Few among us have never brightened a morning with a cup of tea or coffee. While the caffeinated beverages-tea, coffee, chocolate, cola, cocoa, and yaupon-are a part of our daily lives, their history is little known and less taught. In this paper we may see how the history of tea forms a part of the history of America and especially of the South. The English preference for tea over coffee is evident among the antebellum planters in the South, but the modern Southener drinks coffee to the almost total exclusion of tea. The reasons for this change are the subject of the work at hand. Things changed and people with them, and though tea and coffee changed but little, the ways in which people used them did. Our historical inquiry covers the period from 1850 to 1930, from secession to depression and including the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the Gilded Age. We may begin with 'pots and bottles', with the archaeologist James Deetz and the English tea ceremony.1
We are taught in school that the American colonists drank tea until the Revolution, at that time rejecting it for coffee. The legend of the Boston Tea Party, with lesser-known sequels as far away as South Carolina, reinforces this historical assertion. However, a look at household records and archaeological findings makes us realize that things are not so simple. The food historian David Evans tells us flatly that the most popular of the cups that cheer was tea until the Civil War.2 A Charleston merchant, Daniel Saylor, records the sale of tea by the chest in the 1780s, but he sold no coffee at all.3 Tea drinking actually seems to have undergone a transformation in the late eighteenth and early ninteenth centuries. James Deetz mentions that household inventories from this time show unprecedented complete sets of creamware, stoneware, and porcelain consisting of teapots, cups, and saucers with holders for cream and sugar. These sets of teaware he interprets as meaning that the "full-blown English tea ceremony" was practised in America for the first time. Henry Hobhouse speaks of the large quantities of Chinese export porcelain that came to England as ballast in the tea trade, and of the transformation of Chinese porcelain in response to English needs. Teacups were provided with handles because the English added sugar and needed hot tea to make it dissolve.4 A similar phenomenon may have taken place in America, as porcelain became so cheap that ordinary pottery was often more expensive. Rodris Roth has discussed the social significance of the tea ceremony in American cities in the eighteenth century, but I wish to confine my argument to the nineteenth and twentieth.5
Tea is native to China, but spread by the first millenium AD to all of East Asia, and in the seventeenth century to Europe. Strangers to Chinese and Japanese customs, the Europeans added milk to tea and then sugar.6 Tea was a long time taking root. In England its adoption is credited to Catherine of Braganza or Anna, Duchess of Bedford.7 These ladies are said to have taken tea in the afternoon with pastries, a custom that the British continue today. I shall refer to this practice hereafter as the English-style tea ceremony, to distinguish it from the Japanese tea ceremony, which has its origins in Zen Buddhism and the glorification of beauty as its object. The Japanese tea ceremony has been the subject of anthropological study, notably by Anderson.8 It has been argued that the English have no true ceremony of tea in the same sense. But if the Japanese tea ceremony is the only tea ceremony, then certainly no other people on earth practice a tea ritual. The Chinese and Korean tea rituals have been amply documented, while Goodwin, Hobhouse, and many others argue that the English practice of afternoon tea, while not the same as the Japanese rite, is in every sense of the word a ceremony.9 Anderson sees in Japanese tea ceremony a ritual that reaffirms the world, and Schivelbusch an expression of bourgeois class consciousness.10 The anthropologist Sidney Mintz discusses the transformation of the English diet with the introduction of what he calls the 'tea complex': the replacement of one or two meals daily with tea, jam, and bread-substituting addictive sugar and tea for more filling vegetable foods.11 As consumption of tea and sugar increased, the older use of alcohol faded slightly, and men as well as women sat round the tea table. It was this tea ritual-the gathering for tea in the afternoon, accompanied always by sweet pastries and sometimes by meat or savory foods, presided over by women and adhering to decorum, that I propose here was transmitted to the American South and its plantation aristocracy.
