19552 GW Mag 26_Final_singles - Flipbook - Page 44
Brewing History:
Alumna Stirs Coffee’s
Revolutionary Roots
Early American coffeehouses, like
this one in an 1876 drawing, operated
as businesses, banks, bars and
restaurants. (Illustrations courtesy
American Philosophical Society)
Historian Michelle Craig McDonald, MA ’94,
reveals coffee’s surprising place in America’s
story of independence—and interdependence.
CALL IT THE BOSTON COFFEE PARTY.
On a July morning in 1777, a crowd of women gathered
in front of a Boston warehouse. It was just a year after
the Declaration of Independence and two years into the
Revolutionary War. The city-under-siege was strangled by
British taxes and supply chain shortages. The restless colonial
women demanded the shopkeeper hand over desperately-need
provisions—-not muskets or saltpeter, but coffee.
“We’re so used to hearing about the Tea Party—but
this is the Coffee Party,” said Michelle Craig McDonald,
MA ’94, director of the Library & Museum at the American
Philosophical Society (APS) in Philadelphia.
In her book Coffee Nation: How One Commodity Transformed
the Early United States, McDonald serves up the story of how
coffee awakened the fledgling country’s revolutionary spirits.
From the first coffee grinders carried on the Mayflower to
the slavery-based plantations of the Caribbean and South
America, McDonald describes coffee, for better or worse,
as a staple of the American legacy.
George and Martha Washington drank it. So did John
Adams—reluctantly. Jefferson served it at Monticello and
Ben Franklin sampled it in France. Throughout the colonies,
coffeehouses were hot beds of revolutionary fervor, hosting
debates over Stamp Acts and Townshend Duties. Philadelphia’s
first coffeehouse opened in 1703, Boston’s in the 1690s. They
operated as businesses, banks, even bars.
44 | www.columbian.gwu.edu
“Coffee is part of the story of America,” McDonald said.
From founding fathers to provincial patriots, “they all drank it.”
For McDonald, whose research focuses on North American
and Caribbean trade during the 18th and 19th centuries, coffee
also brews up a challenge to traditional interpretations of
the American Revolution—and the American character.
Colonial coffee was mostly produced in the Caribbean.
The drink’s profitability and popularity thrust the U.S. into
the global economy. By the mid-19th century, America
dominated coffee consumption and trade—despite every
bean brewed by mainland colonists coming from
somewhere else.
“U.S. citizens have long seen themselves as an independent
and industrious people,” McDonald said. “In a sense, coffee
flips our idea of independence on it on its head. Coffee isn’t
a story of independence—it’s one of interdependence.”
Percolating Patriotism
For McDonald, her role with the Library & Museum at the
American Philosophical Society is a culmination of a 30-year
career as an historian, educator and administrator—even if,
as she joked, “I’m neither a librarian nor a philosopher.”
McDonald has worked at universities, museums and historic
sites from Colonial Williamsburg to the African American
Heritage Museum of Southern New Jersey. At APS, she
curates over 14 million pages of historical manuscripts
including handwritten copies of the Declaration of
Independence and the original journals of Lewis and Clark.
