“Last night,” John Adams confided in his diary on December 17, 1773, just after the Boston Tea Party, “3 Cargoes of Bohea Tea were emptied into the Sea… This is the most magnificent Movement of all. There is a Dignity, a Majesty, a Sublimity, in this last Effort of the Patriots, that I greatly admire.”

Some things – like hyperbole and random capitalization – never seem to go out of style in American politics. Tea has been less fortunate. Once the most beloved non-alcoholic beverage in the 13 colonies, it fell so low in America’s regard, as Emily Dickinson would say, we heard it hit the ground. Or the water, in the case of the Boston bunfight.

Sadly for Adams, neither revolution nor coffee is any help when it comes to heartburn

Sadly for Adams, neither revolution nor coffee is any help when it comes to heartburn

Adams’s interpretation of tea-chucking as a magnificent patriotic effort shows just how deep a hold England really had on him. After all, only a fortune teller or a soul steeped in pure Britishness could detect magnificence, majesty and sublimity in anything, however dramatic, to do with tea leaves.

Before their relationship foundered on the Boston rocks, tea was one of Adams’s favorite beverages. He suffered from heartburn and he found tea, consumed in quantity, a soothing remedy. But English as he was at his core, he could not continue drinking it after the example of patriotism and self-abnegation set by the Boston colonists. He wrote sadly to his wife Abigail: “Tea must be........

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