The Silver Chocolate Pots of Colonial Boston

The Boston Chocolate Pots

Of this group of eight, the earliest example is probably the one made by John Coney about 1701 (fig. 4). It is engraved on the bottom “The gift of Wm Stoughton Esquire / to Mrs. Sarah Tailer : 701,” presumably in error for 1701. In his will, executed on July 6, 1701, Lt. Gov. Stoughton left his niece, Mrs. Sarah Byfield Tailer, twelve pounds to buy a piece of plate as a “particular remembrance” of him, and presumably this vessel is the result of that bequest. It may have been a fitting choice, for Stoughton (see fig. 2) is known to have enjoyed a cup of chocolate at breakfast with Samuel Sewall, and he may have had a fondness for the drink. In form, this Coney pot resembles an Oriental vase, and it would have been virtually at the height of fashion in London and smaller English towns when it was made. It has its handles at right angles to the spout, as many (but not all) examples do, perhaps to facilitate stirring while pouring. The turned-ball finial covers the hole necessary for insertion of the stirring rod. The curved spout originally had a hinged lid at the end, now lost, that perhaps helped to keep the contents warm. The Coney pot is further distinguished by its cut-card ornament around the base.14

Sarah Tailer was the wife of Lieutenant Governor William Tailer (1677–1732). Their household included many stylish goods, including two English cane chairs that have survived (one in the Massachusetts Historical Society and the other in the Bostonian Society); these were probably among eighteen such chairs in the fashionable Tailer household.15

An English example (fig. 5), made by Isaac Dighton of London in 1697, provides a high-style analogue to the Coney pot, with its more elaborate gadrooning and other ornament and its gilt surface. A London pot made by George Garthorne (fig. 6) in 1686 is more similar to the Coney example, and some provincial English examples, like one made by R. Williamson of Leeds about 1695, are also close in feeling. In other words, Coney’s work, while not at the highest level of court silver, was nevertheless stylish and up-to-date in the Anglo-American community.16

Coney, who was probably apprenticed to Jeremiah Dummer, was the leading Boston goldsmith of his day. His work included rare forms such as sugar boxes, punch bowls, and monteith bowls, as well as the earliest known American silver teapot, and thus it is not surprising that a second chocolate pot by him is known (fig. 7). This example was probably made between 1715 and 1720, as indicated by its curvilinear pear-shaped body in the incipient late baroque taste. Its most decorative feature is its serpent-headed spout. This pot originally had a sliding or pivoted finial for the insertion of the stirring rod, and the underside of its base shows a circular pattern of wear that suggests the pot was often placed on a small brazier or chafing dish to keep it warm. The original owners of this pot, unfortunately, are not known—their initials have been erased and replaced with those of William Downes and his wife, Elizabeth Edwards Cheever, who were not married until 1749. This Coney example also has its counterparts in English work.17

Perhaps the most beautiful American chocolate pot was made by Edward Winslow of Boston between 1700 and 1710 (fig. 8). It is richly decorated with gadrooned ornament that is played off of plain areas, creating what the silver scholar John Marshall Phillips of Yale University called the beautiful counterpoise of baroque silver. This pot, now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, has an acorn finial that unscrews and is then held in place by a chain. It was owned originally by Thomas Hutchinson (1675–1739), a wealthy merchant and husband of Sarah Foster, the daughter of Colonel John Foster. They were the parents of the notorious Tory Governor Thomas Hutchinson.18

Another Winslow pot, very similar to the one in the Metropolitan Museum, is now in the collection of the Yale University Art Gallery (fig. 9). Also made in the first decade of the eighteenth century, the Yale Winslow pot has had its spout moved to a higher location on the body, perhaps as early as 1740—the hole where the original spout was located was patched with a decorative plaque. This alteration probably had its origins in the function of the object. A higher location for the spout allowed for sediment to settle more easily in the pot, and thus the change may have allowed the chocolate to flow more smoothly. The Yale Winslow pot is engraved with what are thought to be the Auchmuty family arms; if such is the case, the pot’s original owner may have been lawyer Robert Auchmuty (1687–1750) of Roxbury.19

