19552 GW Mag 26_Final_singles - Flipbook - Page 45
As a museum studies major at GW, McDonald learned how
to tell stories through material culture. “Objects fill in the gaps
where written words weren’t kept or collected,” she said.
“They are an important lens through which to understand
societies, their history, beliefs, social structures and identities.”
In coffee, she found a subject that historians have often
overlooked. Numerous studies of early Atlantic trade have
focused on sugar or rum, especially in connection with the
transatlantic slave routes. But despite coffee’s widespread
consumption—imports grew from 4 million pounds in 1789
to 53 million just five years later—it’s usually viewed as a
“stepsister” to tea, McDonald said.
But, she maintains, “the rejection of tea is really at the
heart of the American story.” Tea was too expensive for most
colonists to drink on a regular basis. Coffee, on the other hand,
appears in working-class diaries of biscuit bakers, mariners,
Quaker merchants and even enslaved laborers.
The much cheaper coffee, however, tied the British
North American colonies and later the early United States
to economies outside of their boundaries. John Adams
himself warned against this reliance on foreign trade.
When Abigail Adams wrote to him in Philadelphia about
the women’s coffee protest, he implored “the females [to]
leave off their attachment to coffee.”
“We must bring ourselves to live upon the produce of
our own country,” Adams wrote.
The new nation didn’t listen. By the early 19th century,
the U.S. made more money trading coffee than it did from
sugar, tea and wine combined—dependent on access to a
commodity that it could not grow for itself. Coffee also made
America reliant on slavery-based fields and plantations from
the West Indies to Brazil. “Coffee and slavery are very much
intertwined stories,” McDonald said.
Arabica coffee plants,
as shown in this 1774
illustration, were cultivated
in the West Indies and
consumed by Americans.
As an historian, McDonald found that capturing the
American coffee story took time to percolate. Unlike sugar
or wine, the coffee economy lacked large-scale merchants
with well-organized balance books. Instead, McDonald spent
21 years researching in locales from Philadelphia to Jamaica
while poring over stacks of archival documents—like shipping
lists, customs papers, plantation records, newspapers ads and
diaries. “It took a lot of patience and a lot of persistence—
and a lot of coffee,” she said.
In the end, McDonald returned to Adams for a favorite
revolutionary coffee tale. After a grueling horseback ride
through the Massachusetts backcountry, an exhausted
Adams stopped at an inn and asked for tea that had been
“honestly smuggled.” The proprietress turned him down.
“No sir, we have renounced all tea in this place,” she said.
“But I can make you coffee.” Adams then “drank coffee every
afternoon.” He didn’t particularly like it, McDonald recounts.
But as a sacrifice for his new nation, he “borne it very well.”
“U.S. citizens have long seen
themselves as an independent
and industrious people…
Coffee flips our idea
of independence on
its head.”
— MICHELLE CRAIG MCDONALD, MA ’94,
DIRECTOR, LIBRARY & MUSEUM AT THE
AMERICAN PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY
GW Arts & Sciences | ALUMNI & DONORS | 45
