Molasses: the syrup that made New England’s rum

What is molasses?

Molasses is what is left when sugar crystals are separated from boiled sugar cane juice. On a Caribbean plantation the thick boiled syrup was poured into clay moulds or pots with a hole in the bottom. As the sugar slowly cured and hardened, a dark, sticky syrup dripped out. That syrup was molasses.

A planter had three choices. He could boil it again to squeeze out a little more sugar, sell it, or ferment it with the scum skimmed from the boiling kettles and distil it into rum. Rum made this way often brought in a tenth to a fifth of a plantation’s income.

Who made molasses?

Molasses came from the same plantations as sugar, so it was made by the same people: enslaved Africans. They planted and cut the cane, fed the mills and worked the boiling houses, under harsh and often deadly conditions, so that sugar could be sold in Europe and molasses in North America.

The molasses trade also reached into New England itself. From the 1670s some Boston distillers bought enslaved people to work in their distilleries, and by about 1720 roughly one in eight people living in Boston was enslaved.

Why was French molasses so cheap around 1715?

The answer lies in France. In 1713 France passed a law against making or importing spirits from anything except wine. French wine and brandy makers had pushed for it, to protect their own business. It meant French island planters could not sell their rum in France, so the molasses they would have turned into rum was suddenly worth very little at home. Some was shipped to France for making gingerbread, and the rest needed other buyers.

The British islands were different. Their planters distilled much of their own molasses into rum, so they had less to spare. French island molasses, plentiful and cheap, was the obvious bargain for northern traders. From about 1717 French sugar was also beginning to undersell British sugar in Europe, which made British planters even more worried about their French rivals.

How did New England merchants buy French molasses?

Small, fast ships such as sloops sailed south from Boston, Newport and New York carrying salt cod, lumber, horses and other supplies. The French islands needed these supplies badly, because their plantations grew sugar instead of food. The captains traded them for molasses and sailed home.

This trade lived in a grey zone. The trade with Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut and New York broke the rules, and one historian calls it one of the great smuggling stories of the Americas. Before 1733 British law did little to stop it, and colonial customs officers were few. By the late 1760s, French island molasses supplied nearly nine tenths of what New England’s distilleries used.

How did Boston and Newport turn molasses into rum?

Boston had a licensed distiller as early as 1646, and from the 1670s rum distilleries gathered along its harbour. Distillers let molasses and water ferment, then heated the mixture in a still and collected the strong spirit that came off. By the 1730s Boston was making more than a million gallons of rum a year, and colonists drank close to four gallons each a year.

Northern rum was made from molasses alone, without the plantation skimmings, and English distillers looked down on it as “molasses brandy”. It was cheap, though, and it sold. Numbers grew all century: Boston had 25 distilleries in 1750, and Newport had 22 by 1764.

How was molasses tied to the slave trade?

New England rum became a main trade good on the coast of West Africa, where it was traded for captives. The first recorded slave ship left Newport in 1709, and regular voyages began in 1725, at the very end of the pirate years. Captains often sold the captives in the sugar islands and loaded molasses for the voyage home, partly so they would not sail back empty. That molasses became more rum.

This trade grew far larger later in the century. Over its whole history Rhode Island ships made at least 1,000 slaving voyages and carried more than 100,000 Africans into slavery. Rhode Island sent about 60 per cent of all slave voyages from North America, and in some years more than 90 per cent.

How did colonial families use molasses?

Molasses cost less than sugar, so it was the everyday sweetener of New England kitchens. Families poured it into baked beans, brown bread, puddings and pumpkin pie. One estimate suggests the average colonist used about three quarts of molasses a year, not counting the molasses that went into rum, though sources disagree on whether that figure applies to the early or the middle 1700s.

What was the Molasses Act of 1733?

British sugar planters, led by Barbados, were furious that New England fed and supplied their French rivals and bought French molasses instead of theirs. After bills to ban the trade failed in 1731 and 1732, Parliament passed the Molasses Act in May 1733, a few years after the game’s era. From Christmas Day 1733 it charged sixpence on every gallon of foreign molasses, ninepence on foreign rum and five shillings on each hundredweight of foreign sugar.

The tax was so high that merchants simply avoided it. There were too few customs officers, and smuggling carried on much as before. In 1764 Britain replaced it with the Sugar Act, which halved the molasses duty but enforced it, and that caused angry protests. Years later John Adams wrote that molasses was “an essential ingredient in American independence”.