A fifth Boston silver chocolate pot was made by Peter Oliver, who died at the young age of thirty and left only about seven examples of his work behind (fig. 10). Oliver was probably apprenticed to Coney, “his trusty friend.” His chocolate pot must have been made in the short period of time between the completion of Oliver’s training in about 1703 and his death in 1712. Visually, Oliver’s pot is similar to the Winslow examples, sharing the use of gadrooned ornament, and the finial, originally removable, has been soldered in place. The pot was probably made for Beulah Jacquett, who married Thomas Coates, and then it subsequently descended in their family in the female line through many generations.20

Edward Webb was the maker of a sixth Boston silver chocolate pot (fig. 11). While it bears an overall resemblance to the Winslow and Oliver examples, it has some significant differences. It has an unusual finial assembly, consisting essentially of a screw-on cap, and it has fluted, rather than gadrooned, ornament on its body and cover. Webb, born in England about 1666, learned his craft in London during an apprenticeship to William Denny. Denny had opened shop in London in 1679 and worked there until his death in 1709. He had just entered into business when Webb started his training in 1680, which lasted until about 1687. Denny’s prominent shop filled many important commissions, and Webb was thus exposed to sophisticated English silver styles during his formative years there. It is possible that Webb stayed on in Denny’s shop as a journeyman. Objects that have Denny’s mark, like a monteith dated 1702 (fig. 12) and others dated about the same time, often bear the type of fluting—the tight, somewhat pinched, irregular, almost nervous fluting—that Webb must have learned in Denny’s shop and brought to America. It is not known when Webb arrived in this country, although evidence places him here as early as 1704. Most other objects bearing Webb’s mark, including tankards, porringers, and spoons, are simpler than the chocolate pot. Some of them have well-executed cast ornament, but none is as ambitious as the pot. However, Webb was a wealthy man when he died in 1718, and his estate inventory indicates that he owned all the tools necessary to create such a complex pot. As an English immigrant and one with specialized skills, Webb may have worked primarily as a jobber or journeyman for native-born silversmiths. Although the writer is not aware of any chocolate pots bearing William Denny’s mark that resemble the Webb pot, some contemporaneous English work, such as an example of 1703 by William Charnelhouse of London (fig. 13), is closely related. Unfortunately, the original owner of the Webb pot is not known. The applied cartouche on the side of the pot is a later addition of uncertain, although possibly eighteenth-century, date, and the engraved initials it bears, P / TA, remain unidentified.21

The last two Boston colonial chocolate pots known were made by Zachariah Brigden, one in the Museum of Fine Arts (fig. 14) and the other at Historic Deerfield (fig. 15), both dated to about 1755–60 and thus made very early in Brigden’s career. The MFA Brigden pot was made for Ebenezer and Mary (Edwards) Storer, who were married in 1723, and is engraved with the coat of arms used by Ebenezer.22 The Deerfield Brigden example, which is slightly larger but otherwise very similar, was made for a member of the De(e)ring family.23 Both have removable finials; the MFA example has an open-link chain to secure the finial when it is removed. Brigden’s chocolate pots, last in the Boston series, document the survival of their kind for more than half a century, into the era when tea and coffee pots were the more common forms.

Provincial Luxury

This group of eight objects—perhaps statistically insignificant even when one considers that undoubtedly a few examples have been lost to the melting pot in the last two centuries—is of extraordinary significance when considered in light of developments in Boston in the colonial era, especially in the years 1700 to 1715 or 1720, when all but the Brigden pots were made. As the seventeenth century came to a close, changes began to be felt in the small seaport town of about ten thousand people. “The worldwide commercial interests of the town,” according to the historian G. B. Warden, “did provide luxuries and diversions from Augustan England which seriously affected the town’s way of life.”24 Many of these “luxuries and diversions” were brought to Boston by the succession of royal governors and other officials who administered the province’s affairs after 1692. Changes in architecture, furniture, silver, and other furnishings took place, and the little cluster of chocolate pots is perhaps best seen as part of a constellation of material objects, large and small, that introduced new styles, customs, and behaviors to Boston.

