Hydrocolonialism, Countersurveillance, and “America Independent”: Poetic Framings of Revolutionary Tea Parties

Abstract

Between December 1773 and May 1775, several port cities and towns across the American seaboard participated in a “tea party” as an act of political defiance toward the recent onslaught of taxation laws implemented by the British government on American colonists. Indeed, on 19 October 1774, in Annapolis, Maryland, taxpayer Anthony Stewart was coerced by the Sons of Liberty to burn his ship to the water line to prove his patriotism to the American cause, despite his Loyalist leanings. The circumstances that led to the Patriots targeting tea as their symbol for destruction, the Bostonian group to attire themselves as Mohawks and throw boxes overboard, the multiple threats made to Customs officials and Loyalists alike, speak to the American Revolution borne of a relationship between the mechanisms of hydrocolonialism (concentrated at the Custom House and at major trade docks) and countersurveillance systems implemented by the Sons and Liberty (represented by a number of different groups) and enforced by emerging poetic forms rising with the times of revolution. This is most demonstrated in the “poet of the American Revolution,” Philip Morin Freneau, and his poetic responses to the events leading up to and during the American Revolution. Taking the example of the Annapolis Tea Party and Freneau’s poetry under the consideration of hydrocolonialism among other critical interventions, this essay will consider the push and pull of imperial surveillance and patriotic countersurveillance at the breaking point of the American Revolution, when riots between colonists over goods and taxes spoke to larger socioeconomic systems of control that remain ever present in American cultural values.

1. Introduction: The Boston Tea Party

On the evening of 16 December 1773, an estimated 90 men of varying age and social status rowed out to the ships the Dartmouth, the Eleanor, and the Beaver, to destroy 342 boxes of tea that had been shipped from London’s East India Company. The attack on the tea was determined and swift; on all three vessels, the tea was the only cargo destroyed, being hacked away with the men’s hatches and tossed overboard. It is even said that the men, disguised as “Mohawks,” swept up the decks of the vessels when they had completed their act of patriotism (Pointdexter 2012). This decisive political response to the preceding months of imperial taxation schemes was witnessed by dozens of citizens, who had followed the men along the docks. The satirically named “Boston Tea Party,” is heralded by many historians to be one of the most significant catalyzing events that launched into a full-blown rebellion and the colonial fight for American independence. Many observers of the Boston Tea Party anticipated that a war was on the horizon, and though an energetic collective was charged with the fervor of national independence, much of the colony was ambivalent and even fearful of the future that was to unfold. John Greenough, a Massachusetts-based purveyor of East India Company tea, wrote to his father in Boston:

This [referring to the tea party] is our Liberties destroyed...our properties are become precarious and uncertain being at the disposal of these Indian Liberty Sons—can we imagine [a] more absolute state of Tyranny and outrageous Cruelty that when every private gang of Plunderers & Assassins may wreek [sic] their Vengeance against any Person or their Property unpunish’d.

(Qtd in Norton 2020)

Governor of Massachusetts, Thomas Hutchinson, felt similarly, shocked at the “barbarity” of the men’s actions, something that “none of the Aboriginals [were] ever guilty of” (Norton 2020, p. 31). At the early stages of what would become the American Revolution, the responses to the Sons of Liberty were mixed, particularly for the Loyalists who would see the purported “patriots for the cause” as despotic authoritarians, inciting mob violence and opportunistic rioting.1 Or, in the words of Greenough, “plunderers” and “assassins.” For a number of Americans living in the North American colonies, what is conventionally hailed as a revolution for freedom was seen as the riotous despotism of “private gangs” exerting their will on a hapless public.

The historical impact of the Boston Tea Party is not to be underestimated. It has canonized, in both deed and in sentiment, a great deal of the conventional American identity. In American history textbooks and popular websites, it is remembered as a moment of extraordinary anti-authoritarian pushback against a magisterial tyrant across the seas, of men committing their patriotic cause to action. Yet, as the United States celebrates its 250th anniversary of its Declaration of Independence, it presents readers with the opportunity to reflect upon the flashpoint moments which provided the foundation for the political ideology of today. The Boston Tea Party and the tea parties that ensued the following year were public performances of political resistance against a ruling authority. These were specific and effective in their motivations and actions and offered multiple critical interventions. When looking at them through the lens provided by Joshua Clover’s Riot, Strike, Riot, for example, many of the tea parties preceding the Revolution could be thought of in the socio-cultural context of a riot. As defined by Clover and early American scholar Paul Gilje, the Boston Tea Party fits within the categorical definition, specifically as it was a “‘group of twelve or more people attempting to assert their will immediately through the use of force outside the normal bounds of the law’” (Clover 2016). It can also be considered riotous as it responded to the political, social, and economic circumstances of the colony in the aftermath of the Tax Acts levied against the colonial Americans following the Seven Years’ War. The men that evening were purposefully exercising their will on the market, demonstrating the power that a riot can have in determining matters of supply and demand (Clover 2016, pp. 55–59). This means that the group of men premeditated, made provisions and equipment for, and strategized their attack on the vessels. Men and boys of differing labor backgrounds (though most were of the middling sort), bonded together in the tea’s destruction (Clover 2016, p. 59). Like many riots (though not all), this collective of men built a sense of community within their group as they destroyed the property of the East India Company.

