“Governor, you might as well take half a dozen grains”

Here’s another sample of what’s reported to be tea from the Boston Tea Party on display in a museum.

Jonathan Lane of Revolution 250 clued me into this little vial of tea leaves last week.

It’s at the Seward House Museum in Auburn, New York. This was the home of William H. Seward, U.S. senator and secretary of state under Abraham Lincoln.

In 1841, when Seward was the governor of New York, he made a visit to Boston. Among the notable places he visited was the Massachusetts Historical Society, then located in the Provident Institution for Savings building on Tremont Street beside the King’s Chapel Burying-Ground.

Seward’s Memoir of His Life and Selections from His Letters, 1831-1846, edited by his son Frederick, described that visit:

…a morning passed in the State-House, and an afternoon at the Athenæum and Historical Society, with their Revolutionary relics, swords, and flags, letters of the colonial patriots, and a sealed bottle of tea.

The old gentleman who was pointing out the curiosities said: “Here is some of the tea which was thrown overboard in the harbor. A broken chest floated ashore near the residence of an old lady, who, though a patriot, thought it a great pity that so much good tea should be wasted, and so locked the ‘treasure-trove’ in her closet. She was forced to use it sparingly and privately, however, to avoid the observation of her neighbors. So it was not all gone before the event became historic and the tea a precious relic. This is some of it.”

That was most likely the tea that the Rev. Thaddeus Mason Harris donated to the M.H.S. before he died in 1842. However, the story the Sewards recorded is different. The label on Harris’s tea now says those leaves were “gathered up on the Shore of Dorchester Neck,” suggesting they were loose instead of in a chest, and thus probably undrinkable. No mention of an old lady or a broken chest.

The Seward account continues with the “old gentleman” at the M.H.S.:

Just as he was saying this, the bottle slipped from his hand and broke; the tea was scattered on the floor. Hastily gathering it up, and putting the parcel back upon the shelf, he remarked: “There is none lost, and it won’t be hurt by it, but since the bottle is broken, Governor, you might as well take half a dozen grains as mementos of Boston.”

The precious leaves were put into a diminutive vial and taken to Albany.

That seems like a gracious gift for a visiting dignitary, but hardly a good testament to how the M.H.S. of 1841 preserved its historical artifacts.