The house built in 1679 by Peter Sargeant was probably the grandest house in Massachusetts in its time and for many years thereafter. In the 1710s, it was remodelled to become the fashionable city home of the colonial governors and became known as the Province House. Portraits of kings, queens, and governors hung in its council chambers, and it symbolized the existing power structure in Boston. It also was the epicenter of the increased urbanization and sophistication that characterized Boston in this period.25

The Foster-Hutchinson house (fig. 16), built on Garden Court Street in the North End about 1692 (and destroyed in 1833), is representative of this new wave of change. As Abbott Lowell Cummings has observed, the Foster-Hutchinson house is the first “recorded example of the English Renaissance in Boston,” with its Ionic pilasters topped by capitals of imported Portland stone.26 The house is central to our theme because it was built by John and Abigail Foster, and descended to Mrs. Foster’s nephew, the merchant-captain Thomas Hutchinson, the owner of the Winslow chocolate pot now at the Metropolitan (see fig. 8). The Foster-Hutchinson house stood next door to the Clark-Frankland house, built by the merchant William Clark about 1712. (It, too, was taken down in 1832 or 1833.) This three-story brick mansion was an even more fully developed example of the Georgian style, with its string courses, rhythmic facade, and alternating segmental and triangular pediments. Many less ambitious houses, like the Moses Pierce-Hichborn house of ca. 1711, which still stands in the North End, came from the same mold, as were collegiate buildings at Harvard and churches and civic buildings in Boston, such as the landmark building now known as the Old State House of 1712–13.27

These developments in architecture, in which the Georgian style supplanted the timber-frame first-period buildings of the post-medieval style, started to transform the landscape. They were mirrored in changes in furniture and furnishings that similarly began to affect domestic space. Such objects as the Warland family chest-on-chest (fig. 17) and the Reverend John Avery’s desk and bookcase (fig. 18) are key to understanding Boston furniture of possibly as early as 1715. Both are very English in style, and advanced stylistically. Edward S. Cooke, Jr., has suggested that they are the cabinetmaking equivalent of the elaborate Boston silver made by Coney, Winslow, and others—silver that includes the sophisticated group of chocolate pots, as well as other notable examples of conspicuous consumption, such as the wrought candlesticks of 1690–1710 by Coney and gadrooned candlesticks by John Noyes of about 1695–1700, lighting devices rarely made in silver in this country. Other rare forms made in this period include John Coney’s spectacular monteith (made about 1705–10 for rinsing and cooling wineglasses) and his simple yet elegant punch bowl of about 1710.28

The chocolate pots bear perhaps the most significant relationship to Boston silver sugar boxes, a similarly small group of ten known examples, including ones by John Coney of ca. 1685 (fig. 19) and Edward Winslow of about 1700 (fig. 20). Both forms are rare, costly, stylish, and linked to relatively short-lived customs. The chocolate pots lack the overt snake symbolism and other embellishments that are practically unique to Winslow’s sugar boxes, as explained by Ed Nygren, who explored the complex iconography and sexual connotations of these objects, which are related to issues of marriage, fertility, and fecundity. Although sugar boxes were used primarily in the service of wine, one can imagine a wealthy family using sugar boxes and chocolate pots in the same household, for sugar was also important as a sweetener for the otherwise bitter chocolate.29

Both forms also were produced by only a few craftsmen. Of the combined total of eighteen sugar boxes and chocolate pots, Coney (four sugar and two chocolate) and Winslow (five sugar and two chocolate) produced thirteen, or 72 percent; another chocolate pot was made by Peter Oliver, who was probably apprenticed to Coney. It is possible that Coney and Winslow were able to employ a journeyman with experience in London—perhaps Edward Webb or Henry Hurst—to assist in the fashioning of such stylish, sophisticated forms.30

The “Excellent Nectar”

Drinking chocolate was both a private and a public custom. Chocolate was taken at coffee-houses, or houses of public entertainment, in a public setting, although because of its higher price due to high duties, chocolate initially took a secondary role to coffee and was soon almost completely eclipsed by the more caffeine-laden drink. A silver chocolate pot was not necessary, of course, for even though silver’s purity and thermal conductivity made it suitable for hot beverages, base-metal vessels would do as well and were commonly used in these commercial establishments.

