Crumpets of Freedom: The Edenton Tea Party

Here’s the story: On October 25, 1774, Mrs. Penelope Barker led a tea party at Mrs. Elizabeth King's house in Edenton, North Carolina. There, the two women and their forty-nine female guests signed a decree vowing to support the resolutions of the colonies' First Provisional Congress, which had banned, among other things, the importation of British tea.

Penelope Barker

            This tale has traditionally been accepted as fact in Edenton. A bronze teapot even marks the site of Mrs. King's house, now part of the beautiful town's Old Courthouse Green.

            The downside of the tea party legend is that it probably never happened. While it's near-certain that fifty-one North Carolinian women signed their names to a protest document sent to England, many historians doubt whether they all ever sat down together at Mrs. King's house, or anywhere else. The best anyone can figure, it's unlikely that the women, most of them housebound with domestic responsibilities, and who hailed from at least five different counties and a variety of social classes, would or could have ever arranged a mass meeting. Nonetheless, in what is considered one of the earliest examples of political involvement by American women, the women did manage to sign the same piece of parchment, which likely was circulated petition style. In part, it declared:

The Provincial Deputies of North Carolina having resolved not to drink any more tea, nor wear any more British cloth & c., many ladies of this Province have determined to give a memorable proof of their patriotism, and have accordingly entered into the following honourable and spirited association. I sent it to you to shew you faire countrywomen, how zealously and faithfully American Ladies follow the laudable example of their husbands, and what opposition your Ministers may expect to receive from a people thus firmly united against them.

The Edenton Tea Party as imagined by English cartoonists.

            This audacious show of feminine resolve shocked British sensibilities, confirming their notion of American men as half-savage rubes who couldn't control their women any better than they could manage their liquor. A London cartoonist imagined the female signers gathered for a decadent tea party complete with snifters and paramours. Apparently when the colonials heard about the alleged incident, they decided to go along with the idea that an actual party had taken place, and before long, the story of the Edenton Tea Party had settled into its present-day form.

            The ironic thing, of course, is that the Edenton Tea Party story imagines the women sitting around drinking British tea—while the point of the resolution was that they vowed not to.

                                                              

(Originally published in Moon Travel Handbooks: North Carolina)