THERE IS DEATH IN THE POT - The University of Texas at Arlington

CHAPTER 1
“VITAL BLOOD”: THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY ABSTENTION CAMPAIGN
In 1791, Ferdinand Bayard, his wife, and infant son escaped the upheaval of
revolutionary France to tour the United States. Bayard avoided the cities, which he
described as places “where everything is imitation, where the inhabitants, communicating
constantly with Europe, remain still imbued with English prejudices, and reveal in their
customs as in their opinions, the traces of the irons which they had the courage to break.”
In the Shenandoah Valley, Bayard found what he described as a “promised land,” where
dependence on the land liberated Americans from aristocracy and European influence. 1
Imagine, then, his wonder at encountering that British female ritual, the tea party, in rural
Bath, Virginia:
They go to tea-parties at five o’clock. The strictest formality is observed
there. All the ladies, decked out in their finest, are arranged in a
semicircle on the right of the mistress of the house. A deep silence
follows the entrance of each invited guest; and all those ladies are as grave
as judges on the bench. Vessels of silver contain the tea and the hot water.
The hot water is used to weaken the tea, or to wash the cups. A servant
brings in, on a silver tray or a tea service, the cup, the sugar bowl, the
cream pitcher, round slices of buttered bread and slices of smoke-cured
1 Ferdinand M. Bayard, Travels of a Frenchman in Maryland and Virginia with a Description of
Philadelphia and Baltimore in 1791 or Travels in the Interior of the United States, to Bath, Winchester, in
the Valley of the Shenandoah, etc., etc. during the Summer of 1791, trans. Ben C. McCary (Williamsburg,
Va.: Edwards Brothers, Inc., 1950), 1. For more about Bayard’s American tour, see also Warren R.
Hofstra, The Planting of New Virginia: Settlement and Landscape in the Shenandoah Valley (Baltimore:
The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), 336-337.
2