The location of the Boston Tea Party is worthy of further examination as well. Unlike riots on land, there is a sense of isolation or containment with the tea party in Boston, simply predicated on the placement of the ships—they were anchored off dock, with access to the vessels only available by boat. Hence, the engaged public could only follow the disguised men to the ships and watch, though not participate, in the tea party. The gaze of the public as witnesses gives the riot the air of political performance; though not invited to participate, the public spectators were invited to bear witness to the tea’s destruction. As shared by American historians Jeffrey Richards and Jason Schaffer, from the beginnings of anti-imperial resistance to the British, American patriots envisioned themselves as leading actors in a political theater. In a physical way, the metaphor for the political theater is sustained by the actual separation between the land and the sea—like in a seated, darkened room, the civilian onlookers have no other option but to watch what lies before them (or leave). The actions, the physical framing of the tea dumping site, and the politics of the moment express a performance of power to be reckoned with. There are economic implications to the site as well. The port at which the ships were harbored is, in the words of Clover, “as close as the made world will come to the intersection in theory of production and circulation,” where the “global” and “local” collide in a whirlwind of law, capital, culture, and production (Clover 2016, p. 53). As a liminal space between land and sea, as well as the site of both imperial and local surveillance, the dock is a nodal location for the formation of American nationalistic identity and the metaphoric (and physical) barrier to imperial otherness. Vessels from around the world come in and out of Boston’s Harbor, importing and exporting people, news, and goods. Typically, it is the role of the Customs Officer to surveil and regulate the flow of human and consumer traffic, but at this juncture, the British-elected official’s authority is usurped. It was the viewing citizenry that was presiding over the determined disposal. The Boston Tea Party provided an excellent template for the citizen-patriot: a concentrated political target, a public spectacle, and a critical location (the port) that would come to signify the physical and cultural boundaries between “us” and “them.”

For a Special Issue concentrating on Anglophone Riots, this article examines the confluence of three elements which helped to compose the cultural framework for the Sons of Liberty (and the group’s offshoots) and their influence on the American Revolution. These are the role of the port and the cultural impact of the “tea parties” along the Eastern Seaboard between the years 1773–1775; the self-positioning of the Sons of Liberty as a kind of distinctly American countersurveillance to English colonial legal systems and law enforcement mechanisms; and the poetry of Philip Freneau, the designated “poet of the American Revolution.” The theoretical frameworks of surveillance espoused by David Rosen and Aaron Santesso, the historical survey of the riot as discussed by Clover, and the conceptualization of hydrocolonialism argued by Isabel Hofmeyr, all guide the observations and discussions over the intersections of the Sons, the dock, and the poetry that would come to define American exceptionalism and patriotism. Before and during the Revolution, there was constant surveillance over known or suspected Loyalist Americans, followed by riotous acts of public violence, commonly against the personhood and the property of these very same Loyalist men. The public narrative of these facts is often mediated as one of nationalistic pride, bordering on jingoism, and had its start mediated and circulated in late eighteenth-century print culture. The Sons of Liberty held both pen and sword, ensuring a narrative of necessary violence to gain their independence from the English monarchy. This essay considers an alternative perspective to the story of American Independence often told in classrooms; it is one of insurgency, spectacle, and poetic hostility.

