How Alcohol Acted as a Catalyst for American Independence
In the summer of 1784, Alexander Hamilton sat down in New York to write one of the stranger letters of his early legal career. The recent peace had allowed transatlantic wine commerce to restart, British blockades had vanished, and claret could once again reach the palates of the American elite in place of rum.
Hamilton’s client, a London wine merchant named Hugh Seton, was owed 7,400 pounds — roughly half a million dollars today — by a man named John De Ponthieu Wilkes. Wilkes had received two shipments of wine to sell in New York on Seton’s behalf. He sold the claret, but never paid Seton.
The wine Seton exported was no Two Buck Chuck; his firm sold, as one contemporary recalled, “first growth claret, properly prepared and of proper age” that normally came “from Boulogne to Mr. Stewart of York Buildings” in the fashionable London neighborhood the Strand. John Stewart, in turn, was Seton’s brother-in-law, having married his sister in 1750.
In New York, Hamilton investigated. The wine, he concluded, had arrived “either damaged or of indifferent quality; and necessarily sold at very low rates.” He handed the case off to a colleague, who had an arrest warrant for Wilkes issued. That colleague was Aaron Burr.
A bad wine shipment from the London-Boulogne merchant corridor had, 20 years before their fatal duel, put Hamilton and Burr on the same side of a courtroom.
This is the story of one Scottish merchant family whose commercial network touched nearly every part of the American Revolution: from a hogshead of Bordeaux vines shipped to William Penn in 1682 to the table where Benjamin Franklin negotiated the peace.
The Vine That Started It All
In January 1682, a London merchant named James Claypoole wrote to two men in Bordeaux on behalf of William Penn, the Quaker founder of Pennsylvania, who was searching for vine cuttings for his new colony: “those that bears the best grapes, rather than ye most.” The men he wrote to were William Popple and Robert Stewart, partners in the most important foreign wine house in the booming port of Bordeaux.
Robert Stewart was a Scot from Berwickshire and the grandfather of John Stewart. Popple was an Englishman with family ties to a powerful merchant family with an important trading network. The two — a fiercely Presbyterian Covenanter and a committed Unitarian — made for an unlikely pairing in Catholic Bordeaux, but their firm supplied the finest wine across London, Edinburgh, Spain, and the Dutch Republic. If you wanted the best Bordeaux could offer, you wrote to Stewart and Popple.
The vine shipment departed for Pennsylvania. Most of it likely perished as European Vitis vinifera struggled brutally against American soil, winters, and parasites. But some of that Bordeaux genetic material survived, crossing with native wild vines over the following decades until, around 1740, a gardener to Thomas Penn (one of William’s sons) named James Alexander noticed a thriving volunteer vine growing near Springettsbury, just above the northwest corner of Philadelphia, close to the old vineyard planted for William Penn in 1683 with the Stewart-Popple cuttings.
The Alexander grape, one of the first viable American wine grapes, was, in its DNA, partly a child of that 1682 shipment. Hamilton’s peer, Benjamin Franklin, understood what others were slower to grasp: A successful American wine grape wasn’t just an agricultural curiosity, it was a declaration of economic independence from the European empires that controlled what colonists drank, and taxed them accordingly. Franklin championed American viticulture tirelessly, publishing winemaking instructions in “Poor Richard’s Almanack,” sending vine cuttings to friends at his own expense, and encouraging every experiment in American wine he heard about.
Rum, Molasses, and the Making of a Revolution
European empires treated alcohol as strategic infrastructure, with roughly the intensity the U.S. now reserves for semiconductors. Spain banned colonial viticulture outright to protect Andalusian wine lords. France forbade commercial winemaking in its vast American territories to shield domestic producers. Every colony was designed to consume the mother country’s product, not compete with it.
England, in contrast, encouraged colonial wine experiments, hoping to reduce its dependence on French imports. Heavily in debt after the costly Seven Years’s War with France, Britain was fiercely protective of something else: the molasses trade that fed New England’s rum distilleries. This is where the real combustion happened.
France had banned rum production in its Caribbean colonies in 1713, ostensibly to protect the lucrative brandy industries in Bordeaux and Cognac. The unintended consequence was a vast surplus of cheap molasses piling up on the French islands, especially Saint-Domingue, modern Haiti. Boston and Newport merchants seized the opportunity. They built an illicit import network of breathtaking scale, shipping cheap French molasses north to be distilled into rum. By 1770, Massachusetts alone had over 100 distilleries producing millions of gallons annually. At this point, rum was colonial America’s largest manufacturing sector after shipbuilding, employing coopers, dockworkers, sailors, insurers, and tavern keepers in a dense commercial web running almost entirely on smuggled French molasses.
Here is where the Stewart family story takes a harder turn. By the 1760s, John Stewart — Robert’s grandson, Hugh’s brother-in-law, now a prominent London merchant, and soon a member of Parliament — had invested in West Indies plantations. The Atlantic economy ran on sugar, and sugar ran on enslaved labor; Stewart was embedded in both. By 1766, he was corresponding with the governor of Martinique about shipping and trade arrangements on the very island whose molasses surplus was fueling the rum economy in the colonies. He understood these pressure points from both ends of the trade.
The British Parliament’s Sugar Act of 1764, designed to pay off the heavy war debt, preceded and in many ways provoked the Revolution more directly than the more famous Stamp Act. It imposed strict, new customs enforcement on exactly this molasses trade. The duty was actually lower than before, but the enforcement was suddenly real, and this became an existential threat to Boston distillers who had operated comfortably in the gray zone for decades.
