The Edenton Tea Party

Brunswick Town DAR public relations chair presented information about the Edenton Tea Party at our April DAR meeting. On May 10, 1773, Tea Act 1773 which was an Act of the Parliament of Great Britain to reduce the massive amount of tea held by the financially troubled British East India Company in its London warehouses. It was also to help the struggling company survive. A related objective was to undercut the price of illegal tea that was being smuggled into Britain's North American colonies. Smuggled tea was a large issue for Britain and the East India Company, since approximately 86% of all the tea in America at the time was smuggled Dutch tea.

Now, up in Boston, the colonists were not happy about this. But they had not been happy for at least the past 8 years, because you see in 1765, that’s when the Stamp Act was imposed as a direct tax on the colonies The Stamp Act required that many printed materials in the colonies be produced on stamped paper from London which included an embossed revenue stamp on it. These printed materials included legal documents, magazines, playing cards, newspapers, and many other types of paper used throughout the colonies, and it had to be paid in British currency, not colonial paper money and it was out of the Stamp Act that the Sons of Liberty were born on the 4th of August of 1765. That was the day a group of notable men from Boston protested in the streets and hung in effigy Andrew Oliver, a distributor of stamps for Massachusetts.

The drumbeat of dissent was underway, and by December 16, 1773 - just seven months after the Tea Act went into effect – the Sons of Liberty, disguised themselves as Native Americans and destroyed an entire shipment of tea sent into Boston Harbor by the East India Company. Their war cry was “taxation without representation”.

Now, back here in North Carolina, in the town of Edenton, located on the coastal Albemarle Sound near the mouth of the Chowan River, a socialite named Penelope Padgett Hodgson Craven Barker - we’ll just call her Penelope Barker for short – was busy leading her own political protest in response to the Tea Act. On October 25, 1774, Penelope led 51 women to sign a statement of protest vowing to give up tea and boycott all other British products "until such time that all acts which tend to enslave our Native country shall be repealed."

That petition was published in colonial newspapers and in London. Barker herself sent a "fiery letter" to London. In London, the women of Edenton were mocked in the London papers with a political cartoon entitled "Edenton Tea Party" portraying the women as bad mothers with loose morals.

However, in the Colonial American press, the women were praised as patriots. Soon, other women followed suit by swearing off tea. Southern women danced in ballgowns made from homespun fabric which started a homespun movement. Northern women had spinning bees for the production of homemade material. And in Charles Town, now Charleston, SC, a shipload of imported East India Company tea was locked away in a port for months because it could not be sold with the tax. At the start of the Revolution, a group of patriots gathered that tea and sold it to other patriots to fund the rebellion against the British. They had also ousted royal officials and agents at the time. These Daughters of Liberty, like the Sons of Liberty, had direct consequences on what was to come in the war between Great Britain and the American Colonies.

In 1908, a plaque was dedicated by the DAR placed in the North Carolina state Capitol Building a plaque honoring the Edenton Tea Party. And in 1940, a marker was placed at West Queen Street, which is also US Business 17 in Edenton by the North Carolina Highway Historical Marker Program that states, "Women in this town led by Penelope Barker in 1774 resolved to boycott British imports. Early and influential activism by women. It was the "first recorded women's political demonstration in America".