2. Tea Parties and Critical Theories: The Burning of the Peggy Stewart

The Watchman in Pieces: Surveillance, Literature and Liberal Personhood (Rosen and Santesso 2013) provides an excellent framework for considering how the Sons of Liberty (also “Sons”) justified their countersurveillance of their fellow North Americans in the time directly preceding the Revolution. In Boston, during the tumult of the 1765 Stamp Act boycott, a group by the name of the Loyal Nine fomented mob violence by targeting certain individuals connected to the offending Act, whether through their political support, regulatory duty, or some other legislative connection. In his discussion of the Loyal Nine, David Carrigy writes that “violence was the chief method through which the original Loyal Nine sought to achieve their goals” (Carrigy 2025). He also writes that the Sons employed a widespread network of surveillance that would complement their definitive acts of violence against individuals whom they saw as enemies to the revolutionary cause. Not only would individuals in particular positions (a stamp collector, the governor, etc.) be targeted, but goods coming into Boston came under significant scrutiny. Carrigy writes that “members of the Sons of Liberty, especially those who worked in the docks or in the customs houses, kept a close eye on incoming goods. Any package or container found to be marked with a stamp was stolen or destroyed” (Carrigy 2025, para. 20). The success of the Loyal Nine in the mid-1760s (to eventually become the Sons) and their countersurveillance tactics against the British imperial institutions, even manifested in their ability to try, convict, and condemn men who complied with the Stamp Act.2 Arguably, their appropriation of the mechanisms of law enforcement and judicial governance between the Stamp Act response and the tea parties nearly a decade later, systematized an alternative social framework opposite the British government that was controlled independently. Moments of political upheaval are perfect opportunities for transformative power shifts, calculated to establish a new norm for a group. To ensure that patriotic duty was in service of American independence, systems of surveillance initiated by the Loyal Nine and mirrored in populated port cities in the years to follow made unscathed individual objection to the Revolution nearly impossible.

Indeed, one could argue these self-appointed groups in major metropolitan areas became a “shadow government” in the mid-1770s, fully displacing British imperial control. With the blueprint for these committees already in place from 1765, patriots developed a “committee of correspondence” (sometimes “observation”), a “committee of inspection,” and a “committee of safety,” first in Boston and swiftly to follow in other colonial port towns and cities. The committee of correspondence was designed to keep the public informed; the committee of inspection to ensure that boycotts were being upheld, effectively replacing the Customs Officer; and the committee of safety to ensure the overall “safety” of the public by identifying political dissenters. The last of these committees is of particular significance, as members took it upon themselves to write and pass new laws, enforce and punish under revised statutes and standards, and condemn ideological dissenters without due process under the implied auspices of their title as a committee member. Jeffrey Richards notes that the committees of safety are not commonly mentioned in history books as one might imagine, given how critical they were to catalyzing the momentum for the American Revolution. Perhaps it is because, as he notes, the committees “took liberties with what we would call civil rights” that historians past and present “shy away from the committees as an object of dramatic or historical presentation” (Richards 2005). This committee, at its time, was defined by its ability to survey and identify the enemy within their own neighborhoods, escalating a patriotic sensibility toward suspicion and xenophobia, especially to those who were not openly a Patriot. In one complaint levied against the construction of these committees, a Loyalist proclamation declared

the Committee of Correspondence, so called, to the several Towns of this Province, accompanied with a scandalous, traitorous, and seditious Letter, calculated to inflame the Minds of the People, to disturb them with ill-grounded Fears and jealousies, and to excite them to enter into an unwarrantable, hostile, and traitorous Combination […] it is a great measure owing to the baneful influence of such committees that many acts of violence and oppression have been perpetrated; whereby the lives of many honest worth persons have been endangered, and their property destroyed.

(Draper 1774)

Surveillance, enforcement, and systematic modes of information dissemination were the hallmarks of the Sons and their Committees. Rosen and Santesso’s work provide a strong theoretical framework for examining these cultural contours of the political shifts that preceded the American Revolution. This is particularly evident when examining the unfolding drama of the Annapolis Tea Party.

