Food Riots and Hyperinflation: How America's Women Won Our War for Independence on the Homefront
The nascent United States is nearly dead only a few years after it was first born--dead, not on the battlefield, but rather economically.
On the homefront, arable land is being destroyed left and right as the British and Continental armies fight back and forth across New England and the mid-Atlantic states. The American dollar, created by Congress just after the Declaration of Independence was ratified, continues to plummet in value thanks in large part to a relentless campaign of British counterfeiting and a rate of inflation that by the end of the 1770’s increases at the staggering rate of 47% each month!
This rate of hyperinflation has given rise to the commonplace term, “As worthless as a Continental,” in reference to the Continental dollar, a phrase that is used by both patriot and loyalist alike, to denote anything, be it literal or intrinsic, that is perceived as having no value whatsoever.
And worst of all foodstuffs and basic necessities are becoming both more and more scarce and more exorbitantly expensive as America’s War for Independence, funded by largely worthless pieces of paper and backed by nothing but good faith drags on.
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| Continental Paper Currency 1776 |
Between the years 1776 and 1779 there were over thirty food riots in major cities across the thirteen colonies. Most of these riots have been organized and led by women, who out of anger, have taken to the streets to assault wealthy merchants whom they accuse of hoarding and overcharging on almost all essential foodstuffs from coffee and tea to flour and meat.
The most famous of these food riots took place in Boston, the cradle of America’s struggle for independence. In New England’s largest city, where most of the men have gone off to war, for either one side or the other, with both inflation and food prices skyrocketing out of control, wives and mothers struggle daily to manage farms and businesses and to feed their children
Add to this, the fact that on a regular basis women are forced to standby and watch as food and livestock are routinely and forcibly requisitioned by both the Continental and British armies and it’s no wonder that their anger and desperation have reached a breaking point.
Over fourteen food riots took place in Boston alone in the three years after the British evacuated the city between 1776 and 1779. The most telling example of the city’s women having to take matters into their own hands to protect themselves from ruthless and unethical price gouging occurred on July 24, 1777: The Boston Coffee Riot.
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| Coffeehouse 1770's |
On that fateful day a mob of angry women flooded the streets of Boston and demanded that one wealthy merchant, a man named Thomas Boylston, charge a more reasonable price for coffee.
Surprisingly, Boylston is considered in all other aspects to be a devout patriot and supporter of the cause of liberty. He is known to donate freely from his own pocket and out of his own inventory both money and foodstuffs to the Continental Army. But over the last three years, since the governing British authority was forced under siege to evacuate Boston, Boylston has been hoarding all coffee shipments that enter the city’s harbor and he has, in turn, made a very handsome profit indeed off the patriotic women of the city. Since the Boston Tea Party of 1773, most Bostonians have, like most freedom loving Americans, taken a strong liking to coffee in lieu of drinking the more traditionally British beverage of tea.
At midday on July 24, 1777 a group of angry women pushing dozens of carts marched down to Boylston’s harbourfront warehouse and demanded that he lower the price of his coffee, sugar and tea and that he allow more of the foodstuffs he had been hoarding to enter the marketplace.
Boylston refused.
At that point, in the words of Abigail Adams, when Boylston stood up in front of his warehouse to block the women's access, “One of them grabbed him by the neck and tossed him into a cart. Upon finding no quarter, he delivered the keys, when they tipped up the cart and discharged him…”
Abigail, wife of America’s 2nd President and Continental Congressman John Adams, then goes on to recount how the women then, “Opened up the warehouse, hoisted the coffee themselves, put it into the trucks and then drove off.”
Interestingly, Thomas Boylston was a cousin of Abigail’s husband John. Infact, Abigail and John in 1772 had named their fifth child Thomas Boylston Adams in honor of, and out of respect for the wealthy Bostonian merchant. But, only five years later in her letters to her husband, Abigail offered no sympathy to her cousin through marriage, citing only that a, “Large concourse of men stood amazed and silent spectators of the whole transaction.”
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| Abigail Adams |
It was reported that the women of Boston freely distributed Boylston’s coffee and sugar to the city’s poor and destitute.
In her work entitled Food Rioters and the American Revolution, historian Barbara Clark Smith points out that, “Excluded from the vote, unqualified to serve as jurors at courts of law…free women were politically disabled by their dependent status…yet women conducted nearly one third of the food riots.”
Barbara Clark Smith then goes on in her scholarly article to point out that the food riots embodied, “[P]ossibilities for political action that resistance and the American Revolution opened up for women…as social and economic actors within the household, neighborhood and marketplace.”
The British, faced with a 3,000 mile long supply line that stretched all the way back across the Atlantic to England itself, and having to deal with all the logistical challenges that such a long supply line entailed, along with having to contend with a malevolent and openly hostile local population, may have early on in the war, realized that the American’s, despite their own inability to deliver a crippling blow to the British army on the battlefield could not completely be defeated militarily either.
For that reason, the crown then sought to launch an economic war through counterfeiting, inflation and simply ravaging the land itself that they hoped would draw support away from the patriot cause. Local merchants and businessmen like Thomas Boylston in Boston, though they may have been American patriots at heart, simply took advantage of what they saw as a unique economic opportunity and unwittingly played into the hands of the British war effort.
Many historians have viewed the food riots of the American Revolution simply as reactions to wartime conditions. It has been said that ordinary Americans, who otherwise supported the patriotic cause on the battlefield, simply lost their faith in the Cause of Liberty when overcome by hunger and economic desperation.
But maybe those historians have gotten it all wrong.
The Food Riots of the American War for Independence, the majority of which were led and organized by our nation’s women, embody, more than almost anything else, the spirit of liberty, freedom and revolution that America’s War for Independence was really all about to begin with.
By seeking to lower prices and by attacking greedy merchants who were more interested in personal gain rather than public good the brave women of America won the war for the United States on the homefront, while George Washington and the Continental Army, with the aid of foreign support most notably from France, Spain and Holland defeated the British army on the battlefield.
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