The Dames of Philipse Manor Hall: Revolutionary Women and Illicit Dutch Tea

In the late summer of 1776, a New York grocer named John Arthur encountered an unusual mounted party on a Westchester road. Roughly thirty women from Sing Sing, Tarrytown, and Wicker’s Creek were riding toward his house near New Castle. Alerted to his presence and wares, the women sought to extract the Bohea stores he possessed. According to the later McDonald Papers, Arthur realized their purpose, deliberately sent them in the wrong direction, and raced home to prepare his household for what followed. His wife, relatives, and an enslaved African woman barricaded the lower floor with furniture. When the women finally arrived, they carried tongs, pokers, spits, broomsticks, and other household implements transformed into improvised weapons. Their leader, Elizabeth Orser, was remembered as a woman of ‘undaunted resolution.’[1]

The confrontation almost ended in violence, as the women demanded a box of tea on a promise of later payment. The Arthurs were adamant that payment be made immediately and after an exchange shouted between the women outside and the family inside, Mrs. Arthur offered a settlement. If the crowd withdrew, her husband would later provide the tea. Importantly, the papers cites Elizabeth Orser as being the final arbiter of this bargain and, according to the account, the attacking party of women were subsequently ‘furnished with a large quantity of the much beloved bohea’ sufficient to supply their households through the winter.[2]

A second Westchester tradition, preserved in an 1850 interview with Talman Orser, describes a different kind of confrontation. ‘At the beginning of the war,’ an Irish tea peddler named James Dunlap traveled along the Albany Turnpike approximately three miles above the old church on the North River. Fifteen to twenty women lay in wait for him, attacked, and compelled him to sell tea for Continental currency. Talman identified the leader as Sarah Orser, wife of Albert Orser. The surviving interview ends abruptly after noting that the women “got as much as they wanted for the present.”[3] These two episodes, both rooted in the extended Orser family network, offer an unusually concentrated view of how women in Revolutionary Westchester moved from household consumers to public regulators of the wartime marketplace.[4]

The principal evidence for both events come from the McDonald Papers, a collection that is simultaneously indispensable and difficult. John M. Macdonald, a lawyer and amateur historian, compiled roughly 407 interviews between 1844 and 1851, producing more than 1,100 manuscript pages devoted largely to Revolutionary life in Westchester and the surrounding Neutral Ground. His interviewees were elderly residents who had either lived through the war or inherited detailed family traditions about it. Macdonald’s original manuscripts were later lost, but they had been copied by John English; those transcriptions ultimately became the foundation of the collection preserved by the Westchester County Historical Society.[5]

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The time separating interview and event requires caution. Memories could compress chronology, merge incidents, preserve family reputations, or absorb later community traditions. The McDonald Papers should not be read as verbatim transcripts of 1776. Yet they are too rich to dismiss. Their people, places, militia units, and episodes can often be checked against newspapers, military records, land documents, pension files, and other contemporary sources. The proper method is therefore neither credulous acceptance nor blanket rejection, but triangulation wherever possible. The two Orser stories are especially valuable because they can be tested against several independent details.

The published McDonald narrative of the Arthur confrontation explicitly describes what it calls ‘female insurrections’ during the summer of 1776, when tea became scarce in the interior and holders of existing stocks withheld them in expectation of higher prices. Its gendered language is revealing. ‘Good Whig husbands’ supposedly found abstinence comparatively easy, while their wives still longed for the ‘forbidden beverage’ and were portrayed as ‘Daughters of Eve’ tempted by the ‘bewitching infusion.’ Beneath that nineteenth-century language, however, the conduct being described is political. The women of Westchester organized collectively, traveled together, besieged a merchant’s house, negotiated terms, and ultimately secured access to a scarce commodity.[6]

A contemporary newspaper advertisement helps anchor John Arthur in the commercial world from which the story emerged. On May 4, 1775, the New-York Journal; or, The General Advertiser carried an advertisement for a John Arthur operating near Peck Slip, opposite William Walton’s. He offered silks, threads, worsted hose, gloves, ribbons, lace, gauze, glass lanterns, lavender water, paper hangings, Scotch barley, raisins, and seeds suited to local and West Indian markets. Tea was absent.[7] The notice does not conclusively prove that this merchant was the same John Arthur later remembered in the McDonald Papers, and the identification should remain cautious. But the name, occupation, chronology, and New York location fit, while the West Indian orientation of his advertised goods places him within exactly the kind of Atlantic commercial world in which illicit tea circulated.