The fury spilled into the streets. In 1768, customs officials seized John Hancock’s sloop Liberty in Boston Harbor, nominally over 25 pipes (casks) of Madeira, though the underlying issue was the entire smuggling apparatus keeping the rum economy afloat. Around 3,000 colonists rioted. Hancock became a revolutionary symbol, though his motivations were straightforwardly commercial: British enforcement was threatening to bankrupt his family liquor business.
The rage found its ritual outlet in the tavern. In August 1769, 350 Sons of Liberty gathered at Colonel Lemuel Robinson’s tavern in Dorchester and drank through 59 carefully choreographed toasts. The first went to the king; protocol still demanded it. But the rest told a different story: to the liberty of the press, to freedom of trade, and 45 toasts to the English radical journalist John Wilkes, whose defiance of the Crown had made him a hero on both sides of the Atlantic.
Toasting Wilkes was a way of insisting on English liberty rather than declaring independence from it. That framing would not last long.
The Merchant, the Philosopher, and the Negotiator
By the time the Revolution broke out, John Stewart had moved into a different kind of eminence. He lived on the Strand in London and counted among his acquaintances figures whose ideas became central to the Constitution: David Hume, Adam Smith, Montesquieu, and Benjamin Franklin. Hume grew up next to Stewart and stocked claret from his cellars; Stewart bought wine from Montesquieu, the man who had articulated the separation of powers in 1748; Smith relied on Stewart’s French connections when he traveled to Bordeaux. Hume and Smith both argued forcefully for a free international wine trade, without prohibitory tariffs.
Franklin spent much of the 1760s in London, settling at his famous lodgings on Craven Street, one block from Stewart’s wine store and home on Buckingham Street. He dined at Stewart’s and moved in the same social world, yet the relationship was more than social. The Stewart household served as a courier stop for Franklin’s correspondence and packages from France, the kind of practical intimacy that tells you more about a friendship than dinner invitations alone. Despite their political differences over the recent Revolution, when Franklin left for Paris as America’s ambassador to France, Stewart wrote to him with a medical question, calling him “a Philanthropist, who is always ready to give every relief in his power to his fellow creatures in all cases of distress.”
But the deeper connection ran through a man named Caleb Whitefoord, a witty Scottish polymath trained for five years as a wine apprentice in the London-Boulogne corridor by the Stewart family firm. Whitefoord likely met Franklin through the Stewarts, and the friendship that followed became one of the great cross-partisan relationships of the Revolutionary era. When the war ended, Whitefoord acted as a pivotal intermediary between the British government and the American delegation during the negotiations that led to the Treaty of Paris of 1783.
The wine apprentice from the Stewart family firm. The man who knew Franklin in London. The peace negotiator. All the same person, orbiting the same commercial network that had stretched from a Bordeaux hogshead in 1682 to a Paris negotiating table a century later.
Bad Wine, and the Bill That Came Due
Which brings us back to Hugh Seton, Hamilton, and the purportedly damaged claret.
The wine Seton sent to Wilkes in 1784 was almost certainly the finest claret available in the Atlantic trade: properly aged Premier Cru. This makes Hamilton’s dry conclusion that it had arrived “either damaged or of indifferent quality” either an account of a genuine catastrophe in the hold, or, more likely, a conniving debtor’s convenient story.
The man Seton had trusted to sell it was John De Ponthieu Wilkes, nephew of the very John Wilkes whom the Sons of Liberty had toasted all through the 1760s.
The irony is almost too neat: The colonists who had raised their glasses to John Wilkes were now, through Hamilton’s law office, chasing 7,400 pounds from his nephew over disappeared claret.
Hamilton had Wilkes arrested. Burr drafted the legal process. Wilkes, working the newly sympathetic New York insolvency laws, had himself discharged before either could secure the debt. The wine money had vanished.
Hamilton wrote in 1785: “The situation of this Country, by means of the war, affords so many examples of ruined debtors, that the Legislature is disposed to make relief to such persons as easy as possible; and accordingly pass from time to time acts for relief of insolvent debtors without the necessary checks for preventing fraud.”
Hamilton’s letter to Seton concluding the affair was a model of restrained mortification. He sympathized with Seton’s “heavy loss.” He confirmed that Burr “did every thing in his power.” He noted, with lawyerly precision, that questions might yet be raised about whether Wilkes’s discharge was valid “as there is no doubt his confinement was voluntary and collusive,” but that such a discussion should “sleep for the present.”
The Atlantic wine trade, an intricate, centuries-old web of factors, credit, reputation, and trust, had just been beaten by a talented grifter and the New York insolvency act.
The Toast That Lasted
Franklin’s friend John Adams, looking back in 1818, was characteristically direct: “I know not why we should blush to confess that Molasses was an essential Ingredient in American independence.”
He was right, but molasses was only part of it. The American Revolution fermented in the intersection of wine commerce and rum economics, of Bordeaux merchants and Caribbean planters, of London drawing rooms where Franklin dined with men like Stewart, and New York courtrooms where Hamilton and Burr cleaned up the aftermath.
Robert Stewart’s vine shipment of 1682 crossed the Atlantic hoping to give Penn’s colonists economic independence in vinous form. A century later, that network had helped ferment a revolution, negotiate a peace, and, finally, been beaten by a single talented grifter with a famous name and nothing to lose.
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This article draws on the Papers of Alexander Hamilton at the Library of Congress; the Franklin Papers at the American Philosophical Society; “The Whitefoord Papers” (Oxford, 1898); the Claypoole-Stewart correspondence, 1682; and Thomas Pinney, “A History of Wine in America” (University of California Press, 1989).
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