of Role paper,” he informed an
English correspondent, “with the price Affixt both [for] Flock work & oth-
ers of Lively Colours & Good figures. [I]f you could send a yard of a sort . . .
[it] may do just to Give the figure and Colour. [I]t would be a Great Advan-
tage to you & me in the Sale here for our People then would Suit themselves
with Colours & Figure & then I shall have a Certain Sale for what I write
for.”90 Other American merchants accepted the logic of Hancock’s argu-
ment.91 Some quickly discovered, however, that British product lines changed
so rapidly that the sample books were out of date before the customer ever
made a decision.92 As one of Beekman’s suppliers confessed, “Fashions alter
so soon that many fancy Patterns are out of Make in 12 Months which ren-
ders sending Patterns of all sorts useless.”93
Storekeepers exploited other imaginative strategies to entice potential
customers into their shops. During this period advertisers developed a strik-
ingly new commercial language of allurement. Retailers came to appreciate
how newspapers could be used to spark curiosity and desire, indeed, to
communicate with strangers about the latest British imports. From this
perspective, advertising copy might best be seen as fragments of cultural
conversations linking ordinary colonists to a larger Atlantic economy. The
commercial announcements generally took the form of long, detailed lists
of goods, suggesting, of course, that colonial consumers were receptive to
news of variety and choice.94 But colonial retailers did not rely solely on
published inventories. After all, other merchants could match them item
for item. In this climate the rhetoric of advertising began to stress fashion,
change, and fluidity. Reports of the arrival of a ship from England carrying
a cargo of dry goods alerted everyone that stores would soon display fresh
colors and designs. These were important events in provincial communi-
ties, moments of public entertainment and personal pleasure. Many people
were probably impatient for fresh shipments of standard household articles.
As the wording of the advertisements revealed, however, others were drawn
to the stores in anticipation of the sheer excitement of discovering what
was on offer. To heighten the attraction, clever merchants hinted at the pos-
sibility of finding lower prices. No one advertised special sales in the mod-
ern sense; merchants did not mark down prices for holidays. Rather, they
tried to persuade comparison shoppers that even during the busiest weeks
of merchandising, they would in fact encounter genuine bargains.
In their advertisement S. and S. Salisbury not only described for the public “a large and
compleat Assortment” of recently imported goods, but also drew attention to a second store in
Worcester that saved country customers in search of “Quality and Cheapness” a long trip to
Boston. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts.
vade mecum N 135
Contemporary newspapers yield thousands of examples. A single one

makes the point. Bremar and Neyle informed readers of the South-Carolina
Gazette that they had a wonderful selection of goods “just imported, in the
Alexander, Capt. Curling, from London, and the latest Vessels from Bristol,
to be sold VERY REASONABLE, at their Store on the Bay.” Bremar and
Neyle appealed to a tough market. Ten other Charleston retailers placed
advertisements in the same issue of the newspaper. Most proclaimed the
arrival of the best goods “just imported” or “a fresh assortment of EURO-
PEAN GOODS, proper for the season, to be sold at the lowest prices.”95
Few retailers manipulated the language of allurement more cleverly than
John Paul Grimke, a Charleston jeweler who boldly placed his advertise-
ments on the front page of the South-Carolina Gazette. In one notice that
appeared in February 1753, Grimke demonstrated how a merchant could
create with words alone an exciting commercial environment. First, he de-
clared that he had on hand items “just imported from London, in the Martha,
Capt. Bell.” The new objects on display were unlike any that the people of
the city had ever before seen. The advertisement pledged “the following
curious new-fashioned goods, made in the neatest and most elegant taste,
which, for the sale of ready money, will be sold on very low rates in his
house in Broad-street.” Second, Grimke guaranteed that all prices would be
clearly marked. The customer had no reason to fear that he or she would be
obliged to haggle over money, a process that could well put the inexperi-
enced consumer at a disadvantage. Third, the jeweler stressed unprecedented
variety. Indeed, “the public may depend on seeing far greater choice in this
branch of trade, and in all kinds of gold and silver work, than has at any
time heretofore been exhibited for sale in this part of the world.” Fourth,
although one might predict that a colonial jeweler would direct his mes-
sage chiefly to the rich and well-born, of which Charleston had many, he
decided instead to stress a kind of rough commercial equality. In his shop
everyone was welcome; all buyers could anticipate personal attention. The
members of the public were assured that they would be “treated in the most
just and upright manner, the lowest price being fixed on each article, and
those that are not judges will be served equally as if they were.” Even suspi-
cious customers could see for themselves that all Grimke’s silver carried
“the London hall mark.” Fifth, people who responded to the advertisement
could have their purchases “engraved gratis.” And finally, the jeweler prom-
ised customers who might not want to carry a package through the streets
of Charleston that they “may be waited on with their goods at their houses.”
The advertisement then listed scores of British imports, including clocks
and watches, candlestick holders and tea strainers, and a “Great variety of
trinkets for ladies.”96 Grimke had mastered the art of communication
through advertising.
Some innovative retailers experimented with an entirely different form
of advertising that linked the seller directly to the consumer. No sooner had
a ship arrived from Britain carrying dry goods than these merchants pub-
lished their own broadsides. Precisely how they distributed the handbills is
not known. Perhaps employees walked the streets of the town, spreading
news of fashion and choice to anyone willing to accept a commercial flyer.
A broadside designed by the Boston firm of Joseph and Daniel Waldo looked
much like the advertisements that appeared in the local newspapers. But, of
course, the virtue of the new medium was that the Waldos did not have to
share the announcement with competitors. They focused attention solely
on the goods “Imported from London,” to be sold in this case at the “Sign
of the Elephant.”97 John Appleton, a Salem merchant, issued a broadside
heralding marvelous goods “Imported in the Last Ships From London.” He
assured local consumers that they would find at his store “A Fine Assort-
ment of English and India Goods.” Appleton even bragged that he sold dry
goods—over seventy-five different types of cloth were listed on his hand-
bill—at prices “as low as can be bought at Boston, by Wholesale or Retail.”98
This was a brazen claim, and one wonders whether people from Salem ac-
tually bothered to compare Appleton’s prices with those of Boston.
However significant advertising and the imaginative presentation of
goods may have been to the small retailer’s success, everyone knew—cus-
tomers as well as storekeepers—that the robustness of the new consumer
marketplace depended ultimately on an extraordinary expansion of credit
throughout the entire Atlantic world. It was a necessary rather than a suffi-
cient cause of change, for within the empire of goods it provided the lubri-
cant allowing buyers and sellers all along the great chain of acquisition to
negotiate purchases that would otherwise have been out of reach. Without
impressive sources of credit the large export houses in Britain could not
have filled American orders.99 In turn, these merchants extended credit to
the colonial wholesalers; they then distributed British manufactures to small
retailers on credit. And finally, the ordinary consumer purchased on credit—
creating what were called “book debts”— often without having to worry
about making interest payments for six months or a year following the ini-
tial transaction. Colonial Americans fully appreciated how credit connected
them to larger economic structures. As a Rhode Island debtor wrote in 1754
from a Newport jail, “Trade, we know, is supported by Credit; and Credit is
to Trade, what the Blood is to the Body; If credit fails, Trade stagnates.”100
We have already observed in our vade mecum how expectations of credit
and problems related to punctual repayment strained conversations among
British export merchants and American wholesalers. Here we are concerned
with ordinary consumers and local retailers, in other words, with a bundle
of mutual, often conflicting perceptions about the workings of a market
economy.
Although small colonial traders eagerly appealed in newspaper adver-
tisements for “ready cash”— offering handsome discounts to those who paid
for goods with hard currency—they knew that their business depended on
a generous offer of credit as well as a pledge of patience in the settlement of
accounts. Philadelphia records indicate that dry-goods merchants sold as
much as 90 percent of their goods on credit. In the Chesapeake colonies,
where the Scottish factors fell all over themselves granting credit to new
vade mecum N 137
customers, the figure was about 80 percent. New England storekeepers ap-
parently followed the same practice.101 Most American consumers seem to
have welcomed the invitation to buy on credit. In an economy that suffered
from a chronic shortage of specie, it allowed farmers to obtain whatever
goods they wanted in advance of the sale of their crops. But credit repre-
sented something more than a convenience. It stimulated desire not di-
rectly connected to need. As one writer explained, “’ [T]is well known how
Credit is a mighty inducement with many People to purchase this and the
other Thing which they may well enough do without.”102
Although small colonial retailers could not have prospered without
credit, they viewed it with nervous ambivalence. For them credit was more
than a financial or legal obligation; it was a set of professional values, a
manner of self-presentation upon which their very survival depended. They
were caught between their suppliers—major wholesale merchants who of-
ten lived in the same community—and their regular customers. If shop-
keepers did well for themselves, treating themselves and members of their
families to the British imports that flowed through their own stores, they
risked public embarrassment. Suppliers interpreted visible success as evi-
dence of a healthy income, perhaps even as a sign of a large supply of cash
on hand, and therefore they had no compunction about pressuring the store-
keeper to settle long-standing debts. By the same token, hints of affluence
suggested to the ordinary customer that the small merchant might be mak-
ing too much profit, thereby taking advantage of a neighbor who had trusted
the trader’s sense of fair dealing. And then again, the good life might have
meant that the shopkeeper who lacked proper restraint was spending him-
self into poverty. As one Boston commentator lectured the harried retail-
ers, “In London a Merchant or Tradesman making a more than usually
splendid Appearance, is frequently a Fore-runner of Bankruptcy.”103
In this insecure commercial environment, appearances could determine
a merchant’s solvency. Indeed, the kinds of values most often associated
with the so-called Protestant ethic—thrift, diligence, honesty, and mod-
esty—were forced upon the colonial shopkeeper as a condition of doing
business. Whatever his or her personal beliefs may have been, the retailer
had to appear energetic and trustworthy. A new consumer marketplace trans-
formed seventeenth-century religious mandates into eighteenth-century
bourgeois concerns. At stake was a public reputation, a kind of social capi-
tal that one squandered at one’s peril. And given the bankruptcy laws of
the period, a sudden demand for the settlement of debts could lead to di-
saster. A creditor could insist on obtaining hard currency. It made no mat-
ter that the merchant himself may have been owed sums well in excess of
the amount being importuned.104 From South Carolina “Honestus” pro-
tested that a small merchant’s “reputation” must be maintained at all costs.
He apparently had learned that “Credit is undone in Whispers. . . . [A]n ill
Word may change Plenty into Want.”105 The Rhode Island debtor who styled
himself “An Impartial Hand” put the point even more bluntly: “[W]hen a
Man in Trade breaks his Agreements . . . so that there can be no well grounded
Dependence upon him, he is soon discovered, hunted down, undone, and

perhaps cast into Prison.”106
Few colonists appreciated the force of these concerns better than Ben-
jamin Franklin. Although he did not write his much quoted Advice to a
Young Tradesman with small storekeepers such as Allen MacLean specifi-
cally in mind, Franklin’s counsel was right on the mark for anyone hoping
to succeed in the dry-goods business. He advised ambitious traders to be
punctual and thoughtful. From him they learned that “Time is Money.”
Maintaining one’s “Credit” was vital in the marketplace. By credit, Franklin
did not refer simply to accounts payable. The wise tradesman had to look
credible to gain popular trust; credit demanded a commercial mask that
may or may not have been in conflict with the clerk’s true self. “The Sound
of your Hammer at Five in the Morning or Nine at Night, heard by the
Creditor,” Franklin observed, “makes him easy Six Months longer.” Anyone
could put these principles into practice. Summing up his own argument,
Franklin reminded commercial readers that “The Way to Wealth, if you desire
it, is as plain as the Way to Market. It depends on two words, INDUSTRY
and FRUGALITY.”107
The theme of merchant virtue became a staple in colonial newspapers.
On their part, retailers complained that they had to endure constant scru-
tiny. One slip could bring ruin. Their customers were spies, gossiping be-
hind the storekeeper’s back. In a curious article that originally appeared in
South Carolina and was later picked up by a New York City journal, “Phi-
lander” whined that “A Merchant’s Credit and a Virgin’s Virtue ought to be
equally sacred from the Tongues of Men.” The author insisted that few people
missed an opportunity to disparage merchants. “The Tea-Table among the
Ladies,” he grumbled, “and the Tavern among the Men seem to be places of
new Invention for a Depravation of our [the merchants’] Manners and
Morals, Places devoted to Scandal.” No one paused to consider the hurtful
consequences of such unguarded conversation. The women were as dan-
gerous as the men in this regard. “On these Accounts it is . . .,” argued Phi-
lander, “that a Merchant walks in continual Jeopardy, from the Looseness
and Inadvertency of Men’s Tongues, ay, and Women’s too.” The lesson for
shopkeepers was not difficult to discern. In the retail business the loss of a
trader’s “Money or Goods is easily made up, and may be sometimes re-
paired with Advantage, but the Loss of Credit is never repaired.”108
Judging from other articles published during this period, not a few re-
tailers ignored such advice. The most common charge against them was
that they put on airs. They did not look like proper merchants. The editor
of the Boston Evening-Post reprinted an essay originally submitted by
“Plautus” to the New Universal Magazine (England) which railed against
the alleged excesses of “young shopkeepers.” These ambitious businessmen
overreached themselves, dressing like dandies rather than sober merchan-
disers. Such public behavior could only lead to the obvious end. “Should
the young and unexperienced shopkeeper,” intoned Plautus, “once find that
his laced waistcoat, ruffles, gold watch and snuff box [have] frighten’d his
vade mecum N 139
customers away, on the wise presumption that they must contribute thereto
in the price of his goods; there is no doubt but he would soon reduce him-
self and family to the stile and simplicity of our forefathers.” The American
editor justified running this English piece on the grounds of its relevance to
recent colonial experience. “These Observations,” he noted, “tho’ calculated
chiefly for the Kingdom of Great Britain, may, without sensible Error, serve
the Province of the Massachusetts-Bay; and, we have Reason to believe, many
other Parts of North America.”109 Only a few years earlier the same newspa-
per had exposed this kind of moral corruption in the heart of Boston. The
problem once again was “our young Merchants.” They apparently waited
on customers dressed “more like foppish Officers . . . than Men of Business,
with their Scarlet and Silk lac’d Wa[i]stcoats and Breeches, and French
Cambrick Ruffles down to their Fingers Ends, &c. which looks very little
like the Dress of Men of Business.”110 No wonder that one New England
writer concluded that merchants—however wealthy they may have been—
were well advised to “live more upon a level with [their] Neighbours.”111
Another colonist, writing as “Incultus Americanus,” suggested that re-
tailers persuaded consumers to purchase more than they really needed. He
placed the blame squarely on a profligate extension of credit. Had not the
merchants encouraged “the people to purchase their commodities, with a
promise of long credit, insinuating that payment would be easily made,
and that the articles were much cheaper imported than manufactured
among us”?112 At the end of the day, credit was something to be controlled
rather than rejected. As one almanac counseled under a section entitled
“Necessary hints for those who would be rich,” unless the customer was
“willing to pay interest, and interest upon interest,” he should pay cash for
“any unnecessary household stuff, or any superfluous thing.” Even the sim-
plest customer should know that “he that sells upon credit, expects to lose
five per cent by bad debts; therefore he charges on all he sells upon credit,
an advance that shall make up that deficiency. Those who pay for what they
buy upon credit, pay their share of his advance.”113
Perhaps too much has been made of the tensions and strains generated
by the sudden expansion of a mid-eighteenth-century consumer marketplace.
Buyers and sellers alike were anxious about reputation, about avoiding temp-
tation, and about staying abreast of new challenges associated with advertis-
ing and credit. While it is valuable to interpret relations between customers
and retailers as a kind of fluid cultural conversation, one in which ordinary
people negotiated the rules of conduct as they went along, we should not lose
sight of the fact that stores in this social context were sites of imagination. If
we overlook the capacity of merchandising to entertain and please, we miss
the powerful insight that Samuel Johnson had during a journey with James
Boswell to the Western Islands of Scotland. As he discovered,
In Col there is a standing shop, and in Mull there are two. A shop in the Islands, as in
other places of little frequentation, is a repository of every thing requisite for common
use. Mr. Boswell’s journal was filled, and he bought some paper in Col. To a man that
ranges the streets of London, where he is tempted to contrive wants for the pleasure of
supplying them, a shop affords no image worthy of attention; but in an island, it turns
the balance of existence between good and evil. To live in Perpetual want of little things,
is a state not indeed of torture, but of constant vexation.114
By 1750 most Americans had discovered that they did not have to live in
“want of little things,” and, like the leading figures of the Scottish Enlight-
enment, they came to regard this freedom from “constant vexation” as
progress.
VII
From the perspective of less affluent Americans, two additional mercantile
activities must be included in our vade mecum. Vendue sales and peddling
may have brought more British manufactures into colonial homes than did
urban shops and country stores. We shall never know for certain the vol-
ume of business conducted within these segments of the market. Neither
form of marketing generated the kinds of records that we associate with
established merchants. The silences of the archives, however, do not pro-
vide a reliable index to the extent to which these enterprises touched the
lives of marginal although honest men and women. It was while attending
the vendue sales—perhaps best imagined as a combination of modern flea
market and wholesale auction—and while examining the mysterious con-
tents of a peddler’s pack that many Americans first discovered the pleasures
of owning an ivory comb or colorful piece of ribbon. For the buyer who
possessed limited financial resources, these were challenging moments, si-
multaneously alluring and threatening, and, as we have noted in our recon-
struction of conversations between shopkeepers and customers, without
some prior knowledge of the rapidly changing character of commerce—
assumptions about products and pricing, for example—the eager colonists
risked disappointment in the marketplace.
Americans often referred to vendue sales simply as auctions. They had
a long history in the colonies, dating back to the late seventeenth century,
but as with most forms of marketing, the size and complexity of the vendues
expanded to keep pace with the consumer economy. During the early de-
cades of the century, they provided a means for merchants quickly to clear
off damaged or unpopular items. By 1750 they functioned as a major outlet
in the great chain of acquisition.115 Madam Knight, whom we encountered
in a small store in New Haven, Connecticut, visited a vendue sale in New
York City. She was in search of high-end Dutch writing paper, apparently in
much larger quantity than could be obtained in the regular shops. The ven-
due price struck her as a bargain, eight or ten shillings for about ten reams
of paper. Perhaps more intriguing was the social aspect of the auction. “At
the vendue,” Knight recounted, “I made a great many acquaintances amongst
the good women of the town who courteously invited me to their houses
and generously entertained me.”116
vade mecum N 141
No doubt, vendues did serve as a form of public recreation. Colonial

authorities recognized that the auctions might draw less savory persons
than the women who spoke with Madam Knight. Larger port cities ap-
pointed “vendue masters” who were expected to maintain order and honest
dealing. A variety of sellers appeared at these events. Most visible were the
established merchants who dumped slow-moving stock at auction. To be
sure, they took a loss on such transactions, but a swift return was preferable
to holding on to stale inventories, which they may have purchased on credit.
That was precisely what the Charleston retailer Robert Pringle did in 1744
with a shipment of dull goods he had received from Thomas Hutchinson
and Thomas Goldthwait of Massachusetts. “Shall sell of the Ribbands, Potts,
& Axes at Public Vendue as you Direct as soon as I Can have an Opportu-
nity,” he informed his Boston correspondents.117 Like the storekeepers, ven-
due sellers advertised in colonial newspapers. Although they did not provide
as much detail about weights and colors as did their competitors, they too
promised large selections of dry goods. In fact, it is highly likely that some
smaller shopkeepers and peddlers were among the bidders. In this sense,
the vendue confused the marketplace, blending wholesale transactions with
retail sales.118 To cite a single example, in 1737 the New-England Weekly Jour-
nal (Boston) carried notice of a “publick Vendue” that would be offering
not only books but also “a large variety of English Goods, Haberdashery
and Cutlery Wares, and choice Piggs [iron blocks], with divers other sorts
of Goods.” The same issue also announced that Joseph Lewis would auc-
tion off a huge assortment of cloth “at the Sign of the red Cross and Crown.”
In addition to the seven textiles listed by name, Lewis would be dispensing
“Men’s Hose, sundry sorts of Cutlery and Haberdashery Ware, with sundry
other Things.”119
More than other forms of merchandising, the vendue sales generated
sharp controversy. Defenders insisted that the public auctions represented
a marvelous innovation that served the interests of everyone involved. These
arguments reveal how thoroughly the colonists had accommodated them-
selves to the new consumer marketplace. Commentators praised the ven-
due for providing much-needed jobs in the cities, for helping the small
merchants obtain hard currency during slow periods, and, perhaps most
interesting, for keeping the established merchants from charging usurious
prices. Modern markets implied open competition. One writer publishing
under the name “A Planter” sounded much like a promoter for a modern
discount outlet: “Vendues are the places where people may get cheap bar-
gains; and they are the means of obliging the shopkeepers in general to sell
their goods cheap; so the country is well supplied on reasonable terms, while
the shopkeepers and store-keepers are kept within due bounds.”120
In a broadside entitled A Few Reasons in Favour of Vendues, another
colonist pushed this line of reasoning. “If it be granted,” he explained, “that
the importation of British manufactures is necessary, and of advantage to
the country, then those persons that introduce and dispose of them on the
lowest terms, must be confessed the best friends to the community, and
deserve their countenance and encouragement.” This is a splendid example

of the kind of insistent bourgeois rhetoric that greeted the new consumer
marketplace. The common interest was defined as the preservation of bar-
gain prices and not, as some historians have declared, a turning back of the
economic clock to some simpler age. In fact, the writer believed that the
citizens of Philadelphia should give “great encouragement to strangers trad-
ing among us.” After all, these strangers—apparently speculative traders
from England and Ireland who relied on the vendues for immediate sales—
”have kept the country well supplied [with British goods]; and in return,
have taken off large quantities of our produce.” It made no sense to this
American to levy heavy taxes on vendue transactions. Apparently some
people had suggested such a policy, but if they ever succeeded in their silly
plan, they would force ordinary people who did not have much cash on
hand to patronize “Pawn-Brokers, as in London.”121 The message was clear.
Unfettered access to consumer goods best served the public good.
As the vendues became more popular, they sparked more vocal criti-
cism. Although the large public auctions supplied some small retailers with
British imports at lower prices, the proprietors of larger stores complained
about unfair competition. After all, they had to factor into their prices sub-
stantial overhead costs. Like the evangelical itinerants who drove the estab-
lished parish ministers to distraction during this period—the Reverend
George Whitefield, for example—the vendue merchants seem to have
worked out of doors. To control the proliferation of these discount mar-
kets, storekeepers regularly appealed to local government authorities, de-
manding that auctioneers pay license fees and special taxes. In 1769 Governor
Moore, the royal governor of New York, reported that the city council in-
sisted on reining in the vendue trade. The members of this body wanted “to
put a stop to the pernicious practice, which had prevailed here for some
time past of putting up every thing to Auction, as well, dry goods, as Rum,
sugars, wines, etc., by which the number of Vendue Masters was greatly
increased to the prejudice of the shopkeeper.”122
The denunciation of the vendue markets echoed noisily in the popular
press of Philadelphia. Antagonists faulted the auctions for diverting labor-
ers away from proper agricultural pursuits. Moreover, the vendues promoted
idleness, for “people go to them without any real necessity, merely to pick
up bargains.” It was asserted as fact, for example, that consumers might
spend an entire afternoon searching for a specific item, and after wasting so
much time, “they often buy nothing.” Bargain hunters traveled from one
vendue to another, often simply to examine the various British imports on
offer. Consumer curiosity also encouraged dishonesty, for, as thieves such
as the members of the Morrison gang had discovered, it was not all that
difficult to purloin desirable objects and then sell them at unregulated mar-
kets. The most troublesome moral issue—at least in the eyes of a critic writ-
ing in a Pennsylvania newspaper—was the scandalously low prices
encountered at the public auctions. “Vendues,” claimed one author, “are the
means of lowering the price of goods in the shops; this is also a temptation
vade mecum N 143
for people to buy articles which they otherwise might have made at home,
or done without.”123 In other words, this undisciplined outlet for cheap con-
sumer goods had taken on a commercial life of its own, and by providing
an exciting new form of public entertainment, it encouraged ordinary men
and women to spend their money however they pleased.
Benjamin Franklin appreciated both the allure and the temptation of
the vendue markets more fully than did most of his contemporaries. For
him, the sale of so many imported articles to so many ordinary colonists
raised moral concerns, but unlike those who wanted to legislate the auc-
tions out of existence, Franklin knew that the popular will could not easily
be restrained. In a wonderful tongue-in-cheek piece published as Father
Abraham’s Speech, Franklin recounted how this revered figure who exem-
plified an earlier, simpler, more self-sufficient culture gave a short lecture
before the start of a large vendue sale. Abraham told the shoppers impa-
tiently waiting for the gates to open, “Here you are all got together at this
Vendue of Fineries and Knicknacks. You call them Goods, but if you do not
take Care, they will prove Evils to some of you.” According to this sage man,
the problem was not the goods themselves—no, not necessarily even the
fineries or knickknacks—but rather the likelihood that buyers would spend
beyond their means. “Many a One,” intoned Father Abraham, “for the Sake
of Finery on the Back, have done with a hungry Belly, and half starved their
Families. Silks and Sattins, Scarlet and Velvets, have put out the Kitchen Fire.”
He understood, of course, the psychology of vendues. The sudden accessi-
bility of British goods blinded some consumers to hard financial logic. They
made purchases simply because the goods “look pretty.” Father Abraham
warned that invitations to buy on credit only made the situation more dan-
gerous. “We are offered,” he explained, “by the Terms of this Vendue, Six
Months Credit; and that perhaps has induced some of us to attend it, be-
cause we cannot spare the ready Money, and hope now to be fine without
it.” But debt represented a loss of liberty, a compromise of virtue, even an
invitation to imprisonment. The people queuing up for the vendue listened
to the advice more or less politely, but it was clear that Father Abraham’s
words made no lasting impression. As soon as the sale commenced, they
acted “just as if it had been a common Sermon; for the Vendue opened, and
they began to buy extravagantly.” Only “Poor Richard” learned the lesson,
leaving the vendue without purchasing “Stuff for a new Coat.”124 No one
seemed to have noticed his personal sacrifice. They were too busy rooting
through the merchandise in search of bargains.
Peddlers made their way along the back roads of empire from Georgia
to New Hampshire. They were mysterious, ubiquitous figures. They arrived
in little communities as strangers, and while colonial authorities viewed
their comings and goings with suspicion, farm families welcomed their ar-
rival. Sometimes called hawkers or petty chapmen, peddlers linked those
who could not conveniently reach country stores with an exciting Euro-
pean marketplace. As one commentator in Massachusetts reported in 1769,
peddlers were “People who carry Goods into the remotest Corners of the
Country, and sell to Inhabitants at a great Distance from Stores, and who
without such Supplies carried to them by Pedlars, wou’d content themselves
with such poor Commodities, as they could manufacture with their own
Hands.”125
Dr. Alexander Hamilton discovered firsthand in 1744 how peddlers gen-
erated an almost insatiable curiosity among people who might normally
have been expected to show more reserve. According to Hamilton, one
evening in Bristol, Rhode Island, “I and my company were taken for pedlars.”
No sooner had Hamilton opened his “portmanteau” to rearrange some per-
sonal belongings than a person who “mistook my portmanteau for a pack”
approached the physician and “would have chaffer’d [bargained] with me
for some goods.” A few days later Hamilton and his slave Dromo experi-
enced an unusual reception in Newport. As the doctor explained, it was
“betwixt seven and eight att night, a thick fog having risen so that I could
scarce find the town.” In the heavy mist the two travelers became separated.
“When within a quarter of a mile of it [Newport], my man [Dromo] upon
account of the portmanteau, was in the dark taken for a pedlar by some
people in the street who I heard coming about him and enquiring what he
had got to sell.”126 It apparently did not strike either Hamilton or the resi-
dents of Newport as odd that an unfamiliar black person carrying a heavy
trunk in the night would be mistaken for a peddler. They were more inter-
ested in the contents of the case than in the stranger’s life history.
Like the people who turned out to interrogate Dromo, we too are curi-
ous about the contents of the peddlers’ packs. For all the excitement that
they generated, the cases or trunks were probably small. After all, these trav-
elers generally transported their goods on their backs. A few may have had
sufficient resources to purchase a horse. We know that travelers from the
Piedmont brought pack animals to Urbanna, Virginia, where they negoti-
ated for goods with Scottish factors.127 But however large their trunks, ped-
dlers seem to have offered consumers the same general range of British
imports found in the more established stores. When the New York peddler
Robert Gregg died, for example, his estate included sundry dry goods,
carpenter’s rules, razors, fiddle strings, some books, and “Spectakles.” An-
other peddler who concentrated on the Connecticut Valley market carried
items on one trip valued at only £8, among which were lace, buttons, neck-
laces, ink, rough cloth, jackknives, and Jew’s harps.128 His pack brings to
mind John Williams, the rascally Derby peddler who pleased the “Country
Girls” with an assortment of enticing baubles. Like the honest peddlers of
the period, Williams had on offer “Needles, Pins, Buckles, Laces, Fans, &c.”
The success of the peddlers greatly annoyed the country storekeepers.
They complained loudly about the competition, sounding much like those
who wanted to legislate the vendue markets out of existence. If the authori-
ties of the various colonies are to be believed, peddlers spread disease to
inland communities, trafficked in stolen goods, and took business away from
resident merchants who contributed to the general welfare by paying taxes.
One Virginia county went over the top, accusing peddlers of undermining
vade mecum N 145
the entire regional economy. In 1760 the angry petitioners informed the
House of Burgesses “of the great Disadvantages to which the Trade of this
Colony is subject, by the Practice of Pedlars and traveling Merchants, in the
Interior Parts of the Country, who import large Quantities of Goods by
Land from Pennsylvania and Maryland, and dispose of them there, and in
Return carry away great Sums of our Paper Currency, and all the Gold and
Silver they can procure.”129 One imagines that the peddlers fervently wished
that the charges were true, for if they could have amassed great sums of
money, they could have retired from peddling, a calling that seldom made
anyone rich. Other critics claimed that peddlers exposed American con-
sumers to irresistible “Lawns, Cambricks, Ribbons, &c.” and thereby tempted
“women, girls, and boys with their unnecessary fineries.”130
Most colonial legislatures passed—and then repassed—statutes de-
signed to control the peddlers.131 Some assemblies tried to restrict the hawk-
ers, petty chapmen, and peddlers to certain underpopulated areas. In other
words, they could not do business within the corporate limits of a major
city. Far more common were fees and licenses. During the early decades of
the eighteenth century, the government of Massachusetts Bay went a step
further, declaring peddling a crime and announcing that “all taverners, ale-
house keepers, common victuallers and retailers are hereby strickly forbid-
den to receive or give any entertainment to any hawker, peddler or petty
chapman . . . under penalty of twenty shillings.” One has the impression
after reading the legislative records that no one paid much attention to these
regulatory acts. Often lawmakers approved statutes that repeated almost in
the same words bills that had passed only a few years earlier. In 1750 the
New-York Mercury begged the elected representatives of New Jersey to en-
force a licensing act that they had accepted twenty years earlier. Failure to
collect fees from peddlers meant that “the Number of that sort of People
are greatly increased in the Province.”132 In neighboring Connecticut, one
town threatened to apply rough justice to the peddlers. After all, insisted
the citizens of Ashford, it was well known “that peddlers who without law
or license go about the country selling wares are a nuisance to the public,
and, if in our power, shall be picked up and put to hard labor.”133 Nothing
of this sort was done, of course; too many people regarded the colonial
authorities as a greater nuisance than the peddlers.
Surviving colonial records reveal very little about the men and women
who actually peddled British goods for a living. They must have been mar-
velous talkers. An anonymous peddler whom Hamilton observed charm-
ing a potential buyer in a country inn at the end of Long Island, New York,
was such a person. Displaying “some linnen by candle light,” the salesman
informed his customer that “he would be upon honour with him and rec-
ommend to him the best of his wares, and as to the price he would let him
know the highest and lowest att one word.” A “Scotch Irish” peddler en-
countered in Stonington, Connecticut, had a gift for “palaber” and was able
to sell “some dear bargains to Mrs. Williams.”134
Not all peddlers remained nameless, of course. We would like to know

more about Sarah Abbot, who merited an obituary in a leading Boston news-
paper. According to this journal, Abbot had died recently in Ipswich “in the
Ninetieth Year of her Age.” She received praise as “a notable Peddler in Goods
through the Course of many Years of her Life in that and the Neighbouring
Towns of this Government.”135 Abbot built up a solid local reputation. Other
peddlers, especially those of Scots-Irish background, had to travel many
miles to find customers. Jonathan Trumbull Sr., a member of one of
Connecticut’s leading political families, regularly recorded the licenses he
issued to peddlers. On January 6, 1758, for example, he certified that “li-
cense is hereby granted to Gideon Prior to trade, traffick, & deal in this
Colony as a Peddler, Hawker or Petty Chapman, for one full year.” Another
person traveled all the way from Londonderry, New Hampshire, to
Trumbull’s home in Lebanon to obtain a license.136 Most peddlers seem to
have been younger, marginal men, in search of economic opportunity. Oc-
casionally, one of their number managed to put together a modest estate.
Robert Gregg did so. For more than two decades, Gregg peddled his wares
through the small towns of New York and New Jersey, and when he died
colonial authorities valued his property at £134, a sum that indicated that
the hardworking Gregg had risen to the middle class.137
VIII
William Moore brings our vade mecum full circle. This unfortunate “Pedler
or Petty Chapman” was not a thief; he posed no threat to the New England
communities where he displayed the small objects he had originally pur-
chased in Boston. Nevertheless, he ran afoul of Massachusetts law. His prob-
lems began during a visit to Berwick, a village located in Maine, then a
province of Massachusetts. Moore arrived in 1721, just in time for the Christ-
mas season. Although he had not bothered to purchase a license to trade,
he felt secure enough to enter the home of Phillip Hubbard and there “Ex-
pose to Sale & Sell Sundry goods and Merchandize.” Local magistrates got
wind of Moore’s activities. They hauled him before the Berwick court, con-
fiscating his “bagg or pack of goods.” After taking depositions from the vil-
lagers, officials convicted Moore of traveling without proper license “from
town to town” and selling “sundry goods . . . to sundry persons.”
However much we may sympathize with Moore, our attention in this
case is drawn to the men and women of this isolated frontier settlement
who were so eager to examine the goods he carried in his pack. Daniel
Goodwin was one. He informed the magistrates that he had “bought of
Wm Moore a yard and halfe of Stuff for handcarchiefs.” Most of Moore’s
customers were women. Sarah Gooding deposed that she had gone to the
Hubbard house three days before Christmas and had purchased “Three
Quarters of a yard of muslin and a yard & a half of firritting [ferreting: tape
or edging material] and a yard and Quarter of Lase for a Cap and for fine
vade mecum N 147
thread 12 pence, in black silk 9 penne worth.” Patience Hubbard acquired “a

pare of garters” and “sundry other goods.” And finally, Sarah Stone con-
fessed to have taken home “one penne worth of smole trifeles.”138
None of these purchases amounted to more than a few pennies. That is
precisely the point. What we encounter in Hubbard’s house is a moment of
excitement and entertainment, a gathering of humble neighbors in their
capacity as consumers of British manufactured goods. The new market-
place presented the Sarah Stones and Patience Hubbards of colonial America
with unexpected opportunities; it compelled such people to compare prices,
follow the advertisements, and weigh the personal risks of buying on credit.
From the great wholesale merchants, the alluring articles reached the ur-
ban shops and country stores. Peddlers distributed them; colonists sought
them out at the vendue markets. Everyone in this society had a chance to
acquire something. For elite colonists, the flood of British imports quickly
transformed an entire material culture. For most Americans—for those
upon whom a colonial rebellion would ultimately depend—the empire first
entered their lives as “smole trifeles.”
5
The Corrosive Logic of
Choice: Living with Goods
E ighteenth-century consumers had choices

to make. Sometimes they found the re-
sults pleasing, sometimes disappointing.
But whatever their decisions, they frequently expressed irritation at the mar-
ket behavior of other people whose choices seemed presumptuous, even
vulgar. The people who inhabited the Moon were a case in point. On the
eve of independence, an amateur sociologist from Massachusetts took a
trip to Lunar City, and what he encountered there revealed just how corro-
sive consumer choice could be to the proper ordering of society.
Surprising as it may seem to modern readers, this early space traveler
showed almost complete indifference to the technical aspects of the feat. As
he explained in a published report entitled News from the Moon, a person
intent on taking such an adventure simply had to follow the correct high-
way and, from time to time, to ask other travelers for directions. The jour-
ney required no unusual equipment, not even special supplies of food and
water. Moon research did, however, take considerable courage. For one thing,
the satellite was densely populated, and while the adventurous colonist as-
sumed that Moon people looked much like ordinary Americans, he expressed
no little anxiety about the state of their culture. A trip to Lunar City, he
discovered, exposed him to the manners and customs of a modern con-
sumer society that a person of his background found utterly shocking.
Everything went well at the start. The traveler reached “the World on
this side [of] the Moon” with remarkable ease. Even without the assistance
of a proper vade mecum, he sensed that he had gained the outskirts of Lu-
nar City when he encountered a sign over a tavern owned by a certain “Mr.
Sharper.” The advertisement struck him as odd, however, for instead of pro-
claiming a familiar drinking establishment such as the King’s Arms or the
Whitehart—as one would have found in Boston—it pictured “one Man
picking another Man’s Pocket.” And sure enough, a short time later, some-
the corrosive logic of choice N 149
one robbed him of his belongings. From this unpleasant experience the
colonist concluded that Moon people, like some colonial Americans, must
be “knaves and rogues.” More unpleasant moments awaited the intrepid
researcher.
The traveler soon began to gather data. He stumbled quite by chance
on an honest innkeeper. After providing him with a tasty chicken dinner
and a comfortable “feather bed”— the Moon seemed to have evolved a cu-
rious parallel universe in which people appreciated chicken dinners and
warm beds—the proprietor told the visitor from Earth in more detail what
he could expect to encounter when he finally reached Lunar City. The pros-
pects were daunting. Since the local economy was depressed, Moon people
were finding it difficult to “get money to trade with, and all commodities
were dear and nothing cheap.” When the colonist expressed surprise at such
a sorry state of affairs, his host informed him that the local merchants were
largely to blame, for they employed unsavory business practices designed
to fleece Lunar workers of hard-earned currency. The next morning the
resolute New Englander, now fortified by a breakfast brandy, set off for Lu-
nar City. As he departed, the innkeeper provided him with a rough map of
the commercial district, warning emphatically that the colonist should un-
der no condition stray from “Honest Dealing-street.”
The advice went unheeded. The Earth traveler simply could not resist
the temptation to explore other streets. A stroll down “Proud-lane” confirmed
his apprehension about the moral health of Lunar City. Everywhere he saw
“men and women dressed up in the best clothing and newest fashions there
were in the Lunar world.” But it was not the face of luxury that the visitor
found most disconcerting. Everything was topsy-turvy, like the convoluted
plot of a Mozart opera. Nothing conformed to what the outside researcher
regarded as the correct order of society. When he entered Lunar homes, for
example, he “could not tell the maids from the mistress by their apparel; the
mistress was patched and painted, and so was the maid.” Things got worse.
“The mistress was clothed in her scarlet cloak and jockey-cap and her fine
pattoons; and when I came to see the maid, she likewise was dressed up in her
scarlet cloak and her jockey-cap and fine pattoons and her silk gown.” The
males of the Moon contributed to the chaos. “The servant man,” the traveler
learned, “must go in his wig and banjan equal to his Master.”
It was the women of Lunar City, however, who seemed most respon-
sible for the confusion so conspicuous on Proud-lane. They ruined their
husbands “by spending so much upon [themselves] in Pride.” The wives of
tradesmen demanded “silk gowns and scarlet cloaks and fine pattoons, and
have chocolate or Tea or Coffee for their breakfasts.” This sybaritic environ-
ment corrupted Moon children. The daughters suffered most visibly.
There is many men in Proud-lane who have—it may be—half a dozen fine daughters
who must go in the newest fashions, so spruce and neat that they may get husbands. . . .
[M]any young women in the Moon are so proud, they will go fine in cloths, [even] if
they undo their parents. They will not only have fine Cloths, but if they are not fair by
nature they will endeavour to make themselves fair by art.
The contagion spread from class to class. Indeed, as the American discov-
ered, “it is grown so common in the Moon that every servant wench must
have fine calamanco or chintz gowns who has hardly a smock to her back.”
The investigation of the streets of Lunar City quickly turned into a night-
mare. The consumers of the Moon were out of control; their excesses in the
marketplace had poisoned commercial relations. The urban tour included
the frightening spectacle of daily life on “Tattling-street” and “Prodigal-
lane,”“Whispering-street” and “Lying-lane street.” It brought the traveler to
“Envy-street,” where Moon citizens regularly indulged themselves in public
fits of jealousy. These horrific neighborhoods sustained the retail shops lo-
cated nearby on “Stealing-lane,” “Over-reaching-street,” and “Cheating-
street.” Here, no one even attempted to mask the disintegration of civil
society. The Lunar City market encouraged the adulteration of goods and
the use of false weights and measures. “The Shopkeepers in Cheating-street,”
observed the Earth visitor, “. . . will sell Moth-eaten or damnified Cloth to
cheat ignorant people who know no better.”
Cheating-street was the last straw. The Lunar traveler could take no
more. As he retraced his steps, he encountered a person who inquired
whether Moon people differed “from the inhabitants of my country.” The
response was predictable. “I told him no,” confessed the colonial space trav-
eler. “They did and acted just like the people in my country.”1 At the end of
the day, Lunar City was just another Boston, or New York, or Philadelphia.
To paraphrase the wisdom of another age, the colonial explorer had con-
fronted an alien culture and recognized it as his own.
To disparage News from the Moon as simply a clumsy dystopia would
be a mistake. In his own heavy-handed style—and one picks up echoes of
John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress—the author addressed the pressing con-
cerns of his own generation. The flood of British imports that we have
chronicled in detail invited colonists to fashion themselves in bold new ways.
Within their own communities, they wanted to appear prettier, or more
successful, or perhaps merely different from other people with whom they
came into contact. But, as they rapidly discovered, the goods of this ex-
panding marketplace were never just goods, things never just things. Con-
sumer objects demanded cultural interpretation; they were the stuff by which
a society experiencing what it perceived as accelerated change sorted itself
out. Whatever the purchaser’s original intentions may have been, store-
bought items spoke to contemporaries of class and gender, of character
and identity. The process of defining meaning and significance was, of
course, always a matter of individual perspective. What one person saw as
innocent pleasure, another labeled as sinful indulgence.
In this context personal decisions about how best to spend one’s own
money inevitably sparked heated cultural controversies in which appeals to
traditional morality and proper behavior were employed to preserve an older
social order in which women and children—indeed, ordinary colonists of
all sorts—allegedly knew their place. If nothing else, the visit to Lunar City
demonstrates that debates over the freedom to acquire British manufac-
tures rested ultimately on conflicting claims to power, and it is for this rea-
son that we should see mass participation in an eighteenth-century empire
of goods as at once wonderfully liberating and deeply threatening. It was,
in fact, what the poet Wallace Stevens might have called “the imagination’s
new beginning.”2
The challenge for the modern visitor to colonial society is to avoid be-
coming caught up in a moral vocabulary of the eighteenth century. We have
no interest in keeping servants and maids in their place. It surely serves no
constructive purpose to try to pin down luxury with great precision or to
determine whether a certain type of fabric represented an extravagance or
a necessity. Such distinctions only divert attention from the social condi-
tions that so thoroughly discredited a language of goods inherited from
medieval church fathers and Renaissance republicans. What generated an
undeniable sense of instability was the huge number of ordinary men and
women who so visibly engaged in making choices about the character of
their everyday lives. This was a genuinely new phenomenon. And, what is
more, the people who most concern us welcomed making choices. As col-
ors, textures, and designs proliferated, such decisions became even more
meaningful. For many of them—and one thinks of the poor farmers who
purchased “smole trifeles” from the peddler in Maine—the act of choosing
could be liberating, even empowering, for it allowed them to determine for
themselves what the process of self-fashioning was all about. As one of them
declared on the eve of independence, “I, for myself, choose that there should
be many Stores filled with every Kind of thing that is convenient and use-
ful, that I might have my choices of Goods, upon the most reasonable or
agreeable Terms; whether foreign or homemade; I would have Liberty of
either, and to Deal as I judge best for myself. And I wish the same Privilege
to all my Friends and Neighbors.”3
It should not come as a surprise that for such men and women choice
in the consumer marketplace gradually merged with a discourse of rights,
so that efforts by the British Parliament that seemed to curtail participa-
tion were interpreted not only as an annoyance, but also as an attack on
basic human rights. Men and women discovered at such moments that the
choices that had brought them so much pleasure could be recast during
market boycotts into choices for political freedom.
II
While humans may not have an innate desire for various familiar comforts,
they surely define their needs within specific historical contexts, so that the
actual choice before them may not have been crates or chairs but rather
chairs of this or that design.4 Eighteenth-century writers fully understood
this point. Francis Hutcheson, a leading figure in the Scottish Enlighten-
ment who also happened to be popular in the colonies, explained that “the
world has so well provided for the support of mankind, that scarce any
person in good health need be straitened in bare necessaries. But since men
are capable of a great diversity of pleasures, they may be supposed to have a
great variety of desires, even beyond the necessaries of life.” Human beings
were by nature industrious and inventive, and for Hutcheson—as well as
for many contemporary Americans—it seemed merely rhetorical to ask,
“What man, who had only the absolute necessaries of meat and drink, and
a cave or a beast’s skin to cover him, would not, when he had leisure, labour
for farther conveniencies?”5
Fashion provided the catalyst necessary to transform normal human
desire into a powerful social force capable of driving the new consumer
marketplace. The word itself is associated with a long history of moral con-
troversy, suggesting to censorious commentators a vacuous chasing after
glitter while to others it signified a quite unobjectionable aspect of social
behavior. One does not expect to find the second, more accommodating
perspective on fashion in eighteenth-century writings. But, in fact, authors
were able to discuss fashion without losing self-control. Richard Rolt, a Brit-
ish author on the topic of trade, regarded it as a legitimate engine of com-
mercial prosperity. He advised merchants of the empire that “the term fashion
is . . . applicable to new stuffs, which pleasing by their colour, their design,
or their manufacture, are first eagerly sought for, but give way in their turn
to other stuffs that have the charms of novelty.” Rolt, of course, was not
saying anything that the anxious Scottish factors of the Chesapeake or the
harried shopkeepers of Boston had not already learned through experience.
He deserves credit, however, for describing fashion as something other than
a moral threat. “The word fashion,” Rolt explained in the pragmatic lan-
guage of business, “is therefore used with regard to every particular that
enters the commerce of wool, and silk, either for clothing, ornament, or
furniture, or even things in no respect relative to commerce.” Rolt conjured
up an ordinary consumer casually sorting through imported goods while
noting that “the colour of this cloth is the fashion,” “this damask is a new
fashion,” or “this design is new, but the fashion will not continue long.” It is
hard to conjure up a shopkeeper so dull-witted that he had to be reminded
that “a stuff is said not to be in fashion when there is no call for it.” But Rolt
revealed a powerful insight into a rapidly changing market culture driven
by choice by counseling, “[I]t is certainly advantageous for a tradesman to
invent new fashions of stuffs, or silks, if he can have a prompt sale for them.”6
Rolt aside, it was far more common for essayists on both sides of the
Atlantic to heap abuse on the “charm of novelty.” In their condemnation of
an incessant pursuit of anything new, they drew upon a vocabulary of sick-
ness. Other societies, including our own, have equated public behavior that
mainstream critics find repellent with disease. Actions that transgress moral
boundaries are seen as evidence of a spreading contagion. Thus, when an
eighteenth-century writer such as the Englishman John Brown contemplated
the rising tide of fashion, he sputtered about “a craving,” a “Rage,” an “Itch,”
and an “unmanly Dissipation.” The consumer marketplace promoted “ef-
feminacy” and “Impotence.” Brown’s Estimate of the Manners provided
Americans who feared that servants might pass for masters with a full cata-
logue of corruptions directly attributable to fashion.7
The colonists did not really need Brown’s assistance. When fashion was
the topic of discussion, they warmed to the task. One Pennsylvania scrib-
bler who appropriately took the pen name “Tim Gruff ” announced in a
newspaper, “[T]here is nothing [that] influences mankind (and by man-
kind here I would be understood to mean woman kind also) so much as
fashion—Let a thing be ever so preposterous or inconvenient, ‘it’s the fash-
ion,’ is sufficient to make it admired.”8 In 1750 a Boston writer identified
simply as “M. F.” insisted that only extraordinary self-control could possi-
bly save New England from “Wild-Fire Fashion.” He devised an extremely
clever argument in his crusade against consumer madness. The society would
have to innoculate itself, so that anti-fashion would become fashionable.
Even assuming the leadership of the local gentry in this project, the pros-
pects were not all that promising, for, as M. F. complained, “it is now fash-
ionable to live great, to indulge the Appetite, to dress rich and gay.”9 And in
New York an avowedly dispassionate writer informed readers how fashion
could destroy a hardworking farm family in only a single generation. A son
without self-discipline invited almost certain doom. In this moral exercise,
the good farmer dies,
and his Son succeeds to the Estate; but being a fashionable Gentleman, he must have
Claret and Madeira; he cannot drink his own Malt Liquor, but must have it from
England; the Linen made of his own Flax is home-spun, he therefore cannot endure it,
but supplies himself with that of Holland and Ireland. He cannot sleep in a Bed with
his own Linen, or Stuff Furniture, but he must have that of Chintz, which are more
genteel; and nothing but a China Damask is fit for a Morning-Gown for him to wear.
By this Means he soon spends the ready Money his Father had saved.10
No one in colonial America seriously contemplated anything remotely

like—to adopt Hutcheson’s examples—wearing the skins of wild animals
or returning to life in caves. M. F. gave the game away when, after excoriat-
ing the evils of fashion, he protested, “I would by no Means be understood
to be a Favourer of a close, mean, niggardly Way of Living.”11 The problem,
in other words, was to determine who in society was best equipped to handle
the temptations of consumer novelty. The glib answer, of course, was the
rich and well-born. Unfortunately, for those who wanted to contain the
contagion, conventional wisdom about class and manners did not speak
effectively to the issue of containment. Everyone assumed that novelty in
the marketplace spread—again like a kind of infectious disease—through
mimicking. The lower orders took their cues about fashion from their sup-
posed betters, so that a consumer decision made by a highly visible person
of influence would in time inevitably capture the imagination of middling
and lower groups, the very people allegedly least able to acquire these goods
without succumbing to vice and degeneracy.
No one who bothered to write on the topic questioned whether the goods
of the marketplace served as the external markers of class; they surely did so,
on the Earth as well as on the Moon. But if people perpetually copied each
other, it became nearly impossible to tell where in the traditional social

order a person properly belonged. Such concerns had been raised in earlier
times—during the reign of Elizabeth I, for example—but now a far greater
percentage of the population was engaged in the process. The author of an
English tract explained as well as anyone the unusual potential for an open,
consumer-oriented society to abrade customary notions of hierarchy. “A
strong emulation in all the several stations,” he explained, sparks “a per-
petual restless ambition in each of the inferior ranks to raise themselves to
the level of those immediately above them. In such a state as this, fashion
must have an uncontrolled sway. And a fashionable luxury must spread
through it like a contagion.”12 Such apparently irrefutable logic echoed
through the provincial press. The Reverend Nathaniel Potter thundered in
a sermon published as A Discourse on Jeremiah that “men naturally emulate
those above them, and study to equal or resemble their Superiors in the
Luxuries and Superfluities of Life, from the highest Favourite to the mean-
est Footman.”13
No one grasped better how Americans communicated claims to social
status through possession of the newest fashions than Benjamin Franklin.
In his Autobiography he recounted the manner in which market novelty
first entered his own Philadelphia household. The culprit in this consumer
confession was Franklin’s wife. She was the one who wanted to acquire the
fashionable objects she had encountered in the homes of her neighbors.
But instead of whining about Franklin’s failure to provide the family with
the goods that would properly reflect his rising social status—after all, he
had become one of the richest men in Pennsylvania—she cleverly manipu-
lated her proud husband. Despite his mild protest, Franklin seems to have
been fully complicit in this mutual experience of self-fashioning. As Franklin
remembered the moment,
my breakfast was a long time bread and milk (no tea), and I ate it out of a twopenny
earthen porringer, with a pewter spoon. But mark how luxury will enter families, and
make a progress, in spite of principle: being call’d one morning to breakfast, I found it
in a China bowl, with a spoon of silver! They had been bought for me without my
knowledge by my wife, and had cost her the Enormous sum of three-and-twenty shil-
lings, for which she had no excuse or apology to make, but that she thought her hus-
band deserv’d a silver spoon and China bowl as well as any of his neighbors. This was
the first appearance of plate and China in our house, which afterward, in a course of
years, as our wealth increas’d, augmented gradually to several hundred pounds in
value.14
However developed Mrs. Franklin’s sense of fashion may have been, it

did not come close to matching her husband’s. He knew that correctly in-
terpreting the cues of this new material culture was a key aspect of social
mobility. One had to be self-conscious about one’s buying habits; consum-
ing British goods could be hard work. In a marvelous letter that Franklin
wrote from London to his wife soon after the “China bowl” incident had
occurred, he gave an account of his frantic efforts to keep up with or, in this
case perhaps, keep ahead of his provincial neighbors. Describing the con-
tents of two large shipping crates dispatched to America, he explained that
since he wanted “to show the Difference of Workmanship[,] there is some-

thing from all the China Works in England.” An itch for “Fancy” compelled
him to purchase a china basin “of an odd Colour” as well as four ladles of
the “newest, but ugliest, Fashion.” Just think, he seemed to suggest, how
friends and rivals in America would react when they saw the “little Instru-
ment to Core Apples” and “another to make little Turnips out of great ones.”
Franklin admitted that he could not resist picking up “56 Yards of Cotton
printed curiously from Copper Plates, a new Invention.” But the central
piece—an example of eighteenth-century schlock—was a china jug for beer.
“I fell in Love with it at first Sight,” Franklin told his wife, “for I thought it
look’d like a fat jolly Dame, clean and tidy, with a neat blue and white Calico
Gown on, good natur’d and lovely, and [it] put me in mind of—Some-
body.”15 One wonders whether Mrs. Franklin appreciated her husband’s
consumer joke.
Franklin was, of course, precisely the kind of self-made man whom
later generations of Americans have found so appealing. Within the con-
text of the mid-eighteenth century, however, upwardly mobile figures such
as Franklin seemed much more problematic. They were men out of place;
they defied traditional notions of social class. The source of the difficulty
was not ambition, for, in point of fact, every free person in this society as-
pired to economic independence, whether that meant purchasing a few more
acres of productive farm land or establishing oneself as a skilled trades-
man.16 What stirred apprehension was the propensity of quite unobjection-
able ambition to spin out of control, becoming for some people little more
than an expression of envy. Franklin may have successfully portrayed the
acquisition of china and pewter as relatively harmless acts, but contempo-
raries—especially those who viewed self-made men as a threat to their own
social standing—insisted that the celebration of novelty betrayed a deeply
flawed character, perhaps even the presence of vice. As one colonial news-
paper warned, “there is always, an Emulation most dangerous to the Com-
munity when every one beholding the Finery of his Neighbours pines to
see himself outdone—burns with Envy—Or perhaps ruins his own For-
tune and Credit to keep with him in those things that excite his Envy.”17
Colonists who trooped so enthusiastically to the local stores professed
to believe in a divinely sanctioned social hierarchy in which each person
had an assigned position. During the seventeenth century this Renaissance
concept still had considerable purchase, and men and women attempted to
sort themselves out as best they could according to different ranks suppos-
edly acquired at birth. Social mobility represented a direct challenge to God’s
cosmic plan. Within this older theological framework, certain rights and
privileges pertained to each class. Magistrates could not, for example, sub-
ject a proper gentleman to corporal punishment; only malefactors recruited
from the lower orders deserved the sting of the lash. External evidence of
wealth—the display of expensive cloths, for example—did not reveal one
thing or another about a person’s genuine status. Rather, as clergymen in
the Chesapeake as well as New England repeatedly explained in a kind of
circular logic, only someone whose position in the community had already
been established could legitimately wear the garments that one would associ-
ate with a man or woman of that particular status.18 By the end of the seven-
teenth century, this static model had come under heavy attack. The leading
figures of the Enlightenment systematically undermined the assumptions that
had for so long sustained inherited religious notions of class and status. John
Locke and Isaac Newton played major roles in the demolition, but scores of
lesser-known writers in Britain and America began to reassess just how much
God cared about maintaining a precisely calibrated social hierarchy.19
At the time when Mrs. Franklin decided that her husband merited a
new breakfast set, the debate over how best to describe the structure of
society remained unresolved. The sudden torrent of imported consumer
goods after 1740 only exacerbated an ongoing controversy, for as more and
more quite ordinary people purchased British manufactures, they inevita-
bly transgressed the older boundaries of class and status. They increasingly
made what we might call choices out of bounds. This situation had a curi-
ous effect on popular discussions about the character of the new market-
place. Those who took it upon themselves to speak for the common good
generally decried the apparent erosion of a divinely ordered society. They
spoke nostalgically of a world that they had lost in which the lower orders
knew their place. But usually these same commentators passionately de-
fended their own right to acquire goods that allegedly brought them so
much happiness. Without openly admitting what was happening, they took
onboard the concept that status was somehow dependent on display—in-
deed, on the spectacle of fashion—and once they had entertained the idea
that the ordering of society turned on one’s visible possessions rather than
on innate qualities, they had to face the unsettling possibility that money
alone determined the character of the social order.20
In this unstable intellectual environment, imported goods took on an
especially heavy cultural burden. In most societies around the world, people
spend a lot of time interpreting the belongings of other men and women
with whom they come into contact. These objects are the props of everyday
life, and by defining sacred and secular rituals, they powerfully reinforce
the social order. At mid-century, however, these normal hermeneutic pro-
cesses short-circuited.21 The availability of so many goods confused shared
meanings about hierarchy. The Boston Gazette complained, “We run into . . .
Extremes as to Dress; so that there is scarce any Distinction between Per-
sons of great Fortune, and People of ordinary Rank.”22 It probably would
not have consoled this writer to learn that the same blurring of social bound-
aries had also occurred in Lunar City. Another journal exclaimed that “no
age can come up to the present, when by their dress, the clerk, apprentice,
or shopman, are not distinguishable from their master; nor the servant maid,
even the cook-wench, from her mistress.”23 Everywhere a frenetic chasing
after fashionable goods had generated disorder. Even Connecticut, styled
by some contemporaries as “the land of steady habits,” seemed in danger.
According to “Intonsus Cato,”
The People throughout our King’s Dominions, seem to vie with each other, in Extrava-
gance. Throughout the Whole, there are zealous Efforts in every single Person to imitate
the person next above him, and in every Town to equal [the] next [highest] in Wealth,
Popularity and Politeness. Thus by a [spread] of the most ridiculous Mimickry, the Fash-
ions of London are communicated to the poorest, meanest Town in Connecticut.24
Although the rhetoric seems at times hyperbolic, popular commentators

worked themselves into a frenzy over the impending anarchy. “Mentor,” for
example, announced that “the lowest rank of men would pass for a middle
sort; and every one lives above his condition . . . to make a shew of their
wealth. . . . Thus a whole nation falls to ruin; all conditions and ranks of
men are confounded; [and] an eager desire of acquiring wealth to support
a vain expense, corrupts the purest minds.”25
The striking newness of it all amplified the shrillness of complaint. The
perception of living at a moment of rapidly accelerating social change—a
condition by no means unique to this generation—convinced many colo-
nists that they were in fact confronting a crisis without historical prece-
dent. The Reverend William Tennent, an evangelical minister, betrayed a
general sense of temporal discontinuity during a sermon delivered in
Charleston, South Carolina. Tennent claimed that in the past—as recently
as the late seventeenth century—each social group had indulged in vices
peculiar to itself. In other words, in those times the poor and middling
classes may have been corrupt, but they were corrupt in ways that separated
them clearly from those above and below them. “Formerly Vices were de-
scribed by the Classes of Mankind to which they belonged,” lectured Tennent.
The most heinous examples, of course, were “confined chiefly to the Chan-
nel of the Court.” Tennent insisted that the “middle and lower Classes of
People” as well as “the Inhabitants of Villages and Country Places” had es-
caped the truly dissolute practices associated with Charles II. But, by the
same token, the minister announced that a different sociology was now in
place, for his contemporaries had witnessed a curious democratization of
vice. Objectionable practices, Tennent observed, have “spread themselves
so universally among all Ranks in the British Empire, that we can no longer
describe them in that Manner.” In the new consumer age, “our common
and Country People seem to vie with the first Classes of Mankind in Vices,
which were formerly peculiar to them alone.”26
The analysis reveals something about Tennent’s own confusion about
the structure of late-eighteenth-century society. He never doubted that hu-
man beings sorted themselves out according to class and status; he issued
no call for social leveling. Like many other Americans, however, he had lost
the ability to decode the rules of the hierarchy. Status and class were sup-
posed to coincide, so that if a man was accepted as a gentleman by others,
he was expected to look like a gentleman. But in the new order almost any-
one of moderate means seemed capable of presenting himself, at least in
terms of material possessions, as a gentleman or lady. The middling orders
found themselves similarly vulnerable to incursions by the poor. Judged on
the basis of innate character, of course, the poor were still the poor, the
middling sorts still middling sorts, but the elements that made them so
seemed unhappily obscure. Put another way, choice in the consumer mar-
ketplace had begun to uncouple status and class. Dr. William Douglass, a
Boston physician, would have had little good to say about Tennent’s evan-
gelical preaching style, but he too understood how rampant emulation had
destabilized the social order. “It is true,” Douglass confessed with a bow to
Locke, that “all Men are naturally equal, but Society requires subordina-
tion.”27 And fearful “Simplicius Honestus” of Philadelphia called attention
to the “quick advancement” of fashion in “this young city.”“This pernicious
distemper,” he cried, “not only discovers itself in people of high rank amongst
us, but is infecting those of an inferior class.”28
III
Controversy over the social impact of fashion focused chiefly on clothes.
Imported fabrics introduced Americans to a stunning range of consumer
choice. After 1740 the market suddenly became alive with possibilities. One
could purchase different textures and weights; shopkeepers offered an un-
precedented selection of colors and designs.29 The fact that men and women
of all backgrounds could so easily acquire the latest styles incensed conser-
vative commentators who insisted that other people dress appropriately to
their stations in life. As the plaintive rhetoric of the period suggests, the
realities of daily life no longer harmonized with the discourse of self-re-
straint. Ordinary Americans were actually demanding the same new weights
and colors, designs and variety, that members of the colonial elites con-
cluded ought rightly to distinguish them from the lower orders. A pam-
phlet calling for reforms in the political economy of New England pinned
the region’s monetary woes squarely on the democratization of fashion in
apparel. “Our Gentry,” observed the essayist, “yea our Commonalty, must
be dress’d up like Nobles, nothing short of the finest Broad-Cloaths, Silks,
&c. will serve.”30
Other writers pursued this critique. “Plautus,” for example, whose re-
flections on the blurring of class and status appeared in a Boston newspa-
per, noted, “[D]ress is grown of universal use in the conduct of life; even so
far that a stranger of tolerable good sense dressed like a gentleman, is fre-
quently better received by those of quality above him, than one of much
better parts, whose attire is regulated by the rigid notions of œconomy.”
The nettlesome issue was not the articulation of difference through styles
of dress. Rather, the grievance was against those of middling and lower or-
ders with a few extra shillings in their pockets who successfully fobbed them-
selves off as real gentlemen. “Dress,” lectured Plautus, “. . . is a necessary
qualification in life; but then it must be suitable to the station and even to
the age, and capacity of the person, that puts it on.” The wanton disregard
for the symbolic rules of apparel threatened to subvert the reflexive dis-
plays of public deference that the members of each class were expected to
show to superiors as well as to inferiors. If etiquette no longer reinforced

the structures of power, then the entire order of things might come tum-
bling down like Humpty-Dumpty. Plautus posed a series of questions that
surely troubled his readers, especially those rendered insecure by the chang-
ing face of provincial material culture. “If a promiscuous use of fine cloaths
be countenanced, who, that is really deserving of our respect and reverence,
can be distinguished from the profligate and base born miscreant, that lies
in wait to deceive under the disguise of noble garb?” Would not such pre-
tenders attempt to worm their way into the hearts of the daughters of lead-
ing families? And how, this author whined, “must we distinguish the young
gentleman . . . from the journeyman taylor or barber, and it may chance the
more artful and dangerous footman; who have had the impudence to dress
like men of quality”?31
If we examine the erosion of traditional deference from the perspective
of the “uppity” sorts rather than from that of a defensive elite, we begin to
appreciate that those men and women who elected “gaiety” over “sobriety”
were more concerned with the private pleasures of dressing fashionably than
with the preservation of social order. They could always judge for them-
selves how they looked, no doubt envisioning themselves at these moments
as prettier, younger, or more successful than they were in fact. During this
period many colonial shopkeepers began carrying mirrors, especially small,
affordable looking-glasses employed in personal grooming. This may have
been the first generation of Americans who could conveniently check how
they actually appeared in public. They decided whether they looked better
in yellow or red, stripes or solids, light cottons or heavy woollens. They
could monitor the process of self-fashioning anytime they pleased.32
The pressure to make the right choices from among so many contend-
ing possibilities must have been considerable. Even chance encounters in
public—a greeting after a church service or a short conversation in a tav-
ern—became occasions for placing other colonists within a social order
now increasingly defined through clothes. Not surprisingly, Americans of
this generation developed a sharp eye for textiles. It is impressive how often
their descriptions of other people drew attention to the quality and color of
garments. These word-pictures sometimes amounted to little more than
commentaries on contemporary fashion. Philip Fithian was not a person
whom one would expect to have noticed such things. This religious young
man, a recent graduate of Princeton, served as a tutor for the children of
Robert Carter. Fithian kept a private journal of his experiences at Nomini
Hall, one of the largest plantations in Virginia. One summer evening in
1774 he met Miss Betsy Lee. “She wore a light Chintz Gown,” Fithian re-
counted, “very fine, with a blue stamp; elegantly made, & which set well
upon her—She wore a blue silk Quilt—In one word Her Dress was rich &
fashionable.” On another occasion he explained that when they attended
church, “Almost every Lady wears a red Cloak; and when they ride out they
tye a white handkerchief over their Head and face.”33 It was not only outsid-
ers who made such observations. The Virginians commented extensively
on the cut of Fithian’s garments. When John Bartram, one of America’s

first botanists, set off in 1737 to visit two of Virginia’s most influential planters,
a friend advised him to purchase a new set of clothes, “for though I should
not esteem thee less, to come to me in what dress thou will,—yet these
Virginians are a very gentle, well-dressed people—and look, perhaps, more
at a man’s outside than his inside.”34
When Bartram’s friend used the word outside, in all probability he was
not referring to the botanist’s physical features. It was clothes that mat-
tered. To be sure, Americans took note of an individual’s height and weight.
They spotted obvious deformities. But when called upon to describe an-
other colonist, they inevitably concentrated on the color and quality of the
person’s garments. One sees this sensitivity to textiles expressed most
arrestingly in the frequent advertisements for runaway servants. These de-
scriptions contained general information about hair color and body type.
It was clothes, however, that received the most detailed attention. An adver-
tisement that ran in the Virginia Gazette announced that when William
Smith disappeared, “He had on . . . a light coloured broad cloth coat, which
is broke at the elbows, and with very few buttons on it, a pail blue duroy
waistcoat, a pair of deep blue sagathy breeches, coarse shoes, several pair of
stockings, steel buckles, coarse felt hat, a Newmarket coat of light bath coat-
ing, not bound, but stitched on the edges, with death head buttons on it, a
pair of wrappers, rather of a darker colour than the Newmarket coat . . . he
likewise carried off with him a black sattin capuchin, a piece of new Vir-
ginia cloth, containing eight yards, striped with blue and copperass.”35 Such
advertisements for servants appeared in newspapers throughout the colo-
nies, indicating if nothing else that the consumer revolution touched the
lives of even the most humble eighteenth-century Americans. During the
Seven Years’ War, military authorities attempting to track down deserters
employed virtually the same descriptive language. When John Thomas left
Captain Thomas Shaw’s Company of New Jersey Provincials, he “had on . . . a
white Drugget Jacket, and Breeches of the same, a Calico under Jacket, check
Shirt, grey Worsted Stockings and new Shoes, with large Brass Buckles in
them.”36
The incessant reading of cloth for cultural meaning extended even to
the paintings that colonists commissioned to hang in their homes. Eigh-
teenth-century portrait painters understood the symbolic significance of
textiles for the Americans, resulting in a heightened awareness of textures
and weights perhaps unmatched until the Asian Indians, another colonial
people dependent upon British exports, defined their own nationalist aspi-
rations around the use and production of cloth.37 The faces of the promi-
nent colonists who were captured on canvas seem by modern aesthetic
standards disappointing. They appear flat, repetitious, totally lacking in
personality. They have nothing of the imaginative depth that one associates
with later, more technically skilled painters such as John Singleton Copley.
And yet, despite their anatomical crudeness, sitters and members of their
families extravagantly praised the works of prolific painters such as John
Newspaper announcements
appealing for the return of
runaway servants and slaves
often focused on the clothes
that the person was wearing
when last seen. Even these
marginal laborers managed
to obtain colorful and
fashionable garments.
Connecticut Courant, 3 July
1772. Connecticut Historical
Society.
Wollaston, Robert Feke, John Hesselius, Joseph Blackburn, and Jeremiah

Theus for having achieved a genuine “likeness.”
What seemed to have most satisfied the people who purchased these
portraits was the extraordinarily detailed delineation of the garments worn
by their friends and relatives. In Great Britain such artists would have been
known somewhat derisively as “drapery painters.” They were the ones em-
ployed by large London studios after a master court painter had completed
the face and hands, in other words, the hard bits. The struggling limners
who accepted American commissions were thus peculiarly prepared to pro-
vide the colonists with exactly what they wanted, paintings celebrating their
acquisition of fashionable garments. What a man like Wollaston may have
lacked in ability to render the depth of individual character, he made up—
in the words of one student of mid-eighteenth-century American art— “ by
his skill in painting laces, silks, and satins.”38 This successful itinerant knew
his market. He produced over three hundred portraits. As in other socie-
ties, the portrait in colonial America asserted one’s claim to status. What
made this culture unusual was that status was negotiated through the qual-
ity and character of the fabric that the provincial consumer chose to wear
at the moment of carefully staged self-fashioning.
Even in so-called folk or primitive paintings, one encounters the same
concern for presenting the sitter in relation to consumer objects, especially
to imported British cloth. A painting from the Garbisch collection, Susanna
Susanna Truax seems quite at ease among her imported possessions. The Gansevoort Limner
Portrait, 1730 (possibly by Pieter Vanderlyn), Gift of Edgar William and Bernice Chrysler Garbisch.
Photograph © 2002 Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
Truax, provides a splendid example of this phenomenon. This portrait by

an unknown artist shows a young girl outfitted in a bright, striped dress,
obviously a garment made of the type of fabric just then flooding into the
colonies from England. On a table one sees a teapot, sugar cubes, and a cup
and saucer. The picture situates the girl within a vibrant Anglo-American
economy. The tea set and a fashionable dress support her claim to social
standing. What gives this painting special charm is the fact that Susanna
Truax is so demonstrably at ease among her possessions.
When we view Susanna Truax, it probably does not seem possible that
she might have been a fake. No doubt, she was exactly what she appeared, a
pleasant middle-class girl. But one could not always be so sure. Behind the
shrill rhetoric lamenting the loss of clear status markers were tales of un-
pleasant moments resulting from colonists interpreting apparel as an ex-
ternal badge of personal worth only to discover that the owner was in fact a
counterfeit.39 One cannot help feeling a little sorry for a struggling Mary-
land farmer who became the butt of a class joke that turned on an errone-
ous translation of cultural symbols. The man had journeyed across the
Potomac River to have his grain ground into flour at a mill operated by the
Carters, one of the wealthiest families in Virginia. Young “Bob,” the son of the
owner of Nomini Hall, decided to have a bit of sport with the simple visitor.
Standing next to his own clerk, who “wore a red Coat,” Bob pretended that he
was the Carters’ paid assistant at the mill. The Marylander took the measure
of the person wearing the “scarlet Coat,” judging him to be a gentleman, and
then inquired who “is the other [fellow] in a frowsled Wig?” The shabbily
dressed Bob responded by identifying himself as “my father’s Clerk.” That
night the tale “entertained” the patriarch of Nomini Hall over dinner. The
“Colonel” may have felt that it was about time that a great planter fooled a
poor farmer rather than the other way round.40 After all, as the story reveals,
it was not very hard to obtain a scarlet coat in this society.
One of the more dramatic accounts of how hard the new consumer
marketplace had made sorting out status occurred in Maryland not far from
the Carter plantation. Dr. Alexander Hamilton entered a rural tavern called
Curtis’s, located on the Maryland-Pennsylvania border. There he met Wil-
liam Morison, an individual to whom the Scottish physician took an im-
mediate dislike. Morison, it seems, was “a very rough spun, forward, clownish
blade, much addicted to swearing, [and] att the same time desirous to pass
for a gentleman.” The proprietor certainly did not think Morison merited
special treatment. She took one look at his clothes— “ a greasy jacket and
breeches and a dirty worsted cap”— and concluded that Morison must be a
“ploughman or carman.” At Curtis’s such persons received only weak tea
and “scraps of cold veal.”
When the owner placed this insulting meal before him, Morison pro-
tested loudly that it was only the presence of another gentleman that kept
him from throwing “her cold scraps out at the window and break[ing] her
table all to pieces should it cost him 100 pounds for damages.” The other
“gentleman” was, of course, Hamilton. Morison judged the doctor’s status
the same way that the tavern’s proprietor had judged his, on the basis of the
style and quality of his garments. In any event, like an irate terrier, Morison
began digging wildly in his own baggage, pulling out various trophies which
until that moment had been hidden from sight. He quickly exchanged “his
worsted night cap” for a “linen one out of his pocket” and went on to perform
a change of clothes worthy of a modern superhero, and then announced to
the amazed onlookers, “Now . . . I’m upon the borders of Pennsylvania and
must look like a gentleman.” Even after the two men had departed Curtis’s,
Morison remained defensive, as if he suspected that the traveling Scot really
did rate him as no more than a common laborer. As Hamilton recounted
with characteristic hauteur, Morison declared “that tho’ he seemed to be but
a plain, homely fellow, yet he would have us know that he was able to afford
better than many that went finer: he had good linnen in his bags, a pair of
silver buckles, silver clasps, and gold sleeve buttons, two Holland shirts, and
some neat nightcaps.” And to support further his demand for respect,
Morison bragged that “his little woman at home drank tea twice a day.”41
Hamilton thought the entire performance vulgar. Morison may have been
about to cross the border into Pennsylvania, but he had a long way to go
before he could traverse the boundaries that separated the laborer from the
gentleman. At least, that would have been Hamilton’s interpretation. Since
class and status are relative categories established through human interac-
tion, we may assume that Morison rode north from Maryland convinced
that Hamilton knew nothing about the workings of American society.
The question posed by the likes of Morison—at least for the wealthier
sort—was how to control choice in an open, liberal society. History sug-
gested some answers. Earlier societies had experimented with sumptuary
laws, which prohibited men and women from wearing garments that al-
lowed them to present themselves as persons of a higher status than that
recognized by their social betters. These statutes seldom achieved the ends
for which they were intended. But during the eighteenth century sumptuary
legislation seemed little more than a risible attempt to lock the barn after
the horse had fled. Ambitious colonists such as Morison were not about to
surrender the store-bought items that helped persuade them that they were
really as good as those gentlemen who defended their own status in the
social order on the basis of largely invisible attributes related to character
and breeding. Franklin understood the realities of the new marketplace.
Writing as “Father Abraham,” he asked an imagined crowd of eager buyers,
“What would you think of that Prince, or that Government, who should
issue an Edict forbidding you to dress like a Gentleman or a Gentlewoman,
on Pain of Imprisonment or Servitude? Would you not say that you are
free, have a Right to dress as you please, and that such an Edict would be a
Breach of your Privileges, and such a Government tyrannical?”42
The effort to keep consumer goods out of the hands of those who de-
sired them even failed when the “uppity” persons involved were African
American slaves. In a “Negro Act” passed by the South Carolina legislature
in 1735, lawmakers complained that black people wore “clothes much above
the condition of slaves, for the procuring whereof they use sinister and evil
methods.” No evidence indicates that the slaves paid the slightest attention
to the act. A Charleston Grand Jury seemed amazed to discover in 1744 that
black women in the city dressed “in Apparel quite gay and beyond their
Condition.” The local newspaper added with a hint of romantic conspiracy
that “there is scarce a new mode [of fashion] which favourite black and
mulatto women slaves are not immediately enabled to adopt.” The situation
in Virginia appeared to mock attempts to restore an imagined social order
in which every person obediently fashioned himself or herself according to
an arbitrary hierarchy that took no account of the force of novelty. One
telling example of the impossibility of coercing consumer desire appeared
in an advertisement for a runaway slave named Bacchus. At the moment of
flight from his master, Bacchus had in his possession
two white Russia Drill Coats, one turned up with blue, the other quite plain and new,
with white figured Metal Buttons, blue Plush Breeches, a fine Cloth Pompadour Waist-
coat, two or three thin or Summer Jackets, sundry Pairs of white Thread Stockings,
five or six white Shirts, two of them pretty fine, neat Shoes, Silver Buckles, a fine Hat
cut and cocked in the Macaroni Figure, a double-milled Drab Great Coat, and sundry
other Wearing Apparel.43
One cannot help speculating what kind of conversation Bacchus might

have had with Morison. The feisty white traveler who resisted Hamilton’s
efforts to define him as a mere laborer would most likely not have been
amused by Bacchus’s efforts to reinvent himself as a free person. But in
point of fact, both colonists—however separated by their consciousness of
racial difference—understood that clothes could indeed make the man. In
a curious essay advocating strict legal controls on how black people dressed,
“A. B.” addressed the complex relation between the new material culture
and what might be termed the psychology of self-presentation. He equated
a recent crime wave in Maryland with the almost insatiable desire of the
local blacks “to raise Money to buy fine Cloaths,” for “when dressed in them,
[they] make them so bold and impudent that they insult every poor white
Person they meet.” A. B. appealed for upper-class support for his proposed
legislation by extending the argument to “poor whites,” another group over
which the elite seemed to exercise minimal control. “I am fully convinced
of the Efficacy of such a Law,” he explained to the readers of the Maryland
Gazette, “from what I have seen of some of our own Colour, for I have been
in Company with Men when they have been meanly dressed, and they have
been as still and humble as a Bee, and at other Times have seen them with
their Sunday or Holyday Clothes on, and they have been as impudent and
bold as a Lion.” His conclusion from an excursion across the boundaries of
class and race was that “such is the Difference fine Cloaths make in the
Vulgar, and such is the Difference, I am sure, they make in the Negroes.”44
Coercion obviously could not preserve an ordered society in which
people of genuine worth ruled over those who remained vulgar and lower
class no matter how tasteful the cut of their garments. At issue was power.
At mid-century, those Americans who so desperately wanted servants and
laborers to remain in their assigned places—indeed, to show proper defer-
ence to their betters—began to imagine a different way to legitimate their
own claims to privileged status. Since they could not effectively outpurchase
ordinary colonists, and since the strutting peacocks of Williamsburg and
New York might in reality be impostors, those who styled themselves the
rightful leaders of provincial society reasoned that they might reduce social
instability by curtailing their own fashionable excesses. If gentlemen and
ladies were supposed to set examples of acceptable public behavior for the
less affluent and the base-born, then they should do so by forgoing the ac-
quisition of fashionable goods. Playing upon the theme of elite self-sacri-
fice, a Boston writer insisted that the extravagance in “Buildings, Furniture,
Apparel, and Tables . . . can never be remedied until they who find most
Fault with these Things remedy them at home, and set their Inferiours a
good Example.”45 The Independent Reflector of New York joined in, exclaim-
ing that there was no hope of reducing wasteful spending on imported goods
unless persons in “the higher and middle Stations of Life” provided guid-
ance. Surely they must know that “as People in the inferior Stations of Life,
are extremely apt to imitate those who move in a more elevated Sphere: It
ought to be the Endeavour of the latter to set them the laudable Example.”46
For many centuries moral writers in Europe had been giving similar
advice. They had long hectored courtiers about cutting back lavish expen-
ditures. With peasants starving in the streets, it seemed objectionable for
aristocratic toffs to consume quite so conspicuously. Scripture sustained
the critique, and although the elite classes of Europe more or less politely
ignored such counsel, the notion that rulers might demonstrate genuine
concern for the common good by curtailing their own purchase of material
goods became woven into religious and political discourses that became
part of the cultural baggage of the eighteenth century. These inherited
ideas—be they Stoic or classical republican in character—were like mod-
ern investments that rise and fall in relation to changing market condi-
tions. The sudden expansion of consumer choice—an unprecedented
phenomenon that touched the lives of even the poorest people in this soci-
ety—activated older notions about the link between self-sacrifice and re-
sponsible leadership. In fact, in this social context, perceptions of a growing
threat to the traditional social order made it increasingly plausible to think
of simplicity and sobriety in the marketplace as a way to reinforce and au-
thenticate claims to political authority. As one newspaper observed, “Let
the principal gentlemen but set the example, [and] they will be quickly fol-
lowed by the bulk of the people.”47
IV
For entirely understandable reasons, historians of the eighteenth century
have tended to depict colonization as an awkward stage of development to
be overcome—like adolescence—so that the American people could get on
with the serious business of nation building. Colonization suggests politi-
cal dependence, perhaps calling to mind those nineteenth-century outposts
of empire where Europeans mixed uneasily with the native peoples. We
imagine such outsiders sipping tea in a secure compound, gossiping about
current events in England and France and all the while frightened that some-
how by simply living in India or Africa they would become not quite Euro-
pean.48 Such conditions, we assume, surely did not pertain in America; our
colonization was not the colonization of that later empire. But, of course, it
was. To be sure, the dynamics of settlement were different, and most white
Americans had not the slightest interest in leaving their homes for a new
life in England. In terms of culture, however, they were not unlike those
nineteenth-century colonial officers and their families who waited impa-
tiently on the edge of empire for the arrival of a ship bringing news from
what they would have regarded as civilized society. Although New York and
Philadelphia were not the Nairobi or Calcutta of colonial America, they
contained many men and women who defined taste as English taste, fash-
ion as English fashion, and polite conversation as but a provincial echo of
the learned and witty talk they believed regularly occurred in cosmopolitan
centers. The shopkeepers who advertised in the colonial newspapers appre-
ciated the allure of Britishness. Like George Bartram, a Philadelphia dry-

