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

specialized tea brewing equipment. 5 Tea drinking also opened the market for mahogany
and other exotic woods, which were used to manufacture matching tables and chairs as
well as smaller pieces such as kettle stands and locking tea boxes. 6 Bayard described in
detail the tea equipment of the Virginia tea party noting, for example, that the tea pot was
made of silver rather than the more common porcelain. 7 Bayard also highlighted
women’s behavior at the tea table: men and women both consumed tea, yet women
wielded the teapot and controlled the tea ritual. The tea ritual and its related luxuries had
spread even to the peripheries of the Atlantic world, as Bayard noted. 8 An important site
for sugar consumption, the tea table became the focus of the slave trade debate when
eighteenth-century British abolitionists urged consumers to boycott slave-grown sugar. 9
Bayard’s visit to Bath coincided with the beginning of the organized abstention
movement in Britain. Shifting the site of debate about the African slave trade from
Parliament to the tea table, abstainers placed the tea ritual at the center of an intense
5 Mintz, Sweetness and Power, 67; Wees, English, Irish, and Scottish Silver, 267. See also
Midgley, Feminism and Empire, 46. Midgley suggests the spread of the tea ritual, which often included the
consumption of pastries and other baked goods, aided the popularity of cookbooks such as Hannah Glasse’s
The Compleat Confectioner: or the Whole Art of Confectionary, first published in 1760.
6 Midgley, Feminism and Empire, 46; Jennifer L. Anderson, “Nature’s Currency: The Atlantic
Mahogany Trade, 1720-1830,” Ph.D. diss., New York University, 2007, 415.
7 By mid-century, demand for porcelain tea pots outpaced silver though tea sets frequently
included both porcelain and silver pieces, even in upper class households. Wees, English, Irish, and
Scottish Silver, 269.
8 At another tea party in western Virginia, Bayard noted the sharp distinctions between the
luxurious equipment of the tea ritual and the otherwise primitive conditions of the home: “We were served
tea in beautiful china cups, in a parlor the floor which was full of holes, and where daylight came in
through cracks in the walls. The sugar-bowl, the cream-pitcher, and everything was tastefully arranged on
a round, and extremely clean, mahogany table.” Bayard, Travels of a Frenchman, 35.
9 “Boycott” is actually a late nineteenth-century term. See Monroe Friedman, Consumer Boycotts:
Effecting Change through the Marketplace and the Media (New York: Routledge, 1999).
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