A Split in the Merchants’ Club in 1771

On Tuesday, 13 Aug 1771, John Adams went into Boston for a weekly meeting of one of his gentlemen’s clubs and discovered that most of the club wasn’t there.

He wrote in his diary:

Spent the Evening at [Hannah] Cordis’s, the British Coffee house.—In the front Room, towards the long Wharfe, where the Merchants Clubb has met this twenty Years. It seems there is a Schism in that Church—a Rent in that Garment—a Mutiny in that Regiment, and a large De­tachment has decamped, and marched over the Way, to [Joseph] Ingersols.

This Evening The Commissary and Speaker, and Speaker and Commissary, Mr. [Thomas] Cushing was present. The Clerk of the House Mr. [Samuel] Adams, Mr. [James] Otis, Mr. John Pitts, Dr. [Joseph] Warren, Mr. [William] Molineux, Mr. Josa. Quincy, and myself were present.

The men left at the British Coffee House were the most politically aggressive members of the Merchants’ Club. In fact, most of those men weren’t even merchants—they were lawyers (Otis, Quincy, John Adams himself), a doctor (Warren), and a full-time politician (Samuel Adams).

Of the remainder, Cushing was pretty busy with the two high provincial offices Adams tagged him with. (Did Adams’s repetition of “Commissary and Speaker, and Speaker and Commissary” hint at some disapproval of dual office-holding?) Molineux appears to have supported himself by managing Charles Ward Apthorp’s local property while setting up a cloth factory. That left only John Pitts concerned full-time with imperial trade. (He would become a selectman in 1773-1777.)

John Adams’s other diary entries for August 1771 show that Otis’s behavior was becoming erratic. He had acted “quite wild at the Bar Meeting” the previous week. Otis had been reelected to his old seat in the Massachusetts General Court in May, but by November the authorities were stepping in. So some members of the Merchants Club might have decamped to get away from Otis.

In general, there was not much support for radical, confrontational politics in late 1771 simply because there was less to confront. The tariff on tea was the only remaining Townshend duty. There were no troops stationed in the center of town. The issues of judicial salaries hadn’t surfaced.

My big question is whether John Hancock was at Ingersoll’s Bunch of Grapes tavern with the “large Detachment” of merchants or had skipped both meetings. In this period Gov. Thomas Hutchinson perceived enough daylight between Hancock and Adams to believe he could win the young merchant over to his side. That didn’t happen, but maybe evenings like this suggested it might.

What Was the British Coffee-House Serving?

On Tuesday I mentioned the British Coffee-House, a landmark in pre-Revolutionary Boston where the Long Wharf met King Street. James Otis, Jr., and Customs Commissioner John Robinson had a violent tussle there in September 1769 which left Otis bleeding from a severe head wound.

Folks might wonder what a Boston coffee-house served in 1769. Kenyan dark roast? Shade-grown Colombian? Capuccino with a sprinkle of cinnamon? What did colonial Bostonians expect to find when they went into the British Coffee-House?

The short answer is:

booze.

My source for these remarks is a book by Boston-area historian David W. Conroy: In Public Houses: Drink and the Revolution of Authority in Colonial Massachusetts. It's a terrific study of a single aspect of eighteenth-century New England life—drinking establishments—that comes up with insights on changes in social policy, centers of political influence, and commerce.

David looked at two major sources to assess how much liquor coffee-houses served:

• province records of who paid the most excise taxes, therefore who had sold the most alcohol.
• probate inventories of the major coffee-house and tavern owners.

In particular, he examined records related to the Crown Coffee House, the most elaborately appointed tavern in Boston in the early 18th century. The owner from 1714 to 1725 was a man from Britain named Thomas Selby. At his death he owned two periwigs, “a number of coats and waistcoats, one of silk damask and one with gold buttons,” twelve shirts, and three pairs of silk stockings. So the Crown was one classy joint.

Excise taxes show that "Selby sold more distilled alcohol in the 1710s than any other tavernkeeper in Boston," David writes. Furthermore, “Selby’s inventory of alcohol, as opposed to coffee, is evidence that even genteel coffeehouses sold far more rum and wine than coffee.” At his death in 1725, he owned more than £1000 worth of wine, rum, brandy, and other liquors. Selby owned no fewer than eight silver punch bowls. In contrast, he owned only 38 pounds of coffee, a single copper coffee pot on a stand, and 32 "coffee dishes." We have to be careful about comparing applejack and oranges because we have the monetary value of the alcohol and the weight of the coffee, but it's obvious that Selby's coffeehouse sold a lot of liquor, and really functioned as a tavern for the upper class.

As for the later British Coffee-House, at his death proprietor Cord Cordis left 100 gallons of rum and 184 gallons of Madeira wine, plus 72 beer and wine glasses. There's no comparable figure on coffee, but it's obvious that "coffee-house" really meant "fancy and expensive bar." No wonder Robinson and Otis started swinging at each other's heads.