goods merchant, they issued to all Americans the Siren call, “Just imported
in the last ships from Britain and Ireland.”49 The construction of a new cul-
tural identity within an “empire of goods” is generally known as An-
glicization, an admittedly awkward term that carries the sense that even in
isolated colonial American communities men and women saw themselves
increasingly as fully British. Like most broad concepts intended to advance
our understanding of social change in earlier times, Anglicization had been
stretched to its explanatory limits, for if it is meant to convey the notion
that the colonists were absolute slaves to English models and incapable of
modifying imported goods in interesting and original ways, then it has taken
us further than the evidence can bear. Many colonists were openly ambiva-
lent about the impact of English culture on their lives, and it was not un-
common for such figures at one moment to sound more English than the
English and at the next to proclaim aggressively the superiority of Ameri-
can ways. This is not a surprising phenomenon. A kind of relatively harm-
less cultural schizophrenia has long been associated with the experience of
colonization.50
But, even if we recognize the capacity of the colonists to develop cul-
tural forms outside the penumbra of Anglicization, we must acknowledge
that after 1740 London and to a lesser extent the rest of England acted as a
powerful magnet pulling the colonists ever closer to the defining center of
the good life. The force worked its magic as strongly in South Carolina as in
Massachusetts. Charleston may have been the most sophisticated city in
mid-century America, but to the disconsolate Eliza Pinckney, a woman cred-
ited with successfully promoting indigo as a commercial export crop, it might
have been located on the dark side of the moon. In 1762 she wrote to a
friend living in England, begging for news of George III’s new queen, Char-
lotte Sophia of Mecklenburg. “If, Madam, you have ever been witness to the
impatience of the people of England about a hundred mile[s] from Lon-
don to be made acquainted with what passes there,” lectured the forgotten
provincial, “[then] you may guess a little at what our impatience is here
when I inform you that the curiosity increases with the distance from the
Center of affairs; and our impatience is not to be equaled with any peoples
within four thousand mile[s].” In another cranky letter, Pinckney described
herself as “an old woman in the Wilds of America” and assured her corre-
spondent in Great Britain, “You people that live in the great world in the
midst of Scenes of entertainment and pleasure abroad, of improving stud-
ies and polite amusement at home, must be very good to think of your
friends in this remote Corner of the Globe.”51
Colonists learned about English fashions in predictable ways. They read
novels depicting themes with which they were all too familiar, especially ones
recounting the perils that awaited innocent women who misinterpreted the
well-dressed seducer as a gentleman. In addition to the advertisements, news-
papers carried stories about the comings and goings of the royal family; they
perused up-market magazines that informed them about the character of
English country life.52 The cultural messages issuing forth from the cosmo-
politan center percolated down through provincial society, from major port
cities to small farming villages, until the latest intelligence about good taste
and polite behavior eventually reached corners of the globe far more re-
mote than Eliza Pinckney had ever seen. An anonymous writer who ap-
peared in a Connecticut journal mapped out the progress of Anglicization
as well as any of his contemporaries. Through an elaborate network of
emulation, he explained, “the Fashions of London, are communicated to
the poorest, meanest Towns of Connecticut.” It was quite a sight “to behold
the Manners and Fashions of the Ladies walking in St. James’s Park, copied
by the Female Quality of S–ff–d and N–F–d in Connecticut. From the Me-
tropolis of Great Britain, these Manners and Fashions are conveyed to Bristol
[England], from Bristol they are transported to Boston in New England,
from Boston they travel to Hartford; thence to C–w–l and N–F–d.”53 A pow-
erful imagination was required to conflate the demimonde display found at
St. James’s Park with the more modest shows encountered at Cromwell, but
then, we must remember, it probably did not take much glitter to persuade
commentators that the poor farmers of America had forsaken their home-
spun garments for the fancy styles of London.
As might be expected of a person so attuned to the offerings of the
consumer marketplace, Franklin put a different interpretation on the colo-
nists’ preference for English goods. He did not believe that their presence in
the little villages of Connecticut was necessarily a matter of great concern.
Rather, the arrival of the latest styles in the provincial shops indicated a
special fondness for the nation that had provided so many choices. What
triggered Franklin’s remarks was a report by a British traveler who allegedly
had just returned from America. It declared that in terms of their apparel
the colonists had been a disappointment. Americans not only had selected
somewhat duller colors for their clothes than the visitor had expected but
also dressed so much alike that one could hardly tell one colonist from an-
other. Writing in a London journal under the pen name “A New
Englandman,” Franklin brilliantly turned the critique into testimony for a
kind of consumer nationalism. “All I know of it is,” Franklin observed in his
disarming way, “that they [the Americans] wear the manufactures of Brit-
ain, and follow its fashions perhaps too closely, every remarkable change . . .
making its appearance there within a few months after its invention here.”
He assured English readers that it was to be expected that the colonists would
see fashion as an expression of their Britishness, for, in point of fact, their
sense of style was “a natural effect of their constant intercourse with En-
gland, by ships arriving almost every week from the capital, their respect
for the mother country, and admiration of every thing that is British.”54
One can never quite tell whether Franklin is pulling one’s leg, but in
this matter—at least, before the imperial crisis over taxation—his assess-
ment seems right on the mark. Colonial booksellers would surely have
agreed. They learned that colonial readers preferred an English imprint to
an American edition of the same title. “Their estimate of things English was
so high,” discovered one historian, “that a false London imprint could seem
an effective way to sell a local publication.”55 The standardization of the
colonial consumer marketplace, a function of the availability of the same
general range of imported British goods from Georgia to New Hampshire,
created a paradoxical situation.56 As Americans purchased the same kinds
of British manufactures—in other words, as they had similar consumer
experiences—they did in fact become more Anglicized. This cultural pro-
cess has sometimes been referred to as “the colonization of taste,” a phrase
that seems as useful for provincial America as for India and Scotland.57
As commentators like Franklin revealed, the ubiquitous items imported
from Great Britain transformed the visual landscape of everyday life in pro-
vincial America. About color, the English traveler who provoked the riposte
from Franklin was simply wrong. We have already seen how shopkeepers
demanded certain colors from their suppliers. One of them candidly an-
nounced that “only an unfashionable colour is a sufficient reason for our
rejecting various goods.”58 He knew his business. After 1740 the new con-
sumer marketplace presented American consumers with an unprecedented
range of colors, in cloth and paint, and so, if nothing else, Britishness sud-
denly brightened how ordinary people appeared in public. Flashy color be-
came a badge of participation in the empire of goods, and although it is
difficult to quantify such cultural developments, the imaginative use of color
in some significant way made Americans feel as if they were British people
who just happened to live in America.59 It certainly transformed drab house-
hold interiors from New England to South Carolina into Technicolor dis-
plays that seem to modern eyes so extraordinary—indeed, so garish—that
those in charge of preserving the material culture of the eighteenth century
have been reluctant to restore the late colonial homes to their true radiance.
They feared that a clash of colors—crimson mock-flock wallpaper strug-
gling against the arresting verdigris of an adjacent room, for example—
would horrify visitors who assumed that colonial Americans would have
rejected the possibility of such colorful self-fashioning out of hand.60
Drawing attention to the mid-century as the moment when Americans
initially discovered the possibilities of color in their lives helps us to recap-
ture the constant sense of surprise—even wonder—that accompanied the
rapid Anglicization of the late colonial landscape. Changes associated with
the new British imports meant that men and women could not take for
granted what the interior of a house might look like. John Adams, for ex-
ample, was not a person easily bowled off his feet, but when he entered the
home of a successful Boston merchant, he could not believe his eyes. “Went
over [to] the House to view the Furniture,” the young lawyer confided to his
diary, “which alone cost a thousand Pounds sterling. . . . [T]he Turkey Car-
pets, the painted Hangings, the Marble Table, the rich Beds with crimson
Damask Curtains and Counterpanes, the beautiful Chimney Clock, the
Spacious Garden, are the most magnificent of any Thing I have ever seen.”61
This was not a typical dwelling, of course, and such “magnificent” things
may have inspired in a latter-day Puritan like Adams a mixture of jealousy
and condemnation. But however the Britishness of the new material cul-
ture was received, it could not be ignored. It was something to be discussed
and then, long afterward, remembered. During the 1820s John Fanning
Watson, an antiquarian, interviewed several citizens who had lived in Phila-
delphia before independence. After the passage of so many years, these older
people still talked about fine English imports of mid-century with as much
excitement as had Adams. “T. Matlack, Esq., when aged 95, told me he had a
distinct recollection of meeting with the first carpet he had ever seen about
the year 1750, at the house of Owen Jones, at the corner of Spruce and Sec-
ond streets,” Watson explained. “Mrs. S. Shoemaker, an aged Friend of the
same age, told me she had received as a rare present from England a Scotch
carpet; it was but twelve feet square, and was deemed quite a novelty.”62
Anglicized provincials who knowingly or not had experienced a coloni-
zation of taste insisted on receiving the “latest” English goods. They became
remarkably attuned to even subtle changes in metropolitan fashion. “And
you may believe me,” a young Virginia planter named George Washington
lectured a British merchant in 1760, “when I tell you that instead of getting
things good and fashionable in their several kinds we often have Articles sent
Us that could only have been us[e]d by our Forefathers in the days of yore.”63
Since most of the imports that Washington demanded had not been available
in Virginia before 1740, his sense of the “days of yore” must be taken as the
hyperbole of a disappointed consumer. Washington may have envied his neigh-
bors in Annapolis, who seemed to obtain the latest British fashions faster
than he. The people of New York were as alert in the interpretation of these
cultural cues as were the consumers in Virginia and Maryland. “In the city of
New-York,” wrote William Smith in 1762, “through the intercourse with the
Europeans, we follow the London fashions.”64 And in Boston the almost des-
perate desire to keep up to date within the empire was equally manifest. One
woman told an English friend—perhaps protesting a bit much—that “here
we follow the fashions in England & have made great strides in Luxury &
Expense within these three years Esply in that of Dress & the young Ladies
seem as smart as those we left in England.”65
Tea provides an especially revealing example of the impact of Anglici-
zation on consumer taste. Early in the eighteenth century this hot drink
became the preferred beverage of gentry households. As in England, in
America polite ladies—perhaps as a device to lure gentlemen away from
tavern society—organized elaborate household rituals around the tea ser-
vice. The purchase of tea necessitated the acquisition of pots, bowls, strain-
ers, sugar tongs, cups, and slop dishes. As Mrs. Franklin might have noted,
once one decided to keep up with neighbors in the contest for British goods,
one thing inevitably seemed to lead to another. A writer in a New York City
newspaper suggested the need for a special school that could instruct un-
certain colonists in proper tea etiquette. The young men of the city, finding
themselves “utterly ignorant in the Ceremony of the Tea-Table,” were ad-
vised to employ a knowledgeable woman “to teach them the Laws, Rules,
Customs, Phrases and Names of the Tea Utensils.”66
Although less well-to-do Americans did not possess the entire range of
social props, they too demanded tea. To be sure, tea did not originate in
England, but it did—a few smugglers excepted—generally find its way to
the colonies through British ports. More than any other item, tea became
the signature of a new polite society. As early as 1734 one New Yorker ex-
claimed, “I am credibly informed that tea and china ware cost the province,
yearly, near the sum of £10,000; and people that are least able to go to the
expense, must have their tea tho’ their families want bread. Nay, I am told,
[they] often pawn their rings and plate to gratifie themselves in that piece
of extravagance.”67 It did not take long for this alleged luxury to become a
necessity. “Our people,” wrote another New York gentleman in 1762, “both
in town and country, are shamefully gone into the habit of tea-drinking.”68
And when Israel Acrelius visited the old Swedish settlements of Delaware at
mid-century, he discovered people consuming tea “in the most remote cab-
ins.”69 During the 1750s even the inmates of the public hospital of Philadel-
phia, the city’s poorhouse, insisted on having tea. Indeed, they made it a
non-negotiable demand.70 All these colonists drank their tea out of imported
cups, not necessarily from china ones but rather from ceramics that had
originated in the English Midlands, where they had been fired at very high
temperature and thus made resistant to the intense heat of the Americans’
new favorite drink. It does not require a great stretch of imagination to
appreciate that the custom of taking one’s tea could under certain circum-
stances become a locus of fierce contest over political identity and culture.
We must not exaggerate the colonization of taste. Ordinary Americans
certainly adopted tea for reasons other than social emulation. After all, it
was a mild stimulant, and a hot cup of tea perhaps laced with a little sugar
probably helped the laboring poor to endure hard work and insubstantial
housing. Nevertheless, in some isolated country villages the desire to keep
up with the latest English fads led to bizarre results, the kind of gross cul-
tural misunderstanding that anthropologists encounter in places where
products of an alien technology have been introduced into a seemingly less
developed society.71 In 1794 a historian living in East Hampton, New York,
interviewed a seventy-eight-year-old woman. “Mrs. Miller,” he discovered,
“remembers well when they first began to drink tea on the east end of Long
Island.” She explained that none of the local farmers knew what to do with
the dry leaves: “One family boiled it in a pot and ate it like samp-porridge
[cornmeal mush]. Another spread tea leaves on his bread and butter, and
bragged of his having ate half a pound at a meal, to his neighbor, who was
informing him how long a time a pound of tea lasted him.” According to
Mrs. Miller, the arrival of the first teakettle was a particularly memorable
day in the community. “It came ashore at Montauk in a ship (the Captain
Bell),” she recounted. “The farmers came down there on business with their
cattle, and could not find how to use the tea-kettle, which was then brought
up to old ‘Governor Hedges.’ Some said it was for one thing, and some said
it was for another. At length one, the more knowing than his neighbors,
affirmed it to be the ship’s lamp, to which all assented.” Mrs. Miller may
have been having some fun at the historian’s expense, but whatever the truth
of her tale, it reveals the symbolic importance of tea in this remote eigh-
teenth-century village. Like so many other colonists, the people of East
Hampton wanted to keep up with English customs; they just were not too
sure how to go about it. The same sort of thing could even happen to afflu-
ent colonists. Virginia’s royal governor gave Mrs. William Nelson, the wife
of a wealthy merchant, a set of modish dessert dishes, but the woman had
no idea how to use them. Her amused husband thanked the governor: “Mrs.
Nelson is obliged for your present of the Necessaries for a Desert: tho’ I
Fancy she will be puzeled [how] to bring them into use.”72
With so many colonists trying so hard to be English in America, it was
quite logical for Franklin—the master consumer of the era—to accentuate
the link between identity and market experience. We have already heard
him give soothing assurances to the readers of a London journal about the
profound sense of Britishness engendered by “constant intercourse with
England.” A few years later he expanded the argument about provincial loy-
alty. On this occasion he wanted to persuade a victorious government that
had just driven the French out of Canada to hold on to these vast territo-
ries. No one in England need be concerned, he explained, that the Ameri-
cans would now entertain thoughts of independence simply because they
no longer had to worry about the French threat. Sounding a lot like Edmund
Burke, Franklin insisted that commerce would ensure American obedience.73
Because of the pervasiveness of consumer trade, many Americans “must
‘know,’ must ‘think,’ and must ‘care’ about the country they chiefly trade
with.” He painted a word-picture of the perfect marketplace. Unlike Ire-
land, which regularly sent its wealthiest inhabitants to live in England, the
Americans remained in the colonies. And there, they spent their money on
British imports. “If the North American gentleman stays in his own coun-
try,” Franklin asked rhetorically, “and lives there in that degree of luxury
and expense with regard to the use of British manufactures, that his fortune
entitles him to; may not his example (from the imitation of superiors so
natural to mankind) spread the use of those manufactures among hun-
dreds of families around him, and occasion a much greater demand for
them, than it would do if he should remove and live in London?”74 No con-
temporary global capitalist could imagine a more favorable situation: con-
sumer colonies consuming at a robust rate and thanking British authorities
for the benefits of the relationship.
V
Eighteenth-century commentators knew who was chiefly to blame for what
they perceived as the confused state of society. Women were responsible.
The colonial Jeremiahs found that they could hardly discuss the challenge
of the consumer economy without immediately denouncing the legions of
wives and daughters who had compromised the common good in the in-
terests of satiating their own selfish desires. The mocking humor of many
attacks barely disguised the misogyny that energized the surging public
rhetoric. A single example captures the rhetorical climate. In 1743 a little
poem entitled “The Ladies’ Complaint” appeared in a South Carolina news-
paper. Devoid of literary merit, the piece advocated greater equality be-
tween the sexes. The final couplets summarized the argument:
Then equal Laws let Custom find;
And neither Sex oppress.
More Freedom give to Womankind,
Or to Mankind give less.75
The very next issue of the journal ran a response from a person identified
as a man, expressing the hope that the female poet would not in the future
conspire “to diminish our [male] Liberty.”76 As many exchanges of this type
made clear, those most anxious about maintaining order associated dis-
ruptive change with too many assertive women making too many choices
in the consumer marketplace. Country shopkeepers certainly could not af-
ford to ignore their demands. Even the visitor to the Moon encountered the
women of Lunar City parading through the streets in fancy clothes they
had no business wearing.
At almost any time, accelerated economic change strains a culture’s as-
sumptions about gender roles. But in the mid-eighteenth century, real mar-
ket conditions heightened the sense—at least among males—that something
had gone terribly wrong. As Albert O. Hirschman, an economic historian,
explains, “antagonism toward material culture comes to the fore in periods
of economic expansion when consumer goods, frequently of a new kind, be-
come more widely diffused.”77 And so it was in colonial America after 1740.
Just as modern critics of consumption complain that an influx of electronic
gadgetry will corrupt the youth of the nation, so too did colonial censors
couple the flood of British goods with the appearance of new kinds of women
who seemed bent on taking control of their own self-fashioning.
Colonial women had the great misfortune to become ensnared in one
of the major controversies of the eighteenth century, the so-called luxury
debate.78 Although a few audacious writers such as Bernard Mandeville
claimed that self-indulgence in the marketplace would probably not de-
stroy Western civilization, most of his contemporaries on both sides of the
Atlantic passionately disagreed, describing luxury as a toxin so powerful
that it could, in fact, undermine the course of empire and deprive free citi-
zens of their liberties. The frenzied reaction to this cultural threat, no doubt,
reflected an uneasy accommodation within the wealthier European states
to the more liberal conditions of getting and spending found in modern
commercial societies. Having witnessed a growing disjuncture between class
and status, luxury’s adversaries vowed to halt its spread before the age irre-
deemably abandoned itself to what one commentator labeled “vain, luxuri-
ous, and selfish EFFEMINACY.”79
The critique took various forms, but the dominant one iterated themes
put forward by early Christian theologians. Within this moral discourse
luxury not only qualified as a sin but also invited a host of attendant evils
such as avarice, intemperance, vanity, and pride. People who worshiped the
fine objects of material culture obviously had set up a false idol. “It is a time
in which mankind in general are much concerned to be adorn’d with the
most agreeable ornaments, & dress’d in the best fashion,” explained the
Reverend Jonas Clarke of Lexington, Massachusetts, but before the young
people of New England set their hearts on appearing “most amiable and
engaging,” he warned, they should “learn the best fashion [is] from the pul-
pit, and the art of dress from the word of GOD.”80 The Reverend Andrew
Eliot gave a Boston congregation a lesson on luxury from Scripture. Ad-
dressing his own “evil and adulterous generation,” he asked, “Shall I speak
of Luxury, or that Propensity there is in us, to gratify our sensual Appetites?
Poor as we are, we live high, and fare sumptiously every Day. This destroys
our Health, consumes our Substance, enfeebles the Mind, feeds our Lusts,
and stupifies Conscience. While we feed and pamper our Bodies, we starve
our Souls.”81 A little bit of this kind of rhetoric must have gone a long way.
Even without his guidance, Eliot’s auditors already knew that the most ef-
fective antidotes to extravagance were frugality and industry.
A second line of attack on luxury involved a didactic reading of history.
As any educated person in this period could testify, the past demonstrated
unequivocally that luxury sapped the public virtue, the fighting spirit, and
even the freedoms enshrined by people who had once celebrated the simple
life. Rome had taken this ruinous path, and if Great Britain did not quickly
mend its ways, it would suffer the same fate. In 1753 an anonymous Ameri-
can writer could take the lessons of history for granted, noting in his appeal
for “Industry & Frugality” that only “a few Pages of History” would be suf-
ficient to demonstrate the threat of luxury to commercial states.82 The edi-
tor of the Independent Reflector announced, as if he were sharing a
self-evident truth, that luxury is “a great and mighty Evil, carrying all be-
fore it, and crumbling States and Empires, into slow, but inevitable Ruin.—
Like sweetened Poison, it is soft but strong, enervates the Constitution, and
triumphs at last, in the Weakness and Rottenness of the Patient.” Curiously,
the New York journal aimed this particular judgment not at the sybaritic
courts of Europe but at neighboring New England, where, according to the
report, men and women “attempt to outlive each other, in Dress, Tables,
and the like.” Boston was on the edge of a great fall. Indeed, it was said that
a traveler in Massachusetts could tell how far he was from the city “by the
Length of the Ruffles of a Belle of the Town he was in.”83 Each nation appar-
ently had a weakness for a different sort of luxury. The Italians liked “pomp-
ous” palaces, the French fine suits, the Poles a “splendid Equipage,” the
Germans a “capacious Cellar,” and the Spanish a “Bead-Roll of Titles.” But
the British provincials outdid them all, for “our Taste is universal; and there
is scarce a little Clerk among us, who doth not think himself the Outcast of
Providence, if not enabled by his Salary, Fees, &c. to out-live the rich Man
in the Gospel.”84
Among the dry leaves of these older discourses rustled a more recently
minted critique of luxury, which, while no less inimical to self-indulgence
in the consumer marketplace, staked out a more secular ground. Put sim-
ply, luxury beggared the people, especially those who happened to live in
the colonies. Within the provinces this argument took onboard much of
the rhetoric associated with a loosely defined economic position known as
mercantilism.85 To be sure, by making unwise choices, Americans revealed
a worrisome inability to control what one writer called their “Horseleech
Desires.” But more than being a sign of moral deficiency, expensive pur-
chases of imported goods sucked hard currency out of the colonies, leaving
them debtors. As one newspaper declared, “a Community may be view’d in
the same Light as a private Man: However extensive and profitable his Trade
is, yet his Gains large as they are may be swallow’d up and annihilated by
Prodigality and Extravagance.”86 Whether one regarded luxury as a badge of
sin or just bad economics, it raised the possibility that the totality of private
consumer decisions in the marketplace—thousands of colonial strangers
indulging their “Horseleech Desires”— could have major, quite negative
consequences on the common good. The luxury debate also revealed a well-
developed capacity to blame someone else for one’s own lack of control.
Women, of course, had been accused of disorderly conduct for a very
long time. As the daughters of Eve, they regularly led unsuspecting males
into temptation. During the seventeenth century, they often found them-
selves embroiled in religious controversies, and the more assertive among
them, like Anne Hutchinson, had voiced the possibilities of dissent from
the established churches.87 But the Jezebels of the consumer revolution be-
guiled men—husbands and lovers—not into theological error but into ef-
feminate luxury. They spoke of heresies in the marketplace; they beckoned
innocent males into purchasing imported British goods beyond their means.
As a Charleston article entitled “NEW THOUGHTS upon LUXURY”
warned, “The manners of women merit . . . a singular attention. When ev-
erything is allowed them, and we shut our eyes to their conduct, they give
into finery and bagatelle with fury, and fill up the very measure of luxury.”88
The complaint against women derived its force from the fact that real women
from New England to the Carolinas were suddenly making decisions about
how to allocate family resources. In other words, the castigating rhetoric
that appeared in the newspapers and the sermons of the period was a par-
ticularly shrill response to a changing market culture. As “Atticus” explained
in the Pennsylvania Gazette, colonists were trying to make sense of a flood
of new items “which were unadmitted in the happy days of our forefathers.”89
The downfall of eighteenth-century American women was a tale told
in terms of cloth. Everywhere colonial males looked, they were confronted
by females decked out in gayly colored “Silks and Lawn” tailored to the lat-
est fashion. Their bodies had become a highly visible index to the advance
of luxury, and judging from the reports found in colonial newspapers, the
prospects of avoiding the kind of catastrophe that had befallen Rome must
not have seemed promising. According to “Intonsus Cato,” a beleaguered
Connecticut male, it did not require much intelligence to predict the future
of a society in which men allowed their wives and daughters to “use
Cambrick, and Velvet, for their ordinary Wear, and spend more than Half
their time in Cards, Visits, Dances, Talk and Tea.”90 Another writer, who
appeared originally in the American Magazine, put forward a more imagi-
native argument, explaining that most of what had gone wrong in contem-
porary society could be attributed to “Female Dress.” At the dawn of time,
it seems, people had apparently been quite content to go about their busi-
ness covered only in animal skins. But the age of commerce—and here he
meant the rise of a consumer economy—had generated entirely new tastes.
“As Men grew rich and ingenious,” he lectured, “something new always pre-
sented [itself], wherewith to decorate and oblige the Ladies.” However pa-
tronizing the generous males may have been, the women took advantage of
the situation to make consumer decisions of their own. In an effort to please
the men in their lives, they “became studious how to apply their Gifts, so as
[they] might at once render themselves more amiable, and express their
Regard for the kind Donors. This naturally enough produc’d an Attention to
Dress.” Indeed, it did, at an almost explosive pace. Women had worn basically
the same sorts of garments from the Norman conquest to the seventeenth
century. But within living memory, fashion had kicked into high gear, and
almost overnight women had become “the Slaves of French Whims, Fan-
cies, and Conceits.”91 No one could tell how far these trends would go. In
1755 a Boston newspaper predicted that women would soon appear in pub-
lic with “no other Covering than the original Fig-Leaf.” Why, the writer asked,
should anyone be shocked? After all, he exclaimed, “considering the present
Dress of our Women of Fashion, there remains no further Step to be taken
except absolute Nakedness.”92
What made the situation even harder for men to accept was that these
female slaves to fashion seemed to have minds of their own. They expressed
a troubling assertiveness precisely by selecting one color over another, one
fabric over an alternative. The author of an essay in the Pennsylvania
Chronicle, identifying himself as “A Sincere Admirer, but no Flatterer of the
Fair-Sex,” concluded that self-fashioning had gone far enough. Honest men,
he maintained, detested false ornamentation and painted faces. Women who
ignored this good advice from concerned males had only themselves to blame
for whatever disappointment might befall them. “If it is the ambition of the
ladies to appear handsome in their own eyes only,” he observed defensively,
“they are at liberty, without doubt, to do it in what manner they think proper,
and to follow their own fancy, in the choice of their dress and ornament.”93
It sounded like a dare, one that John Brown, a popular moral commentator
in the colonies, assumed that modern women would surely accept. His own
interpretation of recent cultural history concluded: “The Sexes have now
little other apparent Distinction, beyond that of Person and Dress: Their
peculiar and characteristic Manners are confounded and lost: The one Sex
having advanced into Boldness, as the other have sunk into Effeminacy.”94
These new bolder women drank tea. So too did a rapidly growing num-
ber of other colonists, but by the middle of the eighteenth century the com-
plex ritual associated with serving tea in one’s home—the proper use of
“Cups, Saucers, Slop-Basin, etc.”— had become closely associated with in-
dependent women making decisions in the marketplace.95 In 1746 one fe-
male writer complained that the “Male Readers” of the local newspaper had
described tea as “a Female Luxury.” She rightly observed that her male friends
were as “great Tea-Sots as any of us,” but that was not exactly the point.96
The afternoon tea parties represented more than social events where friends
sipped a faddish hot drink. Within the framework of a developing con-
sumer economy, such gatherings allowed women to carve out a gendered
space in which they exercised a measure of control. In these situations, they
determined the rules of engagement; they defined the character of a cul-
tural moment already known at mid-century as “the Ceremony of the Tea-
Table.”97 Men could be taught how to behave in the salon, but, as a New
York writer observed, the instructor would most certainly have to be a
woman. One male had the temerity to tell “those dear Creatures” how best to
brew tea. “Publicolus” convinced himself that copper kettles—as opposed
to those made of iron—were “prejudicial to their Health,” but his cautious
tone suggests that he knew he was fighting a losing battle. Health hazard or
not, tea was the province of women. As the author declared, if the modern
women did not believe him about the copper, then “your Grandmothers
will tell you.”98
Tea talk raised other concerns. Within a discourse of threatened mas-
culinity, men worried that the gaily dressed tea drinkers might be gossiping
about manly affairs, such as which local merchants were most worthy of
credit.99 In 1754 another male commentator wondered whether the female
tea drinkers ever bothered with heady matters such as the pernicious at-
tacks “upon English Liberty.” In an effort to enlist their support, he expressed
a patronizing “hope [that] the Tea-Tables and other Female Associations
will take this Affair into their serious Consideration, and use their Influ-
ence, as the Roman Matrons did formerly, to save the State.”100 All this rheto-
ric, of course, has a distinctly middle-class ring. But the symbolic link
between women and tea extended to the lower orders, and while they may
have organized cultural space around breakfast rather than afternoon levees,
they too understood how to manipulate the props of the new material cul-
ture for their own purposes.101 Peter Kalm, for example, the respected Swed-
ish scientist who toured colonial America at mid-century, thought that tea
explained why ordinary American women had such bad teeth. “I then be-
gan to suspect the tea,” Kalm reported from New York, “which is drunk here
in the morning and afternoon, especially by women, and is so common at
present that there is hardly a farmer’s wife or poor woman who does not
drink tea in the morning.”102
The tea ceremony brought
family members together in
complex rituals involving an
impressive array of imported
goods. “A Family Being Served
178
Tea.” Artist unknown, ca. 1740–5.
Courtesy of the Yale Center for
n
British Art, Paul Mellon
Collection.
a n e m p i re o f g o o d s
Skirmishes over the gendered etiquette of the tea service had a coun-
terpart in ongoing negotiations over the nature of marriage. How men and
women expect spouses to behave in a relationship has been a bone of con-
tention for at least as long as societies have kept records. The character of
the cultural debate has evolved over the centuries, but in general it would
be fair to state that the battle of the sexes has usually been waged over issues
of freedom and control. In this respect, mid-eighteenth-century America
was no exception. What distinguished the sparring between men and women
was not the clash between authority and independence but rather how the
participants so self-consciously defined these tensions within the context
of a rapidly changing consumer culture. An economy organized increas-
ingly around the distribution and sale of household goods imported from
Britain invited women to imagine new social opportunities, in other words,
to think of their life chances in terms of choice.
In 1740 a Boston newspaper published an essay entitled “A New Method
for Making Women as Useful and as Capable of Maintaining Themselves,
as the Men are. . . .” Although one can never be certain about the identity of
an anonymous author, the piece claimed to be the work of “a Lady.” The
article began conventionally enough by observing that the education that
women received was not appropriate to the needs of an expanding com-
mercial society. The skills that women acquired as children amounted to
“Trifles.” But such an ill-conceived curriculum could easily be remedied if
young girls of fifteen or sixteen years of age were encouraged to apply their
knowledge of needlework to real business situations. Instead of indulging
themselves in idleness and luxury—as many contemporary males com-
plained—they could take positions as “Apprentices to genteel and easy
Trades, such as Linen or Woollen Drapers, Haberdashers of small Wares,
Mercers, Glovers, Perfumers, Grocers, Confectioners, Retailers of Gold and
Silver Lace, Buttons, etc.” This was a brilliant rhetorical move. Since women
were so identified in the popular culture with consumer goods, then “a Lady”
did not see why they should not apply what they had learned specifically as
women to the marketplace.
Why are not these as credible Trades for the Daughters of Gentlemen as they are for
their Sons; and all of them more proper for Women than Men? Is it not as agreeable
and becoming for Women to be employ’d in selling a Farthing’s worth of Needles, a
Halfpenny of Lace, a Quarter of a Yard of Silk, Stuff, or Cambricks, as it is absurd or
ridiculous to see a Parcel of young Fellows, dish’d out in their Tie Wigs and Ruffles . . .
busied in Professions so much below the Honour and Dignity of their Sex?
“A Lady” anticipated resistance to her proposal. But she would have none
of it, for, in fact, women could not only “weigh and measure” as well as men
but also “buy as cheap, and perhaps cheaper.” The reason for their relative
success in business was that men spent too much time in “Taverns and Cof-
fee houses” after completing a deal, while women “go directly Home, and
follow their Affairs.”103 The slaves of fashion had devised a way to trans-
form an alleged weakness into freedom.
“A Lady” probably represented the worst nightmare for many colonial

males during this period. Beware, one explained, of women who view mar-
riage as “the gilded pill of liberty, authority, privilege and equality.” The
quotation came from an essay fetchingly entitled “A Letter from an Uncle
to his new married Niece, with Advice how to conduct herself in her present
state.” The editor of the Boston Evening-Post had apparently come across
the piece in the New Universal Magazine and immediately concluded that it
spoke truth to “uppity” American women. “This most excellent Letter is
now published,” he noted, “for the Perusal of our Female Readers, [and] . . .
we could not think of a more valuable or a more seasonable Present.”104 He
knew that his male subscribers did not want the objects of their affections
either working in retail shops or spending their husbands’ hard-earned
money on more British baubles.
The ideal marriage partner in a society that presented so many choices
would without doubt possess “Industry, Frugality, and Religion.”105 That logic
seemed to energize “U. Loverule” as he penned “Offences Against Common
Sense in the Ladies, Particularly Wives.” In his opinion, too many modern
women approached social life with “immoderate Zeal.” He begged his read-
ers in South Carolina to consider the long-suffering husband of “Phillis.”
This invented figure “is the discontented Mate of a sober honest Trades-
man, but would fain to pass upon the World for a Woman of Fashion: She
dyes, alters, and turns her little Stock of Finery into all the Changes of Fancy
and Affection.” One might conclude that Phillis should be congratulated
for so cleverly mixing and matching within a small wardrobe, but U. Loverule
knew better. He insisted on full patriarchal authority. Colonial women
should give up even trying to be “the finest” or “the best dress’d.” Indeed,
there could be no compromise. “I would banish every violent Attachment,
whatever be the Object of it,” he growled. “Lap-Dogs or Children, female
Friends, or, what is often the Disguise of bad Purposes, the innocent Desire
of public Approbation; For every attachment, when indulg’d, will engross
too much of the female Mind, and leave too little Room for domestick Care.”
Virtuous men like U. Loverule longed to find a kind of classical republican
woman, obedient, self-sacrificing, inured to “Magnificence,” and dedicated
to “elegant Frugality.” Wives of this sort would stand by their men—the
Catos of South Carolina—and, in the political sphere, help them restore
the community’s “lost Spirit of Independence.” The only problem was that
republican women were probably a little boring, and one can understand
why the honest tradesmen of America went for “Phillis” every time.106
In Connecticut, women of Phillis’s temperament had participated in a
courtship conspiracy. They regularly trapped naive and trusting lads. “’ Tis
well known,” a Hartford newspaper announced, “that the principal Design
of the unmarried Part of Womankind (the Part most addicted to extrava-
gant Expense) is, to make themselves amiable in the Eyes of the other Sex.”
The expense, of course, went to pay for consumer goods, and it was the
women who were making the decisions about which items to purchase.
The prospect was daunting: legions of calculating although highly desir-
able women whose consumer activities threatened to bankrupt the entire

Connecticut economy. This is a curiously ironic argument, considering that
in contemporary novels it was usually the innocent women who became
the victims of improvident men. The author of this desperate admonition
decided to give the seducers a basic lesson in domestic bookkeeping. “All
these Ladies cannot expect to obtain Husbands able to support them and
their Children in Grandeur and Inactivity, for which a Husband must be
worth £200 per Annum.” Could women of such luxurious tastes not see the
unhappy future that awaited their sons and daughters? The writer even raised
the specter of “Children who are to have Poverty entailed on them by their
Parents’ Idleness and Pride, to be tainted by their Parents’ bad Example;
who are likely to be left in such a Condition as to be necessitated either to
starve, or procure their Livelihood in some dishonest Way.”107
Even a respected clergyman such as Jonathan Mayhew felt compelled
to take up the complaint about the rising material expectations that seemed
to be undermining the institution of marriage. Although he did not depict
the issue in terms of a female conspiracy, he did think that the children of
the colonial middle class faced a serious problem. “Among the numerous
bad effects of pride and luxury in life,” Mayhew observed, “the prevention
of MARRIAGE is not the least.” The young demanded instant gratification,
not, as one might predict, in terms of physical fulfillment but rather in terms
of a luxurious style of life to which they had become accustomed. They wanted
all the nice things that they had enjoyed while growing up, and when they
discovered that the normal expenses connected with marriage and children
might deprive them of such pleasurable goods, they refused marriage, thus
failing to “comply with the order of God and nature.” Like an aging and angry
King Lear confronting a generation of yuppies, Mayhew pilloried the “irra-
tional” insistence of young men and women that they “should expect to be-
gin the world with as much equipage and grandeur, or to live at first in as
sumptuous a manner as their parents could well do at last, after having, by
the blessing of God on many years industry, acquired riches.” What, he asked
the children, did they want the parents to do? “Can any expect that their par-
ents should either make away with themselves, or give up all to them while
they live?” The representatives of what Mayhew called the “amiable sex” were
as bad as the men, for the women preferred the single state over marriage to a
person who could not maintain them “in as genteel and grand a manner as
that, in which they were brought up in their fathers’ houses; or that in which
they see some of their contemporaries live.”108
For all their fulminations against the women who purchased the allur-
ing objects sold on the “Proud-lanes” of colonial America, the males who
criticized female consumers do not seem to have made the slightest dent in
the everyday practices of getting and spending. The rhetoric about bank-
ruptcy and celibacy, about moral weakness and fatal luxury, about working
women and the dangers of the tea ceremony, represented doomed attempts
to control a new generation of women who had grown accustomed to mak-
ing choices in the marketplace. We should not overinterpret this evidence.
Access to an exciting range of imported British goods most certainly did

not radically change the social and political life of American women, either
as daughters or as wives, for, whatever they managed to acquire, they re-
mained under stifling legal constraints. But participation in the empire of
goods could have unanticipated consequences for women, indeed, for some
even a growing sense of empowerment. As we turn to the mobilization of a
colonial people against the power of Great Britain—a protest that orga-
nized itself around massive consumer boycotts—we can appreciate the need
to include women in an expanded story of revolutionary politics, for if the
men who led the movement had been unable to persuade colonial women
to sacrifice the pleasures of the marketplace, independence would have re-
mained but a dream.
VI
Other people, fighting on other rhetorical grounds of battle, sought to con-
tain the spreading consumer culture. In this losing battle against a new con-
sumer culture, Protestant ministers played a curiously ineffective part.
Worldly pleasures generally struck ordinary Americans as more attractive
than religious asceticism. On this point, people drinking in Connecticut
taverns told an amusing story about a clergyman who had tried to turn
back the flood of imported British fineries. Early in 1743 the Reverend James
Davenport had brought the full blast of the Great Awakening to the colony.
Other evangelical ministers who followed in the footsteps of the Reverend
George Whitefield criticized the established clergy of New England, but none
of them went quite so far in stirring up religious passions as Davenport.
The itinerant visited New London, and there, according to a person who
claimed to have witnessed what occurred, he informed the people who
flocked to hear him that they had “made Idols of their Gay Cloaths.” The
anxious sinners debated among themselves whether the offending garments
ought to be consigned to a large bonfire in the center of the town. Some
people seeking the New Birth did not initially comprehend the logic be-
hind the appeal to burn their possessions. One man declared that “he could
scarce see how [Davenport’s] disliking the Night-Gown that he had on his
Back, should render him guilty of Idolatry.” But such concerns were quickly
brushed aside. The true believers began stripping, women as well as men.
“The Women brought in their Scarlet Cloaks, Velvet Hoods, fine Laces, and
every Thing that had two Colours,” a Boston journal reported, “so that it is
supposed the Heap of Women’s Idols, and the Men’s Wigs, Velvet Collars,
&c. &c. is worth three or four hundred Pounds.” Davenport consulted the
Lord, and having satisfied himself that he was purging New London of sin,
he took off all that he had been wearing. He then ordered the conflagration
to start. Only nothing happened. At the last possible second, the people in
the crowd had second thoughts, and just before the fire was lit, the semi-
nude citizens rushed to rescue their clothes. A newspaper observed that the
items were “Reprieved from the Flames . . . and that every Bird has taken its
own Feather[s] again.”109
About a year later Dr. Alexander Hamilton found himself in a New
London tavern, where he “sat drinking of punch, and telling of droll sto-
ries” with some of the locals. One of them informed Hamilton about Dav-
enport, whom he called “a fanatick preacher.” And, indeed, by that time the
Connecticut government had declared the minister non compos mentis. The
narrator confirmed that the women had enthusiastically supported the call
to burn the false idols of the marketplace, only in this telling of the story
the list of consumer goods had expanded. “The women,” Hamilton learned,
“made up a lofty pile of hoop petticoats, silk gowns, short cloaks, cambrick
caps, red-heeled shoes, fans, necklaces, gloves, and other such apparel.” At
that moment, Davenport took off his pants and placed them on the very
top of the collection. But reason miraculously prevailed. A “moderate” man-
aged to persuade his neighbors that “making such a sacrifice was not neces-
sary for their salvation.” And that was probably a lucky turn of events for
Davenport, since if his own breeches had gone up in flames, he “would have
been obliged to strutt about bare-arsed.”110 The final line surely sparked a
hearty laugh. It impressed Hamilton enough that he took down every word
of the anecdote in his personal journal.
What made the story funny was the force of common sense. Only per-
sons who had completely lost their senses could possibly throw their clothes
onto a bonfire of vanities. It was one thing to walk many miles in the snow
to hear an evangelical preacher describe the New Birth. It was quite another
to sacrifice all those consumer goods that had cost so much to acquire. The
moderate enthusiast who saved Davenport’s pants probably spoke for the
great majority of the American people. They listened more or less politely
to social superiors who told them that indulging themselves in so much
finery overturned the proper order of society. And then they returned to
the stores. They heard those who said that consuming women were a threat
to male authority. And then they ordered more imported goods from Great
Britain. The rhetoric of denial that has captured the imagination of so many
modern historians—discourses of moral reform—appears at the end of the
day not to have made much impact on the colonists themselves. Stories
similar to the one repeated in New London echoed in other places, suggest-
ing that consumers in Pennsylvania and South Carolina shared the logic of
the Connecticut moderate. When a Philadelphia Quaker, described in the
newspaper as a “Pythagorean-cynical-Christian Philosopher,” decided to
bear public witness against the vanity of tea drinking by destroying a huge
assemblage of china in a central square, he was immediately “interrupted
by the Populace.” They stormed the “stall on which he had placed the Box
of Wares” and grabbed whatever could be saved. They offered to pay him
for the pieces, but, being quite insane, he refused to negotiate.111 And when
an itinerant minister arrived in Charleston, eager to condemn “the splen-
did Equipage” of that city, he received a cool reception. One hard-nosed
consumer announced that it was not in the preacher’s power to persuade
“any rational Man from a clean Shirt on his Back, and a warm House o’er
his Head, or a good Dish of Meat and a Bottle of Wine for his Dinner, if he
has either Money or Credit to procure them.”112 Colonists who did have
money and credit continued to go about their business, preferring the good
life to the simple life, and, as we shall discover, while most of them did not
bother to comment directly on their activities, a few began to speak of choice
as a right, a development that indicated that the daily experience of making
selections from among competing goods and of spending one’s money how-
ever one desired was acquiring an ideological voice.
If evangelical pronouncements against an idolatrous material culture
fell on deaf ears, so too did hectoring by the members of the ruling elites.
However strenuously the colonial gentry railed against luxury—and by this,
they generally meant other people’s buying habits—they found that the
market itself undermined the very categories they employed to control the
consumer demand of those consigned to the lower and middling orders. In
theory, it was easy enough to identify a luxury item. An object such as a
diamond necklace or a gold ornament was so expensive that only the most
wealthy, and presumably the most cultivated men and women in society
could possibly afford it. Indeed, those who tried so hard to check other
people’s spending divided the goods of the marketplace into three decep-
tively neat categories: superfluities, necessaries, and conveniencies.
The critics of luxury who importuned the poorer sorts to content them-
selves with basic needs soon discovered, however, that the categories would
not hold. The language itself was quicksand. The market moved too swiftly
to allow anyone to distinguish with confidence the difference between a
superfluity and a convenience, for what was perceived at one moment as a
luxury could within a short time be seen by consumers as a necessity. This
instability presented a real interpretive challenge. After all, if the upper classes
accused everyone else of corrupting the public virtue and called them back
to industry and diligence, it helped to know just what kind of sacrifice they
had in mind. Many developments explained the difficulty of pinning down
the meaning of words that allegedly carried such far-reaching moral sig-
nificance. The language problem was exacerbated by new manufacturing
technologies that lowered prices, access to cheaper copies of more expen-
sive imports, rising real wages that made it possible for ordinary people to
acquire more goods, and a willingness in even modest households to forgo
the purchase of plain objects in favor of a few exceptional pieces.113
A writer in the Independent Advertiser tried unsuccessfully to negotiate
the shifting categories. He began with a thunderous attack on “LUXURY
AND EXTRAVAGANCE,” the capital letters reinforcing the message that
these were terms of opprobrium. Luxury was a vice capable of destroying
the commonwealth. “Especially does this appear likely to happen,” he
warned, “when this Contagion has infected the lower Sort of People (as it
has apparently among us) by whose Labour and the Sweat of whose Brows
the Community should draw its chief Support.” But then, when it actually
came to defining the evil indulgence, the writer had to admit, “There is
indeed (it must be allowed) a certain Degree to which Luxury may be toler-
ated, and in which it contributes its Part toward Happiness and Support of
the State, especially a trading one; and it may perhaps be difficult to fix the
precise Boundaries; or to determine exactly the very Point where it becomes
exorbitant and dangerous.”114 This loose definition would not have been
very helpful to “the lower Sort of People,” anxious presumably about the
charge of promoting vice. The author’s treatment of luxury was a little like
the United States Supreme Court’s of pornography; the justices have been
unable to determine precisely what pornography is, but they insist that they
would be able to identify it if they ever saw it.
Other colonists eager to stamp out the degeneracy associated with ex-
travagance found that they were chasing a moving target. “Mentor”— a
writer who appeared in a number of different newspapers—complained
that in a rapidly changing marketplace luxury goods soon became items of
everyday consumption. “Thus,” he announced, “a whole nation habituates
itself to look upon the most superfluous things as the necessaries of life;
and thus every day brings forth some new necessity of the same kind.” The
problem in a nutshell was that “men can no longer live without things, which
but thirty years ago were utterly unknown to them.”115 He was speaking
from experience. Once china ranked as a luxury in the colonies, but, as we
have seen, it became common enough in Philadelphia that a deranged per-
son could take a hammer to a crate of cups and saucers in a public square.
Once the women of New London had not been able to afford two-color
fabrics, but by the 1740s such cloth was merely one of many imported goods
that had reached a modest farming community on the edge of empire.
Although the moral critics of luxury pounded away in sermons and news-
paper essays, they did not carry the day. Other colonial writers began to sug-
gest that, far from leading to universal vice, extravagance might under some
circumstances yield real benefits. “Publius Agricola” ridiculed the “abstemi-
ous Sages” who abstracted morality from actual market expectations and who
tried to persuade ordinary people that their desire for expensive imports was
“unreal and imaginary,” in other words, an artificial and irrational inflation
of human need. The author dismissed such cultural theory as out of touch
with “the numerous Herd of Mankind.” To claim that the wants of the mid-
dling sorts of people were invented—a figment of commercial fantasy—
missed the central psychological elements driving eighteenth-century
consumers. “When Industry has furnished any Person with the indispensable
Necessaries of Life, such as Food, Raiment, and Lodging, he rests not there,
but proceeds to Luxury, the Bane of Wealth, to create new Wants, which are so
far real, as they prompt and excite us to Action and Industry; without it, Life
would be tasteless, and a heavy Burden.”“Publius Agricola” could well ask the
moralists—be they civic humanists of the republican tradition or traditional
religious spokesmen—why anyone would bother to work if there were no
prospect of supplying “the Delicacies and Conveniences of Life.” The answer,
of course, was that the true end of labor was “to acquire Wealth, and [to] have
it in his Power to gratify every Appetite, and Every Desire.”116
Another author known to his

readers only as “X” saw no justifica-
tion for prohibiting people from buy-
ing whatever they could afford. “Man
in his nature,” he explained, “is a pro-
gressive being, with the rude materi-
als put into his hands, he naturally
rises, from the necessaries of life, to
the conveniences, the delicacies, and
the luxuries.”117 Reckless and irre-
sponsible spending on imported
goods could become addictive; it
could ruin families and reveal a need
for greater self-control. But turning
the exceptional case into an excuse
for restricting the normal ambition
for a better life made no sense. One
essay even insisted that consumers
promoted the common good. As he
argued, “Whilst things are in their
own Nature necessary to us, or, from
Custom and Fancy, made necessary, Like so many other colonial Americans, this man
we will be turning every thought to from central Massachusetts took pride in his
come at them; and where they can- material possessions, many of which had been
not be got by Violence and Rapine, imported from England. Overmantel panel from the
mid-eighteenth-century house owned by Mose Marcy
Recourse will be had to Invention and in Southbridge, Massachusetts. Unidentified artist, oil
Industry.”118 on wood panel. Collection of Old Sturbridge Village,
And, indeed, the desire to obtain 20.19.1. Photography by Henry E. Peach.
imported British goods did promote
a surge of invention and industry in colonial America before the final
constitutional crisis fractured the empire. We have concerned ourselves
mostly with the acquisition of goods. It would be misleading, however, to
leave the impression that provincial farmers did not appreciate the close
relationship between consumption and production. As Jan de Vries, a com-
parative economic historian of the eighteenth century, has discovered in
western Europe and North America, ordinary men and women were will-
ing to work harder so that they would have more household resources to
spend on manufactured goods. Families reallocated labor so that women
and children who at an earlier time had devoted themselves to producing
basic items such as cloth in the home turned increasingly to assisting the
adult males in the fields or in commercial activities that would generate
hard currency. This radical shift—de Vries calls it the “industrious revolu-
tion”— expanded income, which in turn enhanced the buying power of each
family unit. With more money in their pockets, colonial Americans were
able to indulge new tastes and acquire goods of their own choosing.119 The
Reverend Jared Eliot, a Connecticut essayist who urged contemporaries to
develop more productive farming techniques, imagined his audience as

made up of people already fully accommodated to a commercial mentality.
Whenever they sensed a market opportunity, they exploited it until it could
absorb no more colonial staples. “We glut the markets every where,” Eliot
observed, “if we hear of a market, if we can come at it by land, we run, ride,
and drive, till we have overstocked it; by sea we are all afloat, sailing till
provisions may be purchased cheaper there, than at home.” To pay for their
ever growing consumption of British imports, Eliot told the converts to the
industrious revolution to experiment with new products. He recommended
silk, not only because it represented a potentially lucrative export but also
because “the raising [of] silk may, in all its parts, be performed by women,
children, cripples, and aged persons.”120 The women who were described in
the moral discourse on luxury as idle and frivolous appeared in the litera-
ture of industry and invention as a large, untapped labor force. In 1754 the
Society for Encouraging Industry in Massachusetts explained that because
the colony could not sustain sufficient flocks of sheep—the climate was too
harsh—it had to import large quantities of woollen goods from Great Brit-
ain. The problem extended to “pewter, Brass, and other Commodities bro’t
from thence, that we cannot subsist without, nor produce our selves, [and
which] will require all we can procure for Exportation to make Returns.”
The Society thought the answer was linen. The new enterprise seemed es-
pecially appropriate, since it would “employ our own Women and Chil-
dren, who are now in a great measure idle.”121
During the 1740s intellectual issues associated with the luxury debate
spilled over into the political sphere. Many colonies, chronically lacking a
sufficient supply of hard currency with which to conduct normal commerce,
began to print paper money. This response to the problem sparked a
firestorm of protest from the merchant community as well as from royal
officials convinced that the British government would take a dim view of
the issuance of provincial bills unsecured by either gold or silver. The con-
troversy raged most fiercely in Massachusetts, where opponents of the pa-
per currency trotted out a number of arguments ridiculing plans for soft
money. This colony had in fact long circulated limited amounts of paper
bills, but the new scheme permitting private banks to issue many more notes
provoked a crisis. The paper currency, opponents claimed, would only in-
crease the colony’s growing indebtedness to Great Britain, lead to explosive
inflation, and bankrupt honest merchants, who expected proper payment
in specie. These well-worked themes did not go to the cultural and ideo-
logical heart of the dispute, however, for woven into much of the acrimoni-
ous rhetoric was the assumption that a larger, more accessible supply of
money would further stimulate the consumption of imported goods.
From the perspective of the hard-money advocates that seemed a most
unwelcome development, and while no persuasive evidence demonstrates
that the public battle pitted the haves against the have nots, the language
employed by the adversaries suggests that they saw paper money in terms
of a struggle between freedom and control in the consumer marketplace.
“Philalethes,” for example, blamed “the Floods of European Goods imported,

[on] . . . the Floods of Paper Bills emitted.”122 The logic was simple: The more
paper money the colonies printed, the more the people would flock to the
stores. Another writer pointedly asked, “What has produc’d our Extrava-
gancy so much for these 20 or 30 Years past, as our Paper Money? . . . It is
that which in a great Measure has encourag’d the vast Import of Commodi-
ties more than we want, & prevented People’s improving & Wearing their
own Manufactures; & so long as they can be furnish’d with it for almost
nothing at all, it never will be otherwise.”123 When one reads a passage of
this sort, one wonders why the author distinguished between the “we” and
the “people.” Surely the men and women who wanted to curtail the cur-
rency supply, and thereby deny the people a chance to purchase additional
imported goods, did not propose to sacrifice their own pleasures in the
market. Presumably they possessed characters strong enough to resist the
debilitating consequences of luxury. The others were best advised to re-
strict their desires to those objects that could be made in the home or by
local craftsmen.
Pitted against the champions of hard money were colonists of various
backgrounds who had become accustomed to making choices and fashion-
ing themselves as they alone saw fit. For them the value of things on the
market was determined not by the supply of gold and silver but rather by
decisions taken by innumerable consumers. As one writer in the midst of
the currency controversy explained, the real value of an item was a function
of what a person was willing to pay for it. Articles such as colorful imported
cloth were not intrinsically cheap or expensive. “These [consumer goods]
have their Value or Estimation from the voluntary Choice of Mankind, guided
either by Reason, or mere Humour & Fancy, in choosing one thing and
neglecting or refusing another at one Time, and again choosing what they
before neglected or refused.” The prose was awkward, but there could be no
doubt about the author’s sentiments. Since market values “change with the
Fashion for the Year or a particular Season,” it was proper state policy to let
the people act openly and freely and without concern for currency restric-
tions that denied them the chance to make meaningful choices.124
In Boston, at least, a strange quirk in how imported goods were actu-
ally merchandised exacerbated political tensions. Because the city had long
suffered from an insufficient supply of money—too little specie, not enough
paper—the merchants resorted to something called the “Truck-Trade” or
“Shop Notes.” Laborers brought to retail stores various products, which they
then exchanged for “Shop Notes,” certificates allowing the holder to de-
mand goods at some future date. They received the certificates in lieu of a
full cash payment. When these workers later presented their “Shop Notes”
at the local stores, however, they discovered that the notes had been heavily
discounted, perhaps by as much as a quarter, so that they did not purchase
as many items as a cash customer would have obtained with the same nomi-
nal amount of money. Moreover, the shopkeepers pushed goods onto the
Jolley Allen fully appreciated the importance of consumer choice for mid-century colonial
Americans. Boston Post-Boy, 4 July 1768. Courtesy of the Massachusetts Historical Society.
vulnerable laborers that they did not necessarily want, often things so out-
rageously inappropriate that the moral critics accused the urban poor of
being fools for luxury. As one writer observed, however, there were “Hun-
dreds of honest House-keepers, who, if they were paid in Cash for their
Work, would many times look on their Money before they would give it to
buy their Wives and Daughters Velvet Hoods, red Cloaks, or Silk Gar-
ments.”125 In 1741 the caulkers of Boston—men who labored on the rope-
walks—announced that they would no longer accept “Notes on Shops for
Money and Goods.” These laborers would take only “good lawful publick
bills of Credit,” promissory notes from established merchants, or farm com-
modities “at the Price currant, or Market Price.” The caulkers hoped that
“this good and commendable Example will soon be follow’d by Numbers
of other Artificers and Tradesmen.”126 At stake in this protest was not a call
for more money or better working conditions, however important such
considerations may have been. Like so many other men and women just
getting by in Boston, the caulkers insisted simply on enjoying genuine and
equal consumer choice.127
Within this contentious environment some colonists took an ideologi-
cal step of immense significance. They started discussing the “voluntary
Choice of Mankind” within a regime of human rights. The language of rights
had been around for a long time, and even if mid-eighteenth-century Ameri-
cans did not closely analyze the political philosophy of John Locke, they
understood fully the thrust of his thinking. The rights discourse had begun
to influence how people worked out the meaning of religious toleration in
this society.128 The claim made here, therefore, is not that the experience of
living in a robust consumer marketplace caused liberalism or that it di-
rectly explains the subsequent popularity of Locke’s Second Treatise among
the revolutionary generation. Whatever the long-term possibilities may have
been, however, it seems clear that within this particular context—a colonial
society dependent on imported consumer goods—the concept of freedom
of choice was elevated into a right, and within that mental framework, choice
no longer had to be defended on purely prudential or historical grounds.
From this perspective, rights talk not only gave ordinary men and women
an effective language with which to resist the controlling logic of classical
republican and traditional theology but also made it possible to conceive of
the pursuit of happiness as something more exalted than a vulgar concern
for economic self-interest.129
Within this interpretive context, one text brilliantly captured the move
from experience to ideology. We do not know the identity of the author of
The Good of the Community Impartially Considered, in a Letter to a Mer-
chant in Boston. He called himself “Rusticus.” Writing in 1754 during a dis-
pute over a proposed excise tax that would have allowed inspectors appointed
by the colonial government of Massachusetts to monitor the private con-
sumption of certain items, he explored the liberating assumptions that the
new commercial society had brought into play. To an imaginary disputant
who favored the excise, he responded, “I am really afraid, Sir, the most dis-
cerning Sort of Men will think you are aiming to throw the Burthen of the
Taxes upon the poorer Sort of People, while you yourself are desirous of
wallowing freely in all the Luxuries of Life.” In other words, the issue was
not consumption itself, but rather, the conditions under which others would
be allowed to pursue material happiness. “Rusticus” conceded that all citi-
zens had an obligation to work for the common good. They should pay
taxes. What was unacceptable was an assessment that hit the “poorer Sorts”
harder than it did the upper classes.
To what Purpose is it, that Mankind Work, and Toil, and Slave themselves, unless they
may be allow’d to enjoy all the Comforts of Life, they had as good be in a State of
Nature, and eat and drink nothing but the natural Fruits of the Earth?
The answer was that no one would volunteer to be a member of such a

joyless society. Without real incentives people would lose direction, becom-
ing idle and despondent. After all, “the Enjoyment of Property is the Aim of
all Mankind; and the Foundation of their ent[e]ring into Societies.” We
note that the author has not said that it is a concern over the security of
property that draws people into a social contract. In this American version
of Locke, “Enjoyment” has been silently substituted for security, and we
find ourselves suddenly engaged in a pursuit of happiness. The next move
in the argument elegantly employs the defiant language of rights as a means
to resist the claims of class:
Surely, a poor Man’s Liberty is as dear to him, as a rich Man’s; how unjust is it then for
the Government, to burthen them with a Tax, which the Rich are not burthen’d with?
Every Man has a natural Right to enjoy the Fruit of his own Labour, both as to the
Conveniencies, and Comforts, as well as the Necessaries of Life; natural Liberty is the same
with one Man, as another; and unless in the Enjoyment of these Things they hurt the
Community, the Poor ought to be allow’d to use them as freely as the Rich.—But such is
the Perverseness of human Nature, that when a Man arises to any tolerable Degree of
Fortune, he begins to think all below him were made for his Service, and that they have
no Right to any Thing but what is despised & refused by him. We could very well be
contented with this, if these Gentlemen would but let us enjoy such Things as we were
able to purchase, freely; or with the same Freedom [that] they are allow’d to do it.130
“Rusticus” managed in a short pamphlet to link a political crisis to the

purchase of consumer goods. He demonstrated that behind the seeming
benign cultural vocabulary of politeness and gentility lurked philosophic
concerns about power, equality, and freedom. And although he did not an-
ticipate the coming of the American Revolution, he did suggest how ordi-
nary people might communicate to each other about natural rights through
the experience of making choices in a consumer marketplace. As a modern
anthropologist might say, for them, goods were good to think.131
VII
At the end of the day, an empire of goods came to impede the pursuit of
personal happiness. As we turn our attention in the second half of this study
to the sudden and dramatic politicization of a vast colonial market—to the

organization of massive boycotts—we must remind ourselves that only
people who had experienced within their own families the pleasures and
frustrations of so many consumer choices could possibly have come to ap-
preciate how a disruption of that market might be an effective weapon in a
contest against a Parliament that appeared to rate its own sovereignty above
commercial prosperity. In these chapters, we have demonstrated from dif-
ferent perspectives how British imports transformed everyday life in colo-
nial America for the great mass of middling men and women who would
soon be asked to sacrifice their own common goods for a common good
which none of them could have imagined before 1763. When the crisis ar-
rived, these consumers more than met the challenge.
Part Two
N “A Commercial
Plan of Political
Salvation”
6
Strength out of
Dependence: Strategies of
Consumer Resistance in an
Empire of Goods
N o one knows when precisely American

public opinion first realized that im-
ported goods provided powerful politi-
cal leverage within the empire. Such discoveries usually result from a slow,
cumulative conviction that the taken-for-granted of everyday life has possi-
bilities that no one only a few years earlier quite perceived. But insomuch as
there was a moment when inchoate thoughts about consumer dependence
crystallized into firm belief, it occurred in mid-February 1766. On the elev-
enth of that month the rulers of Great Britain received a lecture from a cel-
ebrated American about the radical potential of the goods exported across
the Atlantic. The British House of Commons, sitting as a committee of the
whole, had just launched a painful review of what seemed to many members
a flawed colonial policy. Violent American resistance to the Stamp Act had
taken them by surprise, and now, confused and angered by the turn of events,
they gathered information on how best to respond to an imperial crisis brought
on by their own decision to collect new revenues in America.1 Not until the
third day of the proceedings did they summon Dr. Benjamin Franklin. Ev-
eryone knew in advance that he would be the star witness.
On this stage Franklin performed brilliantly, as, of course, he knew he
would. He had carefully rehearsed his lines. The initial question—a seem-
ingly straightforward declaration of identity—set the theatrical tone for a
marathon exchange.
Q. What is your name, and place of abode?
A. Franklin, of Philadelphia.
The ambitious provincial had long ago learned how to play the part of the
authentic American before an audience of English gentlemen of the sort
elected to Parliament. His claim to be “Franklin, of Philadelphia”— a plain-
speaking man from the colonies—betrayed a rhetorical strategy more artful
196 n “ a commercial pl an of political salvation ”
than disingenuous. The people present that chilly afternoon recognized him
for what he was: a distinguished scientist, prosperous entrepreneur, and
cosmopolitan philosopher. Had he been anything less—had he not already
crafted the character of the successful representative of an expansive Anglo-
American culture—Franklin would probably have not been called at that
critical moment to speak for the colonies.2
Whatever his qualifications, Franklin experienced rough handling from
the House of Commons. Over several grueling hours, he endured some 174
questions, 89 of which he classified as antagonistic.3 Try as they would, how-
ever, his interrogators could not control the proceedings. The nimble wit-
ness painted before their skeptical eyes a portrait of an expansive commercial
empire, unprecedented in world history. Franklin warned Britain’s rulers
that unless they reconsidered taxing the colonists without representation
and reformed new coercive modes of enforcement, they risked destroying
the American goose that had laid so many golden eggs.
After an initial period of sparring, Franklin took charge of the exchange.
The House of Commons wanted to know, for example, whether the colo-
nists had merely used the passage of the Stamp Act as a convenient excuse
to challenge imperial authority. Perhaps the Americans had long contem-
plated steering an independent political course. Perhaps recent revenue
policies had only exacerbated tensions already present. Franklin dismissed
that line of thought as nonsense. Before 1763, he insisted, the “temper” of
the colonists toward Great Britain had been “the best in the world.” What
made their loyalty all the more impressive in his opinion was that it cost the
Exchequer so little. Obedience never depended on “forts, citadels, garrisons
or armies.” The mere communication of command generated swift results
in distant provinces, for, as the members of Parliament had obviously for-
gotten, the Americans “were governed by this country at the expense only
of a little pen, ink and paper. They were led by a thread.”
The image of imperial authority as a mere thread was inspired. This
most gentle form of social and political control—English threads, not Span-
ish or French chains—explained the extraordinary might of the British
Empire. The entire system drew strength not from military force but rather
from shared values. The colonists, Franklin confessed, had “an affection,
for Great-Britain, for its laws, its customs and manners, and even a fond-
ness for its fashions, that greatly increased the commerce.” And then, in a
flash of rhetorical legerdemain, Franklin leapt from metaphorical “threads”
of authority to the real manufactured threads that sustained the Atlantic
economy, to the wool and cotton fibers woven into fashionable cloth which
for a generation or more had transformed the very bodies of ordinary
Americans into colorful emblems of a flourishing commercial empire. Sta-
tistics told a story of success. “I think the inhabitants of all the provinces
together, taken at a medium, double in about 25 years,” he explained. Stun-
ning demographic growth only began to suggest the true potential of colo-
nial trade. American demand, Franklin assured the members of Parliament,
“increases much faster, as the consumption is not merely in proportion to
strength out of dependence N 197
their numbers, but grows with the growing abilities of the same numbers to
pay for them. In 1723, the whole importation from Britain to Pennsylvania,
was but about 15,000 Pounds Sterling; it is now near Half a Million.”4
Commercial figures of this sort were, of course, old news. But Franklin
interpreted the numbers in a strikingly innovative manner, pushing the
political logic of everyday consumer demand in a direction that suggested
that colonial buyers were neither as vulnerable nor as dependent as their
British rulers may have imagined. In fact, the Stamp Act crisis had cast rela-
tions between Great Britain and the American colonies, between colonial
consumers and English producers, in an entirely new light. No one had
planned such a dramatic shift in political perspective. Reassessment of im-
perial identity simply evolved out of a confrontation with an aggressive
House of Commons, an unintended consequence of an ill-conceived policy.
And now, as a result of these events, the Americans began to appreciate that
Britain’s extraordinary commercial success in the New World had given them
a voice in imperial affairs.
According to Franklin, those eager colonial customers who had been
so willing for so long to part with their money, who accepted ever higher
levels of debt as the inevitable burden of fulfilling material desire, and who
had come to regard the exercise of choice in the marketplace as a right rather
than a privilege could without a second thought reject the manufactured
goods that flowed across the Atlantic. Indeed, the process had already be-
gun. In some major port cities, American dry-goods merchants responding
to popular political anger had canceled orders for imported manufactures.
The market protests were growing. The colonists in a commercial empire
had somehow forged a brilliantly innovative strategy. Before this time no
other dependent people had so fully come to appreciate that their own eco-
nomic dependence could be effectively translated into organized resistance,
uniting anonymous consumers from Portsmouth to Savannah in a com-
mon enterprise that was itself a product of a commercial empire.
Some members of Parliament that February afternoon must have won-
dered whether they had heard the American expert correctly. Surely, Franklin
must have exaggerated the ability of so many colonial buyers to withhold
their traditional custom. What was the meaning of the Pennsylvania trade
statistics that he had just read into the official record if not to expose the
colonists’ utter reliance on imported British manufactures? But on this point
Franklin remained adamant, insisting that “I do not know a single article
imported into the Northern Colonies, but what they can either do without,
or make themselves.”
The astounding claim that the Americans might be willing to forgo the
pleasures of fashion sparked a predictable exchange, one well worth quot-
ing in full since it marked a critical historical moment when British legisla-
tors explicitly confronted a new element in the imperial equation, one that
the colonists themselves had just begun to appreciate: Private consumer
decisions made thousands of miles away from the source of manufacture
might under certain political circumstances become an engine of organized
popular resistance.
Q. Don’t you think cloth from England absolutely necessary to them?

A. No, by no means absolutely necessary; with industry and good management, they
may very well supply themselves with all they want.
Q. Will it take a long time to establish that manufacture among them? And must they
not in the mean while suffer greatly?
A. I think not. They have made a surprising progress already. And I am of opinion, that
before their old clothes are worn out, they will have new ones of their own making.
Q. Can they possibly find wool enough in North-America?
A. They have taken steps to increase the wool. . . . The people will all spin, and work for
themselves, in their own houses.
Q. If the act is not repealed, what do you think will be the consequences?
A. A total loss of the respect and affection the people of America bear to this country,
and of all the commerce that depends on that respect and affection.
Q. How can the commerce be affected?
A. You will find, that if the act is not repealed, they will take very little of your manu-
factures in a short time.
Q. Is it in their power to do without them?
A. I think they may very well do without them.
Q. Is it their interest not to take them?
A. The goods they take from Britain are either necessaries, mere conveniences, or su-
perfluities. The first, as cloth, &c. with a little industry they can make at home; the
second they can do without, till they are able to provide them among themselves; and
the last, which are much the greatest part, they will strike off immediately. They are
mere articles of fashion, purchased and consumed, because the fashion in a respected
country, but will now be detested and rejected. . . .
Q. Is it their interest to make cloth at home?
A. I think they may at present get it cheaper from Britain, I mean of the same fineness
and neatness of workmanship; but when one considers other circumstances, the re-
straints on their trade, and the difficulty of making remittances, it is their interest to
make every thing.
Q. What used to be the pride of the Americans?
A. To indulge in the fashions and manufactures of Great-Britain.
Q. What is now their pride?
A. To wear their old cloaths over again, till they can make new ones.5
Whether Franklin changed the minds of any members of Parliament

during his presentation can never be known with certainty. No doubt, he
confirmed much of what they had heard from well-placed constituents such
as the cloth manufacturers of the Midlands who worried about the loss of
American business and who petitioned against the government’s new rev-
enue policies.6 But, whatever its immediate impact, Franklin’s interroga-
tion was a bravura performance, linking familiar commercial arguments in
new ways suggesting that the colonists’ putative economic dependence could
be interpreted as a source of political strength. This line of reasoning had
been implicit in the standard eighteenth-century writing on the British
Empire, volumes that repeatedly drew attention to the central role the colo-
nies played in Britain’s—read England’s—stunning economic growth.7 Until
the early 1760s, however, no one had so brilliantly seen the threat of orga-
nized market disruption as an effective device for gaining the full attention
of England’s ruling class. Within several weeks, the House of Commons
repealed the hated Stamp Act. As Franklin’s friend William Strahan said of
Franklin’s contribution to the decision, “In Truth, I almost envy him the
inward Pleasure, as well as the outward Fame, he must derive from having
it in his Power to do his Country such eminent and seasonable Service.”8
As so many Americans discovered during the imperial crisis, however,

preaching the language of market sacrifice was a lot easier than actually
adopting the simple life. Basking in the political victory he had done so
much to bring about, a relaxed Franklin dashed off a letter to his long-
suffering wife, Deborah, who had never left Philadelphia. The contrast be-
tween this short note and the formal testimony before Parliament was
striking. The correspondence revealed with surprising candor the fragility
of the strategy of self-reliance and commercial denial that Franklin had just
trumpeted before the House of Commons. “As the Stamp Act is at length
repeal’d,” he declared, “I am willing you should have a new Gown, which
you may suppose I did not send sooner, as I knew you would not like to be
finer than your Neighbours, unless in a Gown of your own Spinning.” Still
maintaining a jolly tone, Franklin reflected that if the hated revenue act
had remained in force, he would have been forced to wear either homespun
clothes or, more likely, old garments that he had long ago consigned to
storage. “I told the Parliament,” he recounted, “that it was my Opinion, before
the old Cloaths of the Americans were worn out, they might have new ones
of their own making. And indeed if they had all as many old Clothes as your
old Man has, that would not be very unlikely; for I think you and George
[Franklin’s black servant] reckon’d when I was last at home, at least 20 pair of
old Breeches.” Personal decisions made over a long period—choices of color,
texture, and cut—suddenly acquired different symbolic possibilities. The “old
Cloaths” had taken on new meaning; the private choices in the marketplace
spoke of shared public sacrifice in a political cause.
Or so it seemed. At precisely the mid-point of his letter, Franklin sud-
denly assumed an entirely different tone. The wording of his abrupt transi-
tion— “ Joking apart”— called into question the character of much of his
testimony a few weeks earlier before Parliament. What exactly was Franklin’s
colonial joke? That American consumers were really prepared to produce
gowns of their own spinning? That men such as Franklin would actually
agree to appear in public in breeches long since gone out of fashion or were
a bit tight around the belly? Franklin seemed relieved that events had saved
him and the members of his immediate family from having to make such
hard market decisions, and the man who found it nearly impossible to re-
sist the “Baubles of Britain” informed Deborah that a ship from London
would soon deliver “a fine Piece of Pompador Sattin, 14 Yards cost 11s. per
Yard. A Silk Negligee and Petticoat of brocaded Lutestring for my dear Sally,
with 2 Doz. Gloves. . . . I send you also Lace for two Lappet Caps, 3 Ells of
Cambrick . . . 3 Damask Table Cloths, a Piece of Crimson Morin for Cur-
tains, with Tassels, Line and Binding. A large true Turkey Carpet cost 10
Guineas, for the Dining Parlour.” The list contained many other exciting
consumer items, including “some oil’d Silk, and a Gimcrack Corkscrew.”9
As Franklin had observed not many years earlier writing as “Father
Abraham,” given the choice the colonists would happily rush to the mar-
ketplace. As individuals they celebrated the comforts of a new and expand-
ing material culture. Franklin was no exception. Of course, as he warned
the House of Commons, it was possible for the colonists to imagine deny-
ing themselves the manufactured goods that had made them feel prettier,
warmer, cleaner, more fashionable, even more British. But it was not a wel-
come sacrifice. Indeed, what his letter to Deborah indicated—and what it
would take many ordinary American consumers a decade fully to compre-
hend—the manufactured threads that held the commercial empire together
were much stronger than even the most fervent colonial protesters under-
stood at this early stage of political controversy. The desire to experience
private pleasure always strained against the appeal to support a common
cause. Until the colonists forged a greater sense of confidence that other
colonists living in other places could be trusted to forgo British imports,
they found it hard to translate rhetoric about the renunciation of the mar-
ket into genuine self-denial and seriously to join utter strangers through-
out America in resisting a powerful military adversary.
The interpretation of the coming of the American Revolution advanced
in this section invites a thoroughgoing reconsideration of popular mobiliza-
tion. Parliament’s attempts to raise revenue in the colonies sparked a pro-
found symbolic transformation in which objects of everyday life—the myriad
“Baubles of Britain”— suddenly acquired new shared meanings.10 Within this
political environment private decisions about mundane purchases became
matters of public judgment. Or, as one might state in a more familiar mod-
ern vocabulary, American men and women slowly, often painfully discovered
that highly personal actions carried inescapable political significance, so that
what once had seemed no more than matters of individual choice about com-
fort and appearance provided the cultural resources necessary during the run-
up to independence to forge effective revolutionary solidarities. The argument
is most definitely not that the language of liberty and rights failed to resonate
across traditional boundaries of class and geography. It obviously did so. But
such rhetoric was not a sufficient cause of revolution. Without a foundation
of widespread trust—a bond linking distant strangers and tested repeatedly
through rituals of consumer sacrifice—the principled declarations that domi-
nate our own memory of national independence would not have been able to
sustain broad structures of political resistance or have produced a meaning-
ful sense of common purpose.
II
Even before Franklin warned Parliament about the economic power of self-
sacrificing American consumers, indeed, well before the colonists seriously
entertained the possibility of separation from the mother country, every-
day imported goods from Great Britain had begun to take on new political
possibilities. The manufactured articles that flooded the imperial market-
place after 1740 had always symbolized a mutually advantageous commer-
cial relationship between English producers and colonial consumers.
Sometime during the late 1750s, however, the social context in which goods
acquired shared meanings changed. It was during the period immediately

following the successful conclusion of the Seven Years’ War that Americans
developed a fuller consciousness of their status as colonists within the Brit-
ish Empire, and in this more uncertain climate, they interpreted the articles
of consumer experience with new eyes.
The transformation of colonial identity within a larger imperial struc-
ture occurred incrementally, almost without anyone being fully aware that
a far-reaching shift was taking place. But whatever the pace of change, per-
sonal reassessments of empire gradually gathered momentum in public
debate. People who had for a very long time taken membership in the Brit-
ish Empire for granted or had viewed it uncritically as the wellspring of
liberty, prosperity, and security began to appraise in unprecedented lan-
guage the burdens as well as the benefits of being British subjects. It was in
this period of initial reassessment, roughly from 1757 to 1764, that many
Americans concluded that they were in fact simply colonists—perhaps noth-
ing more than colonists—subjects of the crown who did not quite measure
up to the men and women who happened to reside in England. Put another
way, the study of revolutionary mobilization forces a recognition that colo-
nists could not have imagined national independence until they had first
experienced the psychological burden of political dependence.
A new, more sober sense of colonial identity surfaced in the wake of
extraordinary military triumph. The stunning victory over the French forces
in Canada in 1759 raised popular expectations about America’s central role
within the empire to an extravagant pitch. It was against this inflated back-
ground that colonists would later express such bitter disappointment when
a prosperity artificially fueled by war suddenly collapsed following the ces-
sation of hostilities. Their reactions to the news of Britain’s successes on the
battlefield had been almost entirely positive. Ignoring the threat of a post-
war cooling of the economy, Americans gloried in a highly flattering self-
image. By their own lights they had done their part in turning back the
French, and if the colonists could not quite claim full partnership within an
ascendant British Empire, they reasoned plausibly that they deserved a kind
of junior membership that awarded them unquestioned respectability.
Although no evidence survives suggesting that colonists belted out the
lyrics of James Thomson’s recently composed song “Rule, Britannia” with
the same gusto as did contemporary English patriots, Americans who shared
in the burst of post-war euphoria enthusiastically adopted what some his-
torians have termed the rhetoric of “colonial nationalism” or “emulative
patriotism.” It was an aggressive language of Britishness that resonated with
equal persuasiveness among the Protestants of Ireland as well as the Scots.11
As one exuberant colonial newspaper editor of this period declared in his
inaugural issue, it was the responsibility of provincial journals such as the
New-Hampshire Gazette to reinforce, perhaps even to construct from whole
cloth, a compelling sense of an American imperial identity “as British Broth-
ers, in defending the Common Cause.”12 For some Americans, imperial pa-
triotism merged with the prophesies of evangelical ministers. The war had
taken on the trappings of a religious crusade. Major General James Wolfe’s

victory over a French army on the Plains of Abraham (1759) sparked wide-
spread millenarian hopes, since, as the Canadian victory appeared abun-
dantly to confirm, the Lord favored the interests of his Protestant subjects
over those of their authoritarian, Catholic rivals.13
The bombast of mid-century colonial nationalism coexisted uneasily
with a different theme. Behind the Americans’ bold declarations of shared
Britishness lurked a gnawing suspicion that their putative “British Broth-
ers”— in other words, an English public—would never accept the colonists
as equals within the empire. As various cabinet members sketched plans for
a more rigorous regulation of colonial affairs, the provincial celebration of
a common imperial identity increasingly rang hollow. It was in this politi-
cal environment that some writers proposed that being colonial meant in
fact being regarded by the English as somehow inferior to those people
who enjoyed the good fortune of having been born in the mother coun-
try.14 The prospect of possible relegation to second-class status within the
British Empire was deeply humiliating. Indeed, the threat of rejection so
nettled several highly educated colonists that they protested in crudely rac-
ist language that the English now thought of the Americans as little more
than black Africans. Only wounded pride could explain such an extreme
reaction. “We won’t be their negroes,” snarled a young, ambitious John
Adams, writing in the Boston Gazette as “Humphrey Ploughjogger.” Like
others of his generation, Adams maintained that Providence had never in-
tended white Americans “for Negroes . . . and therefore never intended us
for slaves. . . . I say we are as handsome as old English folks, and so should
be as free.”15 James Otis Jr., the brilliant Boston lawyer, inquired, “Are the
inhabitants of British America all a parcel of transported thieves, robbers,
and rebels, or descended from such? Are the colonists blasted lepers, whose
company would infect the whole House of Commons?”16 Like the anony-
mous author of a piece that appeared in the Maryland Gazette—an essay
originally published in a Boston journal—colonists throughout America
found themselves asking an embarrassing question of immense political
and cultural consequence: “Are not the People of America, BRITISH Sub-
jects? Are they not Englishmen?”17
The sense of doubt animating these rhetorical questions invites fur-
ther explanation, especially if we are to grasp the context in which private
decisions about consumer objects took on new political meaning. After all,
colonial Americans had not always complained about comparative stan-
dards of good looks or fears of English rejection. Although their extraordi-
nary sensitivity about such matters may strike us as absurd, Adams was in
fact quite serious. If nothing else, his plaintive words remind us how diffi-
cult it is for modern Americans to comprehend what it meant for people of
his generation to imagine themselves as colonists. It is a category that we
take for granted.18 The problem is that we do not really regard the colonists
in this country as ever having been colonists, certainly not in the same way
that twentieth-century Ghanaians or Nigerians, for example, were once
colonists. Unlike them, we downplay the burden of a colonial past, real or