Though it is not as equally remembered as the Boston Tea Party, the city of Annapolis had its own iteration of a “tea party” with its burning of the ship Peggy Stewart on 19 October 1774, signifying the demonstrative lengths of political antipathy the Maryland Sons of Liberty had toward the British. The brigantine merchant vessel named after the ship owner’s daughter, Margaret, arrived in Annapolis on 14 October 1774, carrying over 2000 pounds of tea imported from the English East India Company. There were also 53 indentured servants on board the vessel who were eager to disembark, having not seen land since their departure from London the previous early August.3 In order for them to legally land in Annapolis, however, the ship’s owner Anthony Stewart needed to pay taxes on all cargo. Stewart paid all duties, from the passengers’ travel to sundry goods and supplies and, as was invariably disclosed, the loathed tea. Though within the legal limits of the trade law for the colony, Stewart violated the social contract outlined by the town’s Committees of Correspondence, Inspection, and Safety, who had by that time established a resolution to boycott East India Company tea. He was brought before a committee of these representative men that very afternoon, who decided within the bounds of Committee statute that the tea was not to be landed. Indeed, the assembly room of men was palpably charged with patriotic enthusiasm, which only strengthened in the following assemblies discussing the matter of the doomed tea. In an assembly on 17th October, three days after the Peggy Stewart docked in the Annapolis harbor, in one observation, “the unanimous opinion of all present [ in the assembly was] that [the tea] should be burnt...but that the Vessel should also share the same fate. Matters now began to run very high and the people to get warm” (Galloway 1774). Others in the crowd of fevered patriots had suggested that Stewart’s own house should be burnt, with men threatening to “lay their hands on him” (Galloway 1774). Over the following few days, tensions between an indignant mob of patriots and Stewart, who had recently disclosed his Loyalist leanings, rose rapidly. During the near full week of assemblies and trials against Stewart for his paying taxes for the tea, a gallows was constructed outside of his home, by whom is unknown (Thomas Stone National Historic Site 2021). The tension finally broke, however, on the morning of 19 October 1774, when the fate of the tea was decided. Anthony Stewart, facing a crowd of anticipating men, offered to burn down his own ship with the tea onboard. That night, followed by a rowdy public and with a torch in hand, Anthony Stewart burned his own ship to the waterline. In a letter written to Ann Galloway Cheston, who was daughter to well-known merchant Samuel Galloway, tradesman Adam Leverton writes:

Last night I saw the Brig Peggy Stewart consumed before our windows on account of the tea, a spectacle that shocked me much. Mr. S[tewart] offered to make all proper concessions but the merciless mob would not spare his property. I begin to be out of love with patriotism.

(Leverton 1774)

The Maryland Gazette published full details of the burning and the events leading up to it. Despite the burning of the ship and what he considered just payment for his crime against the cause, the Sons of Liberty and politically empowered public continued to harass Stewart. He and his family inevitably left their remaining property behind and fled to Halifax, Nova Scotia. He, like many Loyalists during the American War for Independence, was never compensated for his loss.4

The case study of the burning of the Peggy Stewart offers multiple unique interventions within a hydrocolonial social infrastructure of surveillance. At the macroscopic level, the burning signifies the social compliance with a shifting in social and political power and organization. The ship, carrying the imperial commodity of tea, also brought on board the fiduciary system through which imperial power is exerted (the customs duty to be paid). For the Sons, the destruction of the ship potentially constituted a necessary interruption in the flow of goods, a blockade in the circuit of colonial capitalism. Furthermore, the burning of the ship signals a sense of escalating violence that the Sons of Liberty were taking against Loyalists not participating in the boycott. Note that in the Boston Tea Party, only the tea was thrown overboard; both the vessels and the other goods on board stayed unharmed. Further, the shipowners of the Dartmouth, Eleanor, and Beaver remained in relative anonymity and safety; neither was the case for the tea party in Annapolis. Finally, as the ship seemingly signified both the literal and figurative vessel of English colonial command, the dock again serves as the boundary of resistance, the battleground (in the eyes of the Sons of Liberty) for political autonomy. The dockside, in both instances of the Boston and Annapolis Tea Parties, becomes a locus where both the material and symbolic dimensions of colonial power intersect, and where popular resistance can be enacted in ways that are both spectacular and transformative.

The spectacle, however, failed to cease for Stewart, whose unsanctioned but legal actions led to him witnessing his own effigy hanging outside of his home. Within Clover’s discussion Riot. Strike. Riot, these continuous acts of mob violence targeted at a single individual, may be registered as an antagonism against the Stewart household and as a warning to those who would align with its political ideology. Though Clover uses the modern example of the “sudden intensification of social conflict around airports and air travel,” the scenarios between airport security biases and the Committees for Inspection and Safety countersurveillance tactics are eerily parallel (Clover 2016, p. 202). In the example provided about airport security, Clover iterates that sites of global circulation, like airports or docksides, make and remake their infrastructure to accommodate the socio-political and economic views of the moment. The airport can “limit the free flow of people while preserving the free flow of capital” (Clover 2016, p. 203). The same was true for the Sons of Liberty and their demonstrative hostilities toward Stewart, to the point that he no longer had capital to destroy on his behalf.

