Coffee Nation

Did coffee fuel the Revolutionary War? If not, is it possible to imagine daily life in Revolutionary cities like Philadelphia without an afternoon cup at a coffee shop on every street corner? A step above the common tavern, coffee houses were bustling places to strike business deals, consider real estate offers, and hear the latest political news. Along the Delaware River, at the corner of Front and Market Streets, Revolutionary politicians, merchants, and sea captains visited the London Coffee House to participate in public auctions of property, including enslaved people.   

Author and American Philosophical Society Librarian and Director of the Library and Museum Michelle Craig McDonald presents the history of coffee, from personal drinking habits to global market trends, in Coffee Nation: How One Commodity Transformed the Early United States. She argues that coffee’s distribution, not production, was central to North America’s coffee business: its profitability and expansion relied on securing and maintaining ties first with the Caribbean and then Latin America. Just as one consumer might prefer single-origin coffee today, coffee’s origins and ultimate financial success across the Atlantic world has impacted political beliefs and business decisions for over 250 years. It became a global commodity for United States businesses by the 1830s and energizing ideals and economics for independence movements around the world.  

Read an excerpt from Coffee Nation about the world of these networks, as McDonald interprets historical accounts from newspapers, privateer ships, and merchants’ records across Africa, North America, and South America. She maps Jamaica’s influence on Philadelphia’s competitive coffee house scene and how coffee fueled debates about American independence in 1776 in the neighborhood surrounding the Museum of the American Revolution.  

Excerpt

These accounts are only a few among hundreds of prize and privateer notices that appeared in North American newspapers between 1755 and 1775 whose seizures included coffee. Indeed, privateering had become so lucrative that Philadelphia's officials came to suspect merchants of using it as a ruse to dispose of not just prize goods but also illegal, smuggled wares. Consequently, harbor authorities reasoned that if they could not catch such smuggling at sea, it might be possible to do so at the coffeehouse, where most public auctions took place. The city council drew up detailed instructions for those managing and overseeing public sales, who were often called vendue masters, requiring them to take an oath (or affirmation if they were Quakers) not to "receive or take into possession or dispose of by public sale, or otherwise, any goods, wares, or merchandize, that [they may have reason to believe have been imported contrary to the rules governing foreign trade." Eleven men oversaw enforcement of these regulations and were empowered to conduct surprise inspections of any invoices and goods they deemed suspicious, and to halt any sales that lacked appropriate documentation. Nevertheless, efforts to circumvent the law continued, and even those sworn to uphold it were not immune from accusation. "The Officers of the Revenue in North America, the Naval Officers particularly are very blameable," wrote the authors of one petition decrying North American collusion with non-British colonies. "All our Colonies," they continued, "would trade independent of the Mother country if they could."  

Coffee also frequently featured in sales that offloaded overstocked, out-of-date, or damaged merchandise, or those intended to raise quick cash to pay off debts. In these circumstances, consignments of beans shared the auction block with just about everything from stem to stern of the vessels that had transported them. In 1774, for example, the owners of the ship Medusa and brigantine Seven Brothers sold the vessels' sails, anchors, and cables "by Public Vendue at Mr. Hamilton's Wharf" while their cargoes of "sugars, coffee, and other effects" could be "seen at James's Coffee House" at three o'clock that same afternoon. Likewise, Samuel Howell offered "a few casks and bags of old Coffee" at auction in December 1765. Sometimes coffee even appeared for sale alongside the enslaved people who might have contributed to its planting and harvesting, and who were transshipped from the Caribbean along with the products of their forced labor, as evidenced by one image of the Old London Coffee House…  and the myriad advertisements that appeared in various sites announcing the availability of people and goods for sale.  

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Public markets, wholesale warehouses, auctions, and vendue stores were all crucial intermediate stages in coffee’s dissemination to colonial consumers, but retail sales – the final step in its journey from port to pot—offer the best evidence for how widely and rapidly evidence for how widely and rapidly North Americans came to depend on number and kind during these years across all colonies, and they also grew the beverage as part of their day-to-day lives. Retail spaces multiplied in both increasingly specialized. Again, Philadelphia, with its especially strong connections to the trade, provides the best example. Along with the wholesale and retail outlets of the city's large merchants, scores of middlemen and middlewomen began to infiltrate the coffee business as grocers, store owners, and shopkeepers. Although their inventories may have overlapped on occasion, distinctions between types of coffee vendors emerged that make it possible to identify to whom they sold the product and what other goods they offered alongside it.  

Grocers like Philadelphia's Isaac Gray specialized in the sale of nonperishable foodstuffs. Advertisements for his shop, which stood on Chestnut Street near Strawberry Alley, varied little from the mid-1770s through the early 1780s and featured "coffee, pepper, chocolate, loaf and muscovado sugars, indigo, [and] spices," as well as "Old Madeira, Lisbon, Mountain and Teneriffe wines," and "claret, red port, and sack wine." Occasionally he included "old Jamaica spirit" and brandy as well as imported English beer and locally produced "Philadelphia bottled beer and cidar" in his inventory, and less often he offered small selections of cheese and pickles.  