imagined, electing rather to treat it as a period during which colonists—
hearty yeomen all—were somehow preparing for nationhood. Within this
narrative, American colonialism has lost its sting. It evokes a popular form
of architecture, a quaint Georgian world that we have lost, or perhaps merely
an invitation to enjoy a patriotic vacation.
For our purposes, such benign images of early American society serve
largely to obscure a significant shift in popular political consciousness that
occurred only at the very end of the so-called colonial era. To give colonial-
ism a harder edge, therefore, let us stipulate that the 1780s were in fact a
genuine post-colonial period in the history of the United States.19 This pos-
sibility represents a kind of thought experiment designed to drive home
the point about the relation between political consciousness and percep-
tions of dependence. As with Europe’s former colonies in Asia and Africa,
our post-colonial moment would have been a time of profound cultural
strain in American society when a newly empowered people struggled to
free themselves from the weight of imperialism and to establish an authen-
tic voice with which to express national aspirations. Historians of the United
States have seldom welcomed the analytic vocabulary of post-colonialism.20
Instead, they have generally situated the years following the Revolution
within a progressive political story that anticipates a burgeoning new re-
public, and few have seen much value in asking exactly how the citizens of
this independent nation may have confronted—as did the peoples of India
and Kenya, for instance—their recent colonial past.
Whatever the merits of this unfamiliar framework, we must accept that
it raises provocative questions about the relationship between popular po-
litical ideas about power on the eve of independence and traditional as-
sumptions about a long, largely undifferentiated era known commonly as
the colonial period of American history. For example, had a genuine post-
colonial mentality expressed itself in the United States after 1783, we might
now feel obliged to determine more accurately than we do at present the pre-
cise content of America’s colonial experience. We might want to know more
about the defining characteristics of the colonial society against which the
revolutionaries reacted. From the perspective of a post-colonial culture, it
would surely make little sense to define the colonial period as everything that
happened between the founding of Virginia in 1606 and the Declaration of
Independence in 1776. Rather, in terms of the history of political conscious-
ness, our colonial period would shrink to a few years following the defeat of
the French in 1757. We would recognize that it was during these years that
ordinary Americans became more fully aware of themselves as being colo-
nists, as being politically and economically dependent on a powerful Euro-
pean state. Of course, one might properly observe in passing that the rulers
of eighteenth-century Great Britain did not bring to white colonists the same
oppressive violence that their nineteenth- and twentieth-century successors
would visit on the indigenous peoples of Africa and Asia. But comparative
repression is not our project. We must remember that however mild the hand
of imperial power may now seem, we still have to explain how—and why—
these particular colonists managed to organize what was in fact a successful
colonial rebellion.
As John Adams and James Otis appreciated, it was only within a rela-
tively short span of time that the term colonist had acquired ominous pos-
sibilities. It had suddenly ceased to be a relatively innocuous category, a
mere geographic designation. The discovery of colonial dependence after
the Seven Years’ War forced itself onto the political imagination, requiring
accommodation and negotiation even by those men and women who, un-
like Adams and Otis, did not fret so much about English measures of hand-
someness. The reassessment of exactly what counts as the “colonial
experience” is of paramount importance to our reinterpretation of popular
mobilization, since it was within this intense, newly problematic setting
that imported manufactured articles, what Samuel Adams would label the
“Baubles of Britain,” crystallized previously inchoate assumptions about
colonial dependency and compelled colonial Americans to reassess the im-
plications of liberal choice in an imperial marketplace.21 Store-bought goods
served as what Michel Foucault has labeled “dense transfer points,” sites of
the production of meaning about relations of power.22
III
The grimmer face of colonialism first appeared in many households in the
form of tighter family budgets. As one historian has observed, “the single
most significant factor” in shaping the colonists’ reaction to British regula-
tory policies “was the depression that by 1764 had fastened a clammy grip
on trade in every colony, and which would not fully release it until the de-
cade had ended.”23 The withdrawal of so many British troops from the
American theater of war depressed local commerce, for without the sol-
diers—the very men who had sustained “the tale of the hospitable con-
sumer”— the demand for goods and services decreased quite rapidly.24 The
colonists had to adjust not only to a contracting domestic market but also
to heavy taxation levied to pay off debts incurred during the long conflict.
After the French surrender, British officials grumbled that the colonists had
failed to provide the level of funding needed to ensure victory, thus leaving
the hard-pressed English rate payers with a huge public debt. The charges
were unfair. Colonies such as Massachusetts had spent large sums during
the war, and it was not until the late 1760s that the provincial governments
were able to liquidate public obligations taken on a decade earlier.25
To make matters worse, during the post-war period international trade
stagnated, forcing some prominent merchant houses into bankruptcy. A
tightening of credit throughout the Atlantic world contributed to a lower-
ing of commodity prices. Among the hardest hit was tobacco. In 1764, ac-
cording to one Maryland newspaper, “The bankruptcies in Europe has made
such a scarcity of money, and had such an effect on credit, that all our
American commodities fall greatly.”26 As with most economic reverses, ev-

eryone predicted that business conditions would soon return to normal,
restoring the prosperity of former times, but recession gradually settled into
genuine depression. These developments exacerbated chronic problems
associated with an insufficient money supply.27 By the middle of the decade
the situation had become bleak, especially in the major port cities, where
higher rates of unemployment and rising prices for basic supplies such as
firewood created severe social pressures.28 Although few Americans feared
starvation, the prolonged downturn touched their everyday lives in many
different ways. Some may have been disappointed in the results from the
sale of a crop; others may have known a tradesman thrown out of work.
Even ordinary people found that personal debts often outpaced income. As
the frustrated members of Maryland’s assembly explained, unless the
colony’s planters found new sources of revenue—something that seemed
to the representatives highly unlikely—they would have no means of “dis-
charging a continually increasing Debt contracted by Woollens and
[Britain’s] other Manufactures, so that should the Trade of the Colonies,
even that which we have no immediate Hand in, be continued to be cramped,
the evident Consequence must be that we should not have Credit to pur-
chase such considerable Quantities of British Manufactures as we now do.”29
Or, as a writer in the Providence Gazette stated, “It is seldom, indeed very
seldom, that any people have had more at stake than we at present have.”30
At stake for the colonists, of course, were the many material comforts
to which they and the members of their parents’ generation had become
accustomed. How best to preserve their newfound well-being turned on
how Britain’s empire of goods was supposed to operate, a subject that came
to preoccupy many American writers. They accepted the fact that within
recent memory a profound division of labor had evolved. On the one hand,
the mother country purchased raw staples from America; on the other hand,
the colonies provided a closed market for British manufactures. Any policy
that disturbed this delicate economic structure—additional commercial
taxes or the growth of consumer debt—threatened the entire balance of
Atlantic trade and all the cultural and political expectations that the rela-
tionship sustained. In 1764 Oxenbridge Thacher, author of a pamphlet pub-
lished in Boston, patiently reviewed the recent economic experience of the
colonies. One can almost feel his sense of frustration. What had happened
to notions of commercial reciprocity within the empire? Why are we being
treated so poorly? What more can the Americans do? “Everybody knows,”
he declared, “that the greatest part of the trade of Great-Britain, is with her
colonies. . . . The colonists, settled in a wide and sparse manner, are per-
petually demanding the linen, woollen and other manufactures of Great
Britain. . . . And while they can pay for those of Great Britain, with any
proper remittances, their demands will be perpetually increasing. Great
Britain besides, is the mart which supplieth the colonies with all the pro-
duce of the other countries in Europe, which the colonies use.” With a nice
touch of irony, Thacher added, “[D]oubtless even the luxury of the colo-
nists is the gain of G. Britain.”31
In fact, the British really did have the best of the deal. Thomas Fitch,
governor of Connecticut, stated the terms of the colonial trade-off as well
as any American during this period. “The Colonies and Plantations in
America,” he wrote in 1764,“are, indeed, of great Importance to their Mother
Country and an Interest worthy of her most tender Regard.” As the colo-
nists grew in number and in prosperity, they would inevitably purchase
more British imports. Rightly considered, therefore, imperial trade implied
reciprocity, not dependency. “In the Colonies there is a Vent for and a Con-
sumption of almost all Sorts of British Manufactures . . . whereby the Rev-
enue of the Crown and Wealth of the Nation are much increased, at the
Expense of the Colonies.”32 From the American perspective, the wisest im-
perial policy—well before the crisis over the Stamp Act in 1765—was not
one that interrupted the flow of consumer goods but one that allowed the
colonists the freedom and opportunity to earn the money they needed to
pay for them. And, as people like Fitch explained, rising debts and new regu-
lations were making that goal harder every year. Something had to be done.
The economic slump did not immediately translate into organized
market strategies of protest. It did, however, draw attention to the politics
of individual consumer decisions. Indeed, changing commercial conditions
persuaded many Americans that their relationship with Great Britain—their
status as colonists within an empire—may have come at a higher personal
cost than earlier generations had appreciated. They were not receiving value
for money. The private pleasures associated with consuming imported
manufactures now raised disconcerting issues directly connected to a grow-
ing level of colonial indebtedness, to a constant drain of hard currency to the
mother country to pay for an ever increasing volume of goods, to the en-
forcement of the Navigation Acts, which prohibited British colonists from
entering foreign markets, and to a rising number of bankruptcies.33 Imported
items themselves were, of course, just as desirable as they had ever been, bring-
ing color, warmth, and beauty to men and women who had worked hard for
their money. But private enjoyments had a social price. Each purchase—no
matter how justified in terms of the finances of a given household—spoke
not simply of self-fulfillment but also of responsibilities to communities of
local purchasers who happened to be experiencing straitened times.34 As “The
Farmer” argued with reference to Pennsylvania, the very survival of the colony
hung in the balance. “Whether this province will continue to languish,” the
writer declared, “or whether folly, luxury, and vanity have taken such deep
root, that wisdom and reason cannot eradicate, must be left to time only to
make manifest; the best is to be hop’d for, and every honest man, no doubt,
wishes that the good sense of the people will rouse them from their leth-
argy.”35 The people of good sense apparently reasoned dispassionately about
consumer desire. “Philo Publicus” echoed the plaintive cry. “We have taken
wide Steps to Ruin,” insisted the Boston author, “and as we have grown
more Luxurious every Year, so we run deeper and deeper in Debt to our
Mother Country. . . . Industry and Frugality are Virtues which have been
buried out of Sight; ’tis Time, High Time to revive them.”36
What we are witnessing is the first stage of a shift in how ordinary people
interpreted consumer goods within an imperial environment which before
they had largely taken for granted or regarded as an altogether good thing.
This was the moment during which imported manufactures took what might
be called a political turn. The initial impulse was not to blame the British
government or even the major importers for the economic depression.
Rather, colonists began asking whether they—as individual consumers—
actually needed so many yards of cloth, such a wide selection of weights
and colors, indeed, whether it might make more sense to curtail personal
expenditures before acquiring new debt. In this context, goods did not cause
a change in collective behavior. They did, however, act as a catalyst for reas-
sessment, a mental link between the personal and the political, a frame-
work in which to reinterpret a shifting imperial landscape.37
As colonists brought a rough form of cost-benefit analysis to member-
ship in a commercial empire, they focused not so much on the details of
their own debts—in other words, on the pounds and pence actually owed
to local storekeepers for imported goods—but rather on everyday patterns
of market behavior that in a depressed economy suddenly threatened to
turn independent consumer choice into slavish dependence. As “Pelopidas”
explained to readers of the Boston Gazette, “it is known to every man in
business, that our trade with Great-Britain is greatly against us, that our
money is daily exported to pay for manufactures, that our debt to them is
notwithstanding annually increasing, and will, if suffered to go on, be the
instrument of making us slaves to that people.”38 Decisions made by indi-
viduals increasingly became matters of public concern; consumer desire
could not so neatly be separated as it once was from its political conse-
quences. To appreciate just how quickly private acts had become matters
for legitimate public review, one only has to look at a letter published in the
Boston Gazette in 1754—in other words, well before the onset of the post-
war depression—for in this piece it was forcefully maintained that no group
had a right to monitor household consumer habits. “Now I would ask,” the
writer announced, “whether it be consistent with that Honour which every
English Householder claims as his Right, to oblige him to expose the pri-
vate Œconomy of his Family, to the View of the World?—Has it not always
been justly deem’d Impertinent for one Man to busy himself with the Fam-
ily Concerns of Another? Would it not be an intolerable Insult for him to
demand of his Neighbour an Account of his private Conduct & Family Ex-
penses?”39 Less than a decade after these words appeared in print, people
raised a quite different question. How, if the common good is at stake, could
a neighbor refuse to bear witness against private excess?
Americans initially pinned responsibility for the economic downturn
on ordinary men and women who purchased so many goods without prop-
erly reflecting on the moral and political effects of their actions. In an ar-
ticle published in several different newspapers in 1764, “The Farmer”
lamented that “luxury and extravagance abound, and have taken deep root,
even to such a degree, that when two hundred pounds, about ten years ago,
would have maintain’d a common family for the current year, three times
that sum is now become necessary.” If the economy had not turned sour,
the colonists might have gone on spending at a high rate, even enjoyed
doing so. But, according to this commentator, as “trade droops and sinks
her head; wisdom cries alou’d to retrench and use our utmost industry,
frugality and economy.”40 The situation called for reform of personal val-
ues, not government intervention nor the mobilization of entire commu-
nities. Consumers who had apparently once taken “luxury and extravagance”
in their stride now had to adjust their buying habits in ways that echoed the
mandates of an earlier Puritan ethic but during a post-war recession repre-
sented a largely secular remedy for an unwelcome reversal of fortune.
That appeals for economic reform merged so easily with conventional
moral values is not surprising. Before the start of the Seven Years’ War, when
the prospects for the colonists looked considerably brighter, American writ-
ers employed an emotionally charged condemnation of luxury to discour-
age ordinary people from buying so many imported goods, especially
high-quality textiles, which allowed them to reinvent themselves in a mar-
ketplace that celebrated choice and to assume airs that belied their humble
origins. In this provincial setting insistence on frugality was a kind of class
rhetoric intended to reinforce a traditional social hierarchy.41 As the colo-
nial economy lost momentum, however, Americans found that the moral
vocabulary of an earlier era could serve other ends. Retrenchment was viewed
less as a means of keeping ordinary people in their place than as a vehicle
for reviving the general prosperity. Consumer virtue even acquired a patri-
otic tone, for men and women who saved their money during a difficult
patch thereby contributed to an imagined common good. The colonists
insisted that “Our enemies very well know that dominion and frugality are
closely connected; and that to impoverish us, is the surest way to enslave us.
Therefore, if we mean still to be free, let us unanimously lay aside foreign
superfluities, and encourage our own manufacture. SAVE YOUR MONEY
AND YOU WILL SAVE YOUR COUNTRY!”42
A writer in the Pennsylvania Chronicle who signed his contributions
with the pen name “Œ conomicus” developed these themes in particularly
persuasive prose. He noted that “the expenses of living, which have of late
increased among us much faster than our abilities to defray them,” had re-
duced many families in “the foremost rank” to “real poverty and distress.”
Œconomicus did not think that such hardship resulted solely from self-
indulgence in the consumer marketplace, but sybaritic habits were surely a
large part of the problem. In fact, an objective observer could see that “in
some instances” rising personal indebtedness could be traced to “idleness
and the pursuit of pleasure.” This author was most familiar with conditions
in Pennsylvania. In that colony “a temperate, industrious, religious people,
with money at command for every emergency, are now become voluptuous,
idle, profligate, involved in debt, and almost left without the prospect of
recovery.” The solution to this sad state of affairs called for nothing less
than a moral recommitment to consumer virtue, a call for each man and
woman to practice within individual households “industry and frugality, a

disuse of foreign superfluities, and a limitation of our desires to the real
necessaries and comfortable conveniencies of life.”43
This type of discourse represented a significant shift in how people
thought about luxury in the marketplace. If the older rhetoric condemning
consumer self-indulgence aimed to preserve the proper order of society
and to dissuade ordinary people from participating too enthusiastically in
the new empire of goods, this more patriotic appeal had the potential to
generate a quite different interpretation. For if the lower orders of society
really had it in their power to effect such marvelous results—nothing less
than balancing trade between Great Britain and the colonies—they could
not be treated as marginal actors in the politics of empire. Ordinary people
may not have counted for much, but they were beginning within this com-
mercial context to count for something. As men and women would soon
discover, moral power in the consumer marketplace was no less effective
for being moral. No one planned to invite other social groups into a public
conversation over debt. But language has its own peculiar logic, suggesting
at moments of social strain consequences that contemporaries never in-
tended. And so the call for frugality in a secular sphere sparked thoughts
about a more expansive political culture, not one defined in traditional terms
of suffrage but rather one best described as a kind of politics out-of-doors,
which was driven by consumer choice. It would be some time before calls
for personal sacrifice spawned large-scale boycotts. So much as a historian
can ever confidently declare that a popular movement originated at a par-
ticular moment, however, this is surely one of them.
The popular rhetoric surrounding what we might call the character of
the virtuous consumer fits uneasily in an impressive historical literature
that has sought to define a dominant ideology that enabled the colonists to
make sense of a changing imperial environment.44 Much of what the Ameri-
cans had to say about the challenge of a depressed provincial economy
sounds like the language of Reformed Protestantism. Like the early New
England Puritans, colonists during the post-war years advocated a bundle
of traditional religious values. From their perspective, it seemed quite clear
that ordinary men and women should encourage frugality, simplicity, and
diligence. But this eighteenth-century moral vocabulary had been drained
largely of religious content. The goal of social reform in the marketplace
was the restoration of general prosperity, not the defeat of idolatry. It was
not that these people no longer concerned themselves with spiritual mat-
ters. They cared very much about such topics, and most attended churches
of one denomination or another.45 When they discussed the decayed state
of the imperial economy, however, they employed a familiar religious vo-
cabulary in strikingly secular ways. After all, anyone with money in his or
her pocket could qualify as a virtuous consumer, even if that person hap-
pened to be an unlikely candidate for admission into a religious group.
The market discourse of the period also echoed key assumptions about
a commercial economy and the spread of capitalist values that historians
have come to associate with civic humanism or Classical Republicanism.46

The fear of losing one’s independence, a condition that seemed to promote
corruption and threaten liberty, haunted writers of republican persuasion.
These authors, we are told, feared commerce, especially the highly specula-
tive variety that became more common during the eighteenth century, argu-
ing that it brought on a culture of luxury, which in time would surely deprive
self-indulgent and effeminate citizens of their ability to resist tyranny.
While it is true that colonists who appeared in the public journals de-
manded public virtue, they did not define virtue in the same way as the
republican theorists who, we are told, played such a central role in the com-
ing of revolution. Colonial commentators situated virtue solidly within the
new consumer marketplace; it was preeminently a bourgeois virtue. When
“A Farmer” praised the “honest man,” he had in mind a person able to exer-
cise self-restraint when tempted by a brilliant array of imported British
goods. Virtue was a function of liberal choice—in this case, of consumer
decisions to forgo private pleasures in order to advance the public welfare.
The virtuous consumer did not reject the market, much less capitalism, but
he or she had the strength of character to appreciate that private vices such
as buying more than the purchaser could afford might compromise the larger
public virtue of the community.47 From this perspective, consumer debt was
a problem not because it exposed a weakness for exciting imported goods—
after all, it was quite natural to want to look prettier, feel warmer, and keep up
with popular fashion—but rather because consumer excess reduced colonial
buyers to slavish dependence on their creditors. Daniel Dulany, a prominent
Maryland lawyer who protested the constitutionality of the Stamp Act in 1765,
provided insight into the mentality of the virtuous consumer. “A prudent
Man,” Dulany explained, “constrained to abridge his Outgoing, will consider
what Articles of Expense may be retrenched or given up, without Distress or
Discomfort, and if, after this saving, he still finds that his Expenses exceed his
Income, he will then consider of what Articles he can provide a Supply by the
Application of domestic Industry.”48
IV
Even before the outbreak of violent resistance to the Stamp Act in 1765,
colonists had begun to discuss strategies that would ensure a continued
access to the basic comforts of material life and, at the same time, reduce
their dependence on imported goods from Great Britain. It was a tall order.
They appreciated the need to reform participation in the consumer mar-
ketplace in ways that increased their political leverage within a commercial
empire. But like anyone intent on having one’s cake and eating it too, Ameri-
cans were not yet prepared to contemplate radical changes in a comfortable
style of life. In this situation some colonists trumpeted the kind of defiant
arguments that Franklin would echo before the members of Parliament.
Americans pledged to become more frugal, more diligent, and more self-
reliant; they would search out alternative sources of goods. The challenge
was clear enough. As one contributor to the New-Hampshire Gazette asked
a local audience of virtuous consumers, “What then must be done?—Can
we give up our Favourite Diversions, our Luxury either in eating or drink-
ing, and take care of our Families?—Can we go plainer in Clothes, lay by
our Laces, Ribbons, gaudy Flowers, and that most trifling of all Things,
GAUZE[?] . . . Can we in New-England do without this?”49
Although it is premature in our discussion of the politicization of manu-
factured goods to explore the gendered aspects of consumer reform, one
can see that brave talk of economic self-reliance was bound over time to
focus public opinion on the household, on the ability and willingness of
women to produce a supply of cloth sufficient to free colonial families from
dependence on store-bought textiles. When the boycott movement reached
its height later in the decade of the 1760s, women discovered that they had
a voice in revolutionary politics, which modern historians interested largely
in the activities of official committees and elected assemblies have failed to
hear. By the same token, however, one might note that attacks on “Laces,
Ribbons, [and] gaudy Flowers” touched the lives of women more directly
than it did men, and it is perhaps not surprising that male writers almost
unthinkingly assumed that it was up to their wives and daughters to make
the greatest sacrifices in the consumer marketplace.
Indeed, from the first stirring of discontent, American consumers found
it hard to define with confidence the precise content of self-denial. Even as
the colonists began associating a flood of British imports with their own
political dependency, they encountered a problem with the elusive language
of the marketplace. As we have seen in our discussion of the traditional
moral condemnation of luxury, the descriptive categories of eighteenth-
century consumption were distressingly fluid.50 One family’s necessities often
struck the members of other families as extravagance or as opulence, cer-
tainly as examples of the kinds of self-indulgence that might easily be
dropped from a shopping list for the welfare of the community. As colo-
nists devised various responses to post-war depression, they struggled to
distinguish between superfluities and conveniences, between fineries and
necessities. Someone was bound to claim that he or she could not do with-
out a certain item. “What are called in North America luxuries,” Daniel
Dulany confessed, “ought for the most part to be ranked among the com-
forts and decencies of life.” He predicted that however Americans defined
the lexicon of demand, they would be willing to relinquish everyday goods
that brought them pleasure if they could be guaranteed “a supply of neces-
saries . . . by domestic industry.”51 Like Franklin, who during his interroga-
tion before Parliament struggled with such semantic distinctions, Dulany
attempted to give precise meaning to what was in fact a highly unstable
vocabulary of popular consumer sacrifice.
Whatever confusions bedeviled popular discourse, the colonists had
no trouble seeing the commercial advantage that would undoubtedly result
from the development of domestic manufacturing. The goal, of course, was
to make the very articles that drained so much hard currency away from
the American market. At least initially, colonists talked most excitedly of
real centers of production, and it took several years before political deci-
sions made in London forced them to refocus attention on the need to in-
crease productivity within the home. In the post-war discussions, however,
they dreamed bold dreams, ignoring the lack of sufficient capital and tech-
nological expertise required to launch large-scale ventures. In their desire
to achieve greater self-sufficiency in the manufacture of basic items such as
cloth, optimistic predictions of success far outran the possibility of satisfy-
ing an ever expanding consumer demand. Newspapers regularly encour-
aged a “recourse to domestic economy.”52 This type of reform, they believed,
would shift the colonial workforce away from agriculture toward manufac-
turing. And confronted with a chronic imbalance of Atlantic trade, Ameri-
cans seemed to have no other rational choice. “Tho’ our Abilities to pay for
the Manufactures of England greatly decrease,” explained one writer in the
New-Hampshire Gazette, “yet the Price, especially of Woolens, rise upon us,
and the Importation and Consumption increase beyond Imagination.”53
Observers bravely searched the provincial landscape for examples of
the new self-reliant economy. Experiments of this sort were thin on the
ground. Several journals praised a “Company of Gentlemen” for establish-
ing “a New Woolen Manufactory” on Long Island, and reports from the site
assured readers from “any of the Provinces . . . [that] they may be supplied
with Broad-Cloths, equal in Fineness, Colour, and Goodness, and cheaper
than any imported.” With no apparent sense of contradiction, the owners
announced that they would welcome “any Persons who are [in] any Way
vested in the Woolen Manufacture.” The list of current job openings in-
cluded “Woolcombers, Weavers, Clothiers, Shearers, Dyers, Spinners, Card-
ers, or [people] understanding any Branch of the Broad-Cloth, Blanket, or
Stroud Manufactory.”54 The large number of positions for skilled laborers
suggested that perhaps the colonists would have to wait a long time before
realistically competing with the makers of British textiles, and although an
occasional advertisement informed “the Publick” of the availability of a
variety of locally produced articles such as “Linen, Stockings, Mittens, Men’s
Caps . . . &c., &c.,” the patriotic rhetoric betrayed defensiveness about qual-
ity as well as availability. The reformers were simply not sure that ordinary
American consumers would accept a cheap substitute even if by so doing
they would be helping to restore the prosperity experienced during the height
of the Seven Years’ War. As one promoter of “HOME MANUFACTURED
GOODS” exclaimed nervously, “Happy Country! That can supply itself with
these Articles, and a People so public spirited as to encourage and be satis-
fied with them.”55
During this early stage in the debate over the appropriate character of
public sacrifice in the marketplace, Dulany expanded on the argument for
local manufacturing. Even he seemed to be straining to make the case. “Let
the manufactures of America be the symbol of dignity, the badge of virtue,”
he insisted, “and it will soon break the fetters of distress. A garment of linsey-
woolsey, when made the distinction of real patriotism, is more honorable

and attractive of respect and veneration than all the pageantry and the robes
and the plumes and the diadem of an emperor without it. Let the emula-
tion be not in the richness and variety of foreign productions, but in the
improvement and perfection of our own.”56 The problem was that most
colonial consumers knew quite well the difference between inferior goods
made in America and the finer weights and colors from Great Britain they
saw in the stores. “O. Z.,” a writer from Rhode Island, summed up the situa-
tion with extraordinary bluntness. “The People of this Colony are daily taught,”
he noted, “from innumerable Lessons or Instances that are but too conspicu-
ous in the numerous Shops, Stores, and Warehouses, how backward and ig-
norant we are in the manifold Branches of Manufacture, necessary or
superfluous.”57 In such circumstances, abstract appeals about the state of the
economy, even those invoking a new language of economic patriotism within
the empire, were not capable of breaking long-standing habits of consumer
desire. An organized sacrifice of pleasure in the marketplace—in other words,
a strategy capable of uniting colonists across the boundaries of class and re-
gion—required more than reminders of hard times.
However quixotic the hope for a rapid build-up of domestic manufac-
turing in provincial America—one writer even claimed that “all these dif-
ferent branches [of manufacturing] have little or no existence but in
news-papers”— the rising concern over the politics of consumer spending
for British imports did have a curious impact on one aspect of public life.58
For a very long time, especially in New England, moralists had complained
that funerals had the unfortunate effect of beggaring poor and middling
families. In anthropological terms these rituals had become scenes of in-
tense, often vulgar competition, as surviving relatives attempted to outspend
other families on the accoutrements that fashion deemed essential for such
occasions. It fell to the widows and widowers to supply a host of mourners
with rings, gloves, and scarves, all of which had come from England. More-
over, those concerned with social appearances at wakes purchased lavish
amounts of imported wine.
These extraordinary episodes of conspicuous consumption occurring
at moments of genuine bereavement came to the attention of the Massa-
chusetts House of Representatives. In 1741 this body concluded that since
“the giving of scarves, gloves, wine, rum and rings, at funerals is a great and
unnecessary expense,” the government had no other choice but to inter-
vene. Henceforth, there would be no more distribution of scarves or rings,
and the representatives insisted that only six people attending a funeral, in
addition to the minister and six pallbearers, could receive special gloves. If
the members of any family ignored these guidelines, or if they served im-
ported wine or rum, they risked paying the state an enormous fine of fifty
pounds sterling.59 As with many reforms of this type, ordinary people in
Massachusetts seem to have taken their chances on being caught, and they
organized funerals in a manner they viewed as a reflection of their own
gentility. In 1753 a newspaper that made a name for itself by criticizing the
governing elite ran an essay entitled “Of the Extravagance of our Funerals,”
a piece that railed against the general insistence upon “a pompous Intern-
ment.” The author, who identified himself as “Shadrech Plebianus,” seemed
offended by “the fashionable Apparatus [which was now required to be]
buried Alamode.” He laid the blame for consumer excess at the feet of the
colony’s wealthier families. Since “People in the inferior Stations of Life are
extremely apt to imitate those who move in a more elevated Sphere: It ought
to be the Endeavour of the latter to set them the laudable Example of sup-
pressing this fantastical and inconvenient Piece of Luxury.”60
Such appeals to bury the dead “with suitable Decency and Decorum”
seem to have fallen largely on deaf ears. That is, they did so until economic
depression threatened the prosperity of Britain’s post-war commercial em-
pire. Suddenly, in this altered imperial context, calls for the reform of fune-
real customs acquired unmistakable political overtones, and warnings about
the moral implications of luxury were woven into a broader discourse that
now included uneasiness about colonial economic dependency. Contem-
poraries understood that the terms of the local debate had shifted. In 1764
“P. P.” lectured readers of the Boston Gazette that the general decay of com-
merce necessitated a reduction of the cost of funerals. If people could be
persuaded to practice frugality at such moments, thus merging concerns
about the common goods with private expressions of grief, then “each indi-
vidual being ransomed from the tyranny of fashion, will be free to act as his
circumstances may require, and such freedom can scarce be purchas’d too
dear, as it has the necessary tendency to deliver a community from bond-
age.”61 The major issue before the public was the colony’s growing debt to
Great Britain. Although no one thought that retrenchment of expenses for
memorial rings and scarves would in itself restore the balance of imperial
trade, such measures represented a welcome start; they communicated a
shared commitment to solving a problem that affected everyone, rich and
poor. As “Incola” explained, colonists must avoid “unnecessary Consump-
tions, particularly in Funerals.” The new “Frugal” methods of burying the
dead would benefit many families by saving “some Thousands [of pounds]
Sterling . . . which would otherwise be Remitted to Great-Britain for those
Expensive and Superfluous Habits formerly used at Funerals.”62
Advocates of less expensive interments turned the language of an eigh-
teenth-century consumer society against itself in innovative ways that only
a people fully engaged in the pleasures of the market could appreciate. No
one claimed that “frugal funerals” represented a return to old customs; no
one invoked memories of thrifty members of a founding generation. Rather,
according to the people who contributed to the local newspapers, simple
burials represented a new fashion. “It is now out of Fashion to put on Mourn-
ing at the Funeral of the nearest Relation,” announced one Boston writer,
“which will make a Saving to this Town of Twenty Thousand Sterling per
Annum.—It is surprising how suddenly, as well as how generally an old
Custom is abolished.”63 Others, sounding a lot like newspaper advertisers
for trendy goods, praised funerals staged “in the new establish’d Method.”64
More than any other item associated with this ritual, gloves seem to
have symbolized an incipient revolt against consumer dependency. The
imported white gloves that families provided for mourners not only cost a
lot of money but also represented a colossal waste. After all, a pair of fu-
neral gloves could only be worn a single time. If New Englanders insisted
on distributing gloves at funerals, then they ought to purchase those made
in America. Such gloves would not reflect the cosmopolitan tastes of con-
temporary London. They would be warm, sensible, “suitable to the Cli-
mate.” In fact, if one wanted to demonstrate a genuine commitment to the
restoration of a balanced trade with Great Britain, one might affix on the
funeral gloves “some peculiar Mark of Distinction.” One person recom-
mended that a proper emblem of colonial self-sufficiency might be “a Bow
and Arrow, or a Pine Tree, in lieu of the usual stitching on the Back.”65 Pall-
bearers in Dorchester received special commendation for refusing “the usual
Present of Gloves, to prevent a needless Expense to the Relations.”66
However radical the New England funeral reformers may have sounded
in terms of the manipulation of fashion, their instincts about social class
remained solidly traditional. They assumed that the poorer sorts would
naturally follow the lead of their betters, so that it was the responsibility of
local gentlemen to set a model of frugality which the less fortunate could
emulate. “S. A.” revealed how during a period of imperial adjustment one
might condemn the errors of the past—adopting a standard trope of En-
lightened discourse—and at the same time preserve the prerogatives of the
ruling elite. Noting how quickly the people of Boston had apparently ac-
cepted the new mode of interment, he could not ignore “the stupidity of
former times! And what amazing treasures have been thrown away, in 100
years past, to support a needless, a foolish and hurtful custom!—Surely then,
those worthy gentlemen, who have been instrumental in shaking off a sense-
less & impoverishing fashion, deserve the esteem & thanks of the public.” In
fact, S. A. believed that the wisdom of the well-born had saved those in the
“lower stations of life” from “inevitable ruin.”67 It is not clear whether Boston’s
poor interpreted the changing fashion in funerals in these terms. In time, as
we shall see, quite ordinary people took the lead in demanding consumer
sacrifice in the name of liberty. For the moment, however, colonists seem to
have agreed that the dead deserved equal treatment at bargain rates. Ac-
cording to “Hannah Prudence,” “People of all Ranks and Conditions have
come into the new Mode of attending the Funerals of their deceased
Friends.”68
To state with certainty how many New England families adopted the new
guidelines for politically correct funerals is not possible. The newspapers, of
course, reported a remarkably wide-spread rejection of the old customs. In
January 1765 one commentator declared, “It is, I think about four months
since this prudent regulation took place in Boston; in which time, I suppose
there have been more than 100 funerals, and among that number (so far as I
can learn) there has been but one or two families that have not strictly con-
formed to the new and laudable custom.” Such impressive results provided a
clear message. “It may fairly be concluded, that all ranks and orders of per-
sons among us, do highly approve of it [the new frugal funerals], as a pru-
dent, a necessary, and a saving article of reformation.”69 However many proper
funerals may have been organized during this period, observers took the
opportunity to introduce an entirely new figure into the realm of popular
opinion. They celebrated the deceased man or woman not simply for hav-
ing led a pious and honest life but also for holding a frugal and patriotic
interment. At the moment of death, they revealed themselves as politically
sensitive consumers. Mrs. Elizabeth Clarke was such a person. “Her Re-
mains were decently interred on Friday last,” announced the Boston Evening-
Post, “in the frugal and laudable Manner lately introduced among us, and
which prevails beyond Expectation in the Colonies.”70 A report from Con-
cord declared, “This Day the Funeral of a Person of distinction was attended
here in a new Mode, which gave universal Satisfaction to Persons of Char-
acter and others who attended the same. It’s hoped other Country Towns
will follow the Example which Boston has set us.”71 But these events paled
in comparison to the burial of the Reverend Mr. Callender, the minister of
the Baptist church in Boston. Whatever his virtues in life, Callender en-
joyed a noble passing.
The Town had the Satisfaction of seeing in this Instance, a Funeral conducted con-
formable to an Agreement lately entered into, by a great Number of the most respect-
able of its Inhabitants.—A long Train of Relations followed the Corpse (which was
deposited in a plain Coffin) without any sort of Mourning at all:—Mr. Andrew Hall,
the chief Mourner, appeared in his usual Habit, with a Crape round his Arm; and his
Wife, who was Sister and nearest Relation to the Deceased, with no other Token of
Mourning than a black Bonnet, Gloves, Ribbons, and Handkerchief.—The Funeral
was attended by a large Procession of Merchants and Gentlemen of Figure, as a Testi-
mony of their Approbation of this Piece of Œconomy, and as a Mark of their Esteem
for a Family who have shown Virtue enough to break a Custom too long established,
and which has proved ruinous to many Families in this Community.72
Although this new consumer ritual drew most support from Massa-
chusetts, it had cultural significance far beyond the number of frugal fu-
nerals actually held. Local newspapers carried tales of the reform; they
advocated the need for immediate retrenchment. The stories of simple buri-
als and groups of “respectable” people who had encouraged them appeared
in the journals of Connecticut and Philadelphia.73 Readers in Charleston,
South Carolina, may have learned from the Boston paper how New En-
gland families responded to the growing colonial indebtedness and, by ex-
tension, to the sting of dependence by refusing to wear imported gloves. An
author in the New-Hampshire Gazette informed his audience that “The
public Prints of a neighbouring Province have presented us with a Frugal,
truly laudable, and now usual Manner of Burying their Dead.”74
Reports of this kind are not usually the stuff of traditional political
history. But for our purposes, it would be a mistake to adopt such a per-
spective. We should enlarge our sense of the political. Certainly, for ordi-
nary people the shared news of heroic self-denial, especially as it affected
the members of families not unlike their own, was profoundly political.
The journals of the period spoke of voluntary collectivities of Americans

adopting innovative strategies of resistance. In this setting it did not really
matter that the new mode of funerals had little direct impact on the overall
imbalance of colonial trade. Tales of reform took on histories of their own,
connecting distant strangers through a common language of consumer sac-
rifice. In this spirit one Boston commentator announced, “[A]s the present
wise establishment relating to funerals, has taken deep root in this town, so
it is likely it will spread not only through our country towns, but also through
all the neighbouring provinces.”75
Short-lived strategies of funereal retrenchment as well as airy dreams
of domestic manufacturing were like so many dry leaves stirring restlessly
before an autumn storm. For all their discontents, Americans did not really
want to forgo the pleasure of the consumer marketplace. We might describe
their anticipation of material happiness as the Franklin dilemma, for, like
the cosmopolitan figure who informed the members of Parliament that
Americans might easily do without so many imported goods, they hoped
that the current crisis would quickly pass. The good times would return.
And, at that moment, the hard-pressed colonists would not have to recycle
their old clothes, now perhaps a little snug around their waists, or join with
other Americans whom they had never met in sacrificing the articles that
had come to define their relationship with Great Britain. They would some-
how avoid being “cloathed like their predecessors the Indians, with the skins
of beasts, and sink into like barbarism.”76
Events took a different course. The Sugar Act of 1764 represented an
ominous hint of a regulatory policy that would reduce the colonists to a
status that they found most objectionable. It reminded them that they were
indeed becoming second-class subjects of the crown, in a word, colonists
but not partners in a robust empire of goods. The legislation outlawed the
colonists’ lucrative trade with the French Caribbean and thus destroyed a
triangular exchange that had become a vital source of the hard currency
needed to pay English merchant houses for imported consumer goods.
Britain’s rulers, it seemed, did not fully comprehend the workings of the
American market.
The burden of unconstitutional taxes and additional commercial regu-
lations would in time suggest to the colonists new, more effective strategies
of resistance and spark innovative forms of popular mobilization. Driving
these collective responses was the firm conviction—first planted, ironically,
by mid-eighteenth-century British commercial writers—that the colonists
derived political strength in part through their own dependence upon the
imported consumer goods.77 From their perspective, it was Britain, not
America, that had the most to lose if the colonists ever managed to curtail
their own demand. Before anyone spoke of a declaration of independence,
they consoled themselves in the knowledge that if Parliament did in fact
break the commercial bonds that had linked them for so long, then “America,
after many revolutions, and perhaps great distresses, will become a mighty
empire.”78
V
The vaguely defined though persistent imperial malaise that pervaded the
post-war period suddenly came into sharper focus on March 22, 1765. It is
no exaggeration to state that passage of the Stamp Act instantly transformed
the political landscape of Britain’s Atlantic world. After that date, colonists
would never again view their imperial connection quite the same way as
they had at mid-century. It was not that they espoused ideas of national
independence. Rather, from their perspective, Parliament’s shocking deci-
sion to levy taxes without representation called into question political as-
sumptions about shared political identity—the stuff of colonial
nationalism—and replaced these inchoate feelings of pride and loyalty with
harsher emotions such as anger, confusion, and disappointment. The Stamp
Act brought home to many Americans, already nervous about accumulat-
ing consumer debt and tighter commercial regulation, the full burden of
colonial dependency. Indeed, the details of the statute—a stamp duty col-
lected by crown officials on a wide variety of papers used in everyday busi-
ness and legal transactions—seemed less significant to the colonists than
did the rude discovery of a doctrine of inequality that now apparently in-
formed imperial policy. In major provincial ports men and women pro-
tested what they interpreted as a direct attack on liberty and property;
newspaper articles warned of dreadful conspiracies designed to reduce all
free Americans to slavery. As William Smith Jr. of New York announced,
“This single stroke has lost Great Britain the affection of all her Colonies.”79
Others echoed Smith’s reaction. Like more modern people who have
experienced what they regard as a break in the flow of time—the destruc-
tion of the World Trade Center or the assassination of President John
Kennedy, for example—colonists felt the sudden weight of history upon
their shoulders. In their own lives, the Stamp Act forced an immediate and
difficult reassessment of the meaning of empire. Few responses were as
poignant as those of John Hancock, then an ambitious young Boston mer-
chant. In his private letterbook where he preserved copies of commercial
correspondence, Hancock recorded in turn waves of fear and defiance, dis-
may and uncertainty. On October 14, 1765, he informed the partners of a
London firm that supplied him with consumer goods, “I have come to a
Serious Resolution not to send one Ship more to Sea, nor to have any kind
of Connection in Business under a Stamp. . . . I am Determin’d as soon as I
know that they are Resolv’d to insist on this act to Sell my Stock in Trade &
Shut up my Warehouse Doors & never Import another Shilling from Great
Britain.” Hancock insisted, “I am free & Determined to be so & will not
willingly & quietly Subject myself to Slavery.” One might conclude that
Hancock’s intemperate rhetoric was intended merely to alarm the English
businessmen. But, in fact, he was genuinely disturbed by the sudden crisis.
In a moving personal postscript to this letter, Hancock added a pledge that
his correspondents could not have read: “This Letter I propose to remain in
my Letter Book as a Standing monument to posterity & my children in
particular, that I by no means Consented to a Submission to this Cruel Act,

& that my best Representations were not wanting in the matter.”80
The Reverend Jonathan Mayhew also appreciated the need to bear wit-
ness against the radical new imperial legislation. This respected Boston
minister who had long served a wealthy congregation blasted the Stamp
Act, and in a sermon entitled The Broken Snare, Mayhew reviewed exactly
how Parliament’s breach of trust had affected colonial society.
This continent, from Canada to Florida, and the West-India Islands, most of them at
least, have exhibited a dismal mixed scene of murmuring, despondence, tumult and
outrage; courts of justice shut up, with custom-house and ports; private jealousies
and animosities, evil furnishings, whisperings and back-bitings, mutual reproaches,
open railing, and many other evils, since the time in which the grievous act . . . was to
have taken place.81
Another thoughtful contemporary, the Reverend Jeremy Belknap, agreed

with Mayhew’s analysis, ruefully noting that news of the passing of the Stamp
Act had produced despair throughout the colonies. As he explained, “The
direct and violent attack on our dearest privileges at first threw us into a
silent gloom; and we were at a loss how to proceed. To submit, was to rivet
the shackles of slavery on ourselves and our posterity. To revolt, was to rend
asunder the most endearing connexion, and hazard the resentment of a
powerful nation.”82
How many other colonial Americans shared such a profound sense of
anger and betrayal at this moment is difficult to gauge. Leading clergymen
and lawyers, merchants and planters, registered their opinions in public
debates. They drew up formal petitions to the king and Parliament; they
organized a gathering known as the Stamp Act Congress, which attempted,
albeit unsuccessfully, to give voice to the grievances of all the colonies. But
ordinary people made the depth of their own hostility to the new imperial
legislation abundantly clear as well. They thoroughly intimidated crown
officials appointed to distribute the stamped papers; they rioted in the streets
of several American cities, sometimes pulling down entire houses. As mem-
bers of a mob, they burned effigies of government agents associated with
the hated duties. While colonists had occasionally employed violence to
protest policies that they deemed obnoxious—the pressing of local seamen
into the Royal Navy, for example—they had never before demonstrated such
destructive passions. For a brief period rank-and-file resistance closed the
courts of law and brought normal commerce to a standstill. Moreover,
American newspapers and pamphlets displayed remarkable ideological con-
viction. There was no question that colonists who refused to pay the rev-
enue did so on the basis of coherent political principles. They assured
themselves as well as their friends in England that Parliament had acted in
an unconstitutional manner that effectively annulled the natural and char-
ter rights of all Americans. They knew exactly what they meant when they
cried out, “No taxation without representation.”83
However widespread the popular anger may have been, the Revolution
did not in fact occur in 1765. This curious non-event begs explanation. After
all, the elements that one assumes were necessary to transform colonial
protest into full-scale rebellion seem to have been present at that moment:
a radical ideology of colonial resistance, organized violence against the es-
tablished government, and widespread anxiety that new taxes would exac-
erbate economic hardship. But, instead of provoking a general call to arms,
the crisis passed, and we now interpret the protest against the Stamp Act as
simply an early chapter in an eleven-year run-up to national independence.
Several factors may account for the revolutionary dog that did not bark in
the night. First, Parliament repealed the hated legislation on March 18, 1766,
and for those Americans who cherished the opinion that compromise might
stave off more serious confrontation, the retreat seemed to suggest a pos-
sible return to happier imperial relations. Second, a political culture shared
time-out-of-mind with the English people—a stock of symbols and tradi-
tions associated with Britain’s balanced constitution and the Glorious Revo-
lution of 1688—proved impressively resilient, and many Americans clung
to the hope that a compassionate king would at the end of the day intervene
in their behalf.
But there is more than this to the story of the timing of revolution.
Although a conservatism born of hope and tradition may go a long way
toward explaining why popular defiance to the Stamp Act did not spark a
full-scale revolt, it tends to obscure another equally persuasive account of
why it took so long to translate what William Smith Jr. in 1765 called a mo-
mentous “stroke” into a broad-based continental cause. However much
Americans may have detested the new revenue act and however passion-
ately they defended their rights and liberty, they had not yet learned to reach
out effectively to each other across the boundaries of social class and physi-
cal geography, so that while the Boston mob destroyed buildings and the
rioters in New York City terrified crown officials, the protesters in neither
locality had developed a sense of mutual trust that would allow them to
assume almost reflexively that other Americans living in other places would
support them if Great Britain decided to crush colonial resistance. In other
words, what was missing from the equation in 1765 was a structure of po-
litical mobilization that would sustain solidarity among virtual strangers
separated by bad roads and historical experience.
Imported manufactured goods played a central role in the process of
reimagining the boundaries of political community. From our perspective,
of course, it is easy to take a strategy of resistance based on the voluntary
non-importation of British goods for granted. We recognize boycotts as a
legitimate means of bringing pressure on those who would ignore popular
grievances. But during the Stamp Act crisis the notion that imported items
could be made to speak to power was entirely new. Consumer articles that
had flooded into American households after 1740 provided colonists of en-
tirely different backgrounds with a means of conversing about common
political problems. No doubt, in other colonial situations over the last two
centuries other aspects of shared experience—a common religion and eth-
nic identity spring to mind—served a similar function as did imported goods
in British North America. But it is extremely important in understanding

the various forms of resistance to colonial dependency to maintain a sharp
focus on the particular historical context in which solidarities developed.
Imported goods resonated with political possibilities precisely because they
had come to define so persuasively Britain’s mid-century relationship with
its “consuming colonies.” In an imperial economy in which colonists worked
ever harder to produce exports to pay for a rising demand for essential con-
sumer items manufactured in England itself, it seemed almost inevitable
that imported goods would come to symbolize economic dependence and
political complaint. Or, put another way, colonial Americans learned, how-
ever slowly, to talk to each other about politics through organized disrup-
tions of the consumer marketplace.
As we have seen, these goods had already begun to take on new, in-
creasingly problematic meanings during the period following the Seven
Years’ War. After 1765 the reinterpretation of the articles of everyday mate-
rial culture acquired a more overt political character. Consider, for example,
a seemingly straightforward list of goods that appeared in a Boston news-
paper shortly after a mob had destroyed a house owned by Thomas
Hutchinson, an extremely wealthy Boston merchant who had been ap-
pointed lieutenant governor of Massachusetts Bay. The Evening-Post asked
subscribers to be alert for certain items that had gone missing on the night
of the attack.
A Silver Hilt of a Sword which had been wash’d with Gold . . . two mourning Swords:
a chafed Gold Head of a Cane, with the Lieut. Governor’s Crest; a Lady’s chafed Gold
Watch, Hook & Chain; a new fashion’d Gold Chain and Hook for a Lady’s Watch: a Set
of large Silver Plate Buttons for a Coat & Breeches; 2 Sets ditto covered with Silver
Wire, and very uncommon; several Funeral Rings . . . Gauze Handkerchiefs & Sattin
Apron, both flowered with Gold; Silk Shoes; brocaded Silk, Padusoy Damask Lustring
Gowns & Petticoats; laced Petticoats . . . Bundles of old Gold and Silver Lace . . .84
What catches the eye is not the traditional moral condemnation of luxury.
A new element has been introduced. The objects of desire have taken on an
unmistakable political character, so that the possession of various goods
that might once have reflected cosmopolitan taste or economic success now
present themselves to ordinary readers as badges of political corruption.
They understood the new critical language of “Funeral Rings.”
Other colonial voices made even more explicit the link between im-
ported goods and political dependence. The author of A Discourse, Addressed
to the Sons of Liberty (1766) compared the situation in which Americans
found themselves to that of “a young raw gamester sitting at a table be-
tween sharpers.” On the one side of the colonist sat the “statesman,” on the
other, the merchant. Both wanted nothing more than “to strip and plun-
der” the naive provincial consumer in this unequal game. But alas, the
American brought so little hard money to the contest that it made no sense
for the other two players to divide the spoils. Both aimed at taking the en-
tire stake. There was hope, however. As “Pro-Patria” explained, the Ameri-
can consumer could avoid being fleeced, if only he would act. The writer
asked “a Solemn Assembly” gathered “Near the Liberty-Tree, in Boston,”

“What if the youth should discover their designs, resolve to keep better com-
pany, and take up his hat and walk off?” He could in effect boycott the com-
mercial game. And if he did, could anyone blame the poor American “cully”
for such resolve? “Whatever you may think,” Pro-Patria continued, “this
conduct, and no other, can bring about our deliverance; [for] as long as our
backs are cloathed from Great-Britain, they [the imperial statesman and
merchant] will lay what burthens upon them they please.” A Discourse—a
work clearly aimed at a popular audience—did not advocate revolt against
consumer goods. The point was that “at a table between sharpers” Ameri-
cans would be best advised to make these necessary articles for themselves.
As he confessed, “[We have] trafficked so long abroad, for what could be
found at home, that we are upon the point of selling, like Esau, our valuable
and inestimable birthright for a mess of pottage.”85
Another writer, who identified himself as “a Friend to the Liberty of his
Country,” took a more sober view of the challenge. He warned that the
dreaded Stamp Collectors would soon demand whatever hard currency the
colonists had managed to put aside for their own enjoyment. Without money
the daughters of America would have to “sacrifice your gold beads, jewels,
ear-rings, &c. until you are made bare and naked to your shame.” Like
Franklin, this writer did not welcome the sacrifice that unconstitutional
taxation had forced on the colonists. The Stamp Act shattered the old sym-
bols of empire. They once had represented a shared British identity. But by
compromising the Americans’ ability to purchase the goods they desired,
Parliament had revealed an intention to treat the colonists like second-class
subjects, in other words, like colonists. “For being called Englishmen,” com-
plained this Friend of Liberty, “without having the privileges of English-
men, is like a man in a gibbet, with dainties set before him, which would
refresh him and satisfy his craving appetite, if he could come at them, but
being debarr’d of that privilege, they only serve for an aggravation to his
hunger.” He concluded, “O my poor brethren in the gibbet of America, that
cannot come at the dainties of Europe, I pity you with all my heart and
soul.”86 The Stamp Act had obviously put a heavy price on the pursuit of
material happiness.
Any attempt to establish with precision the origins of non-importa-
tion as a mode of political resistance would be futile. During the 1720s the
famed Irish satirist Jonathan Swift published “A Proposal for the Universal
Use of Irish Manufacture, &c.” in which he asked rhetorically, “What if . . .
[the Irish Parliament] had thought fit to make a Resolution, Nemine Con-
tradicente, against wearing any Cloath or Stuff in their Families, which were
not of the Growth and Manufacture of this Kingdom?”87 Nothing came of
the suggestion. Nor was there a positive response to an appeal in a Boston
newspaper in 1746 for the formation of an association whose members would
pledge “not directly or indirectly, [to] buy or procure, or cause or permit to
be bought or procured any Tea into our respective Families.”88 Rather than
search for possible precedents for a consumer boycott movement, we should
recognize that the creation of groups dedicated to achieving specific social,

religious, or economic goals had a long history in British America. The colo-
nists regularly formed associations to discuss new scientific ideas, to raise
money for libraries, to finance the building of churches, and to fight fires.
None of these communal efforts received support from local governments.89
And although the non-importation movement that took root during the
Stamp Act crisis was larger and less exclusive than were these earlier en-
deavors, it may have seemed quite unexceptionable for men and women
angry about taxation without representation to think in terms of voluntary
organizations, in other words, of a framework of neighbors joining neigh-
bors to address a common problem. Sacrifice in the consumer marketplace—
like the acquisition of goods in the first place—required a conscious choice.
Although Parliament passed the Stamp Act in March 1765, news of this
event did not reach American ports for almost two months. Popular pro-
test against the statute and even more specifically against the local agents
appointed to collect the stamp duties took many forms, one of which, as we
have seen, was rioting in the streets. The urban merchants quickly found
themselves at the center of a political controversy that threatened to spin
out of control. If they elected to conduct normal commercial relations with
their counterparts in England, they would be forced to purchase the stamped
papers now required to get goods through customs. Organized resistance
in the major colonial cities made capitulation of this sort a virtual non-
starter, and while some leading American merchants wanted desperately to
avoid further involvement in the imperial dispute, others sanctioned elabo-
rate non-importation agreements. Signed at meetings where only mem-
bers of the merchant community had a voice, these resolutions may have
been intended to head off the possibility that people not identified with
commerce would push for non-consumption, a protest strategy that would
have awarded to ordinary men and women a large measure of direct con-
trol over the sale of British goods in America. A group of New York mer-
chants seized the initiative. On October 31 about two hundred of them
gathered at the Long Room of George Burns’s tavern, where they pledged
to cancel all orders for manufactured articles until Parliament repealed the
Stamp Act. They also persuaded local retailers of dry goods to join them in
declaring that if the British government did not back down, New Yorkers
would not accept any British imports after January 1. Merchant assemblies
in other cities soon adopted the central provisions of the New York plan,
and within only six weeks commercial leaders in Philadelphia, Albany, Bos-
ton, Salem, Marblehead, Newburyport, Portsmouth, and Plymouth had
formally endorsed a limited non-importation plan.90 On November 25 an
appeal published in a Boston newspaper urged the “Merchants and Traders
of the Massachusetts Bay” to emulate “the patriotic Conduct of the Gentle-
men in Trade in New-York.” If they came forward, the writer announced,
the New Englanders would find themselves participating in a movement
that was spreading rapidly, for, “a beginning being made, the Spirit will
ketch from Town to Town, and Province to Province, than which nothing
can more contribute to a speedy Redress of our Grievances.”91
As the imperial crisis unfolded, the merchant community advanced
various arguments in support of non-importation, some of which, not sur-
prisingly, sounded transparently self-serving. Even before passage of the
Stamp Act, many colonial merchants found themselves running up ever
larger debts to their British suppliers, and if nothing else, an organized boy-
cott of imported goods held out the possibility of reducing outstanding
obligations while also providing a welcome opportunity to unload inven-
tories that because of dull colors or unfashionable designs had been re-
jected by the consumer. One writer in Pennsylvania reported that “there is a
full sufficiency of English goods now on the continent for a least seven year’s
consumption, and it would be for our advantage (the Stamp Act aside), if
none were imported for half that time; then we might collect and pay our
debts, which are already so heavy that we groan under them.”92 It is doubt-
ful that colonial warehouses actually contained such a huge stock, but even
in more guarded moments merchants assured commercial colleagues that
it made sense in an uncertain business climate not to order new goods for
at least twelve months.93 In fact, in a perverse way the hated legislation ben-
efited the American people, since the taxes prevented “an increase of our
debt to the mother country, which we have now no means of defraying.”94
A second justification for limited non-importation—in other words, a
commercial effort that would cease as soon as Parliament repealed the act—
was the merchants’ assurance that the strategy would put serious economic
pressure on British manufacturers. The argument turned on an insightful
analysis of the new consumer marketplace. When prospects for exporting
goods to the colonies dried up, British producers would be forced to lay off
workers, and as the situation in England’s industrializing centers deterio-
rated, unemployed laborers would join the Americans in protest against
unconstitutional stamp duties. An article in the Boston Evening-Post ex-
plained exactly how the process would operate. Everyone knew that “we
have enough [people] in Great Britain to plead our case,” the journal re-
ported. Although these allies were not powerful aristocrats or members of
Parliament, they represented a “respectable body” of the English public. And
it was certain “they will appear in our behalf . . . [since] if the trifling of-
fence of wearing a piece of French silk can raise so large a body as 100,000
Spitalfield weavers that would attack the very P— — t, what will be the con-
sequence, when a very large part of the manufacturers of Great-Britain have
nothing to do?”95 If the workers took to the streets over non-importation,
imperial reform could not be far behind.
In some accounts the notion that closing off the American market would
have an adverse effect on the British economy took a sharper edge. “A Son
of Liberty,” for example, insisted that “such a measure might distress the
manufacturers and poor people in England, but that would be their misfor-
tune. Charity begins at home . . . and besides, a little distress might bring
the people of that country to a better temper, and a sense of their injustice
toward us.”96 Assertions that a hard-pressed working class in England would

aggressively come forward in defense of American rights were generally
unfounded. To be sure, some groups did lobby Parliament. While petitions
from manufacturers and merchants who feared that non-importation did
not have as great an impact on government policy as American enthusiasts
claimed, it did spark a modest outcry, just enough grumbling, in fact, to
sustain a colonial fantasy that Americans really did have friends in England.97
Champions of non-importation laced an older, more religious rheto-
ric about the virtues of self-sufficiency with bold new interpretive possi-
bilities. Americans had been raised on the belief that diligence and hard
work were positive attributes; individuals who applied themselves to their
callings prospered. Their economic success freed them from dependence
on others. While some critics of the Stamp Act echoed these familiar argu-
ments, urging ordinary men and women to “a disuse of all foreign super-
fluities, and a limitation of our desires to the real necessaries and comfortable
conveniencies of life,” others began to link the emergence of American manu-
facturing to colonial independence.98 No one, of course, anticipated the cre-
ation of a separate republic. Rather, within communities already worried
about the burdens of colonial status within a commercial empire, appeals
for home industries took on a political character. This construction was
surely an unintended consequence of public discussion about non-impor-
tation. The merchants wanted American consumers to flock back to the
dry-goods stores as soon as Parliament repealed the stamp duties.
Whatever their intentions, however, the seeds of new meanings had been
planted. “Colbert” asked readers of the Pennsylvania Gazette seriously to re-
flect “on the dependent State they must ever be in, if they do not engage in, or
encourage Manufactories.”99 A person identified only as “A Friend to this
Colony” announced in the pages of the New-London Gazette that the “floods
of English goods [that] have been poured in upon us” revealed a far-reaching
conspiracy to destroy the local economy. To add insult to injury, these im-
ports were apparently not worth the sacrifice required to obtain them, for “if
[we] examine them we shall find them poor and miserable, such as could
find no buyers in Great-Britain, but they are, it seems, good enough to be
sent here to cheat this country with.” The message to second-class colonial
consumers was clear. “’ Tis time we begin to prefer the goods of our country
to the pride and vanity of individuals.”100 Other newspapers picked up this
theme. A New Hampshire journal observed, “[W]e are told that the people of
a neighboring government are setting us the example, having in bodies de-
clared against wearing or consuming any thing but what is manufactured in
America.” This was an idea whose time had come. After all, “we shall have
little reason to continue any trade that has hitherto brought poverty and a
scourge upon us.” Even more significant, economic independence might be
the harbinger of an even grander destiny, for, as everyone knew, “all states and
empires have been raised and have flourished by their œconomy and indus-
try; but have declined and sunk into poverty and contempt by indolence and
luxury. May it then be the business of America, to raise herself to opulence

and wealth by the internal power she has of doing it.”101
Doubts about the capacity of Americans to produce all the consumer
goods that they desired—and no one really believed that homespun cloth
would make a difference—persuaded some advocates of non-importation
to turn weakness into strength. Drawing upon a mid-century commercial
literature popular in Great Britain and upon arguments initially advanced
during the general recession following the Seven Years’ War, colonists as-
sured each other during the Stamp Act crisis that the English actually needed
them more than they needed the English.102 The key element in this in-
spired line of reasoning was the Americans’ utter dependence on British
manufactures for the comforts of everyday life. Although few colonists wel-
comed the prospect of even a limited experiment with consumer sacrifice,
they came to the conclusion that the indisputable statistical evidence of
their growing indebtedness to Britain and their insatiable craving for fash-
ionable products translated into real power within the British Empire. In-
deed, their heady sense of themselves as vital agents in sustaining England’s
prosperity convinced colonists that repeal of the stamp duties was just a
matter of time. It was in the mother country’s best interest, one New En-
glander insisted, to guarantee that the Americans’ hard-earned monies would
be safe from unconstitutional taxes, for then “we should always send for as
many goods as we could consume.” Moreover, rising colonial imports would
cement political loyalty, since “this demand for the English manufactures
would increase as our numbers, and our union with, and subjection to Great-
Britain would be the being of this trade.”103
Left unspoken in this piece, of course, were the negative implications
of the proposition. Others were more blatant. Writing in a Philadelphia
journal, “Philoleutherus” scoffed at those who feared that commercial re-
sistance might bring British “ships of war . . . [which would] seize and make
prizes of all our vessels.” To such nattering, he responded, “Those who imag-
ine this an objection of any weight, shew great ignorance of our strength.
Whatever courtiers may pretend, Great-Britain is in fact more dependent
on us than we on her. . . . It is well known that by our consumption of her
manufactures we maintain a large proportion of her people.”104 Even the
lawyer John Dickinson appreciated the newfound powers of the colonial
consumer. At the height of the Stamp Act resistance, he declared boldly, “I
think it may justly be said, that THE FOUNDATIONS OF THE POWER AND GLORY OF
GREAT BRITAIN ARE LAID IN AMERICA.”105 The point is not that non-importa-
tion turned people’s thoughts as early as 1766 to political independence.
That most certainly did not occur. But by the same token, we should con-
sider that at moments of severe political tension writers—the sort of per-
sons who contributed to the popular press—constructed the best case they
could from the rhetorical materials at hand. And, whatever their immedi-
ate agenda, they surely made it seem almost inevitable that this colonial tail
might soon wag the imperial dog.
In these several different ways non-importation encouraged colonists

to reimagine their place within an empire of goods. For our purposes, how-
ever, it did a great deal more. It invited provincial consumers to think of the
objects of market desire—the things in themselves—increasingly in terms
of political principle. This mental link is fundamental to an understanding
of how imported goods in this context became emblematic of abstract no-
tions such as freedom. In other words, during this early phase of protest it
gradually became apparent that consumer sacrifice would help Americans
preserve what they defined as their basic rights and liberties. Although those
who promoted non-importation focused almost exclusively on the behav-
ior of the merchants, monitoring the willingness of these leaders to stop
new orders for British goods, they began in published pieces to equate the
pleasures of possession with broader, more public issues of constitutional
misrule, a move that accelerated a symbolic process that would in time al-
low discontented Americans to conflate a perceived loss of freedom with
their own participation in the consumer marketplace. As one Philadelphia
essayist observed, whatever the ill effects of the Stamp Act, it had at least
“awakened a whole continent, till then, going on in luxury, and sinking into
a forgetfulness of their liberty.”106 In another journal “Œ conomicus” warned
that individual consumer purchases that spiraled into irresponsible debt
threatened the common good. The stress here is on the political rather than
the moral aspects of the issue. “Every person who owes more than he can
certainly pay,” declared the author, “is in a state of thraldom, and cannot, in
speech or action, exercise the rights of a freeman. How carefully then should
we, who entertain such high sentiments of the blessings of liberty, avoid
every step that may involve us in debt, and thereby deprive us of this boasted
liberty!”107
Not surprisingly, the non-importation efforts had a haphazard quality.
Enforcement never matched public declarations of intent. The fact of the
matter was that, despite lip service to moral reform and political fortitude,
the merchants of the northern ports never found the new strategy of resis-
tance particularly appealing. From the start of the controversy they worked
to mend imperial fences, knowing full well that serious, sustained violence
would only compromise accounts already strained to the limit. “A Trader”
in Boston warned of the terrible consequences of a long-term boycott of
British goods. “This [action],” he announced, “will involve a very great num-
ber of honest and industrious mechanics in want and misery, and their
misfortune and want will spread to the next class, which is the day labourers
and of great utility to the public.” Unrest would spread to the mariners and
finally “destroy the interest of the farmer.” Soon a stand on principle in the
marketplace would generate anarchy.108
Perhaps as a means to head off such unrest, the merchants—as a group—
drew attention to their social standing as gentlemen, in other words, as rep-
resentatives of the local elite who felt empowered to speak to and for ordinary
Americans. It was no accident that newspaper reports during the height of
the Stamp Act protest emphasized the respectability of the members of vari-
ous urban merchant committees. In an announcement typical of the pe-
riod, the New-York Mercury noted, “We hear that most of the Gentlemen in
Town, have entered into a Resolution not to buy any European Manufac-
tures.” And, as gentlemen, they were not inclined to open their books for
public examination. They did, however, present themselves as models of
proper behavior, as examples of integrity in a time of troubles, and if some-
one of lower social standing registered doubt, that person was likely to be
informed that good merchants were men of good character. Lest skeptics
dismiss such tautology as nonsense, popular writers counseled their read-
ers on how to identify the bad merchant. Ostentatious living was a telltale
sign. “When I enter the Doors of a Gentleman in Trade,” insisted “Philo
Publicus,” “and observe the Decorations of the Parlour, the shining Side
Boards of Plate, the costly piles of China . . . [and when I] see the Mistress of
[the house] dress’d in Apparel which can be worn by none with Propriety
but those who live on their Income; I say when I observe all this . . . I won-
der not when I hear of frequent Bankrupts.”109 A “Plain American” informed
readers in Connecticut that bad traders were those who “put on this gay
Attire to allure our Countrymen to buy their Trifles.” The writer, it seemed,
was just warming to his task.
The industrious, frugal, and exemplary Trader, who sends the Produce of his own
Country to foreign Ones, and imports in Exchange Gold and other Things which our
Soil does not produce, is a [William] PITT to his Country. But the lazy, gay, designing
Fop is a Pest to our Land: By the Help of Friends he gets Credit for a Shop of Fineries,
Nicknacks, and Toys; in the Folds of which he latently imports our Shackles; he opens
his Shop of Rarities, puts a Quantity on his Back, struts about with his Ruffles, Silks
and Satins, a large Box full of the Snuff of Deceit and Flattery to bate well meaning
People.110
Even the “good” merchants were unenthusiastic supporters of non-im-

portation. That they laid the foundation for a later, much broader mobiliza-
tion of ordinary colonists seems counterintuitive, if not simply incredible.
After all, the merchants were by the very nature of their calling suspicious of
competitors, especially those based in other American ports where the arrival
of British imports could not be directly monitored. Under these unpromis-
ing conditions, political cooperation at a distance was bound to be fragile, for
what appeared to one group of merchants as fair market advantage was likely
to strike others as betrayal of the common interest. To reduce uncertainty, the
merchants did what other Americans were doing with ever increasing atten-
tiveness. They read the newspapers. These provincial journals, which were
themselves the creatures of the new eighteenth-century consumer market-
place, provided intelligence about commercial agreements negotiated in other
places. They reproduced the exact wording of every resolution touching upon
trade; they announced the precise number of merchants who signed pledges
of non-importation. A reader in Boston, for example, could learn from a single
issue of the Evening-Post that the merchants of New York had taken the lead
in halting normal trade with Great Britain. Another section of the same pa-
per carried news that the “merchants and traders” of Philadelphia had passed
five resolutions aimed at bringing about the Stamp Act’s repeal.111 Readers in
New York and Philadelphia scoured the local press for reports of merchant
agreements in Boston.112
Doubts about enforcement persisted, of course, but the newspapers
made it possible for Americans to imagine that virtual strangers were ac-
tively supporting each other in ways that would substantially intensify the
commercial and political pressure on Parliament.113 For our purposes, it is
important to remember that the topic of the day was the disruption of the
consumer trade; the language focused on the transit of goods. But at stake
was the first, highly tentative attempt to establish networks of trust, a nec-
essary pre-condition of effective political resistance against a powerful em-
pire. Contemporaries fully appreciated the role of the newspapers in
promoting larger solidarities. In 1766 “A Son of Liberty” writing in a Phila-
delphia journal declared that “the PRESS hath never done greater service
since its first invention.” He recognized the value of pamphlets, to be sure,
but these publications hardly had the widespread impact of the newspa-
pers. “The argumentative pieces, letters, and addresses in the News Papers,”
he claimed, “have had a singular use in the great and good cause.”114
However well the newspapers served the short-term concerns of the
merchant communities, they also brought the latest news of the day to or-
dinary Americans, most of whom were fully literate. In this way they helped
open up colonial political debate, for the journals implicitly invited their
readers to assess the performance of the extra-legal bodies—in this case,
self-selected groups of urban merchants—that had taken on responsibility
to work for the common good, however defined. The non-importation
agreements drafted during the autumn of 1765 were intended to persuade
the members of Parliament and the friends of American commerce in En-
gland that they had made a dreadful mistake by accepting the Stamp Act.
The merchants had in effect situated themselves within an Atlantic conver-
sation. They concentrated their effort as provincial lobbyists on a British
audience that actually determined the character of imperial policy. But
within the American cities another group was taking shape, one that would
be known simply as the “public,” and at this early stage of colonial protest it
focused its attention on the merchants who claimed that non-importation
was a strategy that would bring about the swift repeal of the Stamp Act.115 It
was the public who watched for evidence of cheating: perhaps spotting a
shipment of English dry goods that no one had anticipated or perhaps not-
ing a warehouse that seemed to be the center of unusual consumer activity.
That was as far as it went. Nothing about the non-importation efforts could
rightly be described as democratic or even, in terms of inter-colonial orga-
nization, dependent on the popular will. Nevertheless, the reluctant mer-
chants of 1765–66 had inadvertently opened the door to wider popular
participation in resistance to an empire of goods.
Advocates of non-importation soon realized that if the new strategy of
resistance had any chance of success, it would have to enjoy the full support
of the women of colonial America. Perhaps no one at the time should have
been surprised by this political discovery. After all, as we have seen in our
discussion of mid-eighteenth-century consumer culture, women played a
central part in making decisions about the purchase of British manufactures.
Jan de Vries, a leading economic historian of this period, has demonstrated
persuasively that families throughout western Europe and North America
restructured household labor so that ordinary men and women could ob-
tain a wide range of goods that had just appeared on the market, and as
they did so “the wife [found herself] in a strategic position, located . . . at the
intersection of the household’s three functions: reproduction, production,
and consumption.”116 In a social environment in which imported manu-
factures suddenly came to symbolize the burden of colonial dependence,
therefore, women were inevitably thrust into the political debate. As one
Pennsylvania writer explained in 1767, without the support of “the Ameri-
can Ladies”— single and married—the non-importation movement would
surely fail. After all, their “approbation and assistance would give spirit to
our efforts . . . for we all know how much it is in their power to retrench
superfluous expenses.”117
Whatever the political payoff, the males of colonial society do not seem
to have welcomed the inclusion of their wives and daughters in the public
forum. Men adopted a defensive, sulky tone in print, as if unforeseen events
had forced them to issue an invitation about which they felt profoundly
ambivalent. Some statements echo an earlier, religiously charged rhetoric
depicting women as more likely than men to give in to temptation: Had
they not insisted on purchasing crimson capes and other items of gaudy
apparel, they would not now be recruits in the protest against the Stamp
Act. Once people had linked consumer pleasure with colonial dependence,
however, the provincial gentlemen had grudgingly to accept new voices in
the public forum. “Country-women,” “Philo Publicus” intoned, “will allow
me to wish a general Reformation among them.—May they lay aside their
Fondness for Dress and Fashions, for Trinkets and Diversions, and apply
themselves to manage with Prudence the Affairs of the Family within, which
their Husbands are busied in providing the Means. May none think them-
selves above looking into every Article of Expense,—nor exempt from per-
forming any Part of Family Business, when properly called to it.”118
That such frivolous Eves might tear themselves away from the joys of
consumer life seemed a lot to ask, but “The Farmer” tried, employing none
too subtle language in the attempt. “Tell the fair Ladies . . .,” he announced,
“how much more amiable they will appear in decent plain dresses made in
their own country, than in the gaudy, butterfly, vain, fantastick, and expen-
sive dresses brought from Europe, to pay for which (did they know the whole
truth) their industrious parents or husbands must greatly labor and toil.”119
In New Hampshire more practical arguments apparently carried the day.
“H. J.” told the “Fair Sex . . . that it is high Time to lay aside all Extravagan-
cies in Apparel.” Some women had bravely accepted the challenge, for it was
reported that “some even of the delicate Madams . . . actually have made up
Cotton Shifts, of our own Manufacture which is vastly preferable in this

Cold Climate, to the finest of Hollands, besides much cheaper and stron-
ger.” And surprise, surprise, “what is still a greater Inducement to them to
go on, they say that their Husbands like them full as well or better in a
Cotton Smock, as in a Holland one.”120
In this defensive political climate, some men felt compelled to describe
the “good” wife. She was a person who would sacrifice her pleasures for the
general welfare without thereby upsetting gender relations within the house-
hold. Again, we must remember that colonial Americans would probably
not have raised these issues with such force had they not selected non-
importation as the preferred strategy of protest in an empire of goods. In
1767 “Atticus” explained to the readers of the Pennsylvania Chronicle that
“the mistress” of the household should properly serve as the guardian against
promiscuous consumption. Such a marvelous helpmate “has [it] much in
her power, towards preventing the entrance or growth of luxury.” It was a
major responsibility. She oversaw “the management of the table, the furni-
ture, and the feminine part of the apparel [which] are more particularly
within her province; and, those are articles in which, in this young country,
there is no small danger; besides these, her willingness to be content with
moderate things, in all other instances, will often have great influence.” For-
tunate indeed was a man to have a wife who demonstrated such self-restraint
in the face of so many consumer temptations. He would be wise to expand
her area of influence within the family, pronouncing judgment “in every
branch where her observations can be proper!”121
How American women responded to these instructions within the pri-
vacy of their own families cannot easily be determined. In public, however,
they participated in much-publicized spinning meetings, where, among
other things, they celebrated the domestic production of cloth. These ritu-
als often drew large crowds, for people of all sorts seem to have enjoyed
assemblies that were at once patriotic and non-violent. The social standing
of the spinners seems to have been important in giving legitimacy to the
event. A Boston newspaper, for example, reported that the eighteen “Daugh-
ters of Liberty” who had gathered recently in Providence, Rhode Island,
were all “young Ladies of good Reputation.” Not only that, they were well
chaperoned. According to various New England journals, the women “as-
sembled at the House of Doctor Ephraim Brown . . . in Consequence of an
Invitation of that Gentleman, who hath discovered a laudable Zeal for in-
troducing Home Manufactures.” Safely situated in the doctor’s house, they
worked all day, from “Sunrise until Dark,” and amazed everyone by their
reluctance even to take a break from spinning. Readers throughout the re-
gion learned that the gracious host had “provided an elegantly plain Din-
ner, and other Refreshments for the fair Company; but they expended but
very little Time in dining.” Such industry in such a good cause inspired
other women; spinning meetings became a kind of contest to discover which
group could produce more cloth over the course of a day. “We hear another
Meeting of these Daughters of Liberty, with many more, is intended to be
held at the Court House . . . ,” noted the Connecticut Courant, “there to spin
a handsome Piece of Linen.”
But whatever the likes of Doctor Brown may have had in mind when
they organized these gatherings, the local women “of good Reputation”
sensed that the occasions provided them a measure of power in personal as
well as political affairs. Before the meeting at Providence broke up for the
day, the “Daughters of Liberty” unanimously resolved that “the Stamp Act
was unconstitutional, [and] that they would purchase no more British Manu-
factures unless it be repealed.” They also admonished the young men who
no doubt were mooning around the assembly that consumer sacrifice in-
volved more than just women. In fact, the spinners pledged that they would
“not even admit the Addresses of any Gentlemen should they have Oppor-
tunity, without [unless?] they determined to oppose its [the Stamp Act’s]
Execution in the last Extremity, if Occasion required.”122 Out of genteel set-
tings came amazingly radical demands. In any case, the times were chang-
ing for America’s “delicate Madams”; at least they were for members of the
middle class. In a widely circulated newspaper story, a woman who had
experienced “the Spirit of Patriotism”— almost in evangelical terms—made
a remarkable decision about political resistance. “A Lady of this Town [New-
port, Rhode Island],” a New York journal exclaimed, “though in the Bloom
of Youth, and possessed of Virtues and Accomplishments really engaging,
and sufficient to excite the most pleasing Expectations of Happiness in the
marriage State, has declared, that she should choose rather to be an Old
Maid than that the Operation of the illegal Stamp Act should commence in
these Colonies.”123
Colonial males did not quite know what to make of charming women
willing to forgo marriage and all its pleasures for the sake of political prin-
ciple. From time out of mind, only men could rightly claim to be patriots,
persons like the Roman hero Cincinnatus who put down the plow and gave
his all to defend the common good. American women had not taken up the
sword in the cause of liberty, but they were so determined to have their
voices heard that some writers concluded that they too could be genuine
patriots, a revision of gender stereotypes that reveals just how much the
men in this traditional society needed the women to make non-importa-
tion actually work. In a curious letter entitled “An Address to the Ladies—
From an Inferior,” an author who adopted the name “Tabitha Strawbonnet”
insisted, “Since the Days of the Romans, I have heard my Master say no so
spirited and noble an Example of Patriotism, Male or Female, can be found
as the Ladies in North America have shown.” Strawbonnet may well have
been a man, for later in the piece the writer observed—again suggesting
how sexual politics and imperial politics had become confused—that the
young males of Boston “love & admire you not half so much for your Beauty,
and in gaudy Apparel, as for plain good Sense, Virtue, and Neatness.”124 But
if this scribbler thought he was poking fun at women consumers, the Rev-
erend Jonathan Mayhew, Boston’s most respected Congregational minister,
was quite serious about female patriotism. In a review of the Bay Colony’s
efforts to render the Stamp Act inoperative, he had special praise for the
many “devout women” who were, “I imagine, so far metamorphosed into
men on this sad occasion, that they would have declined hardly any kind of
manly exertions, rather than live to propagate a race of slaves, or to be so
themselves. In short, such was the danger, and in their opinion, so great
and glorious the cause, that the spirit of Roman matrons in the time of the
Commonwealth, seemed to be now equaled by the fairer daughters of
America.”125
The most tough-minded declaration of the political aspirations of co-
lonial women during this period appeared originally in the New-York Mer-
cury early in 1765. Signed “Sophia Thrifty,” this piece achieved unusual
persuasive power by drawing upon the real experiences of ordinary colo-
nists. Whoever the author may have been, she rejected the kind of nervous
playfulness that informed so many essays touching on the relation of the
sexes. She welcomed the spread of colonial “patriotism” through “all ranks
of people.” And at such a critical historical moment, it genuinely annoyed
her to hear Americans—presumably males—declare that women were by
nature addicted to extravagance. In what kind of households did critics like
this live? Had they come into contact with real women? “I can assure you,”
the writer continued, “that we Matrons, who are mothers and mistresses of
families, and know that our husbands and sons must prosper or decline,
with our flourishing or sinking country, will not hesitate a moment about
resigning every thing inconsistent with the general welfare. On the con-
trary, we will sacrifice, cheerfully sacrifice the most darling appurtenances
of the toilet on the altar of public emolument.” And what was more, “Sophia
Thrifty” rejected as utterly specious the argument that young women were
empty-headed consumers whose only goal in life was snagging a man. If
women behaved in this manner it was “not so much to please themselves, as
to dazzle some of yours. While you men will be silly enough to admire a
brilliant figure beyond a prudent girl, and prefer external ornament to in-
trinsic merit; we women will be polite enough to spread the most alluring
snare.” In fact, the patronizing tone of so many public statements about the
inability of women to resist consumer temptation struck this writer as in-
sulting twaddle.
What should induce you to think, gentlemen, that those of us who are daily witnesses
to the difficulty of procuring an estate, or even of providing for a large family, should
be incapable of feeling for our country, for our husbands, for our offspring, amidst
the impending distress universally apprehended.—You all allow us to have a good
deal of spirit. Let me inform you, we have a good deal of publick spirit. We are not
unconcerned spectators of the general calamity. We are not indifferent whether our
native country sinks or swims. We don’t set our trinkets and baubles in competition
with the prosperity of North-America.
The looming imperial crisis required that for every “Cato” who stood up
for colonial rights and liberty, the women of America would produce a
“Cornelia.”126 In a way that no one could have predicted, a protest that or-
ganized itself around the rejection of consumer goods was encouraging some
people, some of the time, to entertain rebellious thoughts about the shape
of society. And in the coming years the door that the “Daughters of Lib-
erty” had pried open, just a little, would open further, inviting into the pub-
lic forum other Americans who just happened to be consumers.
VI
The predictable question to ask about non-importation is whether it actu-
ally worked. Did the canceling of so many orders in Boston, New York, and
Philadelphia force the members of Parliament to reconsider an imperial
policy that took for granted their right to tax the colonists without repre-
sentation? The answer is no. The trade statistics show no appreciable drop
in the value of British imports shipped to American ports during this pe-
riod. But it would be a mistake to claim that because the colonists still loved
fashionable consumer goods—because, like Benjamin Franklin, they did
not want to squeeze into old breeches that no longer fit—that the whole
enterprise had been a failure. The experience had taught some valuable les-
sons. It had not been a good idea to place so much responsibility for en-
forcement on the merchant community, a group that had every interest in
encouraging Atlantic commerce.
If Americans really hoped to redefine their relationship with Parlia-
ment and with an empire that seemed increasingly to insist on colonial
dependence, then they had to find a means to move from non-importation
agreements to broader, more inclusive forms of popular mobilization. The
people had to take charge of enforcement. It was a daunting challenge, and
in the days following repeal of the Stamp Act, few colonists were willing to
contemplate sacrificing the manufac-
tured goods that made life so enjoy-
able. When Parliament again passed
taxes that the Americans deemed un-
constitutional, however, they returned
once more to the consumer market-
place, forging new links with distant
strangers who understood, now more
than ever, how thinking about goods
invited ordinary men and women also
to think about politics.
A celebratory artifact manufactured in England for

the American market. Teapot with lid. “Stamp Act
Repeal’d.” English, 1766. Cream colored earthenware,
lead-glazed and hand-painted. Photograph by Mark
Sexton. Courtesy of the Peabody Essex Museum,
Salem, Massachusetts.
7
Making Lists—Taking
Names: The Politicization
of Everyday Life
T he Townshend Revenue Act of 1767, a

bundle of taxes levied on imported ar-
ticles such as glass, painter’s colors, pa-
per, and tea, triggered a frenzy of list making throughout colonial America.
The lists themselves testify to how Parliament’s tough stand on revenues
brought about an extraordinary reordering of the symbolic meaning of
British goods in this society. The reassessment of an older material culture
had begun during the prolonged economic depression following the Seven
Years’ War, acquiring sharper articulation during the Stamp Act protests,
but at this urgent moment the mental process rapidly accelerated, compel-
ling colonial consumers quite literally to invent new forms of local knowl-
edge. In this highly charged atmosphere, lists of imported manufactures
that had once suggested only personal pleasures acquired overtly political
possibilities.
Within a very short period of time—perhaps no more than the years
from 1767 to 1771—private decisions in the consumer marketplace came to
be widely reinterpreted as acts meriting close public scrutiny. As “Philo Pa-
triae” announced in the pages of a Connecticut journal:
Certainly, ’tis ten thousand times more eligible to enjoy freedom in this state, than to
be slaves in large and well glazed houses, with fine cloaths, tea, wine or punch; and to
have the pleasure of swallowing English beer and cheese; rustling in silks and ribbons,
or glittering with jewels: all which we shall neither use nor wear any longer than our
[British] masters judge they need them to protect, defend and secure us.1
Throughout America, committees and voluntary associations, many of them

extra-legal groups claiming to speak in the name of the “public,” constructed
lists of prohibited goods as well as lists of people who purchased them;
subscription lists favoring non-importation circulated door to door. Con-
sumer polls were taken. These innovative strategies designed to gauge and
enlist public support for non-importation unwittingly opened up political
participation to persons—women, for example—whose only entitlement

to a voice in such affairs was that they were potential consumers of im-
ported British manufactures.
A remarkable list drawn up on October 28, 1767, by the “Freeholders
and other Inhabitants of the Town of Boston” captured the instant when
one group of colonists confronted the symbolic reordering of a culture of
goods. Eligible voters gathered at Faneuil Hall, the city’s commercial cen-
ter; the fiery lawyer James Otis served as moderator. How many people at-
tended is not known; since the proceedings lasted a full day, there must
have been a lot of coming and going. Otis explained that the town had
received a petition urging passage of “some effectual Measures” to be adopted
as a means not only of revitalizing a stagnant local economy but also of
countering “the late additional Burthens and Impositions on the Trade of
the Province, which threaten the Country with Poverty and Ruin.” To this
end, the body put together an impressively detailed inventory of “enumer-
ated” articles currently imported from Britain that it expected patriotic men
and women to boycott after December 31. The full list, which appeared in
several Boston newspapers, read much like the advertisements that shop-
keepers regularly ran announcing the arrival of fresh shipments of goods
from abroad. Only now, the language of marketing was employed self-con-
sciously for different purposes, to stigmatize the objects of desire and to
link consumer experience to political resistance.
Loaf sugar, cordage, anchors, coaches, chaises, carriages of all sorts, horse furniture,
men and women’s hats, men and women’s apparel ready made, house furniture, gloves,
men and women’s shoes, sole leather, sheathing and deck nails, gold and silver and
thread lace of all sorts, gold and silver buttons, wrought plate of all sorts, diamond,
stone and paste-ware, snuff, mustard, clocks and watches, silversmith and jeweler’s
ware, broad cloths that cost above 10 shillings per yard, muffs, furs and tippets, and all
sorts of millenery ware, starch, women’s and children’s stays, fire engines, china ware,
silk and cotton velvets, gauze, pewter, hollow ware, linseed oil, glue, lawns, cambricks,
silks of all kinds for garments, malt liquors, and cheese.2
Unlike the general non-importation agreements published during the