As the discussion of the tea parties pivots to the discussion of portside poetics in the next section, another illuminating theoretical framing is how art and reality respond and recirculate specific narratives, conditions, or ideologies to fit a particular political stance. Isabel Hofmeyr’s Dockside Reading: Hydrocolonialism and the Custom House focuses on the sociopolitical power of global trading networks and the custom house as both a literal and figurative site that divides a country from the rest of the world (Hofmeyr 2022). In the case of colonial North America, territorial acquisition, colonial designation, and eventual nationalistic declaration were all dependent upon aquatic boundaries. She continues that “water sculpts political authority…an ‘informal material’ implicated in hydronationalisms, struggles around citizenship, settler hydrologies, and hydrocosmologies” (Hofmeyr 2022, p. 16). Within the case of the Sons of Liberty, anti-imperial sentiments were consistently placed in alignment with the ocean; it (that which came from the sea) was constituted as “the source of imperialism,” and the threat to the security of a new American nation state. Given the easy associations that can be made between customs practices and fiscal tyranny, it becomes no surprise that the Sons targeted incoming goods from England. Defying the customs duties becomes a point of anticolonial pride, with many of the Patriot factions refusing to allow East India Company ships to make land. Like on the evening of the Boston Tea Party, the dock was a site of political action, serving as the boundary line between who was enemy (ships, cargo, the English), and who was Patriot. The geological split between land and sea became intensely politicized in a way that was unprecedented for the American colonies. A site of political formation and reformation, the Customs House and the dock were situated at the heart of the Revolution; they were undergoing a revolution, or a turning, of their own cultural significance. Instead of serving as the channel of news, information, goods, and the larger world, they now served as both the literal and the symbolic cut-off from the mother country.

News of the tea parties circulated widely in colonial newspapers. Though many songs, including William Billings’ “Chester,” John Dickinson’s “Liberty Song,” and “The World Turn’d Upsidedown” were anthems of American Independence, it is the poetry of Philip Freneau that earned him the title of “The Poet of the American Revolution.” His consistent attachment to jingoistic poetics earned him a rise in popularity in the years of the Revolution but his work fell out of favor once the fledgling country entered times of peace (Nickson 1981). His poetry from the revolutionary era demonstrates a refined endorsement of the anticolonial perspectives and actions advocated by the Sons of Liberty. The poem “America Independent,” for example, published in 1778, reinforces anticolonial sentiments, but also with a rhetorical strategy that normalizes the hyper-surveillance and xenophobic tendencies of the Sons of Liberty. His poetry helps to naturalize the riot against King as patriotic responsibility. At this critical cornerstone of building a national identity, the dock as a site of anticolonial resistance and border security, the poet as Patriot, and the notion that political dissenters were worthy of public damnation, were all cemented.

3. Enemy and Friend: The Port Poetics of Philip Freneau

As an official site of entry, the port is granted regulatory privileges over the goods, people, and ideas that cross the aquatic boundary onto the terrestrial plane. This environment of socioeconomic oversight extended beyond the regulation of commerce; it was also a space where the actions and allegiances of colonial subjects could also be assessed and reported. For Freneau, who spent a good portion of his adult life at sea, the significance of the port was not to be missed. Indeed, his meditation on it, and the ships at dock, is reflected in his poem, “The British Prison Ship,” which records his own time captured by the British in 1780. He begins his poetic narrative with a ship at port, built “with joy,” and with “stupendous size,” about to leave “her station” of Philadelphia and launch into the “seas a stranger, and untry’d before” (Freneau 1781, ll. 9, 10, 25, 26). Like a fair maiden found in the foul clutches of a monster, the vessel, coincidently named the Aurora, is captured by the English, and “mauled” through by the English vessel’s twelve-pound cannon. In this poem, the dock represents home—the final man-made link to land. If one were to view the dock from a ship’s port side, one sees the reassurance of solid ground. Likewise, in his poem “American Independent,” the political boundaries between enemy and friend are clearly outlined:

• When first Britannia sent her hostile crew
• To these far shores, to ravage and subdue
• We thought them gods, and almost seem to say
• No ball could pierce them, and no dagger slay—
• […]
• Yet soon, in dread of some impending woe,
• Even from these islands shall these ruffians go—5