In the home, the principal context of silver articles, chocolate was often taken in the morning, at least during the first years after its introduction, but it was undoubtedly used at many times during the day.31 For example, Madam Sarah Kemble Knight (1666–1727) arrived in the evening in a clean, comfortable house in the Narrangansett country while en route in her famous trip from Boston to New Haven in October 1704. The owner of the home asked what Madam Knight would like to eat, and she replied, “I told her I had some Chocolett, if shee would prepare it; which with the help of some Milk, and a little clean brass Kettle, she soon effected to my satisfaction.”32 But the longstanding, fashionable tradition amongst the European-monied class, in a tradition that migrated from the Catholic countries of southern Europe, Italy, and Spain, was to take chocolate in the morning, as Samuel Sewall did at least once and undoubtedly did more frequently. The chocolate was poured, in most cases, from silver pots into ceramic chocolate cups, often small, handleless beakers imported from abroad, although smaller tea cups would serve nearly as well. No doubt a variety of drinking vessels were used. Peter Fanueil (1700–1742/43), reputed to be the wealthiest man in Boston at his death in 1743, who owned some fourteen hundred ounces of silver, served the beverage in “6 lignum vitae chocolate cups lin’d with silver,” and, as we saw earlier, the Rev. Thomas Prince used a porringer.33

Bostonians obtained their chocolate from local merchants, such as Mrs. Hannah Boydell, who offered “Tea, Coffee, Chocolate, Loaf and Muscovado Sugars of all Sorts” at her shop on King Street in the 1730s, or the grocer John Merrett, at the sign of the Three Sugar Loaves and Canister, also on King Street, who sold “Super-fine Chocolate, Coffee, raw and roasted, [and] very choice Teas,” along with all manner of sugars, spices, and other delicacies. Another merchant offered “Italian chocolate ready prepared with sugar” in 1739, and in 1769, John Goldsmith advertised “Choice Chocolate made and Sold” at his corner shop leading down John Hancock’s wharf.34

Although chocolate contains some theobromine, a mild stimulant, it has more nutritional than stimulating value. In its early days, chocolate was also thought to have medicinal value and to be an aphrodisiac.35 (An English verse of 1652 observes that chocolate “Twill make old women Young and Fresh; / Create new notions of the flesh / And cause them long for you know what, / If they but taste of chocolate.”36) But within a few years, chocolate, like tea, which had similarly been given many magical and mystical powers when first introduced, became primarily a fashionable, expensive drink that did not carry a great deal of attendant symbolic meaning. Thus, the French cavalier and lady seen taking chocolate in a French print published between 1690 and 1710 (fig. 21), were primarily simply enjoying themselves in a cabaret.37

This theme of enjoyment and relaxation typifies many eighteenth-century images of chocolate drinking. A French depiction of a lady’s boudoir—or possibly a brothel—features a chocolate service at its center (fig. 22), for example, with the mill (or molinet) clearly visible. A painting (fig. 23) by the French artist Jean-Baptiste Leprince entitled La crainte (Fear) (1769) depicts a woman in bed leaning toward her departed lover (and her chocolate pot, with its mill clearly visible, and cups). The method of drinking chocolate was to adopt a “fluid, lazy, languid motion,” well typified by this young lady. Dress for taking chocolate was meant to be casual (carried to an extreme in this image).38