Stamp Act crisis, the Boston town meeting’s list provided remarkable speci-
ficity about different products. The inclusion of each item seemed to have
resulted from close analysis of the actual colonial marketplace, from knowl-
edgeable conversations among merchants, store owners, and ordinary con-
sumers about the meaning of certain goods in a changing provincial world.
In fact, the meeting attempted to mobilize a public in a political cause through
decisions about prosaic articles such as muffs and mustard seeds. And in this
way, it effectively connected the defense of American rights and liberty to
consumer self-sacrifice. As an author who assumed the name “Miles Standish”
told readers of a Boston journal, “You who can be comfortably and decently
cloathed with your own manufactures cannot think it an intolerable hard-
ship to abstain from the unmeaning superfluities of foreign countries, when
you discover that your fondness for them is the engine intended to be used to
destroy the free constitution of your country.”3
making lists—taking names N 237
Other groups throughout America protested the Townshend duties by

constructing lists of enumerated British imports. In Charleston, South Caro-
lina, for example, protesters carefully distinguished what local consumers
might properly purchase from what they should avoid. In this case, acced-
ing to the special demands of a slave economy, South Carolinians exempted
from a non-importation plan “Negro cloth, blanketing, . . . plantation tools,
and other tools necessary for our several occupations.” They recommended
that angry citizens in the region refuse articles such as silks and ribbons,
India goods, and woollens, and since people could not go naked, organizers
asked patriots to limit themselves to “coarse cloth” valued at not more than
fifty shillings a yard, always, of course, “giving the preference to blue.”4
The subscribers of a non-importation agreement in Annapolis rivaled
the inhabitants of Boston and Charleston in their attention to detail. Until
such time as Parliament repealed the Townshend Program, the signers prom-
ised not to buy scores of items, including such politically sensitive imports
as “pickles,” “trinkets,” “playing cards,” and “frying pans.”5 The leaders of
Virginia also vowed to drop “pickles” from their shopping lists along with
some fifty other categories of British manufactures.6 The townsmen of
Windham, Connecticut, a small, struggling agricultural community, ech-
oed Boston’s inventory, as did the list makers of nearby New London. Even
in the smaller towns, people gave serious attention to the precise character
of their proposed market sacrifice.7 A meeting “of the major Part of the
Merchants & Traders of the Colony of Connecticut & a Number of the re-
spectable inhabitants convened at Middletown” decided to halt commerce
in “fish hooks and lines, tin plates and hatter’s trimming, salt petre [saltpe-
ter], bar lead, pins and needles.”8 While some lists proscribed the goods
specifically mentioned in the Townshend Revenue Act—tea, painter’s col-
ors, paper, and glass—most read like general shopping guides.
However these various lists may have been constructed, as a collective
statement they revealed much about how Americans forged political soli-
darities on the eve of independence. First, although local groups promised
to deny themselves the pleasures of the consumer marketplace, they com-
municated their decisions through newspapers, so that men and women
living in other, often distant communities could learn how colonists whom
they had never met were responding to a common threat. Newspapers had
originally served as handmaidens to a rapidly expanding commercial em-
pire, carrying information about the transit of goods throughout the At-
lantic world, and now, as the meaning of things shifted, the same journals
disseminated appeals which served to disrupt the very commercial ties that
had once been seen as the special signature of enlightened eighteenth-cen-
tury British authority.
Second, without giving much thought to the matter, colonists who be-
gan to reach out to other Americans during this period simply assumed
that distant strangers—people on whom they would have to depend in any
coordinated resistance to Parliament—were as dependent as they upon ac-
cess to British manufactures. The language of the consumer marketplace,
expressed in detailed lists, helped bridge differences of religion, ethnicity,

and labor systems that might have immediately cut off the possibility of
making common cause. Ironically, the market itself allowed Americans to
accommodate difference, since, whether they recognized it or not, colonial
consumers had been purchasing the same basic range of British goods for a
very long time—a reflection of a growing standardization of weights, col-
ors, and styles—and it was not hard for someone living in New England or
New York to appreciate the construction of non-importation lists produced
in Virginia and South Carolina.
Of course, the call for consumer sacrifice did not in itself guarantee
that at a moment of military danger New Englanders could automatically
trust South Carolinians nor that Virginians might without second thought
count on the patriotic support of New Yorkers. But however tentative the
movement toward broader imagined horizons—toward what some mod-
ern voices of nationalism have called a country of the mind—a shared hos-
tility to their dependency on Britain for the key articles of the good life
provided the ligaments for political union in the years to follow. Individual
self-sacrifice gave palpable demonstration that one was willing to act for
the public good. It gave force to high-sounding words that were easy to
mouth and even easier to disavow when the going got tough. As one hard-
nosed New Englander explained:
Now let me lay down this plain undoubted Principle, That a State of Dependence is a
State of Subjection, and Servitude. We may then project, resolve, vapor and threaten, as
much as we please; ’tis all in vain, and we make but a ridiculous Figure, while we are
dependent upon Great-Britain for a warm Coat to save us from freezing in the Winter.9
And finally, as the lists suggested, from Georgia to New Hampshire,

Americans appreciated the link between liberty and consumption, between
the enjoyment of political rights and the sacrifice of market pleasures. Goods
were made to speak to power. “Atticus,” appearing in a New York newspa-
per, understood the relationship. Once Great Britain had enjoyed a “grand-
market for all her various manufactures,” he observed, but instead of
cherishing its loyal American customers, it had brought tyranny to the colo-
nies. And, “since a contrary, and unaccountable system of politics, has been
adopted, and we are not allowed to purchase the manufactures of our
Mother-Country, unless loaded with taxes to raise a revenue from us, with-
out our consent,” there was no other recourse open to Americans but to
refuse “their manufactures . . . until our grievances are redressed.”10 Even
more poignantly, a Rhode Island “Son of Liberty” asked: Could Americans
after more than a century in the New World give up the “liberty, which
[their forefathers] purchased at so dear a rate, for the mean trifles and frivo-
lous merchandise of Great-Britain”?11
In 1770, as it had done in 1765, Parliament retreated from violent con-
frontation, repealing all of the obnoxious duties except that on tea. Colo-
nial consumers responded to the news by running back to the goods they
so dearly loved, accepting political dependence when it no longer seemed
so directly tied to unconstitutional forms of taxation. They did so as a

changed people, however, for whatever disappointments they had suffered,
they had in fact refined an entirely new strategy of resistance that survived
in the memories of all consumers who had learned that lists now carried
serious political implications.
II
Rightly or wrongly, Charles Townshend bore much of the blame for the
crisis that engulfed the empire. As chancellor of the exchequer, he provided
the catalyst for the second great wave of non-importation throughout the
North American colonies. Perhaps the members of Parliament could have
avoided what appears with hindsight to have been an unnecessary aggrava-
tion of imperial tensions, but a reconciliation would have required inspired
political leadership. Townshend and his followers in the House of Com-
mons were not up to the challenge, so that instead of preserving the bonds
of a commercial empire, they encouraged partisan, seemingly vindictive
legislation designed to assert the sovereignty of Parliament without acknowl-
edging the colonists’ legitimate complaints.
Like so many figures of modest talents who find themselves thrust into
positions of authority, Townshend promised more than he could deliver.
During the spring of 1767 he boldly announced that he could reduce the
land taxes so hated by the English ruling class while at the same time com-
pelling recalcitrant Americans to obey explicit orders to contribute to the
housing and maintenance of British troops still stationed in the colonies.
Predictably, the political establishment greeted his proposals with enthusi-
asm; it too wanted to show restive Americans how tough Parliament could
be. But alas, for all his braggadocio, Townshend had no real plan. His so-
called program offered little more than a grab bag of legislation, and, as his
colleagues must surely have understood, the new duties on glass, paper, tea,
and painter’s colors that sparked so much resentment in the colonies would
have covered only a small fraction of the total cost of the British army in
America, that is, if they had actually been collected.12
Although the Townshend Program did not ignite the kind of street vio-
lence that had greeted the Stamp Act, the colonists made clear their impla-
cable hostility to all legislation of this sort. They rejected out of hand the
notion that Parliament could tax them without their consent; they dismissed
claims that an unrepresentative body in England exercised absolute sover-
eignty over their domestic affairs.13 On an emotional level, however, the
popular contempt for the new Revenue Act involved more than abstract
principles about the character of the British constitution. Townshend
poignantly reminded Americans of the heavy burden of colonial depen-
dence. It was not that in 1769 or 1770 they wanted to free themselves from
British rule. What fueled anger was rather the lack of respect for the colo-
nists that seemed increasingly to inform imperial policy. And most people
appeared to have equated the sting of insult with the consumer market-
place. In his widely admired Letters from a Farmer, John Dickinson noted
that since articles such as glass and paper were “absolutely necessary for us,”
the colonists would end up paying the duties whether they liked it or not.
In an irate outburst worthy of Jonathan Swift, Dickinson observed, “I think
it evident, that we must use paper and glass; that what we use must be Brit-
ish; and that we must pay the duties imposed, unless those who sell these
articles, are so generous as to make us presents of the duties they pay.”14 In
other words, commercial necessity had forged the shackles of dependence,
and although to modern ears such rhetoric may seem excessive, even con-
spiratorial, that is in fact how many colonists came to appraise their com-
mercial entrapment.15
Other, lesser-known writers took up the theme. After rejecting the pos-
sibility of confronting “the military force of Great Britain,” for example, a
Connecticut writer concluded darkly that “We will either make our own
cloaths, go naked, or augment our debt with Great Britain to a sum which
will in the end enslave the country.”16 A South Carolinian excoriated mar-
ket dependence in even blunter terms: “Our continuing to buy British manu-
factures then, under our present situation, is as weak, as unnatural, as it
would be to buy a rod for our own breech; ’tis, in fact, doing the very same
thing.”17 New Englanders expressed similar sentiments in the language of
the Old Testament. According to “Philo Patriae” of New London, “[I]f we
continue to purchase foreign [i.e., British] goods as in times past, ’tis easy
to see that we shall be very soon in the case of the Egyptians, we shall have
nothing left to pay for them, but our bodies and our lands.”18 The colonial
situation had encouraged a bondage of pleasure; it was time to rethink con-
sumer desire. “Philo Libertatis” reflected on the American dilemma. “Will
not all mankind say,” he asked the readers of a Connecticut newspaper, “we
are an inconsistent people? Crying to heaven, and crying to the king against
being made slaves, when at the same time we are struggling hard to make
ourselves so, and to rivet our chains?”19 It is not insignificant that with rare
exception the most bitter protests against market dependence were found
in the local newspapers, not in the formal pamphlets of the period, an indi-
cation perhaps that ordinary people almost reflexively grounded discon-
tent in their personal experiences as consumers.
So effortlessly did Americans come to champion non-importation that
it appears that what was in fact a highly innovative strategy of resistance
sprang forth into the political world fully formed, as if an organized, popu-
lar disruption of normal trade required no serious justification. But, of
course, it did. One of the first statements calling for an organized market
protest appeared in the Boston Gazette on August 31, 1767, and even though
it relied heavily on raw passion, it put forward a reasoned case for boycott-
ing British goods. “My blood is chilled, and creeps cold through my stiff-
ened veins,” the author cried. “To what alas! is America reduced. This land
for which our fathers fought and bled, must now become the den of slav-
ery.” The only hope for political salvation was to “put a stop to the impor-
tation of all English goods” and to demonstrate to Parliament that the colo-
nists could “freely part with the gay trappings of a butterfly.”20
One common argument stressed what might be described as Great
Britain’s breach of contract. For Americans, trade was never just trade; the
sale of goods within an imperial framework implied mutual obligations.21 In
exchange for the enjoyment of a non-competitive market—the Navigation
Acts dating back to the seventeenth century prohibited ships of foreign na-
tions such as Holland or France from entering Britain’s American ports—the
mother country had agreed to give the colonists the best manufactures avail-
able at the best prices. Colonists saw no reason why British merchants should
take advantage of a privileged market situation—a naive opinion, perhaps,
or simply a reflection of bargaining weakness within the empire, but an inter-
pretation that made sense to the Americans nonetheless.
One particularly thoughtful rendering of this point of view appeared
in a South Carolina journal. The author, identified as “A Member of the
Assembly and Signer of the Resolution”— probably Christopher Gadsden—
analyzed the colonists’ commercial connection with Great Britain. On their
side, he observed, the British claimed “a right, to an absolute exclusive trade
with her American colonies; and hath so confined them in their imports
and exports . . . that the manufactures they want, they are not permitted to
receive directly from any other nation but herself.” It was widely accepted
that the same goods could be had “from fifteen to twenty per cent cheaper
than they can have from her, and better in quality than what she sends to
them.” Why, a reader might ask, would English businessmen engage in such
offensive practices? “It is no secret,” the writer confided, “that her manufac-
turers and wholesale dealers, put off their worst goods this way, many of
them making scruple to say, anything will do for America.” There was a
solution to this problem, of course, one that had radical implications for an
empire nurtured on protected markets. “This disadvantage to us, arises
merely from Great-Britain having an exclusive trade to her colonies. Were
it otherwise, by our ports being freely open to all nations, she would then,
soon find it [in] her interest, to take the same care to please us, as well with
regard to the quality as price of her wares, as she is obliged to do at the
markets [where] she expects to meet any rival.”22
Whether hawking second-rate goods represented a genuine conspiracy
against American interests or merely reflected the colonists’ structural de-
pendence was not clear. Whatever the full implications of such reports may
have been, people living in other colonies found them entirely credible de-
scriptions of recent commercial experience. In Providence, Rhode Island, “A
Friend” reminded readers of the local journal that “since floods of English
goods have been poured in upon us . . . family economy is at an end. . . . ’Tis
true goods are sold something cheaper than formerly but if we examine
them, we shall find them poor and miserable, such as could find no buyers
in Great Britain; but they are it seems good enough to be sent here, to cheat
this country with.”23 Again, authors who advanced these views were not
advocating political independence. It would be remiss, however, not to point
out that at a moment of widespread anger over unconstitutional taxation,

Americans raised the highly corrosive proposition that the “consumer colo-
nies” had been sold a bill of goods, and if that was the case, then non-im-
portation might not be as painful as one had imagined.
Several other arguments in support of a general boycott of British goods
were more predictable. Writers explained, for example, that traditional rem-
edies for political grievances simply had not worked. The Anglo-American
legal culture had long recognized the petition as a legitimate means for
bringing a complaint to the attention of crown or Parliament, but during
the current controversies over taxation, formal appeals of this sort had fallen
on deaf ears. Faced with indifference as well as hostility, a New Yorker known
as “A. B.” concluded, “we [have] no other peaceable Way left, but to use
some effectual Measures to prevail with those who are represented in the
British Parliament, and may be supposed to have some Influence there, to
exert themselves in our Behalf and make our Cause their own.”24 Short of
armed resistance, the most promising “effectual Measures” on offer were
non-importation agreements. Organized consumer protests not only would
serve to broadcast discontent but also seemed likely to promote manufac-
turing in America. As many colonists knew full well, this was a tenuous
proposition. Manufacturing schemes had received an optimistic reception
for some time, and even though there was almost no evidence that the colo-
nists were really prepared to make cloth, glass, and metal objects on a scale
commensurate with popular demand, they spoke of a boycott as a bitter
although welcome medicine that would at last excite domestic industry.
“The way then to get redress for our wrongs,” insisted a Hartford writer, “is to
render ourselves unprofitable to Great Britain, by industry. We must begin
sooner or later; the increase of the inhabitants of this country being so great
as to put it out of the power of Great Britain to cloath us a century hence.”25
As a plan to achieve a measure of economic independence by the 1870s, it had
merit, but as a strategy to gain swift repeal of the Townshend Program, it left
a lot to be desired.
More encouraging for the short term, newspaper essays throughout
America assured colonists that non-importation would succeed precisely
because it would make conditions intolerable for England’s poorest indus-
trial workers. The argument turned on pragmatism. A South Carolina au-
thor announced as a certainty that the only reason why British merchants
exported so many goods to America was their desire “to prevent the
Clamours of the People at Home.” The colonial market was in fact little
more than a mechanism for maintaining full employment in urban centers
like Birmingham, and it did not take much intelligence to appreciate that
“it is from the Loss of Business these [laborers] will FEEL, [and therefore]
that we must originally look for Redress of our Grievances.”26 Another colo-
nist asked rhetorically, “Must not such a number of idle hands, in the heart
of any country, be extremely alarming?”27 A New Yorker concurred with
this tough line of reasoning:
The corrupt Authors of the comprehensive System of Mischief, which has thrown one
of the most prosperous, powerful and happy Empires the World ever produced, into
Discontent, Confusion, and Distress, are well aware of the powerful Influence that our
Non-importation Scheme, duly prosecuted, would give us over the manufacturing
and trading Part of the Nation, and consequently over themselves at second Hand.28
However absurd notions of consumer tails wagging British dogs may

have sounded to English authorities, they only had themselves to blame.
After all, since the middle of the eighteenth century self-styled commercial
experts had been announcing as an uncontested fact that the American
market was absolutely essential to the continued prosperity of the mother
country. The colonists came to believe what they read.
Another argument offered in support of non-importation drew atten-
tion to the actual men and women who purchased British goods, in other
words, to the ordinary colonists who believed that they had a right to make
choices from among contending products in a consumer marketplace. Se-
lections reflecting personal preferences for color, weight, and texture were
expressions of a cultural process known as self-fashioning. But as Ameri-
cans discovered during this period, they could exercise the right of choos-
ing by not doing so, by withholding their custom, and by engaging in a
kind of political self-fashioning that probably would never have suggested
itself as a strategy of resistance had they not come of age in a commercial
empire in which colonists were extravagantly described as consumers of
goods manufactured in the mother country. After all, provincial writers
observed, the American people could do with their money exactly as they
pleased. This definition of freedom sounds a bit crude, but in the context of
the colonial experience it translated individual decisions about British ar-
ticles into a political weapon, for the “it’s your own money” justification for
boycotts placed ultimate responsibility for success directly on anonymous
shoppers. As one South Carolinian explained, “[E]very American has an
indisputable right to lay his money out as sparingly as he pleases, and to
give preference to American manufacturers, when to be had, [or] to any
other whatever; and it is particularly his duty, to do so at this extremity.”29
The energizing spirit behind this statement was not a protest against the
consumer market per se, or against commercial capitalism, but rather against
specific British imports that now symbolized dependence. The Virginia
Gazette reminded colonists that no imperial official, neither royal gover-
nors nor parliamentary leaders, “can oblige us to buy goods, which we do
not choose to buy.”30 A New Englander universalized the claim, pointing
out that “no power on earth can make us buy what we will not buy.”31
Transforming arguments for non-importation—many of them really
expressions of annoyance and hope rather than certainty—into an effec-
tive strategy of political resistance represented a formidable challenge. In
1767 few colonists probably appreciated the full immensity of the task that
lay before them, for, like coaches for a team of untested players, they had no
assurance that they could overcome even the more obvious obstacles to a
continental boycott. Modern historians have tended to ignore these orga-
nizational problems, assuming apparently that since ideological principles
of one sort or another drove the engine of American protest, it was not all
that important to work out the evolution of large-scale political mobiliza-
tion. But this lapse is surely a mistake. Even the most high-minded ideas
about liberty and representation would have amounted to little more than
sputtering anger without an organizational structure capable of sustaining
a sense of unity and purpose.
Confronted with the Townshend Program, therefore, the colonists faced
four major difficulties, and the failure to address any of them would have
reduced non-importation to a hollow gesture of discontent. First, there was
the matter of coordinating various local protests. The movement depended
on grassroots agitation, but of course, if the various communities did not
act together, the targeted imports would inevitably flow to the port or re-
gions that had not yet come onboard, effectively destroying any real chance
of putting pressure on British manufacturers or the members of Parlia-
ment. Drawing upon the lessons of the Stamp Act protest, one South Caro-
lina writer observed, “If the alarm was so high in Great Britain, when only
two or three of the Northern governments commenced their salutary and
patriotic measures; what must it be, when she finds Pennsylvania, Mary-
land, and Virginia, together with our province, have adopted them too?”32
Second, since any colonist was in fact a potential consumer of British goods,
organizers had to persuade quite different sorts of people—women as well as
men, gentlemen as well as farmers and laborers—to support the boycott. Third,
as the colonists had discovered during an earlier wave of protest, non-impor-
tation agreements that lacked teeth were easily ignored, and they had to es-
tablish extra-legal means of enforcing a huge disruption of the market without
thereby alienating moderate supporters. And finally, as the protest spread from
colony to colony, from city to city, issues related to cooperation across vast
distances forced them to imagine themselves in broader, more inclusive terms
than they had ever done before, as “Americans,” as members of an ill-defined
“union,” or as spokesmen for a “continent.” Like other rebellious groups
throughout history, they had to decide for themselves just who spoke for
whom. What precisely was the character of the larger community to which
they professed to belong? Who was the “we” urging ordinary people to hold
steady in the face of danger? This was uncharted cultural ground, and within
an experimental framework of political identity words such as virtue, corrup-
tion, and patriotism acquired special, historically specific meanings that reso-
nated persuasively among defiant provincials.
III
The non-importation movement got off to a rocky start. With hindsight
the reason seems clear enough. Like addicts, the colonists looked to someone
else to protect them from their own dangerous habits—in this case, purchas-
ing British goods whose price tag was political dependence—and in this
situation, they demanded more of the merchants than they could deliver.33
It was not surprising, therefore, that as soon as Americans learned of the

new duties, they insisted that local merchants organize an effective boycott
of British manufactures. After all, the merchants provided the link between
producer and consumer, and if they stopped their orders, the rulers of Great
Britain would soon realize the stupidity of their attempts to bring the colo-
nists to heel. It was widely believed that the merchants had forced Parlia-
ment to repeal the Stamp Act, and there seemed no cause to doubt that the
merchants could bring about a second major victory.
The problem was that the merchants no longer wanted to play the part
that other Americans had scripted for them. They dragged their heels, hop-
ing that somehow the imperial problems would be resolved before they had
to take a public stand on non-importation. Perhaps they understandably
feared that they were being asked to ride the tiger of popular protest. In
Boston the leading merchants—a few such as John Hancock excepted—
refused to sign an agreement until March 1768, and even then they made
clear that they would support non-importation only so long as the mer-
chants of New York and Philadelphia followed their example. This decision
set off a nervous dance. The New York merchants went along, but their
counterparts in Philadelphia would not join, and so for lack of mutual trust
the entire boycott in the northern colonies seemed fatally ill organized. But
the tide of public opinion was running swiftly against the commercial com-
munity, and, bowing to the growing pressure to act, the merchants of Bos-
ton, New York, and Philadelphia in 1768 finally signed non-importation
agreements. As Francis Bernard, royal governor of Massachusetts, observed
of the Boston agreement, “The merchants are at length dragged into the
cause; their intercourse and connection with the politicians and the fear of
opposing the stream of the people have at length brought it about.” The
governor added that refusal to support non-importation would “be ob-
noxious to the lower sort of people.”34
The major southern colonies—Maryland, Virginia, and South Caro-
lina—did not adopt non-importation agreements until the summer of 1769.
During the Stamp Act protests they had evinced little enthusiasm for inter-
rupting the consumer trade with the mother country, but, faced with mount-
ing opposition to British imperial policy, they gradually warmed to the
proposition that cutting back on expenditures for a wide range of manu-
factured goods, especially luxury items, might force Parliament to repeal
the hated Revenue Act. George Washington, who loved imported goods as
much as any other American, accepted the strategy, noting that the colo-
nists had to do something to resist “our lordly Masters in Great Britain.”
His neighbor on the Potomac River, George Mason, bravely tried to fortify
Washington’s resolve. “Our All is at Stake,” Mason explained, “& the little
Conveniencys & Comforts of Life, when set in Competition with our Lib-
erty, ought to be rejected not with Reluctance but with Pleasure.”35 Another
Chesapeake planter concurred. “These are the proper Means to use upon
the present interesting Occasion,” he wrote. “These are the Arms with which
GOD and Nature have furnished us for our Defense.”36
As leaders of the region discovered, however, in staple economies de-

pendent on the export of tobacco, rice, and indigo, it was hard to put pres-
sure on the merchant community. Unlike the northern colonies, where
merchants generally came from respected local families and identified with
the culture of the communities in which they worked, the southern colo-
nies relied heavily on the employees of large Scottish or English merchant
houses.37 These transient factors, whom one South Carolinian dubbed “birds
of passage,” seldom gained acceptance into planter society.38 Thus when it
became apparent in 1769 that a united movement to boycott British goods
might actually succeed, the southern colonies had to devise somewhat dif-
ferent ways to mobilize support. Usually, representatives of the dominant
planter class took charge. These men either drafted agreements to halt most
trade on a certain date or persuaded resident merchants that it would be
wise for them to do so.
In Virginia, for example, a distinguished body of elected representa-
tives including the likes of Washington, Mason, and Thomas Jefferson walked
out of the House of Burgesses, reassembled in a nearby Williamsburg tav-
ern, and, acting on their own authority, signed their names to a long list of
British imported goods which they now renounced. Washington wondered
whether his gentry friends could really count on the many insecure plant-
ers throughout Virginia who might complain that self-sacrifice of this sort
would compromise their social ambitions. Such a person might cry out,
Washington observed, that “an alteration in the System of my living, will
create suspicions of a decay in my fortune, & such a thought the World
must not harbour.”39 Washington, of course, might well have been describ-
ing himself, but whatever reservations he may have had, he too added his
signature to the document. In Baltimore and Annapolis the principal gentle-
men of Maryland joined local tobacco merchants in proclaiming non-im-
portation, and eventually South Carolina came around, forging, in the words
of one leading rice planter, “A happy Coalition of our Interest, and that of
the Merchants, into ONE immediate SELF-INTEREST.”40
However the early non-importation associations and committees con-
stituted themselves throughout colonial America, they quickly exposed
structural weaknesses that could well have compromised the growth of
popular political mobilization. Since the agreements reflected the sentiments
of particular communities—Boston or Williamsburg, New York or Charles-
ton, for example—the colonists initially found it hard to coordinate con-
sumer protest over large geographic areas. Different groups joined the cause
when local conditions allowed. But the difficulties ran deeper, especially in
the northern colonies. Reliance on the merchants to bring about political
ends was probably doomed from the start. The world of commerce guarded
its secrets carefully, and successful merchants seldom shared intelligence
about credit, price, and supply with competitors. During this imperial cri-
sis, merchants let normal suspicion about rivals develop into a kind of pro-
fessional paranoia, and, under extreme pressure to make non-importation
work, they projected onto other merchants schemes to gain market advan-
tage. The argument was not without merit. If Boston’s merchants canceled
their orders for British goods while those in Philadelphia did not, then it
seemed entirely plausible—at least, to the Boston traders—that their coun-
terparts in Philadelphia must be cheating.
Consider just a single case. A group of merchants in Wethersfield, Con-
necticut, suspected the “Committee of Merchants of Boston” of having im-
ported some highly questionable goods. Responding defensively to charges
of bad faith, John Hancock and eight other Boston merchants insisted that
they had confined “their Importations to the repeal of the Duty on Tea,
paper, glass & Colors . . . & we Positively are now more firm, united & reso-
lute than ever; We shall be glad at all Times to Concur with you in every
legal measure to promote this Valuable purpose.”41 As in many exchanges
of this type, the accusing merchants could not force the issue; they could
not insist that the other merchants open their ledgers for inspection. And
despite effusive expressions about the need to work together for the com-
mon cause, doubts festered. Between 1767 and 1770 the merchants of the
northern ports spent a lot of anxious time watching the merchants of other
colonies, trying to learn for sure whether competitors had really halted the
sale of proscribed consumer goods. Commercial self-interest did not pro-
vide a credible foundation on which to build broad political trust.42 Stated
in different terms, during the heat of imperial controversy the merchants
found that they could not convincingly speak for collectivities such as
“America,” or “our country,” or the “people.”
But others in colonial society managed to do so. During this period,
Americans began to imagine allegiances that extended beyond the local
communities which time out of mind had been the basis of political iden-
tity. Ultimately what allowed scattered colonists to overcome merchant sus-
picion and parochial loyalties and to communicate with each other across
traditional boundaries of space and class, perhaps even of gender, was a
profound shift in the character of popular political rhetoric. So long as broad
mobilization in support of non-importation depended on narrowly de-
fined interest groups such as the merchants, ordinary people did not have
much incentive to participate actively in putting pressure on the British
government. As one colonist explained, “The farmers and tradesmen in the
country have vainly hoped that the virtue and public spirit of the merchant
would be their relief, and that they [the merchants] would not import these
things. But have we not had sufficient conviction, that this is not to be de-
pended on? Why should we expect they should have more virtue than we?”43
The discovery that the interests of the colonial merchants were not nec-
essarily those of the people helped to transform largely ineffectual bursts of
anger into a mass protest. The process occurred slowly, in fits and starts,
but during the course of mounting resistance against British duties on im-
ported goods, the authors of broadsides and newspaper essays began to
speak to and in the name of a powerful abstraction known as “the public.”
Colonial writers addressed the public, inviting it to take part in pressing
political concerns which until very recently had been the purview of the
provincial gentry, the great planters and well-connected lawyers who as-
sumed that they spoke for the rest of society. But after 1769 it was clear that
the times were changing, and the catalyst of change was the almost univer-
sal experience of making choices and voicing opinions in the new consumer
marketplace of the eighteenth century. At this crucial moment, an imperial
dispute triggered by parliamentary taxes on imported goods encouraged
middling sorts of people who generally had little impact on the shape of
the political culture to participate in the affairs of the day. Not surprisingly,
Benjamin Franklin understood this transformation earlier and more clearly
than did most contemporaries. Writing in a London newspaper, he ex-
plained, “I say, the generality of the people in America . . . have now taken
the lead in a great degree, out of the hands of the Merchants, and in town
and country meetings are entering into solemn resolutions not to purchase
or consume British commodities: . . . if any Merchants do import before
that time, they will mark them as enemies to their country, and never deal
with them when the trade shall be opened. This is now become a restraint
upon the Merchants.”44
This shift in perception about the true locus of political power repre-
sented a genuinely radical development. In fact, protest against the
Townshend Program activated what one might describe as a consumer pub-
lic sphere.45 With a rising sense of urgency, writers urged ordinary people—
now defined as members of a colonial public—to judge for themselves
whether the merchants had properly defended the public interest against
its many enemies. Thus, to offer an example of this innovative rhetorical
strategy, a New York City broadside appealed “To the PUBLIC.” The street
flier exhorted “the Inhabitants of this CITY . . . to meet at the Coffee House,
on Monday next, precisely at twelve o’Clock, to give their Sentiments rela-
tive to the article of TEA.”46 On another occasion, the authors of a Philadel-
phia “CIRCULAR LETTER, from the COMMITTEE OF THE City to the
COMMITTEES of other Colonies,” praised “the Voice of the Public” which
had recently exposed the schemes of clandestine importers.47 What one
encounters in such passages is anonymous persons invoking the public as a
source of empowerment, thereby arrogating to themselves the high moral
ground in political exchange. Although on some level everyone knew that
the public was a convenient fiction, an invented category, it trumped the
counter-arguments of special interests.48 It was a construction that facili-
tated conversations about non-importation between distant strangers who
came to accept the fact that they too belonged to a consumer public sphere
which had acquired responsibility to preserve the freedom and liberty of all
Americans.
Provincial newspapers sustained the public as an imagined moral force
in colonial politics.49 Ordinary people—the majority of whom were fully
literate—turned to weekly journals for intelligence about what was hap-
pening in distant communities, and in the pages of what tellingly were called
the “public Prints” they learned that the public was busy monitoring the
non-importation of British goods. Governor Moore of New York lamented
this state of affairs, informing the earl of Hillsborough in May 1768,“It would
give me great pleasure if I could boldly assert that the inflammatory Publica-
tions in the printed News Papers . . . had been treated with the contempt they
really deserve, but I am afraid the bad effects of them are but too sensible
already, and that the doctrine they would endeavour to establish is without
the least reluctance adopted by all Ranks and conditions of People here.”50
Like modern televison viewers who marvel how rapidly the details of
distant tragedies now reach their homes, the colonists appreciated the ca-
pacity of newspapers to expand their knowledge of events taking place in
American cities and towns as foreign to their own experience as happen-
ings in Afghanistan or Bangladesh are to most modern Americans. The
Boston Evening-Post, for example, ran an item during this period in which
the writer confessed, “We, who are at a distance from the metropolis, have
no other way of being conversed with the political world than the News-
Papers; therefore it is our constant practice to peruse them.”51 And when
country readers did not find what they anticipated, they complained. “A
Tradesman” reported that he was tired of articles about “Poles or Corsicans,”
preferring to learn more about the state of the domestic economy. The edi-
tors of the papers must know that “surely it is high time for the middling
People to abstain from every Superfluity, in Dress, Furniture, and Living.”52
In 1770 one aspiring Connecticut poet celebrated the role of the journals in
providing news that was, in fact, genuinely new, and in a piece entitled “The
News-Paper” the author declared:
’Tis truth (with deference to the college)
News-papers are the spring of knowledge,
The general source throughout the nation,
Of every modern conversation.
What would this mighty people do,
If there, alas!, was nothing new?53
What was new in colonial America, of course, was not accounts of herbal
medicines, or the doings of the royal family, or advertisements of “the Lat-
est Goods Just Arrived from London,” but rather reports about a “public”
putting pressure on merchants to hold the line against the importation of
British manufactures. A reader living in New England or New Jersey might
not have ever actually visited New York City, but he or she could ascertain
from “A CITIZEN,” who published in a New York paper circulating through-
out the region, that the public should turn a deaf ear to the self-serving cries
of the merchants, because “the private Interest of such Persons ought not to
stand one Moment in Competition with the Common Good. They [the mer-
chants] ought to wait patiently, till the Circumstances of the Times alter in
their Favour; or if they cannot do this, then to apply themselves to other
Employments.”54 Newspaper writers may have exaggerated local resistance;
they may have even been blatantly disingenuous about the character of pro-
test. Such considerations do not much matter here, since the distant reader,
perhaps frightened about challenging British authority even by boycotting
consumer goods, took a measure of assurance from the knowledge that he
or she might be working in concert with persons who would never be iden-
tified more precisely than as members of the public. And it was consoling
to be told that one’s sacrifice—doing without the pleasures of the market-
place—really did advance the common good.
The question that one might ask, of course, was: Whose common good?
For whom did the public speak? Although no one at the time consciously
set out to reconceive colonial political identity, that was exactly what hap-
pened, for the accelerating swirl of communication in the weekly journals
about non-importation provoked ordinary people to imagine themselves
within larger political frameworks which had been formed of necessity in
opposition to British imperial policy. The newspapers encouraged men and
women who perhaps had never given much thought to what was happen-
ing in neighboring communities, let alone in distant colonies, to situate
themselves within a larger community. Public journals kept people scat-
tered over a vast territory informed about what other Americans were do-
ing to curtail the sale of British goods, and it was not unusual, for example,
to encounter in the newspapers of South Carolina or New York detailed
stories recounting how the people of Boston or Pennsylvania had sustained
the boycott.55 Sir Henry Moore, the beleaguered royal governor of New York,
complained to superiors in London that “extracts of a letter” about the suc-
cess of non-importation sent to one person in a particular colonial city
soon reached almost everyone in America, since “as soon as one of these
letters appears in any public paper, it is copied into the Gazettes of all other
Provinces, and propagated throughout the whole Continent.” Moore exag-
gerated the reach of the journals, but he was correct to draw attention to
the danger that an expanding audience for political intelligence posed for
the British administration. As he observed, the “chief tendency of them [the
letters in the journals] is to encourage Union among the Provinces, and to
distress Great Britain by not importing any English manufactures.”56
Everywhere Americans reached out to each other through the channel
of print. Soon, even in small, relatively isolated communities, people began
to situate themselves within a continental conversation that assumed that
the members of local committees and associations belonged to an Ameri-
can public that spoke for the interests not of a single village or county, not
even of a particular colony, but of something greater, a solidarity created
originally by the rhetoric of resistance and soon taken for granted by the
very people it was meant to persuade. In this extraordinary political envi-
ronment, the “respectable inhabitants” of Middletown, Connecticut, to-
gether with “the major Part of the Merchants & Traders of the Colony”
could declare with remarkable insouciance, “This meeting taking into Con-
sideration the unmerited Distress which the People of America and the In-
habitants of this Colony in particular suffer and are further exposed to from
the operation of several Acts of Parliament Imposing Duties.” No one
doubted, apparently, that “the People of America” actually existed or that
they might suffer as one. Perhaps even more revealing, the Middletown group
inserted in “the public News Papers of the Colony” an announcement of its
intention to cooperate with “our Sister Colonies, in preserving just natural

rights, Liberty, and the Welfare of America, & this Colony.”57
Similar meetings throughout the colonies responded to the imperial
challenge in precisely the same manner as did the inhabitants of this Con-
necticut community. They published their decisions; they protested their
uncompromising resolve. And increasingly, they thought of themselves as
Americans. A sudden proliferation of collective nouns and phrases reflected
a pressing need among people who previously had not had much to do
with each other to describe what they were becoming. This development in
the political language of the day did not signal that the colonists had re-
placed older, local identities with a new sense of self. They still thought of
themselves as New Englanders or Virginians, as rice planters or urban me-
chanics, as Lutherans or Congregationalists. Rather, an inventive terminol-
ogy suggested that the extraordinary difficulties of coordinating a massive
consumer boycott over such a large territory had raised a tough question of
diction for those many popular newspaper writers who now presumed to
speak within the consumer public sphere about a much broader although
as yet ill-defined collectivity that seemed to be taking shape. They found
themselves trying to project a political entity commensurate with the huge
transatlantic market that it intended to disrupt.
The tentative choice of words employed to meet this challenge reflected
the problem of representing a people who were not really a people who
lived in a country that was certainly not a country. These were men and
women who had no desire for independence from Great Britain and who
would have been shocked to learn that they were on the high road to form-
ing a nation of the mind. Some authors used the word country. Others
seemed more comfortable referring to the “British Colonies in America,”
but however the union with the “Sister-Colonies” originated, the goal of
the whole was the promotion of “American Happiness.” After all, “Every
Lover of Liberty on the Continent” strove to advance “the general Cause of
American Liberty” or the “Common Cause of American Liberty.” If “Our
brethren in North-America” did anything less, they would be incapable of
defending “The present and future INTEREST, LIBERTY AND WELL-BE-
ING OF AMERICA.”58 A leading Boston paper reported that other colo-
nists had urged that “we become one DETERMINED PEOPLE.”59 A New
York City author went over the top, advocating in 1769 an “American Ma-
gna Charta and a Bill of Rights.” As this person explained in screaming capi-
tal letters, “every SON AND DAUGHTER OF LIBERTY IN AMERICA, must
inevitably, FIRMLY RESOLVE NOT TO BE SLAVES FOR CONTINUANCE,
but immediately subscribe to, and immediately PRACTICE the wearing of
the cheapest Cloathing, THE VERY CHEAPEST CLOATHING that can pos-
sibly be invented. AMERICAN REPRESENTATIVES should immediately
begin and set the EXAMPLE; it must strongly be promoted, become fash-
ionable, and universally be esteemed POPULAR, till the Time shall arrive
that EVERY GRIEVANCE IN AMERICA is justly removed.”60 Equating pa-
triotism with fashion was a nice touch in a consumer economy.
Another perspective on the fabrication of political identity was to see it

as an aspect of the formation of trust. It was all well and good for colonists
living in different regions and separated by often impassable rivers and roads
to champion the rhetoric of “the general Cause of American Liberty,” but if
those distant strangers failed to do more than talk the language of mutual
purpose, there was no incentive for any group to take the lead in promoting
consumer sacrifice. Trust of this sort is easily taken for granted. Anthro-
pologists have long described, often nostalgically, the sense of trust that is
frequently a characteristic of face-to-face relations or defines life in small,
traditional communities. The colonial phenomenon was different. It in-
volved trust established across space, impersonally, a product of a print
culture, and it was absolutely essential for the development of the popular
mobilization on which any successful revolutionary action depended. It had
to be learned and relearned, nourished, proclaimed, and reaffirmed, for
unless firmly grounded in public opinion, trust could not possibly survive
rumors of betrayal.
And so, like inexperienced lovers, the colonists in 1769 and 1770 tenta-
tively reached out to each other, afraid of having expressions of interest
spurned and worried that the objects of their attention might turn out to
be less reliable than had been assumed. The Sons of Liberty in North Caro-
lina, for example, declared that the “People of this Province have bound
themselves, in the general Cause of American Liberties, by extending their
Resolutions [not to import British goods], until the Whole of their com-
plaints is removed. It would be a capital Crime in us, to suspect the public
Virtue of our Countrymen.”61 But, of course, the virtue of other Americans
had to be taken on trust, at least until it had been affirmed in no uncertain
terms by refusing British manufactures. After applauding “the spirited be-
havior of our Boston, New-York and Philadelphia brethren, in renouncing
all commerce,” the “Freeholders, Merchants, and Traders” of Elizabeth Town,
New Jersey, bravely announced “That we are determined that we will at all
times, be ready to join in any measure that shall be entered into by the
colonies in general, to carry the design of said agreement into the fullest
execution.” To these people who were creatively expanding their political
horizons it seemed worthwhile to take a chance on trust, for they had con-
vinced themselves that “these are the general sentiments of all the freehold-
ers and inhabitants of this Province; and we will readily concur with them
in any further measures they may propose, for the support of an agree-
ment, upon which the preservation of the liberties of America so essen-
tially depend.”62 The general sentiments of the entire free population of
New Jersey had to be accepted on faith; if one resided in Elizabeth Town,
one simply assumed the best of political strangers. This was also the mes-
sage of a Charleston writer who reminded the public that what was “whole-
some” for South Carolina “politically speaking” must be so for the northern
colonies as well, for although “our circumstances are, in some respects, dis-
similar to theirs,” they were potential allies. “And,” the essayist continued,
“the man, who endeavors to suggest any thing at this time, which may cause
any jealousy or division amongst the American colonies, can be no friend
to any of them.”63 Declaring trust in this manner did not in itself make the
northern colonies more trustworthy, but certainly, if one wanted to pro-
mote non-importation in Charleston, it helped to imagine they were.
Expansion of political horizons throughout colonial America occurred
most strikingly within a framework of consumer experience. This is a point
of considerable significance, and one that historians have tended to under-
rate. Although a cherished language of rights and liberty played a central
part in the process of reaching out to strangers, it almost always found ex-
pression in a strategy of non-importation. Abstractions about political free-
dom were thus woven into the fabric of everyday life, so that in this social
climate one’s relation to enumerated British objects became a concrete
measure of commitment to rhetorical principle. Mobilization across tradi-
tional boundaries, therefore, should not be put forward as an either/or
proposition: Either Americans constructed a larger sense of community
through a shared political vocabulary of rights and liberty, or they assembled
meaningful trust through the strategy of non-importation. The process of
reimagining identity tapped both possibilities. People who were commit-
ted to the defense of rights and liberty were precisely those men and women
who were most likely to support the boycott movement, and by publicly
demonstrating their willingness to sacrifice manufactured British goods—
the items so carefully inventoried on the lists—they communicated to oth-
ers a deep commitment to political principle.
Communities did not talk to other communities through the newspa-
pers simply about rights and property, about ideas in the abstract, but rather
about the rights and property that they were actively defending by support-
ing non-importation. The men attending a town meeting at Ashford, a small
farming village in eastern Connecticut, understood the connection. In 1770
they declared, “[I]f the people of America properly attend to the concern of
salvation and (unitedly) resolve upon an unshaken perseverance in the af-
fair of non-importation till there is a total repeal of the revenue acts and an
ample redress of American grievances, we shall be a free and flourishing
people!”64 “Philo Patria,” a New London writer, agreed. “The truth is we
have no occasion for British manufactures; they are rank poison to the con-
stitution of this country,” to which he added, “Let us save our money in
order to save our country.”65 A gathering of “freeholders, merchants and
traders” in New Brunswick, New Jersey, endorsed the same logic, voting
“That the Non-Importation Agreement which was generously and uniformly
entered into, by the merchants and traders in the several colonies, is the
best and most reasonable scheme that could have been fallen on, to prevent
the direful effects of the act of parliament . . . calculated to enslave this
country.”66 And finally, a group in Newbern, North Carolina, concluded
that non-importation was a “momentous business, wherein we may now
clearly perceive, entirely hinges American liberty.”67
IV
The colonists rapidly learned that the rhetoric of protest unsupported by
the means of enforcement amounted to little more than bombast. Between
1768 and 1770 Americans formed hundreds of groups to monitor the be-
havior of local merchants. In each community the composition of the over-
sight committees differed slightly. In some regions—especially in the New
England colonies—town meetings put pressure on the merchants to up-
hold agreements not to import enumerated goods. In other places, such as
Virginia and South Carolina, the source of authority in these matters was
less clear. But however people decided to police the flow of British manu-
factures, they almost always focused attention on the activities of the mer-
chants, a fact of some significance in understanding the precise timing of
the final separation from king and Parliament. The Stamp Act had sparked
furious passions, and if rebellion within the empire had depended solely on
venting emotion, the despised legislation would have surely generated armed
conflict. But however enraged the colonists may have been, they lacked in
1765 an infrastructure capable of sustaining a coordinated sense of purpose
over large distances. If the Townshend Revenue Act did not quite ignite the
same heated response, it did invite Americans of different backgrounds to
explore the possibilities of trust, and while this development encouraged
the invention of new, more expansive identities, it did not yet address the
central question posed by the need to mobilize a population in a political
cause: Were ordinary men and women willing to take direction and per-
sonal responsibility for their own actions, in this case, in the marketplace?
During the second wave of boycotts, the answer was generally negative. They
tried to pin blame for spotty enforcement of non-importation upon the
merchants, insisting that those who sold and distributed British imports
must cut off the flow of merchandise, a strategic move that temporarily
masked their own political obligations as consumers.
In modern political terms one might conclude that “non-governmen-
tal organizations” had assumed authority over the enforcement of non-
importation throughout colonial America. The analogy provides insight
into the distribution of power on the local level. Even when town meetings
exerted themselves, they did so more as groups of concerned citizens than
as formal legal bodies. The Boston town meeting, for example, issued a
report in May 1769 that “unanimously expressed their high Satisfaction on
being informed that the Merchants had so strictly adhered to their late Agree-
ment relative to a Non-importation of European Merchandise.” In other
words, a significant number of Boston merchants had previously agreed
among themselves—whether out of love of country or fear of bankruptcy
was not stated—to halt the sale of enumerated British goods until Parlia-
ment repealed the Townshend duties. Orders that arrived while the agree-
ment was in effect were supposed to be stored in a public warehouse, and
from time to time representatives of the town checked to discover if articles
had mysteriously gone missing. The purpose of the May report was to warn
all “Inhabitants” against doing business with those merchants who had re-
fused to sign the agreement and who were rumored to have imported a new
shipment of dry goods on “the Vessels lately arrived from Great-Britain.”
Confronted with a fresh inventory of imported manufactures, inhabitants
were urged—not ordered—to give their custom only to merchants who
had signed the original agreement and who, thereby, had “freely preferred
the future Welfare of their Country and all North-America, to any present
Advantage of their own.”68 The pressure on the merchants was obviously
very great, and to make matters worse from their perspective, the self-ap-
pointed monitors of trade published their findings in newspapers that
quickly reached other cities and towns. The effectiveness of these non-gov-
ernmental organizations amazed General Thomas Gage, who in December
1769 wrote from New York City:
Committees of Merchants at Boston, N: York, and Philadelphia contrive to exercise
the Government they have set up to prohibit the Importation of British Goods, ap-
point Inspectors, tender Oaths to the Masters of Vessels, and enforce their Prohibi-
tions by coercive Measures. In times less dissolute, and licentious, it would be a matter
of Astonishment, to hear that British Manufactures were prohibited in British Prov-
inces, by an illegal Combination of People . . . and surely wonderful, that such an
Imperium should be set up, and at length established, without the least Show of Op-
position.69
Quasi-legal modes of enforcement served different ends. However they

may have constituted themselves, local authorities clearly wanted to dis-
rupt consumer trade with Great Britain. Less obvious but no less impor-
tant in mobilizing political resistance, the mechanisms devised for keeping
the merchants in line functioned to distinguish persons who supported
protest from those willing to compromise principle in the name of private
advantage. Rituals of enforcement exposed people who might have mouthed
the right words, urging others to defend liberty, but did not really want to
sacrifice personal well-being in order to reform imperial policy. And finally,
enforcement of non-importation helped indoctrinate the general public—
not just the members of the merchant community—about the issues that
energized the controversy with Great Britain.
Discipline and instruction in the marketplace thus developed hand in
hand. In a Philadelphia broadside arrestingly entitled To the Public (1770), a
writer complained of the “pathetic” and presumably not fully sincere mer-
chants who were recently caught selling enumerated goods. Every reader
should see through the charade, for “the gentlemen censured have meanly
and from pecuniary motives, endeavored to subvert the grand, the glorious
cause of Liberty; long ably, virtuously and successfully supported by our
Brethren on the continent in general, and the truly patriotic Philadelphians
in particular.”70 Such merchants had revealed themselves to be “Enemies to
American Liberty; their Names will be made public; their Companies
avoided; and every Stigma fixed upon them to make them despicable.”71
The point is not that ordinary people did not understand the language
of rights or the arguments against unconstitutional taxation. They did.
(Above)
This 1770 Philadelphia broadside was
addressed To the Public, an ill-defined
but newly empowered group of
colonial consumers. 4 July 1770.
Philadelphia. Courtesy of the American
Antiquarian Society.
(Right)
This public notice urged “the Sons
and Daughters of LIBERTY” not to
purchase goods from William Jackson,
“an IMPORTER” who had refused to
sign the Boston non-importation
agreement. Reproduced from the Prints
Division, Library of Congress.
Rather, enforcement provided a rough index of commitment, and when

respected commercial leaders—the type of man one might instinctively look
up to in a society that encouraged dreams of upward mobility—were com-
pelled by local committees of inspection to defend the common political
good, ordinary people saw for themselves the power of ideas about rights
and liberty. It was in this spirit that the author of a 1768 broadside pub-
lished under the banner The True Sons of Liberty and Supporters of the Non-
Importation Agreement decried those who purchased from William Jackson,
a wealthy Boston merchant who had refused to sign the boycott agreement.
“It is desired,” announced this writer who spoke to the public in the name
of the public, “that the Sons and Daughters of LIBERTY would not buy any
one thing of him [Jackson], for in so doing they will bring Disgrace upon
themselves, and their Posterity, for ever and ever, AMEN.”72
In an unsettled political environment, colonists invented what might
best be described as rituals of consumer protest. This surge of creativity
comes as something of a surprise. Historians have long been aware that the
Reform Protestant societies planted in North America lacked the kind of
rich folk culture that one associates with early modern Catholic Europe.
Within that customary world, peasant communities celebrated in the ap-
propriate manner saints’ days that structured the annual calendar. The high-
light of the year may have been Carnival, held just before Lent, when the
normal expectations of gender and class were often suspended. And when
people strayed from the conventions of the community—for example, when
an old man took a very young wife—they could find themselves targets of
charivaris, highly threatening expressions of what was known as “rough
music.” The European migrants who traveled to the New World seemed
largely to have discarded such expressions of traditional life.73 And yet, when
confronted with a political crisis within the empire, the colonists quickly
devised popular rituals which like the charivaris of Europe attempted to
shame those who defied the will of the community. Although in general
form the rituals of consumer protest may have drawn upon knowledge of
similar events in Europe, they did not in fact have much to do with religion.
These were secular, market-inspired occasions intended to articulate the
community’s commitment to non-importation. Shaming mechanisms dra-
matically separated friends from enemies and thus made it ever harder for
ordinary people to remain neutral in the cause of liberty.
The mere risk of public censure was frequently sufficient to neutralize
opposition to the boycott. George Mason explained to a fellow Virginia
planter, Richard Henry Lee, how the public might compel obedience. “Ex-
perience [has] too fully proved,” wrote Mason, “that when the Goods are
here, many of our People will purchase [them], even some who affect to be
called Gentlemen. For this Purpose, the Sense of Shame & the Fear of Re-
proach must be inculcated & enforced in the strongest Manner; and if that
can be done properly, it has a much greater Influence upon the Actions of
Mankind than is generally imagined. Nature has impress’d this useful Prin-
ciple upon every Breast: it is a just observation that if Shame was banished
“A Meeting of the Merchants & Traders, at Faneuil-Hall, on the 23d January 1770” called upon
“the Friends to Liberty and their Country’s Cause” to display this announcement “over the
Chimney Piece of every public House, and on every other proper Place, in every Town, in this
and every other Colony . . . as a Monument of the Remembrance of the detestable Names
above-mentioned.” FMs Sparks 10, vol. 3, p. 62, by permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard
University, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
out of the World, she wou’d carry away with her what little Virtue is left in
it.”74 Errant merchants, of course, had the most to fear. The public threat-
ened to ostracize them, for, as “Civis” announced in a Boston journal in
1770, “Any man, I should think, must be lost to all sense of remorse, who
from a consideration of commercial advantages, can be unfeeling to so high
a censure of his fellow-citizens . . . [as well as the] additional resolution to
withhold all social intercourse with him forever hereafter.” By merchandis-
ing enumerated goods, the enemies of liberty “severed themselves from the
Commonwealth.” Civis thought such a fate almost too terrible to contem-
plate. “I know not what ideas some persons may have of happiness,” he
wrote, “[but] I cannot think of any greater misfortune in this life, than for a
man to be cursed by his Country.”75
A chilling reminder of just what it might have meant for a person to be
shunned in this manner came from a “Farmer,” who claimed to have lived
in Connecticut. After railing against Americans who might “value liberty at
so small a price as a ribbon, a paper of pins or a silk neckcloth,” the Farmer
put forward his plan for enforcing non-importation:
[I]f the principal part of the towns on the continent would vote it at their public town
meetings not to purchase any goods imported from Great-Britain contrary to the agree-
ment formerly held to, nor allow any to be had in their families, and that all such as
purchase such goods or wares, shall incur the displeasure of the town, and be treated as
enemies and betrayers of their country, and their names together with the offences com-
mitted, be recorded in the public records of the town. And further that they shall not be
allowed the honor of any office of public trust in said town, nor have any privileges that
they lawfully could withhold from them, it would greatly discourage the importing of
British goods into America, and perhaps for the present put a stop to it.76
Several cases of people actually brought to the bar of public censure

revealed how commercial shaming operated. Only the printed record sur-
vives. Notorious importers may have received private warnings to change
their ways; rumors of their greed may have circulated in the taverns. But
eventually, the local press exposed the more brazen offenders. During the
summer of 1769 a broadside—revealingly labeled an “ADVERTISEMENT”
by its anonymous author—was distributed on the streets of New York City
under a sensational headline: “Of greater IMPORTANCE to the PUBLIC,
than any which has yet appeared on the like Occasion.” The problem was
Simeon Cooley, a “Haberdasher, Jeweler, and Silversmith,” who had estab-
lished a solid business venture, purchased a house, and once even voiced
sympathy for the rights of the American people. But ideological appear-
ances were deceptive. First, Cooley took enumerated goods out of storage
after promising that he would return them. He lied. “The vile Ingrate,” the
broadside proclaimed, “. . . took Advantage of the Lenity and Credulity of
the Committee,” and soon Cooley openly offered British imports for sale.
Unless the public acted immediately, the “Reptile and Miscreant” might
succeed. Indeed, the public must not allow him “to baffle or defeat the united
virtuous Efforts, in the Support of so righteous a Cause, not only of this
City, but of the whole Continent.” Henceforth, Cooley should “be treated
on all Occasions and by all legal Means as an Enemy to his Country, a Pest
to Society, and a vile Disturber of the Peace, Police, and good order of this
City.” Perhaps Cooley could endure “the Loss of a little Reputation,” but for
most colonial shopkeepers, the “Hatred of the Public” was a real concern.77
John Taylor also suffered the pain of being ostracized. According to a
Boston newspaper, he had joined “the TRUE HEART Fire-Club,” an exclu-
sive fraternity that served the community while bestowing a measure of
distinction on its members. But whatever his qualifications for election,
Taylor’s public behavior angered his associates. A meeting of the society
“unanimously Voted” to dismiss Taylor, since in the opinion of his colleagues
he seemed “unworthy [of] being a Member of it, for not complying with
the Agreement of the Merchants.” Taylor apparently promised to mend his
ways, and after three months the club readmitted him. Like Simeon Cooley,
however, Taylor had not learned the desired ideological lesson. Six months
after the first confrontation, the “TRUE HEART Fire-Club” lost patience,
announcing that Taylor had “grossly affronted the Body of Merchants and
this Society, by perfidiously violating his Agreement with them, and his
Promise to us, not to vend any British Goods contrary to the universal Sense
of the Friends of this oppressed CONTINENT, by which he has rendered
himself justly obnoxious to all good Men, and more especially to every well
wisher to AMERICA.” It is striking that the firefighters claimed to represent
the will of a country that was not a country, but, as Taylor discovered, by
merchandising British imports he had shown himself no supporter of lib-
erty. The fire club dropped him from the organization, denying him “all the
Benefits of this Society, even in Times of Greatest Distress; and [voted] that
he NEVER be Re-admited upon any Terms whatever.”78 How many other
people endured public shame on this order is impossible to discern. Per-
haps of greater significance is the fact that by debating Taylor’s betrayal the
members of the “TRUE HEART Fire-Club” gained a much clearer sense of
their own colonial rights—and of exactly how selling British goods put those
rights in jeopardy.
Shaming worked presumably because the likes of Taylor and Cooley
did not want to lose face. Although men of modest standing in this society,
they cared about honor and reputation. For time out of mind, honor had
been at risk in small face-to-face communities where everyone quickly
learned who had violated local custom. Exposure required only a word on
the street, and soon neighbors shunned the rule breaker in church and tav-
ern. But late eighteenth-century colonial ports were not intimate commu-
nities of this sort. As commercial centers they hosted many transient
workers—sailors and day laborers—and cities like Boston, New York, and
Philadelphia supported hundreds of shops, large and small. Almost no one
could possibly have had dealings with more than a tiny fraction of the mer-
chants and store owners in such a place, and the increasingly impersonal
quality of public life made it hard to shame particular men and women
who imported British goods. In these matters, the public needed guidance.
Not surprisingly, the popular press provided the remedy. It regularly
published lists of names of those merchants who either refused to sign a
non-importation agreement or broke their promise after signing. A “Com-
mittee of Inspection” in Boston, struggling to keep up with rumors of in-
fractions, vowed “that the names of such persons shall be published
constantly in the news-papers, and also in hand bills dispersed through the
province, that the public may know them.”79 Ordinary readers combed
through these lists, sometimes discovering that local figures whom they
had previously held in high esteem were actually enemies of American lib-
erty. A person from Long Island wrote to a New York City journal recount-
ing that “In perusing a List of the infamous, untimely Importers, I observed
the Names of a Number of respectable Gentlemen, who I thought would

have suffered almost any Thing that might have been laid on them, rather
than to have entered into such a Measure; a Measure which if persisted in,
will entail Infamy and Disgrace upon themselves and their Posterity.”80 If
nothing else, monitoring names eroded traditional deference. Even so-called
gentlemen could not hide from the public their preference for their own “little
private advantage [over] . . . the common Interest of all the Colonies.”81
Exposure in print was not restricted to major cities. In remote towns
along the North Carolina coast, the Sons of Liberty challenged the honor of
violators, announcing that “Should those gentlemen still persist in a prac-
tice so destructive in its tendency to the liberties of the people of this colony,
they must not be surprised, if hereafter the names of the importers and
purchasers should be published in the Cape-Fear MERCURY.”82 The publi-
cation of names seems to have worked even over long distances. A South
Carolina merchant accused of not supporting the boycott—wrongly, in his
estimation—complained that by including his name on a list public en-
forcers had tarnished his reputation “in other Parts of the Continent,” and
that was bad for business.83
Rituals of consumer enforcement ended most satisfactorily when an
accused merchant confessed to crimes against the political community. As
extra-legal bodies, the committees of inspection could not arrest or jail bra-
zen importers. In any case, disciplining traders represented only part of the
challenge. Public admission of commercial misbehavior also provided a
dramatic mechanism for indoctrinating ordinary people who for one rea-
son or another had not given much thought to the ideological implications
of non-importation. As performance, therefore, confessions might be com-
pared to execution sermons, a popular form of entertainment in early
America. At the moment of death, a minister often lectured the condemned
man or woman about the moral deficiencies that had brought the person
to the scaffold. Whatever their worth for the individual about to be hanged,
these occasions served to legitimate normative religious values. The lesson
was clear. If one lived according to Scripture, one might well avoid swing-
ing at the end of a rope.
In an analogous setting, Alexander Robertson, a New York City mer-
chant caught red-handed selling enumerated goods, presented just the kind
of statement that the political culture demanded. In a broadside appropri-
ately addressed “To the PUBLICK,” Robertson proclaimed the legitimacy
of non-importation. “As I have justly incurred the Resentment of my Fel-
low citizens, from my Behavior, as set forth in an Advertisement Of great
Importance to the Publick,” he confessed, “I beg Leave to implore the pardon
of the Publick, assuring them that I am truly sorry for the Part I have acted;
declare and promise that I never will again attempt an Act contrary to the
true Interest and Resolutions of a People zealous in the Cause of Virtue and
Liberty.” After swearing that he had returned the objectionable British goods
once in his possession, Robertson beseeched “the Public in general to be-
lieve me.”84 Whether it did so is hard to assess.
General Thomas Gage could not believe what was happening. Colo-
nists were extorting confessions from merchants engaged in perfectly law-
ful trade. In a letter dispatched from New York to London, Gage sputtered,
“A man brought by Threats and Violence from his House into the most
open Part of the Town under a Gallows, and forced to read a Paper put into
his Hands, to make Excuses for importing British manufactures: His Goods
taken from him & put into Storage. You would from these Proceedings sup-
pose this to be rather a French or Spanish Province, instead of Part of the
British Territories.”85 What the general failed to appreciate was that in an
empire of goods market protest was the most effective way to resist author-
ity that increasingly seemed as autocratic as that of France or Spain.
The situation in New York was not exceptional. In another confession
directed “To The Public,” four Philadelphia merchants acknowledged “with
shame and confusion” that they had acted “contrary to the sentiments of
the inhabitants” by taking some goods out of storage “under the cover of
night.” They now admitted that they had acted “privately and clandestinely,”
and like Robertson, they declared, “[W]e are sincerely and heartily sorry
and ask pardon of the Public.”86 In the small Connecticut village of Windham
the process of discipline and indoctrination took a different turn. A “Com-
mittee of Inspection” found two traders guilty of knowingly bringing enu-
merated goods from Providence, Rhode Island, into Connecticut. Called
before the members of the committee, James Flint and Shubel Abbe were
asked to justify their actions. The men may not have understood exactly
what was expected at that moment. Whatever their thoughts, they received
a remarkable lecture on American rights. The traders should have appreci-
ated “the mischievous Tendency of such Measures, and their threatening
Aspect upon the Rights of America. . . . It was then urged, that the Body of
Merchants in Providence had violated their explicit Agreement, counter-
acted the Spirit and Sense of the Country relative to Non-Importation, basely
betrayed their Trust, and sold their Birthright Privileges for a Mess of Potage.”
Flint and Abbe were further reminded that “if such Dissimulation and Du-
plicity in Dealing was countenanced by the People in general, we should
soon be grasped in the Iron Arms of Oppression, kicked about by the Tools
of arbitrary Power, and plundered of every thing dear and valuable in Life.”
Modern Americans who like to believe that independence came effort-
lessly, certainly painlessly, might reflect on such episodes, for if they are
familiar with more recent revolutionary movements in Soviet Russia and
Maoist China they might recognize in this colonial American town the voice
of tough-minded political activists. Flint and Abbe certainly got the point.
They wanted nothing to do with arbitrary power. And perhaps with a sigh
of relief, they “freely and cheerfully” surrendered the objectionable British
goods, and in the process of schooling the malefactors, the people of
Windham reaffirmed their own political correctness.87
Some importers endured far worse than an impromptu lecture on lib-
erty. How many so-called dishonest traders suffered tar and feathers dur-
ing the Townshend protest cannot be accurately discerned, but the number
was probably less than frightened British officials imagined. It would not
have required many incidents of this sort to persuade fence-sitters among
the merchants to sign a non-importation agreement. In any event, contri-
tion, not physical violence, was the goal. A Boston case supports this hy-
pothesis. According to someone calling himself “A Resolutionist,” the trouble
began one afternoon, between two and three o’clock, when a small-time
merchant identified as McMasters was apprehended selling British goods.
A group of angry people immediately seized him “at the South part of the
town, and put [McMasters] into a cart, with some tar in a barrel, and a bag
of feathers.” A growing crowd then dragged the cart to King Street in the
center of Boston, “where it was said he was to undergo the indignity of this
modern punishment.” By this time the trader was overcome by fear. Even
his tormenters acknowledged that McMasters “appeared to be greatly fright-
ened, which the humanity of some persons present, imagin[ed] might pro-
duce a fainting.” Obviously, this exercise in street justice was not supposed
to bring on a fatal heart attack. “A Resolutionist” explained that McMasters
“was thereupon permitted to go into a gentleman’s house for a short time,
properly attended, in order to recover himself, where he soon after solemnly
promised, that if he might be spared from being tarred and feathered, he
would immediately leave the town, and never come into it again.” The offer
resolved a situation that seemed to be getting out of hand. The enforcers
agreed “upon condition that he should be carried out in the cart.” To this,
McMasters “readily consented, and a chair being placed therein in lieu of
the tar-barrel, he was then carted out of town as far as [the] Roxbury-line.”88
What dishonest merchants such as McMasters lacked and what the vigi-
lant public possessed was virtue. This word came close to defining the ide-
ology of the entire non-importation movement. Indeed, at the time, almost
everyone agreed that without popular virtue the cause of American liberty
had no chance at all. Consumer virtue, however, must be clearly distin-
guished from two of its distant cousins, both of which have received a lion’s
share of attention from historians of eighteenth-century political thought.
Perhaps the most celebrated virtue of the period was associated with a re-
publican tradition which modern scholars have traced back to the Renais-
sance Italian city-states of Niccolo Machiavelli. This philosophy of civic
power undoubtedly influenced some highly educated colonial American
leaders who wrote formal pamphlets. It schooled them to depict the virtu-
ous citizen as a man—never as a woman—whose landed property enabled
him to rise above the corrupting influence of commerce and thereby to
preserve the integrity of republican government. Cincinnatus, the noble
Roman who famously put down the plow to defend the republic, was a
model of classical republican virtue. Such a figure could not be bribed. His
agrarian wealth guaranteed the independence of his political judgment and,
of course, afforded him an opportunity unavailable to most other people in
society of cultivating virtue.89 A second language of virtue available to the
colonists was solidly grounded in Christian morality, and at least one his-
torian has insisted that the so-called Puritan ethic energized the rhetoric of
popular protest. This claim was undoubtedly true. A population that had
recently flocked to hear the Reverend George Whitefield expatiate on the
New Birth, promoted a huge evangelical movement known as the Great
Awakening, and described the future development of the American colo-
nies in glowing millenarian terms almost unthinkingly brought the vocabu-
lary of Scripture to political discussion.90
While both languages of virtue helped colonists make sense of an ever
more threatening imperial crisis, neither rivaled the impact of consumer
virtue on the mobilization of the American people. Indeed, the virtue that
resonated through the entire boycott movement was closer to what one
scholar has provocatively labeled “bourgeois virtue.”91 Unlike Christian vir-
tue, it was essentially a secular quality whose origins could be found in the
experience of participating in an advanced commercial economy rather than
in the Bible. And unlike republican virtue, consumer virtue did not assume
that one owned a great landed estate or could bring an unsullied indepen-
dent judgment to civic debate. Anyone could possess consumer virtue. All
one needed was the capacity to purchase goods in the marketplace, a quali-
fication so elementary that women as well as men, urban dwellers as well as
yeomen farmers, the poorer sorts as well as the well-to-do, could dare openly
to invoke its name in the public sphere.
A virtuous person was one who voluntarily exercised self-restraint in
the consumer marketplace. No one denied the desirability of the exciting
new manufactured items imported from Great Britain; consumer virtue
did not represent a revolt against the tenets of eighteenth-century com-
mercial capitalism. But however appealing the imports were, the virtuous
colonists exercised self-control for the common good. It was in this spirit
that “a large body of respectable inhabitants” in one colonial city resolved
to promote “virtuous self-denial.”92 In another case, the delegates to a New
Haven boycott meeting in 1770 assumed without fear of contradiction that
“the non-importation agreement come into by the colonies in general, and
by this [one] in particular . . . were founded on free, virtuous, peaceable,
manly and patriotic principles.”93 And “Juris Prudens,” writing in a popular
New York City newspaper, urged all Americans: “[L]et us import no Goods
whatsoever from Great-Britain, and we shall be crowned Victors; we shall
be free forever.”94
The rather straightforward sense of market virtue that developed
throughout the colonies on the eve of independence had powerful implica-
tions for political mobilization. Anyone who regularly purchased manufac-
tured goods from Great Britain could become virtuous simply by curtailing
consumption. The concept thus linked everyday experience and behavior
with a broadly shared sense of the general welfare. What one did with one’s
money suddenly mattered very much to the entire community, for in this
highly charged atmosphere economic self-indulgence became a glaring
public vice. Unlike Cincinnatus, the bourgeois patriot did not reach imme-
diately for the sword. He first examined the household budget, asking how
each member of the family might contribute to the cause of liberty. “I laugh
at a man who talks of facing cannon and red coats,” asserted one Boston
writer, “who cannot conquer his foppish empty notions of grandeur. What is
true grandeur, but a noble patriotic resolution of sacrificing every other consid-
eration to the Love of Country! And can he be a true lover of his country . . .
who would soon be seen strutting about the streets, clad in foreign fripperies,
than to be nobly independent in russet gray!”95 Wherever they lived, bour-
geois Americans instructed their “children . . . to practice virtue and industry
with good economy, which will naturally supply the individuals . . . with abun-
dance, and enable them to improve in all kinds of learning and science and
render them useful, respectable and independent.”96
Virtue of this sort encouraged ordinary people to join with distant
strangers—consumers of the continent—in making a genuine sacrifice for
their rights within the empire. To give up a personal item of comfort and
beauty was something that they all could do. It was a realistic request, a call
for sacrifice that touched the lives of colonists who perhaps had never heard
of Cincinnatus but nevertheless wanted to make a palpable contribution to
the American cause. To be sure, the individual consumer could exercise his
or her free will and ignore appeals from those who supported the general
boycott. But one thereby surrendered one’s right to blame others for politi-
cal oppression. Membership in a commercial society implied responsibili-
ties to a large collectivity. As “Pro Aris Et Focis” wrote in 1769,“Our merchants
have done worthily; but it is the body of the people, who must, under GOD,
finally save us. For while there are debauched consumers of foreign luxu-
ries, there always will be, in this depraved state, mercenary creatures enough
to import the bane of their country.” The author refused to let the vicious
consumer sit complacently. Victory over an autocratic Parliament required
“the virtue of the people,” all of them.97
In the formation of new political solidarities, it was of no little impor-
tance that the virtuous consumer actually look virtuous. Although it was
not always advisable to judge people by appearances alone, a patriotic style
of dress accompanied the celebration of bourgeois virtue. Fashion became
a measure of ideological commitment; it certainly beat other ways of dis-
cerning what was going on inside people’s heads. “Philo Americanus” could
hardly contain himself when he reflected “on our political virtue.” “I am
almost transported,” he exclaimed in 1769; “my heart distends with gener-
ous pride because I am an American. Others may extol Roman greatness or
Corsican bravery, but the impartial must think American patriots fall be-
hind neither.” And what had the patriotic Americans done to deserve such
praise? They had visibly changed their consumer habits. “America, from
one end to the other, can now boast of Gentlemen and Ladies, used to all
the delicacies of life, encouraging industry, and submitting to eat and drink
and wear, what every peasant may procure. These are efforts of patriotism
that Greece and Rome never yet surpassed, nay not so much as equaled.”98
Another Virginian who happened to share with Philo Americanus a pen-
chant for grandiloquence assured newspaper readers that virtuous colo-
nists had completely reformed the face of colonial society. Everyone could
see that “our present Wants may be supplied, by importing only a few Ar-
ticles from Great Britain; and that in a very short Time we can live without
them. . . . The whirling of our Spinning Wheels affords us the most delightful
Music; and that Man is the most respected who appears clad in Homespun,
as such Dress is a sure Evidence of Love to his Country.”99 Journal authors
even counseled Americans against giving their votes to candidates who failed
to achieve the proper look of virtue. “A. Y.,” for example, vowed not to sup-
port any person in an upcoming election “who do[es] not appear princi-
pally Clothed in Cloth made either in this Colony or some Part of America.”
As A. Y. explained, “Let a Man’s Zeal for his Country appear ever so Flam-
ing, if he is Attired in Foreign Fineries, I can’t believe his Patriotism is sin-
cere, for his very Apparel gives him the Lie.”100 A report from South Carolina
echoed this logic: A Charleston writer insisted on halting all commerce with
Georgia and Rhode Island until the merchants in those colonies showed
more enthusiasm for non-importation. There should be no trade with them
“till they have Virtue enough to cloath themselves in the humble Dress of
public Virtue, preferable to the Chains of Oppression, or dirty Allurements
of Self-Interest.”101
The call for the public display of homespun had an unmistakable class
edge to it. In fact, it represented an inversion of an earlier consumer rheto-
ric. At mid-century moral writers had employed the language of luxury to
keep less affluent colonists in their places. If such people purchased goods
beyond their means, they would soon call into question a traditional status
system in which gentlemen were supposed to look like gentlemen, mid-
dling farmers like middling farmers. The problem was that the ordinary
colonists with a little money in their pockets bought whatever they pleased,
and they sometimes passed themselves off as belonging to a higher social
class than the one into which they had been born.102 But the politicization
of fashion allowed the lower orders to turn the tables on their putative bet-
ters. It was now the wealthy gentlemen who had to rein in their expendi-
tures, who had to give the appearance of consumer virtue, and who had to
wear homespun garments however unappealing they may have seemed. As
one contributor to the Boston Gazette complained, “The greatest Difficulty,
with Regard to wearing Homespun Garments is, that the rich, the polite &
fashionable do not wear them.” Since the ordinary American allegedly loved
“to mimic his Superiors,” it seemed advisable “for our fine Gentlemen . . .
instead of declaiming and writing in Favor of our own Manufactures, to
appear in Public clothed all over in Homespun.” If that happened, virtuous
dress would become good for business. The shops would redouble their
efforts to obtain homespun cloth. “For my Part,” this writer concluded, “I
never will believe that our great Folks are in earnest desirous of a Reforma-
tion in this Particular, till they bring Homespun into Fashion by wearing it
themselves.”103
One Henry Lloyd, Esquire, had apparently learned the lesson of visible
equality. In March 1770 the Boston Gazette noted that this true American
patriot had just set out on a journey to “New-York, Philadelphia and the
Southern Colonies.” Lloyd won high marks since his “whole Apparel and
Horse Furniture were of American Manufacture. His Clothes, Linen, Shoes,
Stockings, Boots, Gloves, Hat, Wig . . . were all manufactured and made up
in New-England—An Example truly worthy of Imitation.”104 Lloyd still
looked like a proper gentleman, and as the public could now attest, his con-
sumer heart was obviously in the right place.
V
A narrative of the non-importation movement might well be organized
around a series of unintended consequences. Just as the need to coordinate
consumer protest over a huge geographic area forced colonies to think of
themselves in innovative collective terms—most typically, as Americans—
so too a market strategy of resistance created unanticipated situations in
which non-importation substantially transformed the character of politi-
cal life, encouraging persons with little or no personal experience in formal
elections to record their opinions on the most pressing issue of the day.
From New England to South Carolina ordinary people scribbled their names
on subscription rolls, pledging support for a boycott. These documents were
carried through the neighborhoods, and although modern Americans may
think nothing of signing their names to various petitions, colonists rightly
understood that putting one’s name on a list of this sort was a very serious
act. Subscriptions taught middling people that the public was not simply a
rhetorical device. It described the will of the majority. Numbers mattered.
No one involved in these innovative procedures consciously set out to make
colonial political culture more democratic. But whatever their goals may
have been, organized non-importation rewarded ordinary consumers an-
gered by recent parliamentary policy with a voice in public affairs, and once
they discovered that they counted for something, they found it hard to re-
turn to an older, deferential system of political expression. Subscription
politics figured in different areas at different moments. First observed in
Boston, they later appeared in most major port cities and many smaller
country towns, everywhere generating lists of the names of America’s vir-
tuous consumers, women as well as men.
The idea that ordinary people might sign up to support non-importa-
tion seems to have originated during a Boston town meeting held on Octo-
ber 28, 1767. After discussing possible explanations for a sharp downturn in
the local economy, the most urgent of which was “the late additional
Burthens and Impositions on the Trade of the Province, which threaten the
Country with Poverty and Ruin,” the city government voted to recommend
cutting back on a long list of consumer items imported from Great Britain.
But, instead of resting content with a statement of good intentions, the
meeting decided that some kind of general subscription affirming popular
support for non-importation should be drawn up for “individuals and
householders” to sign. A committee drafted a document, which it then sent
to a printer for distribution throughout Boston. Every person who affixed

his or her name to one of these forms did “promise and engage, to and with
each other, that we will encourage the Use and Consumption of all Articles
manufactured in any of the British American Colonies, and more espe-
cially in this Province; and that we will not, from and after the 31st of De-
cember next ensuing, purchase any of the following Articles, imported from
abroad.” The inventory contained about fifty separate entries, many of them
luxury goods. Pleased with their innovative plan to mobilize popular sup-
port for non-importation, town leaders ordered that the basic subscription
form “relative to the enumerated Articles, be immediately Published; and
that the Selectmen be directed to distribute a proper Number of them among
the Freeholders of this Town; and to forward a Copy of the same to the
Select-Men of every Town in the Province; as also to the principal City or
Town Officers of the chief Town in the several Colonies on the Continent.”105
The issuance of the subscription papers set off a buzz of excitement.
The Boston selectmen reminded the public that they “strongly recommend
this Measure to Persons of all Ranks, as the most honorable and effectual
way of giving a public Testimony of their Love to their Country.” The effort
to obtain as many signatures as possible seems to have expanded the nor-
mal definition of politics. The call to “individuals and householders” be-
came an appeal to “Persons of all Ranks.” Town leaders were clearly worried
about possible loss of face, for if few people bothered to sign the subscrip-
tion, critics of organized non-importation—in this case, prominent mer-
chants and crown appointees—could legitimately claim that relatively few
Boston consumers were prepared to sacrifice comfort for principle. Market
resistance, however, forced both sides to concede a significant point. Since
anyone could qualify as a potential consumer, it made no sense to pretend
that a narrowly defined group such as the “householders” could speak for
“Persons of all Ranks.” Grumbling about the subscription movement did
not intimidate the selectmen. They observed that the town clerk had a good
supply of forms, and “we especially recommend it [signing the pledge] at
this Time, as malicious Persons venture, in the public Prints, falsely to in-
sinuate that the above mentioned Subscription is merely a Party Business,
and the Proposal only of a Junto; notwithstanding so many Gentlemen of
the first Credit, Character, and Reputation have already encouraged it by
their Subscription.”106
Local newspapers cheered on the effort, providing regular updates on
the number of people coming forward to sign. “We hear the Subscription
Papers for encouraging our own Manufactures, and laying aside certain
enumerated Articles,” recounted the editor of the Boston Gazette, “fill up
surprisingly, and that [the] said Measure is so well approved of in the Coun-
try, that Town Meetings are now calling in order to agree upon similar mea-
sures.” Several issues later the journal announced that “the Subscription
Rolls are daily filling up at the Town Clerk’s Office.” The Evening-Post had it
on good authority from the “Gentlemen” who carried the forms through
the neighborhoods that “it appeared that a great Part of the Freeholders
had subscribed.” Both newspapers reported that in the nearby communi-

ties of Charleston and Dedham consumer forms modeled on Boston’s were
“filling up fast,” and in Providence and Newport, Rhode Island, subscrip-
tion lists made the rounds.107
Although surviving records do not make it possible to know for certain
how many people actually signed the rolls in Boston, British officials feared
for the worst. Their comments suggested that “Persons of all Ranks” did in
fact take this occasion to voice contempt for recent British legislation. Con-
sumer politics was eroding traditional assumptions about the privileges of
class. The royal governor of Massachusetts somewhat nervously assured a
British correspondent that it was safe to dismiss the entire subscription
drive, since, as he had apparently learned, most of the signers were mar-
ginal men and women. An even more revealing assessment of the new con-
sumer politics came from Peter Oliver, a crown official who later penned a
delightful though dyspeptic history of the American Revolution. Poking
fun at Boston’s radical spokesmen, people such as Samuel Adams and James
Otis, Oliver declared that “they entered into non-importation Agreements.
A Subscription Paper was handed about, enumerating a great Variety of
Articles not to be imported from England, which they supposed would
muster the Manufacturers in England into a national Mob to support their
Interests. Among the various prohibited Articles, were Silks, Velvets, Clocks,
Watches, Coaches & Chariots, & it was highly diverting, to see the names &
marks, to the Subscription, of Porters & Washing Women.” But surely Oliver
missed the point. If these poor laborers had no prospect of purchasing a
clock or coach, they fully appreciated the symbolic significance of these
imports, and while a self-styled “True Patriot” could insist in a newspaper
“that the most wealthy & respectable among us, have treated the thing in
the ludicrous light it deserves,” one suspects that however desirous the por-
ters and washing women of Boston may have been of one day owning such
fine objects, they also recognized that consumer dependence translated into
a loss of liberty.108
In Connecticut non-importation also heightened popular participa-
tion in political affairs. Although no one seems to have done more than to
suggest the circulation of subscription lists in this colony, commentators
noted that a lot more people were turning out for town meetings.109 In 1770
voters were especially agitated by rumors coming out of New York City that
the merchants of that port had unilaterally decided to resume normal trade
with Great Britain. Suddenly, previously indifferent persons felt compelled
to record their resolute support for a continued boycott of imported goods.
In Norwich, for example, it was reported that “there was as full a town Meet-
ing as ever known, when the Town voted, almost unanimously, to adhere to
their former Non-Importation Agreement.” The “Inhabitants” of Norwich
were remarkably well informed about the relation between consumer resis-
tance and parliamentary oppression, and at this moment they wanted “to
give their Sentiments upon the State of the general Agreement, as it now
stands in this and the neighboring Colonies.”110 In Lyme a gathering of
townsmen announced that they were “fully sensible of the necessity of Union
and Harmony among the American Colonies at this Time especially when
our Liberties are attacked in the most unjust and high-handed Manner, by
the wicked Influence of a haughty and tyrannical Minister.”111
The people of Connecticut did more, however, than simply give voice
to a determination to uphold their non-importation agreements. They
elected delegates—two from each town—to a completely unprecedented
“General Meeting,” which was in fact held in New Haven on September 13.
The convention went by several different names, “general Congress of the
Merchants,”“Meeting of the Mercantile and Landed Interest of the Colony,”
and “General Congress of the Merchants and Landholders of the Colony of
Connecticut,” but whatever it was called, it operated outside the normal
channels of government. Some evidence suggests that Connecticut voters
experimented with an innovative form of representation based on economic
interest, so that one representative from each town was supposed to be a
merchant or trader, the other a farmer.112 As “X” explained, “The Plough
and the Sail” must unite for the common good, since in an advanced
economy like Connecticut’s, “Land, the capital of the husbandman, is of
little or no value (however fertile) if no market offer for its produce, and
ever rises, and becomes valuable, in proportion to the increase of trade, and
commerce.”113 A majority of Connecticut’s towns selected delegates, and
while the elections may not have drawn into consumer politics persons of
all ranks, their inventive character convinced “A Freeman,” writing in a
Hartford newspaper, that extra-legal meetings of this sort might be part of
a conspiracy aimed at overthrowing traditional authority.114
In Maryland printed forms helped mobilize popular support for non-
importation. In June 1769 colony leaders concluded that they needed a “gen-
eral Resolution,” precisely laying out in nine separate sections their
expectations for political resistance. Although the wording of the Mary-
land statement was much like those drafted in other regions, it stipulated
that the final document should be circulated throughout the various coun-
ties. Even before they got down to the business of passing resolutions, the
delegates to the Annapolis meeting agreed that “Twelve Copies should be
printed and transmitted to each County, to be signed by the People, which
it is expected, will be done with great Readiness throughout the Province.”
The language of the Maryland statement did not define “the People,” and
since the great tobacco planters—designated in the documents as “the
Gentlemen of the different Counties”— were not eager to expand the po-
litical culture, one may assume that an appeal to the people was not in-
tended to encourage radical forms of participation. Still, once the genie was
out of the bottle, one could not predict what might happen. As in other
colonies attempting to generate popular enthusiasm for non-importation,
Marylanders found that numbers counted, and a local newspaper proudly
announced that some 840 people had signed their names to a list pledging
“to promote Frugality and lessen the future Importation of Goods from
Great-Britain.” And, of course, the printed resolutions served to indoctri-

nate the populace, to make trimmers uncomfortable, and to remind all con-
sumers that failure to abide by the new rules would make them “Enemies to
the Liberties of America,” who would be treated “on all Occasions, with the
Contempt they deserve.”115
Non-importation thoroughly unsettled the politics of South Carolina.
For many decades a group of wealthy and complacent rice planters had run
the colonial assembly like a private club, and had Parliament left well enough
alone, these men might have voiced their unhappiness with the Townshend
Acts in ways that did not upset business as usual. But even before the British
government enacted new duties, crown appointees in Charleston had man-
aged to alienate powerful leaders in South Carolina, and agitation for an ef-
fective non-importation agreement during the summer of 1769 exacerbated
festering tensions. In June two men claiming to speak for Charleston’s “me-
chanics”— Christopher Gadsden and Peter Timothy, editor of the South-Caro-
lina Gazette—put forth a list of resolutions related to non-importation.
Although it enjoyed considerable popular support, the merchants objected
to several details, and in July they issued their own agreement. Since having
competing non-importation agreements made no sense, the mechanics and
merchants—as well as an impressive crowd of prominent planters—gath-
ered under Charleston’s Liberty Tree to negotiate an uneasy alliance. Some
268 people took the occasion to sign the joint agreement.116
For the likes of Gadsden and Timothy that number, however impres-
sive, was not sufficient. A lot of people living in other sections of South
Carolina had not been present at the Liberty Tree, and so, like the organiz-
ers in Boston, they circulated subscription papers throughout the colony.
As quickly became apparent, they not only wanted additional signatures
but also demanded accurate reporting of the names. It was important to
know precisely who was a “Subscriber” and who a “Non-Subscriber.” Timo-
thy reminded the “Gentlemen in the country [who are] possessed of these
Forms . . . to transmit the names subscribed thereto, as frequently as pos-
sible.”117 As soon as the information on the new names reached Charleston,
it was placed in “an exact Register,” which anyone could examine. What few
foresaw was that insistence on precision was intended more to punish non-
subscribers than to identify the colony’s virtuous consumers. The names of
the resisters—a kind of negative list—appeared in the newspapers. An en-
forcement committee carefully monitored commercial dealings through-
out South Carolina in an ongoing effort to isolate subscribers from
non-subscribers. In November, for example, it spotted a problem. It seemed
that some people who had signed the original non-importation papers had
sold a parcel of rice belonging to a “Non-Subscriber”“contrary to the TRUE
INTENT AND MEANING of the said Resolutions”:
The General Committee therefore think it necessary, to publish the first Breach of that
solemn Agreement; and at the same Time, to remind every SUBSCRIBER, that the PUR-
CHASING FROM, OR SELLING FOR, NON-SUBSCRIBERS, ANY GOODS OR MER-
CHANDISE WHATEVER, will be deemed an Infringement of the said Agreement.118
Non-importation resolutions circulated throughout South Carolina during the summer of 1769. Supporters obtained “Blank Copies” of the general
agreement, collected as many signatures as possible, and then returned the lists to the leaders of the boycott. South-Carolina Gazette, 13 July 1769. Courtesy
of the Charleston Library Society, Charleston, South Carolina.
By December life for the non-subscribers had become extremely difficult.