In these Freneau’s poems, the patriotic divide between land and sea structurally parallels that between what is distinctly American and British. The American vessel in “The British Prison-Ship” leaves its American dock to depart onto unknown and hostile seas. The British in the second poem similarly comes from the sea, with clear military intentions towards violence and suppression. It is unclear to this reader to what point on the historical timeline is referred to in the line, “When first,” as it was English imperial traders who came first arrived in the region we now know as North America with the intention of “ravaging” and “subduing,” the land in the name of England. The American nationalism in this stanza problematically eschews its colonial heritage and instead places Americans as having been indigenous to the North American continent. In other words, here is a sense that the “we” in the poem has always lived in the colonies, belying the “we’s” settler origins. Particularly when considering both poems together, with the applause for the American-made vessel in “The British Prison Ship,” and the vitriol aimed at the British in both, it is made abundantly clear that the British, now distinct from Americans, are no longer welcome. Indeed, between the Stamp Act Boycotts of 1765 to the Tea Parties of 1773–1774 to the wartimes of the American Revolution between 1775–1783, British ships in American ports were increasingly eyed as suspect and indemnified.

In contrast to his poem, “The British Prison Ship,” is Freneau’s 1778 work, “On the New American Alliance,” which celebrates the newly launched American-built vessel Alliance and the rising American Navy. Pulling from the classical tradition, the poem recounts the Roman sea god Neptune gazing admiringly at the glory of a vessel of “gallant mien”, that which is “majestic, aweful, and serene” (Freneau [1778] 1865a, ll. 1, 8, 13). The Alliance, considered the finest vessel of the American Revolution, carried the Marquis de LaFayette to France, for his petition to the French court to support the Americans with munitions, money, and men. When on the water, this ship, as she “displays her gloomy tier,/The boldest Britons freeze with fear” (Freneau [1778] 1865b, ll. 29–30). The heroic couplets in the poem reify the vessel, the classical referents cementing a teleology from antiquity to the fledgling United States. These two poems, “The British Prison Ship,” and “On the New American Frigate Alliance,” demonstrate passionate, if conflicting, images of American vessels at war with the British. The water, as the state for the theater of war, provides the perfect background for Freneau’s symbolic focus on American vessels and the oscillating promise of victory against the British.

Freneau’s patriotic poetry was both a respondent to and signifier of the paradigm shift of hostilities toward Loyalists during the American Revolution. In the words of Rosen and Santesso, the “urban panopticon” of the Annapolis dockside, compounded with the “social tyranny” of patriotic dictates generated a tension between the liberty of independent thought amongst its city’s population and the assumed welfare of the people joined under the common cause. For Freneau and the other Sons, there was no other alternative; whether a direct threat or not, known Loyalists were condemned to social (and in many cases, actual) exile from the North American colonies. In his poem, “America Independent,” Freneau knows the perfect spot for them to go. Though the passage is a little long, it is worth reading in its entirety:

• Far to the north, on Scotland’s utmost end
• An isle there lies, the haunt of every fiend,
• No shepherds there attend their bleating flocks,
• But withered witches rove among the rocks;
• Shrouded in ice, the blasted mountains show
• Their cloven heads, to daunt the seas below;
• The lamp of heaven in his diurnal race
• There scarcely deigns to unveil his radiant face,
• Or if one day he circling treads the sky
• He views this island with an angry eye,
• Or ambient fogs their broad, moist wings expand,
• Damp his bright ray, and cloud the infernal land;
• The blackening winds incessant storms prolong,
• Dull as their night, and dreary as my song;
• When stormy winds and gales refuse to blow,
• Then from the dark sky drives the unpitying snow;
• When drifting snows from iron clouds forbear,
• Then down the hail-stones rattle through the air—
• There screeching owls, and screaming vultures rest,
• And not a tree adorns its barren breast;
• No peace, no rest, the elements bestow,
• But seas forever rage, and storms forever blow.
•  
• There, Loyals, there, with loyal hearts retire,
• There pitch your tents, and kindle there your fire;
• There desert Nature will her stings display,
• And fiercest hunger on your vitals prey,
• And with yourself let John Burgoyne retire
• To reign the monarch, whom your hearts admire.
(Freneau [1778] 1865a, ll. 144–170)

