Free Dark Tide by Stephen Puleo Page B

McCusker, in his comprehensive 1989 study of the molasses trade and rum production in the thirteen American colonies, points out that in the town of Colchester, Connecticut, at least one Thanksgiving celebration had to be delayed until additional molasses could be procured. During Christmas, molasses was the key ingredient in the traditional gingerbread. In the mid-1700s, each colonist was consuming about three quarts of molasses per year.
    Molasses played an even greater role in the distilling industry. In 1750, there were twenty-five distilleries in Boston and about ten others in coastal towns around Massachusetts. By 1770, the number had grown to fifty-one across the colony, thirty-six of which were in Boston. Massachusetts produced more than 2 million gallons of rum, or more than 40 percent of the total distilled in North America. Another two dozen distilleries operated in Rhode Island and Connecticut, and all of them distilled molasses to produce rum. In 1770, New England imported fifteen times the amount of molasses that the colonies of Massachusetts and New Hampshire had imported a half-century earlier, mostly to support the burgeoning rum business. New England also exported thousands of gallons of molasses to other colonies and to Canada during this period, and cash from molasses trading helped the colonists repay their debt to England.
    Molasses—whether for eating, for export in exchange for cash, or for use in rum production—had become an indispensable part of the Massachusetts and New England economy by the eve of the American Revolution.
    Which is why, when Parliament renewed and enforced the Molasses Act of 1733 as the Sugar Act of 1764, colonists viewed it as a threat to their livelihoods and their lifestyles, and protested vehemently. The act imposed new or higher duties on sugar, textiles, molasses, and other goods from non-British territories and mandated that colonists could ship these goods only to English ports. This was the first law Parliament enacted specifically designed to raise revenue from the colonies, part of a broader effort to help reduce England’s national debt after the Seven Years’ War.
    But angry colonists dubbed it “taxation without representation”—the first widespread use of the phrase—because their elected representatives sat in colonial legislatures and not in Parliament. Colonists began corresponding with each other and agreements were made in a number of cities not to import British goods. This set the stage for the stauncher, bolder resistance that followed over the next several years when Parliament imposed the Stamp Act and Tea Act. The colonists simmered, revolution was brewing, and the trade in molasses contributed decisively to both.
    Years after the American Revolution, former President John Adams wrote to a friend: “I know not why we should blush to confess that molasses was an essential ingredient in American Independence. Many great events have proceeded from much smaller causes.”
    A sharp drop in sugar prices following the Revolutionary War meant that molasses was used less as a sweetener, but it continued to provide the raw material for the Massachusetts rum and distilling businesses. Industrial alcohol became a significant part of the economy by the late 1800s. It was used in cleaning products, solvents, dyes, and lacquers, and companies like U.S. Industrial Alcohol relied on molasses to produce these products for a country whose economy was expanding and becoming more industrialized. The production of industrial alcohol from molasses continued steadily into the early 1900s, and then spiked dramatically just before and during the First World War, when munitions production soared.
    By the time U.S. Industrial Alcohol built the tank on the Boston waterfront in 1915, by the time Frank Van Gelder, Isaac Gonzales, and George Layhe noticed its disquieting amount of leakage, molasses had developed deep and integral roots in the New England and Massachusetts