It may make sense here to describe the English-style tea ceremony.12 The tea may be a gathering of friends and relatives or a formal affair announced by engraved invitations, but at any but the largest teas(which are in any case outside the scope of this work), the hostess, with her servants if she had any, would make pastries and bake bread, or buy these things from a store. When the guests arrived, she would boil water, using it to warm the pot before she put the leaves in. The choice of teas was never as wide as today, but there was some leeway-we will explore the connotations of tea types later. The pot was usually porcelain, or silver for the very best company, and the same went for the cups. With the tea came sugar and milk, and usually lemon as well. To the warmed pot the hostess or her helper added one spoonful of leaves per cup and one for the pot, the poured boiling water over the leaves. Three minutes usually meant that the tea had been brewed, and could be poured. In England the pourer is called 'mum' and is usually the hostess, but I have not seen this custom in America. The guests added sugar and milk or lemon. Lemon and milk are never added together. The cakes or bread then come round, their elaborateness depending on the circumstances.
This summary cannot convey the immaterial part of the tea ritual-the creation and re-creation of the social world of the tea-takers. Like the reading of novels, tea was a feminine pastime-in the words of Nancy Scherer-Hughes, a gendered work. But with so few outlets, it is little wonder that nineteenth-century women clustered round the tea table. Women of all classes took tea-Frederick Law Olmsted gives us an example-but the elaborate tea ritual was the prerogative of the upper crust.13 It will serve us to consider just who it was that sat at antebellum tea tables.
Wilbur J. Cash, in his The Mind of the South, theorized that while the myth of a southern antebellum plantation aristocracy was just that, that there had been three places in the South where large landholdings had passed down through several generations of a family and in which the landowners had become distanced from poorer whites-areas which he called "pocket aristocracies".14 These were the ricelands of South Carolina and Georgia, centered on Charleston and Savannah, the southern part of Louisiana, centered on New Orleans, and the northern 'camel's hump' of Virginia, including a little of Maryland. It is my contention that the English-style tea ceremony was practiced among the aristocrats of Virginia, Carolina, and Georgia. I shall also argue that the Civil War and Reconstruction ended the practice as well as so many other leisure activities, and that the New South of the Gilded Age and the early twentieth century was ignorant of the tea ceremony.
Of the three plantation aristocracies, that of the Louisiana bayous was the least likely to embrace the English tea ceremony. Coming into the US with their French language and culture intact, the Creoles clung to the French style of coffee making in which milk and strong coffee mix in equal proportions, often with chicory added. 15 This coffee is still served in New Orleans today.
The rice coast of Georgia and South Carolina had a much more Anglophilic culture. Fanny Kemble, the British actress who married a Georgia planter, laments that even the wealthy on the Georgia coast lived as did peasants in her native land.16 She records two mentions of tea. One is a passing reference to tea made with the local water being of excellent quality. The other is in the chant of her slaves as they rowed her from one island to another. They chant of 'gentlemen in the parlor, drinking wine and cordial/ ladies in the hall, drinking tea and coffee". Kemble, as a British immigrant, naturally drank tea, but it seems that others drank it as well. Susie King Taylor , a Civil War laundress, writes of tea drinking among Geechees who served in the Union Army.17 The ledger of some South Carolina Huguenots may give us a clue as to who.
In the records of the Porcher family of Middleton, South Carolina, the household accounts describe purchases of small amounts of coffee every four to six months, but the doctor's family bought gunpowder and hyson, two types of green tea, in five, six, or twelve-pound lots every month or so.18 Though French by their name, they owned silver tea services and bought porcelain tea ware. They also sent their daughters to a female academy, where manners were as important as grammar. The Porchers owned sixty slaves and were therefore at the uppermost levels of society. The use of green tea in preference to black is a folkway inherited from England that persisted until the end of the nineteenth century. Green tea was also the base for highly alcoholic punches made with liquor and fruit juice. Mary Chesnut recalls numerous teas taken with fellow ladies of the Confederate government, and the Hammonds of Redcliffe Plantation also enjoyed afternoon tea, as their letters testify.19 Men seldom join the ladies, being too busy losing the war to sit at tea. Significantly enough, Mary Chesnut was also fond of laudanum, the preferred drug of the Victorian housewife. Here we see another aspect of the tea ceremony and of the chatting over coffee that has taken its place. Etiquette, the taking of tea, and the use of the language of flowers were all gendered works - tasks that reaffirm peoples' expectations of sex roles , and also ways to keep women occupied 'without really educating them". Seen by modern feminists as vehicles of oppression, the womanly arts were something more-a way for women to carve out a sphere of influence, however small, and to build a base on which to establish more lasting achievements. The efforts toward moral reform and suffrage grew out of such beginnings. A man who wanted the ladies' approval must be a gentleman-as polite at the tea table as they were.