A most inhospitable place for Freneau to send his enemies. The sufferer in these exiled lands on the outskirts of the United Kingdom enjoys no rest, no calm, but instead meteorological ire and spiritual damnation. Set in contrast to “these islands” denoting the newly independent United States, the “isle” off the coast of Scotland is importantly void of the bustling human life that constitutes the urban centers of political activity that Freneau was so eager to be a part of. This juxtaposition also serves to showcase the agrarian fertility, social and moral cogency, and providential beneficence of the newly independent America. The Loyalist exclusion from this privileged site was intended to demean and denigrate a defeated foe. Yet, it is more than just their exclusion from the country that is being called for in this section of the poem. In descriptive terms, Freneau details the hostile terrain, the roaring sea and the divine’s own spurning of the Scottish site. The isolation is not just one of exclusion, it is one of tortuous punishment of nearly Promethean dimensions. Thinking through this section of the poem along with Rosen and Santesso, it is understood that these are justified consequences for the Loyalist break with the social contract outlined by the political ideologues and actors of the American Revolution. If society, as Erving Goffman writes, is built upon shared systems of moral rights, obligations to one another and the enforcement of the obligations, the British loyalty needed to be excised (Qtd in Rosen and Santesso 2013, p. 65). By casting their fate in such bleak, mythic terms, Freneau helps construct a moral geography where dissent is not merely wrong—it is unnatural and worthy of elemental vengeance.

The networks of surveillance that the American Patriots had developed since 1765 allowed for the poet to enmesh his art into the cultural psyche, acting as a co-creator of the physical, moralistic, and social boundaries between the self-defined American public and the increasingly “othered” defeated Loyalists. Though it is often spoken of in terms of the novel and its “rise” in this period, poetry and culture can also conform to and shape one another, solidifying the sociopolitical paradigm shift at the end of the Revolution. Freneau’s “America Independent” in its publication signals this shift to be sure. However, when read with a critical eye, one cannot help but notice an undercurrent of hypocrisy. Arguably, when understood in conjunction with the larger cultural context that it purportedly helped to develop, this poem signals the limits of American liberalism and freedom of conscience which were foundational tenets of the nation’s new identity. It appears that freedom in the new nation can only be extended to those who were aligned with the dominant political values. Those who disagree should be swiftly relocated to a barren, craggy, and forlorn island off the coast of Scotland.

Indeed, what is missing from this definitive ousting of political rivals to the outskirts of the United Kingdom is the Lockean notion of political tolerance. This is a particularly compelling omission from Freneau’s condemnation, as the American Revolution was well known to be grounded in the Lockean philosophies of his Treatises of Two Governments—life, liberty, and the right to pursue property. As discussed in Rosen and Santesso, Locke was a proponent for governmental tolerance of groups with dissident or even antagonist belief systems. For Locke, “toleration does not merely prevent subversion from happening: administered wisely, it can also expose existing unrest. Practically speaking, he reasons, ‘whispering’ is far more dangerous and likely to ‘foment a conspiracy’ than open dissent (73–74). Though for Locke, there was to be a balance of power between those who govern and those who are governed, social toleration of difference in a socio-economically stable community is one of the hallmarks of a healthy urban population. At the very start of America’s independence, with debt, loss of life, and a governmental system to build, it appears counterproductive to condemn fellow citizens to deportation. In both philosophical and practical ways, Freneau’s poetic vitriol betrays the revolution’s foundational political framing founded on Lockean philosophy.

A final note of poetic irony in Freneau’s work comes to the reader in his poem “A Dish of Tea,” published in 1792. In the patriotic poetry that condemns tea during the American Revolution, whether it be associated with “a certain great King, whose initial is G” or finds itself “drowned” in the Boston Harbor, Freneau recognized that tea was a central matter on which the early colonial antipathy against the crown hinged.6 The tea parties were the symbolic rallying cries of the patriots, concentrated bursts of heightened political fervor with the East India Company tea the physical and symbolic target of ideological destruction. One would imagine that the political sentiment against tea would continue after the end of the American Revolution, with victory clenched and the English forever debarred from colonial rule. However, the commercial networks for tea were resumed and the symbolic taboo against it had been lifted once the war had concluded. Though there are amatory poems toward tea that preceded Freneau’s (1792), this 1792 poem begins

• Let some in beer place their delight,
• O’er bottled porter waste the night,
• Or sip the rosy wine:
• A dish of TEA more pleases me,
• Yields softer joys, provokes less noise,
• And breeds no base design.
(ll. 1–6)

The poem continues with praise for tea’s ameliorative effects against headache, the “hyp” or bouts of depression, and lifts the spirits. The cerebral and spiritual positive effects appear to know no boundaries. The “magic bowls revives the soul;” quite an amnesiatic position from 10 years earlier. Freneau’s—and the nation’s—revised views to the former “weed” of tea, demonstrate how steeped it had become in the patriotic rhetoric of the period. No longer a villain with “base designs,” tea was fully embraced and socially integrated back into the newly independent United States. If anything, this demonstrates the sheer power of will that had been in play during the American Revolution—patriots maintained a clear message about boycotting the tea and enforcing that message across the Eastern Seaboard. With the war won, the urgency around the condemnation of tea is lost, and individuals—Patriots and Loyalists alike—returned to old habits and pleasures.