One Charleston newspaper claimed that the “List of Non-Subscribers” had
dropped to only twenty names. Even some of these people, it was reported,
seemed to be trying to uphold the patriotic resolutions “by not dealing with
other Non-Subscribers, and not even offering the Produce for Sale, but ship-
ping it off.” In South Carolina, at least, the public had been transformed
into an extra-legal police force, and by expanding the scope of politics, the
keepers of the Charleston lists reduced British imports by more than 50
percent in a single year.
A few voices protested the actions of the protesters. For them, it seemed
absurd to claim that the public was a repository of consumer virtue. In Charles-
ton, this self-constituted body had become an authoritarian instrument de-
signed to strip honest merchants of their constitutional rights as British
subjects. Drawing on his knowledge of the common law, William Wragg in-
sisted that the July non-importation agreement represented an illegal combi-
nation in constraint of trade. As a
non-subscriber he thought he should
be allowed to sell his goods to whom-
ever he pleased.119 William Drayton
agreed. A prosperous merchant who
enjoyed family ties with the sitting
lieutenant governor, Drayton blasted
Gadsden’s pretentious claim to speak
for the popular will. “This Commit-
tee,” Drayton fumed, “hath violated
the first Principles of Liberty. Its
Members act in a despotic and un-
just Manner . . . for they have as-
sumed a Power unknown to the
Constitution.” If Drayton enjoyed
the same rights as any other English-
man, then he should not have to suf-
fer seeing his name “printed and
dispersed through North-America,
with Design to prejudice my Coun-
trymen against me.” And in a direct
challenge to his tormentors, he sug-
gested that the heading appearing in
the newspapers over the list of non-
subscribers be revised: “A List of the
Names of those Freemen, who, by Local organizers of the South Carolina boycott
being possessed of a proper Idea of maintained up-to-date lists of those who had
Liberty, and the Constitution of subscribed to the “Resolutions” concerning
Government under which they live, commerce with Great Britain. The activities of
“Non-Subscribers”— now easily identified—were
have the Courage and Integrity to exposed to constant public scrutiny. South-Carolina
persist, in acting in Conformity to Gazette, 23 November 1769. Courtesy of the
the Dictates of their Reason.”120 Charleston Library Society.
Gadsden rejected these cries out of hand. After all, the enemies of lib-
erty had driven virtuous people into a corner. He reminded critics that the
Americans had been “reduced to a necessity of associating together, in or-
der to discover, and unite in, some common means, for the recovery and
preservation of their rights and liberties.” Gadsden never doubted that “the
means they have actually fixed upon, for that purpose, are justifiable, upon
natural and constitutional principles; and will, probably be productive of
the end they aim at.” In other words, pragmatism warranted the printing of
the names of the non-subscribers. If the public did not know their identi-
ties, these secret foes might continue selling imported British goods to un-
suspecting patriots, thus profiting from the noble sacrifice of those
subscribers who had halted trade. But more, Gadsden had numbers on his
side. He could point to the “exact Register” of names. When the majority
determined how best to respond to a political threat—in this case, parlia-
mentary legislation—the minority was obliged to accept that course of ac-
tion. Although Gadsden possessed a tenuous grasp of syntax, his defense of
the popular will revealed dramatically how the pressure to make non-im-
portation work had affected colonial political discourse:
And further, if we consider, that in the carrying on of all kinds of human transactions,
of whatever nature or consequence, where the consent of a community or body of
men is required, from the lowest club up to the parliament of Great-Britain, or to the
people of the greatest nation upon earth, that, when an indubitable majority of such
bodies of men, have deliberately determined upon any business within their several
spheres, and fixed upon the manner of doing it, the minority . . . are, and ought to be,
bound of course: And were this not the case, it would be next to impossible, to com-
plete any business of this sort amongst mankind.121
Perhaps not surprisingly, Drayton left for England, to the last depicting him-
self a martyr to an extra-legal consumer public.
Subscription lists should be seen as a highly innovative instrument
through which colonists explored the limits of democratic participation.122
Appearing on the margins of mainstream political discourse, the popular
lists addressed the issue of political exclusivity. Did the men and women
who signed the papers, for example, necessarily represent the public? If they
did not, then for whom did they speak? These were the sorts of questions
that “Cato” examined in the Pennsylvania Chronicle in 1770. For him, the
colonial political crisis was too important to be left in the hands of a mi-
nority pretending to speak for a majority. “This is a point,” he wrote, “in
which every freeholder of this province is highly interested, and in which
every one of them has a right to a voice.” He was irritated by inflated claims
to political authority advanced by a select group of local “subscribers to the
non-importation.” These people assumed “an exclusive right to determine
this matter.” If they did possess such a privilege, Cato warned, “it follows
that the subscribers to the non-importation have the sole right to deter-
mine a question of liberty, that most nearly concerns every freeman of this
province. For if it is the only mode of opposition of any force, and those
two or three hundred subscribers have a right to make the agreement voice
whenever they please, it is a plain inference that they have a right to decide
on a point which affects the liberties of the people of this province.” Cato
wanted to open up the process. Votes, not signatures, reflected the popular
will, and he trusted that “every freeman, whether he be farmer, merchant,
or mechanic, will insist upon his right to a vote in so important an affair.”123
The question of political inclusion also flared in New York, sparking a
debate that echoed those of the other colonies. During the summer of 1770
spokesmen on both sides of the boycott movement hotly debated the issue
of democratic participation. After Parliament repealed most of the
Townshend duties, the major import merchants of New York City agitated
to renew trade as soon as possible. Delays in reestablishing English con-
tracts, it was feared, might give competitors in Philadelphia or Boston a
huge advantage. But however much the New York merchants wanted to
turn a profit, they could not bring themselves unilaterally to break the local
non-importation agreement. What they needed at this decisive moment
was authorization from the public, and this they determined to obtain
through a public opinion poll of consumers, perhaps the first such con-
sumer plebiscite conducted in America. The merchants knew they would
be safe if they could demonstrate with quantitative evidence that the public
wanted to rescind the boycott. The tactic worked. Polling papers carried
through the city wards revealed that a majority of the people of New York
supported a greatly modified boycott that allowed the merchants to import
virtually everything from Great Britain except tea.
Leaders of more radical persuasion in New York found themselves con-
fronted with a quandary that had haunted democratic theorists since an-
cient Greece. How does a minority respond when it is certain that the
majority has made a mistake? The obvious ploy was to declare the entire
poll a fraud, and over several months the supporters of a continued total
boycott did just that. They hammered away at the merchants’ sham democ-
racy. The author of “A Protest” in the New-York Mercury argued that the
reported numbers were not credible. “It appears from the Ward-Lists,” the
writer charged, “that only 794 Persons in this populous City, including all
Ranks, and both Sexes; declared for the Affirmative of the Question.”124 It is
particularly significant that this writer assumed that a true canvass of colo-
nial consumers—even one involving complex political issues—required
inclusiveness, full participation by women as well as men, the poor as well
as the rich. One South Carolina newspaper thought that the New Yorkers
had already opened the floodgates, reporting that in New York City “The
Sense of the People was taken by Subscription, and near 800 Names got,
about 300 of the People without a single Shilling Property.”125
“A Son of Liberty” also challenged the merchants’ democratic claims.
In the New-York Advertiser he ridiculed the assertion that “a majority ap-
peared for importation.” The merchants had not even approached most of
the men and women who composed the consumer public. “A Son of Lib-
erty” observed that “there were not quite twelve hundred persons who signed
for importing (notwithstanding the diligence and indefatigable industry of
those who went about for the purpose), and I am well assured that they do
Subscribers in New York pledged to support an association of like-minded people “of all
reputable Ranks, Conditions, and Denominations” in defense of “the Rights of America.”
Broadside. New York, 1770. Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library, Brown University.
not amount to above one third of the inhabitants of this city (not to men-
tion the counties, who have an undoubted right to give their voices upon
this very interesting and important subject).”126
During this contest, “A Citizen” produced a pointed defense of open,
egalitarian procedures in a politicized consumer marketplace. To appreci-
ate fully his contribution to a discussion of the meaning of the public, one
must remember that “A Citizen” was exploring civic responsibility within a
commercial public sphere of quite recent invention—in other words, within
a popular political arena that was just beginning to express itself apart from
traditional institutions of governance. The merchant canvass of New York
brought theory into contact with events, helping ordinary men and women
better to appreciate the interdependence of liberty and commerce. “Will it
excuse this City to the rest of the World,” “A Citizen” asked, “if it should
appear that a Majority of the Inhabitants concurred in desiring to break
through the [non-importation] Agreement?” He argued through interro-
gation, with hard questions leading to harder ones until the logic of the
performance seemed irrefutable. “Supposing there is a Majority, (which is
not admitted),” he inquired of the merchants,
was it fairly and properly obtained? Was that Opinion given and subscribed with due
Deliberation, Knowledge and Freedom? Or were not a very considerable Number of
the Subscribers, influenced and determined, by your Persuasions and Representations,
or by submitting their Opinions to be guided by your Advice and superior Judgment?
Can opinions so given and obtained, properly be called the Voice of the People, or
given a Sanction to the Dissolution of an Agreement of such immense Weight and
Importance?127
The breaking of the New York boycott in 1770 came to a curious con-
clusion that prefigured America’s eventual separation from Great Britain.
As in the larger imperial contest, the failure of local authorities to expand
representation, to listen to a newly empowered “Voice of the People,” ended
in violence. When “Gentlemen” sought to rationalize the resumption of
trade, they were confronted by a group of forty or fifty people who gath-
ered at the “house of Mr. Jasper Drake, inn-keeper.” The New-York Mercury
reported that “they erected a flag, as a signal of the place appointed for their
rendezvous, and after carousing and drinking very plentifully . . . they sal-
lied out in the evening, . . . carrying with them music, colors and staffs,
upon which were labels fixed with the inscription of, Liberty and Non-Im-
portation.” The mob marched through the streets “crying out, No Importa-
tion.” The leading merchants and their allies could not endure the
provocation. The popular protest ended when “a Number of principal People
. . . applied to an Alderman to go and stop those People, and take the Flag
from them, upon which the Alderman headed a considerable Number with
Canes and Clubs, and attempted to take their Colors, upon which a Scuffle
ensued, and a few got hurt.”128
The British could never quite comprehend why taxes on a few inconse-
quential consumer goods had sparked such intense debate. Nor, for that
matter, did many privileged Americans understand where the popular cur-
rents were carrying them. But long before anyone dared to speak openly of
independence, ordinary consumers had challenged several basic assump-
tions about colonial politics, inviting men and women of all ranks into a
conversation about liberty and declaring that the act of signing one’s name
to a subscription list or carrying a banner in the streets of New York City
was as fully political as were elections to the colonial assemblies. Experi-
mental politics had demonstrated to those who had opposed the public
will “what an evil thing and bitter it is to set up against the universal judg-
ment of the people.”129 The narratives of consumer resistance remind mod-
ern Americans, once again, that it was “on the level of day-to-day life, rather
than on the rarefied plateau of theoretical debate, that the opinions of most
men were formed.”130
VI
During the summer of 1770 an exchange occurred in the Pennsylvania
Chronicle, and Universal Advertiser that revealed from yet another perspec-
tive how the politics of non-importation encouraged new voices to speak
to power in a consumer public sphere. Two readers identified only as “Fidelia”
and “Constantia” reported an argument provoked by an essay in the news-
paper. In that piece “Atticus” claimed to have quoted directly from a letter
written specifically by a woman, and Fidelia and Constantia challenged the
authenticity of the correspondence. They demanded Atticus confess whether
he had actually fabricated the material for his own editorial purposes. “Pray
Mr. ATTICUS,” demanded the inquisitive pair, “be so kind as to decide a
dispute between two girls, who pretend to know something of style, by tell-
ing us whether you wrote the letters signed Betty Telltruth, or that they were
really wrote by a female hand.” Like advice columnists, then and now, Atticus
responded coyly, assuring readers “that several of the letters which in the
course of these essays, I have published, were not of my own composition . . .
and by the delicacy of the sentiment, and handwriting, I believe them to
have been wrote by a polite female.”131
Atticus’s evasive response probably failed to settle the quarrel. How-
ever unsatisfied the two women may have been, their aggressive interroga-
tion draws attention to the fact that in this particular society women were
speaking out. In the swirl of controversy over non-importation, they par-
ticipated in the political life of American communities more fully, more
expectantly, and more impatiently than at any previous time. During the
Stamp Act crisis, men and women had sparred over the proper role of women
in organized market resistance. As the political stakes were raised and as
mere “Washing Women” signed their names to subscription lists, ongoing
tensions between the sexes spilled over into the imperial debate, setting off
a conversation within a conversation. Although colonial males may have
hoped to contain the expansion of political participation—both in the streets
and in print—it was clear that some women intended to make themselves
heard, forcefully articulating what one historian has recently called “com-
munal consciousness.”132
About the centrality of women in determining the success of the non-
importation moment, few American men disagreed. As consumers, women
had long exercised broad discretion over day-to-day household expendi-
tures, and even though the law formally awarded colonial males—as hus-
bands and fathers—control over real property, women regularly dealt with
the shopkeepers and itinerant traders who merchandised imported British
goods. Without their enthusiastic support, a strategy of consumer sacrifice
stood no chance. As a writer in a Boston newspaper declared quite matter-
of-factly, “We must after all our Efforts, depend greatly upon the Female
Sex for the Introduction of Economy among us.”133 An address entitled “To
the Ladies of North America” made much the same point in an edgy, defen-
sive style so characteristic of political commentary touching on questions
of gender. “I am convinced,” the male writer asserted, “that at this present
[time] it is not only in your Inclination and Will, but also in your Power, to
effect more in Favor of your Country, than an Army of a Hundred Thou-
sand Men; and indeed more than all the armed Men on this vast Conti-
nent.—Can a Woman forget her Ornaments? Yes, I know she can.”134
And, no doubt, the author was correct. Targeted market resistance de-
pended on America’s wives and mothers. Christopher Gadsden, the fire-
brand of Charleston, stated the proposition with typical bluntness. In a
long speech urging an effective boycott of British manufactures, he told the
audience, “I come now to the last, and what many say and think is the great-
est difficulty of all we have to encounter, that is, to persuade our wives to
give us assistance, without which ’tis impossible to succeed.” After all, if the
colonists were serious about abridging consumer spending, they would soon
discover that “our political salvation” depended on establishing the prin-
ciples of “strictest economy,” a “management” skill associated in his mind
with women. Gadsden was optimistic. However women in other colonies
might react to the political crisis, he could declare of South Carolina women
that “none in the world are better economists, make better wives and more
tender mothers, than ours. Only let their husbands point out the necessity
of such a conduct . . . [and] their affections will soon be awakened, and
cooperate with their reason.”135
Political urgency did not do much to promote male charm. Men pro-
fessing to have the best interests of the country at heart fretted about the
ability of their newly recruited female allies to make the kinds of sacrifices
that genuine patriotism required. Part of the problem, male writers con-
fessed, was that women were weaker vessels and therefore constitutionally
less able to resist consumer temptation. If truth be known, they bore much
of the responsibility for colonial dependency, since it was they who had
insisted on purchasing so many faddish British imports in the first place
and thereby had added immensely to the load of debt that weighed so heavily
on the provincial economy. Newspaper commentators never had much to
say about the flood of consumer goods acquired by other members of Ameri-
can families, nor did they seem much concerned that if women did in fact
buy more British manufactures than did their husbands, then the women’s
sacrifice for liberty would be proportionally greater than the men’s. Rather,
like “Mahalaleel” of New London, male commentators whined that “Tea
drinking is a female sin. Eve is represented as first in the transgression, so
Eve’s daughters are first in and most attached to this vice. They are most
violently addicted to it, and use all their persuasions to entice their Adams
to perpetuate the like folly, or at least to countenance them in it.” One should
not mistake the tone of such complaint for gentle teasing. A nasty streak
was undeniable. “Eve’s fair daughters, or sordid self-interest, encourage our
merchants to the importation of this fatal plant.”136
Although a contributor to a New York City journal known as “A. B.”
avoided outright belligerence, he still wondered whether the females of this
society were up to the political challenge. It has been declared, he snidely
reported, “that an Opinion prevails in England, among the Enemies of our
Liberty, that the American Ladies, through an inordinate attachment to
European Superfluities, will not be possessed of a sufficient Share of Virtue
to discontinue their Use, under our present unconstitutional Impositions.”
In a classic backhanded compliment, A. B. announced that he never be-
lieved all the bad things people were saying about American women. After
all, as “a real Friend to the Ladies,” he felt comfortable advising “the mar-
ried Ladies, [to] unite in one general Agreement, that they will respectively
use their Influence (which is not a little) with their Husbands, not to re-
scind from that noble Resolution of Non-Importation.” They might start,
he thought, by “quitting the Use of those Tinsels, Gewgaws, and exuberant
Fineries, which cost their Husbands much Toil in the Acquisition, and a
serious Sum of Money in the using.”137
The evidence against self-indulgent women was disturbing. In Con-
necticut, “Incutius Americanus” noted that “the ladies instead of attending
the true interest of their families . . . have expended their estates in imitat-
ing the customs and dress of foreigners in adorning themselves according
to the newest taste, with silks, lawns, cambrics, gauzes, chintz, calicoes, rib-
bons of the newest cut, &c. &c. &c.”138 One might observe in passing that
Incutius Americanus seems to have followed the newest foreign cuts very
attentively, but apparently that dangerous consumer knowledge did not
threaten his virtue. A writer “From the Country” echoed the evangelical
style, lecturing women, “Throw aside your sloth & bury your pride in
oblivion, and lay your hand on the spindle.” The “virtuous woman” was a
marvel, for like the woman “given by Solomon, she seeketh wool and flax,
and maketh fine linen, and selleth it. . . . Her price is far above rubies; she
will do a man good, and not evil, all the days of her life.”139
Cultural conversations about non-importation had the capacity to trans-
form colonial households into revolutionary cells. Within these domestic set-
tings, men attempted to institute a new political aesthetic, instructing women
exactly how genuine female patriots should appear in public. The female body
literally became a battleground of imperial politics. Male writers seemed
particularly fond of homespun cloth, for example, missing few opportuni-

ties to recommend it to Eve’s American daughters. The rhetoric of con-
sumer sacrifice sometimes took on a romantic quality as male writers
imagined a brave society in which women dutifully resisted British oppres-
sion by saving their husbands’ money. One New England writer celebrated
this wonderful new world. “Let the [women] rich and poor join heart and
hand together,” he exclaimed, “and their only ambition be to see which can
make the best and finest apparel. What a beautiful prospect will then open
to our view, to see the young ladies both of city and country, clothed in
garments of their own manufacturing. How will it inspire the young gentle-
men with elevated thoughts!”140
The everyday appearance of an ordinary woman—one’s own wife or
daughter—communicated political commitment; she embodied the sym-
bolic shift in a material culture. “I would,” announced another colonist,
“observe that a Homemade Dress, will ever have an advantage beyond the
Boughten & Foreign [one]; even under all circumstances, the latter can only
be an ornament as a plume of fine feathers, but the other serves to a more
noble purpose, as a badge of Virtue and Industry in the family.”141 A South
Carolina essayist agreed. Calling for strict non-importation, “Pro Libertate
et Lege” reminded “the ladies” that “they certainly will be much the properest
persons to manage an affair of so much consequence to the American world.”
To demonstrate their dedication to the cause, he counseled, they might “at
least wear out your old silk gowns, purchase no new ones ’till this heavy
storm is past (storms are apt to spoil new silks): this will please your eco-
nomical husbands; it will certainly be a sacrifice worthy to them.”142 “A Bach-
elor” writing in a Pennsylvania newspaper thought that “pretty country
women” would have a better chance of finding honest suitors if they left off
“those superfluities of dress, which their native beauty should teach them
are unnecessary, and by this patriotic measure remove all complaints of
their would be admirers.”143
Colonial women apparently found patronizing advice as insufferable
in the late 1760s as they had during the Stamp Act crisis.144 Indeed, in sting-
ing retort to Pro Libertate, “Philanthropos” observed that his condescend-
ing “kind of address to the Ladies . . . will, prove as unsuccessful, as he has
already done, in some others made to that beautiful sex.” Other women
challenged their so-called lords and masters in ways that suggested that the
non-importation movement had given them a greater sense of indepen-
dence in the consumer public sphere, and the more that male writers in-
sisted that women were politically indispensable, the more the women strove
to renegotiate the taken-for-granted of domestic life.145 On one level, the
males who preached about the sensual allure of homespun clothes were
hypocrites. They knew from their own experience that it was they who had
encouraged women to dress like fashionable peacocks. One Connecticut
author reminded male readers that for a very long time the women had
“plumed ourselves only to please you. We baited our hook according to
your humors. We found you was in chase of gay feathers, when you came
into company with us. You respected our finery more than our persons; if
one of us was loaded or even over-loaded with Silks, Ruffles and Lace, above
the rest, she was your Phoenix.” And now, confronted with a new round of
British taxes, the eager suitors of yesterday had changed their tune. They
chose to forget that had the women actually “appeared in Home Spun dress,
we should have been treated as kitchen maids by you; had you respected
our Persons, Comage and Virtue, or even our Tongues as you did our Dress,
you would never have seen your Country at this pass.”146
On another level of engagement, women resented men offering gratu-
itous advice about consumer choices. Three Boston women— “ Aspatia,”
“Belinda,” and “Corrinna”— rounded on a man who had urged them to
“‘ lay aside our present Clothing, and Dress’ entirely and universally in the
‘Manufactures of America.’” They felt that he did not know what he was
talking about. “How far (if practicable) it is prudent,” they explained, “we
must take Liberty to judge ourselves, since we do, or at least ought to know,
what our own Circumstances as to the Means of Purchasing are; or, in other
Words, whether we can afford to let our Garments lay useless, and buy new
in their Room.” It was not that the three authors refused to support non-
importation. They stood with a number of people prepared to “promote
the Public Good” and to practice “Public Virtue.” They just did not want to
hear from “the little Wits and Foplings” of Boston about making consumer
choices.147
Although the details remained nebulous, patriotic women advanced a
vision of a better society in which men would radically change their ways. In
another context such criticism might have sounded chimerical, but with so
many male writers appealing to women to endorse non-importation, women
realized that their own, more domestic concerns might receive more serious
discussion. Many women took the opportunity to castigate the heavy drink-
ing that threatened the integrity of the colonial family. Such self-indulgence
not only drew men away from their homes but also wasted money. One writer
noted that males were always blathering about boring afternoon tea assem-
blies, social gatherings over which women exercised unquestioned cultural
authority. “You charge us with drinking at the Tea-Table,” the author explained,
“. . . and cannot we charge you with drinking more unnaturally at the Tav-
ern?” Contemporary males had forgotten their manners. “When we were at
the Tea-Table, you were as merry in the Chat as any of us, tho’ you now cry,
we were ruining you and ourselves together: pretty Lovers to sport with the
destruction of their Country.” This author recommended that until Parlia-
ment repealed the Townshend duties American women should dismiss “Proud
and Foppish” males, condemn public drunkenness, and refuse salutations
from any man who was obviously in his cups.148
Some women pushed the argument in surprising directions. “The La-
dies” of Newport, Rhode Island, for example, offered besotted males a bar-
gain that could only have made sense within a far-reaching public debate
over the political meaning of imported British goods. “We are willing to
give up our dear & beloved Tea, for the Good of the Public,” they announced,
“provided the Gentlemen will give up their dearer & more beloved Punch,
renounce going so often to Taverns, and become more kind and loving
Sweethearts and Husbands.” In a not very subtle jab at the performance of
intoxicated males, they added:
Most gladly we aside our Tea would lay,
Could we more Pleasures gain some other Way.149
In this spirit, “A Female” writing in the Massachusetts Spy reported that a

male contributor in a different newspaper had described women as “the
softer sex.” To which she responded smartly, “[N]otwithstanding our weak-
ness . . . I believe there are a greater number of tories of the male than of the
female kind. Pray how many of our sex joined and denied ourselves of what
was an idol to us—Tea? How did we withdraw from the shops of the im-
porters, and abhor them?” When it came to making sacrifices for the public
welfare, she concluded, “I have thought there may be a set of men who may
be styled ‘the softer sex.’”150
The most remarkable call for the reformation of males came from
Charleston, South Carolina. A woman who adopted the pen name “Margery
Distaff ” demanded, if not equality, then healthy signs of respect. It seems
that someone called “Pedes Œconomist” had urged local women to take up
spinning. To which Margery Distaff asked: What about the men? Were they
prepared to give up drinking, gambling, horse racing, and cockfighting?
“Women think,” she stated, “it would tend to but very little good Purpose
were they to card and spin, whilst the Men are racking their Brains, in con-
triving how to dissipate their Time and Money, in what they call PARTIES
OF PLEASURE.” Women would never behave like this. In a thoughtful al-
though obviously angry attack on her society’s construction of gender,
Margery Distaff observed:
The Reverse of all these Prodigalities is the Case with Women, whose utmost Expecta-
tions are, to go sometimes to a Ball or an Assembly, or to spend a few Hours in the
Evening with an Acquaintance or two, after having carefully attended the Concerns of
their Families in the preceding Part of the Day. These innocent Amusements only
serve to relax their Minds for a small Time, and also to support a friendly Sociability
between Friends; nor are such Meetings ever attended with any Expense that can hurt
one’s Fortune, whereas the Men throw away Hundreds, nay Thousands Of Pounds, in
one Evening without the least Remorse, however their helpless infants may suffer for
the future, by their present Imprudencies.
The essay reversed gender stereotypes. Her female companions were strong,
responsible, prudent, and frugal. In other words, they possessed all the “vir-
tues” claimed by males of the classic republican persuasion. Margery Dis-
taff concluded this remarkably tough-minded piece with a stern warning
to all would-be male patriots. “’ Til such a Reformation is brought about by
our Superiors, we shall not think ourselves obliged to wear out our Fingers,
either by carding or spinning,” she announced. And even more striking, she
told the strut-about males of Charleston that wearing “a Homespun Coat
only, will never pass with Women, for a Mark of thorough Amendment, un-
less they give up better Proofs thereof than this paltry outside Show of it.”151
For some American women—some of the time—resistance to parlia-

mentary taxation extended beyond relationships within the family. Although
it is impossible to tell from surviving records just how many women par-
ticipated in the new consumer politics, a few women announced that they
wanted a more prominent role in the defense of liberty. A strongly worded
poem published in the Pennsylvania Gazette captured an aggressive mobi-
lizing spirit that had not been present during the Stamp Act Crisis. “A Fe-
male” informed the newspaper’s editor that she had penned the piece merely
for “the Entertainment” of male readers. Such a claim may have raised ex-
pectations of a bantering interrogation of polite society. But “A Female”
had a more serious agenda. She entitled the work “The FEMALE PATRI-
OTS: Addressed to the Daughters of Liberty in America.” And from the
opening lines, the author called upon colonial women to make their voices
be heard in the public forum.
Since the Men, for a Party or Fear of a Frown,
Are kept by a Sugar-plum quietly down,
Supinely asleep—and depriv’d of their Sight,
Are stripp’d of their Freedom, and robb’d of their Right;
If the Sons, so degenerate! The Blessings despise,
Let the Daughters of Liberty nobly arise;
And tho’ we’ve no Voice but a Negative here,
The Use of the Taxables*, let us forbear:—
(Then Merchants import till your Stores are all full,
May the Buyers be few, and your Traffick be dull!)
Stand firmly resolv’d, and bid Grenville to see,
That rather than Freedom we part with our Tea.
The asterisk drew the reader’s attention to a list of prohibited imports—

“Tea, Paper, Glass and Paints”— and the despised British minister was George
Grenville, former chancellor of the exchequer, author of the Stamp Act, and
Townshend’s ally in squeezing revenues out of the American colonies. A
Female acknowledged the traditional exclusion of women from political
life. They could not vote. But in this performance, she seized an indirect
power over public affairs; the Daughters of Liberty in America spoke for
the communal consciousness.
Join mutual in this—and but small as it seems,
We may jostle a Grenville, and puzzle his Schemes;
But a Motive more worthy our Patriot-Pen,
Thus acting—we point out their Duty to Men;
And should the Bound-Pensioners tell us to hush,
We can throw back the Satire, by bidding them blush.152
The patriotic women of Boston refused to hush their protest. Like the
merchants and town committees, they drew up a binding non-importation
agreement. In 1770 the signers not only pledged to stop drinking tea “until the
Revenue Acts are repealed” but also summarized the ideological principles
that energized the market protest against Great Britain. Nothing about this
striking document suggests that women deferred to men on questions of “our
invaluable Rights and Privileges.” To be sure, by their own admission the
A non-importation agreement which circulated in Boston during the height of popular

resistance against the Townshend Revenue Act. 31 July 1769. Mss. Large. Image number 652.
Courtesy of the Massachusetts Historical Society.
Women joined scores of male “Subscribers” in Boston in support of non-importation, a

profoundly political act. Their signatures appear prominently on this 1769 agreement. 13 July
1769. Mss. Large. Image number 652. Courtesy of the Massachusetts Historical Society.
women had not taken the lead in the boycott movement, and their detrac-
tors suggested that they were unable to sacrifice consumer pleasures for the
common good. The authors of this agreement, however, announced that
they were now fully prepared to advance the colonial cause. “We think it
our Duty,” they asserted, “perfectly to concur with the true Friends of Lib-
erty, in all the Measures they have taken to save this abused Country from
Ruin and Slavery.” Tea had become the seal of American oppression. And in
these trying circumstances, Boston women wanted to support their hus-
bands in resistance to the empire and to carve out a separate political space
in which to operate. “We the Subscribers do strictly engage,” they declared,
“that we will totally abstain from the Use of the Article, (Sickness excepted)
not only in our respective Families; but that we will absolutely refuse it, if it
should be offered to us upon any Occasion whatsoever.” The women’s sub-
scription immediately collected three hundred names. The organizers noted
that they had obtained the signatures of a number of “worthy Ladies of the
highest Rank and Influence,” suggesting that a majority of the first signers
had been ordinary women anxious to record a political opinion.
The Boston newspapers followed the subscription drive with great in-
terest. Soon a hundred more women joined. Several weeks later the “young
Ladies of this Town” followed their mothers’ example. “We [are] the Daugh-
ters of those Patriots who have and now do appear for the public Interest,”
they stated. “We as such do with Pleasure engage with them in denying
ourselves the drinking of Foreign Tea, in hopes to frustrate a Plan that tends
to deprive the whole Community of their all that is valuable in life.” One
hundred twenty-six “young Ladies” signed this second agreement.
The movement spread. Communication came in from Connecticut that
“a Number of the principal Ladies” had discarded “foreign Tea.” Nothing
about this effort to mobilize consumers indicated that either the men or
women of Boston regarded these activities as marginal to the cause of lib-
erty. “The wise and virtuous Part of the fair Sex in Boston and other Towns,”
explained the Boston Gazette, “. . . being at length sensible that by the Con-
sumption of Tea, they are supporting the Commissioners and other famous
Tools of Power, have voluntarily agreed, not to give or receive any further
Entertainments of that kind, until those Creatures, together with the Bos-
ton Standing Army, are removed, and the Revenue Acts are repealed.”153
To exaggerate the numbers of women who actively engaged in orga-
nized consumer protests would be a mistake. The point is not that they
transformed the character of the political culture. Rather, an increasingly
intense conversation about British imports and American liberties invited
people to think about political life in more inclusive terms. This was the
society that inspired Abigail Adams to urge her husband, who was serving
in the national legislature, to remember the ladies. Like his colleagues, John
did not do so, and in the years following the Revolution some women looked
back at this period with a sense of disappointment. Expectations had not
been fulfilled.154 After all, non-importation had unexpectedly raised hard
questions about gender and politics. None reflected the radical mood bet-
ter than an obscure New York poem entitled simply “A New Favorite Song
for the Ladies.”
Though man has long boasted an absolute sway,
While woman’s hard fate was, love, honor, obey;
At length over wedlock fair liberty dawns,
And the Lords of Creation, must put in their horns;
For Hymen among ye proclaims his decree
When husbands are tyrants, their wives may be free.
Away with your doubts, your surmises and fears,

’Tis Venus beats up for her gay volunteers;
Enlist at her banner, you’ll vanquish with ease,
And make of your husbands what creatures you please;
To arms then ye fair ones, and let the world see,
When husbands are tyrants, their wives will be free.
The rights of your sex wou’d ye e’er see restor’d

Your tongues sho’d be us’d as a two-edged sword;
That ear piercing weapon—each husband must dread,
Who thinks of the marks you may place on his head;
Then wisely unite, till the men all agree,
That woman, dear woman, shall be free.
No more shall the wife, all as meek as a lamb,

Be subject to ‘Zounds do you know who I am.’
Domestic politeness shall flourish again,
When women take courage to govern the men;
Then stand to your charter and let the world see,
Tho husbands are tyrants, their wives will be free.155
Whether the author of this piece was in fact male or female does not matter.
For embattled consumers, the “Song” commented on a world turned up-
side down.
VII
The news from England might at another time have triggered wild celebra-
tions throughout America. This was not such an occasion. During the sum-
mer of 1769 key members of the British cabinet decided to abandon the
Townshend Program. It was not until March 1770 that Parliament finally
repealed the legislation that had sparked colonial resistance. One nettlesome
provision survived: A tax on tea remained on the statute books. The
government’s actions have been described as a retreat in face of mounting
opposition. To call the elimination of duties on various consumer items a
retreat, however, would leave the impression that the ministry had a coher-
ent plan from which it was now retreating. None was in place. As the rulers
of the greatest empire the world had ever known returned from London to
their country seats that spring, they sensed that the country’s leaders were
floundering, and like so many regimes over the centuries that have lacked
imaginative vision, this one mistook force and threats of force for a genu-
inely constructive policy.
The colonists shared the imperial fatigue. Another crisis had been
averted. But the differences that had created the controversy had not been
resolved, only temporarily tabled, and, of course, each gulp of tea repre-
sented an acceptance of taxation without representation. American mer-
chants cried that they had had enough of non-importation. And however
sincere their protestations about liberty and slavery, freedom and oppres-
sion, may have been, ordinary people interpreted partial repeal as an ex-
cuse for purchasing British goods in greater quantity than they had ever
done before.
Colonists who had expended so much energy mobilizing the American
people in support of non-importation found the sudden collapse of orga-
nized resistance devastating. They begged the merchants to abide by their
agreements; they appealed to town committees to maintain their vigilance.
They drew upon arguments that seemed to have worked so well only a few
months earlier. “It is in the power of the people of New-York, and God be
praised, of the people of the continent, by REFUSING TO PURCHASE, the
baubles bought from the Island of Britain to prevent their future importa-
tion,” insisted “An American,”“and in doing this, they will save their money
and their country at once.”156 “A Tradesman” asked poignantly, “Shall we

exchange our birthright Privileges for the paltry Luxuries of Great-Britain,
which impoverish and destroy us while we consume them?” Where were
the “real Lovers of Liberty” at such a time?157
Cajoling rhetoric only inspired finger-pointing. Recriminations flowed
from every region. It had been the New Yorkers who betrayed the cause.
Rhode Island and Georgia were surely to blame. Everyone knew that the
merchants of Boston cheated. The Philadelphia committees had always been
lukewarm. On and on it went, a chorus of disappointment as the sinews of
political trust dissolved. Whoever bore responsibility for defeat, it seemed
clear that self-interest had thwarted consumer virtue in the marketplace. As
“Cato” told the readers of several American journals, “The late Conduct of
the Merchants of New-York, Philadelphia, &c. sufficiently proves that no
Dependence is to be had upon any Combination or Agreement that can be
entered into for the public Good, however well calculated to answer that
End—if it interferes with the private immediate Interest of Individuals.”158
A statement originating in Charleston, South Carolina, employed heavy-
handed irony to make the same point. “Thus disposed and situated,” the
author declared, “we pay little or no regard to the many reports and publi-
cations, of the whole Continent’s having broken through their Non-Im-
portation Agreements, or the infamous insinuations most industriously
propagated, that none of them have played fair, but each endeavored to
Repeal of the more objectionable sections of the Revenue Act seemed to cool popular
enthusiasm for “AMERICAN LIBERTY.” Leaders of the non-importation movement bitterly
accused those who had abandoned the cause of having sacrificed universal political rights for
transient consumer pleasures. South-Carolina Gazette, 16 August 1770. Courtesy of the
Charleston Library Society.
circumvent and take advantage of the other.” After achieving such unprec-
edented cooperation, surely colonists would continue to sacrifice their per-
sonal pleasures for the common good. “We do not, nor can we believe, that
the American Band of Union is broken or will be dissolved, merely because
a few leading men in trade in each Northern Colony, have been so lost to
every consideration, but their private emoluments.”159
They did, of course, pay regard to such rumors in South Carolina. And
so too did people in New England and the middle colonies. Partial repeal
had tricked consumers into accepting partial freedom. One Connecticut
writer concluded in 1772, “Ever since people’s consciences have been re-
leased from the bonds of the non-importation agreement, we flow in goods;
commerce not only meets with high encomiums, but is practiced upon as
the health and wealth of the country.”160
An occasional note of optimism emerged from the fog of gloom. One
Boston writer dissented from those who insisted that non-importation had
been a failure. “I am of a direct contrary opinion,” he explained. “I am sen-
sible it has produced great effects, and such as will be felt through ages.
Great things rise from small beginnings. Industry, economy, and a resolu-
tion to inquire into and support our rights are visible through even the
back settlements of America.” Although this enthusiastic commentator did
not express himself in terms of a symbolic shift in the meaning of material
culture, he did remind his readers that in 1758 Americans had viewed with
pride the scarlet coats worn by the soldiers in General Wolfe’s army. Only a
dozen years later the same brightly colored cloth from Great Britain had
become an object of public disgust.161 Such was a measure of progress. Les-
sons had been learned during the boycott, some more apparent than oth-
ers. The lack of coordination had undermined the impact of the movement.
Enforcement had been uneven, and despite heroic pledges to defend the
common good, people had cheated, buying British imports that they knew
had been enumerated.
Less appreciated at this moment of dejection was how Americans had
constructed in their own imaginations a nation that was not yet a nation. A
strategy of market protest had compelled colonists to think of their politi-
cal futures in a language of union. Even as the house of cards came tum-
bling down, the Jeremiahs of non-importation unwittingly revealed how
far they had come since the Stamp Act crisis. In his condemnation of the
treachery of Philadelphia’s erstwhile allies in the boycott, an anonymous
writer inquired, “Do not the Importers in that province [Maryland] expect
the same quantities [of imported goods] this Fall? Have not the Eastern-
Governments most shamefully imported, notwithstanding their solemn
declarations and resolves? Does not the conduct of the Bostonians suffi-
ciently prove their perfidy, by re-shipping trunks and cases filled with rub-
bish, after gutting them of their British contents? In what manner have
New-York and Rhode-Island behaved? Has Virginia ever entered into any
agreement? Are not all the ports to the southward of South-Carolina open?
Are not the ports of Quebec and Halifax, and other trading places in that
Although effective political resistance dissolved after 1770, many Americans—such as those
who attended a Connecticut meeting of “Merchants and Traders”— now thought in terms of
the “present and future INTEREST, LIBERTY and WELL-BEING of AMERICA.” In all the
colonies, local decisions were seen increasingly as affecting “the whole Continent.” Connecticut
Courant, 6 June 1770. Connecticut Historical Society.
part of America open?”162 This broadside offered up a list of betrayal, and

however disconsolate its author may have been, he had begun almost re-
flexively to employ the language of continental identity. He took for granted
shared interests that linked strangers from Canada to Georgia. To call this
vision of a larger commercial and political solidarity the foundation for a
later, more fully articulated American nationalism may seem premature.
Nevertheless, it is hard to comprehend how colonists could have negotiated
a common cause in 1776 without first having tasted this earlier promise of
cooperation and union.
A second, more sobering lesson of non-importation was that the people
were ultimately accountable for the common good. At the start of protest,
men and women had turned to the merchants, believing that ordinary con-
sumers like themselves could indirectly persuade, even compel, the leading
importers to cancel their orders for British manufactures. In some commu-
nities the strategy worked well enough, but the merchants were a weak link
on which to place such extravagant hopes. As “A Farmer” observed, “we see,
that the Virtue of the Merchants, could not hold out, as was foreseen by our
Enemies.” But if the ordinary colonist could not count on the patriotic sac-
rifice of the merchants, then he or she had to face the fact that the success of
a general boycott depended on a consumer public. During the dark days of
1770 when it seemed that the public had defaulted on its commitment to
liberty, newspaper writers encouraged the American people to take respon-
sibility for their own freedom. A boycott would only be politically effective
if they made a total break with the store-bought objects that had made
them at once more comfortable and more British. In his plea to the public,
Protest leaders addressed appeals to a new imagined constituency, the “PUBLIC,” a body of
virtuous consumers whose sacrifice for political principle seemed the best hope for preserving
American rights. Broadside. New York, 8 March 1770. Courtesy of the Library Company of
Philadelphia.
“A Farmer” stated that if the people turned their backs on an empire of

goods, “You will save your Country, and be as Healthy, as Easy and as Happy,
as you need to be—God has put it in your Power: Improve that power:
Help yourselves and God will help you.”163
Could the colonists rise to the challenge? According to “Pro Aris Et
Focis,” the British had persuaded themselves that colonial consumers would
never sacrifice the pleasures of the marketplace. It is blazed abroad, he de-
clared, “that the mercantile endeavors would prove utterly abortive;—that
no dependence was to be had upon the virtuous stability of the generality
among us;—that the common people, or, as they disdainfully term it, the
herd, were sunk in luxury, intemperance and degrading vice;—and that
hence, any commercial plan of political salvation would prove, only, an amus-
ing dream—a transitory phantom.”164 Whoever accepted the truth of this
statement badly underestimated the political will of the American consumer.
8
Bonfires of Tea:
The Final Act
C olonial rebellion touched the lives of or-

dinary—and not so ordinary—Ameri-
cans in surprising ways. For Ebenezer
Withington, a common “laborour” living in Dorchester, Massachusetts, the
moment of reckoning arrived one Saturday morning in late December 1773.
Without giving much thought to the political crisis then brewing in Bos-
ton, Withington took a walk “round upon the Marshes,” and there he came
upon “part of a half chest” of tea bobbing in a tidal pool. He could not
believe his good fortune. Tea in such quantity, he knew, might fetch a hand-
some price, and, oblivious to the possibility that the Boston Sons of Liberty
dressed as Native Americans might have recently thrown this very chest
into the water, Withington decided to transport the treasure home. His
political ignorance was stunning. Only a few weeks earlier the members of
the First Provincial Congress in Massachusetts had strongly recommended
“to the people of this province an abhorrence and detestation of all kinds
of East India teas, as the baneful vehicle of a corrupt and venal administra-
tion, for the purpose of introducing despotism and slavery into this once
happy country; and that every individual in this province ought totally to
disuse the same.”1 But “old” Ebenezer Withington, as he was described in
later interrogations, seemed indifferent to the gathering storm.
Withington traveled only a short distance when he happened upon
“some Gentlemen belonging to the Castle.” The encounter might have per-
suaded a more politically savvy person to drop the project. After all, the
Castle was the British fortification in Boston Harbor where royal office-
holders sought security when urban mobs threatened to get out of hand.
Withington did not know these gentlemen by name. He remembered only
that they “asked me if I had been picking up the Ruins.” The question per-
plexed the laborer from Dorchester, and, expressing proper deference, he
inquired of these Tory sympathizers “if there was any Harm.” They assured
bonfires of tea N 295
him that he had nothing to fear, “except from my Neighbours.” The warn-
ing seems not to have made the slightest impression on Withington, for, as
he later explained, “Accordingly, I brought Home the same, part of which I
disposed of.” Another commentator might have observed, perhaps ungen-
erously, that Withington ran his mouth, bragging about his amazing piece
of luck to the people who purchased a few ounces of tea.
Word of the tea spread quickly through the small agricultural commu-
nity. Since the residents of Massachusetts had specifically been enjoined
not to market this ubiquitous British import, “a number of the Cape or
Narragansett-Indians” took it upon them-
selves to investigate the matter. Not imag-
ining that “old” Withington might have
been involved, the patriotic Indians first vis-
ited a house owned by Ebenezer’s two sons
“on the lower road from Boston to Milton.”
The owners offered no resistance when their
disguised neighbors asked if they might
search the building for contraband tea. None
was discovered. Only then did suspicions
turn to the father. And sure enough, the
committee of pretend Indians soon found the
parcel of tea, now a little lighter as a result of
recent sales, and its members carried the tro-
phy “to Boston Common where they com-
mitted it to the flames.” On December 31,
John Rowe, a leading Boston merchant, jot-
ted in his diary: “There was found in the
House of One Withington of Dorchester
about half a Chest of Tea—the People gath-
ered together & took the Tea, Brought it into
the Common of Boston & Burnt it this night
about eleven of Clock. This is supposed to
be part of the Tea that was taken out of the
Ships & floated over to Dorchester.”2
The bonfire in Boston did not conclude
Withington’s ordeal. He had yet to atone for
a crime against the common good. At a full
meeting of the “Freeholders and other In-
habitants” of Dorchester—no doubt, many
of them formerly “Cape or Narragansett-
Indians”—the aged worker was made to
confess his ideological sins. Before an audi- A bottle containing tea leaves allegedly
ence of familiar faces, he recounted the en- “collected on the Shore of Dorchester Neck”
tire story of finding the chest; while some soon after the Boston Tea Party. 17
December 1773. MHS image number 106.
of his listeners may have desired a more ab- Courtesy of the Massachusetts Historical
ject apology, they resolved that Withington’s Society.
deplorable conduct had “proceeded from inadvertency.” However unpleas-

ant the episode may have been, full disclosure served to clear the commu-
nity itself of wrongdoing. As the Dorchester farmers explained, “[I]t gives
the greatest Satisfaction to this Town that he [Withington] hath been dis-
covered selling said Tea; otherwise the Conspirators against our Rights and
Liberties might have taken Occasion to have insinuated, as their Manner is,
that the whole of the Tea said to have been destroyed was plundered and
privately sold contrary to the most notorious Fact.” The investigators de-
termined to ferret out all persons who had done business with Withington.
A chance purchase might have represented no more than error of judg-
ment; it might have revealed the presence of a subversive group operating
within Dorchester. The buyers of Withington’s tea were ordered to surren-
der the remaining leaves for destruction, or to be “deemed as Enemies who
have joined with the Tea Consigners and other Conspirators, to promote
the use of the detested Article, and their Names shall be publicly posted
accordingly.” A final step remained. The townsmen voted that they would
henceforth employ “all means in their Power [to] discountenance the use
of Tea, while it is subject to a Duty imposed on it by the British Parliament.”
Withington went home a chastened although politically wiser man. Events
he had little understood transformed his life. His inadvertent actions com-
pelled neighbors publicly to reaffirm their commitment to the cause of lib-
erty. Such was the process of revolutionary indoctrination.3 In coercive
settings throughout America, the doubters and fence-sitters, occasionally
simple old men, were reminded that consumer sacrifice had become the
signature of colonial patriotism in a contest against a commercial empire.
Less than a year after the Dorchester incident, a much more prominent
American felt obliged to explain his passion for imported British goods.
Despite his effusive praise for the simple life of the yeoman farmer, Thomas
Jefferson could hardly restrain himself when he wanted a special object for
Monticello, his beloved Virginia estate. After the Revolution, for example,
Jefferson served the new nation in London and Paris, and when he was not
performing official duties, he indulged his almost insatiable appetite for
shopping. Upon his return to the United States in 1787, it required some
sixteen pages just to inventory all the goods that he had acquired in Europe.
Betraying a side of his character that often escapes modern comment,
Jefferson informed Madame de Corney that the “splendor of their [the En-
glish] shops . . . is all that is worth seeing in London.” His consumer frenzy
embarrassed his old friend the marquis de Lafayette, who on one occasion
admonished Jefferson to exercise more self-control in the stores. Jefferson
responded weakly, “It is not from a love of the English, but a love of myself
that I sometimes find myself obliged to buy their manufactures.”4
An earlier expression of self-indulgence caused Jefferson’s colleagues
similar uneasiness. In late 1774 he informed local members of the Virginia
Association, which had been charged with enforcing a total boycott of Brit-
ish goods, about an order to a London merchant house for “14 pair of sash
windows” with glass. In a letter to Archibald Cary and Benjamin Harrison
about the windows, Jefferson protested that he had intended to be “a con-

scientious observer of the measures generally thought requisite for the pres-
ervation of our independent rights,” and he seemed quite unhappy that his
purchase might “wear an appearance of contravening them.” The order was
all a misunderstanding, he reported. When the leaders of the House of Bur-
gesses originally formed the Association, Jefferson assumed that it was aimed
“against the future use of tea only.” Sounding increasingly defensive, Jefferson
continued: “Tho’ the proceedings of the [British] ministry against the town
of Boston were then well known to us, I believe nobody thought at that
time of extending our Association further to the total interruption of our
commerce with Britain: or if it was proposed by any (which I do not recol-
lect) it was condemned by the general sense of the members who formed
that Association.” And so, reasoning that tea was the only prohibited item,
Jefferson dispatched a detailed request to London for the sash windows.
The months passed; political conditions in America changed. Jefferson
became aware that many Virginians wanted a complete ban on British im-
ports, but, diverted by the press of personal business and calls for a national
congress, “I did not write to countermand my order, thinking I should have
sufficient time, after the final determinations of the congress should be
known, to countermand it.” Finally, Jefferson received news that the win-
dows were scheduled to land in Virginia. In a panic that his behavior might
“give a handle for traducing our measures,” he laid before the local mem-
bers of the Association “a full state of the matter by which it might be seen
under what expectations I had failed to give an earlier countermand and to
shew that as they come within the prohibitions of the Continental Associa-
tion (which without the spirit of prophecy could not have been foretold
when I ordered them) so I mean they shall be subject to its condemna-
tion.”5 That was the end of the affair. Perhaps, like Withington, Jefferson
had made an inadvertent error of judgment. One wonders, however, why a
person of such perspicacity about political affairs did not more fully appre-
ciate how a purchase of this nature might appear to neighbors pushing for
a total boycott on the eve of independence.
The experiences of two colonial consumers serve as poignant remind-
ers to the complexities of popular mobilization. The Thomas Jefferson who
is celebrated in so many modern histories of the period seems to have been
a person motivated almost entirely by ideas about liberty and freedom, about
the character of republican government, and it is easy to imagine that for
the great majority of American people such abstractions, however dimly
understood, were sufficient to explain their resistance to Great Britain. But
principles without proof of commitment, ideas without structures of trust,
thoughts without networks of communication, could not have sustained a
revolutionary movement. As Jefferson discovered, the imperial crisis made
private choices about domestic goods matters of legitimate public scrutiny.
Without a willingness to sacrifice for a shared political cause, the rhetoric
of protest rang hollow. Had Jefferson not been obliged to surrender the “14
pair of sash windows,” he still would have been prepared to write nobly
about rights and equality, but among his colleagues he might always have
been regarded as a person who did not appreciate the full dimensions of
personal responsibility. Visible acts of self-denial conveyed one’s sincerity
to strangers. Unlike Jefferson, Withington probably did not spend his days
reading political philosophy. Within a world bounded by the Dorchester
marshes, the tea acted as a converting mechanism, bringing him into a com-
munity of patriots who had already learned the relation between principle
and sacrifice, between bonfires of tea and political solidarity. In both ex-
amples consumer goods provided the means for colonists not only to reas-
sess their identity within an empire but also to forge political bonds with
revolutionary neighbors.
Reflections on the structures of resistance raise once again questions
posed at the beginning of this investigation. How does one explain the tim-
ing of revolution? Why did the break with Great Britain not occur at an
earlier moment when passions ran high and mobs roamed the streets of
the major colonial ports? A glib answer would be that the colonists were
not ready to mount such a united effort in 1765 or 1770. The translation of
local grievance into organized rebellion required the development of ways
for Americans to reach out effectively to other Americans. That process of
discovery took time. The colonists drew upon their participation in a vast
new consumer marketplace, an experience that persuaded them that their
dependence upon British manufactures might be turned by a colonial people
into a powerful political weapon. During the Stamp Act agitation they took
tentative steps toward non-importation. At first, it seemed reasonable to
place responsibility for the success of this strategy on the merchants. Only
slowly did ordinary colonists begin to appreciate that such a plan had little
chance of success. The merchants marched to different drummers. More
radical Americans such as Samuel Adams concluded that the protest against
the Townshend duties had been a failure; after 1770 colonial consumers raced
once again to the shops, buying British imports at record levels. In their
disappointment, Adams and others undervalued changes in the political
culture that were of profound significance for the character of later events.
Between 1767 and 1770 Americans invented a “public” which monitored
behavior in a consumer public sphere, experimented with new forms of
extra-legal political participation, constituted themselves as a group with
interests separate from those of the British, and forged channels of com-
munication that promoted a sense of trust among distant strangers.
When Parliament passed the Tea Act in May 1773, the colonists were
not the same people they had been in 1768. They drew upon a history of
protest within the consumer marketplace, a history without precedent and
entirely of their own making. Almost without fully comprehending the
magnitude of their own achievement, Americans now almost instinctively
moved from demands for non-importation to appeals for non-consumption,
a shift of immense importance in the history of popular political protest.
On this occasion they insisted that the people must take personal responsi-
bility for their own political destiny. As one Connecticut writer observed in
1774, the former effort to make non-importation work had collapsed be-
cause “it stood on a rotten and unsolid basis. It was erected wholly on the
virtue of the merchants, and rested its whole weight solely on this prop.”6
Just as the authors of the formal political pamphlets—documents that so
often structure modern accounts of the American Revolution—were strug-
gling to comprehend a republican polity founded on the will of the people,
ordinary men and women were being asked in a parallel discourse to sacri-
fice personal comforts for the common good. Samuel Adams understood
the challenge. In a letter written in June 1774 to Richard Henry Lee about
the prospects for a total American boycott, Adams observed, “It is the vir-
tue of the yeomanry we are chiefly to depend on.”7 In this atmosphere, the
people no longer defined British imports such as tea as luxuries or as sources
of debt but as poisons they had to purge in the name of liberty.
The argument is not that consumer goods caused the American Revo-
lution. In Aristotelian terms, the claim is rather that British imports pro-
vided a necessary but not sufficient cause for the final break with Parliament.
Other developments within late colonial society—the spread of evangelical
Christianity, for example—helped ordinary men and women make sense
of political events. And without an inspiring language of universal rights,
non-importation would have been little more than a strategy in search of a
proper goal. Still, imported goods invited colonists to think radical new
thoughts about empire. British manufactures came to symbolize depen-
dence and oppression. The mental link was so strong that when a small,
very poor community in Massachusetts addressed the problem of the tea, it
also raised questions about its place within a larger world. In response to
news of the arrival of the tea ships in Boston Harbor, the inhabitants of the
town of Harvard discussed the situation and found “it to be a matter of as
interesting and important a nature when viewed in all its Consequences
not only to this Town and Province, but to America in general, and that for
ages and generations to come, as ever came under the deliberation of this
Town.”8 The intensity of the reaction of these obscure farmers helps ex-
plain why colonists from South Carolina to New Hampshire stood with
Boston during the terrible days following the destruction of the tea.
II
During 1773 the pace of events accelerated. Following the collapse of orga-
nized resistance three years earlier, many people on both sides of the At-
lantic persuaded themselves that the time of troubles had ended and Humpty
Dumpty had not in fact taken a great fall. But the House of Commons,
now led by Frederick Lord North, second earl of Guilford, managed once
again to roil imperial waters. The new crisis resulted not from tougher
American policy but rather from a much overdue attempt to bring order to
the chaotic affairs of the East India Company. This grossly mismanaged
enterprise possessed a monopoly to import tea from South Asia into Great
Britain, but for many reasons—internal corruption being a prime candi-

date—the directors had run up huge operating debts, and to avoid bank-
ruptcy they turned to the government for an emergency loan. Lord North
offered to support such an arrangement, but only on condition that the
Company reform its business practices. The directors argued that if they
could sell their tea directly to the Americans without paying normal duties
or going through wholesalers who ran up the price, they might be able to
turn a profit. A concession from the government on duties would enable
the Company to undersell the smugglers, who obtained their tea from the
Dutch. Anxious that he not signal a retreat on the principle of parliamen-
tary sovereignty, North refused to drop the last remaining Townshend Duty,
a decision that still allowed the Company to cut prices substantially but
also compelled the Americans to pay a tax which they labeled unconstitu-
tional. When asked why he did not show greater flexibility on this point,
North growled that “the temper of the people there is little deserving favour
from hence.”9 If the minister really thought the colonists would accept the
Tea Act, he was in for a shock. Although some modern Americans seem to
accept the notion that the federal government should bail out failing cor-
porations, the colonists branded the legislation venal, and they vowed to
teach North that their love of liberty exceeded their love of tea.
During the fall of 1773 Americans scrambled to nullify the Tea Act. Learn-
ing that Company ships would arrive in the major colonial ports sometime
in November, local protest groups pressured civil authorities to prohibit
the unloading of the vessels. The Sons of Liberty did their best to intimi-
date newly appointed tea agents, many of them prominent merchants whose
personal loyalties lay with the crown. In the newspapers and in cheap broad-
sides, patriotic voices sounded the alarm once again, urging the colonists to
resist political oppression by refusing to buy imported goods. By now the
mental link between consumer sacrifice and political ideology was well es-
tablished. Still, at that moment, no one could confidently predict the popu-
lar response to the Tea Act. After all, between 1770 and 1773, in addition to
the smuggled Dutch tea, Americans bought some 300,000 pounds of tea
annually from British merchants, knowing full well that the purchase price
included the Townshend duty. Of the many entreaties broadcast during this
period, few were as strongly worded as a letter in the Pennsylvania Packet
addressed to “the Freeholders and Freemen” of Pennsylvania. “Taking for
granted . . .,” the writer reasoned, “that the revenue acts are opposite to the
very idea and spirit of liberty, it will naturally follow, that a ship, loaded
with goods which come under one of those acts is the true and literal
Pandora’s box, filled with poverty, oppression, slavery, and every other hated
disease.” Colonial consumers should be forewarned that this legislation was
only the start. “Whenever the Tea is swallowed, and pretty well digested, we
shall have new duties imposed on other articles of commerce.”10 The Asso-
ciation of the Sons of Liberty in New York City prepared a stirring history
of American non-importation from the “detestable Stamp Act” to the cur-
rent campaign against tea.
What had been an imaginative although tentative strategy of consumer

protest in 1765 had now evolved into the accepted mode of American resis-
tance. If people embraced the tea, declared the Sons of Liberty, they would
acquire a heavy burden of guilt. They would forever have to justify why
they had failed “to defeat the pernicious Project” and thereby denied “to
our Posterity, those Blessings of Freedom, which our Ancestors have handed
down to us.”11 A New York newspaper wailed that “A SHIP loaded with TEA
is now on her Way to this Port, being sent out by the Ministry for the Pur-
pose of enslaving and poisoning ALL the AMERICANS.” A later issue of the
same journal provided readers with a secular catechism so that they might
better understand the gravity of the crisis. Compared to the formal legal
and constitutional pamphlets of the day, these productions may seem simple,
even childish, but they expose a level of popular mobilization that intellec-
tual histories generally ignore. The litany not only outlined the challenge
but also advised ordinary men and women what they could do to demon-
strate their commitment to the common good.
QUERIES—Respecting the TEA ACT submitted to the most serious Consideration of
every person in AMERICA.
Query. As there is an Act of the British Parliament in Being, that would subjugate America
to Three Pence Sterling Duty upon every Pound Weight of Tea imported from Britain;
and as this Duty is voted independent of, and without the Sanction of any of our Ameri-
can Parliaments, what ought to be done unto every one of those traitorous Persons, who
shall aid or abet the Importation of, or landing, the said Tea in any part of America, till
the Act is totally repealed, jointly, by King, Lords, and Commons?
Answer. Such base Traitors to this Country, without Exception, should immediately
and resolutely be dragged from Concealment; they should be transported, or forced
from every Place in America, loaded with the most striking Badges of Disgrace . . .
Query. What will be the most effectual Methods of Proceeding, to obtain a Repeal of
the said oppressive, unconstitutional Act?
Ans. TO USE NO TEA, at least for the present, for if any Persons should give the Sellers
more than the usual Price for Tea, he ought to be held up as a mortal Enemy to Ameri-
can Freedom. And,—brave Americans.12
In New York City, Charleston, and Philadelphia last-minute negotiations

helped prevent serious violence. Either the tea ships returned to London or
crown officials prudently stored the tea in safe places where it could not be
sold.13
In Boston events took a different turn. A crowd of five thousand men
and women witnessed the arrival of the Company ships, carrying 342 chests
of East India tea. Popular leaders begged the captains of these vessels to
return to London, but perhaps to no one’s surprise, local tea agents refused
to compromise. The Hutchinson brothers, Thomas and Elisha, who repre-
sented the Company in Boston, insisted on landing the entire cargo. Samuel
Adams and his friends pledged never to let that happen. The standoff pushed
those who opposed the Tea Act to stake out ever more radical ground.
One announcement signed by “The People” reminded “The Public, That
it was solemnly voted by the Body of the People of this and the neighboring
Towns . . . that the said Tea never should be landed in this Province, or pay
one Farthing of Duty.” Anyone who dared to assist such an attempt, de-
clared “The People,” “must betray an inhuman Thirst for Blood, and will
also in great Measure accelerate Confusion and Civil War. This is to assure
such public Enemies of this Country, they will be considered and treated as
Wretches unworthy to live, and be made the first Victims of our just Re-
sentment.”14
If crown officials and their supporters thought that such inflated rheto-
ric amounted to no more than bluster, they were mistaken. On December
16 Boston “Mohawks” spent much of the day throwing tea chests into the
harbor, one of which, of course, found its way to Ebenezer Withington.
Accounts of the Indian disguise have given this famous incident a slightly
ludicrous character in American history, transforming the Tea Party into a
kind of carnival event in which feathered citizens lightheartedly sparked
the final confrontation with Parliament. It was nothing of the sort. As every
participant understood, the destruction of the tea invited immediate and
severe retaliation. They had violated private property, a provocation no
British ruler could ignore. More to the point, the Tea Party represented not
a break with the previous history of colonial resistance but rather an esca-
lation of a tradition of consumer protest that had begun a decade earlier.
Boston’s punishment staggered even those who expected the worst. Lord
North could endure no more insolence from what seemed to him America’s
hotbed of radicalism. A well-placed London diarist, Matthew Brickdale,
recorded the ministry’s case against the community that had drowned the
tea. Boston, scribbled Brickdale, “has been the ringleader of all violence
and opposition to the execution of the laws of this country. New York and
Philadelphia grew unruly on receiving the news of the triumph of the people
of Boston. Boston had not only therefore to answer for its own violence but
for having incited other places to tumults.”15 Thinking of this sort led in the
spring of 1774 to a series of statutes known collectively in the colonies as the
Intolerable Acts. These bills closed Boston Harbor to all commerce until
the city reimbursed the East India Company for its loss. Other acts funda-
mentally altered the constitution of Massachusetts Bay. Perhaps the most
intrusive measure was legislation limiting town meetings throughout the
colony to a single session each year, a serious blow to a people who prized
the rough-and-tumble debate of local government.
One Connecticut writer who styled himself the “Conciliator” explained
the larger meaning of North’s punitive policy. “At length,” he declared, “the
Harbor of Boston is blocked up, and the Business of Importation in that
Town at an End. . . . Foreign Manufactures, it seems, are considered as per-
nicious to the Constitution of America, and we must either disuse them, or
encounter the Horrors of Slavery.” The Conciliator insisted that no colonist
should be surprised to discover that common consumer goods now de-
fined the battle lines of empire. “The Language of Great-Britain in Years
past, in Accents loud as Thunder, has rung this solemn Peal in our Ears—
Americans! Stop your Trade.” But even in these dark hours, hope beckoned.
The British “know that Economy, Frugality and Virtue will raise us above
the Reach of the envenomed Arrows of Oppression. . . . Our foolish Fond-
ness for the Toys of that Country, provokes her Resentment.” The message
was clear. Americans might assist Boston with food and money. If they meant
to be free, however, they had to rededicate themselves to consumer sacri-
fice. Sounding like an Old Testament prophet who believed that virtuous
consumers must atone for past market sin, the Conciliator exclaimed, “It is
our Treachery to ourselves, my Countrymen, that has brought these Bur-
dens upon us.”16
It did not require a miracle to persuade other Americans to pledge their
support to Boston. They might, of course, have taken an easier path. After
all, they might have reasoned, the Intolerable Acts did not directly affect
them. Why not wait? Since Parliament had not closed their ports, they might
continue to do business as usual. And yet, by and large, they stood firm
when it counted most. The explanation for solidarity—a challenge inform-
ing this study from the start—was that by the summer of 1774 Americans
had learned how to reach out to each other.17 They had begun to think
continentally. The experience of mounting ever more effective consumer
protests against a commercial empire had encouraged them to imagine a
new, geographically inclusive identity. A decade of protest in the market-
place had forced them to define themselves as not fully British. Indeed, in
defiance of parliamentary taxation they increasingly saw themselves as
Americans. The North government failed to appreciate that it was no longer
dealing with a loose collection of colonies which might turn on each other
to gain some transient advantage.
Parliament tried to make an example of Boston and, by so doing, aroused
a nation. The reaction of the planters of Queen Anne’s County, Maryland,
to the Boston crisis was unusual only in its eloquence. In June 1774, they
declared, “Duly considering, and deeply affected with the prospect of the
unhappy situation of Great Britain and British America, under any kind of
disunion, this Meeting think themselves obliged, by all the ties which ever
ought to preserve a firm union amongst Americans, as speedily as possible,
to make known their sentiments to their distressed brethren of Boston, and
therefore publish [them] to the world.” The planters’ first decision reflected
long years of experimentation with non-importation: “[T]hey look upon
the cause of Boston, in its consequences, to be the common cause of
America.”18 Resolutions of this sort poured forth from small, scattered com-
munities. Their residents wanted to register a public commitment to a larger
responsibility. At a “General Town Meeting” in Huntington, New York, for
example, it was concluded that “we are of opinion that our brethren of
Boston are now suffering in the common cause of British America.”19 The
small farmers of Caroline County, Virginia, announced that they were pre-
pared “not to import from Great Britain any commodity whatsoever . . .
[until] the cruel Acts of the British Parliament against the Massachusetts
Bay and the town of Boston are repealed.”20 The freemen of the lower part
of Frederick County, Maryland, gathered in Hungerford’s Tavern to resolve
unanimously “That it is the opinion of this meeting that the town of Bos-
ton is now suffering in the common cause of America.” After analyzing the
current crisis, they concluded—as did people throughout the colonies—
“that the most effectual means for the securing American freedom, will be
to break off all commerce with Great Britain.”21
To stake its demand for colonial obedience on tea represented a high-
risk decision for Parliament. Had it chosen a different British import—
perhaps porcelain or small metal items—it might have avoided such a
firestorm of protest. But, as the leading English merchants of the day could
have informed imperial legislators, tea had long ago made its way into the
great majority of colonial households. A Philadelphia businessman calcu-
lated that Americans purchased almost six million pounds of tea a year. On
the basis of this figure, he estimated that about a third of the entire popula-
tion of British America drank tea twice a day. And, of course, although tea
was not itself a durable good, its use sustained a huge market in related
imported articles such as china cups and tea pots.22 It had become the mas-
ter symbol of the new consumer economy. By mid-century the tea service
provided a standard of good manners and cosmopolitan taste. Women anx-
ious to establish a social sphere of their own organized elaborate afternoon
tea parties.
The question for Lord North as well as for American spokesmen was
how consumer popularity might translate into political protest. In 1774 a
Tory sympathizer offered an obvious answer. If the Americans really re-
sented the tax on tea, he observed, they could simply stop buying it. They
were free to choose what they consumed. To this proposition, a skeptical
patriot writer responded with a story about a Philadelphia “madman” who
some twelve years earlier had proclaimed himself “monarch of the coun-
try,” a privileged position that allowed him to “tax the air.” To which his
subjects asked, “[M]ay it please your Majesty, will such a tax be right? Air
was always common and free, in the time of your Majesty’s royal progeni-
tors and predecessors. Will not your subjects think this an arbitrary law,
like the poll tax? Arbitrary! Cried the prince, enraged; and like the poll tax
too! What rebels! Why unless they breathe, they don’t pay the duty; there-
fore it is quite in their option whether they will pay it or no.”23 Enjoying a
morning mug of tea may not have been quite the same thing as breathing,
but the point hit the mark. It was hard to imagine maintaining the normal
fabric of social relations without tea. A contributor to a South Carolina
newspaper took it as a given that tea was a ubiquitous article of colonial
life. “The Ministry too well know the Effect of long Habit. . . . It is Tea that
has kept all America trembling for Years. It is Tea that has brought Ven-
geance upon Boston.”24
Anyone quoting odds on how easy it would be to mobilize the Ameri-
can people around a boycott of tea would have been well advised to con-
sider the product’s recent history in the colonial marketplace. At the
beginning of the eighteenth century, tea drinking had been an activity only
affluent colonists could afford. Critics identified tea as a luxury item which
threatened the morals of elite society. But like so many other consumer
goods during this period, tea migrated from luxury to necessity. On the eve
of revolution, people of very modest means drank tea, sometimes from
porcelain cups. According to “A. B.,” “At the introduction of TEA into
America, it was considered as a luxury, and only used by the wealthy and
extravagant, but since being more plentiful and cheaper, it is become a nec-
essary and common diet for the poor, and as used by them will go further
than any thing else of equal value.”25 A writer in the New-York Mercury ech-
oed this commonplace. He rejected the notion that tea was “a mere Luxury.”
“By Habit it is become necessary, and it has been found as cheap as almost
any Thing that could be substituted in its Stead.”26 This evidence might be
interpreted as an indication of the great difficulty that patriot leaders faced
in persuading ordinary men and women to sacrifice something deemed so
essential to their well-being.
But there is another, more compelling possibility. If poor people did pur-
chase so much tea, they then had an article in their possession that could
actually be given up for a political cause. Calls for this kind of sacrifice, there-
fore, were neither abstract nor impossible. During an earlier subscription drive
in Boston, an opponent of non-importation had chided the “Porters & Wash-
ing Women” for pledging not to purchase silks and velvets, coaches and chari-
ots. He argued that one could not take the political commitment of these
people seriously since they were not able to buy the goods that they publicly
pledged to forgo. Tea, however, was a different matter. It appeared in modest
homes; as a mild stimulant, it helped urban workers and marginal farmers
endure hard physical labor. A voluntary promise from such people to do with-
out tea in the name of liberty represented a genuine sacrifice, one that was
perhaps even more difficult for them than it was for their social betters. And,
of course, one should not forget that without their support—as soldiers, for
example—the Revolution would have died aborning.
Consumer protest against the Intolerable Acts encouraged a strident,
often hyperbolic language unprecedented in the evolution of non-impor-
tation. Earlier efforts to curtail the purchase of British goods had stressed
the link between imported manufactures and American concerns such as
the growing burden of colonial dependence, the rising level of colonial debt,
and the moral dangers of self-indulgence in the marketplace. Within this
context, British goods symbolized a strained although remediable imperial
relationship. But few writers described tea in these terms. During the months
following the closing of Boston Harbor, tea became emblematic of an emo-
tional separation between a people who now regularly called themselves
Americans and a distant English government that seemed to have squan-
dered their trust and affection. Such a mental process—a psychological dis-
tancing from Great Britain—was an essential element not only for popular
mobilization but also for the development of a broadly shared sense of
American identity. Within this mental framework, tea sustained an incho-
ate spirit of nationalism.
By mid-1774 drinking tea had become equated in the popular mind

with political sin. No longer could one pretend that private enjoyments
within one’s own family did not have public consequences. Anyone could
see that tea, like an insidious drug, allowed conspirators in the mother coun-
try to erode colonial rights. As “A Woman” informed readers of a Massa-
chusetts journal, “[I]n the present case the use of tea is considered not as a
private but a public evil; so the arguments used against it should be of a
public nature.” It did not matter, she insisted, whether tea undermined per-
sonal health. The most salient fact was that since Lord North had “saddled
[tea] with a tribute, &c. . . . we are not to consider it merely as the herb tea,
or as what has an ill tendency as to health, but as it is made a handle of to
introduce a variety of public grievances and oppressions amongst us.”27 A
sermon on tea published in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, reminded all Ameri-
cans that tea drinking was “a political absurdity. This baneful herb is the
match by which an artful wicked ministry intended to blow up the liberties
of America.” People who believed that a sip of their favorite beverage would
do no harm were wrong. “Continuing to purchase tea, under present cir-
cumstances, is high treason against three millions of Americans.”28 A colo-
nist writing under the name “A Consistent Patriot” captured in powerfully
persuasive prose the hardening of symbolic categories. For him, as a result
of an alchemy driven by imperial politics, a former pleasure had been trans-
formed into a dangerous poison.
The importation and use of Tea, abstractly considered, may be innocent, and he who
in ordinary times, has an inclination to import or use it, has a right to the protection
of the laws. But when the importation is connected with the ruin of government, its
trade—and what is infinitely more valuable, its liberty;—when it is designed for that
purpose and will infallibly have that effect, we ought to consider and treat it as we
would THE PLAGUE.29
In even stronger rhetoric, a South Carolina essay entitled “On Patriotism”

explained that “the baneful chests” of tea forced on the Americans by the
East India Company contained “in them a slow poison, in a political as well
as a physical sense. They contain something worse than death—the seeds
of SLAVERY.”30
As the flow of events swept ever more colonists into the imperial mael-
strom, popular writers revived an older discourse about the actual physical
dangers of using tea. Even at the time some pseudo-scientific rhetoric about
tea struck some readers as mere “scare crow stories.”31 But from the perspec-
tive of those determined to mobilize a population in support of renewed non-
importation—not to mention American rights and liberty—reports about
the deleterious impact of tea on normal men and women served to heighten
public attention. Moreover, tales of contagious disease increased the pressure
on individual households to sacrifice for the common good. Earlier in the
century, social commentators often argued that tea undermined the moral
health of its users. Women, it was claimed, were especially susceptible to the
enervating effects of tea. As this import came to symbolize political oppres-
sion, however, the critique focused increasingly on the peril it represented for
the well-being of the entire community.
The tea menace appeared in different forms. One widely reprinted ar-
ticle asserted that the habit of drinking tea made people smaller. Within a
generation or two, observers had allegedly discovered that “our race is
dwindled, and become puny, weak and disordered, to such a degree, that
were it to prevail a century more, we should be reduced to meager Pyg-
mies.”32 Another critic appealed to the lessons of history. “It is about 100
years since this herb, worse than Pandora’s Box, was introduced into Eu-
rope,” he declared. “In which time mankind had lost some inches in their
stature, many degrees in their strength, and disorders have assumed a new
complexion.” The most serious menace was “Histeria.” Once only women
suffered from the nervous complaint, but now tea exposed able-bodied males
to this wasting ailment. As anyone could document, tea had “reduced the
robust masculine habit of men to a feminine softness—In short, it has turned
men into women, and the women into—God knows what.”33 The point
was clear. If patriotic colonists wanted to stand tall against the empire, they
had better give up tea. And it was a decision that they could not postpone.
A Boston physician warned that the spread of tea drinking had caused
“spasms, vapors, hypochondrias, apoplexies of the serious kind, palsies,
dropsies, rheumatisms, consumptions, low nervous, miliary and petechial
fevers.”34 Rumors circulated that imported English tea bred insects, was
packed in chests by people with dirty feet, and promoted smallpox.35 No
wonder that “An Old Mechanic” expressed nostalgia for “the time when Tea
was not used, nor scarcely known amongst us.” He testified that “people
seemed at that time of day to be happier, and to enjoy more health in gen-
eral than they do now.” But then, what was one to expect of unreflective
shoppers? “We must be every day bringing in some new-fangled thing or
other from abroad, till we are really become a luxurious people. No matter
how ugly and deformed a garment is; nor how insipid or tasteless, or preju-
dicial to our healths an eatable or drinkable is, we must have it, if it is the
fashion.”36 As appeals for non-importation echoed loudly in the newspa-
pers, Americans had to face the fact that a nation of puny tea drinkers could
never hope to summon the manly virtue required to battle Great Britain.
Many Americans probably did not fully appreciate what a sacrifice giv-
ing up tea represented until they tried a substitute suggested by well-meaning
experimenters. These alternative beverages seem as a group to have been so
ill-tasting that every cup must have reminded ordinary colonists of the plea-
sure that they had renounced in a show of political solidarity. The only posi-
tive attribute of these replacements was that they were locally grown—in some
cases, as weeds—and so, when patriotic persons drank these vile concoctions,
they had the satisfaction of knowing that American plants did not carry par-
liamentary taxes. “If we must, through custom, have some warm tea, once or
twice a day,” queried a Pennsylvania author, “why may we not exchange this
slow poison, which not only destroys our constitutions, but endangers lib-
erty, and drains our country of so many thousand pounds a year, for teas of
our own American Plants.” He listed