Later testimony strengthens the case that the Arthur story was a distinct local tradition rather than a garbled version of the Sarah Orser incident. Jesse Ryder told Macdonald that the ‘Westchester Tea Party’ account involving Arthur was ‘correct in its facts throughout without any embellishment’ and identified Arthur as the later proprietor of Tabor Farm in Dutchess County. Samuel Washburn separately referred to Talman Orser as the ‘son of the tea captain.’ Talman was the son of Jonas Orser and Elizabeth Pugsley Orser.[8] That relationship is particularly significant when read alongside Talman’s own testimony. If Talman inherited and preserved the tradition of his mother leading the mounted expedition against Arthur, his decision in 1850 to identify Sarah Orser, the wife of his father’s first cousin Albert, as the leader of an encounter with a different merchant, at a different location, involving a different number of women and a different method of coercion strongly suggests that he was recalling a second event rather than simply retelling his mother’s story with altered details.

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The family connections are themselves significant and provide additional evidence that the two accounts preserve separate but closely related events. Genealogical research preserved by the Ossining Historical Society identifies Jonas Orser, husband of Elizabeth Pugsley, as a son of William Orser, while Albert, or Elbert, Orser, husband of Sarah Gardenier, was a son of William’s brother Abraham. Jonas and Albert were therefore first cousins, making Elizabeth and Sarah members by marriage of the same extended Orser family network.[9] The geographical evidence nevertheless places their households in somewhat different settings. Jonas and Elizabeth resided on Long Hill Road in Ossining, within the communities associated with the mounted expedition against John Arthur, while Albert and Sarah lived at Sparta before eventually relocating to Pittstown. Albert also served as a private in Captain Martling’s and Captain Honeywell’s companies of the First Westchester Regiment of the New York militia.[10] These family and geographical relationships help explain why two women bearing the Orser surname could emerge as leaders of similar actions without requiring the surviving accounts to describe the same incident. Rather than two unrelated outbreaks of female crowd action, the Arthur and Dunlap confrontations may represent political behavior circulating through a tightly connected kinship and neighborhood network. Their households were embedded in the same wartime community that supplied Patriot manpower, intelligence, food, transport, and local knowledge.

The identity of the peddler Talman remembered as James Dunlap remains uncertain, but newly recovered evidence broadens the field of possible identification. One possibility remains the Irish-born Loyalist James Dunlop, who entered the Queen’s Rangers in 1776 and was later described as an energetic officer. A 1779 letter to Sir Henry Clinton indicates that he possessed substantial family property in England.[11] Yet evidence connecting this officer to prewar New York commerce or the tea trade remains circumstantial, and the identification should not be treated as established.

A second possibility emerges from contemporary New York commercial records. In 1773 newspaper advertisements explicitly identified a John Dunlap ‘of New-York, Merchant’ who had been ‘lately reduced by Misfortunes in Trade.’ A lottery organized at Powles Hook sought to raise £720 to enable him to return to business, with several established New York merchants assisting in the sale of tickets. At approximately the same time, Dunlap’s substantial residence near the Fly Market was placed on the market. One notice described a house with seven fireplaces, cellars, a large yard, pump, and cistern in what it called ‘a good Part of the City for Business.’ A later advertisement again offered his Queen Street house and 165-by-25-foot lot for public sale, with inquiries directed to Robert G. Livingston.[12] Taken together, these notices establish that a New York merchant named John Dunlap experienced a significant commercial reversal only three years before the Westchester confrontation remembered by Talman Orser. Another contemporary record places a John Dunlap in paid service to New York’s revolutionary authorities during the summer of 1776 as a “Door-keeper.” An account credited him with fifty-nine days of service beginning June 19, while on August 17 the Convention ordered his account audited only through that date and directed that “the said John Dunlap be, and is hereby, discharged from the Service of the said Committee & of this Convention.”[13] The record does not identify the full nature of his employment, nor can this man yet be conclusively identified with the financially distressed merchant of 1773. Nevertheless, it places a John Dunlap in the service of New York’s revolutionary government during precisely the period in which the Westchester tea disturbances occurred. His discharge date also corresponds with the approximate chronology in which the event was said to have occurred and the potential movement through the region could have offered him ample opportunity to assess market potential.