Most everything about chocolate drinking suggested ample amounts of leisure time, which is perhaps the greatest symbol of power. The Englishman William Hughes, writing in 1672, cautioned his readers that “it is not convenient, as experience hath sufficiently taught us, to eat or drink any tiling else quickly after the drinking of it; or presently to use any immoderate exercise; but rather to rest awhile, whether it be taken hot or cold: because it is apt to open the Pores, and thereby it causeth the greater expence of Spirits by transpiration, and so consequently nouriseth the less.”39 In other words, take it easy. As the scholar Wolfgang Schivelbusch has observed, a long breakfast involving chocolate “does not start off a workday—rather it marks the start of a day’s carefully cultivated idleness,” a “morning-long awakening to the rigors of studied leisure.”40

Such a style of life—of slow, languorous mornings—was at odds with the Puritan and Yankee modes of behavior, and this divergence may account for the small number of silver chocolate pots made in Massachusetts Bay Certainly the Rev. Prince was not an idle aristocrat—his morning draft of chocolate inaugurated a long day of scholarship and meditation. Coffee was more in tune with New England Protestantism. The silver chocolate pots of Coney, Winslow, Webb, and Oliver allow us to see a few Bostonians, in the first few years of the eighteenth century, trying on a Continental style of life that, apparently, didn’t fit. Although chocolate remained a part of the culinary landscape throughout the eighteenth century, it was not afforded the exalted status of silver pouring vessels, designed and reserved just for chocolate, with the exception of the two Brigden pots made at midcentury. Other forms became more popular in silver. Based on surviving examples, for example, Massachusetts silversmiths are known to have made at least ninety-five silver teapots before about 1775. Most of these, however, were made relatively late. The earliest is one by John Coney of about 1710 and only five others are known that date before 1730. By the middle of the 1730s, there was a real spike in the production of teapots, with at least twenty-five known examples, including many by Jacob Hurd, that can be dated to ca. 1735 to ca. 1745; the numbers continue to increase during the following decades. Silver coffeepots were crafted rarely by Massachusetts silversmiths in the first half of the eighteenth century. Only about six made before 1750 survive, although at least twenty-one are known dating to the period ca. 1750 to ca. 1775. Silver coffeepots or pots of other materials may have been used for chocolate after 1720, but the era when it demanded specialization had largely passed.41

The historian Cary Carson, in a very lengthy study of the style of life in the eighteenth century, has observed that there was something in the air in the years just before and after 1700. The world was changing, and among the many consequences of those changes, he suggests, “none was more novel or conspicuous than the pleasure that men and women took in their physical well-being and the value they placed on material things.”42 Why this was so remains a matter of debate among historians in the academy, but it is likely that the story of Boston’s silver chocolate pots might add a footnote to the ultimate resolution. Certainly people drank chocolate because it tasted good, and wealthy people apparently took pleasure in using silver vessels to do so. The surviving chocolate pots indicate that the period of 1700 to 1715 was especially significant for these changes in one small area of “cultivated gentility.” Thus, aside from their intrinsic qualities as works of art, these pots have something to add to the current academic concerns about the rise of gentility and genteel behavior in America, about changes in etiquette and manners, and about the ongoing concern in American life over the pernicious effects of luxury.43 They offer information about the consumer revolution, and no doubt, like the story of sugar as told by Sidney Mintz, they say something about power relationships based on wealth and exploitation.44

The thoughts expressed by William Hughes in 1672, however, probably come closer to the true meaning of chocolate to people of the eighteenth century than do our latter-day theoretical speculations. In his volume entitled The American Physitian, or. A Treatise of the Roots, Plants, Trees, Shrubs, Fruit, Herbes, &c. Growing in the English Plantations in America, . . . whereunto is added a Discourse of the Cacao-Nut-Tree, And the use of its Fruit; with all the ways of making Chocolate, the like never extant before, Hughes wrote “But what shall I say more of this excellent Nectar? It is a very good aliment, a clear Pabulum multi nutriment: that it doth fatten . . . is undeniable; and that it nouriseth . . . is without dispute . . . [I]t revives the drooping spirits, and chears those that are ready to faint; expelling sorrow, trouble, care, and all perturbrations of the minde: it is an Ambrosia: And finally, in a word, it cannot be too much praised.”45

Notes