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imbalances, and colonists relied on British imports more than the reverse. The colonists paid for their imports with gold and silver, then suffered currency shortageswhen England didn’t buy anything in return. Credit was one answer, but English financiers hesitated to invest in remote projects, forcing many colonial merchants to barter using rum when cash was short. The spirit was easy to make, relatively simple to ship, and maintained a value that fluctuated less than paper money.
    As colonists increasingly used rum as a barter tool for international trade, the British soon introduced tariffs to ensure they got a fair share of the growing profits. The Molasses Act was passed in 1733, prompted by British sugar planters who pulled strings in Parliament to establish duties making colonial imports of French and Spanish molasses more expensive than British molasses from the West Indies. Unfazed, colonists shrugged off the duties and spent the next three decades simply smuggling the cheaper molasses. Corrupt British customs officials usually doctored the paperwork.
    In 1764, England became more serious when it passed the Sugar Act. The measure increased the price that New England rum distilleries paid for molasses by further curtailing foreign imports, and was once again a maneuver by Parliament to help its cronies in the Caribbean. But whereas the colonists had considered the Molasses Act a mere nuisance, the Sugar Act touched a nerve. It landed amid an economic depression, closing many distilleries and forcing the rest to muddle along, enduring higher costs. Colonists began carving time out of their busy smuggling schedules to protest and begin writing pamphlets. One title breathlessly said it all:
Reasons Against the Renewal of the Sugar Act as It Will Be Prejudicial to the Trade Not Only of the Northern Colonies But to Those of Great Britain Also.
    The colonists’ outcry convinced England to roll back parts of the act, but that did little to settle the matter. They were now talking, organizing, and warming up the presses. England, working to prevent the colonists from becoming emboldened by their victory, quickly imposed other taxes. The Sugar Act was replaced by the Stamp Act, which was an even more burdensome tax on all varieties of printed papers, including newspapers, playing cards, contracts, and pamphlets with ridiculously long titles.
    Colonists responded with a shorter message: “No taxation without representation.”
    On the brink of war, just two months before the battles at Lexington and Concord, a group of British soldiers marched toward Salem, Massachusetts, and were confronted by an angry mob blocking the only bridge into town. A colonist named Joseph Whicher stepped forward from the crowd and dared the soldiers to fight, pulling back the sides of his shirt to reveal his bare chest. A British soldier glanced him with his bayonet—it was just a little warning telling the colonist to back off, but enough to spill a thin line of blood down the front of Whicher’s shirt. The Revolutionary War’s first blood was drawn, and from a man who happened to be the foreman of a local rum distillery, a spirit that was about to be ousted in favor of whiskey.

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    George Washington was a moderate drinker, usually preferring the expensive Madeira or brandy favored by many in his high social class. But most Americans enjoyed the ubiquitous rum, including the regular troops serving under Washington in the war, who were given a daily four-ounce ration of the spirit for morale and health. Shortly after the war started, however, British blockades of molasses shipments from the Caribbean created shortages of the drink. When American major general Horatio Gates prepared to fight the British in South Carolina during the summer of 1780, as British troops swept up the coast from the south in a series of successful offensives, he found his rum supplies bare. He did, however, have plenty of molasses. Figuring the raw