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 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2025), McDonald serves up the story of how coffee awakened the fledgling nation’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.
“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.”
A museum studies major at the Columbian College of Arts and Sciences, 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.
At GW, McDonald learned how to tell stories through material culture when written words are absent. “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.
Indies and consumed by Americans.
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.
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.”