The pocket aristocracy of Northern Virginia, all the more English than the Charleston rice planters, were all the more given to tea. Letitia Burwell, in the memoir of her plantation childhood, happily recalls a tea table laden with many kinds of meat and pastry, indicating the English-style tea ceremony.20 She states that her family had been in Virginia longer than a hundred years, thus placing these wealthy planters firmly in Cash's "plantocracy". The same lady speaks of tea with Robert E. Lee, at whose table the Mount Vernon silver was displayed. Here three icons of the Southern Way meet: the Anglophilic rite of afternoon tea, the passion for old silver, and the reverence for Robert E. Lee. The records of a plantation from Spottsylvania County, Virginia, and a general store from Halifax give us a good chance to compare class attitudes. The Halifax store of James Easley, in Halifax County on the Carolina border, sold much more "Java coffee" than tea.21 In 1853, Mr Nelson Purding, a regular customer, bought three or four pounds of coffee every two or three months, indicating daily use. Coffee and loaf sugar or molasses were very often bought together, reinforcing Mintz's thesis about the rise of sugar as part of a tea complex. William Lewis, a planter in Spottsylvania County, was certainly a member of the ruling class, owning 82 slaves. He also owned two copper tea kettles, two dollars worth of china, three coffee pots, and seven silver tea spoons worth six dollars, evidence of the tea ritual.22 Note that the china, probably export porcelain judging by its value, was old. It would have been carefully treasured or it would not have lasted so long.
A more detailed account of English-style afternoon tea comes from Weyanoke Plantation on the James River.23 Ransom True tells us that bohea, a black tea, was the most common, but that on special occasions, the planters served hyson or the costlier young hyson, both China green teas. This brings to our attention the curious fact that the English and Americans preferred green tea to black until about 1900, though green tea is almost unknown today.24 The reason for this is unclear, but must be considered as a part of the decline of tea as a folkway. The dislocations of World War One caused the breakdown of older societal norms, but it may be a little farfetched to connect tea ways in the "camel's hump" of Northern Virginia to Wilfred Owen's doomed youth. A store catalog from Northern Virginia dated 1845 and a British Tea Cyclopedia preserved in Charleston confirm that green tea was as common as black or more so in the American teapot.25 Certainly the Chinese and Japanese prefer green tea to black, but green tea's decline is heard to explain. The Cyclopedia advises tea merchants that 'as Americans do not object to tea containing 15% dust, it is therefore not necessary to clean them". This is further illuminated by the statement of a Pittsburgh newspaper in 1907 that the Chinese packaged Pingsuey, ' a sort of weed', and sold it as tea in the American South.26 Pingsuey, meaning 'ice water', is a prized China green today, and the weed racket may be imaginary.27 Nevertheless, between 1879 and 1880 America's consumption of tea declined.28 Another reason was movement. In 1850 most Americans worked within a short distance from their homes. In 1930 the number had vastly declined, and even the survivors of the old plantation families were holding down jobs that took them away from home and the tea table.29 Coffee was simply more convenient to prepare and keep hot than was black tea, which tastes vile when left to stew.30 Green tea, drunk without milk, does not, but milk consumption was rising and that of green tea dropping from the Civil War to 1930. Simpler than the tea ceremony was the speedy coffee pot. Like the transformation from the genteel pipe to the instant cigarette, it was a hallmark of modernization. Wolfgang Schivelbusch observes this process of acceleration in the case of tobacco, but it is true of caffeine as well.31
Frederick Law Olmsted, the famous architect, reports that tea was rarely offered to him during his famous trip through the South.32 In Alabama his planter host had guests to tea, and in Mississippi an old woman offered him Bohea tea with honey, similar to that drunk at Weyanoke. The old woman had never heard of green tea, which Olmsted preferred. We see that green tea is also associated with the upper classes. In any case, the woman's practice of boiling her tea in a pot would have ruined green tea. The need to treat green tea gently has likely kept many people from making it twice.33