4. Hydrocolonialism: Then and Now

Hydrocolonialism rests at the heart of this intersection of trade, water, patriotism, and poetry. It also marks the very gendered nature of the movement for American independence, with questions of consumption and production circulating throughout. Firstly, the very nature of the “tea party” taking place either on or next to the water, on a merchant vessel participating in the global network of imperial exchange, heightens the masculinized nature of the events themselves. Revolutionary action and patriotic fervor are also commonly allocated as masculine qualities, with demure and rumor mongering as qualities more commonly figured in more feminine forms of resistance. The gendered nature of the tea parties undergirds the very nature of the American Revolution itself, which were motivated by ideals inspired to seek liberty under oppression, as opposed to equity amongst a people. Historically, socioeconomic unrest was universally experienced by a group, who, in uniform spirit, revolted against the status quo. In his examination, Clover notes that women were the initiators of riots and resistance movements, for the “evident reason that ‘they were also, of course, those most involved in face-to-face marketing, most sensitive to price significancies, most experienced in detecting short-weight or inferior quality’” (191). Yet, in the context of the American Revolution, the narrative of the tea parties and similar acts of resistance was reshaped to emphasize male heroism and collective masculine agency, often marginalizing and even satirizing women’s direct contributions to the revolutionary cause. Consequently, the memory and meaning of these formative events were inscribed in a way that privileged a male-centered view of revolutionary action, even as the broader dynamics of protest and upheaval relied fundamentally on the participation of women as members of a colony at a crossroads. To this day, American patriotism has a distinctly militant and masculine vigilance associated with it, conceivably inaugurated with the Sons of Liberty and transcribed in the poetry of Philip Freneau.

The masculine energies alone did not define the events preceding the American Revolution. So, too, was there evidence of xenophobia and proto-nationalism. In his 1775 poem, “A Voyage to Boston,” Philip Freneau asks his reader, “What is a Tory,” and then proceeds to pursue the following twenty lines in heroic couplets to figuratively dissect a nameless Tory, a “blind monster.” The body of the Tory is torn apart in the poem, limb by limb with each passing line; the “monster” is effectively destroyed, with arms bound, teeth extracted, and brain removed: “That tortoise brain, no larger than a pea--/Come rake his entrails, whet thy knife again,/Let’s see what evils threat the next campaign” (Freneau 1775, ll. 400, 403, 416–418). Like Freneau’s other works, the narrating subject’s views toward the political opposition are less than kind. The views, in fact, are marked with a degree of hyper-surveillance, of a violent peering into the brain of the non-human, clearly in a position of authority. Within a hydrocolonial context, Freneau’s poetics possess and dominate the Tory’s body, wielding it for his own narrative exploits and extractive pleasures. Freneau revels in the punishment. Arguably, the networks of observation and punishment described—both in Freneau’s poetry and in the revolutionary “tea parties”—are part of a hydrocolonial infrastructure that polices bodies and beliefs through violence, enforcing and sustaining a new community of uniformity and exclusion.

On the turn of the semi-quincentennial in the summer of 2026, it is important to carve out time for critical reflection on the enduring legacies of the American Revolution. Freneau’s poetry and revolutionary rhetoric remind us that the ideals of liberty and tolerance can always be examined and re-examined through a critical eye, renegotiated for different contexts and lived experiences. The tea parties, as a preliminary political movement that catalyzed much of the sentiment espoused by the Sons of Liberty, also established a kind of social protocol that also begs for us to question systems of power and the true nature of liberty. The intertwining of surveillance, violence, and the construction of national identity reveals the paradoxes at the heart of the American Revolution, many of which remain present today. Finally, there is opportunity for us to examine the role of the port, the dock, and the pier, liminal sites that are neither sea nor land but provide the man-made links between the two, in addition to the multitudinal chains of global exchange that grew to define the modern era. These are also sites of witnessing, where the turn of cultural tides brought new ways of thinking and being—for better and for worse. The beginning months of the American Revolution were rife with uncertainty and escalating tension. The American riot, a collective group of individuals employing force to exert their will for political change, was essential to the success of the Sons. It remains a critical part of American political action to this day.