American Rum 20: Rum and Revolution

American Rum 20: Rum and Revolution

In the Rum Community many believe that rum played a fundamental role among the causes of the American Revolution. This opinion maintains that molasses, rum and the slave trade were central to the economy of the Continental Colonies, serving to pay for the structural deficit in the balance of payments between them, especially New England, and the Motherland. Therefore the Sugar Act, by attacking the molasses imports, shook the very foundations of the American economy, directly leading to the colonies’ revolt.

This opinion is very gratifying for us rum lovers as it gives rum a central place in American history and therefore in world history. But I regret to say that this widespread opinion is incorrect: the historic reality is that the Colonies actually learned to coexist with the Sugar Act. In order to understand why, we have to look into the role played by rum in the economy of the Continental Colonies. 

As far as I know, the only scholarly work about this issue is still “THE RUM TRADE AND THE BALANCE OF PAYMENTS OF THE THIRTEEN CONTINENTAL COLONIES 1650-1775”, the Ph.D. Thesis submitted by John McCusker in 1970 and subsequently published in 1989. Working his way through a huge mass of documents from the time, in a number of different languages, McCusker sought to determine just how much rum the Continental Colonies actually imported, produced and exported on the eve of the Revolution.

Let’s begin with the slave trade. The American ships involved in the slave trade, when compared with all the ships which cleared from colonial ports in 1770, represented less than 1% of the total. They carried around 4,400 slaves to the Americas, approximately 4% of the slaves transported across the Atlantic by European slave ships in that year. Therefore we have to acknowledge that the slave trade was NOT the backbone of New England’s economy.

And now we get to molasses and rum. As is often the case in historical research, the first problem is the reliability of the sources of information at our disposal. We know that contraband trade in molasses and rum from the West Indies to the Continental Colonies was very common, and so customs records are not very helpful to us because they only record legal imports. But McCusker did not rely only on customs records. He studied the figures contained in documents on sugar production in the West Indies: the financial statements of the plantations, customs records, ships’ loading and unloading certificates, etc. These figures are largely dependable, because taxes on sugar were low and so contraband trade was scarce. We can therefore confidently work out how much sugar was produced every year. In addition, we are aware of the approximate ratio between the quantity of sugar produced and the quantity of molasses that resulted. And we also know approximately how much molasses was required to make a gallon of rum. On the basis of this and other figures, McCusker quantifies how much molasses and how much rum truly entered the Continental Colonies and therefore their value as imports/debts. And because we know the export figures for molasses and rum quite precisely, we can find out how much the Continental Colonies effectively earned from the rum trade, and therefore how much they had at their disposal to pay their debts to Great Britain.

In and around 1770, the Continental Colonies imported a total of more or less 6,626,000 gallons of molasses, of which 3,936,000 legally and 2,690,000 smuggled. For a total value of about £ 256,000: the equivalent of 8% of the total debt owed to Great Britain in 1770. They imported more than 3,000,000 gallons of rum in the same time period, with a value of £339,000: the equivalent of 10.6% of the amount owed to Great Britain in 1770.

Performing the necessary calculations: “The total molasses and rum debt in the balance of payments of the Continental Colonies in 1770 amounted to £ 595,000”, that is 18.6% of all imports from Great Britain. “In other words, the residents of the Continental Colonies imported molasses and rum in 1770 to the equivalent value of nearly one-fifth of all British commodities.” But British imports were not all the imports of the Continental Colonies, which also traded outside the British Empire. So, if we take these foreign imports into account, “The trade in imported molasses and rum constituted 12.8% of the total colonial debit so estimated”. Molasses and rum therefore accounted for only a small, though significant, part of the Continental Colonies imports. 

And what about exports? Much less. As we know, rum was exported almost exclusively to Africa for the slave trade, while there was significant re-exportation of molasses to Canada and Newfoundland. In any case, the total earnings from the exports of molasses and rum were limited. McCusker pitilessly quantifies them: “In summary we can only total the net credit value of the export of molasses and rum from the Continental Colonies to £201,300, note that this was the equivalent of 0.6% of the debit owed to Great Britain in 1770, and conclude that the rum trade came nowhere near balancing the colonists’ debit with the Mother Country.”

To quantify the past is difficult. There are just too many factors to be taken into account, too many uncertainties, sources which are too complex. For example, the simple fact that in Britain until 1752 the year began on the 25th of March complicates the interpretation of books of accounts. And then there are the many different units of measure, the many different currencies used in trade, and so on; in short, precise quantification such as we are used to seeing today is practically impossible. But the overall picture is very clear, beyond all doubt. Maybe the percentage of 0.6% is not an exact figure, it may have been a little more or a little less, but the approximate amount does not change: rum exports were absolutely NOT an essential component of the Continental Colonies’ exports.

Must we therefore conclude that rum was not important to the Continental Colonies and that it played no role among the causes of the Revolution? Not at all. Rum WAS important, but in a more complicated way than simply the income to be earned from exporting it. We shall see why in the next article.

-Article written by Marco Pierini-   

My name is Marco Pierini, I was born in 1954 in a little town in Tuscany (Italy) where a still live. I got a degree in Philosophy in Florence and I studied Political Science in Madrid, but my real passion has always been History. And through History I have always tried to know the world, and men. Life brought me to work in tour ism, event organization and vocational training. Then I discovered rum. With Francesco Rufini, I founded La Casa del Rum (The House of Rum),that runs a beach bar and selects and distributes Premium Rums in Italy, www.lacasadelrum.it.

And finally I have returned back to my initial passion: History. But now it is the History of Rum. Because Rum is not only a great distillate, it’s a world. Produced in scores of countries, by thousands of companies, with an extraordinary variety of aromas and flavors; it has a terrible and fascinating history, made of slaves and pirates, imperial fleets and revolutions.

All this I try to cover in this column, in my FB profile, www.facebook/marco.pierini.3 and in my articles on the Italian webpage www.bartender.it