While the planters liked a daily cup of coffee all over the rural South, even giving the beverage to children, their black slaves were another matter. The love of coffee was long unrequited in the Southeast: bad roads and worse economy meant that up to the Civil War, many people, especially slaves, had real coffee only a few times a year. Peter Randolph, a freedman, writes that slaves infused water with "simmons" and "locusses", possibly persimmons and locust seed, and boiled it to make a coffee substitute.34 Other coffee substitutes included burnt yams, burnt rye, chicory, dandelion roots, burnt maize, and best of all okra seed.35 Of course, coffee transported in containers that were not airtight lost much of its flavor, and roasting the beans in a frying pan wasted still more.36 House servants, who ate and drank what their masters ate, got used to a daily cup along with the religion and foodways of the whites, but field hands were usually given real coffee only on special occasions. Among these were Christmas and the ritual of shucking the corn. Observers of this latter occasion always remarked on the great quantity of food present, including meat, poultry, pastry, and hot coffee.37 Even here, a caffeinated beverage is juxtaposed with meat and sweet pastry or pie to create a stereotype of luxury for people whose daily diet was a monotonous round of greens, sidemeat, cornbread and grits.
Black and white alike relished coffee. But coffee and tea were not the first caffeinated beverages in the South, and burnt okra not the strangest cup that cheers. Stranger still is a caffeinated beverage known long ago, whose use is now almost extinct. This is yaupon or cassina, a decoction of holly leaves called black drink by the Native American Indians who discovered it.38 It was drunk by native peoples from Virginia to Texas, in a ceremony practiced by male rulers. It was once drunk almost daily, but as whites occupied the native range of yaupon holly, its use declined. By the Civil War the Miccosukee and Muscogee of Florida and the poor whites of the Carolinas were the only ones who used it, though it was substituted for coffee during the World and Civil Wars. By the 1930s it was a curiosity limited to the Outer Banks and the old guard of Charleston, who recorded it in the Charleston Receipts along with a colonial wedding cake.39 Its decline parallels that of other native foodstuffs such as Jerusalem artichoke and goosefoot, all of which had connotations of low status.
Coffee is the favorite caffeinated beverage of the United States today, and has been since before the Civil War. The US is unique among English-speaking nations in this preference, though France, Germany, and the Latin and Arabic nations share it. By comparison to Italian or French coffee, American coffee is weak and poorly flavored, and Waverly Root's condemnation of American food as devoid of quality would seem to apply here (although, withj the recent growth of specialty coffee shops, the siutation is improving).40 In America, coffee was not shared by groups of men, as black drink was among the Muskogee and maté among the Argentines. It had no definite gender connotations. Tea, on the other hand, is associated with indoor situations, with gardens, with sweet pastry, with illness, in short, with womanly things. Tea has become wholly feminized, retaining nothing of the connotations of the Chinese and Japanese tea ceremonies, which were originally male affairs. (Oddly, in Japan, the tea ceremony is currently mostly practiced by women, the one teacher the author knows being a woman, and having learned from her grandmother. The same obtains for religion, most regular attendance at churches and temples in Japan being women.) This may have two causes: the leisure of Japanese women, many of whom do not work outside the home, to engage in artistic pursuits, and the time required for the making of tea, which if it is to have any taste cannot be prepared nearly as fast as coffee. Interestingly enough, opium was the drug most commonly associated with and abused by women in the late nineteenth century, and was often taken with tea to kill the bitter taste of the opium. Again, opium or laudanum were feminine alternatives to the masculine drinking of alcohol, with tea serving as a gloss of elegance upon the horror of opiate addiction.