possibilities. In the Chesapeake colo-
nies, for example, people were brew-
ing “Hairy Moss,” a drink guaranteed
to cure various illnesses.37 Others ad-
vised boiling common herbs. In South
Carolina it was reported that East In-
dia Tea had been dropped in favor of
“Sage, Balm, Rosemary, and Cassina.”38
Northern colonists apparently pre-
ferred Labrador Tea, made from the
leaves of red root, which according to
individuals who had actually tried it
was similar to wild rosemary with a very
strong flavor and deep brown color.
Some users confessed that they could
barely swallow this disgusting liquid.
North Carolinians recommended
Hyperion Tea “as a succedaneum to
that more pernicious and destructive
plant Bohea, which annually drains
America of thousands.”39 And then, for
those suffering severe withdrawal,
there was always Yeopann Tea. “This
In this sermon even St. Paul warned American plant is much used among the lower
patriots against drinking tea. A Sermon on Tea sort,” explained one newspaper; “[it]
(Lancaster, 1774). Rare Book/Special Collections
Reading Room (Jefferson LJ 239). Courtesy of the is of great efficacy when taken physi-
Library of Congress. cally, being a powerful sudorific; is no
exotic but a domestic of almost every
sandy plantation in this province.”40 Having a powerful sudorific for break-
fast, a medical treatment intended to produce heavy sweats, would undoubt-
edly have concentrated the mind on political affairs.
Colonists who refused to give up imported English tea for the com-
mon good faced increasing pressure from neighbors. This was a significant
development, since what sustained colonial resistance in the face of intimi-
dation from Parliament was the readiness of ordinary men and women to
enforce the public will within their own communities. Traditional histories
of the American Revolution that concentrate on the proceedings of colo-
nial assemblies and the decrees of imperial administrators tend to take the
participation of these people for granted. After being relegated to bit parts
as urban rioters, they appear almost magically just in time to take up arms
against the Red Coats. But a deep shift in popular allegiances was underway
before New England militiamen flocked to Bunker Hill. If, as some have
claimed, all politics are in some significant measure local politics, then it
was within the small towns and scattered counties of provincial America
that colonists finally decided that they were no longer subjects of the crown.
And, more often than not, the litmus test of commitment was the pri-
vate citizen’s relationship to common goods, initially to tea, but soon to all
imported articles. During the protest against the Townshend duties, efforts
to implement a strategy of non-importation had relied largely on shame
and humiliation, and except for several notorious examples of the tarring-
and-feathering of merchants who brazenly sold British manufactures, the
worst an unrepentant consumer might fear was censorious looks and insult-
ing language in the streets. No one advocated forcing obedience. But as
Americans moved fitfully toward an endorsement of non-consumption, as
opposed to non-importation, they employed more coercive techniques to
expose the doubters and trimmers in their midst. Seizure of property—an
extremely radical act in any social context—served the double function of
punishing colonists defined as political enemies while at the same time
quickening a spirit of solidarity among those who policed the possession of
tea. Ebenezer Withington’s ordeal provided a dramatic example of the pro-
cess leading to effective mobilization—threat, indoctrination, and destruc-
tion—a community ritual which if nothing else made other Dorchester
farmers think twice before violating the rules of patriotic consumption. As
“A Carolinian” warned soon after Parliament shut down Boston Harbor,
“[W]e need only fight our own selves, suppress for a while our Luxury and
Corruption, and wield the Arms of Self-Denial in our own Houses, to ob-
tain the Victory. . . . And the Man who would not refuse himself a fine Coat,
to save his Country, deserves to be hanged.”41
The colonists burned as much tea as they had tossed into the ocean.
The drama surrounding the Tea Party dominates American memory, but
in fact people anxious to pledge their solidarity not only with the Boston
resistance but also with protest leaders of their own community carried
small amounts of tea—often no more than a few ounces stored in a kitchen
cupboard—to a central green where they consigned the package to the
flames. Since they had come to regard tea as a pollutant, it was fitting that
they organized collective rituals of this sort to purge local society of politi-
cal sin. These bonfires served as the funeral pyres of empire. Only days after
the destruction of the Boston tea, a newspaper “recommended to every in-
habitant who is a friend to his country, to collect every atom of this poison-
ous herb, and sacrifice it to the flames in the Common[s], as an utter
detestation of a mean[s] that may contribute to the support of tyrants, per-
jured traitors and those who insolently lord it over the liberties of a free
people.”42 A Connecticut writer who identified himself as “Home Manu-
facture” wondered whether it was such a good idea to incinerate so much
tea. He asked the organizers of the bonfires “whether when the duty was
fix’d on Glass as well as Tea, it would not have been a very extraordinary
resolution, to have determined on breaking all the glass in America, and to
send round committees to put it in execution?”43
The point was lost on those who chose to define colonial patriotism in
terms of ritual immolation. “The freeholders and other inhabitants” of
Charleston, Massachusetts, for example, met on December 23, 1773, to cleanse
their village of imported tea. After weighing “the advantages that will result
to this community (in every point of light,) from the disuse of India tea,”
they voted not to use, sell, buy “or suffer [tea] to be used in our families”
until Parliament repealed the Tea Act. It was not enough, however, to give
up drinking tea. The physical evidence of oppression had to be removed.
Those present selected a committee of neighbors to demand “from all the
inhabitants of this town, all the tea they may have by them.” The Charleston
meeting then determined that “the tea so collected, be destroyed by fire, on
Friday next at noon day, in the market place.” Tea lovers who might have
been tempted to squirrel away enough leaves for a last cup were admon-
ished that “if any of the inhabitants of this town, shall do anything to coun-
teract, or render ineffectual the foregoing votes, they are not only inimical
to the liberty of America in general, but also show a daring disrespect to
this town in particular.” And finally, the group decided that “the above pro-
ceedings of this town, be published in the News-Papers,” a reminder that
communicating consumer sacrifice to other Americans may have been as
significant in mobilizing popular support for rebellion as the deed itself.44
Other bonfires of tea invited ordinary people in Massachusetts to re-
flect on their political allegiance during the months following the Tea Party.
Lexington received praise in the newspapers for its blazing display of pa-
triotism. The Massachusetts Spy reported that the town had “unanimously
resolved against the use of Bohea tea of all sorts, Dutch or English importa-
tion; and to manifest the sincerity of their resolution, they brought together
every ounce contained in the town, and committed it to one common bon-
fire.”45 One can only speculate about a connection between this ritual purg-
ing of tea and the decision of Lexington’s militia to confront the British
army in April 1775. Perhaps they were simply unrelated events that hap-
pened to take place on the same village green. A month after the destruc-
tion of the Lexington tea, the journal learned that on a particularly chilly
day the people of Exeter organized a similar sacrifice. “We hear . . . ,” the
paper announced, “that last Wednesday a number of ladies and gentlemen,
met on Tower-Hill . . . and there consumed by fire a considerable quantity
of that baneful and despised article, TEA.” Their actions gave new meaning
to the word consume. The writer could not resist a patronizing barb: “As the
weather was very cold, the ladies were not backward in feeding the fire.”46
Sometime later, Providence, Rhode Island, ignited a much more elabo-
rate bonfire. At noon of the appointed day, the town crier gave notice to the
public: “At five o’clock, this afternoon, a quantity of India Tea will be burnt
in the market-place.—All true friends to their country and lovers of free-
dom, and haters of SHACKLES and HANDCUFFS, are hereby invited to
testify their good disposition, by bringing, and casting into the fire, a need-
less herb, which for a long time has been highly detrimental to our liberty,
interest, and health.” Billed as “the funeral of Madam SOUCHONG,” the
event drew “a great number of inhabitants.” They cheered as patriotic colo-
nists brought forth “about three hundred pounds weight of tea” and fed it
to the fire. For good measure, the people of Providence burned a barrel of
tar, a speech recently delivered by Lord North, copies of newspapers that

had taken a Tory stance, and “divers other ingredients.” The destruction of
“so pernicious an article” as tea apparently spurred individuals to come
forward. Women, for example, made sacrificial offerings of imported leaves
“from a conviction of the evil tendency of continuing the habit of tea-drink-
ing.” As the smoke from the bonfire rose, the bells of the city rang out. One
particularly “spirited son of liberty” went through Providence with a brush
and supply of lampblack, obliterating “the word TEA on the shop signs.”
No one could have predicted a few years earlier that Madam Souchong would
come to such an ignominious end. Only forty years before, she had arrived
in America, where she was “greatly caressed by all ranks.” But the lady proved
herself a prostitute, and over time “her price was so lowered that any one
might have her company for almost nothing.”47 The funeral pyre concluded
a long and passionate American relationship with an imported love.
Colonists also engaged in more spontaneous attacks on tea. In small
country towns the provocation came in the form of a furtive peddler who
thought that the locals would compromise political principle for a fresh
supply of imported Asian tea. In Montague, Massachusetts, an inhabitant
“inadvertently purchased a small quantity of tea” from a traveler. Several
neighbors who witnessed the transaction immediately went to the man’s
house and “endeavored to convince him of the impropriety of making any
use of that article for the present, while it continues to be a badge of slav-
ery.” Apparently, these self-appointed enforcers made a persuasive case, since
the buyer “was easily induced to commit it to the flames.”
The Montague story seems to have been intended as a general warning
to peddlers or, as one journal explained, to “those gentry called peddlers,
from selling this noxious herb, at a time when the shop-keepers have gener-
ally abandoned it.” No doubt, it was not hard for the patriotic supporters of
Boston to monitor business conducted in stores. Peddlers posed a different
problem. They could appear at any hour of the day; they displayed their
wares in the privacy of people’s homes. But, as the residents of Montague
knew, there were laws on the books “against hawking and peddling” that
they were prepared to put into effect should strangers “offer any more of
this politically poisoned herb for sale.” “We can’t say what their punish-
ment would be,” one person speculated ominously, “but [we] have reason
to imagine they would bless themselves, should theirs be as light as was the
peddler’s last Friday se’night at Shrewsbury.” He referred to an example of
rough justice most certainly not countenanced by provincial law. The
Shrewsbury peddler’s tea “was taken from him by a number of people, at
the tavern in that town, and carried into the road, where it was burnt to
ashes; and had not [the] culprit very opportunely made his escape, he might
have found himself soon enveloped in a modern dress.”48 Tarring and feath-
ering was probably a messy affair, and most towns seem to have been con-
tent with an instructive fire.
The author of a letter published in a Massachusetts newspaper pro-
vided more detail about consumer rituals of political indoctrination in the
countryside. Once again, a peddler triggered the crisis, this time in Leo-
minster. Something about his demeanor aroused suspicion, and a search of
his goods by local patriots—called Whigs—soon yielded “a Quantity of the
destructive & detestable Weed Tea.” Asked to explain himself, the man
claimed that he had brought the tea back to America “in a late Foreign Voy-
age” as a present for “his dear Wife.” He persuaded no one in the village.
“Ruth,” who recounted the incident, observed that the peddler showed little
regard for his wife’s political welfare “by his giving her Poison.” In any event,
a few inhabitants of Leominister had actually witnessed the stranger’s at-
tempt to sell tea to a storekeeper, a bad move since everyone present in the
shop identified himself as a “true Whig.” When he realized his error, the
“Tea-Merchant” started to tremble with fear. According to Ruth, it was “as
violent an agitation in his knees as ever was in those of Belshazzar,” the last
king of Babylon, whose downfall was prophesied by mysterious writing on
a wall. The traveling salesman begged to be spared a coat of tar, pointing
out that the weather that day was excessively hot. The patriots of Leominister
“granted his Petition, but repeatedly exhorted him to reform, and be no
longer an Enemy to himself and Country.” They urged him voluntarily to
burn the tea, a proposal to which he readily agreed. He even “thanked them
for their Kindness and Benevolence.” But Ruth was in a less forgiving mood.
She announced that such leniency “cannot, must not be exercis’d toward
these Enemies much longer, [for] it is to be fear’d the direful Period is at
Hand, when the Sons of Liberty will be bound by Duty, both to God and
themselves, to hang, drown, or otherwise demolish these execrable Villains
from the Face of the Earth, that Posterity may enjoy a peaceful and happy
Land, preserv’d from utter Ruin, by the Noble Efforts of Freedom’s Sons.”49
The impact of the scattered local tea protests on women was hard to
determine. They were certainly present, often making small contributions
to the flames.50 If nothing else, their participation in these extra-legal events
obsessed some Tory sympathizers, in other words, those persons already
persuaded that the times were out of joint. In these attacks, ridicule pro-
vided a sharp weapon. Introducing himself as “Susanna Spindle,” a Boston
writer gave a tongue-in-cheek account of a recent “Meeting of the Matrons
of Liberty.” A “Moderatrix” appealed to the members of her audience “to
take into consideration the distressed state [to which] the Females are re-
duced, by the unreasonable and arbitrary procedure of their Husbands,
under a pretense of defending their Liberties.” The boycott strategy, she
thought, had backfired. Had men not called for homespun cloth to replace
British imported fabrics, and then, instead of weaving and spinning, or-
dered their poor, overworked wives “to manufacture the wool and flax”? In
the name of equity, the Matrons of Liberty concluded that “it is high time
to exert ourselves, and to stand for our just Liberty (which is arbitrarily
wrested from us without our consent).” The joke apparently was that women
might really extend the kinds of arguments voiced regularly in the Boston
town meeting by the likes of Samuel Adams and James Otis to domestic
affairs. The Matrons advanced twelve profoundly silly proposals. The first
The British never quite understood that the boycott movement had given political voice to
American women. This caricature by Philip Dawe poked fun at the women who organized the
“Edenton [North Carolina] Tea Party.” North Carolina Collection. Courtesy of the University of
North Carolina Library at Chapel Hill.
proclaimed that “the Women in America, are entitled to all the Liberties
which Women in Great-Britain enjoy, and particularly to drink Tea.” The
second announced that “we understood our Husbands did covenant (when
we married) to provide us Tea, or we never would have joined our hands
with theirs.”51 Not a few women rejected this lampooning of legitimate as-
pirations. “Prudence Vertue” responded to the condescending wits, explain-
ing, among other things, that women were prepared to save America and, if
their husbands failed to perform, to go it alone. “Be it known to all Men
and Women,” she stated, “that we will not still add Fuel to the Fire, by using
foreign Teas, and make ourselves and children still greater Slaves to our
Lusts and other tyrannical Masters; but as the Women once saved the Na-
tion from the Tyranny of the Danes, so will we from the Tyranny of Bute
and North, &c. &c.”52
Everywhere the circle of politics was expanding. In small, largely self-
contained agricultural communities, ordinary people found that tea focused
attention as never before on the governance of an empire of goods. The
catalyst for these local discussions may have been anxious letters from the
Boston Committee of Correspondence, inviting colonists in outlying vil-
lages to hold open debates about the best way to resist parliamentary au-
thority.53 But whatever intelligence sparked confrontation with hard issues,
the people themselves conducted their own conversations without outside
interference. They could have ignored external appeals. In a letter to the
historian Mercy Otis Warren written long after the American Revolution,
John Adams chided her for taking a narrow, overly traditional view of poli-
tics. By concentrating her analysis on maneuvers in the colonial assemblies,
she had missed what Adams called the other theaters of politics, one of
which he identified as “every fireside.”54 One theater was surely the town
meetings where inhabitants came to think about tea. Before this moment,
local meetings had been generally ill attended. One suspects that neighbors
bored each other, repeating the words of previous speakers and sometimes
forgetting the motion on the floor. But during the first half of 1774 the pub-
lic pulse beat faster. External events demanded attention, even in the ab-
sence of a devious peddler or a bonfire of tea. The townspeople voted
resolutions which were a form of covenant, pledges of mutual obligation
no less binding for being secular in character. As a community they prom-
ised to transform ideas into actions, and although the talk was about tea
and the relief of Boston, the energizing theme was what it now meant not
to be fully British.
Tea certainly had the capacity to mobilize an entire village. By their own
admission, the inhabitants of Truro, an isolated village on Cape Cod, had not
kept well informed about the gathering political storm in Boston. Then, one
day, some tea apparently washed ashore near Provincetown, and, like Ebenezer
Withington, the men who discovered it sold small quantities to a few Truro
farmers. That purchase precipitated a local crisis. A town committee ques-
tioned these persons and concluded “that their buying this noxious Tea was
through ignorance and inadvertence, and that they were induced thereto by
the base and villainous example and artful persuasions of some noted pre-
tended friends of government from the neighboring towns; and therefore
this meeting thinks them excusable with an acknowledgment.”
But individual confession was not sufficient to exonerate the commu-
nity. The people of Truro had failed to educate themselves about the dan-
gers to their constitutional liberties and, of course, had left themselves
vulnerable to scheming persons who peddled tea, the symbol of oppres-
sion. The town meeting decided, therefore, to form a special committee
which would draft a resolve “respecting the introduction of Tea from Great
Britain subject to a duty, payable in America.” After deliberating for half an
hour, the members of the committee returned with a statement that was at
once defensive and radical:
WE, the inhabitants of the town of Truro, though by our remote situation from the
center of public news, we are deprived of opportunities of gaining so thorough a knowl-
edge in the unhappy disputes that subsist between us and the parent state as we could
wish; yet as our love of Liberty and dread of slavery is not inferior (perhaps) to that of
our brethren in any part of the province, we think it our indispensable duty to con-
tribute our mite in the glorious cause of liberty and our country.
People asked immediately what in fact they could do to demonstrate that

their ideological hearts were in the right place. “We think,” the committee
responded, that “the most likely method that we can take to aid in frustrat-
ing those inhuman designs of administration is a disuse of that baneful
dutied article Tea.”55 The inhabitants of this village communicated their
political commitment not only to the protest leaders in Boston and to the
members of the Massachusetts general assembly but also to themselves
through the disuse of tea. By dropping this popular beverage they over-
came the peculiarities of local experience and linked up in their imagina-
tions with other Americans, distant strangers whose crucial common bond
with the farmers of Truro at this moment was their participation in an eigh-
teenth-century consumer society.
Truro was unusual only in that the discovery of real tea on the beach
sparked a debate about the community’s political future. In other towns the
stimulus for action was less spectacular, perhaps a letter from a Boston com-
mittee or a report in a provincial newspaper. But whatever concentrated public
attention, these local discussions about tea rendered increasingly problem-
atic long-held ideas about identity and obedience. The ideological founda-
tions of commercial empire shook more violently in New England than in
other parts of America, but within a short time the tremors would be felt in
distant places where it also seemed that the common good might be in con-
flict with the purchase of common goods manufactured in Great Britain. In
January 1774 the freeholders and inhabitants of Newbury concluded that the
actions of the agents of the East India Company—men such as Thomas
Hutchinson—threatened to reduce a free people to slavery. They agreed that
“it is unmanly, mean and deserving of general contempt, for private per-
sons, who are in affluent circumstances to endeavor the increase of their
rights, by dealing in an article of commerce so circumstanced, as that the
support or continuance of it, among a people, tends greatly to impoverish

them, and bring them into bondage.” What, the inhabitants of Newbury
must have asked, can we do to demonstrate our sincerity? That we are wor-
thy of trust? First, they agreed no longer to “buy other useful commodities
of such traders, whether far or near, as shall be publicly known to supply
themselves anew with the article TEA.” And second, these people linked
personal behavior to a shared commitment, everyday village experience to
a world of fellow consumers, for, as they knew, if they could not practice
virtue around “every fireside,” the rhetoric of sacrifice meant little. “We will
not use it [tea] ourselves,” they resolved, “and with our best prudence dis-
continue the use of it in our families; and particularly that we will abso-
lutely forbid the use of it in our houses as a species of entertainment for
visitors, whether relations or others, until the act of Parliament imposing a
duty upon it is repealed.”56
In each community tea sparked a slightly different political conversa-
tion. A meeting of the inhabitants of Brookline, Massachusetts, for example,
agreed with other towns that anyone who imported tea while it was still
subject to a parliamentary tax should be “considered and treated by this
Town as an Enemy to this Country.” What struck these people as most of-
fensive was the blatant inequity of the legislation. They were tired of being
treated like second-class subjects of the crown. They had no doubt that a
few well-placed individuals in England were getting richer at the expense
of American rights, a kind of corporate profiteering that once had the ca-
pacity to inspire indignation. “Thus,” the Brookline meeting observed, “have
the Parliament discovered the most glaring Partiality in making one and
the same Act to operate for the Ease and Convenience of a few of the most
opulent Subjects in Britain on the one Hand, and for the Oppression of
MILLIONS of Freeborn and most loyal Inhabitants of America on the
other.”57 Only a few months later, the “votable inhabitants” of Bolton staged
a seminar on tea and taxation, and after considering the issue of parlia-
mentary sovereignty from various perspectives—they termed it a “free de-
bate”—the assembly passed without a single negative voice a number of
strongly worded resolutions, the most demagogic of which declared that
“in order to counteract and render abortive (according to the utmost of
our power) the British act, respecting the duty on Tea to be paid here, we
will not take of this politically forbidden fruit, if even solicited thereto by
the Eves of our own bosoms, nor any other consideration whatever, whilst
it remains under the circumstance of taxation.”58
Other towns added their views. The “freeholders and other inhabit-
ants” of Falmouth took up the challenge of the tea on February 10, 1774.
Although the possibility of military violence frightened these people, they
concluded that it was time to make a united stand against British tyranny.
“It is the opinion of this town,” they reported, “that one of the most effec-
tual means for obtaining a redress of our grievances, is for every town to
make proof of their virtue, by desisting from the use of all India tea.” The
phrase “proof of their virtue” seems to have been their own invention, but
even if they borrowed it, the wording captured the profoundly commercial
character of American resistance. In their minds the sacrifice of consumer
pleasures had become the seal of public virtue, the single action that broad-
cast to “the whole continent” their own devotion to freedom.59 The “Free-
holders and other Inhabitants” of Charlestown passed five resolutions, one
of which revealed just how tenuous the hold of empire had become for the
sorts of Americans most at risk to show up on revolutionary battlefields.
“We are and will be on proper Occasions,” they proclaimed, “ready in Con-
junction with our oppressed American Brethren to risk our Lives and For-
tunes in the Support of these Rights, Liberties and Privileges with which
God, Nature and our happy Constitution has made us free.”60
At the distance of over two centuries, public opinion can be measured
only crudely through anecdotes. As colonial leaders were busy attempting
to make sense of an official British policy of punishment, ordinary Ameri-
cans sought as best they could to provide proof of consumer virtue. In a
letter sent to Abigail during the summer of 1774, John Adams recounted a
scene that warmed the heart of a weary patriotic traveler. After a hard ride
of over thirty-five miles through the interior of Massachusetts, Adams fi-
nally arrived at the house where he intended to take a rest. “‘Madam’ said I
to Mrs. Huston, ‘is it lawful for a weary Traveller to refresh himself with a
Dish of Tea provided it has been honestly smuggled, or paid no Duties?’”
Mrs. Huston was shocked by the request. “‘No sir,’ said she, ‘we have re-
nounced all Tea in this Place. I cant make Tea, but I’le make you Coffee.’
Accordingly I have drank Coffee every Afternoon since, and have borne it
very well. Tea must be universally renounced. I must be weaned, and the
sooner, the better.”61 About Adams’s contribution to the revolutionary cause,
there is not the slightest doubt. It is people such as Mrs. Huston who have
been undervalued.
III
Tea was not enough to mobilize a nation. Transforming an imagined state
into an actual one required a greater sacrifice from American consumers than
forgoing their favorite beverage. To be sure, in the immediate aftermath of
the Intolerable Acts, colonists from Georgia to New Hampshire wanted to
express solidarity with Boston. But during the summer of 1774 the tide of
public opinion was also running strong for a more demanding form of con-
sumer resistance, one that would demonstrate to the British as well as the
Americans that they were now capable of uniting in one great demonstration
of popular virtue. A total denial of British imported goods was a necessary
step on a long, difficult road from consumer colonies to an independent re-
public. Even before the recognized political leaders of the day were prepared
to take such a radical decision, farmers and mechanics—the middling sort
who had for so long enjoyed the fruits of the consumer economy—contem-
plated a complete cessation of trade with Great Britain. The exact number of
people involved is impossible to estimate with precision. The figure could

not have been small, however, and it was these men and women who were in
the vanguard of the final push for independence.
John Dickinson, a savvy observer of such matters, sensed the change in
the political climate. “What never happened before,” he explained to Josiah
Quincy in June, “has happened now. The country people have so exact a
knowledge of [the] facts, and of the consequences attending the surrender
of the points in question, that they are, if possible, more zealous than the
citizens who lie in a direct line of information.”62 That same day, Samuel
Adams reported from Massachusetts to his Virginia friend Richard Henry
Lee, “The people of this Province are thoroughly sensible of the necessity of
breaking off all commercial connection with a country whose political
Councils tend only to enslave them. . . . [T]hey are urged to it by motives of
self-preservation; and are, therefore, signing an agreement in the several
towns, not to consume any British manufactures.”63 In a statement that might
have served as an epitaph for an empire of goods, a Pennsylvania writer
asked American newspaper readers:
What could she [Britain] wish from us more than we freely gave? For whom have we
toiled in this once uncultivated wilderness; For whose benefit do we rise up early and
lye down late, is it not for Great Britain?—Are not our sails spread to every wind that
blows under heaven, to bear away the dear earnings of the sweat of our brow, that they
may at last center in Britain? Are we not her faithful generous customers, for all the
various commodities of her industrious workmen? Do we clamor at the prices they
exact? . . . What more, in a commercial way, has she a right to wish?64
Once the commercial link that had bound these two people together for so
long came unraveled, the partners in the relationship suddenly discovered
that they did not have as much in common as they may have thought.
Renewed appeals for non-importation came from local meetings
throughout America. Their willingness to entertain the possibility of a to-
tal boycott of British goods, especially in New England, may have reflected
attempts by the Boston Committee of Correspondence to push for a more
aggressive strategy of resistance. But the influence of the Boston radicals
has been exaggerated. People in other parts of America took the manifestos
pouring out of Boston with a grain of salt. They certainly had minds of
their own, and as they assessed the flow of events, they came to indepen-
dent conclusions about a proper plan of action. Although Samuel Adams
and his allies in the Boston town meeting initially dragged their heels on
the wisdom of calling an “American Congress,” others encouraged such a
national gathering.65 They remembered how the non-importation cam-
paigns of 1769 and 1770 had collapsed amid charges of cheating and smug-
gling. If non-importation had any chance of persuading Parliament to
reconsider its punishment of Boston, it would have to be a coordinated
effort, a response commensurate to the resources of a global commercial
empire. George Mason, the thoughtful Virginia lawyer, understood the prob-
lem. “The associations,” he had explained in 1770, “almost from one end of
this continent to the other, were drawn up in a hurry and formed on erro-
neous principles.” The local organizers of those boycotts had expected Par-
liament to back down quickly, certainly within a year or two, but that had
not happened. The colonists’ inability to overcome parochial concerns did
not discourage Mason, however, for, as he had posited then, “had one gen-
eral plan been formed exactly the same for all colonies (so as to have re-
moved all cause of jealousy or danger of interfering with each other) in the
nature of a sumptuary law, restraining only articles of luxury and ostenta-
tion together with the goods at any time taxed,” the results might have been
more impressive.66 In 1770 Americans had not yet discovered how to think
continentally, how to compromise differences for a common cause.
By mid-summer 1774, however, public opinion had caught up with
Mason. One newspaper called for a “Politico-Mercantile Congress,” which
it claimed “seems now to be the voice of all the Colonies from Nova-Scotia
to Georgia; and New-York the place of [the] meeting.”67 This definition of
the continent was perhaps overly expansive, but the report captured the
kinds of conversations Americans were having with each other about their
future. As was the case during the earlier non-importation drives of 1768
and 1769, public discussion about closing their markets pushed the colo-
nists a little closer to accepting a political identity that was not British. The
“Freeholders and Inhabitants” of Orange Town, New York, resolved that “it
is our unanimous Opinion, that the stopping [of] all Exportation and Im-
portation, to and from Great Britain, and the West-Indies, would be the
most effectual Method to obtain a speedy Repeal.”68 The farmers of East
Hampton, a village on the eastern tip of Long Island, voted to join other
colonies to defend the “Liberties and Immunities of British America.” They
concluded that “a Non-importation Agreement through the Colonies is the
most likely Means to save us from the present and further Troubles.”69 The
concept of a united boycott became for these people a way both to bring
pressure on Lord North’s government and to voice a shared sense of politi-
cal purpose with distant Americans who probably could not have located
East Hampton on a map. The freeholders of Rowan County, a small Tide-
water settlement on the coast of North Carolina, also weighed the issues,
concluding that “this Colony ought not to trade with any Colony which
shall refuse to join in any Union or Association that shall be agreed upon by
the greater Part of the other Colonies on this Continent, for preserving
their common Rights and Liberties.”70 The North Carolinians communi-
cated their trustworthiness through consumer sacrifice; their ideology
through common goods. A meeting of people in Queen Anne’s County,
Maryland, agreed that “the only effectual means for obtaining such repeal
[of the Intolerable Acts] . . . is an association under the strongest ties, for
breaking off all commercial connections with Great Britain.” And they im-
mediately dispatched a report of their decision to “the next Maryland and
Pennsylvania Gazettes.”71
A particularly poignant discussion of a small town’s political future in
a suddenly wider world occurred in Dartmouth, Massachusetts. By their
own admission, the residents of Dartmouth had been slow off the mark,
A 1774 covenant binding subscribers in Lincoln, Massachusetts, not to “purchase or consume”

British goods. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.
neglecting even to hold a meeting about the crisis in Boston. But, adopting
a better-late-than-never philosophy, they “moved at last in the common
cause.” For whatever reasons, they now felt themselves part of “a general
American union.” And in their eyes America was in deep trouble. “America
we apprehend,” the Dartmouth meeting announced, “has been exposed to
ruin, by the excessive use of foreign commodities, therefore the late acts of
the British Parliament, may be considered a loud call in providence, for a
fast from those excesses.” It was rare even in the late eighteenth century for
a boycott to be labeled a fast, but Dartmouth had been consulting the Old
Testament for insight about the present political situation. It thought that
“similar to the preaching of Jonah to Nineveh, who, as he expressed him-
self, cried out of the belly of hell, yet his errand was designed by heaven, to
prevent the destruction of multitudes: and if Americans will proclaim and
keep a universal fast from English and India goods (which seems to be the
(Here and following page)

The actual signatures of some subscribers to the 1774 Lincoln covenant. Courtesy of the
American Antiquarian Society.
terms and conditions regarded for their salvation) no doubt their deliver-
ance . . . will be complete.”72
As momentum for a national congress accelerated, a few skeptics dared
to speak out, arguing that non-importation could not possibly fulfill popu-
lar political expectations. They assembled an exhaustive list of reasons why
a national boycott could not succeed. If Americans sealed their ports to
imported goods, the British would simply develop new markets in other
parts of the world. It was asserted that the Americans had grossly overesti-
mated their commercial importance to Great Britain, and thus non-impor-
tation—even if rigorously enforced—would scarcely trouble Lord North
and those setting imperial policy. To claim that American manufacturers
could supply current market demand for consumer goods was a joke. A
boycott would jeopardize civil society, “raising a most unnatural Enmity
between Parents & Children & Husbands & Wives.”73 Moreover, the money
supply would soon dry up. A New York Loyalist beseeched proponents of
non-importation—a strategy often coupled with non-exportation—“Can
you live without money? Will the shop-keeper give you his goods? Will the
weaver, shoemaker, blacksmith, carpenter, work for you without pay? If they
will, it is more than they will do for me.”74 The naysayers warned that colo-
nists would cheat on their agreements, so that the sacrifice of honest mer-
chants and consumers would amount to a hollow gesture.
Most of all, however, the scoffers could not believe that other Ameri-
cans would voluntarily forgo the material pleasures which for more than
half a century had brought them warmth, beauty, color, comfort, sanita-
tion, leisure, and a heady sense of self-worth. Writing under the name of
“The British American,” a Virginian ridiculed those who advocated the
simple life in the name of rights and liberty. They might be able to give up
imported salt, he predicted, since “hickory ashes, though a poor substitute,
may supply the place of it as well to you as it formerly did to the native
Indians.” Getting by in such an environment would be an adventure, a little
like summer camp for people who normally took modern appliances for
granted. “Nails, without slitting mills, will be made with great difficulty,
but logged cabins may be built without them; clothes for yours[e]lves and
Negroes are not worth thinking of, because you may confine yours[e]lves
and them to your houses in cold weather.” But surely, even under the primi-
tive conditions of self-sufficiency, the patriot would somehow survive. “El-
egancies, and even luxuries,” observed “The British American,”“which many
of you, by having been long accustomed to, now consider as the conven-
iencies, if not the nceessaries of life, may be resigned as baubles, beneath
the consideration of men who either desire or deserve to be free.”75
One skeptic gave the Loyalist game away when he urged Americans to
ignore what they could read every day in the colonial press. The Reverend
Jonathan Boucher begged the public in vain, “[f]or the Sake of common
Humanity . . . [to] disdain to co-operate, with hand bills, with news papers,
with the high menacing resolves of common town meetings.”76 But, of
course, the conversations about non-importation that one heard in the
streets and taverns shared none of his dark predictions of impending eco-
nomic ruin. On the eve of a continental congress, popular writers assured
American consumers that their huge demand for manufactured objects was
actually a source of strength. “We can when we please,” announced “Steel,”
“set up an independent commonwealth in America, and Britain would not
dare to attack us, for her existence as a nation depends upon her union with
America.”77 It is perhaps worthy of note that Steel put forward the incendi-
ary idea of an independent commonwealth more than a year before Jefferson
penned his famous declaration. By the summer of 1774 such notions were
already in the air. In a dialogue with an imaginary Englishman, “Consider-
ation” asked, “How can the colonists affect your [the British] interest, and
the interest of other nations, for the grand purpose of securing the liberties
of America?” The answer was obvious to those who had turned apparent
economic dependence—the colonial burden—into political advantage. “The
colonies,” declared Consideration, “will withhold their trade from you, and
give it to other nations. This stroke of policy will be effectual and decisive;
and as it is seen to be the only thing which will answer the grand purpose of
preserving LIBERTY, it will be pursued with ardor, and persevered in with
firmness.” Anyone who knew anything at all about international trade could
state with assurance that “the TRADE of America is a prize for which the
commercial states will all contend, and embrace every opportunity to ac-
quire.”78 “An American” told South Carolinians that “we can do without her
[Great Britain] forever, and be great gainers by it.”79
These were radical statements for people who had never faced a Red
Coat on the field of battle. Whether such rhetoric reflected ignorance or
naïveté, hope or arrogance, it suggested that the seeds of a powerful new
national identity were sprouting among colonial consumers who were still
British subjects. The most elegant argument for taking a separate commer-
cial road appeared under the name of “A Citizen of Philadelphia.” Echoing
however subtly the social contract theory of John Locke, “A Citizen” ex-
plained that “Our commerce with England being founded on mutual con-
venience, and voluntary compact, it certainly rests with us to determine
how far it shall be extended, and when it shall cease; this is a right, which
even Lord North, with all his arbitrary views, dare not deny.” These remarks
were aimed straight at the choicemaker in the marketplace who was now
being recruited for rebellion. “No man can be obliged to purchase goods of
another: the seller can do no more than expose his wares to public sale, the
buyer is to determine what, when, and how much, he will buy; this being
the case, it becomes now a question, whether this is not the time to make a
general exercise of that power: as an individual, after having maturely
weighed the subject, I give my voice for exerting it, in its fullest extent. I
would recommend a general non-importation, as the most effectual means
of convincing the people of England, of how much importance we are.”
Just in case American readers missed the central point, he added in bold
letters, “It is A GENERAL NON-IMPORTATION HONESTLY ADHERED
TO, that must work our deliverance.”80
Delegates to the First Continental Congress opened their proceedings

on September 5, 1774. As might be expected, they spent the early days learn-
ing more about each other. They were, in fact, a collection of strangers from
distant places who had only a superficial understanding of the various cul-
tures that had sent representatives to Philadelphia. They quickly overcame
personal differences. Although many of them would have denied the charge,
these men were engaged in a revolutionary act that challenged the author-
ity of Parliament. They appreciated the possible consequences of their con-
duct. Anyone who knew even a little about recent Irish and Scottish history
comprehended the cruel violence that Great Britain might visit upon them
and their supporters. Bravely taking their chances on America, the delegates
turned to the business at hand. Within a few weeks they devised a grand
scheme for halting all trade with the mother country. The members of the
congress argued about the details of the program, for, as they discovered,
the southern colonies worried that colonial resistance too quickly imple-
mented might cost them the sale of the annual harvest of tobacco and rice.
But for all the grumbling about the particular needs of local economies,
they accepted a complex package containing provision for non-importa-
tion, non-consumption, and non-exportation, a plan as radical in its im-
plications for the American people as any passed by any legislature during
the nation’s entire history. It drew upon more than a decade of experience.
It brought to fruition a brilliantly original strategy of consumer resistance
to political oppression, one that had invited Americans to think of them-
selves as Americans even before they entertained a thought of indepen-
dence. On October 20, the Continental Congress proclaimed:
To obtain redress of these grievances, which threaten destruction to the lives, liberty,
and property of his majesty’s subjects, in North-America, we are of opinion, that a non-
importation, non-consumption, and non-exportation agreement, faithfully adhered to,
will prove the most speedy, effectual, and peaceable measure: And, therefore, we do, for
ourselves, and the inhabitants of the several colonies, whom we represent, firmly agree
and associate, under the sacred ties of virtue, honour and love of our country.81
Non-importation went into effect on December 1. Non-consumption, which

the delegates described as “an effectual security for the observation of non-
importation,” started on March 1, 1775, and non-exportation was put off
until September 1.
The delegates had also learned from the failure of earlier appeals for
non-importation that enforcement held the key to success. Voluntary mea-
sures had not worked; the consumer marketplace held too many tempta-
tions for too many people. To remedy the problem, Congress called for the
creation of the Continental Association. This action authorized the forma-
tion of local committees throughout America. Elected by voters in each
town, city, and county, these groups of virtuous citizens were charged with
monitoring the economic activities of their neighbors. Modern historians
have generally discounted the significance of the Continental Association.82
For whatever reasons, they have failed to see that these were genuinely revo-
lutionary organizations, responsible under a ruling by an illegally convened
national assembly to police and indoctrinate a public comprised of many

individuals not yet prepared openly to disobey Parliament, nor for that
matter to sacrifice the goods imported from Great Britain. In another con-
text such as the French Revolution these local bodies would have been called
committees of safety. The eleventh section of the congressional resolution
declared:
That a committee be chosen in every county, city, and town, by those who are quali-
fied to vote for representatives in the legislature, whose business it shall be attentively
to observe the conduct of all persons touching this association; and when it shall be
made to appear, to the satisfaction of a majority of any such committee, that any per-
son within the limits of their appointment has violated this association, that such
majority do forthwith cause the truth of the case to be published in the gazette; to the
end, that all such foes to the rights of British-America may be publicly known, and
thenceforth we respectively will break off all dealings with him or her.83
The Association represented a profoundly bourgeois response to the poli-

cies of a commercial empire, and it was not a bit less revolutionary for be-
ing so.
To argue that the Association made the American Revolution inevi-
table would be unwarranted. Last-minute negotiations could have altered
the course of events. Lord North might have rejected a military solution.
But the formation of local committees altered the political chemistry in the
cities, towns, and counties of America. It was on this level that ordinary
men and women declared their independence. Lord Dunmore, the royal
governor of Virginia, realized immediately how local committees were able
to intimidate those subjects who still professed loyalty to the crown. The
Associations spoke in the name of a new national authority. In December
1774 he reported to Lord Hillsborough, the British secretary of state for
America, that “the Associations . . . recommended by the people of this
colony, and adopted by what is called the Continental Congress,” were en-
forcing their regulations “throughout this country with the greatest rigor. A
committee has been chosen in every county whose business it is to carry
the Association of the Congress into execution, which committee assumes
an authority to inspect the books, invoices, and all the secrets of the trade
and correspondence of the merchants, to watch the conduct of every in-
habitant without distinction, and send for all such as come under their sus-
picion into their presence, to interrogate them.” When Virginians put
through this ordeal challenged the authority of the local committees, they
were informed that they had violated what the enforcers “call the laws of
Congress.”84
The Reverend Samuel Seabury, an Anglican rector in New York, ex-
pressed shock at what he witnessed in his neighborhood. The colony’s As-
sociation had called a general meeting in New York City of “freeholders and
freemen . . . to chose eight persons out of every ward, to be a Committee, to
carry the Association of the Congress into execution.” Seabury predicted
that these patriotic busybodies would soon invade the privacy of law-abid-
ing men and women. They would ask impertinent questions. Do the fami-
lies drink “any Tea or wine”? Have they imported garments manufactured
in Great Britain or Ireland? And if the answer was affirmative, “their names
are to be published in the Gazette, that they may be publicly known, and
universally condemned, as foes to the Rights of British America, and enemies
of American Liberty.” The threat of exposure marked the end of the old or-
der as Seabury recognized it. The consumer revolt had spawned an ill-dis-
ciplined mob which had the audacity to declare purchasers of British goods
“Out-laws, unworthy of the protection of civil society . . . to be tarred, feath-
ered, hanged, drawn, quartered, and burnt.—O Rare American Freedom!”85
Seabury inflated the punishments dispensed for breaking the political
rules of consumption.86 Everywhere, however, one encountered a wave of
excitement. As Henry Laurens of South Carolina explained in anticipation
of the Association:
From the best intelligence that I have received, my conclusions are, that, So. Carolina,
No. Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, Connecticut,
Rhode Island, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, one Chain of Colonies extending up-
wards of 1,200 Miles & containing about three Millions of White Inhabitants of whom
upwards of 500,000 [are] Men capable of bearing Arms, will unite in an agreement to
Import no goods from Great Britain, the West India Islands, or Africa until those Acts
of Parliament which Strike at our Liberties are Repealed.87
Laurens judged correctly. It has been estimated that local elections for the
committees brought seven thousand men into the political process who
had never before served in public office.88 The committees monitored con-
sumption, identifying local patriots by the garments they wore and by the
beverages they drank, and demanded public confessions from those who
erred. In Virginia counties everyone was expected to sign the Association, a
promise before one’s neighbors—almost a statement of one’s new birth as
a consumer—not to purchase the despised manufactures of the mother
country. According to James Madison, these signings were “the method used
among us to distinguish friends from foes and to oblige the Common people
to a more strict observance of it [the Association].”89
As in earlier boycotts, people sorted themselves out politically through
goods. A committee in Prince George’s County announced “That to be
clothed in manufactures fabricated in the Colonies ought to be considered
as a badge and distinction of respect and true patriotism.”90 In Charleston,
South Carolina, a committee sent children through the streets to collect
tea, which was then burned publicly on Guy Fawkes Day.91 The local asso-
ciations also educated ordinary men and women about the relation be-
tween consumer goods and constitutional rights, in other words, about the
relation between experience and ideology. A committee in Anne Arundel
County, Maryland, helped Thomas Charles Williams understand that by
importing tea he had “endangered the rights and liberties of America.” Pro-
ceedings against Williams were dropped after he proclaimed that he was
“sincerely sorry for his offense.”92 An Association in Farmington, Connecti-
cut, forced Solomon Cowles and his wife to confess that secretly drinking
tea after March 1, 1775,
The Association forced Americans such as the man signing a local agreement to support the
general boycott of British goods. “The Alternative of Williamsburg,” Print, 1775. Courtesy of the
Colonial Williamsburg Foundation.
is a violation of the third article of said Association, contrary to the sense of the people
of this town, derogatory of the character it sustains as firmly engaged in the interest-
ing cause of liberty, and to the manifest injury of the public interest of British America:
Which conduct of ours, we do voluntarily, in this public manner, utterly disapprove of
and condemn, And further, we do promise and engage for the future, strictly to con-
form ourselves to the obvious sense and meaning of the said Association, in this and
every other particular.93
Alas, Silas Newcomb of Cumberland, New Jersey, was more stubborn. The
members of the local Association failed to convince the man of his error
in drinking “East-India Tea in his family,” and they were finally compelled
“to break off all dealings with him, and in this manner publish the truth
of the case, that he may be distinguished from the friends of American
liberty.”94
The colonists who responded to Boston’s call in 1774 were consciously
repudiating the empire of goods. Within barely a generation the meaning
of the items of everyday consumption had changed substantially. At mid-
century imported articles—the cloth, the ceramics, the buttons—had served
as markers of a British identity, and as they flooded into the homes of yeo-
men and gentry alike, they linked ordinary men and women with the dis-
tant exciting culture of the metropolis. By participating in the marketplace,
by making choices among competing manufactures, the colonists became
in some important sense English people who happened to live in the prov-
inces. By taxing these goods, however, Parliament set in motion a process
of symbolic redefinition, slow and painful at first, punctuated by lulls that
encouraged the false hope that the empire of goods could survive, but ulti-
mately straining the colonial relationship to the breaking point. Americans
who had never dealt with one another, who lived thousands of miles apart,
found that they could communicate their political grievances through goods
or, more precisely, through the denial of goods that had held this empire
together. Private consumer experiences were transformed into public ritu-
als. Indeed, many colonists learned about rights and liberties through com-
mon consumer items, articles which in themselves were politically neutral
but which in the changed political atmosphere of the 1760s and 1770s be-
came the medium through which ideological abstractions acquired con-
crete meaning.
When the colonists finally and reluctantly decided that they could do
without the “Baubles of Britain,” they destroyed a vital cultural bond with
the mother country. “The country,” explained James Lovell to his friend
Joseph Trumbull in December 1774,“seems determined to let England know
that in the present struggle, commerce has lost all the temptations of a bait
to catch the American farmer.”95 Lovell may have exaggerated, but he helps
us to understand why in 1774 the countryside supported the cities. Con-
sumer goods had made it possible for the colonists to imagine a nation; the
Association made it easier for Americans to imagine independence.
IV
David Ramsay possessed outstanding talent. The South Carolina physician
not only fought in the Revolution with distinction but also wrote a won-
derfully insightful history of that event. While the outcome of the war was
still in doubt, Ramsay delivered “An Oration on the Advantages of Ameri-
can Independence,” a statement that revealed that he was already contem-
plating the future of a new republic. He reminded the people of Charleston
that they had rejected British tyranny for a country “for which we would
choose to live, or dare to die.” The struggle had been uphill from the start.
“It was [in] the Interest of Great-Britain to encourage our dissipation and
extravagance, for the two-fold purpose of increasing the sale of her manu-
factures, and of perpetuating our subordination.” Ramsay told the audience
that Parliament had done everything it could to maintain special commer-
cial privileges in the colonies, and the flow of imported goods, many of
them luxury items, had come close to undermining American virtue. The
British wanted the colonists to be more like the British. “The whole force of
example was employed to induce us to copy the dissipated manners of the
country from which we sprung.” The temptations were so great, in fact,
that had “[we] continued dependent, our frugality, industry, and simplicity
of manners, would have been lost in an imitation of British extravagance,
idleness, and false refinements.” But good had triumphed over evil; Ameri-
cans had made the sacrifices necessary to preserve liberty.
And then, with the swiftest of transitions, Ramsay turned his attention
to the future. A free republic would open its harbors to the trade of the
world. He foresaw a level of prosperity that could not have been grasped
before the Revolution. “Our change of government,” Ramsay asserted, “smiles
upon our commerce with an aspect peculiarly benign and favorable. In a
few years, we may expect to see the colors of France, Spain, Holland, Prussia,
Portugal, and those of every other maritime power, waving on our coasts;
whilst Americans unfurl the thirteen Stripes in the remotest harbors of the
world. Our different climates and soils produce a great variety of useful
commodities. The sea washes our coast along an extensive tract of two thou-
sand miles; and no country abounds in a greater plenty of the materials for
ship-building.” Ramsay may have intended to raise the spirits of a war-weary
city, but this was not simply a learned pep talk. Like him, the people who
heard Ramsay’s oration anticipated that “the wealth of Europe, Asia, and
Africa, will flow in upon America: Our Trade will no longer be confined by
the selfish regulations of an avaricious step-dame, but follow wherever In-
terest leads the way. Our great object, as a trading people, should be to pro-
cure the best prices for our commodities, and foreign articles at the most
reasonable rates.”96 In a new, expansive continental environment the ob-
jects of material culture changed their meaning. No longer associated with
oppression, they communicated hope; no longer equated with political slav-
ery, they spoke of prosperity; no longer coupled with the destruction of
morality; they invited all Americans to share in the common goods which
they had always desired.
It has become fashionable among some commentators to condemn
modern consumer culture, insisting that it sustains itself on the creation of
false wants. Self-indulgence, one hears, erodes the bonds of civil society.
The critics may be correct. Whatever the truth, they do sound a lot like
those eighteenth-century moralists who fretted that ordinary people could
not handle the temptations of the marketplace. This perspective underesti-
mates the capacity of men and women to comprehend their own political
situation. It is true that goods can corrupt. But in certain circumstances
they can be made to speak to power. The choice is ours to make.
Notes
Introduction
1. Reprinted in Bernard Peach, ed., Richard Price and the Ethical Foundations of the American
Revolution: Selections from His Pamphlets, with Appendices (Durham, N.C., 1979), 292.
2. The phrase “consumer revolution” appears in Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, and J. H. Plumb,
The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England
(Bloomington, Ind., 1982), 9–33. Also see Martin Daunton and Matthew Hilton, eds., The
Politics of Consumption: Material Culture and Citizenship in Europe and America (Oxford,
2001).
3. The mobilization of the people under Mahatma Gandhi and other nationalist leaders pro-
vides an interesting comparison. Like the Americans, Gandhi’s followers believed that mas-
sive British imports, especially textiles, sustained colonial dependence and therefore that
political freedom required ordinary consumers to boycott goods manufactured in the mother
country. See Manu Goswami, “From Swadeshi to Swaraj: Nation, Economy, and Territory in
Colonial South Asia, 1870 to 1907,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 40 (1998),
609–36; and Bernard S. Cohn, “Cloth, Clothes, and Colonialism: India in the Nineteenth
Century,” in Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India, ed. Cohn (Princeton,
N.J., 1996), 106–62.
4. Quoted in John Shy, “Confronting Rebellion: Private Correspondence of Lord Barrington
with General Gage, 1765–1775,” in Sources of American Independence: Selected Manuscripts
from the Collections of the William L. Clements Library, ed. Howard H. Peckham (Chicago,
1978), I, 37.
5. 27 November 1767.
Chapter 1
1. Benjamin Woods Labaree, The Boston Tea Party (New York, 1964).
2. Richard Price, Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty (1776), in Richard Price and the
Ethical Foundations of the American Revolution: Selections from His Pamphlets, with Appen-
dices, ed. Bernard Peach (Durham, N.C., 1979), 99.
3. Massachusetts Spy, 15 July and 11 August 1774.
4. Massachusetts Spy, 28 July 1774.
5. “Proceedings of the Freeholders of Rowan County,” in The Colonial Records of North Caro-
lina, ed. William L. Saunders, 10 vols. (Raleigh, N.C., 1886–90), IX, 1025.
6. Massachusetts Spy, 16 June 1774.
334 n n ote s to pag e s 3–9
7. Cited in Henry S. Nourse, History of the Town of Harvard, Massachusetts, 1732–1893 (Harvard,
Mass., 1894), 308.
8. Massachusetts Spy, 4 August 1774.
9. Charles Chauncy to Richard Price, 10 January 1775, in Peach, ed., Richard Price, 293.
10. John Adams to Hezekiah Niles, 13 February 1818, in The Works of John Adams, ed. C. F. Adams,
10 vols. (Boston, 1850–56), X, 283.
11. David Ramsay, An Oration on the Advantages of American Independence . . . (Charleston,
S.C., 1778), 18.
12. Samuel McClintock, A Sermon Preached on Occasion of the Commencement of the New Con-
stitution (Portsmouth, N.H., 1784) reprinted in Political Sermons of the American Founding
Era, 1730–1805, ed. Ellis Sandoz (Indianapolis, Ind., 1991), 800.
13. Andrew Burnaby, Travels Through the Middle Settlements in North America in the Years 1759
and 1760 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1963), 113.
14. Thomas Pownall, The Administration of the Colonies, 2d ed. (London, 1765), 64.
15. [Benjamin Franklin], The Interest of Great Britain Considered . . . (Philadelphia, 1760), 31.
The best modern account of the Albany Congress is Timothy J. Shannon, Indians and Colo-
nists at the Crossroads of Empire: The Albany Congress of 1754 (Ithaca, N.Y., 2000).
16. Ezra Stiles, A Discourse on the Christian Union . . . (Boston, 1761), 99.
17. Clarke to Franklin, 6 May 1754, in The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, ed. Leonard W. Labaree,
35 vols. (New Haven, Conn., 1959–) V, 270.
18. Adams to Niles, in Works of John Adams, X, 283.
19. “Journal of Josiah Quincy, Jun., During His Voyage and Residence in England from Septem-
ber 28th, 1774, to March 3d, 1775,” Massachusetts Historical Society Proceedings 50 (1917), 438.
20. Ramsay, Advantages of American Independence, 1.
21. See T. H. Breen, “Making History: The Force of Public Opinion and the Last Years of Slavery
in Revolutionary Massachusetts,” in Through a Glass Darkly: Reflections on Personal Identity
in Early America, ed. Ronald Hoffman, Mechal Sobel, and Fredrika J. Teute (Chapel Hill,
N.C., 1997), 67–95.
22. Quite a few excellent monographs address the coming of revolution within a specific colony,
and although many of these studies are thorough and imaginative, they seldom explain how
the issues that propelled one group or region toward independence might have resonated in
other areas. This is the problem of micro explanations for a macro event. A list of some of
the better monographs would include Rhys Isaac, The Transformation of Virginia, 1740–1790
(Chapel Hill, N.C., 1982); Edward Countryman, A People in Revolution: The American Revo-
lution and Political Society in New York, 1760–1790 (Baltimore, Md., 1981); and Robert A.
Gross, The Minutemen and their World (New York, 1976).
23. A good discussion of the problem of explaining popular mobilization can be found in John
Shy, “The American Colonies in War and Revolution, 1748–1783,” in P. J. Marshall, ed., The
Eighteenth Century, vol. 2 of Oxford History of the British Empire, ed. William Roger Louis
(Oxford, 1998), 300–324.
24. “Libertas at Natale Solum,” South-Carolina Gazette, 20 August 1770 (italics omitted).
25. Bernard Bailyn, Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1967), iv.
Also see J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the At-
lantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, N.J., 1975), and “Virtue and Commerce in the Eigh-
teenth Century,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 3 (1972–73), 119–34; Gordon S. Wood,
The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1969). For a useful
review of the historiographic debate, one might look at “The Creation of the American Re-
public, 1776–1787: A Symposium of Views and Reviews,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser.,
44 (1987), 549–640, and Ronald Hamowy, “Cato’s Letters, John Locke, and the Republican
Paradigm,” History of Political Thought 11 (1990), 273–94. For the enthusiastic reception of
Trenchard and Gordon’s “Cato’s Letters” in colonial America, see Bernard Bailyn, The Ori-
gins of American Politics (New York, 1968), 3–58.
26. James T. Kloppenberg, “The Virtues of Liberalism: Christianity, Republicanism, and Ethics
in Early American Political Discourse,” Journal of American History 74 (1987), 9–33. For a
different analysis see T. H. Breen, The Lockean Moment: The Language of Rights on the Eve of
the American Revolution (Oxford, 2001).
27. Gordon S. Wood posed the interpretive problem most forcefully in “Rhetoric and Reality in
the American Revolution,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 23 (1966), 3-32.
n o t e s t o p a g e s 10– 18 N 335
28. See, for example, Edmund S. Morgan, “The American Revolution: Revisions in Need of
Revising,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 14 (1957), 3–15.
29. Richard L. Bushman, The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (New York, 1992).
The English side of the story is detailed in Paul Langford, A Polite and Commercial People:
England, 1727–1783 (Oxford, 1989).
30. These interpretive issues are explored in T. H. Breen, “Can Goods Speak to Power? A Curi-
ous Silence in the History of the 18th-Century Atlantic World,” a presentation for Going
Abroad: British Art and Design in a Wider World, 1500–1900, a conference at the Victoria
and Albert Museum, London, 6 December 2002; and Martin Daunton and Matthew Hilton,
eds., The Politics of Consumption: Material Culture and Citizenship in Europe and America
(Oxford, 2001), 1–32.
31. [Anonymous], Considerations upon the Act of Parliament . . . (Boston, 1764), 22. In his colonial
history of New York, originally drafted in 1762, William Smith confirmed what British mili-
tary officers had suspected: “Every man of industry and integrity has it in his power to live
well, and many are the instances of persons who came here distressed by their poverty, who
now enjoy easy and plentiful fortunes.” Smith, The History of the Late Province of New-York,
New-York Historical Society Collections, vol. 4, pt. 2 (1829), 277. Much of the discussion of the
“Hospitable Consumer” appeared originally in T. H. Breen, “Narrative of Commercial Life:
Consumption, Ideology, and Community on the Eve of the American Revolution,” William
and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 50 (1993), 471–501.
32. [John Dickinson], The Late Regulations Respecting the British Colonies on the Continent of
America Considered . . . (Philadelphia, 1765), 23–24. The scholarly Dickinson footnoted his
version of the consumer narrative, citing Malachy Postlethwayt, Universal Dictionary of Trade
and Commerce (London, 1751–55), who claimed that since Sir Walter Raleigh’s time, English
writers “have found an interest in misrepresenting, or lessening the value” of the American
colonies. During the eighteenth century, however, hostile commentators began alleging the
Americans “were not useful enough to their mother country; that while we were loaded with
taxes, they were absolutely free; that the planters lived like princes, while the inhabitants of
England laboured hard for a tolerable subsistence”([Dickinson], Late Regulations, 23–24).
To this, he added that especially heavy duties on Chesapeake tobacco in Great Britain were
part of a “design to bring down the pride of these PRINCELY PLANTERS” (ibid.).
33. Josiah Tucker, A Letter from a Merchant in London to His Nephew in North America . . .
(London, 1766) with Franklin’s notes is reprinted in Pennsylvania Magazine of History and
Biography 25 (1901), 315–21, 524–25.
34. The Power and Grandeur of Great-Britain, Founded on the Liberty of the Colonies, and the
Mischiefs Attending the Taxing of Them by Act of Parliament Demonstrated (New York, 1768),
5, 7.
35. Ibid., 7–8.
36. [William Hicks], The Nature and Extent of Parliamentary Power Considered . . . (Philadel-
phia, 1768), 18–19.
37. New-London Gazette, 20 January 1769.
38. Boston Evening-Post, 2 January 1769.
39. Connecticut Journal, and New-Haven Post-Boy, 11 October 1771.
40. Ebenezer Baldwin, “An Appendix, Stating the Heavy Grievances the Colonies Labour
Under . . . ,” in Samuel Sherwood, A Sermon, Containing, Scriptural Instructions to Civil
Rulers (New Haven, Conn., 1774), 45, 50–51.
41. New-York Mercury, 4 July 1774, reprint of “A Citizen of Philadelphia,” Pennsylvania Packet,
27 June 1774.
42. David Ramsay, The History of the American Revolution, ed. Lester H. Cohen, 2 vols. (1789;
reprint, Indianapolis, Ind., 1990), I, 51.
43. Jeremy Belknap, The History of New-Hampshire, 2 vols. (1784–92; reprint, New York, 1970), I,
327–28.
44. Carole Shammas, “How Self-Sufficient Was Early America?” Journal of Interdisciplinary His-
tory 13 (1982), 247–72. Also see Ann Smart Martin, “Makers, Buyers, and Users: Consumer-
ism as a Material Culture Framework,” Winterthur Portfolio 28 (1993), 141–57; and Martin,
“Frontier Boys and Country Cousins: The Context for Choice in Eighteenth-Century
Consumerism,” in Historical Archaeology and the Study of American Culture, ed. Lu Ann De
Cunzo and Bernard L. Herman (Winterthur, Del., 1996), 71–102.
336 n n ote s to pag e s 18– 23
45. John J. McCusker and Russell R. Menard, The Economy of British America, 1607–1789 (Chapel
Hill, N.C., 1985), 10–34. An example of production-driven analysis is Peter A. Coclanis, The
Shadow of a Dream: Economic Life and Death in the South Carolina Low Country, 1670–1920
(New York, 1989).
46. Jan de Vries, “Peasant Demand Patterns and Economic Development: Friesland, 1550–1750,”
in European Peasants and Their Markets: Essays in Agrarian Economic History, ed. William N.
Parker and Eric L. Jones (Princeton, N.J., 1975), 206. Also see Eric L. Jones, “The Fashion
Manipulators: Consumer Taste and British Industries, 1660–1800,” in Business Enterprise
and Economic Change: Essays in Honor of Harold F. Williamson, ed. Louis P. Cain and Paul J.
Uselding (Kent State, Ohio, 1973), 198–226.
47. De Vries, “Peasant Demand,” 236.
48. McCusker and Menard, Economy of British America, 277.
49. See, for example, T. H. Breen, Tobacco Culture: The Great Tidewater Planters on the Eve of
Revolution (Princeton, N.J., 1985).
50. Samuel Adams to Arthur Lee, 31 October 1771, in The Writings of Samuel Adams, ed. Harry
Alonzo Cushing, 4 vols. (New York, 1904–6), II, 267.
51. Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, and J. H. Plumb, The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Com-
mercialization of Eighteenth-Century England (Bloomington, Ind., 1982).
52. See Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven, Conn., 1992); J. L.
McCracken, “Protestant Ascendancy and the Rise of Colonial Nationalism, 1714–60,” in T.
W. Moody and W. E. Vaughan, eds., Eighteenth-Century Ireland, 1691–1800, vol. 4 of A New
History of Ireland (Oxford, 1986), 106–8; Joep Leersen, “Anglo-Irish Patriotism and Its Euro-
pean Context: Notes Toward a Reassessment,” Eighteenth-Century Ireland (Dublin), 3 (1988),
7–24; Thomas Barlett, “‘ A People Made Rather for Copies than Originals’: The Anglo-Irish,
1760–1800,” International History Review 12 (1990), 11–25; Isolde Victory, “The Making of the
Declaratory Act of 1720,” in Parliament, Politics, and People: Essays in Eighteenth-Century
Irish History, ed. Gerard O’Brien (Dublin, 1989), 9–30; and S. J. Connolly, “Varieties of
Britishness: Ireland, Scotland and Wales in the Hanoverian State,” in Uniting the Kingdom?
ed. Alexander Grant and Keith J. Stringer (London, 1995), 195.
53. T. H. Breen, “Ideology and Nationalism on the Eve of the American Revolution: Revisions
Once More in Need of Revising,” Journal of American History 84 (1997), 13–39.
54. Cited in Ned C. Landsman, Scotland and Its First American Colony, 1683–1765 (Princeton,
N.J., 1985), 72.
55. Nicholas Phillipson, “Politics, Politeness, and the Anglicisation of Early Eighteenth-Cen-
tury Scottish Culture,” in Scotland and England, 1286–1815, ed. Roger A. Mason (Edinburgh,
1987), 56. On Adam Smith’s analysis of “luxury,” see Neil De Marchi, “Adam Smith’s Accom-
modation of ‘Altogether Endless’ Desires,” in Consumers and Luxury: Consumer Culture in
Europe, 1650–1850, ed. Maxine Berg and Helen Clifford (Manchester, Eng., 1999), 18–36. See
also Colin Kidd, “North Britishness and the Nature of Eighteenth-Century British
Patriotisms,” Historical Journal (Cambridge) 39 (1996), 361–82; Kidd, British Identities Be-
fore Nationalism: Ethnicity and Nationhood in the Atlantic World, 1600–1800 (Cambridge,
1999); and Tony Claydon and Ian McBride, eds., Protestantism and National Identity: Britain
and Ireland, c.1650–c.1850 (Cambridge, 1998).
56. T. C. Smout, A History of the Scottish People, 1560–1830 (London, 1969), 287–97.
57. Francis Godwin James, Ireland in the Empire, 1688–1770 (Cambridge, Mass., 1973), 207–8;
and Sarah Foster, “Buying Irish: Consumer Nationalism in 18th-Century Dublin,” History
Today 47 (1997), 44–51.
58. Lynn Hunt discusses the “politicization of the everyday” in Politics, Culture, and Class in the
French Revolution (Berkeley, Calif., 1984), 53–56.
59. South-Carolina Gazette, 9 November 1769.
60. Albert O. Hirschman, Shifting Involvements: Private Interest and Public Action (Princeton,
N.J., 1982), 63–67.
61. See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Na-
tionalism (London, 1983).
62. The most useful general discussion of this point is Robert D. Putnam, Making Democracy
Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy (Princeton, N.J., 1993), 163–85. Also see Niklas Luhmann,
Trust and Power (Chichester, Eng., 1973); Karen S. Cook, ed., Trust in Society (New York, 2001);
and Fran Tonkiss and Andrew Passey, eds., Trust and Civil Society (New York, 2000).
n o t e s t o p a g e s 24– 35 N 337
63. [Christopher Gadsden], “To the Inhabitants of the Province of South-Carolina, About to
Assemble on the 6th of July,” reprinted in American Archives . . . , ed. Peter Force, 4th ser., 9
vols. (Washington, D.C., 1837–53), I, 511.
64. In his Revolutionary People at War: The Continental Army and American Character, 1775–
1783 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1979), Charles Royster makes a similar argument about the relation
between experience—in this case, the shared sacrifice of ordinary soldiers for the common
good—and the acceptance of a political ideology. As Royster explains, the men who served
in the Continental Army may not have joined the military because they were republicans,
but after serving with other American troops for long periods and after keeping the dream
of national independence alive when so many of their countrymen appeared to have had
second thoughts, they became republicans. Solidarity nurtured a political language which
helped explain to themselves and to the American people what they had endured.
65. “Aspatia, Belinda, and Corinna,” Boston Gazette, Supplement, 28 December 1767. Also see
Linda K. Kerber, “’ History Can Do It No Justice’: Women and Reinterpretation of the Ameri-
can Revolution,” in Women in the Age of the American Revolution, ed. Ronald Hoffman and
Peter J. Albert (Charlottesville, Va., 1989), 18.
66. On the timing of the development of nationalism, one should also see David Waldstreicher,
In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism, 1776–1820 (Chapel Hill,
N.C., 1997). Also Breen, “Ideology and Nationalism.”
67. Massachusetts Spy, 14 October 1773.
68. Samuel Johnson, A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland . . . , ed. R. W. Chapman (1775;
reprint, London, 1924), 18–20.
69. Cited in Robert M. Weir, “The Role of the Newspaper Press in the Southern Colonies on the
Eve of the Revolution: An Interpretation,” in The Press and the American Revolution, ed.
Bernard Bailyn and John B. Hench (Worcester, Mass., 1980), 100.
70. Isaiah Thomas, The History of Printing in America: With a Biography of Printers and an Ac-
count of Newspapers, ed. Marcus A. McCorison (1810; reprint, Barre, Mass., 1970), 267.
71. [Peter Annet?], A Discourse on Government and Religion, Calculated for the Meridian of the
Thirteenth of January (Boston, 1750), 39–40.
Chapter 2
1. In 1756, for example, “Poor Richard” advised colonial readers, “When you incline to have new
Cloaths, look first well over the old Ones.” Moreover, “when you incline to buy China Ware,
Chinces, India Silks, or any other of their flimsey slight Manufactures . . . put it off.” The author
insisted that “Superfluities, or at best, Conveniences . . . you might live without for one little
Year, and not suffer exceedingly.” As we shall discover, neither Franklin nor many other wealthy
Americans of this period were prepared to accept such counsel. Leonard W. Labaree, ed., The
Papers of Benjamin Franklin, 35 vols. (New Haven, Conn., 1959–), VI, 323.
2. Carl Bridenbaugh, ed., Gentleman’s Progress: The Itinerarium of Dr. Alexander Hamilton,
1744 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1948), 3, 54–55.
3. A good account of this debate can be found in David E. Shi, The Simple Life: Plain Living
and High Thinking in American Culture (New York, 1985). A recent survey of early nine-
teenth-century American society celebrates the values of subsistence families, who although
not wholly self-sufficient still managed to distance themselves from the market. “From the
perspective of economic historians,” writes Charles Sellers, “farm folk who bartered a few
hams or a tub of cheese for a frying pan or piece of calico sometimes seem incorporated
into the market. But from the perspective of the household devoting its labor overwhelm-
ingly to subsistence, the market remained marginal” (The Market Revolution: Jacksonian
America, 1815–1846 [New York, 1991], 15). A rich, often contentious literature examining the
economic culture of mid-eighteenth-century America includes Daniel Vickers, “Compe-
tency and Competition: Economic Culture in Early America,” William and Mary Quarterly,
3d ser., 47 (1990), 3–29; James A.Henretta, “Families and Farms: Mentalité in Pre-Industrial
America,” ibid., 35 (1978), 3–32; Richard L. Bushman, “Family Security in the Transition
from Farm to City, 1750–1850,” Journal of Family History 6 (1981), 238–56; Michael Merrill,
“Putting ‘Capitalism’ in Its Place: A Review of Recent Literature,” William and Mary Quar-
terly, 3d ser., 52 (1995), 315–26; and John E. Crowley, The Invention of Comfort: Sensibilities
and Design in Early Modern Britain and Early America (Baltimore, 2001).
4. Lord Cornbury, “Trade and Manufactures of the Province, 1705,” reprinted in The Docu-
mentary History of the State of New-York, ed. E. B. O’Callaghan, 4 vols. (Albany, N.Y., 1849),
I, 711.
5. Ibid., 712.
6. Ibid., 713–14.
7. Ibid., 717.
8. Ibid., 757–58.
9. Cited in Jean B. Lee, The Price of Nationhood: The American Revolution in Charles County
(New York, 1994), 33.
10. Ibid., 33–42.
11. [James Glen], “A Description of South Carolina,” in Historical Collections of South Carolina . . . ,
ed. B. R. Carroll, 2 vols. (New York, 1836), II, 227.
12. Ibid., 227–30.
13. “The Law Papers: Correspondence and Documents During Jonathan Law’s Governorship
of the Colony of Connecticut, 1741–1750: Volume III,” Connecticut Historical Society Collec-
tions 15 (1914), 301.
14. The Official Papers of Francis Fauquier, Lieutenant Governor of Virginia, 1758–1768, ed. George
Reese, 3 vols. (Charlottesville, Va., 1980–83), II, 1012.
15. Gottlieb Mittelberger, Journey to Pennsylvania, ed. and trans. Oscar Handlin and John Clive
(Cambridge, Mass., 1960), 37, 88–89. The respected Swedish scientist Peter Kalm traveled
through the middle colonies at roughly the same time as Mittelberger. When he visited New
York City, he discovered that “cloth is imported from London and so is every article of
English growth or manufacture, together with all sorts of foreign goods.” (Peter Kalm’s Travels
in North America, ed. Adolph B. Benson, 2 vols. [New York, 1937], I, 134). In 1740 an English
commercial visitor known only as “Mr. Bennett” penned a short account of “Boston in
1740.” Like Kalm and Mittelberger, Bennett was impressed by how much the colonists relied
on England for basic goods, “but more especially clothing for men, women, and children”
(“Bennett’s History of New England,” Massachusetts Historical Society Proceedings 5 [1860–
62], 111).
16. “Letters of Rev. Jonathan Boucher,” Maryland Historical Magazine 7 (1912), 5.
17. William Eddis, Letters from America, ed. Aubrey C. Land (Cambridge, Mass., 1969), 57, 75,
51–52.
18. John M. Hemphill, ed., “John Wayles Rates His Neighbours,” Virginia Magazine of History
and Biography 66 (1958), 305. On the use of Turkey carpets in the British mainland colonies
during this period, see Charels F. Hummel, “Floor Coverings Used in Eighteenth-Century
America,” in Imported and Domestic Textiles in Eighteenth-Century America, ed. Patricia L.
Fiske (Washington, D.C., 1976), 61–92; and John F. Watson, Annals of Philadelphia, and Penn-
sylvania, in the Olden Times, ed. Willis P. Hazard, 3 vols. (1830; reprint, Philadelphia, 1884), I,
205. Another valuable discussion of the highly visible effects of economic change during the
eighteenth century can be found in “Autobiography of the Rev. John Barnard,” Massachu-
setts Historical Society Collections, 3d ser., 5 (1836), 239–40.
19. Independent Reflector, 14 June 1753.
20. William Smith, The History of the Late Province of New-York, New-York Historical Society
Collections, vol. 4, pt. 2 (1829), 277. Another interesting commentary on consumer behavior
in New York can be found in an anonymous pamphlet, The Commercial Conduct of the
Province of New-York Considered, and the True Interest of that Colony Attempted to be Shewn.
In a Letter to the Society of Arts, Agriculture, and Œconomy (New York, 1767). The author
exclaimed, “That such a Country [New York] . . . should have Recourse to Europe, and even
to some of the most despicable Corners of it, and through them to Asia, in order to clothe
themselves, is such a Conduct of its Inhabitants, that a Stranger, unacquainted with these
Facts, would pronounce it incredible. But would he not be astonished when he was told,
that the Colonies of North America were near Five Millions . . . in Debt to Great Britain, not
only for British Goods, but for Silks, Chintz, Callico, Muslim, Tea, &c. from Asia, and even
for Linen from Silesia and Austria, via London, Hamburgh, and Amsterdam; Hemp, Diaper,
and other Linen, through England from Russia, and even from Arch-Angel, when they have
under their Feet a Country whose natural Fertility surpasses any in the World?” (9–10).
21. Jared Eliot, A Continuation of the Essay upon Field-Husbandry, As it is or May be Ordered in
New England (New London, Conn., 1749), 20.
n o t e s t o p a g e s 45– 52 N 339
22. A marvelous introduction to this world of goods can be found in Michael Snodin and John
Styles, eds., Design and the Decorative Arts: Britain, 1500–1900 (London, 2002), 154–305.
23. Richard L. Bushman, The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (New York, 1992), xi.
24. Cited in Edward A. Chappell, “Housing a Nation: The Transformation of Living Standards
in Early America,” in Of Consuming Interests: The Styles of Life in the Eighteenth Century, ed.
Cary Carson, Ronald Hoffman, and Peter J. Albert (Charlottesville, Va., 1994), 216.
25. On the celebration of the colonial craftsman see Carl Bridenbaugh, The Colonial Craftsman
(New York, 1950).
26. William M. Kelso, Captain Jones’s Wormslow: A Historical, Archaeological, and Architectural
Study of an Eighteenth-Century Plantation Site near Savannah, Georgia (Athens, Ga., 1979);
James J. F. Deetz, “Ceramics from Plymouth, 1635–1835: The Archaeological Evidence,” Marley
R. Brown III, “Ceramics from Plymouth, 1621–1800: The Documentary Record,” Garry
Wheeler Stone, “Ceramics from the John Hicks Site, 1723–43: The Material Culture,” and
Arnold R. Mountford, “Staffordshire Salt-Glaze Stoneware,” in Ceramics in America, ed. Ian
M. G. Quimby (Charlottesville, Va., 1973), 15–40, 41–74, 103–40, 197–216. James Deetz pro-
vides a highly readable introduction to the entire field of historical archaeology in his In
Small Things Forgotten: The Archaeology of Early American Life (Garden City, N.Y., 1977).
27. The interpretive problem is discussed in William M. Kelso, Kingsmill Plantations, 1619–1800:
Archaeology of Country Life in Colonial Virginia (Orlando, Fla., 1984), 204–5. Also see Den-
nis J. Pogue, “The Archaeology of Plantation Life: Another Perspective on George Washing-
ton’s Mount Vernon,” Virginia Cavalcade 41 (1991), 76–78; and William Hampton Adams
and Sarah Jane Boling, “Status and Ceramics for Planters and Slaves on Three Georgia Coastal
Plantations,” Historical Archaeology 23 (1989), 69–96. Similar discoveries have been made at
other plantations throughout the South.
28. Francis Parkman, France and England in North America, 2 vols. (New York, 1983), II, 736.
29. Michael D. Coe, “The Line of Forts: Archaeology of the Mid-Eighteenth Century on the
Massachusetts Frontier,” in New England Historical Archaeology, ed. Peter Benes, Dublin Semi-
nar for New England Folklife Annual Proceedings 2 (1977), 52, 54.
30. James Deetz, Flowerdew Hundred: The Archaeology of a Virginia Plantation, 1619–1864 (Char-
lottesville, Va., 1993), 165.
31. Kelso, Kingsmill Plantations, 205, 213–4 (Appendix B).
32. Cornbury, “Trade and Manufactures of the Province,” 757–58.
33. York County (Virginia), Wills and Inventory, Bk. #19, 1740–46, 86–87, Foundation Library,
Colonial Williamsburg. For a splendid account of how one astonishingly complete inven-
tory led to the reinterpretation of an entire building, see Graham Hood, The Governor’s
Palace in Williamsburg: A Cultural Study (Williamsburg, Va., 1991).
34. Gloria Lund Main, “The Correction of Biases in Colonial American Probate Records,” His-
torical Methods Newsletter 8 (1974), 10–28; Main, “Probate Records as a Source for Early
American History,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 32 (1975), 89–99; Peter Benes, ed.,
Early American Probate Inventories, Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife Annual Pro-
ceedings 12 (1987), 5–17; Margaret Spufford, “The Limitations of the Probate Inventory,” in
English Rural Society, 1500–1800: Essays in Honour of Joan Thirsk, ed. John Chartres and
David Hey (Cambridge, 1990), 139–74.
35. Carole Shammas, The Pre-Industrial Consumer in England and America (Oxford, 1990), 52–
194; Shammas, “Constructing a Wealth Distribution from Probate Records,” Journal of In-
terdisciplinary History 9 (1978), 297–307; Shammas, “Consumer Behavior in Colonial
America,” Social Science History 6 (1982), 67–86; John J. McCusker and Russell R. Menard,
The Economy of British America, 1607–1789 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1985), 286–87; and Cary Carson,
“The Consumer Revolution in Colonial British America: Why Demand?” in Of Consuming
Interests: The Styles of Life in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Cary Carson, Ronald Hoffman, and
Peter J. Albert (Charlottesville, Va., 1994), 483–697.
36. Lois Green Carr and Lorena S. Walsh, “Changing Lifestyles and Consumer Behavior in the
Colonial Chesapeake,” in Carson et al., eds., Of Consuming Interests, 59–166; Carr and Walsh,
“Inventories and the Analysis of Wealth and Consumption Patterns in St. Mary’s County,
Maryland, 1658–1777,” Historical Methods Newsletter 13 (1980), 81–104; Carr and Walsh, “The
Standard of Living in the Colonial Chesapeake,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 45
(1988), 137–43; Walsh, “Urban Amenities and Rural Sufficiency: Living Standards and Con-
sumer Behavior in the Colonial Chesapeake, 1643–1777,” Journal of Economic History 43 (1983),
109–17; Gloria Lund Main, Tobacco Colony: Life in Early Maryland, 1650–1720 (Princeton,
N.J., 1982), 239–44; Gloria Seaman Allen, “The Consumption of Delftware in Kent County,
Maryland, 1740–1780,” Journal of Early Southern Decorative Arts 9 (1983), 10–12.
37. Gloria Lund Main, “The Standard of Living in Southern New England, 1640–1773,” William
and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 45 (1988), 125–29; Main, “The Standard of Living in Colonial
Massachusetts,” Journal of Economic History 43 (1983), 101–8; Garry Wheeler Stone, “Ceram-
ics in Suffolk County, Massachusetts, Inventories, 1680–1775,” Conference on Historical Site
Archaeology Papers, vol. 3, pt. 2 (1970), 73–90; and Rodris Roth, Tea Drinking in Eighteenth-
Century America: Its Etiquette and Equipage (Washington, D.C., 1961).
38. Pennsylvania Gazette, 14 September 1752. Also see Harry D. Berg, “The Organization of Busi-
ness in Colonial Philadelphia,” Pennsylvania History 10 (1943), 157–77.
39. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nation-
alism (London, 1991), 62–64. Kathleen Wilson explores the commercial character of English
provincial newspapers in The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture, and Imperialism in En-
gland, 1715–1785 (Cambridge, 1995), esp. 38–39.
40. Stephen Botein, “‘ Meer Mechanics’ and an Open Press: The Business and Political Strate-
gies of Colonial American Printers,” Perspectives in American History 9 (1975), 127–225; and
David A. Copeland, Colonial American Newspapers: Character and Content (Newark, Del.,
1997), 23–41.
41. Clarence S. Brigham, Journals and Journeymen: A Contribution to the History of Early Ameri-
can Newspapers (Philadelphia, 1950).
42. Virginia Gazette, October 8, 1736, cited in Lawrence C. Wroth, The Colonial Printer (Port-
land, Me., 1938), 236.
43. James Parker to Benjamin Franklin, 24 December 1767, in Labaree, ed., Papers of Benjamin
Franklin, XIV, 347.
44. Patricia Cleary, “‘ She Will Be in the Shop’: Women’s Sphere of Trade in Eighteenth-Century
Philadelphia and New York,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 119 (1995),
181–202.
45. Brigham, Journals and Journeymen, 29.
46. Observations about the character and content of eighteenth-century American advertising
found in this section are based on extensive research in the newspapers of Boston, New
York, Philadelphia, Williamsburg, and Charleston (South Carolina), carried out by the au-
thor and Rebecca Becker, then a graduate student at Northwestern University. Starting with
the year 1723, Becker constructed a decade-by-decade count of all British imports adver-
tised in the New York papers over the next fifty years. She was also able to chart—again
decade by decade from 1723 to 1773—the first appearance in the New York market of almost
2,000 separate consumer items.
47. New-York Mercury, 13 June 1763 and 14 June 1773. On the commercialization of medicine
during this period, see Colin Jones, “The Great Chain of Buying: Medical Advertisement,
the Bourgeois Public Sphere, and the Origins of the French Revolution,” American Histori-
cal Review 101 (1996), 13–40.
48. Mountford, “Staffordshire Salt-Glaze Stoneware,” 205; Leslie A. Clarkson, The Pre-Indus-
trial Economy in England, 1500–1750 (London, 1971), 106–14; Charles Wilson, England’s Ap-
prenticeship, 1630–1763 (New York, 1965), 302–6; and Maxine Berg, “From Imitation to
Invention: Creating Commodities in Eighteenth-Century Britain,” Economic History Re-
view 55 (2002), 1–30.
49. William Culliford’s career and the later development of the customs accounts is the subject
of G. N. Clark, Guide to English Commercial Statistics, 1696–1782 (London, 1938), 1–42.
50. Ibid., 11–30. Some contemporaries and not a few modern scholars seem to have been un-
aware that the eighteenth-century figures did not reflect current values. The problems asso-
ciated with interpreting the Customs House ledgers are treated in John J. McCusker, “The
Current Value of English Exports, 1697 to 1800,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 28
(1971), 607–28; Jacob M. Price, “New Time Series for Scotland’s and Britain’s Trade with the
Thirteen Colonies and States, 1740 to 1791,” ibid. 32 (1975), 307–25; and McCusker and Menard,
Economy of British America, 73–75.
51. Clark, English Commercial Statistics, 1–25; Price, “New Time Series,” 307–17.
52. For an impressively full accounting of how the static figures employed in the Customs House
records were recalculated to reflect an eighteenth-century consumer price index, see
n o t e s t o p a g e s 60– 63 N 341
McCusker, “The Current Value,” and Price, “New Time Series.” Although smuggling affected
the import totals for Great Britain, it did not greatly influence figures for exports to the
mainland colonies. As Thomas C. Barrow argues, the incidence of smuggling in late colo-
nial America has generally been greatly exaggerated. See his Trade and Empire: The British
Customs Service in Colonial America, 1660–1775 (Cambridge, Mass., 1967), ch. 7.
53. The figures are taken from Appendix IIB (“British Exports to the Thirteen Colonies and
States, 1740 to 1791”) in Price, “New Time Series,” 324–25. The numbers for the 1740s and
1760s reflect running averages, 1742–48 and 1762–68. It is true that the customs ledgers known
as CUST 3 list goods that cannot be classified strictly as durable or semi-durable manufac-
tures. They contain some foodstuffs, for example, but these items represent a very small
percentage of the total exports to America. Moreover, because of the way the inspector-
general’s staff constructed these records, it would be almost impossible to separate this cat-
egory of goods from the major articles such as cloth and metal ware. See Public Record
Office, Board of Customs and Excise, CUST 3 ledgers, London, Great Britain.
54. Price, “New Time Series,” 324–25.
55. Jacob M. Price, “What Did Merchants Do? Reflections on British Overseas Trade, 1660–
1790,” Journal of Economic History 49 (1989), 274; and Price, “Colonial Trade and British
Economic Development, 1660–1775,” in La Révolution Américaine et L’Europe (Paris, 1979),
221–42.
56. McCusker and Menard, Economy of British America, 283–286; Ralph Davis, “English Foreign
Trade, 1700–1774,” Economic History Review, 2d ser., 15 (1962), 285–303; and Bernard Bailyn,
“1776: A Year of Challenge—A World Transformed,” Journal of Law and Economics 19 (1976),
437–66.
57. The most accessible discussion of colonial population growth can be found in McCusker and
Menard, Economy of British America, ch. 10. The quotation from Malthus appears on page 213.
Also see Daniel Scott Smith, “Early American Historiography and Social Science History,”
Social Science History 6 (1982), 267–91; Bernard Bailyn, The Peopling of British North America:
An Introduction (New York, 1986); and Aaron Fogleman, “Peopling of Early America: Two
Studies by Bernard Bailyn,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 31 (1989), 612–13.
58. “Estimated Population of American Colonies: 1610 to 1780,” Series Z1-19 in Historical Statis-
tics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1970, 2 vols. (Washington, D.C., 1975), 1168.
59. McCusker and Menard, Economy of British America, 279–80. Also, Price, “What Did Mer-
chants Do,” 276.
60. The calculation of a per capita income figure is explained in Carole Shammas, “How Self-
Sufficient Was Early America?” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 13 (1982), 247–72. Also see
Shammas, “Consumer Behavior in Colonial America,” 67–86. In her examination of one
colony, Shammas wrote, “From figures now available on per capita income and imports
circa 1770, I would estimate that roughly one quarter of yearly expenditures went toward
buying goods brought in from outside the province [Massachusetts]” (81). Shammas in-
cluded all imports, including sugar from the Caribbean Islands and foodstuffs from other
mainland colonies, and thus comes up with a much higher consumer percentage than I did
by using the £12 figure found in McCusker and Menard, Economy of British America, 280
(Table 13.1).
61. “Achenwall’s Observations on North America, 1767,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and
Biography 27 (1903), 14. In his Interest of Great Britain Considered (Philadelphia, 1760),
Franklin claimed that the consumption of British exports in colonial America was increas-
ing faster than was the total population and explained that this phenomenon “must be
owing to this, that the people having by their industry mended their circumstances, are
enabled to indulge themselves in finer cloaths, better furniture, and a more general use of
all our [British] manufactures than heretofore” (30).
62. Arthur L. Jensen, The Maritime Commerce of Colonial Philadelphia (Madison, Wisc., 1963),
89–90.
63. These comments are based on my analysis of CUST 3 (Customs Records).
64. Davis, “English Foreign Trade,” 290.
65. On the limited domestic production of cloth during this period, see Carole Shammas, The
Pre-Industrial Consumer, 61–62; and Shammas, “Consumer Behavior in Colonial America,”
81–83. For a different interpretation of the extent of homespun production, at least in late
eighteenth-century New England, see Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, “Wheels, Looms, and the
Gender Division of Labor in Eighteenth-Century New England,” William and Mary Quar-
terly, 3d ser., 55 (1998), 3–38.
66. [Anonymous], Industry and Frugality Proposed as the Surest Means to Make Us a Rich and
Flourishing People . . . (Boston, 1753), 11.
67. Connecticut Journal, and New-Haven Post-Boy, 6 January 1769. In The Power and Grandeur of
Great-Britain, Founded on the Liberty of the Colonies . . . (New York, 1768), another anony-
mous American declared with considerable hyperbole that “[n]ew countries can seldom do
more than support themselves: But a country that is not only new, but where every person
consumes from three to twenty pounds sterling, of British manufactures, must necessarily
be poor. All the exports of North-America, will scarce suffice to pay for their necessary
cloathing” (18).
68. Pennsylvania Gazette, 6 July 1758.
69. American Weekly Mercury, 31 July 1740.
70. Much recent analysis of early modern consumer activity compares Europe and America
without adequately considering precisely what segment of the various populations was at
risk to participate in the new marketplace. Neither England nor Holland, the two most
advanced manufacturing nations during this period, experienced rapid increases in the rate
of population growth, and while Great Britain had a large servant class, it did not arbitrarily
drop as much as a fifth of its population from the consumer economy. One reason that
Adam Smith condemned the institution of slavery was that it excluded so many people
from the world of goods and thus discouraged productivity. For general comparative pur-
poses the best study of eighteenth-century English consumer behavior remains Neil
McKendrick, John Brewer, and J. H. Plumb, The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commer-
cialization of Eighteenth-Century England (Bloomington, Ind., 1982). Also see Jan de Vries,
“Between Purchasing Power and the World of Goods: Understanding the Household
Economy in Early Modern Europe,” in Consumption and the World of Goods, ed. John Brewer
and Roy Porter (London, 1993), 85–132.
71. McCusker and Menard, Economy of British America, 270; Carole Shammas, “Changes in
English and Anglo-American Consumption from 1550 to 1800,” in Brewer and Porter, eds.,
Consumption and the World of Goods, 177–205; and Carr and Walsh, “Changing Lifestyles
and Consumer Behavior,” 104–5.
72. Carole Shammas, “The Decline of Textile Prices in England and British America Prior to
Industrialization,” Economic History Review, 2d ser., 47 (1994), 483–507.
73. See Shammas, “Changes in English and Anglo-American Consumption.”
74. Lois Green Carr, Russell R. Menard, and Lorena S. Walsh re-create this stark material cul-
ture in Robert Cole’s World: Agriculture and Society in Early Maryland (Chapel Hill, N.C.,
1991).
75. On the broad geographic distribution of imported goods, see McCusker and Menard,
Economy of British America, 279–82, 302–3; and Robert D. Mitchell, Commercialism and Fron-
tier: Perspectives on the Early Shenandoah Valley (Charlottesville, Va., 1977), 152–54.
76. Connecticut Courant, 7 December 1767, originally published in Providence Gazette, 14 No-
vember 1767.
77. “Letters and Papers of Cadwallader Colden: Volume II, 1730–1742,” New-York Historical
Society Collections 51 (1918), 32–33.
78. Smith, History of the Late Province of New-York, 278.
79. “Gov. Moore to the Lords of Trade,” in O’Callaghan, ed., Documentary History of the State of
New-York, I, 735.
80. [Franklin], The Interest of Great Britain, 15.
81. Ibid., 30–31.
82. See Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, ed. William Peden (Chapel Hill, N.C.,
1955); and Drew R. McCoy, The Elusive Republic: Political Economy in Jeffersonian America
(Chapel Hill, N.C., 1980).
83. Charles S. Olton, Artisans for Independence: Philadelphia Mechanics and the American Revo-
lution (Syracuse, N.Y., 1975), 23–28.
84. Cited in Arlene Palmer, “Glass Production in Eighteenth-Century America: The Wistarburgh
Enterprise,” Winterthur Portfolio 11 (1976), 98.
85. Paul Leicester Ford, ed., The Writings of John Dickinson, Vol. 1: Political Writings, 1764–1774,
(New York, 1970), 354.
n o t e s t o p a g e s 68– 75 N 343
86. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich makes this argument in “Wheels, Looms, and the Gender Division
of Labor,” 3–38.
87. Connecticut Courant, 17 August 1767.
88. “Pitkin Papers: Correspondence and Documents During William Pitkin’s Governorship of
the Colony of Connecticut, 1766–1769,” Connecticut Historical Society Collections 19 (1921),
56.
89. Mary Beth Norton, “The Evolution of White Women’s Experience in Early America,” Ameri-
can Historical Review 89 (1984), 604–5.
90. O’Callaghan, ed., Documentary History of the State of New-York, I, 733–34.
91. McKendrick et al., Birth of a Consumer Society; John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagina-
tion: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (New York, 1997); and Simon Schama, The
Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age (New York,
1987).
92. See Henretta, “Families and Farms,” 3–32; and T. H. Breen, “Back to Sweat and Toil: Sugges-
tions for the Study of Agricultural Work in Early America,” Pennsylvania History 49 (1982),
241–58.
93. An ongoing debate over the meaning of “self-sufficiency” in early American history has
generated some excellent articles. Among the most valuable are Winifred B. Rothenberg,
“The Market and Massachusetts Farmers, 1750–1855,” Journal of Economic History 41 (1981),
283–314; Shammas, “How Self-Sufficient Was Early America?” 247–72; Bettye Hobbs Pruitt,
“Self-Sufficiency and the Agricultural Economy of Eighteenth-Century Massachusetts,”
William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 41 (1984), 333–64; and Daniel Vickers, “Competency
and Competition,” 3–29. Ann Smart Martin, a respected interpreter of colonial material
culture, makes some of the same points from a different perspective in her “Frontier Boys
and Country Cousins: The Context for Choice in Eighteenth-Century Consumerism,” in
Historical Archaeology and the Study of American Culture, ed. Ann De Cunzo and Bernard L.
Herman (Winterthur, Del., 1996), 71–102.
94. Connecticut Courant, 7 December 1767.
95. James P. Horn, “The Letters of William Roberts of All Hallows Parish, Anne Arundel County,
Maryland, 1756–1769,” Maryland Historical Magazine 74 (1979), 125.
96. Cited in Linda Baumgarten, Eighteenth-Century Clothing at Williamsburg (Williamsburg,
Va., 1986), 11.
Chapter 3
1. The debate in early modern England over the meaning of “empire” is explored by David
Armitage in The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge, 2000).
2. The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, 8 vols. (London, 1854–56), II, 180, 170. See
Frank O’Gorman, Edmund Burke; His Political Philosophy (Bloomington, Ind., 1973), 67–79;
and Isaac Kramnick, The Rage of Edmund Burke: Portrait of an Ambivalent Conservative
(New York, 1977), 106–25.
3. Works of Edmund Burke, II, 179.
4. Ibid., II, 180.
5. Ibid., II, 180–81.
6. Ibid., II, 183. Burke seems to have invented the phrase. See John Bartlett, Familiar Quota-
tions: A Collection of Passages, Phrases, and Proverbs Traced to their Sources in Ancient and
Modern Literature, rev. ed. (Boston, 1980), 372.
7. For a fuller discussion of the meaning of the phrase, see James A. Henretta, “Salutary Ne-
glect”: Colonial Administration Under the Duke of Newcastle (Princeton, N.J., 1972), 317–18,
323–25, 344. Also see T. H. Breen, “Ideology and Nationalism on the Eve of the American
Revolution: Revisions Once More in Need of Revising,” Journal of American History 84 (1997),
22–23.
8. Works of Edmund Burke, II, 119, 181. Edmund Burke, “Speech on American Taxation, 19 April
1774,” in Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, ed. Paul Langford, 9 vols. (Oxford, 1981–),
II, 432–33.
9. [William Douglass], A Discourse Concerning the Currencies of the British Plantations in
America . . . (Boston, 1740), 4, 55.
10. See T. H. Breen, Puritans and Adventurers: Change and Persistence in Early America (New
York, 1980).
11. Roy Porter develops this point in his Creation of the Modern World: The Untold Story of the
British Enlightenment (New York, 2000). Several paragraphs on colonial nationalism in-
cluded in this section originally appeared in Breen, “Ideology and Nationalism,” 13–39.
12. Lawrence Stone, “The New Eighteenth Century,” New York Review of Books, 29 March 1984,
42–48; Paul Langford, A Polite and Commercial People: England, 1727–1783 (Oxford, 1989),
679; Kathleen Wilson, The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture, and Imperialism in England,
1715–1785 (Cambridge, 1995), 4; Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New
Haven, Conn., 1992); John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money, and the English State,
1688–1783 (New York, 1989); and Brewer, “The Eighteenth-Century British State: Contexts
and Issues,” in An Imperial State at War: Britain from 1689 to 1815, ed. Lawrence Stone (Lon-
don, 1994), 52–71.
13. See Linda Colley, In Defiance of Oligarchy: The Tory Party, 1714–1760 (Cambridge, 1982); P. C.
Corfield, The Impact of English Towns, 1700–1800 (Oxford, 1982).
14. Patrick K. O’Brien, Power with Profit: The State and the Economy, 1688–1815 (London, 1991).
15. Langford, Polite and Commercial People, 692.
16. Breen, Puritans and Adventurers, 134–35.
17. A fine assessment of this literature can be found in Joanna Innes, “Review Article: Jonathan
Clark, Social History and England’s ‘Ancien Régime,’” Past and Present, no. 115 (1987), 196–
97. On Britain’s ability to finance modern warfare, see Peter G. Dickson, The Financial Revo-
lution in England: A Study in the Development of Public Credit, 1688–1756 (London, 1967);
Brewer, Sinews of Power; Stone, ed., Imperial State at War; Nancy F. Koehn, The Power of
Commerce: Economy and Governance in the First British Empire (Ithaca, N.Y., 1994); M. J.
Braddick, Parliamentary Taxation in Seventeenth-Century England: Local Administration and
Response (Woodbridge, Eng., 1994); and Mark Greengrass, ed., Conquest and Coalescence:
The Shaping of the State in Early Modern Europe (London, 1991).
18. For useful discussion of the changing historical contexts in which different peoples experi-
enced a heightened sense of national identity, see E. J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism
Since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge, 1990); Ernest Gellner, Nations and Na-
tionalism (Oxford, 1983); and Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the
Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London, 1991). For some splendid insights into the shift-
ing intellectual frameworks in which various European nationalisms have found popular
meaning, see Maurizio Viroli, For Love of Country: An Essay on Patriotism and Nationalism
(Oxford, 1995). Less successful in dealing with these contextual issues is the ambitious com-
parative work of Liah Greenfield, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge, Mass.,
1992), 27–87. On older expressions of national identity, see Richard Helgerson, Forms of
Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago, 1992).
19. Colley, Britons, 86. Also see Colin Kidd, British Identities Before Nationalism: Ethnicity and
Nationhood in the Atlantic World, 1600–1800 (Cambridge, 1999).
20. Gerald Newman, The Rise of English Nationalism: A Cultural History, 1740–1830 (New York,
1987).
21. As Roy Porter correctly reminds us in “Review Article: Seeing the Past,” Past and Present, no.
118 (1988), “English patriotism during the Georgian century should not be passed off as
nothing but hegemonic social control, the conspiratorial ideological imprint of the ruling
order; rather it signified a positive and critical articulation of the political voice of the middle
classes” (198). Also see Dror Wahrman, “National Society, Communal Culture: An Argu-
ment About the Recent Historiography of Eighteenth-Century Britain,” Social History 17
(1992), 61–62; and Kathleen Wilson, “Empire, Trade and Popular Politics in Mid-Hanoverian
Britain: The Case of Admiral Vernon,” Past and Present, no. 121 (1988), 74–109.
22. Langford, Polite and Commercial People; and Lawrence Stone and Jeanne C. Fawtier Stone,
An Open Elite? England, 1540–1880 (Oxford, 1984), 408.
23. Langford, Polite and Commercial People, 59–121. See also Nicholas Rogers, “Review Article:
Paul Langford’s ‘Age of Improvement,’ ” Past and Present, no. 130 (1991), 201–9.
24. B. G., Esq, The Advantages of the Revolution Illustrated, by a View of the Present State of Great
Britain . . . (London, 1753), 17, 19–20, 20–21, 22, 23.
25. Jacob M. Price, ed., Joshua Johnson’s Letter Book, 1771–1774: Letters from a Merchant in Lon-
don to His Partners in Maryland, London Record Society Publications 15 (1979), 33. Also see
n o t e s t o p a g e s 81– 85 N 345
Kenneth Morgan, ed., An American Quaker in the British Isles: The Travel Journals of Jabez
Maud Fisher, 1775–1779 (Oxford, 1992).
26. Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, and J. H. Plumb, The Birth of a Consumer Society: The
Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England (Bloomington, Ind., 1982), 1. For a sam-
pling of the large and growing literature on the development of a consumer economy in
Great Britain and, by extension, in colonial America, see Roy Porter, English Society in the
Eighteenth Century (Middlesex, Eng., 1982), 201–68; Frank O’Gorman, “The Recent Histori-
ography of the Hanoverian Regime,” Historical Journal (Cambridge), 29 (1986), 1005–20;
John Brewer and Roy Porter, eds., Consumption and the World of Goods (London, 1993);
Carole Shammas, The Pre-Industrial Consumer in England and America (Oxford, 1990); Joan
Thirsk, Economic Policy and Projects: The Development of a Consumer Society in Early Mod-
ern England (Oxford, 1978); and Lorna Weatherill, Consumer Behavior and Material Culture
in Britain, 1660–1760 (London, 1988).
27. Josiah Tucker, “Instructions for Travellers” (1757), in Josiah Tucker: A Selection from His Eco-
nomic and Political Writings, ed. Robert Livingston Schuyler (New York, 1931), 245–46.
28. P .J. Marshall, “Empire and Authority in the Later Eighteenth Century,” Journal of Imperial
and Commonwealth History 15 (1987), 105–22.
29. Several studies that provide a broader, more complex analysis of the eighteenth-century
imperial connection are Jack P. Greene, Peripheries and Center: Constitutional Development
in the Extended Polities of the British Empire and the United States, 1607–1788 (Athens, Ga.,
1986); Greene, Pursuits of Happiness: The Social Development of Early Modern British Colo-
nies and the Formation of American Culture (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1988); Bernard Bailyn and
Philip D. Morgan, eds., Strangers Within the Realm: Cultural Margins of the First British
Empire (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1991); and J.G.A. Pocock, “British History: A Plea for a New Sub-
ject,” Journal of Modern History 47 (1975), 601–21.
30. James Parker, The Power and Grandeur of Great-Britain . . . (New York, 1768), 3–4.
31. On the alleged “ensavagement” of European civilization in eighteenth-century America, see
Bernard Bailyn, Voyagers to the West: A Passage in the Peopling of America on the Eve of the
Revolution (New York, 1986).
32. Jack P. Greene raises many of these issues in “Search for Identity: An Interpretation of the
Meaning of Selected Patterns of Social Response in Eighteenth-Century America,” in his Im-
peratives, Behaviors, and Identities: Essays in Early American Cultural History (Charlottesville,
Va., 1992), 143–73. As John Clive and Bernard Bailyn explain, the Scots faced many of the
same problems in relation to an imperial English culture (“England’s Cultural Provinces:
Scotland and America,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 11 [1954], 200–13).
33. The striking development of Marblehead and the Reverend Mr. Barnard’s impressive entre-
preneurial skills are examined in Christine Leigh Heyrman, Commerce and Culture: The
Maritime Communities of Colonial Massachusetts, 1690–1750 (New York, 1984).
34. “Autobiography of the Rev. John Barnard,” Massachusetts Historical Society Collections, 3d
ser., 5 (1836), 200.
35. Breen, “Ideology and Nationalism,” 13–39.
36. James Otis, The Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved . . . (1764), reprinted in
Bernard Bailyn, ed., Pamphlets of the American Revolution, 1750–1776 (Cambridge, Mass.,
1965), 436.
37. See Anthony Pagden, Lords of All the Worlds: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and France,
c. 1500–c. 1800 (New Haven, Conn., 1995).
38. Cited in McKendrick et al., Birth of a Consumer Society, 122. Also see Ralph Davis, A Com-
mercial Revolution; English Overseas Trade in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Lon-
don, 1967), 3–14.
39. Cited in McKendrick et al., Birth of a Consumer Society, 108.
40. Joyce O. Appleby, Economic Thought and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century England (Princeton,
N.J., 1978); William Letwin, The Origins of Scientific Economics: English Economic Thought,
1660–1776 (London, 1963); and E.A.J. Johnson, Predecessors of Adam Smith: The Growth of
British Economic Thought (New York, 1937).
41. Daniel Defoe, The Complete English Tradesman, vols. 16 and 17 of The Novels and Miscella-
neous Works of Daniel Defoe (Oxford, 1841), XVI, 260.
42. John Campbell, A Political Survey of Britain: Being a Series of Reflections on the Situation,
Lands, Inhabitants, Revenues, Colonies, and Commerce of this Island . . . , 4 vols. (Dublin,
1775), IV, 565. Johnson quoted in The Dictionary of National Biography, ed. Leslie Stephen
and Sidney Lee, 2d ed., 22 vols. (London, 1908–9), III, 827.
43. A valuable discussion of market expansion in this period can be found in David Ormrod,
“English Re-Exports and the Dutch Staplemarket in the Eighteenth Century,” in Enterprise
and History: Essays in Honour of Charles Wilson, ed. D. C. Coleman and Peter Mathias (New
York, 1984), 89–115.
44. See Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a
Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, Mass., 1989), 1–26.
45. See the entry entitled “Britain—Great” in Richard Rolt, A New Dictionary of Trade and Com-
merce, Compiled from the Information of the Most Eminent Merchants . . . (London, 1756), n.p.
46. B. G., Esq, Advantages of the Revolution, 30.
47. See Albert O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism
Before Its Triumph (Princeton, N.J., 1977).
48. Rolt, “Britain-Great,” New Dictionary of Trade, n.p.
49. Malachy Postlethwayt, Universal Dictionary of Trade and Commerce, 2 vols. (London, 1751–
55), I, 533.
50. [Benjamin Franklin], reprinted in Boston News-Letter, 7 August 1760.
51. Thomas Pownall, The Administration of the Colonies, 2d ed. (London, 1765), 26.
52. Bernard Bailyn, The Origins of American Politics (New York, 1968), 40–41, 54–55. See also
Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1967),
35–45.
53. John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, Cato’s Letters; or, Essays on Liberty, Civil and Religious,
and Other Important Subjects, ed. Ronald Hamowy, 2 vols. (Indianapolis, Ind., 1995), I, 474.
54. The fullest discussion of the development of England’s commercial policy can be found in
Charles M. Andrews, England’s Commercial and Colonial Policy (New Haven, Conn., 1938).
55. The phrase comes from Jacob M. Price, “What Did Merchants Do? Reflections on British
Overseas Trade, 1660–1790,” Journal of Economic History 49 (1989), 270–71. Also see Jacob
Price, “Who Cared About the Colonies? The Impact of the Thirteen Colonies on British
Society and Politics, circa 1714–1775,” in Bailyn and Morgan, eds., Strangers Within the Realm,
395–436; and Ralph Davis, Commercial Revolution, 15.
56. Cited in Boston Evening-Post, 11 January 1742.
57. Pownall, Administration of the Colonies, 27.
58. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed. R. H.
Campbell and Andrew S. Skinner, 2 vols. (Indianapolis, Ind., 1981), II, 661.
59. Rolt, “British Islands,” New Dictionary of Trade, n. p.
60. Campbell, A Political Survey, IV, 567.
61. Pownall, Administration of the Colonies, 26.
62. [Robert Dodsley], The Preceptor: Containing a General Course of Education . . . , 4th ed., 2
vols. (London, 1763), II, 445–48.
63. Ibid., II, 447, 450.
64. New-York Mercury, 24 September 1764.
65. [Amicus Reipublica], Trade and Commerce Inculcated in a Discourse . . . (Boston, 1731), 2–4.
66. Independent Reflector, 3 May 1753.
67. Mason to Washington, 5 April 1769, in The Papers of George Mason: Volume I, 1749–1778, ed.
Robert A. Rutland (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1970), 100.
68. Letters from a Pennsylvania Farmer to the Inhabitants of the British Colonies (1768), in The
Writings of John Dickinson: Vol. 1, Political Writings, 1764–1774, ed. Paul Leicester Ford (New
York, 1970), 337. Many leading figures of the Scottish Enlightenment analyzed economic
progress in similar although more sophisticated developmental terms. See Hirschman, Pas-
sions and Interests.
69. John M. Murrin, “Political Development,” in Colonial British America: Essays in the New
History of the Early Modern Era, ed. Jack P. Greene and J. R. Pole (Baltimore, 1984), 432.
70. Jared Eliot, The Sixth Essay on Field-Husbandry . . . (New Haven, Conn., 1759), 12–13.
71. Ibid., 16–17.
72. William Douglass, A Summary, Historical and Political, of the First Planting . . . of the British
Settlements in North-America (Boston, 1749), 227–28.
73. [Anonymous], Four Dissertations, on the Reciprocal Advantages of a Perpetual Union Be-
tween Great-Britain and Her American Colonies . . . (Philadelphia, 1766), 55–57.
n o t e s t o p a g e s 96– 110 N 347
74. Ford, ed., Writings of John Dickinson, I, 213–15.

