Yaupon, Rebellion, Indians and Indianness

Guest Opinion

When American colonists renounced British tea in the 1770s, they faced a practical problem alongside their political one: what to drink? One answer grew wild along the coastal plain from Virginia to Texas. Yaupon holly (Ilex vomitoria), the only indigenous plant containing caffeine, had become a beverage tradition in the Southeast for well over a millennium before any colonist thought to boycott anything.

The story of Yaupon’s brief career as a patriotic substitute for Chinese tea, set alongside Philip J. Deloria’s reading of the Boston Tea Party in Playing Indian (1998), reveals two parallel modes by which revolutionary-era Americans drew on Native America to define themselves against Britain — one material, one symbolic, and both dependent on Indigenous peoples whose actual presence the new nation was simultaneously working to erase.

An Indigenous Beverage Tradition

Long before European contact, southeastern peoples — the Timucua, Guale, Muscogee (Creek), Cherokee, Catawba, Chickasaw, Choctaw and others — cultivated, traded, and consumed Yaupon. Archaeological evidence carries the tradition deep into the pre-contact past: residue analysis of ceramic beakers from Cahokia, hundreds of miles beyond Yaupon’s natural range (see map below), indicates that the leaves moved along extensive trade networks by the eleventh century. The drink Europeans encountered was not a casual refreshment but a beverage embedded in ceremony, diplomacy, and social order. Spanish sources called it cacina or cassina, after the Timucua term; among Muscogean speakers it was asi; English observers, noting the dark liquor produced by roasting and boiling the leaves, called it the “black drink.”

There is early European documentation. Jacques le Moyne de Morgues, who accompanied the French expedition to Florida in the 1560s, depicted Timucua leaders in council consuming cassina from shell cups — an image later engraved and circulated by Theodore de Bry. John Lawson, surveying Carolina in the first decade of the eighteenth century, described Yaupon use among the coastal tribes in A New Voyage to Carolina (1709) and noted that English settlers had already taken up the habit.

The Scientific Naming of Yaupon

In ceremonial contexts, the black drink functioned as a purifier: consumed in quantity before councils, ball games, and warfare, it was sometimes followed by ritual vomiting. That ceremonial practice, that was practiced with a great volume of tea, was what inspired the unfortunate scientific name. Some would say, it had a serious blow to its commercial value. When William Aiton formally classified the plant in 1789 as Ilex vomitoria, he codified a European misreading of Indigenous ceremony verses a plant’s actual properties into Linnaean taxonomy, permanently.

Coastal colonists in the Carolinas learned preparation methods (parching the leaves, sweating them, brewing the infusion) directly from Native neighbors from whom they traded for the tea and adopted the drink into their daily life. By the early eighteenth century, Yaupon was being harvested commercially along the Carolina coast and even exported to Europe, where it was sold under tradenames like “Carolina tea,” “South Sea tea,” and “Appalachina.”

Liberty Teas and the Boycott Economy

The Townshend Duties of 1767 and the Tea Act of 1773 made tea a political statement. Non-importation agreements and non-consumption pledges made abstention from East India Company tea a public demonstration of patriotic allegiance, but also created an immediate demand for substitutes for tea. Colonists brewed “liberty teas” from whatever the local ecology had to offer: raspberry leaf, loosestrife, sage, sassafras, Labrador tea in the North. In the South, Yaupon held a decisive advantage over all of these. It was the only substitute that actually delivered caffeine.

During the Civil War, Union blockades pushed southern households toward the “black drink,” Yaupon. It was not until the 1880s that tea production was considered a viable agricultural possibility, despite trying to grow tea without success from the 1700s. This made it all the more important to make use of Native American developed Yaupon tea. Into the Twentieth Century, the North Carolina Outer Banks communities, continued as a small industry, the harvesting and production of Yaupon tea. Today, several universities are experimenting with Yaupon as a pathway to developing a tea growing industry in the south, without attribution to the traditional ecological knowledge that led to their ultimate experimentation and likely commercialization of it. (That’s a biopiracy story for another time.)

The Boston Tea Party

While southeastern Native American tribes had provided the tea substitute that fueled the resistance to the taxed tea of the East Indian Tea Company, the American resistance in the north was dressing up as the most original American possible — Native Americans. In Philip Deloria’s book, Playing Indian (1998), Deloria opens his first chapter with the night of December 16, 1773, when Boston’s Sons of Liberty, faces darkened with soot and lampblack, draped in blankets, brandishing hatchets and whooping in what they took to be Mohawk fashion, boarded three East India Company ships and destroyed 342 chests of tea. The dress was not accidental, Deloria explains, that it was clearly a costume and not an attempt to look authentic, but its symbolism was that of fierceness and the savage, other. The colonists rejected British identity but had no American-formed identity to replace it and so borrowing from the most original of Americans was an answer. In the European imagination, the Indian stood for the American continent itself — aboriginal, free, natural, and categorically not British. The dress and performance as Indian was not hiding their identities so much as taking on the identity of Indians for a night for the ideological act of resistance.

Three years later, in the Declaration of Independence, in the list of grievances against the British, the colonies included the complaint that the British had “endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, (emphasis added) whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.”

Final thoughts

Native Americas are depicted as savage in the Boston Tea Party, later memorialized in the Declaration of Independence as the colonists point to the British for their complicity in creating conflict between Native America and the colonies. The convenient use of the fierce fighting reputation of the Mohawks in their Boston Tea Party political performance of resistance was duplicitous and a useful borrowing. Yet, it seems the colonists’ greatest weapon for resistance was trade between the Colonists and Native America through the trade of Yaupon tea, where Indians negotiated trade deals and business transactions that could be described as sophisticated negotiations²⁰ — anything other than savage. Even if I may have slightly overstated the role of Yaupon in bolstering the American Revolution, it must still be said that Yaupon tea provided a kind of fuel for the resistance in performance, symbolism and substance, courtesy of Native America.

Happy 250th Anniversary, America.

To read more articles by Professor Sutton go to:  https://profvictoria.substack.com/ 

Professor Victoria Sutton (Lumbee) is a law professor on the faculty of Texas Tech University. In 2005, Sutton became a founding member of the National Congress of American Indians, Policy Advisory Board to the NCAI Policy Center, positioning the Native American community to act and lead on policy issues affecting Indigenous communities in the United States.