By the time of the Great Depression the South had modernized. Of the many who glorified the antebellum days, few remembered them. The tea rituals of other times and places served as signals of otherness to writers such as Ellen Glasgow. In Glasgow's novel Barren Ground, published in 1923, the heroine, Dorinda Oakley, is tending a country store:
As the morning advanced a line of white and coloured farmers, assembled by the counter, with the chickens, eggs and pats of butter which they had brought to exchange for coffee, molasses, sugar, or simple household remedies such as Jamaica ginger and Sloan's liniment. Tea was used only in case of illness, and the brown tin canister on the shelf sometimes remained empty for weeks.41
In this passage we see the social significance of the two most important nonalcoholic beverages in rural turn-of-the century Virginia. The folkway described, the daily use of coffee and infrequent use of tea for the sick, remains in place to this day in rural North Carolina, where a student at Appalachian State University informed me that her mother made tea when children were sick.42 Tea was a rare luxury, classed with liniment and ginger as something both possesed of medical properties and not for everyday use-though Dorinda's mother uses camphor, more expensive still, on a regular basis. Later in the story Dorinda, jilted by a lover, flees to New York, where kindly lady offers her afternoon tea:
At Pedlar's Mill tea was not used except in illness or bereavement, and she was not prepared for the immediate consolation it afforded her. Strange that a single cup of tea and a buttered muffin from a bakery should revive her courage!43
Not strange at all, when we examine the social meaning of tea. The beverage, from its advent in the West, has carried with it a connotation of ease, calming and relaxation. This is a paradox, as tea is a stimulant. The connotations of 'tea' go far beyond the cup. itself. As mentioned in the scene from Glasgow, 'tea' is a ritual involving pastries, sugar and milk for the tea, and a sense of order and decorum-almost recalling the tea ceremonies of the Chinese and Japanese with whom the beverage originated. Later, Dorinda's dying mother refuses tea, saying that she is not sick, but Dorinda herself accepts a cup in illness, recovering soon after.
In Glasgow's Virginia, published earlier, the wife of a rector offers tea to an evening visitor.44 Later, her granddaughter drinks 'cambric tea', a cup of hot milk with a small amount of tea added, reinforcing the folkway derived from England that denies real tea to small children.45 Cambric tea was also a favorite in Southside Virginia in the 1930s, and in the Georgia hills much longer.46 Considering the effects of caffeine and sugar on small children's behavior, this seems only prudent. Here Glasgow again uses tea to distance herself from the worn-out South of her own time.
In the South since Glasgow's time, tea has seen little revival. The occasional eccentric prefers it to coffee, but even the most determined addict finds that a good cup of tea is hard to come by. Afternoon tea is always linked part and parcel to visions of past elegance, such as the tea served to visitors at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, over pastry at the Windsor in New Orleans, or in a private garden after a tour of historic Charleston. Bohemians are fond of tea in the South, as everywhere, but espresso is now much more fashionable. In its way, espresso is as much a reaction against the prevailing orthodoxy of coffee and Coke as tea is, but no great ritual has ever graced the service of coffee.
So in closing we see that the South between Secession and Depression was the home of diversity in caffeine folkways as well as other matters. The antebellum elegance of the tea ceremony vanished, but tea hung on as a medicine and a metaphor, while coffee stood as mainstay and the old ersatz coffees became memories. Black drink dwindled in importance, retreating by the 1930s to the Outer Banks and the Everglades. Meanwhile, Coca-Cola spread from Atlanta to take over the world. In short, the South, like the rest of America, was becoming modernized. The pace of life sped faster and faster, fueled by gasoline and caffeine. We can only hope that in the Vivarin rush of modern life, wherein Mobile can scarcely be told from Manhattan, some room is left for the grace and polish that our ancestors invoked with every clatter of porcelain and each clink of silver.
Notes
Ideals of womanhood have also accelerated. At North Carolina's Meredith College, the turn-of-the-century porcelain tea and coffee services are preserved in the Alumni House. The thought of today's college students mastering the subtlties of tea service, what the Chinese Buddhist monks called the 'artless art', is as bizarre as the idea that ladies never talk about money.
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