75. New-England Weekly Journal, 18 November 1740.
76. The American Magazine, or a Monthly View of the Political State of the British Colonies, no. 1
(1741), 5.
77. “Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind” (1755), in The Papers of Benjamin
Franklin, ed. Leonard W. Labaree, 35 vols. (New Haven, Conn., 1959–), IV, 229.
78. Rolt, “Excise,” New Dictionary, n.p.
79. [Archibald Kennedy], Observations on the Importance of the Northern Colonies Under Proper
Regulations (New York, 1750), 10.
80. Cited in New-York Mercury, 11 January 1768.
81. Connecticut Journal, and New-Haven Post-Boy, 2 February 1770.
82. William Smith, The History of the Late Province of New-York . . . , New-York Historical Soci-
ety Collections, vol. 4, pt. 2 (1829), 281.
83. [Kennedy], Observations on the Importance of the Northern Colonies, 9–10.
84. Cited in the New-York Mercury, 24 September 1764.
85. On the parallel development of different colonial discourses during this period, see T. H.
Breen and Timothy Hall, “Structuring Provincial Imagination: The Rhetoric and Experi-
ence of Social Change in 18th-Century New England,” American Historical Review 103 (1998),
1411–38.
86. Cited in the South-Carolina Gazette, 23 February 1769. The piece originally appeared in Penn-
sylvania Journal, 12 January 1769.
S.C., 1778), 2.
88. Cited in Henry S. Nourse, History of the Town of Harvard, Massachusetts, 1732–1893 (Harvard,
Mass.,1894), 304–5.
89. South-Carolina Gazette, 23 February 1769.
Chapter 4
1. [Thomas Prince], The Vade Mecum for America; or a Companion for Traders and Travellers
(Boston, 1731), i–iii.
2. Pennsylvania Chronicle, and Universal Advertiser, 17 February 1772.
3. Cited in A. Roger Ekirch, Bound for America: The Transportation of British Convicts to the
Colonies, 1718–1775 (Oxford, 1987), 13–14. Also see Beverley Lemire, Dress, Culture, and Com-
merce: The English Clothing Trade Before the Factory, 1660–1800 (New York, 1997), ch. 5.
4. Boston Evening-Post, 2 October 1738; New England Weekly Journal, 14 March, 8 August, and
27 September 1738.
5. New-York Journal; or, General Advertiser, Supplement Extraordinary, 12 February 1767; also
22 January and 14 February 1767.
6. An Account of the Robberies Committed by John Morrison, And his Accomplices, in and near
Philadelphia, 1750: Together with the Manner of their being discover’d, their Behaviour on their
Tryals, in the Prison after Sentence, and at the Place of Execution (Philadelphia, 1750/1).
7. [Isaac Frasier], A Brief Account of the Life, and Abominable Thefts, of the Notorious Isaac
Frasier, who was Executed at Fairfield, Sept. 7th, 1768, Penned From His Own Mouth, And
Signed by Him, A Few Days Before His Execution (New London, Conn., 1768). Also see Noah
Hobart, Excessive Wickedness, the Way to an Untimely Death (New Haven, Conn., 1768).
After breaking out of the jail in Worcester, Massachusetts, Frasier briefly worked with a
small gang of young black and white men. One of these associates was Arthur, a slave whose
own curious story is recounted by T. H. Breen, “Making History: The Force of Public Opin-
ion and the Last Years of Slavery in Revolutionary Massachusetts,” in Through a Glass Darkly:
Reflections on Personal Identity in Early America, ed. Ronald Hoffman, Mechal Sobel, and
Fredrika J. Teute (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1997), 67–95.
8. The newspapers carried stories of other burglars who seem to have had a well-trained eye
for quality goods. See Boston Weekly Post-Boy, 27 March 1738, for the “country woman” who
successfully stole goods from a shop where “there were six Men present.” For the story of the
man who turned a piece of expensive green velvet pulpit cloth into a pair of breeches, see
Dell Upton, Holy Things and Profane: Anglican Parish Churches in Colonial Virginia (Cam-
bridge, Mass., 1986), 153. Also Connecticut Courant, 23–30 June 1772 and 17–24 August 1773.
348 n n ote s to pag e s 111– 119
9. Daniel A. Cohen, Pillars of Salt, Monuments of Grace: New England Crime Literature and the
Origins of American Popular Culture, 1676–1860 (New York, 1992).
10. Jared Eliot, God’s Marvellous Kindness . . . (New London, Conn., 1745), 5. The sermon gave
thanks for the victory of Anglo-American forces over the French at Louisbourg.
11. [Jacob Duché], Observations on a Variety of Subjects . . . (Philadelphia, 1774), 3–4.
12. Lynn Glaser, Engraved America: Iconography of America Through 1800 (Philadelphia, 1970), 56.
13. On the changing eighteenth-century skylines, see Jon Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith: Chris-
tianizing the American People (Cambridge, Mass., 1990), 107–16.
14. See Patricia A. Cleary, “‘ She Merchants’ of Colonial America: Women and Commerce on
the Eve of the Revolution” (Ph.D. diss., Northwestern University, 1989), as well as her Eliza-
beth Murray: A Woman’s Pursuit of Independence in Eighteenth-Century America (Amherst,
Mass., 2000).
15. Richard L. Bushman, “Shopping and Advertising in Colonial America,” in Of Consuming
Interests: The Style of Life in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Cary Carson, Ronald Hoffman, and
Peter J. Albert (Charlottesville, Va., 1994), 239–46. Historian Bruce H. Mann claims, on the
basis of an analysis of legal documents, that “[a]s trade expanded [in colonial Connecticut],
so did the ranks of the merchants, whose numbers by mid-century were increasing both
absolutely and relative to other occupational groups.” Neighbors and Strangers: Law and
Community in Early Connecticut (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1987), 126.
16. See R. C. Nash, “The Organization of Trade and Finance in the British-Atlantic Economy,
1600–1830,” paper presented at a conference on North Atlantic Economic History held by
the Institute for Early American History and Culture, Charleston, S.C., October 1999. Also
see Thomas M. Doerflinger, A Vigorous Spirit of Enterprise: Merchants and Economic Devel-
opment in Revolutionary Philadelphia (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1986), 90–93.
17. A good account of the structure of the British export market can be found in Kenneth
Morgan, “Business Networks in the British Export Trade to North America, 1750–1800,” in
The Early Modern Atlantic Economy, ed. John J.McCusker and Kenneth Morgan (Cambridge,
2000), 36–64.
18. Cited in Philip L. White, The Beekmans of New York in Politics and Commerce, 1647–1877
(New York, 1956), 387.
19. Ibid., 372–73.
20. Ibid., 370.
21. A valuable account of merchant practices can be found in Doerflinger, A Vigorous Spirit of
Enterprise, esp. 86–88. Also see Harry D. Berg, “The Organization of Business in Colonial
Philadelphia,” Pennsylvania History 10 (1943), 157–77; and James Blaine Hedges, The Browns
of Providence Plantations, 2 vols. (Providence, R.I., 1968), I.
22. Cited in White, The Beekmans, 381. See W. T. Baxter, The House of Hancock; Business in Bos-
ton, 1724–1775 (New York, 1965).
23. This theme is developed in T. H. Breen, Tobacco Culture: The Mentality of the Great Tidewa-
ter Planters on the Eve of Revolution (Princeton, N.J., 1985).
24. Cited in John W. Tyler, Smugglers and Patriots: Boston Merchants and the Advent of the Ameri-
can Revolution (Boston, 1986), 113. Also see Marc Egnal and Joseph A. Ernst, “An Economic
Interpretation of the American Revolution,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 29 (1972),
15–16.
25. John Hancock to Harrison, Barnard & Spragg, 16 October 1767, in the Hancock Papers (JH-
6), Baker Library, Harvard University School of Business, Cambridge, Mass.
26. Berg, “The Organization of Business,” 172–73.
Hill, N.C., 1985), 71–88.
28. William Eddis, Letters from America, ed. Aubrey C. Land (Cambridge, Mass., 1969), 51–52.
29. Cited in Christopher P. Bickford, Farmington in Connecticut (Canaan, N.H., 1982), 148.
30. Madam Knight, “Journal,” in Narratives of Colonial America, 1704–1765, ed. Howard H.
Peckham (Chicago, 1971), 31.
31. The Journal of Nicholas Cresswell, 1774–1777 (New York, 1924), 17.
32. Bickford, Farmington in Connecticut, 141–44.
33. Robert D. Mitchell, Commercialism and Frontier: Perspectives on the Early Shenandoah Val-
ley (Charlottesville, Va., 1977), 154–59. For a full discussion of British retailing practices dur-
ing this period, see Hoh-cheung Mui and Lorna H. Mui, Shops and Shopkeeping in
Eighteenth-Century England (Kingston, Ont., 1989).
n o t e s t o p a g e s 119– 125 N 349
34. Cited in Baxter, House of Hancock, 188. See also White, The Beekmans.
35. Thomas Hancock to Mr. John Rowe, 13 June 1737, in Thomas Hancock Letterbook [TH-3],
Baker Library, Harvard University School of Business, Cambridge, Mass.
36. Cited in Kenneth Wiggins Porter, The Jacksons and the Lees: Two Generations of Massachu-
setts Merchants, 1765–1844, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass., 1937), I, 179.
37. Glenn Weaver, Jonathan Trumbull, Connecticut’s Merchant Magistrate, 1710–1785 ( Hartford,
Conn., 1956), 32–40; and Hedges, The Browns of Providence Plantations, I, ch. 3.
38. Cited in T. H. Breen, Imagining the Past: East Hampton Histories (Athens, Ga., 1996), 150.
39. Knight, “Journal,” 31–32. On the shortage of currency see Curtis Nettels, The Money Supply
of the American Colonies Before 1720 (Madison, Wisc., 1934).
40. These changes are documented in James Hoffman Lewis, “Farmers, Craftsmen, and Mer-
chants: Changing Economic Organization in Massachusetts, 1730 to 1775” (Ph.D. diss., North-
western University, 1984).
41. Quoted in Margaret E. Martin, Merchants and Trade of the Connecticut River Valley, 1750–
1820, vol. 24 of Smith College Studies in History (Northampton, Mass., 1939), 19.
42. Breen, Imagining the Past, 154–55; Bickford, Farmington in Connecticut, 144; and Richard I.
Melvoin, New England Outpost: War and Society in Colonial Deerfield (New York, 1989), 280.
43. The best account of these turbulent years is Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, Ameri-
can Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York, 1975).
44. Among the most valuable titles are Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in
the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1998); Gloria L. Main,
Tobacco Colony: Life in Early Maryland, 1650–1720 (Princeton, N.J., 1982); Allan Kulikoff,
Tobacco and Slaves: The Development of Southern Cultures in the Chesapeake, 1680–1800
(Chapel Hill, N.C., 1986).
45. The classic study of the eighteenth-century tobacco trade is Jacob M. Price, Capital and
Credit in British Overseas Trade: The View from the Chesapeake, 1700–1776 (Cambridge, Mass.,
1980). Also see T. M. Devine, The Tobacco Lords: A Study of the Tobacco Merchants of Glasgow
and Their Trading Activities, c. 1740–90 (Edinburgh, 1975).
46. Devine, Tobacco Lords. Also helpful is T. M. Devine, The Scottish Nation: A History, 1700–
2000 (New York, 1999), 24–26, 52–59, 120–22.
47. Paul G. E. Clemens, The Atlantic Economy and Colonial Maryland’s Eastern Shore: From To-
bacco to Grain (Ithaca, N.Y., 1980), 82–97.
48. Lois Green Carr and Lorena S. Walsh, “Inventories and the Analysis of Wealth and Con-
sumption Patterns in St. Mary’s County, Maryland, 1658–1777,” Historical Methods Newslet-
ter 13 (1980), 96.
49. See Nash, “The Organization of Trade and Finance.”
50. Breen, Tobacco Culture.
51. Charles Carter to Charles Gore, 10 August 1764, cited in Charles Royster, The Fabulous His-
tory of the Dismal Swamp Company: A Story of George Washington’s Times (New York, 1999),
62. See also Harry Roy Merrens, Colonial North Carolina in the Eighteenth Century: A Study
in Historical Geography (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1964), 168–69.
52. Francis Jerdone to Neil Buchanan, 4 August 1743, cited in Lois Green Carr and Lorena S.
Walsh, “Changing Lifestyles and Consumer Behavior in the Colonial Chesapeake,” in Carson
et al., eds., Of Consuming Interests, 108.
53. Jerdone to Messrs. Buchanan and Wilson, 7 May 1739, ibid.
54. Carr and Walsh, “Inventories and the Analysis of Wealth,” 96; Marc Egnal and Joseph Ernst,
“An Economic Interpretation of the American Revolution,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d
ser., 29 (1972), 25–27.
55. John Mair, Book-Keeping Modernized . . . , 6th ed. (Edinburgh, 1793), 497.
56. James Robinson to Bennet Price, 7 October 1767, in T. M. Divine, ed., A Scottish Firm in
Virginia 1767–1777: W. Cuninghame and Co., Scottish History Society Publications, 4th ser.,
20 (1984), 1–2, 12.
57. Robinson to John Turner, 22 April 1769, ibid., 12.
58. Edward C. Papenfuse, In Pursuit of Profit: The Annapolis Merchants in the Era of the Ameri-
can Revolution, 1763–1805 (Baltimore, 1975), 15–17, 52–57; Clemens, The Atlantic Economy
and Maryland’s Eastern Shore, 88–96.
59. Jacob M. Price, “Buchanan & Simson, 1759–1763: A Different Kind of Glasgow Firm Trading
to the Chesapeake,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 40 (1983), 3–41.
60. Nash, “Organization of Trade and Finance,” 5–7; Rachel N. Klein, Unification of a Slave State:
The Rise of the Planter Class in the South Carolina Backcountry, 1760–1808 (Chapel Hill, N.C.,
1990), 30.
61. Walter B. Edgar, ed., The Letterbook of Robert Pringle, 2 vols. (Columbia, S.C., 1972), I, 30–31,
56, 224, 249.
62. Tryon to the Board of Trade, 30 January 1767, in The Correspondence of William Tryon and
Other Selected Papers, ed. William S. Powell (Raleigh, N.C., 1980–81), I, 410. See also Merrens,
Colonial North Carolina, 168–69.
63. Daniel B. Thorp, “Doing Business in the Backcountry: Retail Trade in Colonial Rowan
County, North Carolina,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 48 (1991), 387–408.
64. See Arthur L. Jensen, The Maritime Commerce of Colonial Philadelphia (Madison, Wisc., 1963),
70–71; James Floyd Shepherd and Samuel H. Williamson, “The Coastal Trade of the British
North American Colonies, 1768–1772,” Journal of Economic History 32 (1972), 783–810.
65. Edgar, ed., Letterbook of Robert Pringle, I, 392; II, 567–68. Also Baxter, House of Hancock, 189.
66. Baxter, House of Hancock, 189.
67. Allan MacLean, Account Book 1741–6, Merchant Hartford, Connecticut Historical Society,
Hartford, Connecticut. Almost every colonial archive has a few records of this sort. Others
that I examined were Mss. Samuel Grant, Account Book, 1737–1760, Folio vols. G, American
Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts; and Gay Fisher, Account Book 1768–1774,
Connecticut Historical Society.
68. Doerflinger, Vigorous Spirit of Enterprise, 92–93.
69. Cited in Carl Bridenbaugh, Cities in Revolt: Urban Life in America, 1743–1776 (New York,
1964), 275.
70. Boston Evening-Post, 21 August 1749.
71. South-Carolina Gazette, 2 September 1732.
72. Knight, “Journal,” 31–33.
73. Cited in Carr and Walsh, “Changing Lifestyles and Consumer Behavior,” 110.
74. Thomas Clifford to Abel Chapman, 25 July 1767, cited in Anne Bezanson, Robert D. Gray,
and Miriam Hussey, Prices in Colonial Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, 1935), 263. Also Baxter,
House of Hancock, 185–87.
75. Edgar, ed., Letterbook of Robert Pringle, I, 30.
76. Doerflinger, Vigorous Spirit, 92–93.
77. “Letters from Letter-Book of Richard Hockley, 1739–1742,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History
and Biography 28 (1904), 31.
78. Carr and Walsh, “Changing Lifestyles and Consumer Behavior,” 110. Also see Richard L.
Bushman, “Shopping and Advertising in Colonial America,” 233–51; Jean B. Lee, Price of
Nationhood: The American Revolution in Charles County (New York, 1994), 32–42; and T. H.
Breen, “An Empire of Goods: The Anglicization of Colonial America, 1690–1776,” Journal of
British Studies 25 (1986), 467–99.
79. Cited in Jensen, Maritime Commerce, 103.
80. Cited in Ann Smart Martin, “The Role of Pewter as Missing Artifact: Consumer Attitudes
Toward Tablewares in Late 18th-Century Virginia,” Historical Archaeology 23 (1989), 6.
81. Edgar, ed., Letterbook of Robert Pringle, I, 392.
82. Thomas Hancock to Edward Cradock, 20 December 1736, TH-3.
83. Cited in Berg, “Organization of Business,” 170.
84. Hancock to John Cooper, 27 September 1736, TH-3.
85. Cited in S. Botein, “The Anglo-American Book Trade Before 1776,” in Printing and Society in
Early America, ed. William L. Joyce (Worcester, Mass., 1983), 75.
86. Henry Callister to Foster Cunliffe, 2 October 1750, cited in Carr and Walsh, “Changing
Lifestyles and Consumer Behavior,” 108–9.
87. David Barclay and Sons to Mary Alexander, 10 July 1759, cited in Cleary, “‘ She Merchants’ of
Colonial America,” 234.
88. Cited in Berg, “Organization of Business,” 171. Also see Kenneth Morgan, “Business Net-
works,” 46–50.
89. Cited in Porter, The Jacksons and the Lees, I, 181.
90. Hancock to John Rowe, 13 June 1737, TH-3.
91. Joshua Johnson of Maryland proposed that his agents circulate “patent cards” among store-
keepers operating in the western parts of the colony. He seems to have anticipated what we
n o t e s t o p a g e s 133– 142 N 351
know as the catalogue store. Jacob M. Price, ed., Joshua Johnson’s Letter Book, 1771–1774:
Letters from a Merchant in London to His Partners in Maryland, London Record Society
Publications 15 (1979), 37.
92. On the rapid changes in product design, see John Styles, “Product Innovation in Early Modern
London,” Past and Present, no. 168 (2000), 124–69.
93. Cited in White, The Beekmans, 455.
94. See Chapter 2 for a discussion of how mid-eighteenth-century advertising provides evi-
dence for the development of a radically new consumer marketplace.
95. South-Carolina Gazette, 29 October 1753. Also see Robert Magnum Barrow, “Newspaper
Advertising in Colonial America, 1704–1775,” (Ph.D. diss., University of Virginia, 1967).
96. South-Carolina Gazette, 12 February 1753.
97. Joseph and Daniel Waldo, Imported from London & Sold by Wholesale or Retail at the Cheap-
est Rates . . . (Boston, 1749).
98. John Appleton, Imported in the Last Ships from London . . . (Salem, Mass., 1773).
99. Peter Mathias, “Risk, Credit, and Kinship in Early Modern Enterprise,” in McCusker and
Morgan, eds., Early Modern Atlantic Economy, 15–35. Although it deals with an earlier pe-
riod, Craig Muldrew’s The Economy of Obligation: The Culture of Credit and Social Relations
in Early Modern England (London, 1998) challenges historians of eighteenth-century America
to pay closer attention to the social and cultural role of credit.
100. [Anonymous], The Ill Policy and Inhumanity of Imprisoning Insolvent Debtors (Newport,
R.I., 1754), 11.
101. Doerflinger, Vigorous Spirit of Enterprise, 90–92; Carole Shammas, The Pre-Industrial Con-
sumer in England and America (Oxford, 1990), 269; White, The Beekmans, 394; Mann, Neigh-
bors and Strangers, 5–62; Wilbur C. Plummer, “Consumer Credit in Colonial Philadelphia,”
Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 66 (1942), 390–94; and Gregory H. Nobles,
Divisions Throughout the Whole: Politics and Society in Hampshire County, Massachusetts,
1740–1775 (Cambridge, 1983), 120–22.
102. Boston Evening-Post, 26 June 1738. Also New-England Weekly Journal, 1 May 1739.
103. Postscript, to a Discourse Concerning the Currencies of the British Plantations in America,
republished in Colonial Currency Reprints, 1682–1741, with an Introduction and Notes, ed.
Andrew McFarland Davis, 4 vols. (New York, 1964), IV, 53–54.
104. See John Brewer, “Commercialization and Politics,” in Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, and J.
H. Plumb, eds., The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Cen-
tury England (Bloomington, Ind., 1982), 208–16.
105. South-Carolina Gazette, 29 January 1732.
106. [Anonymous], Ill Policy of Imprisoning Debtors, 11.
107. [Benjamin Franklin], Advice to a Young Tradesman (Boston, 1762), 1–4. Also, “Rules Proper
to Be Observed in Trade,” Pennsylvania Gazette, 20 February 1750.
108. New-York Weekly Journal, 12 July 1736, reprinted from South-Carolina Gazette.
109. Boston Evening-Post, 16 March 1752.
110. Ibid., 1 September 1746.
111. Ibid., 6 April 1741.
112. New-London Gazette, 10 February 1769.
113. Ezra Gleason, The Massachusetts Calendar, or, Wonderful Almanack for . . . 1773 (Boston,
1772), 4–5.
114. Samuel Johnson, A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, ed. Mary Lascelles (New Ha-
ven, Conn., 1971), 130.
115. Marc Egnal and Joseph A. Ernst, “An Economic Interpretation of the American Revolution,”
William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 29 (1972), 15–16.
116. Knight, “Journal,” 37.
117. Edgar, ed., Letterbook of Robert Pringle, II, 645.
118. Bridenbaugh, Cities in Revolt, 276.
119. New-England Weekly Journal, 6 December 1737.
121. [Anonymous], A Few Reasons in Favour of Vendues (Philadelphia, 1772).
122. Moore to the earl of Hillsborough, 26 May 1769, in Documents Relative to the Colonial His-
tory of the State of New-York . . . , ed. E. B. O’Callaghan, 15 vols. (Albany, N.Y., 1853–87), VIII,
167.

124. [Benjamin Franklin], Father Abraham’s Speech . . . (Boston, 1758), 10–11, 13–14, 16.
125. Thomas Gage to Lord Barrington, 7 October 1769, in The Correspondence of General Thomas
Gage . . . , ed. Clarence Edwin Carter, 2 vols. (New Haven, Conn., 1931), II, 527.
1744 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1948), 104, 150.
127. Darrett B. Rutman and Anita H. Rutman, A Place in Time: Middlesex County, Virginia, 1650–
1750, 2 vols. (New York, 1984), I, 231; Merrens, Colonial North Carolina, 168–69; and Robert
D. Mitchell, Commercialism and Frontier, 153–54.
128. Martin, Merchants and Trade of the Connecticut River Valley, 139.
129. H. R. McIlwaine, ed., Journals of the House of Burgesses of Virginia, 1758–61 (Richmond, Va.,
1908), 92, 189.
130. Peter Force, ed., American Archives . . . , 4th ser., 6 vols. (Washington, D.C., 1837–53), I, 1105.
131. William S. Sachs, “The Business Outlook in the Northern Colonies, 1750–1775” (Ph.D. diss.,
Columbia University, 1957), 249–50. A sample of these kinds of regulations can be found in
Acts and Resolves, Public and Private of the Province of the Massachusetts Bay . . . , 21 vols.
(Boston, 1869–1922) I, 720–21; II, 47, 232–33, 386.
132. Cited in William Nelson, ed., Documents Relating to the Colonial History of the State of New
Jersey . . . , New Jersey Archives, 1st ser., 12 (1895), 677–78.
133. Quoted in Ellen D. Larned, History of Windham County, Connecticut, 2 vols. (Worcester,
Mass., 1880), II, 119.
134. Bridenbaugh, ed., Itinerarium of Dr. Alexander Hamilton, 95, 160.
135. Boston Weekly Post-Boy, 26 February 1739.
136. Jonathan Trumbull Sr. Papers I (1653–1759), Connecticut Historical Society, Hartford, Conn.
Also Jackson Turner Main, Society and Economy in Colonial Connecticut (Princeton, N.J.,
1985), 280; and Richard Bushman, From Puritan to Yankee: Character and Social Order in
Connecticut, 1690–1765 (New York, 1967), 113.
137. White, The Beekmans, I, 356–57, 392–93.
138. Neal W. Allen Jr., ed., Province and Court Records of Maine, 6 vols. (Portland, Me., 1928–75),
VI, 72–76.
Chapter 5
1. [Anonymous], News from the Moon. Containing a Brief Account of the Manners and Customs
of the Inhabitants: Very Suitable to the Present Times (Boston, 1772), 1–15. There has been
some ambiguity concerning the authorship of this pamphlet, and it should not be confused
with an earlier work of a similar title, which was published in Boston in 1721. That piece,
which ridiculed the prosecution of libel, was copied from Daniel Defoe’s “A Review of the
State of the British Nation,” a serial publication in England. Some bibliographers, therefore,
have entertained suspicions that this anonymous pamphlet might have also been a reprint
of some Defoe material. While the author certainly drew inspiration from Defoe’s style of
satire, and imitated his use of the moon as a lunar setting for his critiques, the weight of
evidence strongly suggests that Defoe was not in fact the author. There are no similar pas-
sages in either his popular work, The Consolidator; or, Memoirs of Sundry Transactions from
the World in the Moon, Translated from the Lunar Language (London, 1705), or the various
editions of “A Review of the State of the British Nation.” There is also evidence from within
the text itself that would seem to cast doubt upon Defoe’s authorship. In a time of rapid
change, new terms and vocabularies were emerging to describe the expanding consumer
world. Words like “Jockey-cap,” which the author employed to describe the new fashions he
witnessed on the moon, were not even coined until mid-century, well after Defoe’s death (J.
A. Simpson and E.S.C. Weiner, eds., Oxford English Dictionary, 2d ed., 20 vols. [Oxford,
1989], VIII, 252). The thrust of the entire satire, moreover, would seem somewhat strange
for Defoe, who always used the lunar world to criticize the political sphere, and who gener-
ally celebrated the new consumer world just beginning to emerge in his day. See Sandra
Sherman, Finance and Fictionality in the Early Eighteenth Century: Accounting for Defoe (Cam-
bridge, 1986).
2. Wallace Stevens, “Esthétique du Mal,” in Collected Poems (New York, 1954), 320.
n o t e s t o p a g e s 151– 157 N 353
3. New London Gazette, 1 February 1771.

4. On the relevance of this particular debate for the study of eighteenth-century material cul-
ture, see John E. Crowley’s provocative Invention of Comfort: Sensibilities and Design in Early
Modern Britain and Early America (Baltimore, 2001).
5. Francis Hutcheson, Reflections upon Laughter, and Remarks upon the Fable of the Bees
(Glasgow, 1750), 44, 49.
6. Richard Rolt, New Dictionary of Trade and Commerce . . . (London, 1756). This volume has
no pagination. The quotations can be found under the heading “Fashion.” On the impor-
tance of product innovation see John Styles, “Product Innovation in Early Modern Lon-
don,” Past and Present, no. 168 (2000), 124–69. Also see Neil McKendrick’s essays on
Wedgwood and other innovators in the marketplace in Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, and
J. H. Plumb, The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century
England (Bloomington, Ind., 1982), 100–94.
7. [John Brown], An Estimate of the Manners and Principles of the Times . . . , 5th ed. (London,
1757), 117–18, 125.
8. Pennsylvania Chronicle, 9 November 1767.
9. Boston Weekly News-Letter, 19 July 1750; continued 26 July 1750.
10. The Commercial Conduct of the Province of New-York Considered, and the True Interest of
that Colony Attempted to be Shewn . . . (New York, 1767), 7.
11. Massachusetts Gazette and Boston News-Letter, 19 July 1767.
12. Cited in E. W. Gilboy, “Demand as a Factor in the Industrial Revolution,” in The Causes of
the Industrial Revolution in England, ed. R. M. Hartwell (London, 1967), 128.
13. Nathaniel Potter, A Discourse on Jeremiah 8th, 20th (Boston, 1758), 13. Potter is here quoting
from an unnamed source.
14. Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography, intro. by Lewis Leary (New York, 1962), 80.
15. Benjamin Franklin to Deborah Franklin, 19 February 1758, in The Papers of Benjamin Franklin,
ed. Leonard W. Labaree, 35 vols. (New Haven, Conn., 1959–), VII, 381–83.
16. Daniel Vickers, “Competency and Competition: Economic Culture in Early America,” Wil-
liam and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 47 (1990), 3–29.
17. Independent Advertiser, 20 March 1749.
18. Stephen Foster, Their Solitary Way: The Puritan Social Ethic in the First Century of Settle-
ment in New England (New Haven, Conn., 1971), and Perry Miller, “Religion and Society in
the Early Literature of Virginia,” in his Errand into the Wilderness (Cambridge, Mass., 1956),
99–140.
19. Roy Porter, Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World (London, 2000).
20. J. E. Crowley, This Sheba, Self: The Conceptualization of Economic Life in Eighteenth-Century
America (Baltimore, 1974), 4. Also see Albert O. Hirschman, Shifting Involvements: Private
Interest and Public Action (Princeton, N.J., 1982), 57.
21. The problem of how to sort people out in a fluid, open society also affected the structure of
the churches. As the historian William McLoughlin explained, “Social boundaries were still
in theory strict and definable, yet every time it became necessary to ‘dignify the pews’ by
assigning seats around the pulpit proportionate in distance to the social and economic pres-
tige of each parishioner, it became increasingly difficult to discern the lines of difference.
Men born as bond servants or the sons of bondservants, rose in wealth to equal that of the
oldest families and most respected leaders.”“Such rapid fluctuations in society,” he revealed,
meant “that it was increasingly difficult to discover what God (who controlled it all) in-
tended.” New England Dissent, 1630–1833: The Baptists and the Separation of Church and State,
2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass., 1971), I, 334.
22. Boston Gazette, 7 January 1765.
23. Although this essay originally appeared in the Gazetteer and London Daily Advertiser, the
Boston editor reprinted the piece with his “blessing.” Boston Evening-Post, 6 January 1755.
24. Connecticut Courant, 10 June 1765.
25. Boston Gazette, 10 January 1763. The parallels between this debate and the one that swirled
around the new evangelical religion are striking. See Timothy Hall, Contested Boundaries:
Itinerancy and the Reshaping of the Colonial American Religious World (Durham, N.C., 1994).
26. William Tennent, An Address, Occasioned by the Late Invasion of the Liberties of the American
Colonies by the British Parliament (Philadelphia, 1774), 13–16.
354 n n ote s to pag e s 158– 166
27. [William Douglass], A Discourse Concerning the Currencies of the British Plantations in
America . . . (Boston, 1740), 29.
28. Pennsylvania Packet, 9 November 1772.
29. See Chapter 2.
30. Philopatria [Thomas Paine], A Discourse, Shewing That the Real First Cause . . . (Boston,
1721), cited in Margaret Ellen Newell, From Dependency to Independence: Economic Revolu-
tion in Colonial New England (Ithaca, N.Y., 1998), 147.
31. Boston Evening-Post, 16 March 1752. On the theme of clothes and status, see the anonymous
pamphlet The Miraculous Power of Clothes, and Dignity of the Taylors: Being an Essay on the
Words, Clothes Make Men (Philadelphia, 1772); and Jonathan Mayhew’s advice to the young
people of Boston on how to dress in Christian Sobriety . . . Preached with a Special View to
the Benefit of the Young Men . . . (Boston, 1763), 150–55.
32. The statistics for the importation of mirrors are derived from Customs 3: Ledgers of Imports
and Exports, 1696–1780 (East Ardsley, Wakefield, Yorkshire, 1974), microfilm. See also Ben-
jamin Goldberg, The Mirror and Man (Charlottesville, Va., 1985).
33. Journal and Letters of Philip Vickers Fithian, 1773–1774: A Plantation Tutor of the Old Domin-
ion, ed. Hunter Dickinson Farish, 2d ed. (Williamsburg, Va., 1957), 29, 130–31.
34. Peter Collinson to John Bartram, 17 February 1737, quoted in T. H. Breen, Puritans and
Adventurers: Change and Persistence in Early America (New York, 1980), 153–54.
35. Cited in Bernard Bailyn, “Voyagers in Flight: A Sketchbook of Runaway Servants, 1774–
1775,” in his Voyagers to the West: A Passage in the Peopling of America on the Eve of the Revo-
lution (New York, 1986), ch. 10.
36. Gary Zaboly, “Descriptions of Military Uniforms and Equipage in North America, 1755–
1764, Part I,” Military Collector and Historian 39 (1987), 8.
37. Chris Bayly, “The Origins of Swadeshi: Cloth and Indian Society, 1700–1930,” in The Social
Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge, 1986),
303–11.
38. The quotation is from Edgar P. Richardson, American Paintings and Related Pictures in the
Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum (Charlottesville, Va., 1986), 30. Also see George
C. Groce, “John Wollaston (Fl. 1736–1767): A Cosmopolitan Painter in the British Colonies,”
Art Quarterly 15 (1952), 133–48; and Wayne Craven, “John Wollaston’s Career in England and
New York City,” American Art Journal 7, no. 2 (1975), 19–31. The argument about the cultural
significance of cloth for early American painting is more fully developed in T. H. Breen,
“The Meaning of ‘Likeness’: Portrait-Painting in an Eighteenth-Century Consumer Soci-
ety,” in The Portrait in Eighteenth-Century America, ed. Ellen G. Miles (Newark, Del., 1993),
37–60.
39. The widespread fear of accepting a counterfeit object or a confidence man as the real thing
is explored in T. H. Breen and Timothy Hall, “Structuring Provincial Imagination: The Rheto-
ric and Experience of Social Change in Eighteenth-Century New England,” American His-
torical Review 103 (1998), 1411–39. A striking example of the fear of being fooled by upwardly
mobile “sons and daughters of inferior mechanics” can be found in New-Hampshire Ga-
zette, 11 November 1763.
40. Cited in Karin Calvert, “The Function of Fashion in Eighteenth-Century America,” in Of
Consuming Interests: The Style of Life in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Cary Carson, Ronald
Hoffman, and Peter J. Albert (Charlottesville, Va., 1994), 232.
1744 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1948), 13–14.
42. [Benjamin Franklin], Father Abraham’s Speech . . . (Boston, 1758), 13–14.
43. The quotations from South Carolina and Virginia come from Shane White and Graham
White, “Slave Clothing and African-American Culture in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth
Centuries,” Past and Present, no. 148 (1995), 154–55, 159–61.
44. Maryland Gazette, 18 October 1770.
45. [Anonymous], A Proposal to Supply the Trade with a Medium of Exchange . . . (Boston, 1737),
x. Also, Boston Evening-Post, 25 August 1746.
47. New-York Journal; or, General Advertiser, 1 June 1769, reprinted from Virginia Gazette.
48. Two books that imaginatively develop this comparative perspective on empire are Linda
Colley, Captives: The Story of Britain’s Pursuit of Empire and How Its Soldiers and Civilians
n o t e s t o p a g e s 167– 170 N 355
Were Held Captive by the Dream of Global Supremacy, 1600–1850 (New York, 2002); and
Kathleen Wilson, The Island Race: Englishness, Empire, and Gender in the Eighteenth Century
(London, 2003).
49. Pennsylvania Chronicle, 6–13 January 1772. For more on the character of advertising during
this period, see Chapter 2.
50. For an early discussion of the concept of Anglicization, see John M. Murrin, “The Legal
Transformation: The Bench and Bar of Eighteenth-Century Massachusetts,” in Colonial
America: Essays in Politics and Social Development, ed. Stanley N. Katz (Boston, 1976), 415–
49. Also see T. H. Breen, “Ideology and Nationalism on the Eve of the American Revolution:
Revisions Once More in Need of Revising,” Journal of American History 84 (1997), 13–40. The
widespread cultural ambivalence of the period is stressed in Jack P. Greene, “Search for
Identity: An Interpretation of the Meaning of Selected Patterns of Social Response in Eigh-
teenth-Century America,” in his Imperatives, Behaviors, and Identities: Essays in Early Ameri-
can Cultural History (Charlottesville, Va., 1992), 143–73. The American “ensavagement” that
Bernard Bailyn highlights in his Voyagers to the West appears to have receded by the eigh-
teenth century, when colonists like William Byrd II inhabited a cultural world that was
assertively English and cosmopolitan. See Kenneth A. Lockridge, The Diary and Life of Wil-
liam Byrd II of Virginia, 1674–1744 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1987).
51. Elise Pinckney, ed., The Letterbook of Eliza Lucas Pinckney, 1739–1762 (Chapel Hill, N.C.,
1972), 175, 180–81.
52. David S. Shields, Civil Tongues and Polite Letters in British America (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1997);
and Jay Fliegelman, Prodigals and Pilgrims: The American Revolution Against Patriarchal
Authority, 1750–1800 (Cambridge, 1982).
53. Connecticut Courant, 29 October 1764.
54. “To the Printer of the London Chronicle, 9 May 1759,” in Labaree, ed., Papers of Benjamin
Franklin, VIII, 342.
55. Stephen Botein, “The Anglo-American Book Trade Before 1776: Personnel and Strategies,”
in Printing and Society in Early America, ed. William L. Joyce et al. (Worcester, Mass., 1983),
79.
56. See Chapter 2.
57. Bayly, “Origins of Swadeshi,” 303–11. See also Nicholas Phillipson, “Politics, Politeness, and
the Anglicisation of Early Eighteenth-Century Scottish Culture,” in Scotland and England,
1286–1815, ed. R. A. Mason (Edinburgh, 1987), 226–46; and Bernard S. Cohn, “Cloth, Clothes,
and Colonialism: India in the 19th Century,” paper presented at Wenner-Gren Foundation
symposium, 1983.
58. Boston Gazette, 9 November 1767.
59. The symbolic importance of color is explored in T. H. Breen, “Discovering Color: Recon-
structing a New Visual Landscape in the Age of Washington” lecture at the John Carter
Brown Library, Providence, R.I., 13 April 2000.
60. Frank S. Welsh, “The Early American Palette: Colonial Paint Colors Revealed,” Thomas H.
Taylor Jr. and Nicholas A. Pappas, “Colonial Williamsburg Colors: A Changing Spectrum,”
and Matthew J. Mosca, “Paint Decoration at Mount Vernon: The Revival of Eighteenth-
Century Techniques,” in Paint in America: The Colors of Historic Buildings, ed. Roger W.
Moss (New York, 1994), 68–85, 87–103, 105–27.
61. Diary and Autobiography of John Adams, ed. L. H. Butterfield, 4 vols. (New York, 1964), I,
294.
62. John Fanning Watson, Annals of Philadelphia and Pennsylvania, in the Olden Times, 2 vols.
(Philadelphia, 1856–57), I, 205.
63. George Washington to Robert Cary & Co., 28 September 1760, in The Writings of George
Washington, ed. John C. Fitzpatrick, 39 vols. (Washington, D.C., 1931–44), II, 350. According
to one historian, Washington ordered “fine china and silver, fashionable clothing, furniture,
books, decorative porcelains, statuary, and paintings. . . . The latest London fashions ap-
peared at Mount Vernon within months of their introduction on the London market.” Bruce
A. Ragsdale, “George Washington, the British Tobacco Trade, and Economic Opportunity
in Pre-Revolutionary Virginia,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 97 (1989), 143.
64. William Smith, The History of the Late Province of New-York . . . , New-York Historical Soci-
ety Collections, vol. 4, pt. 2 (1829), 277.
65. [Ann Hulton], Letters of a Loyalist Lady (Cambridge, Mass., 1927), 45.
356 n n ote s to pag e s 170– 177
66. Cited in Esther Singleton, Social New York Under the Georges, 1714–1776 (New York, 1902),
380–81.
67. Ibid., 375.
68. Smith, History of New-York, 281.
69. Cited in Rodris Roth, Tea Drinking in Eighteenth-Century America: Its Etiquette and Equi-
page (Washington, D.C., 1963), 66.
70. Billy G. Smith, “The Material Lives of Laboring Philadelphians, 1750 to 1800,” William and
Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 38 (1981), 168–70.
71. A wonderfully humorous example of this phenomenon can be found in H. A. Powell, “Cricket
in Kiriwina,” Listener 48 (1952), 384–85.
72. William Nelson to Francis Fauquier Jr., 16 August 1768, cited in Graham Hood, The Governor’s
Palace in Williamsburg: A Cultural Study (Williamsburg, Va., 1991), 132.
73. For Burke’s views on commerce in the empire, see Chapter 3.
74. [Benjamin Franklin], The Interest of Great Britain Considered . . . (Philadelphia, 1760), 27–28.
75. South-Carolina Gazette, 15 August 1743. For the kind of over-the-top criticism of women
that surged forth during this period, see the many so-called news stories found in the Bos-
ton Evening-Post for late 1752. These include a report of a jealous woman who cut off the
genitals of her philandering husband with a knife. A poem entitled “Advice to a Young Lady
Lately Married” (6 November 1752) counseled the woman:
Be sure you ne’er for Pow’r contend,
Nor try by Tears to gain your End. . . .
Heaven gave to Man superiour Sway,
Then Heaven and him at once obey.
This advice sparked a stinging rebuke from a woman, informing the males of Boston
that reform of marriage should begin with the men. “If Honour and Generosity, Tenderness
tempered with Resolution, Frugality and Industry, and such other Virtues as dignify Hu-
man Nature, and Contribute to the Happiness of Society, could once be brought into Fash-
ion among them, I dare say we should hear very few Complaints against Ladies.”
76. Ibid., 22 August 1743.
77. Hirschman, Shifting Involvements, 50.
78. A fuller examination of the “luxury debate” can be found in John Sekora, Luxury: The Con-
cept in Western Thought, Eden to Smollett (Baltimore, 1977); Crowley, This Sheba, Self; and
Christopher J. Berry, The Idea of Luxury: A Conceptual and Historical Investigation (Cam-
bridge, 1994).
79. John Brown, An Estimate of the Manners and Principles of the Times, 7th ed. (Boston, 1758),
19.
80. Jonas Clarke, The Best Art of Dress; or, Early Piety Most Amiable and Ornamental (Boston,
1762), 7–8.
81. Andrew Eliot, An Evil and Adulterous Generation (Boston, 1753), 19.
82. [Anonymous], Industry & Frugality Proposed As the Surest Means to Make Us a Rich and
Flourishing People . . . (Boston, 1753), 8.
83. Independent Reflector, 18 January 1753.
84. Maryland Gazette, 9 March 1748. The article originally appeared in the Boston Gazette, 19 Janu-
ary 1748.
85. On this policy, see John E. Crowley, The Privileges of Independence: Neomercantilism and the
American Revolution (Baltimore, 1993).
86. Independent Advertiser, 27 February 1749.
87. See Jane Kaminsky, Governing the Tongue: The Politics of Speech in Early New England (New
York, 1997), ch. 3; and Mary Beth Norton, Founding Mothers and Fathers: Gendered Power
and the Forming of American Society (New York, 1996).
88. South-Carolina Gazette; and Country Journal, 2 November 1773.
89. Pennsylvania Gazette, 7 December 1767.
91. Maryland Gazette, 17 February 1747, reprinted from American Magazine, November 1746.
92. Boston Gazette, 2 June 1755.
93. Pennsylvania Chronicle, 17 April 1769 (emphasis added).
94. Brown, Estimate of the Manners, 51.
n o t e s t o p a g e s 177– 188 N 357
95. Cited in Singleton, Social New York, 381. Also see Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace, Consuming
Subjects: Women, Shopping, and Business in the Eighteenth Century (New York, 1997), 19–36.
97. Cited in Singleton, Social New York, 381.
98. Boston News-Letter, 18 February 1762.
99. New-York Weekly Journal, 12 July 1736.
100. [John Lovell], Freedom, the First of Blessings (Boston, 1754), 1, 3.
101. Roth, Tea Drinking in 18th-Century America, 66.
102. Peter Kalm’s Travels in North America, trans. Adolph B. Benson, 2 vols. (New York, 1937), I,
190, also 346–47. For a broader European perspective on the demand for tea among the
working classes, see David Ormrod, “English Re-Exports and the Dutch Staplemarket in the
Eighteenth Century,” in Enterprise and History: Essays in Honour of Charles Wilson, ed. D. C.
Coleman and Peter Mathias (Cambridge, 1984), 89–115.
103. Boston Gazette, 17 March 1740. The newspaper editor explained to his subscribers that he
especially recommended this piece, which he had taken from an unnamed magazine.
104. Boston Evening-Post, 6 April 1752.
106. South-Carolina Gazette, 20 June 1748. On the republican discourse in eighteenth-century
America, see Bernard Bailyn, The Origins of American Politics (New York, 1968), 3–58.
107. Connecticut Courant, 10 June 1765. Also see [John Barnard], A Present for an Apprentice; or, A
Sure Guide to Gain Both Esteem and Estate . . . (Boston, 1747), 16.
108. Mayhew, Christian Sobriety, 197–99.
109. Boston Evening-Post, 14 and 21 March 1743. The best general history of the Great Awakening
is Frank Lambert, Inventing the “Great Awakening” (Princeton, N.J., 1999).
110. Bridenbaugh, ed., Gentleman’s Progress, 160–61.
111. Boston Weekly Post-Boy, 12 April 1742.
112. South-Carolina Gazette, 9 March 1738.
113. Dell Upton, Holy Things and Profane: Anglican Parish Churches in Colonial Virginia (Cam-
bridge, Mass., 1986), 229; Cary Carson, “The Consumer Revolution in Colonial British
America: Why Demand?” in Carson et al., eds., Of Consuming Interests, 504–47; and [Anon.],
Industry & Frugality Proposed.
114. Independent Advertiser, 20 March 1749. Also see Colin Jones, “Bourgeois Revolution Revivi-
fied: 1789 and Social Change,” in Rewriting the French Revolution, ed. Colin Lucas (Oxford,
1991), 88–89.
115. Boston Gazette, 10 January 1763; Virginia Gazette, 29 December 1752; and Nathaniel Ames,
An Astronomical Diary; or, An Almanack for 1773 (Boston, 1772). Also “Atticus,” Pennsylvania
Chronicle, 7 December 1767.
116. Maryland Gazette, 23 December 1746.
117. Connecticut Journal, and New-Haven Post-Boy, 16 February 1770.
118. Independent Advertiser, 26 June 1749. Also see Albert Hirschman, The Passions and the Inter-
ests: Political Arguments for Capitalism Before Its Triumph (Princeton, N.J., 1977).
119. Jan de Vries, “Between Purchasing Power and the World of Goods: Understanding the House-
hold Economy in Early Modern Europe,” in Carson et al., eds., Of Consuming Interests, 85–
132; de Vries, “The Industrial Revolution and the Industrious Revolution,” Journal of Economic
History 54 (1994), 249–70. Also Eric Jones, “Agricultural and Economic Growth: Economic
Change,” in his Agriculture and Industrial Revolution (Oxford, 1974), 116–17.
120. Jared Eliot, The Sixth Essay on Field-Husbandry (New Haven, Conn., 1759), 12–17. Also see
Lois Green Carr and Lorena S. Walsh, “Changing Lifestyles and Consumer Behavior in the
Colonial Chesapeake,” in Carson et al., eds., Of Consuming Interests, 109–11; Laurel Thatcher
Ulrich, “Wheels, Looms, and the Gender Division of Labor in Eighteenth-Century New
England,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 56 (1998), 16–17; and Kevin M. Sweeney, “From
Wilderness to Arcadian Vale: Material Life in the Connecticut River Valley, 1635–1760,” in
The Great River: Art and Society of the Connecticut Valley, 1635–1820, ed. Gerald W. R. Ward
and William N. Hosley Jr. (Hartford, Conn., 1985), 23.
121. Articles of Incorporation of the Society for Encouraging Industry (Boston, 1754), 1–2.
122. Boston Evening-Post, 9 December 1751.
123. Boston Gazette, 6 October 1740. See also [William Douglass], An Essay Concerning Silver and
Paper Currencies: More Especially with Regard to the British Colonies in New-England (Boston,
358 n n ote s to pag e s 188– 201
1738), 12–13; and Independent Reflector, 24 May 1753. The best recent account of the currency
controversy in Massachusetts is Newell, From Dependency to Independence, 181–240.
124. [Hugh Vans], An Inquiry into the Nature and Uses of Money (Boston, 1740), 2.
125. Boston Weekly Post-Boy, 8 December 1740; also 22 September 1740.
126. New-England Weekly Journal, 24 February 1741; also Boston Evening-Post, 22 September 1740
and 6 April 1741. There is no fully satisfactory historical account of the “Shop Notes.”
127. Boston Weekly News-Letter, 20 December 1750; [Anonymous], A Letter to the Merchant in
London (Boston, 1741), 7; and William Borden, An Address to the Inhabitants of North Caro-
lina (1746), reprinted in Some Eighteenth-Century Tracts Concerning North Carolina, ed.
William K. Boyd (Raleigh, N.C., 1927), 69–73. Breen and Hall explore the pre-revolutionary
development of a “liberal self ” in “Structuring Provincial Imagination,” 1411–38.
128. See Edmund S. Morgan, ed., Puritan Political Ideas, 1558–1794 (Indianapolis, Ind., 1965),
xiii–xlvii; and John Dunn, “The Politics of Locke in England and American in the Eigh-
teenth Century,” in John Locke: Problems and Perspectives, a Collection of New Essays, ed.
John W. Yolton (Cambridge, 1969), 45–80.
129. John J. McCusker, “Comment,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 45 (1988), 170; John
Brewer, “Commercialization and Politics,” in McKendrick et al., Birth of a Consumer Society,
200–206; and Michael Ignatieff, The Needs of a Stranger (New York, 1984), 122. Joyce Appleby
has traced the development of an American language of liberal “self-interest” in “The Social
Origins of American Revolutionary Ideology,” in her Liberalism and Republicanism in the
Historical Imagination (Cambridge, Mass., 1993), 161–87.
130. “Rusticus,” The Good of the Community Impartially Considered, in a Letter to a Merchant in
Boston (Boston, 1754), 5, 12, 18–19. Also [Anonymous], The Ill Policy and Inhumanity of Im-
prisoning Insolvent Debtors (Newport, R.I., 1754), 31; and Boston Gazette, 16 July 1754.
131. Jean-Christophe Agnew, “Coming Up for Air: Consumer Culture in Historical Perspective,” in
Consumption and the World of Goods, ed. John Brewer and Roy Porter (London, 1993), 19–39.
Chapter 6
1. The most satisfactory account of these events is Edmund S. Morgan and Helen M. Morgan,
The Stamp Act Crisis: Prologue to Revolution (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1953), 282, 286–87. The Mor-
gans stress the confusion that Franklin created for both the members of Parliament and
many subsequent historians of the American Revolution over the alleged distinction be-
tween internal and external taxation.
2. A study that captures the complexities of Franklin’s character is Edmund S. Morgan, Ben-
jamin Franklin (New Haven, Conn., 2002).
3. Leonard W. Labaree, ed., The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, 35 vols. (New Haven, Conn.,
1959–), XIII, 127–29.
4. Ibid., 135–36.
5. Ibid., 140–59.
6. The lobbies and factions that shaped colonial policy during this period are the subject of
Peter D. G. Thomas’s British Politics and the Stamp Act Crisis: The First Phase of the American
Revolution, 1763–1767 (Oxford, 1975).
7. See Chapter 3 for a discussion of consumer colonies in a commercial empire.
8. Cited in Labaree, ed., Papers of Benjamin Franklin, XIII, 125.
9. Benjamin Franklin to Deborah Franklin, 6 April 1766, ibid., 233–34.
10. Jean-Christophe Agnew discusses the “symbolic dimensions of goods” in “Coming Up for
Air: Consumer Culture in Historical Perspective,” in Consumption and the World of Goods,
ed. John Brewer and Roy Porter (London, 1993), 32–33.
11. The striking development at mid-century of a heightened sense of English nationalism is
the subject of Linda Colley’s important book Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New
Haven, Conn., 1992). Also useful are John Brewer, “The Eighteenth-Century British State:
Contexts and Issues,” in An Imperial State at War: Britain from 1689–1815, ed. Lawrence Stone
(London, 1994), 52–71; Colin Kidd, “North Britishness and the Nature of Eighteenth-Cen-
tury British Patriotisms,” Historical Journal (Cambridge), 39 (1996), 361–82; and Kathleen
Wilson, “Empire, Trade, and Popular Politics in Mid-Hanoverian Britain: The Case of Ad-
miral Vernon,” Past and Present, no. 121 (1988), 74–109. A discussion of “colonial national-
n o t e s t o p a g e s 201– 205 N 359
ism” within the American colonies can be found in T. H. Breen, “Ideology and Nationalism
on the Eve of the American Revolution: Revisions Once More in Need of Revising,” Journal
of American History 84 (1997), 13–39. Also valuable is Stephen Conway, “From Fellow-Na-
tionals to Foreigners: British Perceptions of the Americans, circa 1739–1783,” William and
Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 59 (2002), 65–100.
12. New-Hampshire Gazette, 13 July 1764.
13. Nathan O. Hatch, The Sacred Cause of Liberty: Republican Thought and the Millennium in
Revolutionary New England (New Haven, Conn., 1977); and Ruth Bloch, Visionary Republic:
Millennial Themes in American Thought, 1756–1800 (Cambridge, 1985).
14. See Jack P. Greene, “Independence and Dependence: The Psychology of the Colonial Relation-
ship on the Eve of the American Revolution,” in his Imperatives, Behaviors, and Identities:
Essays in Early American Cultural History (Charlottesville, Va., 1992), 174–80; and John Clive
and Bernard Bailyn, “England’s Cultural Provinces: Scotland and America,” William and Mary
Quarterly, 3d ser., 11 (1954), 200–13. On the mid-century tightening of imperial controls, see
Jack P. Greene, Peripheries and Center: Constitutional Development in the Extended Polities of
the British Empire and the United States, 1607–1788 (Athens, Ga., 1986), 48–76.
15. Boston Gazette, 14 October 1765.
16. James Otis Jr., A Vindication of the British Colonies (1765), in Pamphlets of the American
Revolution, ed. Bernard Bailyn (Cambridge, Mass., 1965), I, 568.
17. Maryland Gazette, 8 August 1765 (reprinted from Boston Gazette, 15 July 1765).
18. This theme is developed in greater detail in T. H. Breen, “Subjecthood and Citizenship: The
Context of James Otis’s Radical Critique of John Locke,” New England Quarterly 71 (1998),
378–403.
19. These reflections on the meaning of colonial in American history were inspired by Michael
Warner’s essay “What’s Colonial About Colonial America,” in Possible Pasts: Becoming Colo-
nial in Early America, ed. Robert Blair St. George (Ithaca, N.Y., 2000), 49–70. The literature
on post-colonialism is huge. For comparative purposes, one might start with Leela Gandhi,
Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction (New York, 1998), and Howard J. Booth and
Nigel Rigby, eds., Modernism and Empire (Manchester, Eng., 2000).
20. One historian recently rejected the notion that the American colonists were ever colonized,
thus effectively dismissing comparisons between twentieth-century liberation movements
against European imperialism and popular mobilization on the eve of American indepen-
dence. See David Armitage, “The Declaration of Independence and International Law,” Wil-
liam and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 59 (2002), 64.
21. Samuel Adams to Arthur Lee, 31 October 1771, in The Writings of Samuel Adams, ed. Harry
Alonzo Cushing, 4 vols. (New York, 1904–8), II, 267.
22. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley, 3 vols. (New York, 1978), I,
103. The relevance of Foucault’s insight to my analysis was suggested by Ann Laura Stoler,
“Tense and Tender Ties: The Politics of Comparison in North American History and (Post)
Colonial Studies,” Journal of American History 88 (2001), 831.
23. Fred Anderson, Crucible of War: The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire in British North
America, 1754–1766 (New York, 2000), 588.
24. See Chapter 1 for the peculiar history of this colonial conceit.
25. See William Pencak, War, Politics, and Revolution in Provincial Massachusetts (Boston, 1981),
149–58.
26. Cited in T. S. Ashton, Economic Fluctuations in England, 1700–1800 (Oxford, 1959), 127.
27. The best discussion of the general economic crisis remains Charles M. Andrews, “The Bos-
ton Merchants and the Non-importation Movement,” Colonial Society of Massachusetts
Publications 19 (1916–17), 159–259.
28. Good accounts of the economic slump can be found in Gary B. Nash, The Urban Crucible:
Social Change, Political Consciousness, and the Origins of the American Revolution (Cam-
bridge, Mass., 1979), 246–63; and Anderson, Crucible of War, 588–89. A new culture of debt is
explored in T. H. Breen, Tobacco Culture: The Mentality of the Great Tidewater Planters on
the Eve of Revolution (Princeton, N.J., 1985).
29. J. Hall Pleasants, ed., “Proceedings and Acts of the General Assembly of Maryland 1764–
1765,” Maryland Historical Society Archives 59 (1942), 207–8.
30. Boston Evening-Post, 4 February 1765, reprinting article from the Providence Gazette, 21 January
1765.
360 n n ote s to pag e s 205– 214
31. [Oxenbridge Thacher], The Sentiments of a British American (Boston, 1764), 13.
32. [Thomas Fitch], Reasons Why the British Colonies in America, Should Not Be Charged with
Internal Taxes (New Haven, Conn., 1764), 21–22.
Hill, N.C., 1985), 354–55.
34. A good example of this rhetoric can be found in the Newport Mercury, 24 September 1764.
35. New-Hampshire Gazette, 14 September 1764, taken from Pennsylvania Journal, 23 August
1764.
37. My thinking on the hermeneutic aspects of the consumer marketplace owes much to Albert
O. Hirschman’s Shifting Involvements: Private and Public Actions (Princeton, N.J., 1982), 5–6.
39. Ibid., 16 July 1754. For the context of this statement, see Paul S. Boyer, “Borrowed Rhetoric:
The Massachusetts Excise Controversy of 1754,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 21 (1964),
328–51.
40. New Hampshire Gazette, 14 September 1764, taken from Pennsylvania Journal, 23 August
1764. Also Andrews, “The Boston Merchants,” 191.
41. See Chapter 5 for a discussion of class and consumer choice.
42. Boston Evening-Post, 9 November 1767. Edmund S. Morgan develops a similar argument
about the relationship between consumer virtue and the common good in “The Puritan
Ethic and the American Revolution,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 24 (1967), 3–43.
43. Pennsylvania Chronicle, 28 December 1767.
44. In his “Virtues of Liberalism: Christianity, Republicanism, and Ethics in Early American
Political Discourse,” Journal of American History 74 (1987), 9–33, James T. Kloppenberg pro-
vides a thoughtful summary of the various positions in this ongoing debate over the char-
acter of revolutionary ideas.
45. See Patricia U. Bonomi, Under the Cope of Heaven: Religion, Society, and Politics in Colonial
America (New York, 1986), chs. 4 and 7.
46. The main contributions to what has been labeled the “republican synthesis” are J.G.A. Pocock,
“The Mobility of Property and the Rise of Eighteenth-Century Sociology,” in his Virtue,
Commerce, and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth
Century (Cambridge, 1985), 103–23; Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political
Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, N.J., 1975); Bernard Bailyn, Ideo-
logical Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1967); and Gordon S. Wood,
The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1969). For a general
critique of this literature, see T. H. Breen, The Lockean Moment: The Language of Rights on
the Eve of the American Revolution (Oxford, 2001).
47. Steve Pincus raises some of the same points about liberal virtue in “Neither Machiavellian
Moment nor Possessive Individualism: Commercial Society and the Defenders of the En-
glish Commonwealth,” American Historical Review 103 (1998), 705–36.
48. Daniel Dulany, Considerations on the Propriety of Imposing Taxes in the British Colonies (An-
napolis, Md., 1765), 45. A valuable sketch of Dulany’s public life can be found in Edmund
and Helen Morgan, The Stamp Act Crisis, ch. 6.
49. H. J. in the New-Hampshire Gazette, 15 February 1765.
50. See Chapter 5.
51. Dulany, Considerations on the Propriety of Imposing Taxes (1765), in Bailyn, ed., Pamphlets, I,
648–49.
52. Pennsylvania Journal, 28 June 1764, reprinted in Newport Mercury, 16 July 1764.
54. Boston Evening-Post, 8 October 1764.
55. New-York Mercury, 30 December 1765.
56. Dulany, Considerations, 649.
57. Newport Mercury, 17 September 1764.
58. Boston Evening-Post, 23 November 1767.
59. “An Act to Retrench the Extraordinary Expense at Funerals,” reprinted in Acts and Resolves
Passed by the General Court of Massachusetts, 72 vols. (Boston, 1920–), II, 1086.
n o t e s t o p a g e s 214– 223 N 361
62. New-Hampshire Gazette, 19 October 1764.

