Smuggled Tea

Do you know the most popular type of tea before the Revolutionary War? It was smuggled tea! Founding Father John Hancock made the bulk of his fortune smuggling tea into the colonies. In the late 1760s, John Adams successfully defended Hancock against smuggling charges.

Smuggling was so prevalent during the era in the book, Observations on the Tea & Window Act and on the Tea Trade, 1784, Richard Twining commented that “the smuggler has become so formidable a rival [to the East India Company], that, upon the most moderate computation, they shared the Tea-trade equally between them; and according to some calculations, the smuggler had two thirds of it.”