Sugar in your Tea Party?

BRIAN: This is BackStory. I’m Brian Balogh.

PETER: I’m Peter Onuf.

ED: And I’m Ed Ayers. Today on the show, we’re considering the American history of sugar. Now it turns out that that history isn’t particularly sweet, but it is consequential. Let’s consider the case of the American Revolution.

We’re used to thinking about that war as a revolt against taxes on tea and stamps. But Brown University scholar Peter Andreas says there was another lesser known factor in the lead-up to war.

PETER ANDREAS: The smuggling of molasses to the New England colonies.

ED: Yeah. You have heard that right, molasses smuggling. At the time, New England’s number one export was rum. And in order to make that rum, you need molasses. The problem was the British Caribbean didn’t produce anywhere near enough molasses to keep New England’s distilleries busy. So colonists struggled to bring in enough barrels of molasses.

PETER ANDREAS: They needed tens of thousands of hog’s heads per year to run the region’s 63 distilleries. They were importing less than 400.

ED: In case you’re wondering, a hog’s head is the equivalent of 240 liters. Now there was plenty of sugar being produced in the French West Indies, and so enterprising colonists turned to the black market. Andreas told me that the smugglers included some of the colonies most powerful men.

PETER ANDREAS: We’re talking about major American Founding Families, the Hancocks in Boston for example. Or I should point out the Brown brothers in Providence, the founders of the university that employs me. I mean they were–

ED: Whoa.

PETER ANDREAS: –deeply complicit in the molasses smuggling trade.

ED: What was the legal regime? What were the statutes that the colonists were not adhering to?

PETER ANDREAS: Right. It was smuggling because they were technically in violation of the Molasses Act, which was first imposed in 1733. And it imposed a prohibitive tariff on importing molasses and sugar products from non-British West Indies. So if you import it from the French West Indies, you’re supposed to pay this extraordinary tax.

So what happened is this act, the Molasses Act, the reason it existed in the first place was to protect British subjects in the British West Indies. But in fact what it led to I would call it a de facto invitation to smuggle. It was so poorly enforced and so widely violated that it is essentially treated as a dead letter.

ED: And it’s clear the British officials, customs officials, have to be winking at this, actually falling asleep and completely OK with it. It’s obvious to everybody what’s going on in these places.

PETER ANDREAS: And they were getting paid off. In the sense, one could argue the corruption had a pacifying effect.

ED: Uh-huh.

PETER ANDREAS: Everybody got something out of it. The customs agents were getting their take, and the merchants were getting what they wished. There was a positive balance of trade and so on. So this was a sustainable status quo for decades.

ED: Peter, when did the good old days give way to the imperial crisis and there’s a crackdown?

PETER ANDREAS: The turning point was really the Seven Years’ War, 1756 to 1763, between the British and the French. And the British won the war, but the war lasted much longer than they expected, and they ended that war broke. And partly the reason it lasted so long is because the otherwise loyal British subjects in the colonies were actually supplying the French, making a lot of money trading with the enemy, treasonous trade if you, while also supplying the British.

So they were making a lot of money on both sides so much so that when that war ended there was actually an economic downturn in the colonies. And coinciding with that downturn in the colonies, The British decided, we’re going to now tighten their grip.

So when the British actually tried to crack down on the smuggling trade and actually extract revenue, that’s when the merchants in the colonies, especially in New England obviously, balked essentially–

ED: Right.

PETER ANDREAS: And not only complained loudly but ultimately contributed to them taking up arms. I don’t want to overstate the case, but I think it’s pretty clear that was an essential ingredient in galvanizing merchant outrage. It’s no surprise that the outrage directed at the Crown wasn’t just the Crown in general but actually very much targeted customs officials. The whole tar and feathering, the people who were tarred and feathered tended to be informants or actual customs officials for the Crown. And what were they doing? They were cracking down often on New England smuggling. And there were other sorts of smuggling going on. It wasn’t just molasses, but arguably it was the molasses trade which was most important.

ED: I’m wondering if you could say that the cause of the American Revolution might be the failure of the British state to enforce its regulations, a demonstration of state incapacity, the British state had attempted to impose a trade regime and did so with only fitful and occasional success?

PETER ANDREAS: That’s a fair reading. Another reading would be that it was actually much more successful when it wasn’t enforcing.

ED: Yes.

PETER ANDREAS: That in fact–

ED: Exactly.

PETER ANDREAS: –the very incapacity to enforce, which actually served lots of interest on all sides, it was the blunder of over stretch to think that you could suddenly change your mind and change the status quo virtually overnight without all kinds of negative repercussions often unintended and unanticipated.

ED: So, Peter, we see that there are escalating grievances that are alienating New England merchants and New England communities from the British Crown as it enforces these acts. How do we get to the point of revolution itself?

PETER ANDREAS: Basically, you had a perfect storm situation where you had onerous trade restrictions, high incentives to engage in evasion of those restrictions, and actual in practice very little capacity to in fact enforce those restrictions. And you add that all up, and it’s going to produce a formidable smuggling problem.

And then if you suddenly change your mind and say, you know what, we’re going to actually quite suddenly and dramatically not just extend our policing reach but actually squeeze our hand in the colonies, it’s perhaps in retrospect not surprising that there was such a backlash against that because for decades it was this sort of overlooked, winked at, tolerated activity, and things changed rather dramatically.

So that has to be part of the story of our founding. It sometimes perhaps provocative to put it front and center in explaining the origins of our country. But frankly, John Adams himself after the American Revolution he put it, quote, “I know not why we should blush to confess that molasses was an essential ingredient in American independence,” unquote. But for whatever reason, those observations, shall we say, haven’t gotten the attention I think it deserves.

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ED: Peter Andreas is the author of Smuggler Nation, How Ilicit Trade Made America.

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