65. Ibid., 24 September 1764; also see Boston Gazette, 14 December 1767.
67. Ibid., 21 January 1765.
69. Ibid.
70. Boston Evening-Post, 4 February 1765
71. Ibid., 29 October 1764.
72. Ibid. Peter Oliver, a Tory placeholder in Massachusetts, wrote an acerbic account of the
rising discontent in the Bay Colony, and among other things he accused the people of Bos-
ton of gross hypocrisy in their insistence on frugal funerals. Oliver claimed that however
principled the rhetoric of retrenchment may have sounded, the colonists used these occa-
sions to show off their most recent and expensive purchases. “Under Pretence of Œconomy,”
Oliver reported, “the Faction undertook to regulate Funerals, that there might be less De-
mand for English Manufactures. . . . But what at another Time would have been deemed
œconomical, was at this Time Spite & Malevolence. One Extreme was exchanged for an-
other. A Funeral now seemed more like a Procession to a May Fair; and Processions were
lengthened, especially by the Ladies, who figured a way, in order to exhibit their Share of
Spite, & their Silk Gowns. In short, it was unhumanizing the Mind, by destroying the So-
lemnity of a funeral Obsequy, & substituting the Gaiety of Parade in its Stead.” (Douglass
Adair and John A. Schutz, eds., Peter Oliver’s Origin and Progress of the American Revolution:
A Tory View [San Marino, Calif., 1961], 62). Robert A. Gross suggests that in the case of
Concord, Oliver may have been correct. (See his The Minutemen and Their World [New
York, 1976], 33). In a Boston newspaper devoted to the “new mode” of funerals, we note the
following advertisement: “Bonnets and crapes for gentlemen in the ‘genteelest Manner’ can
be obtained from Ame & Elizabeth Cummings” (Boston Evening-Post, 24 September 1764).
73. Connecticut Courant, 29 October 1764, and Pennsylvania Gazette cited in Labaree, ed., Papers
of Benjamin Franklin, XII, 240.
74. New-Hampshire Gazette, 19 October 1764.
76. [Thacher], Sentiments of a British American, 14–15.
77. See Chapter 3 for a full discussion of the importance of colonial consumers for general
British prosperity.
78. [Anonymous], The Power and Grandeur of Great-Britain, Founded on the Liberty of the Colo-
nies (New York, 1768), 23.
79. Cited in Gordon S. Wood, The American Revolution: A History (New York, 2002), 24.
80. John Hancock Papers, Baker Library, Harvard Business School, Letter Book 1762–83, Hancock
to Barnard & Harrison, 14 October 1765.
81. Reprinted in Ellis Sandoz, ed., Political Sermons of the American Founding Era, 1730–1805
(Indianapolis, Ind., 1991), 247.
82. Jeremy Belknap, The History of New-Hampshire, 3 vols. (Dover, N.H., 1812), II, 250.
83. For a full account of these events, see Morgan and Morgan, Stamp Act Crisis.
84. Boston Evening-Post, 2 September 1765.
85. A Discourse, Addressed to the Sons of Liberty, at a Solemn Assembly, near the Liberty-Tree, in
Boston, February 14, 1766 (Providence, R.I., 1766), 7–8.
86. [Benjamin Church], Liberty and Property Vindicated, and the St— — pm— — n Burnt (Bos-
ton, 1765), 11–12.
87. The essay can be found in Herbert John Davis and Louis A. Landa, eds., Jonathan Swift: Irish
Tracts, 1720–1723 (Oxford, 1963), 16.
89. See, for example, Peter Clark, British Clubs and Societies 1580–1800: The Origins of an Asso-
ciational World (Oxford, 2000), 389–404; David S. Shields, Civil Tongues and Political Letters
in British America (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1997); and Benjamin L. Carp, “Fire of Liberty:
Firefighters, Urban Voluntary Culture, and the Revolutionary Movement,” William and Mary
Quarterly, 3d ser., 58 (2001), 781–818.
362 n n ote s to pag e s 223– 231
90. Andrews, “The Boston Merchants,” 159–259; Merrill Jensen, The Founding of a Nation: A
History of the American Revolution, 1763–1776 (New York, 1968), 129–30; Morgan and Mor-
gan, Stamp Act Crisis, 264; Pauline Maier, From Resistance to Revolution: Colonial Radicals
and the Development of American Opposition to Britain, 1765–1776 (New York, 1972), 74; and
Joseph S. Tiedemann, Reluctant Revolutionaries: New York City and the Road to Indepen-
dence,1763–1776 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1997), 69–71. Also New-York Mercury, 28 October 1765.
93. See, for example, John Chew’s letter to Samuel Galloway (7 November 1765), cited in Ronald
Hoffman, A Spirit of Dissension: Economics, Politics, and the Revolution in Maryland (Balti-
more, 1973), 37.
96. [Silas Downer] A Son of Liberty, A Discourse, Delivered in Providence . . . at the Dedication of
the Tree of Liberty (Providence, R.I., 1768), 14–15.
97. See Thomas, British Politics and the Stamp Act Crisis.
98. Pennsylvania Chronicle, 28 December 1767. For the moral content of this discourse see Mor-
gan, “Puritan Ethic and the American Revolution.”
99. Pennsylvania Gazette, 9 January 1766.
100. New-London Gazette, 27 November 1767.
101. New-Hampshire Gazette, 10 August 1764, originally published in the Pennsylvania Journal,
28 June 1764.
102. For the history of this discourse, see Chapter 3.
104. Pennsylvania Journal and Weekly Advertiser, 2 January 1766 (Supplement).
105. [John Dickinson], The Late Regulations . . . Considered in a Letter from a Gentleman in Phila-
delphia to His Friend in London (1765), reprinted in Bailyn, ed., Pamphlets of the Revolution,
I, 687.
109. New-York Mercury, 16 December 1765; Boston Gazette, 1 October 1764.
110. Connecticut Journal, and New-Haven Post-Boy, 25 December 1767.
112. See, for example, Pennsylvania Gazette, 26 December 1765. The journals played a similar role
in spreading political news, and as Edmund S. and Helen Morgan have demonstrated, er-
roneous reports about radical resolves allegedly passed by the Virginia House of Burgesses
spread throughout colonial America, persuading leaders in other colonies to phrase their
grievances more aggressively than they might have done had the news out of Virginia been
more accurate (Stamp Act Crisis, 92–107).
113. See Arthur M. Schlesinger, “Colonial Newspapers and the Stamp Act,” New England Quar-
terly 8 (1935), 63–83.
114. Pennsylvania Journal and Weekly Advertiser, 10 April 1766 (Supplement).
115. On the concept of a “public” as it developed during the eighteenth century, see Jürgen
Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of
Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, Mass., 1989); and Craig Calhoun, ed.,
Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge, Mass., 1992).
116. Jan de Vries, “Between Purchasing Power and the World of Goods: Understanding the House-
hold Economy in Early Modern Europe,” in Brewer and Porter, eds., Consumption and the
World of Goods, 119. A thoughtful discussion of women and revolutionary politics can be
found in Linda K. Kerber, Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary
America (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1980), 15–67.
119. Pennsylvania Journal, 23 August 1764.
120. New-Hampshire Gazette, 15 February 1765.
n o t e s t o p a g e s 232– 240 N 363
122. Boston Gazette, 7 April 1766 (Supplement), and Connecticut Courant, 7 April 1766. Also see
Andrews, “The Boston Merchant,” 193–94; Alfred F. Young, “The Women of Boston: ‘Per-
sons of Consequence’ in the Making of the American Revolution,” in Women and Politics in
the Age of Democratic Revolution, ed. Harriet B. Applewhite and Darline G. Levy (Ann Ar-
bor, Mich., 1990), 181–226; and Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, “‘ Daughters of Liberty’: Religious
Women in Revolutionary New England,” in Women in the Age of the American Revolution,
ed. Ronald Hoffman and Peter J. Albert (Charlottesville, Va., 1989), 211–43.
123. New-York Mercury, 30 December 1765.
124. Boston Gazette, 6 January 1766. On the debate over female patriotism, see Kerber, Women of
the Republic, 35–45.
125. Jonathan Mayhew, The Snare Broken: A Thanksgiving Discourse (1766), reprinted in Sandoz,
ed., Political Sermons, 248.
126. Originally published in New-York Mercury and rerun in Boston Evening-Post, 4 February
1765.
Chapter 7
1. New London Gazette, 15 April 1768.

2. A Report of the Record Commissioners of the City of Boston Containing the Boston Town Records,
1758–1769 (Boston, 1886), 220–21; Boston Evening-Post, 2 November 1767. Also see Merrill
Jensen, The Founding of a Nation: A History of the American Revolution, 1763–1776 (New
York, 1968), 268–70.
3. Boston Gazette, 19 February 1770.
4. South-Carolina Gazette, 22 June 1769; South-Carolina Gazette and Country Journal, 25 July
1769.
5. Maryland Gazette, 29 July 1769.
6. Virginia Gazette [Purdie and Dixon], 25 May 1769.
7. Ellen D. Larned, History of Windham County, Connecticut, 2 vols. (Worcester, Mass., 1874–
80), II, 115–17; New-London Gazette, 25 December 1767. Also see Charles M. Andrews, “The
Boston Merchants and the Non-Importation Movement,” Colonial Society of Massachu-
setts, Transactions (1916–17), 191–92.
8. Silas Deane Papers, 1753–1842: Correspondence 1761–76, Box I, Folder 2, in the Connecticut
Historical Society, Hartford, Conn.
9. Connecticut Journal, and New-Haven Post-Boy, 6 January 1769.
10. New-York Journal; or, General Advertiser, 1 June 1769, originally published in Virginia Ga-
zette, 11 May 1769.
11. [Silas Downer?], A Discourse . . . at the Dedication of the Tree of Liberty by a Son of Liberty
(Providence, R.I., 1768), 14.
12. The most detailed account of the Townshend Program is Peter D. G. Thomas, The Townshend
Duties Crisis: The Second Phase of the American Revolution, 1767–1773 (Oxford, 1987). One
should also see Jensen, Founding of a Nation, ch. 8.
13. Historians now reject an older interpretation of American resistance which argued that the
colonists regularly redefined the principles that underlaid their political protest. Edmund S.
Morgan has persuasively demonstrated that from the very beginning of the imperial con-
troversy Americans rejected as fatuous distinctions between “internal” and “external’ taxes.
They rightly concluded that taxation without representation was unacceptable whatever
the form it took. A good review of this debate can be found in Morgan, The Birth of the
Republic, 1763–1789, 3d ed. (Chicago, 1992).
14. Paul Leicester Ford, ed., The Writings of John Dickinson, Vol. 1: Political Writings, 1764–1774
(Philadelphia, 1895), 355.
15. Many years ago historian Gordon Wood drew attention to the oddly hyperbolic character
of public rhetoric during this period. His analysis of the colonists’ excessive language can be
found in “Rhetoric and Reality in the American Revolution,” William and Mary Quarterly,
3d ser., 23 (1966), 3–32, and although my response to Wood’s interpretive challenge is not
one that he himself has favored, I acknowledge a great intellectual debt to his original for-
mulation of the problem. See also Wood, “Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style: Causality and
Deceit in the Eighteenth Century,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 39 (1982), 401–41.
16. Connecticut Courant, 7 December 1767, reprinted from Providence Gazette, 14 November
1767. Ironically, General Thomas Gage, who had no sympathy for the calls for non-importa-
tion which appeared in the provincial newspapers, assured a member of the current cabinet
that the colonists would never succeed, for “they must take them [imported manufactures]
from Britain, or go naked.” Had such a letter become public knowledge in the colonies, it
would have persuaded many Americans that there was in fact a conspiracy in the market-
place. See Gage to Lord Barington, 10 March 1768, in The Correspondence of General Thomas
Gage . . . , ed. Clarence Edwin Carter, 5 vols. (New Haven, Conn., 1931–), II, 450.
17. South-Carolina Gazette, 1 June 1769.
18. New-London Gazette, 15 April 1768.
20. Boston Gazette, 31 August 1767.
21. See Chapter 3 for a fuller discussion of the origins of this interpretation of colonial com-
merce.
22. South-Carolina Gazette, 26 October 1769.
23. Providence Gazette, 14 November 1767.
24. New-York Journal; or, General Advertiser, 23 November 1769.
25. Connecticut Courant, 7 December 1767. Also see South-Carolina Gazette, 30 November 1769,
and “Amicus’s” assertion, “I can prove almost all goods imported from home [England],
may be made full as cheap, and many much cheaper than can be made in England,” in the
Massachusetts Spy, 27 October 1770.
26. South-Carolina Gazette, 8 December 1769 (Supplement).
27. Ibid., 26 October 1769.
28. New-York Journal; or, General Advertiser, 23 November 1769.
30. Virginia Gazette, 11 May 1769, as reprinted in New-York Journal; or, General Advertiser, 1 June
1769.
32. South-Carolina Gazette, 26 October 1769. Also Arthur L. Jensen, The Maritime Commerce of
Colonial Philadelphia (Madison, Wisc., 1963), 183–84.
33. Historian Merrill Jensen argues persuasively, against an older historiography, that “it is my
view that the evidence demonstrates that the non-importation movement was actually be-
gun by the popular leaders who forced or persuaded merchants to take part in it by threats
of non-consumption, and even of physical violence” (Founding, 265). On this point, I do
not disagree. What must be explained, it seems to me, is why the so-called popular leaders
insisted that the merchants organize the boycott, when it was so clear that the merchants
resisted the idea and were prepared to resume trade with Great Britain as soon as they had
an opportunity.
34. Cited in Jensen, Founding, 270. For a fine account of the maneuvering among northern
merchants, see 265–87; and Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr., Colonial Merchants and the American
Revolution (New York, 1918), 106–31.
35. The exchange between Mason and Washington can be found in Robert A. Rutland, ed., The
Papers of George Mason, 1749–1778, 3 vols. (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1970), I, 96–100.
36. Maryland Gazette, 11 May 1769.
37. See Chapter 4 for a full description of merchandising in the southern colonies.
39. Rutland, ed., Papers of George Mason, I, 98.
41. Silas Deane Papers, 1753–1842: Correspondence 1761–76, Connecticut Historical Society, Box
I, Folder 2, “A Committee of Merchants at Boston to Mr. Silas Deane and others of the
Committee of Merchants at Wethersfield,” 15 February 1770.
42. See Richard Buel Jr., “Freedom of the Press,” in The Press and the American Revolution, ed.
Bernard Bailyn and John Hench (Worcester, Mass., 1980), 27.
43. New-London Gazette, 20 January 1769.
44. “To the PRINTER of the LONDON CRONICLE: ‘The Rise and Present State of Our Misun-
derstanding,’ ” reprinted in The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, ed. Leonard W. Labaree, 35
vols. (New Haven, Conn., 1959–), XVII, 272.
n o t e s t o p a g e s 248– 255 N 365
45. The author acknowledges a debt to Michael Warner for helping him appreciate how the so-
called public sphere, which transformed the character of political discourse in ancien régime
France, Germany, and Great Britain in the late eighteenth century, took on a peculiar com-
mercial character in the American colonies. The literature on the public sphere is large. One
should start with Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An
Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, Mass., 1989),
and Craig Calhoun, ed., Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge, Mass., 1992). Also
helpful is Michael Warner, The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in
Eighteenth-Century America (Cambridge, Mass., 1990).
46. To the PUBLIC . . . (New York, 1770), a broadside dated 8 March 1770.
47. The statement appeared in South-Carolina Gazette; and Country Journal, 13 November 1770.
48. See Edmund S. Morgan, Inventing the People: The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and
America (New York, 1988).
49. My debt here to Benedict Anderson is obvious. His Imagined Communities: Reflections on
the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London, 1983) reshaped how a generation of histori-
ans understands the relation between commercial print culture and new forms of political
identity such as nationalism which appeared throughout the Euro-American world during
the late eighteenth century. See also T. H. Breen, “A Framework for Interpreting Nationalism:
Patriotism and Political Ideology During the Age of the American Revolution,” paper pre-
sented at Nationalism in the New World, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tenn., Oct. 9, 2003.
50. E. B. O’Callaghan, ed., Documents Relative to the Colonial History of the State of New-York . . . ,
12 vols.. (Albany, N.Y., 1857), VIII, 68.
52. Connecticut Journal: and New-Haven Post-Boy, 25 December 1767, copied from a New York
journal.
53. New-London Gazette, 25 May 1770 (“The Poet’s Corner”).
54. New-York Journal; or, General Advertiser, 21 June 1770. Also see Buel, “Freedom of the Press,”
and Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr., “Politics, Propaganda, and the Philadelphia Press, 1767–1770,”
Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 60 (1936), 309–22.
55. See Andrews, “The Boston Merchants,” 191–92. It was a rare colonial newspaper that did not
carry news of the success or failure of the non-importation effort in other cities. A few examples
of this spreading interest and increased borrowing of material are Boston Gazette, 9 and 23
November 1767; Boston Chronicle, 10 July 1769; and Massachusetts Spy, 29 September 1770.
56. Moore to the earl of Hillsborough, 3 June 1769, in O’Callaghan, ed., Documents Relative to . . .
New York, VIII, 171.
57. Silas Deane Papers, 1753–1842: Correspondence 1761–76, Box I, Folder 2, Connecticut His-
torical Society.
58. “To the Gentlemen Select Men of Leicester, Massachusetts, 25 December 1769,” Revolution
Collection, Box I, Folder 3: 1754–1773, American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Mass.;
[Anonymous], At a Town-Meeting Called by Order of the Town-Council (Newport, R.I., 1767);
Pennsylvania Gazette, 31 May 1770; “John Neufville, Chairman, General Committee to the
Sons of Liberty in North Carolina (25 April 1770),” in Colonial Records of North Carolina, ed.
William J. Saunders, 9 vols. (Raleigh, N.C., 1890), VIII, 197–98; South-Carolina Gazette, 9
August 1770; “The New-Castle [Delaware] County COMPACT,” ibid., 12 October 1769; “At a
Meeting of the Principal Merchants and Traders of the Colony of Connecticut,” broadside,
Connecticut Historical Society.
60. New-York Mercury, 29 May 1769.
61. Saunders, ed., Colonial Records of North Carolina, VIII, 198.
62. “At a Meeting of the FREEHOLDERS, MERCHANTS, and TRADERS of the county of Essex,
at Elizabeth-Town,” published in South-Carolina Gazette, 28 June 1770.
63. Ibid., 9 November 1769.
64. Town records quoted in Larned, History of Windham County, II, 119.
66. Published in Massachusetts Spy, 16 August 1770.
67. Report found in ibid., 29 November 1770.
68. Boston Post-Boy and Advertiser, 15 May 1769.
69. Carter, ed., Correspondence of General Gage, II, 530.
70. [Anonymous], To the Public . . . (Philadelphia, 1770).

71. “A Letter from a Gentleman in Virginia,” New-London Gazette, 3 August 1770.
72. Boston, 1768. When John Mein, a feisty Boston merchant who refused to sign the non-
importation agreement, started publishing his own newspaper, called the Boston Chronicle,
in which he listed by name patriot leaders who he said had cheated on the boycott, the
accused declared that such a man had no right to speak for the public in these matters.
Francis Green, for example, asked, “Who gave this Mushroom Judge, Authority, to summon
even a Chimney-Sweeper to his ridiculous Tribunal? Or wantonly, presumptuously, and
very fallaciously to assume the respectable Title of The Public, in his romantic and indecent
Addresses to an affronted Community?” (Boston Gazette, 25 September 1769).
73. Morgan and Morgan, Stamp Act Crisis, ch. 4.
74. 7 June 1770, in Rutland, ed., Papers of George Mason, I, 116–17.
75. Boston Gazette, 5 February 1770.
76. Massachusetts Spy, 22 November 1770.
77. New York, 20 July 1769.
78. Boston Gazette, 19 February 1770. The South-Carolina Gazette, 15 February 1770, carried an
article from the Massachusetts Gazette which claimed that Taylor had fooled the Boston
“Committee of Inspection “ and gained entrance to the public warehouse “by means of a
false key.” On the fire clubs of Boston see Benjamin L. Carp, “Fire of Liberty: Firefighters,
Urban Voluntary Culture, and the Revolutionary Movement,” William and Mary Quarterly,
3d ser., 58 (2001), 781–818.
79. Quoted in South-Carolina Gazette, 15 February 1770. Also see New-London Gazette, 24 August
1770; Boston Gazette, 12 February 1770; and Boston Post-Boy and Advertiser, 13 August 1770.
80. New-York Journal; or, General Advertiser, 9 August 1770.
81. A Report of the Boston Town Records, 297–98.
82. South-Carolina Gazette, 9 August 1770.
83. Ibid., 14 September 1769.
84. [Anonymous], To the PUBLICK . . . (New York, 1769).
85. Carter, ed., Correspondence of General Gage, II, 526.
86. Broadside, Philadelphia, 1770. Also see Boston Gazette, 29 January 1770.
87. New-London Gazette, 15 June 1770.
88. The story was reprinted in South-Carolina Gazette, 12 July 1770. See Benjamin H. Irvin, “Tar,
Feathers, and the Enemies of American Liberties, 1768–1776,” New England Quarterly 74
(2003), 197–229.
89. J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Re-
publican Tradition (Princeton, N.J., 1975); Pocock, “Virtue and Commerce in the Eighteenth
Century,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 3 (1972–73), 119–34; Bernard Bailyn, The Ideo-
logical Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1967); Gordon S. Wood, The
Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1969); and James T.
Kloppenberg, “The Virtues of Liberalism: Christianity, Republicanism, and Ethics in Early
American Political Discourse,” Journal of American History 74 (1987), 9–33. For a critical
assessment of this interpretive tradition, see Daniel Rodgers, “Republicanism: The Career
of a Concept,” Journal of American History 79 (1992), 11–38.
90. Edmund S. Morgan, “The Puritan Ethic and the American Revolution,” William and Mary
Quarterly, 3d ser., 24 (1967), 3–43; Patricia Bonomi, Under the Cope of Heaven: Religion, So-
ciety, and Politics in Colonial America (New York, 1986); and Nathan O. Hatch, The Sacred
Cause of Liberty: Republican Thought and the Millennium in Revolutionary New England
(New Haven, Conn., 1977).
91. T. A. Horne, “Bourgeois Virtue, Property, and Moral Philosophy in America, 1750–1800,”
History of Political Thought 4 (1983), 317–40. Also see Jeffrey C. Isaac, “Republicanism Vs.
Liberalism? A Reconsideration,” ibid. 11 (1988), 349–77; Isaac Kramnick, Republicanism and
Bourgeois Radicalism: Political Ideology in Late Eighteenth-Century England and America
(Ithaca, N.Y., 1990), 260–88; and Colin Jones, “Bourgeois Revolution Revivified: 1789 and
Social Change,” in Rewriting the French Revolution, ed. Colin Lucas (Oxford, 1991), 78–96.
93. New-York Mercury, 24 September 1770.
94. Ibid., 6 August 1770. See also New-London Gazette, 2 November 1770.
95. Boston Evening-Post, 7 December 1767.
n o t e s t o p a g e s 265– 280 N 367
96. Connecticut Journal, 11 October 1771.

97. Boston Gazette, 11 September 1769.
98. Virginia Gazette, 9 November 1769, Supplement [Purdie and Dixon].
99. “A Letter from a Gentleman in Virginia,” New-London Gazette, 3 August 1770.
100. Newport Mercury, reprinted in Boston Gazette, 6 March 1769.
102. This argument is developed in Chapter 5.
104. Ibid., 26 March 1770.
105. Boston Evening-Post, 2 November 1767; Boston Gazette, 2 November 1767.
106. Ibid., 30 November 1767. For an insightful discussion of the radical implications of the gen-
eral subscription in Boston, see Gary Nash, The Urban Crucible: Social Change, Political
Consciousness, and the Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1979).
107. Boston Gazette, 9 and 23 November 1767; Boston Evening-Post, 23 November 1767; Newport
(R.I.) Mercury, 30 November and 7 December 1767; and [Anonymous], At a Town-Meeting
Called by Order of the Town-Council . . . (Newport, R.I., 1767).
108. On the royal governor, see John W. Tyler, Smugglers and Patriots: Boston Merchants and the
Advent of the American Revolution (Boston, 1986), 112; Douglass Adair and John A. Schutz,
eds., Peter Oliver’s Origin and Progress of the American Rebellion: A Tory View (San Marino,
Calif., 1961), 61; Boston Evening-Post, 23 November 1767.
109. On a proposal to prepare a subscription list, see Connecticut Journal, and New-Haven Post-
Boy, 21 December 1767.
110. New-London Gazette, 24 August 1770; New-York Mercury, 10 September 1770.
111. New-London Gazette, 7 September 1770.
112. Ibid., 24 August and 7, 21, 28 September 1770; New-York Journal; or, General Advertiser, 20
September 1770; Connecticut Courant, 17 September 1770; and Christopher P. Bickford,
Farmington in Connecticut (Canaan, N.H., 1988), 141.
113. Connecticut Courant, 29 January 1770.
114. Ibid., 19 February 1770.
115. Maryland Gazette, 11 May, 15 and 29 June 1769.
116. See Jensen, Founding of a Nation, for a detailed account of these negotiations, 306–12.
118. Ibid.
119. Ibid., 16 November 1769.
120. Ibid., 21 September 1769. Also see Robert Wier’s introduction to The Letters of Freeman, Etc.:
Essays on the Nonimportation Movement in South Carolina, ed. Robert M. Wier (Columbia,
S.C., 1977).
122. The following six paragraphs originally appeared in T. H. Breen, “Narrative of Commercial
Life: Consumption, Ideology, and Community on the Eve of the American Revolution,”
William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 50 (1993), 491–94.
123. Pennsylvania Chronicle, 4 June 1770.
124. New-York Mercury, 6 August 1770. See also New-York Journal; or, General Advertiser, 2 August
1770.
125. South-Carolina Gazette, 20 August 1770 (Supplement).
126. New-York Journal; or, General Advertiser, 21 June 1770.
127. Ibid.
128. Ibid., 27 September 1770; New-York Mercury, 23 July 1770; New-London Gazette, 20 July 1770.
129. “A Trader that will not Import,” Connecticut Courant, 10 September 1770.
130. Jensen, Founding of a Nation, 306.
131. Pennsylvania Chronicle, 4 June 1770.
132. Nancy F. Cott, “What’s in a Name? The Limits of ‘Social Feminism’; or, Expanding the Vo-
cabulary of Women’s History,” Journal of American History 76 (1989), 809–29. Also see Mary
Beth Norton, Liberty’s Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750–
1800 (Boston, 1980).
133. Boston Gazette, 2 November 1767; reprinted in New-London Gazette, 6 November 1767.
135. Richard Walsh, ed., The Writings of Christopher Gadsden (Columbia, S.C., 1966), 83. See
Linda K. Kerber, Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America
(Chapel Hill, N.C., 1980), 7–12, 35–45.
136. New-London Gazette, 9 June 1769. Also see [Anonymous], The Female Patriot, No. 1. Ad-
dressed to the Tea-Drinking Ladies of New-York (New York, 1770).
137. New-York Journal; or, General Advertiser, 29 June 1769; also see the much reprinted story of
the middle-class husband nearly run into bankruptcy by his spendthrift wife. One day, when
she was out visiting friends, he sold all her “fashionable” possessions to pay off his debts
(Boston Gazette, 30 March 1767).
138. New-London Gazette, 10 February 1769.
140. Ibid.; and [Anonymous], A Verse, Occasioned by Seeing the North-spinning, in Boton [sic]
(Boston, 1769).
141. Connecticut Journal, and New-Haven Post-Boy, 8 April 1768.
142. South-Carolina Gazette, 13 July 1769.
143. Pennsylvania Chronicle, and Universal Advertiser, 20 August 1770.
144. See the discussion of women and non-importation in Chapter 6.
145. South-Carolina Gazette, 20 July 1769.
147. Boston Gazette, 28 December 1767 (Supplement).
149. Newport Mercury, 7 December 1767; reprinted in Boston Evening-Post, 28 December 1767.
150. Massachusetts Spy, 14 March 1771.
151. South-Carolina Gazette, 5 October 1769. “Cleora” in the Pennsylvania Chronicle, and Univer-
sal Advertiser accused males of a political double standard. “You think you may indulge
yourselves with impunity, in such instances of indiscretion, avarice, and ambition, which in
women you take liberty to censure with freedom and severity.” But, as Cleora warned, women
possessed an unerring “faculty” to spot true virtue (7 January 1771).
153. Boston Gazette, 5, 12, 19, 26 February 1770.
154. See T. H. Breen, The Lockean Moment: The Language of Rights on the Eve of the American
Revolution (Oxford, 2001), and see Kerber, Women of the Republic.
155. New-York Journal; or, General Advertiser, 25 October 1770 [“Poet’s Corner”].
156. New-York Journal; or, General Advertiser, 9 August 1770; originally published in Boston Ga-
zette, 23 July 1770.
157. “A Tradesman,” To the Tradesmen, Farmers, and Other Inhabitants . . . (Philadelphia, 1770).
158. New-London Gazette, 5 October 1770, reprinted from a New York journal, 9 September 1770.
159. Report published in Massachusetts Spy, 31 December 1770.
160. Connecticut Journal, and New-Haven Post-Boy, 8 May 1772.
161. Boston Evening-Post, 23 July 1770.
162. [Anonymous], To the Freeholders, Merchants, Tradesmen and Farmers of the City and County
of Philadelphia . . . (Philadelphia, 1770), broadside. Also, [Anonymous], To the Inhabitants of
the City and County of Philadelphia . . . (Philadelphia, 1770), broadside.
163. New-London Gazette, 2 November 1770.
164. Boston Gazette, 11 September 1769.
Chapter 8
1. William Lincoln, ed., The Journals of Each Provincial Congress of Massachusetts in 1774 and
1775, and of the Committee of Safety (Boston, 1838), 26. The quotations describing Withington
and his adventure come from Massachusetts Spy, 6 and 13 January 1774.
2. Anne Rowe Cunningham, ed., Letters and Diary of John Rowe, Boston Merchant, 1759–1762,
1764–1779 (Boston, 1903), 259.
3. John W. Shy, A People Numerous and Armed: Reflections on the Military Struggle for Ameri-
can Independence (New York, 1976), 216–22.
4. Susan Stein, The Worlds of Thomas Jefferson at Monticello (New York, 1993).
n o t e s t o p a g e s 297– 310 N 369
5. To Archibald Cary and Benjamin Harrison, 9 December 1774, in The Papers of Thomas
Jefferson, ed. Julian Boyd et al., 29 vols. (Princeton, N.J., 1950–), I, 154–55.
6. “A Friend to Port-Bills,” Connecticut Gazette, 29 July 1774.
7. Peter Force, ed., American Archives . . . , 4th ser., 9 vols. (Washington, D.C., 1837–53), I, 447.
8. Henry S. Nourse, History of the Town of Harvard, Massachusetts, 1732–1893 (Harvard, Mass.,
1894), 308.
9. Cited in Peter D. G. Thomas, Lord North (New York, 1976), 74.
10. Boston Gazette, 8 November 1773, taken from Pennsylvania Packet.
11. [Anonymous], The Association of the Sons of Liberty . . . November 29, 1773 (New York, 1773).
12. New-York Journal; or, General Advertiser, 2 and 9 December 1773.
13. Merrill Jensen, The Founding of a Nation: A History of the American Revolution, 1763–1776
(New York, 1968), 440–52.
14. Massachusetts Gazette and Boston Post-Boy, 6 December 1773.
15. Cited in Thomas, Lord North, 76.
17. See Chapter 1.
19. Force, ed., American Archives, I, 453.
20. Ibid., 540.
21. Ibid., 403. For Charleston, South Carolina, see New-York Journal; or, General Advertiser, 4
August 1774.
22. Francis S. Drake, ed., Tea Leaves: Being a Collection of Letters and Documents Relating to the
Shipment of Tea to the American Colonies in the Year 1773 (Boston,1884), 200. Lois Green
Carr, “Diversification in the Colonial Chesapeake: Somerset County, Maryland, in Com-
parative Perspective,” in Colonial Chesapeake Society, ed. Lois Green Carr, Philip D. Morgan,
and Jean B. Russo (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1988), 379.
23. [Philip Livingston], The Other Side of the Question; or, A Defense of the Liberties of North-
America . . . (New York, 1774), 10.
24. South-Carolina Gazette; and Country Journal, 2 August 1774.
25. Pennsylvania Chronicle, and Universal Advertiser, 29 January 1770.
26. New-York Mercury, 6 August 1770. See Rodris Roth, Tea Drinking in Eighteenth-Century
America: Its Etiquette and Equipage (Washington, D.C., 1961), 66.
27. Massachusetts Spy, 6 January 1774.
28. [Anonymous], A Sermon on Tea (Lancaster, Pa., 1774), 6. Also see “Phileleutheros” in New-
York Journal; or, General Advertiser, 21 October 1773.
30. South-Carolina Gazette. 21 October 1773.
31. Massachusetts Spy, 23 December 1773. On claims that tea undermined public health, see Roy
Porter, “Consumption: Disease of the Consumer Society?” in Consumption and the World of
Goods, ed. John Brewer and Roy Porter (London, 1993), 58–81.
32. Massachusetts Spy, 27 January 1774, taken from the Pennsylvania Journal.
33. [Anonymous], Sermon on Tea, 4.
35. Massachusetts Spy, 23 December 1773.
36. Pennsylvania Journal and Weekly Advertiser, 20 October 1773.
38. South-Carolina Gazette, 19 September 1774.
39. Cited in Charles M. Andrews, “The Boston Merchants and the Non-Importation Move-
ment,” Colonial Society of Massachusetts Publications 19 (1916–17), 194.
42. Massachusetts Spy, 23 December 1773.
43. Connecticut Gazette [New London], 25 February 1774.
44. Massachusetts Spy, 6 January 1774; New-York Journal; or, General Advertiser, 23 December
1773. An invaluable guide to local Massachusetts politics during this period is Richard D.
Brown, Revolutionary Politics in Massachusetts: The Boston Committee of Correspondence
and the Towns, 1772–1774 (Cambridge, Mass., 1970).
370 n n ote s to pag e s 310– 326
45. Massachusetts Spy, 16 December 1773. The story also ran in New-York Journal; or, General
Advertiser, 23 December 1773.
47. Connecticut Courant, 13 March 1775.
48. Massachusetts Spy, 17 February 1774. Also see the odd case of a purchaser of tea who was
“way-laid . . . in the Wellfleet woods,” ibid., 10 February 1774.
49. Boston Gazette, 5 September 1774. Another case was reported in Lyme, Connecticut, Massa-
chusetts Spy, 31 March 1774.
50. Ibid., 28 July 1774.
51. Boston Evening-Post, 7 February 1774; also ibid., 5 September 1774 (Supplement).
52. Ibid., 21 March 1774.
53. See Brown, Revolutionary Politics in Massachusetts.
54. Adams to Warren, 27 July 1807, reprinted in Massachusetts Historical Society Collections, 5th
ser., 4 (1878), 354–55.
55. Massachusetts Spy, 31 March 1774.
57. Massachusetts Gazette and Boston Post-Boy, 29 November 1773.
58. Massachusetts Spy, 15 April 1774.
59. Ibid., 17 February 1774.
60. Massachusetts Gazette and Boston Post-Boy, 29 November 1773. For the debates and resolu-
tions of some other towns, see Massachusetts Spy, 6 January 1774 (Harvard); 13 January 1774
(Haverhill, New Hampshire); 27 January 1774 (Salem); 15 April 1774 (Westford).
61. John Adams to Abigail Adams, 6 July 1774, in Adams Family Correspondence, ed. L. H.
Butterfield, 6 vols. (Cambridge, Mass., 1963–93), I, 129–30.
63. Ibid., 447.
64. Pennsylvania Packet, 20 June 1774; reprinted in New-York Mercury, 27 June 1774.
65. Jensen, Founding of a Nation, 464–82.
66. Kate Mason Rowland, The Life of George Mason, 1725–1792¸ 2 vols. (New York, 1892), I, 148–
49.
67. Massachusetts Spy, 16 June 1774.
68. New-York Journal; or, General Advertiser, 14 July 1774.
69. Ibid.
70. William L. Saunders, ed., The Colonial Records of North Carolina, 10 vols. (Raleigh, N.C.,
1886–90), IX, 1026.
72. Massachusetts Spy, 25 August 1774. Also see “Lincoln, Massachusetts, 1774. Covenant Not to
Purchase Goods from Great Britain.” U.S. Revolution Collection, Box 1, Folder 4:1774, Ameri-
can Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Mass.
73. Douglass Adair and John A. Schutz, eds., Origin and Progress of the American Rebellion: A
Tory View (San Marino, Calif., 1961), 104. Also “A. Farmer” [Samuel Seabury], Free Thoughts,
on the Proceedings of the Continental Congress . . . (New York, 1774); and “A Philadelphian,”
New-York Mercury, 25 July 1774.
74. “A. Farmer” [Seabury], Free Thoughts, 14.
76. [Jonathan Boucher], A Letter from a Virginian . . . (Boston, 1774), 22.
77. Massachusetts Spy, 9 September 1773.
78. Ibid., 30 June 1774.
79. South-Carolina Gazette, 20 June 1774 (Supplement), from Boston Evening-Post, 23 May 1774.
Also see [Richard Wells], A Few Political Reflections . . . (Philadelphia, 1774); and Robert
Carter Nicholas, Considerations on the Present State of Virginia Examined . . . (Williamsburg,
1774).
80. Pennsylvania Packet, 20 June 1774.
81. William MacDonald, ed., Select Charters and Other Documents Illustrative of American His-
tory, 1606–1775 (New York, 1899), 363–64.
82. Two notable exceptions are David Ammerman, In the Common Cause: American Response to
the Coercive Acts of 1774 (Charlottesville, Va., 1974), 85, and Jensen, Founding of a Nation, 506.
83. MacDonald, ed., Select Charters, 366.
n o t e s t o p a g e s 326– 330 N 371
84. Cited in Thomas J. Wertenbaker, Give Me Liberty: The Struggle for Self-Government in Vir-
ginia (Philadelphia, 1958), 241.
85. “A. Farmer” [Seabury], Free Thoughts, 17–18.
86. The following four paragraphs originally appeared in slightly different form in T. H. Breen,
“‘ Baubles of Britain’: The American and Consumer Revolutions of the Eighteenth Cen-
tury,” Past and Present, no. 119 (1988), 73–104.
87. Henry Laurens to John Petrie, 7 September 1774, in The Papers of Henry Laurens, ed. George
C. Rogers Jr., 10 vols. (Columbia, S.C., 1981), IX, 552.
88. J. G. Marston, King and Congress: The Transfer of Political Legitimacy, 1774–1776 (Princeton,
N.J., 1987), 124.
89. James Madison to William Bradford, 20 January 1775, in The Papers of James Madison, ed. W.
T. Hutchinson and William M. E. Rachal, 3 vols. (Chicago, 1962), I, 135.
91. Jensen, Founding of a Nation, 517.
93. Connecticut Gazette, 15 April 1775.
94. Force, ed., American Archives, II, 34.
95. Cited in Jensen, Founding of a Nation, 561.
S.C., 1778), 2–8.
Index
Note: Page numbers in italics indicate photographs and illustrations.
Abbe, Shubel, 262 53–59; non-importation Barnard, John, 82–83, 90

Abbot, Samuel, 40 agreements, 290; stolen goods, barter system, 120
Abbot, Sarah, 146 108; stores depicted, 128; Bartram, George, 167
Achenwall, Gottfried, 62 subscription rolls, 274; textile Bartram, John, 160
Acrelius, Israel, 171 patterns, 69; variety of goods, Bathurst, Henry, 73–75
Adams, Abigail, 288 47, 56; vendue sales, 141 Becker, Rebecca, 340n. 46
Adams, John: broad view of Advice to a Young Tradesman Beekman, James, 116
politics, 314; on class issues, (Franklin), 138 Belknap, Jeremy, 16, 219
202; on colonial identity, 204; Africa, 203 Bernard, Francis, 116, 245
on luxuries, 169–70; on age issues, 63–64 Blackburn, Joseph, 161
popular mobilization, 6–7; on Albany Congress, 5 Board of Trade, 36–37, 66–67, 121
solidarity of colonies, 4; on tea alcohol use, 283–84 Book-Keeping Modernized (Mair),
protests, 317; women’s issues Allen, Jolley, 189 123–24
and, 288 American Magazine (Philadel- booksellers, 168–69
Adams, Samuel: on “American phia), 96, 176 Boston, Massachusetts:
Congress,” 318; on colonial Anderson, Benedict, 365n. 49 Committee of Correspon-
dependency, 20, 204; on failure Anglicization, 167, 355n. 50 dence, 314, 318; crime, 110;
of protests, 298; non- Annapolis, Maryland, 41, 270 criticisms of, 150; engraving,
importation agreements, 269; Anne, Queen of Great Britain 112–13; fashion, 139, 170; harbor
tea protests and, 301; on and Ireland, 74 closure, 20; money supply, 188–
women’s role in protests, 312; Appleton, John, 136 90; tax protests, 1–3, 301–4
on yeomanry, 299 appraisals, 51 Boston Chronicle, 366n. 72
The Administration of the archaeology, 48–51 Boston Evening-Post: advertise-
Colonies (Pownall), 5, 86–87 Asia, 203 ments, 56; on false advertising,
The Advantages of the Revolution Atkins, John, 63 129; on funerals, 216; on gender
Illustrated, by a View of the auctions, 140. See also vendue issues, 180, 356n. 75; on the
Present State of Great Britain markets “hospitable consumer,” 14; on
(B. G. Esq.), 80 Autobiography (Franklin), 154 merchant reputations, 138; on
advertising (see also broadsides availability of imports, 104, 116, non-importation, 224; public
and handbills; marketing and 212 consciousness and, 249;
merchandising): British subscription rolls and, 268–69;
market, 80; commercial Baldwin, Ebenezer, 14–15 on tax protests, 221, 228–29
announcements, 35, 47, 53–59, Bank of England, 77 Boston Gazette: on class issues,
57, 63, 133–35, 134, 189; false banking, 77, 122 202; on dependency, 207; on
advertising, 129; fashion, 57; bankruptcy, 98, 137 fashions, 156; on funerals, 214;
fictional, 148–49; funerals, Baptists, 102 on gender issues, 25, 288; on
361n. 72; as historical source, bargaining, 120–21 homespun, 266; on
374 n index
Boston Gazette (continued) The Broken Snare (Mayhew), 219 and, 163–64; commercial
non-importation, 240–41; Brown, Ephraim, 231–32 inequity, 95; consumer choice,
subscription rolls and, 268–69 Brown, John, 152–53, 176 153–57; economic leveling, 14;
Boston Port Bill, 1–2 Bunyan, John, 150 elite debt, 122–23; elite self-
Boswell, James, 139–40 Burgis, William, 114 sacrifice, 165–66; England and
Boucher, Jonathan, 41, 42, 323 burglary, 105, 107–8, 110 colonies compared, 91; English
Boycott, Charles C., xvi Burke, Edmund, 72–75, 73, 82, 172 working class, 224–25;
boycotts and non-importation Burnaby, Andrew, 4–5 Enlightenment and, 156;
(see also non-consumption Busiris, King of Egypt (play), 2–3 fashion and, 158–66;
movement): agreements, 236, Byrd, William, II, 122 homespun and, 266; middle-
242, 257, 272–73, 286, 290, 320– class society, 10, 78–80, 90;
22, 366n. 72; as American Callister, Henry, 131 mobilization and, 10; portraits,
invention, xvi; argument for, Campbell, John, 85, 89 160–62; probate records and,
240–42; breaches, 271–74, 294– Cape-Fear Mercury, 261 51; religion, 166; servant class,
96; colonial manufacturing, capital, 125. See also currency 342n. 70; social status, 14, 353n.
212–13, 225, 242; communal issues 21; sumptuary laws, 100, 163–
nature, 223; Continental capitalism, 209–10 65; taxation and, 191; tea and,
Congress and, 325; democratic Caribbean, 117, 121, 217 304–5; trade reciprocity, 99–
rule and, 276–77; dependency carpets, 57 100; travel accounts, 163–65
and, 221–22, 238; difficulties, Carter, Robert, 159, 163 clothing, 37–38, 160, 163–64, 185,
244–45; effects, 234; ethics, Cary, Archibald, 296 327. See also fabrics and
263–64; Franklin on, 198, 337n. Catholicism, 78 textiles; fashion
1; general boycott, 319, 328, 329; Cato, Marcus Porcius, 8 Coats, William, 128
implementing and enforcing, “Cato’s political letters” coercion in commerce, 75
227–29, 243–44, 247, 254–67, (Trenchard and Gordon), 87 coffee, 317
294–96, 300–301, 325, 326; ceramics and china: collection Colden, Cadwallader, 37, 66
lessons of, 289–93; lists of of, 45; Deborah Franklin on, collection of imports, 44
boycotted items, 236–37; 154–55; as luxury item, 185; colonial policy, 195–98
merchants and, 245, 254, 256, pewter contrasted with, 50–51; colonial self-image, 21, 99, 200–
257–60, 260–62, 292, 299–300, porcelain, 46–47; pottery, 45, 204, 244–53, 254. See also
364n. 33; multiple waves of, 19– 68; pricing, 68; “Stamp Act nationalism and political
21; newspapers on, 223–24, Repeal’d” teapot, 234; tea identity; solidarity among
248–50, 365n. 55; non- services, xii, xii, 45–46, 171, 177– colonists
consumption and, 20, 24, 286, 78; trash pits, 48–49, 50; Colonial Williamsburg, xi, 45
298–99, 325, 364n. 33; Wedgewood on, 84 commodities, 205, 330
organizing, 70–71; patriotism channels of trade, 121–27 communication, 126–27. See also
and, 238; petitions and charity, 2 newspapers
subscription rolls, 25–26, 242, Charles II, 156 competition, 64
267–79, 272–73, 274, 277, 287, Charleston, South Carolina, 112, The Complete English Tradesman
287–88; politics of, 221–22; 114, 125–26, 167 (Defoe), 84–85
public opinion, 229–30; Chauncy, Charles, xiii, 3–4 Congregationalists, 102
resistance, 323; revolutionary Chesapeake colonies, 60, 121–23 Connecticut, 43, 118, 269–70
implications, 101; rights and, children, 63–64 Connecticut Courant, 66
227; social contract and, 324; china. See ceramics and china Connecticut Journal, 63
solidarity and, 23–24, 244–53, choice (see also variety of Considerations upon the Act of
303; Stamp Act, 220; successes, imports): advertising and, 58– Parliament (anonymous), 11
291; town meetings and, 236, 59; class issues and, 153–57; consignment system, 122
254, 310, 314–17, 319–20; consumer sacrifice, 282; credit constitutional period, xvii
Townshend Acts, 239, 285, 309; and, 184; dependency and, 207; consumer behavior: Benjamin
trust and, 252–53; unintended fabrics and textiles, 62–63; Franklin, 96, 154–56, 341n. 61;
consequences, 267; women importance of, xvii; News from categories, 35; consumer
and, 182, 230–34, 236 the Moon, 148; purchase culture, 127–40, 182; “consumer
Bradford, Andrew, 96 decisions, 150–51; rights and, revolution,” xv; demand, 96;
Bremar and Neyle, 135 190; symbolism of, 199 George Washington, 355n. 63;
Brickdale, Matthew, 302 Christianity, 299. See also religion “hospitable consumer”
“British nationalism,” 21–22. See churches, 353n. 21 narrative, 10–19; mobilization
also England Cincinnatus, Lucius Quinctius, 8, and, 200; patriotism and, 94–
broadsides and handbills (see 232, 263 95, 100; per capita consump-
also advertising): on crime, 105; civic humanism, 8–9 tion, 61; slavery and, 64;
distribution, 135–36; merchant civil society, 323, 327, 331 Thomas Jefferson, 122, 296–97;
meeting, 292; public Clarke, Elizabeth, 216 women, 172–82
consciousness and, 247, 256, Clarke, John, 174 Continental Army, 337n. 64
257–59, 258; public opinion, Clarke, William, 5 Continental Association, 296–97,
293; subscription rolls, 277; class and equity issues: British 325–29, 328
vendue markets, 141 imperialism and, 202; clothing Continental Congress, xiii, 26, 325
index N 375
Cooley, Simeon, 259 on, 221–22; commercial ties Estimate of the Manners, 152–53
Copley, John Singleton, 160 and, 217; Cornbury on, 36; debt etiquette, 179
correspondence of colonists, 65–70 and, 218; Dickinson on, 240; excavations, 48–51
corruption, 99 English fabrics, 63; fashion executions, 106–7, 108–9. See also
cost of living, 208 and, 280–82; Gage on, 364n. 16; crime
cottage industry, 81 in India, 333n. 3; mutual export economy, 28–29
country stores, 118–21, 120 dependence, 95–96, 100; non-
courtship, 180 importation and, 238; public fabrics and textiles (see also
Cowles, Samuel, 119 opinion on, 293; Ramsay on, homespun): advertisements,
Cowles, Solomon, 327 330 56; boycotts, 198, 251; carpets,
craftsmanship, 48 depression, economic, 204–10 57; colonial production, 66,
credit: advertisements, 40; deserters, 160 68–70, 212; colors, 169; demand
bankruptcy, 42; consumer Devine, Magdalen, 69 for, 64; dependency and, 36, 84,
choice and, 184; criticized, 139; Dickinson, John, 11, 68, 92–97, 333n. 3; Fauquier on, 39; as
dry goods, 136–37; import 226, 240, 318 historical source, 47; linens,
volume and, 123; merchant A Discourse, Addressed to the Sons 187; luxury debate and, 40–41,
reputation and, 137–39; of Liberty, 221 185, 208; peddlers, 146–47; in
postwar period, 204–5; vendue A Discourse on Jeremiah (Potter), probate records, 52; silk, 80,
markets, 141, 143; volume, xv 154 93–94; social impact of, 158–66;
Cresswell, Nicholas, 118 Discourse on the Christian Union trade imbalance, 97–98; travel
crime: import values and, 104–11; (Stiles), 5 accounts, 44, 338n. 15; variety
Isaac Frasier, 347n. 7; distribution of goods, 118–19, of, 62–63, 169
newspaper announcement, 105; 121–27, 187 factories, 81
peddling, 145, 146–47; diversity in the colonies, 4–6 A Family Being Served Tea
sumptuary laws and, 165; tar Dodsley, Robert, 90–91 (unknown), 178
and feathering, 262–63, 311–12; domestic markets, 84 Faneuil Hall, 236
women and, 347n. 8 Douglass, William, 75, 94, 158 Farell and Jones Company, 42
Culliford, William, 59–60 Drake, Jasper, 278 farming techniques, 187
cultural identity, 166–72, 281 Drayton, William, 274 fashion (see also clothing; fabrics
culture of business, 127–40 dry-goods, 54, 125, 136, 223 and textiles; luxury debate):
culture of colonialism, 166–72 Dulany, Daniel, 210, 211, 212 boycotts and, 230; choice and,
cupboards, 46, 46 Dutch traders, 88, 300 152; consumer choice, 152–57;
cures and medicines, 57–58, 308 Dwyer, Thomas, 105–6 crime and, 108, 111; English
currency issues (see also debt): styles, 22, 167–70; Franklin on,
consumer credit and, 136–37; East Hampton, 172 196, 197–98; gloves, 57, 215;
de Vries on, 186; invisible East India Company, 299–300, jewelry, 135; merchants, 138–39;
commerce, 117; money supply, 302, 315 News from the Moon story, 148–
120–21, 205; paper money, 187– “An East Prospect of the City of 50; patriotism and, 251, 265,
90; pricing and, 129 Philadelphia” (Heap), 114–15 281–83; pattern cards, 132–33;
customs records, 35, 59–64, 340n. economic decline, 204–10 politicization of, 266; poverty
50, 341n. 53 economic leveling, 14 and, 71; self-fashioning, 21–26,
Eddis, William, 41–42, 118 159, 243; social impact of, 158–
Daughters of Liberty, 231–32, 234 education, xiii 66; tea use and, 307; variety of
Davenport, James, 182–83 egalitarianism, 24–25 imported goods, 40–41;
Dawe, Philip, 313 elections and voting, 236, 266, women and, 281–83
Deane, Silas, 28 327 Father Abraham’s Speech
debt (see also currency issues): Eliot, Andrew, 174 (Franklin), 143, 164
dependency and, 210, 218; Eliot, Jared, 43, 93, 111, 186–87 Fauquier, Francis, 39
elites, 122–23; in England, 15; Elizabeth I, 154 Feke, Robert, 161
Franklin on, 197; funeral empire of goods, xv, xvii, 75, 100, A Few Reasons in Favour of
expenses, 214; imbalance of 329 Vendues, 141
payments, 97–98; luxury employment, 242–43 “Field-Husbandry” (Eliot), 93–94
debate and, 226; non- England (see also House of “financial revolution,” 77
importation and, 224; postwar Commons; Parliament First Continental Congress, 325
period, 204–5; public debt, 204; (British)): buying habits, 81; First Provincial Congress, 294
Stamp Act and, 227; value of colonial views of, 76; debt, 15; Fitch, Thomas, 206
debt to England, 338n. 20; English Civil War, 76; export Fithian, Philip, 159
women and, 368n. 137 economy, 28–29; fashion, 22, Flint, James, 262
Deetz, James, 50 167–70; military conflicts, 77; Fort Massachusetts, 49
Defoe, Daniel, 84–85, 352n. 1 nationalism, 80; naval power, Foucault, Michael, 204
demand for British exports, 42, 78, 79, 226 Founding Fathers, 19
90, 98 Enlightenment, 156 France, 77, 201
democratic participation, 275–76 equity issues. See class and equity Franklin, Benjamin: buying habits,
demographic changes, 63–64, 196 issues 234; on colonial consumerism,
dependency: colonial literature estate probate, 35, 51–53 96, 154–56, 341n. 61; on credit,
376 n index
Franklin, Benjamin (continued) Hancock, Thomas, 119, 126, 133 Ireland and Irish immigrants, 22,
138; on English fashion, 168–69; handbills. See broadsides and 76, 82, 146, 172, 201
on expansion of trade, 61–62; handbills Itinerarium (Hamilton), 33–34
“Father Abraham” writings, 199– happiness, 191–92
200; on imperial trade, 86, 172; Harrison, Benjamin, 296 Jackson, William, 256, 257
on Josiah Tucker, 11–12; on labor Harvard, Massachusetts, 100 Jackson and Bromfield Co., 119,
force issues, 67; newspaper Hayman, Francis, 79 132–33
business, 54; Parliament Heap, George, 114, 114 James and Drinker Co., 131
testimony, 195–99, 210, 211, 217, Hesselius, John, 161 Jefferson, Thomas, 17, 67, 122,
358n. 1; on public consciousness, Hicks, William, 13 246, 296–97
248; on Seven Years’ War, 5; on highways, 118–19, 126 Jensen, Merrill, 364n. 33
sumptuary laws, 164; on textile Hinman, Truman, 110 Jerdone, Francis, 123
boycott, 337n. 1; on vendue Hirschman, Albert O., 173 jewelry, 135
markets, 143 History of New-Hampshire John Glassford and Co., 122
Franklin, Deborah, 154–55, 199 (Belknap), 16 John Leverett and Co., 56
Franklin, William, 68 History of the American Johnson, Joshua, 80–81, 350–51n.
Frasier, Isaac, 109–10, 347n. 7 Revolution (Ramsay), 15–16 91
Frederick, Lord North, second homespun (see also fabrics and Johnson, Samuel, 27, 33, 85, 90,
earl of Guilford, 73, 299–300, textiles): Boston Gazette on, 139–40
302–6, 311, 326 266; class and equity issues, Jones, Owen, 170
free trade, 88 266; dependency, 226; Franklin journals, 362n. 112
French and Indian War, 82 on, 198; gender issues and, 284;
frontier stores, 118 looms, 69; patriotism and, 282; Kalm, Peter, 177, 338n. 15
frugality, 214–17. See also luxury quality, 68–69; self-reliance Kennedy, Archibald, 97, 98
debate and, 211; spinning meetings, Keyser’s Pills, 58
funerals, 213–17, 361n. 72 231–32, 266 King George’s War, 43
hospitable consumer narrative, Kingsmill plantation, 50
Gadsden, Christopher, 24, 241, 10–19, 335n. 31 Knight, Sarah Kemble (“Madam
271, 274–75, 280 House of Burgesses, 145, 246, 297, Knight”), 118, 129–30, 140–41
Gage, Thomas, xvi, 255, 262, 362n. 112
364n. 16 House of Commons, 73, 75, 195– labor cost, 66–67
Gandhi, Mohandas, 333n. 3 98, 299. See also Parliament “The Ladies’ Complaint”
Gay, Fisher, 119 (British) (poem), 173
gender issues. See women’s housing, 323 Lafayette, Marquis de, 296
issues Hubbard, Patience, 147 laissez-faire economics, 75
Gentleman’s Magazine, 88 Hubbart, Phillip, 146–47 Lancaster, Pennsylvania, 108
Georgia, 60 Hughes, Samuel, 57 The Late Regulations Respecting
Germany, 76 human rights, 190 the British Colonies
Gilmer, George, 46 Hunter, Robert, 36–37 (Dickinson), 11, 95–96
Glen, James, 38 husbandry, 67, 93 Laurens, Henry, 327
Glorious Revolution, xv, 76, 220 Hutcheson, Francis, 151–53 Law, Jonathan, 39
gloves, 57, 215 Hutchinson, Elisha, 301 Lee, Arthur, 20
God’s Marvellous Kindness Hutchinson, Thomas, 6, 117, 141, Lee, Betsy, 159
(Eliot), 111 221, 301, 315 Lee, Richard Henry, 257–58, 299,
gold, 188 318
Goldthwait, Thomas, 141 imperial administrators, 38 A Letter from a Merchant in
The Good of the Community imperialism, 99, 200–204 London to His Nephew in North
Impartially Considered income, per capita, 341n. 60 America, 11–12
(Rusticus), 190 “The Increase of Mankind” Letters from a Pennsylvania
Gooding, Sarah, 146 (Franklin), 96 Farmer (Dickinson), 68, 92–93,
Goodwin, Daniel, 146 Independent Advertiser, 184 240
Gordon, Thomas, 8–9, 87, 99 Independent Reflector, 43, 92, 165, Leverett, John, 56
Great Awakening, 182 174 liberalism, 23, 190
Green, Francis, 366n. 72 indoctrination, 296. See also peer liberation movements, 359n. 20
Gregg, Robert, 144, 146 pressure Lincoln Covenant (Massachu-
Grenville, George, 285 industrial revolution, 80 setts), 320–22
Grimke, John Paul, 135 Inquiry into the Nature and linens, 187. See also fabrics and
Grotius, Hugo, 83–84 Causes of the Wealth of Nations textiles
(Smith), 88–89 Lloyd, Henry, 266–67
Hamilton, Alexander: on international trade, 204, 241–42, Locke, John, 23, 156, 158, 190, 324
fashions, 183; on peddlers, 144, 330 Louisbourg campaign, 109
145; self-caricature, 33; travels, Intolerable Acts, 302–3, 305, Loveland, Elizabeth, 128, 129
33–35, 67, 163–65 317 Lovell, James, 329
Hancock, John, 117, 131, 218, 245, invention, 186 loyalists, 323, 326
247 invisible commerce, 117 loyalty, 93, 94
index N 377
luxury debate: defining luxuries, importation movement and, Navigation Acts, 88–89, 93, 206,
184–87, 211; economic decline 245, 254, 256, 257–60, 260–62, 241
and, 206–8; Glen on, 38–39; 292, 299–300, 364n. 33; “Negro Act,” 164
morality issues and, 209; numbers of, 348n. 15; Nelson, William, 172
patriotism and, 265; political reputation, 137–39; retailers, networks of exchange, 121
corruption and, 221; religion 117, 136; trade meetings, 292; New Dictionary of Trade and
and, 175; self-indulgence, 331; urban, 120; wholesalers, 111–17, Commerce (Rolt), 85–86, 97
Stamp Act and, 227; women 119, 136 New England, 53, 60, 62, 213–17.
and, 172–82, 187, 356n. 75 middle-class society, 10, 78–80, See also specific colonies and
90 cities
Machiavelli, Niccolo, 263 middle colonies, 61–62 New-England Weekly Journal
MacLean, Allen, 127–28, 138 Middletown, Connecticut, 110 (Boston), 141
macroeconomics, 99 migrant labor, 66, 67 “A New Favorite Song for the
Madison, James, 327 military conflicts, 77, 79 Ladies,” 288–89
Mair, John, 123–24 military expenditures, 11 New-Hampshire Gazette, 201, 211–
Makintosh, William, 22 military service, 109, 308, 337n. 12, 216
Malthus, Thomas, 61 64 New-Haven Post-Boy, 14, 63
Mandeville, Bernard, 173 Milne, John, 34–35, 38 New-London Gazette, xvi, 13–14,
manufacturing: boycotts and, ministers, 183, 201–2. See also 225
212–13, 242; colonial, 212, 323; religion New Universal Magazine, 138, 180
dependency and, 225; in Great mirrors, 159 New York: commercial
Britain, 80; home spinning, misogyny, 173 challenges, 36–37; consumer
231–32; manufacturing towns, Mittelberger, Gottlieb, 40–41, 42, behavior, 338n. 20; consumer
80–81; prices and, 184 47 goods in, 43; crime, 107;
Marblehead, Massachusetts, 82– mobilization: arguments about, criticized, 150; depicted, 114;
83 27; complexities of, 297; fashion, 166; newspapers, 56;
marketing and merchandising consumerism and, 200; non-importation in, 269; trade
(see also advertising): language difficulty achieving, xviii; expansion, 60
of, 120; Mair on, 123–24; Indian example, 333n. 3; non- New-York Advertiser, 276
peddlers, 143–46; seasons, 130; importation enforcement, 234; New-York Mercury: advertise-
stock rotation, 124; store peer pressure and, 257–62, 271, ments, 58; on British empire,
layouts, 128, 128–29; variety of 309, 312–15; social diversity 91, 98; on class issues of tea,
imports, 128; vendue sales, 141 and, 6–8; solidarity and, 8–10, 305; on non-importation
marriage, 179–80, 232 220; taken for granted, xii–xiii; protests, 278; on peddling, 145;
Maryland, 38, 41–42, 52, 60 tea protests, 314; virtue and, on public opinion polls, 276;
Maryland Gazette, 165, 202, 319 264 on women’s role in protests,
Mason, George, 92–93, 245–46, modernity, 76 233
257–58, 318–19 money. See currency issues Newcomb, Silas, 329
Massachusetts (see also Boston, monopolies, 88 News from the Moon (Anony-
Massachusetts): British Moore, Henry, 66–67, 69–70, 142, mous), 148, 352n. 1
sanctions, 302; crime, 105–6; 248–50 newspapers (see also specific
House of Representatives, 213; Moore, William, 146 publications): advertising and
mobilization in, 1–2; paper morality issues: fashion and, 152– announcements, 35, 47, 53–59,
money, 187–90; peddling in, 53; luxury debate and, 172–82, 57, 63, 133–35, 134, 189; colonial
146–47; port towns, 115; travels 184–85, 209; News from the identity and, 28, 96, 247–48,
in, 33 Moon story, 148–50 248–50; commercial analysis,
Massachusetts Gazette, 366n. 78 Morgan, Edmund S., 362n. 112, 87; on domestic manufactur-
Massachusetts Spy, 3, 26, 28, 284, 363n. 13 ing, 213; on gender issues, 179–
310 Morgan, Helen, 362n. 112 80; non-importation
Matlack, T., 170 Morison, William, 163–64, 165 movement and, 223–24, 237,
Mayhew, Jonathan, 181, 219, 232– Morrison, John, 107, 109 248–50, 365n. 55; runaway-
33 museums, 44–48 servant notices, 161; on Stamp
McClintock, Samuel, 4 Act protests, 227–29;
McCoy, Francis, 107–8 nationalism and political subscription rolls and, 268–69,
McCusker, John, 18 identity (see also solidarity 287–88
McLoughlin, William, 353n. 21 among colonists): American Newton, Isaac, 156
media, 28 identity, 305; boycotts and, 26, Nomini Hall plantation, 159, 163
medicines and remedies, 57–58, 329; British, 77–78; Continental non-consumption movement (see
308 Army and, 337n. 64; print also boycotts and non-
Mein, John, 366n. 72 culture and, 365n. 49; protests importation): Continental
Menard, Russell, 18 and, 244–53, 303; social Congress and, 325; as extension
merchants (see also stores): contract and, 324; taxation of non-importation, 20, 298–99,
dishonest traders, 262–63; and, 218 364n. 33; mobilization and, 24
merchant houses, 115; natural rights, 191 non-governmental organiza-
merchant notices, 55; non- naval power, 79, 226 tions, 254
378 n index
non-importation. See boycotts Pickett, Martin, 124 petitions, 25–26, 242; public
and non-importation Pilgrim’s Progress (Bunyan), 150 rituals, 24; subscription rolls,
Pinckney, Eliza, 167–68 25–26, 267–79, 272–73, 274, 287
Observations on the Importance of Pitkin, William, 68 publishing, 54. See also specific
the Northern Colonies Plautus, 159 publications
(Kennedy), 97 Pleas of the Crown (casebook), 104 Pufendorf, Samuel, 83–84, 85
Observations on the Nature of political identity. See nationalism Puritans, 209, 263–64
Civil Liberty (Price), 2 and political identity “putting-out system,” 81
“Of the Extravagances of our political ideology, 8, 10–11, 23
Funerals,” 214 Political Survey of Britain Quakers, 102, 183
Ogle, Samuel, 38 (Johnson), 85 quality of imports, 116, 130–31,
Old Testament, 92, 111, 320 politics, 99 212, 241–42
Oliver, Peter, 269, 361n. 72 Pomeroys and Hodgkin, 116 quantity of imports, 28, 104. See
“On Trade and Commerce” popular culture, 179 also variety of imports
(Johnson), 90 popular mobilization. See Queen Anne’s County,
ordering merchandise, 132 boycotts and non-importation; Maryland, 303
Otis, James, Jr., 83, 90, 202, 204, mobilization Quincy, Josiah, 318
269, 312 population growth, 61, 342n. 70
oversight committees, 254 port cities, 111–14, 112–15 racial issues, 64, 164–65. See also
Port Royal, 41 class and equity issues; slavery
paintings, 160–62 portraits, 160–62 and slaves
pamphlets, 108, 299. See also Portugal, 87 Rake’s Progress (Hogarth), 50
broadsides and handbills post-colonialism, 203 Ramsay, David, 4, 6, 15–16, 100,
paper, 56–57, 66 Postlethwayt, Malachy, 86, 335n. 330–31
Parkman, Francis, 49–50 32 Ravenet, Simon E., 79
Parks, William, 54 Potter, Nathaniel, 154 rebellion, 324
Parliament (British) (see also pottery. See ceramics and china Red Coats, 82
Townshend Revenue Acts): poverty, 38, 39, 71, 181, 342n. 67 religion: Catholicism, 78;
Burke and, 73–75; colonial The Power and Grandeur of churches, 353n. 21; class issues
solidarity and, 9; confronta- Great-Britian (anonymous), 12 and, 166; Congregationalists,
tions with the colonies, 72–73; Pownall, Thomas, 5, 86–87, 89 102; diversity and, 6–7; ethics
consumer choice and, 151; preachers, 183 of non-importation, 263–64;
Franklin’s testimony, 195–99, Preceptor: Containing a General luxury debate and, 175;
210, 211, 217, 358n. 1; Course of Education (Dodsley), ministers, 183, 201–2; Old
protectionism, 88–89, 206; Tea 90 Testament, 92, 111, 320; political
Act, xv, 20, 298, 300–301 press, 80 implications, 299; Protestant-
Pasteur, John, 51–52 Price, Bennet, 124, 127 ism, 37, 78, 137, 182, 202, 209;
patent cards, 350–51n. 91 Price, Richard, xiii, 2 public virtue and, 263–64;
patriotism: consumption and, prices: bargaining, 117, 120–21; Puritans, 209, 263–64; Quakers,
94–95, 100; fashion and, 251, competition, 64; manufactur- 102, 183; sermons, 111, 306, 308
265, 281–83; gender issues and, ing technology and, 184; remedies, 57–58, 308
232–33, 283; luxury debate and, market pricing, 188; representation, 270, 289
212–13, 265; non-importation merchandising and, 135 republicanism, 8–9
and, 238 Prince, Thomas, 102, 103, 118 “Resolutions for Conciliation
pattern cards, 132 Pringle, Robert, 125, 126, 127, 141 with the Colonies” (Burke),
Patterson, John, 119 Prior, Gideon, 146 72–73
Peach and Pierce, 116 probate records, 35, 51–53 retailers. See merchants
peddling, 106, 107, 140–47, 311 production issues, 18–19 Revenue Acts, xv, 239, 287–88
peer pressure, 257–62, 271, 309, profit, 94–95, 125, 137 “A Review of the State of the
312–15 property, 191 British Nation” (Defoe), 352n. 1
Penn, Thomas, 111–14, 130 “A Proposal for the Universal Use rhetoric, 363n. 15
Pennsylvania, 60, 183 of Irish Manufacture, &c.” rights: choice and, 151, 184;
Pennsylvania Chronicle, 176, 208, (Swift), 222 happiness, 191–92; natural
231, 275–76, 279 protectionism, 88–89, 206 rights, 191; non-importation
Pennsylvania Gazette, 53–54, 56, Protestantism, 37, 78, 137, 182, and, 227, 238; social contract
175, 225, 285, 319 202, 209 and, 324
Pennsylvania Packet, 300 protests. See boycotts and non- The Rights of the British Colonies
period rooms, 45 importation Asserted and Proved (Otis), 83
Peters, Richard, 114 Providence Gazette, 205 Rivington, James, 58
petitions, 25–26, 242. See also public opinion (see also roads, 118–19, 126
mobilization; subscription subscription rolls): common robbery, 107, 109. See also crime
rolls cause, 319; consumer behavior, Roberts, B., 114
pewter, 50–51 298; measuring, 317; Roberts, William, 71
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 114, mobilization and, 293; Robertson, Alexander, 261
114–15, 132, 150, 166, 170 newspapers and, 247–51; Robinson, Elizabeth, 107, 109
index N 379
Rolt, Richard, 85–86, 89, 97, 152 53, 303; Continental Army, social importance, 304–5;
Rowe, John, 295 337n. 64; mobilization and, 8– substitutes, 308; tea service, xii,
Royster, Charles, 337n. 64 10, 220; newspapers and, 247– xii, 45–46, 171, 177–78, 178;
“Rule Britannia” (song), 201 51; social diversity and, 5–6; tea volume of imports, 304;
“rum books,” 131–32 protests and, 316–17 women and, 281, 288–89, 306–7
runaway servants and slaves, 160, Solomon (biblical), 92, 111 Tea Act, xv, 20, 298, 300–301
161, 164–65 Sons of Liberty, 300–301, 312 technology, 184
sources on colonial life, 27–28, 35, textiles. See fabrics and textiles
S. and S. Salisbury, 134 47, 53–59 Thacher, Oxenbridge, 205
“salutary neglect,” 75 South-Carolina Gazette, 8, 56, 129, theft, 104–11. See also crime
samples, 132–33 135, 271, 356n. 75, 366n. 78 Theus, Jeremiah, 161
Sandburg, Carl, 127 southern colonies, 132, 246 Thomas, Isaiah, 28–29
Scotland: colonial nationalism, Spain, 77, 87 Thomas, John, 160
201; English imports, 22; speculative trading, 142 Thomson, James, 201
immigrants, 76, 122–24, 136–37, Speirs, Bowman, and Co., 122 Timothy, Peter, 271
146; perceptions of, 82; Scottish spinning meetings, 231–32, 266 “To the Public” (broadside), 256
Enlightenment, 22, 346n. 68; Stamp Act: boycotts and, 26; tobacco, 39, 121–23
trade, 60 colonial self-image and, 218– Tories, 77
Seabury, Samuel, 326–27 34; Franklin and, 195–99; town meetings: advertisements,
Second Treatise (Locke), 190 imperial policy and, 206; non- 258; boycotts and non-
selection of imported goods. See importation and, 20; protested, importation, 236, 254, 310, 314–
variety of imports 1, 70, 223, 232–33, 254, 298; 17, 319–20; public conscious-
self-denial/self sacrifice, 298 repealed, 199, 234, 245; Stamp ness and, 250–53; restrictions
self-sufficiency, 17–18, 70–71, Act Congress, 219; women’s on, 302–3
210–11, 323. See also homespun impact, 230, 279 Townshend, Charles, xv, 239
Sellers, Charles, 337n. 1 standard of living, 65 Townshend Revenue Acts:
semi-durable goods, 55–56 standardization, 59, 65 Adams on, 298; colonial
separatism, 324 Stevens, Wallace, 151 responses, 235–39; non-
sermons, 111, 306, 308 Stiles, Ezra, 5 importation and, 20, 286;
Seven Years’ War: colonial image Stone, Sarah, 147 protests, xv, 242, 244, 248, 254,
and, 21; colonial nationalism stores, 115, 118–21, 128, 128–29. See 271, 300, 309; repealed, 289–93
and, 201–2; deserters, 160; also merchants trade guides. See vade mecum
economic decline following, Strahan, William, 198 trade imbalances, 97–98
235; Franklin on, 5; “hospitable subscription rolls: background traders. See merchants
consumer” narrative, 10–19; of, 25–26; in newspapers, 274; transportation. See distribution
resolution, xv; Smith on, 43 public consciousness and, 267– of goods
sexism, 281 79; sample agreement, 272–73; trash, 48–49
Shaw, Thomas, 160 violations of, 274; women on, travel in the colonies, 33–35, 40,
shipping crates, 120 287 102, 338n. 15
“Shop Notes,” 188–90 subsistence families, 337n. 1 Trenchard, John, 8–9, 87, 99
shops and shopkeepers. See Sugar Act, 11, 217 The Triumph of Britannia
merchants; stores sumptuary laws, 100, 163–65 (Ravenet), 79
silk, 93–94 Supreme Court, 185 “Truck-Trade,” 188–90
silver, 188 Susanna Traux (unknown), 161– The True Sons of Liberty and
slavery and slaves: arguments 62, 162 Supporters of the Non-
against, 94, 342n. 70; “Cato’s Swift, Jonathan, 22, 222 Importation Agreement, 257
political letters,” 87; Trumbull, Jonathan, 146
consumerism and, 64; Talcott, Joseph, 121 Trumbull, Joseph, 329
manufacturing labor and, 66; tar and feathering, 262–63, trust (see also solidarity among
runaways, 161, 164–65; 311–12 colonists): common protest
secondhand consumer items, taxation (see also specific acts of and, 254; mobilization and,
49; tobacco farming and, 122 Parliament): British xiii, 200, 220; newspapers and,
Smith, Adam, 88–89, 90, 342n. 70 justifications for, 12–13; class 249–50; non-importation and,
Smith, William, Jr., 43, 66, 98, issues and, 191; Franklin on, 12; 252–53, 290–91; political
160, 218, 220, 335n. 31 internal and external, 358n. 1, identity and, 247; political
smuggling, 300, 340–41n. 52 363n. 13; postwar, 204; protests, trust, 7
social contract, 324 xii, 8, 70, 92–93, 197, 219–20 Tryon, William, 37–38, 126
social issues. See class and equity Taylor, John, 259–60 Tucker, Josiah, 11, 81
issues tea: alcohol use compared to, Tudors, 76
Society for Encouraging Industry 283–84; Anglicization and, 170– Turner, Frederick Jackson,
in Massachusetts, 187 72; from Boston Tea Party, 295; 118
solidarity among colonists: boycotted, 222–23, 276, 285, 310,
Adams on, 4; Boston port 314–17; contraband, 294–96; Universal Dictionary of Trade and
closure and, 2–4; boycotts and East India Company, 299–300; Commerce (Postlethwayt), 86
non-importation, 23–24, 244– negative publicity, 26, 306–7; urban centers, 111
380 n index
vade mecum, 102–47, 103 Wallace Gallery, xi, 45 Wolfe, James, 202
Vade Mecum for America Walpole, Robert, 8 Wollaston, John, 160–61
(Prince), 118 Warner, Michael, 365n. 45 women’s issues: consumer
variety of imports: advertise- Warren, Mercy Otis, 314 behavior, 236; consumer
ments, 40, 53–59, 189; English Washington, George, 92, 122, 170, reform, 211; debt and, 368n.
fashions, 167–70; entrepreneurs 245–46, 355n. 63 137; luxury debate, 172–82;
and, 125; fabrics and textiles, Watson, John Fanning, 170 luxury debate and, 187, 356n.
56–57; papers, 56–57; per capita Watts, Stephen, 94–95 75; marketing to women, 130;
consumption and, 61–62; Wayles, John, 42–43, 47, 52 marriage, 232; misogyny, 173;
quality and, 131; sources on, The Wealth of Nations (Smith), News from the Moon story, 148–
340n. 46; standardization 88–89 50; non-importation
among colonies, 65; Wedgewood, Josiah, 45, 84, 85 movement, 182, 230–34, 236;
wholesalers and, 119 weekly journals, 28. See also peddlers, 146; probate records,
Vaudrieul, Rigaud de, 49 specific publications 51; public opinion, 276;
“Velvet Merchant,” 105–6 West Indies, 117 religion and, 183; role in
vendue markets, 140–43, 147 Wheeler, Joseph, 3, 100 protests, 24–25, 279–89, 312–14,
Virginia, 39, 52, 60, 90, 121–23 Whitefield, George, 82, 142, 182, 264 313; sexism, 281; stereotypes,
Virginia Association, 296 wholesale merchants, 111–17, 119, 232–33, 284; subscription rolls,
Virginia Gazette, 54, 160, 243 136 287; tea use, 281, 288–89, 306–7
virtue, 210, 263–65 Wigglesworth, Edward, 47 Wood, Gordon, 363n. 15
voluntary organizations, 223, 235 William Cuninghame and Co., wool, 36, 62, 63. See also fabrics
voting. See elections and voting 122, 124 and textiles
Vries, Jan de, 18, 186, 230 Williams, John, 106–7, 144 Wragg, William, 274
Williams, Thomas Charles, 327
Waldo, Daniel, 136 Withington, Ebenezer, 294–96, Yarnall, Mordecai, 53, 58
Waldo, Joseph, 136 298, 302, 309 yeomanry, 17, 66, 203, 299

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The Marketplace of

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

The Character of the Good Ruler (1970)

Myne Owne Ground, with Stephen Innes (1980)

American Colonies in an Atlantic World, with Timothy Hall (2003)

Copyright © 2004 by T. H. Breen

Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Printed in the United States of America

1 Tale of the Hospitable Consumer:

Part One: An Empire of Goods

Part Two: “A Commercial Plan for

M y memories of writing The Market-

I would be hard pressed to identify the precise

fancy that he or she partook of a polite society centered in faraway places

colonial Americans—at least, in sufficient numbers to make good on their

point here is that if we begin an investigation of revolution with ideology—

the mar ketpl ace of revolution

C olonial rebellions throughout the mod-

amounts of rice were accepted in lieu of cash—would go toward the relief

ourselves, it was they who sustained the possibility of winning indepen-

modern capitalism, and, according to some leading historians, it provided

and economic backgrounds.28 What passed for class consciousness in the

sumer.” It was a profoundly anthropological project, one that effectively

At this point, the author added a sociological dimension to an evolving

popular culture on the eve of independence. Writing for the New-London

misunderstanding. “The luxury and superfluities in which even the lower

world of the mid-eighteenth century. The colonists had to accommodate

bizarre. In more recent times, the concept of self-sufficiency has attracted

system as “pre-industrial”—as critics of modern capitalism have done—

ordinary consumer goods—in this case, durables and semi-durables—to bring

The centrality of the boycott to the coming of the American Revolution

all subjects with commercial prosperity, military security, and individual

Colonial Americans took a different course. Indeed, during the 1760s

organized public sacrifice, through the denial of the “Baubles of Britain.” By

ancient history—together with the scores of sermons that have survived—

A n interpretive journey to the frontiers of

Trade questionnaire in 1715, he echoed much that Cornbury had written.

proportion of Houses are in like manner furnished with British Manufac-

The mainland colonies also attracted a number of European travelers,

metropolis [London].” No doubt, he exaggerated the speed at which con-

the original purchase—the more money the colonist actually spent—the

material culture devote most attention to the possessions of the well-to-do,

of knowledge about the human landscape of late colonial society, other

children in independent households, donating sheets, tableware, and fur-

The probate records of eighteenth-century New England tell a similar

advertisement could ever communicate. He managed to conjure up differ-

beverages such as wine and beer—

they listed seventeen varieties of paper distinguished by size, function, and

import markets expanded, they also experienced remarkable congruence.

Culliford remained as inspector-general. After he retired from service early

From a British perspective the customs volumes tell a somewhat differ-

doubt, these boys and girls engaged in consumer activities insomuch as

With so many consumers demanding so many British goods, one can-

Other frustrated planners echoed Colden’s complaint. In 1762 William

The words “cheerfulness” and “satisfaction” remind us of the industrious

categories of imported items regularly advertised in the provincial newspa-

Massachusetts owned spinning wheels, an artifact which modern interpret-

E ighteenth-century writers seemed uncer-