The scale and scope of Gray's inventory resembled those of the seventeen other grocers who, according to the city tax lists, operated within the Philadelphia city limits in 1775. Most of these storekeepers were men, but not all. Rebecca Robinson advertised an almost identical stock of coffee and other imported goods in her grocery just two blocks south of Gray's business and "about mid-way between Front and Second Streets." Inventories such as these matched most closely those offered by wholesale merchants, and so these grocers were the branch of the retail sector most directly affected by the rising number of wholesale/retail warehouses and vendue stores, like that of Levi Hollingsworth, and they made their resentment of the wholesalers encroachment on their clientele known. "Every Merchant is a shopkeeper & every Shopkeeper is a Merchant," read one grocer's lament appearing in Print in 1775. But their concerns probably meant little to cost-conscious customers, who were happy to walk a tew extra yards or forgo the fancy displays on grocer's shelves for the chance to save money by buying direct from the importer.  

Forty-two Philadelphians listed their occupation as store owner or store keeper in the 1775 tax lists, distinguishing themselves from grocers by their sale of durable goods alongside consumables. George Habacker, for exam-ple, stocked coffee, sugars, teas, and spirits along with lumber ("good oak scantling) and "sundry other" dry goods in his store. John Mitchell advertised his coffee stock beside an extensive variety of textiles, including "wide Irish linens" as well as "sheetings, a general assortment of Damasks, diaper and huckback table linen," which he had "determined to keep a constant sup-ply" for sale at "the most reasonable terms." In addition to establishments like those of Habacker and Mitchell, which can perhaps best be described as general stores, some shopkeepers concentrated on a particular commodity or range of goods, such as wine and spirits, books, or dry goods. Yet coffee could be found even in these specialty stores. Beans were sold alongside hair powder, linseed oil, hooks, thimbles, and "a great variety of Queen's ware, of the newest Fashion," as well as silk stockings, worsted breeches, split bone knives and forks, and "an elegant assortment of blue, white and enameled china bowls," in the dry goods stores of Robert Caldwell and William Sitgreaves. And coffee, along with Jamaican spirits, West Indian rum, and Spanish sugars, as well as an assortment of "dry goods, imported in the last vessels from France and St. Eustatia, and among which are a great variety of coarse and fine linens," comprised the stock of Miller & Taylor's store. Even Thomas Anderton, owner of the Philadelphia-based London Book Store, who dealt principally in primers, prints, gentlemen's desks, and traveling cases, sold coffee from the back of his shop, "by the barrel or smaller quantity."  

Coffee's increasing availability at a range of retail outlets is hardly surprising given how much of it was imported into North America from the middle of the eighteenth century onward, but the escalating number of those involved in supporting the spread of this habit is still striking. The number of advertisers selling coffee in various newspapers increased by 25 percent between 1765 and 1770 and by an additional 60 percent by 1775. Even between 1775 and 1780, while a war was being waged, the number of vendors continued to grow apace, particularly notable since nonimportation agreements followed by the cessation of trade with the British West Indies had eliminated the city's chief prerevolutionary sources of coffee supply.  

Tracking coffee's sellers on a map of colonial Philadelphia gives even more credence to the commodity's omnipresence. Between 1765 and 1780, scores of grocers and storekeepers advertised coffee for sale in Philadelphia's leading and most popular weekly newspapers, the Pennsylvania Gazette and the Pennsylvania Packet.' Table 1 maps these vendors in five-year intervals between 1765 and 1780. It is based on the notices of ninety-three different shopkeepers, operating in all the city's nine wards, who collectively posted more than a thousand notices of coffee for sale, and similar patterns appear in other ports up and down the North American seaboard.  

That the number of advertisements for coffee was rising quickly is one finding, but just as important is what these notices reveal about where it was sold and, by extension, to whom. In 1765 a third of these sellers were based in the High Street, Chestnut, and Walnut Wards, the districts closest to the city's ports and the sites of its largest public markets, which is to be expected. Roughly another third came from the adjacent North, Middle, and South Wards, which contained not only businesses but also some of the city's most affluent residential neighborhoods, which is also not surprising. But coffee consumption was not confined to the commercial arena and the homes of elite citizenry, since the Upper and Lower Delaware Wards, which accounted for a quarter of all coffee retailing venues, were working-class neighborhoods.  

Among these were sailors, longshoremen, and other occupations affiliated with shipping and maritime trade, who may have developed their taste for coffee abroad. But even Mulberry and Dock Wards, which contained some of the smallest and poorest homes in the city, and housed a significant number of single or widowed women as well as most of Philadelphia's free Black residents, had at least four stores that sold coffee. So while the principal retail districts and more well-heeled residential neighborhoods dominated the retail market numerically, coffee vendors, and by extension coffee's drinkers, ranged far more broadly throughout the city. + In other words, what Table 1 indicates is that anyone who lived in any part of Philadelphia and who wanted to buy coffee could find it within easy walking distance, and that even the city's most marginal citizens did so in large enough numbers to sustain retail operations in their locales. Moreover, these findings are, at best, conservative estimates of coffee's ubiquity and availability, since not all coffee vendors would have advertised in the newspapers. Smaller grocers or store owners, unable or unwilling to spend money on marketing, as well as transient and petty vendors of all sorts, would have been responsible for an even broader distribution and consumption of the beverage.”  

Craig McDonald, Michelle, Coffee Nation: How One Commodity Transformed the Early United States. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2025). pp. 62-77.