Tea’s political significance emerged partly from the expanding consumer culture of eighteenth-century British America. T. H. Breen has shown how British colonists increasingly inhabited an ‘empire of goods’ in which objects such as textiles, ceramics, and tea created shared tastes across otherwise divided communities.[14] Tea was especially important because its consumption took place largely within the household, where women managed many of the domestic rituals surrounding it. When imperial taxation made tea politically controversial, Parliament politicized a sphere of consumption already strongly associated with female household authority.

That politicization occurred in a market Britain never fully controlled. James Fichter estimates that between 1768 and 1772 somewhere between one-half and three-quarters of the tea consumed in the thirteen colonies was smuggled. ‘Dutch tea’ was less a precise geographic description than a label for tea moving through an illicit network involving Dutch and British traders, European ports, and Caribbean entrepots.[15] General Thomas Gage complained in 1767 that tea from Holland was reaching the colonies through St. Eustatius, and by 1771 a Boston customs official could describe the Dutch island as the channel through which the colonies were chiefly supplied with tea.[16]

St. Eustatius, the small Dutch free port later known as the Golden Rock, became one of the most important nodes in this traffic. Its value lay not in agricultural production but in its ability to connect merchants from rival empires. Victor Enthoven and Kenneth Morgan have shown how its open commercial regime and its dense Anglo-Dutch connections made it a critical re-export center for North American trade.[17] New York was particularly receptive because the English conquest of New Netherlands in 1664 had not erased Dutch family networks, commercial habits, or Atlantic relationships. Political sovereignty changed faster than trading culture.

This background helps explain an otherwise puzzling feature of Revolutionary tea politics. Colonists could publicly denounce taxed British tea while continuing to consume smuggled Dutch tea. Benjamin Carp has demonstrated how the prevalence of Dutch contraband complicates the conventional story of the Boston Tea Party, especially in the middle colonies where merchants had a direct economic interest in resisting East India Company competition.[18] Non-importation therefore operated partly as a public language of virtue within a commercial world that remained far messier in private practice.

Women were deliberately drawn into that language. During the Townshend crisis and again in the early 1770s, Patriot writers addressed women as consumers whose willingness to abstain from imported goods could determine the success or failure of resistance. Mary Beth Norton has shown how boycotts, household production, correspondence, and purchasing decisions increasingly politicized domestic life, while Linda Kerber traced the ideological movement by which female virtue acquired public significance during the Revolution.[19] Women were often blamed for an attachment to luxury at the same time that male political leaders insisted their self-denial was indispensable. That contradiction gave political weight to choices women already made inside the household. There is evidence that Dutch-descended communities in New York were deliberately targeted with such rhetoric.

In February 1775, the New-York Journal advertised the proceedings of the Continental Congress translated into “Low Dutch,” while a March advertisement offered the Articles of Association in “Elegant Low Dutch” alongside a letter from Congress addressed to the inhabitants of the colonies.[20] These notices demonstrate deliberate efforts to communicate Revolutionary politics to Dutch-speaking communities, although whether such material directly reached the women involved in these disturbances cannot be established.

