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

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.