Washington Winter Show 2019

60 the bowl exactly to the company. In Dumfries, Virginia, of the twenty-seven clients buying punch bowls between 1758 and 1764, half bought more than one bowl, up to as many as nine. 20 And these were purchasers who “bought locally”; the grandees, who exported tobacco and made purchases through agents in London, purchased on an even larger scale. In 1758, George Washington ordered “1/2 dozen fashionable China Bowls from a large to a Mdlg Size,” actually receiving twelve bowls in sizes including three pint, quart, and two quart. He ordered two more bowls in 1766, and an astonishing seventeen bowls in 1770, including one- and two-gallon sizes. 21 Mount Vernon was already provisioned with punch bowls; three are recorded in Lawrence Washington’s posthumous inventory of 1752, and at least one, in rare imported Chinese porcelain, probably came with Martha Custis when she married George in 1759 (preserved at Mount Vernon). But there was a reason for Washington’s stocking up — punch was politics. In 1755, he had run unsuccessfully for the Virginia House of Burgesses, failing in part because he had not wanted to ply voters with the customary alcohol. In 1758, although George himself was away fighting in the French and Indian War, his agent distributed libations, including “1 hhd [hogshead] and one barrell of Punch consisting of 26 gals. Best Barbados rum” (£6 10s) and “10 Bowls of Punch at 2/6 each” (another £1 5s.); Washington won the seat. 22 Official entertaining kept pace; the 1770 inventory of Lord Botetourt, at the Governor’s Palace in Williamsburg, listed “2 large enam[elle]d China bowls” and “2 lessr blue & white d[itt]o,” plus the “16 Bottles Arrack…11 doz peach Brandy… 6 Bottles fine Arrack…11 Bottles french Brandy… 1 Barrel peach Brandy… 1 Hhd [hogshead] of Rum” with which to fill them. 23 Revolutionary Carousing In 1754, Lord Baltimore’s twenty-third birthday was celebrated with a ball, cannon fire, a bonfire on the Baltimore Common, and punch distributed to “the Populace.” 24 A few years later, for George III’s birthday in 1766, Philadelphia provided the public with “Rum, Sugar, and Water, to make Punch.” 25 But such expressions of loyalty were giving way to Revolutionary sentiments, nurtured over bowls of punch. Paul Revere’s “Sons of Liberty bowl,” reproduced in thousands of 20th-century copies, is an 11-inch-diameter punch bowl, probably the best-known one in America. It was filled for gatherings of the subversive group, usually at the Bunch of Grapes and Green Dragon taverns in Boston’s North End. In June 1768, shortly after it was finished, the bowl is recorded in use at a Sons of Liberty meeting that ended with toasts of rum punch. 26 Before the Boston Tea Party on December 16, 1773, conspirators met in the afternoon at the house of printer Benjamin Edes. As they waited for darkness, they imbibed liquid courage — punch, made by their host’s son in another room, and served from the family’s Chinese Export punch bowl. By 1777, with hostilities in full swing, John Adams wrote to Abigail from Philadelphia that punch there was up to 20 shillings a bowl, and notes that they were using whiskey instead of rum; the merchantmen who had brought the rum, sugar, citrus, and spices had been blocked from rebel harbors. 27 Decline Difficulty in sourcing ingredients may have been one of many factors that pushed punch from a daily tipple into a “special occasion” dish in the last quarter of the 18th century. In the celebrations at Philadelphia’s City Tavern around the drafting and signing of the Constitution, the seven bowls of punch consumed are dwarfed by the fifty- four bottles of Madeira and sixty of claret. 28 America’s alliance with France made wines easier to come by, while supplies from the British colonies were unpatriotic. Martha Washington served punch as First Lady, but her husband also ordered a dozen wine coolers for the presidential table. When Jefferson relaxed at Monticello with a sympathetic guest, “book and bowl… carried us far into the night,” but his official entertaining was known for the excellence of its French wines. 29 There were holdouts; Harrison Gray Otis, born in 1765 and one of the wealthiest men in Boston, had a ten-gallon blue-and-white bowl filled and placed on his stair landing every afternoon for his visitors. 30 Today we associate New England religion with Blue Laws, but at an ordination of ministers in Hartford in 1784, the most expensive items on the account were twenty-four dinners — and eighteen “boles Punch.” 31 With the start of direct trade between the United States and China in 1784, many large Export porcelain punch bowls arrived on American shores, but their very scale reveals their intended use for large parties; those for Masonic gatherings, for example, were appropriately decorated. For private tippling, patriotic American whiskey or imported and fortified port were chosen for masculine drinking binges in the early 19th century. By the time Isabella Beeton was compiling her Book of Household Management in 1861, she noted that “Punch, which was almost universally drunk amongst the