By 1776 the problem had changed. American ports were opened to international commerce in April, and independence effectively ended the practical logic of the Continental Association even though Congress never formally announced its termination. Tea itself could return to Patriot households, especially when it was not British-taxed tea, but wartime scarcity and hoarding now made price and access politically explosive. Fichter argues that revolutionary leaders responded to widespread noncompliance by effectively making tea patriotic rather than declaring enormous numbers of consumers unpatriotic.[21] What had been a politics of abstention became a politics of regulation.

The two Westchester episodes fit precisely within that transition. Elizabeth Orser’s party demanded access to the tea but did not simply ransack Arthur’s house. Although the transaction was coercive, it still recognized a relationship between ownership, payment, and communal claims to scarce goods. The women were asserting that Arthur’s possession of tea did not give him unlimited authority to withhold it from the surrounding community during a shortage.

Sarah Orser’s party acted more directly. The women intercepted a peddler on a public road and compelled him to sell for Continental currency. This new currency represented the revolutionary state and its acceptance therefore an acknowledgment of its principals. Forcing Dunlap to accept it placed the transaction within the political economy of independence. The crowd of women dictated the terms under which the commodity would circulate, and that distinction resembles what Barbara Clark Smith identifies in Revolutionary-era food riots. Crowds frequently claimed a customary right to regulate price and distribution without necessarily rejecting private property itself.[22]

These actions therefore mark an evolution rather than a sudden rupture in female political behavior. Revolutionary resistance had spent years telling women that domestic consumption was a public matter, that household virtue supported the Patriot cause, and that the success of collective resistance depended partly on their choices. Once war and independence changed the rules surrounding tea, that political authority did not disappear. Women who had been asked to regulate what entered their own homes began asserting the right to regulate how merchants and peddlers supplied the community.

The Arthur episode also exposes the limits of treating expanded female agency as straightforward liberation. An enslaved African woman helped the Arthur family barricade the house while Elizabeth Orser’s party gathered outside with improvised weapons.[23] Her presence in the source is brief, and it is impossible to determine her own views concerning her participation in the event, but Dunmore’s Proclamation provides another context for understanding the place of slavery within these disturbances.

Reports circulating in New York by December 1775 portrayed Dunmore’s offer of freedom to enslaved people who joined British forces as a dangerous assault on the established social order.[24] Against this background, the presence of enslaved people in confrontations involving Arthur is significant. The presence of the enslaved became entangled with accusations of Loyalism and the enforcement of Patriot authority. The treatment of this enslaved woman demonstrates how revolutionary efforts to regulate the marketplace and police political allegiance could readily extend coercion and violence toward the most vulnerable members of the community.

The two Westchester tea parties are most revealing when viewed at the intersection of local society and Atlantic commerce. The women lived in communities shaped by the persistence of Dutch culture, English political rule, wartime mobilization, and a consumer economy long supplied through imperial and illicit channels. The tea they sought was part of an Atlantic system in which St. Eustatius and other Dutch trading centers repeatedly frustrated British regulation. That contraband economy normalized the availability of alternative goods and weakened the idea that Parliament could determine what colonial households might consume.

By 1776, this produced a striking reversal in the politics of tea. A commodity that Patriots had recently been encouraged to reject became one that these Westchester women asserted a communal right to obtain. Elizabeth Orser organized a mounted expedition that compelled a local merchant to promise access to his tea, while Sarah Orser led a group that intercepted a peddler and dictated the terms of sale, including payment in Continental currency.

Examining these two incidents closely changes the scale at which we understand the Revolution. Political agency could be negotiated on rural roads and outside private houses, through household goods, kinship networks, improvised weapons, Continental currency, and the contested meaning of a pound of Bohea. Dutch illicit tea had helped erode the economic boundaries of empire, while Revolutionary resistance had made women’s consumption politically consequential. In Westchester, political authority cultivated within the home crossed the domestic threshold. Here, within the contested Neutral Ground, female agency was asserted both in support of the new Revolutionary moral economy of virtue and as a means of regulating communal adherence to its emerging norms.

[1] John Macdonald, The McDonald Papers, Part 1, Chapter 1: Before the Battle of White Plains, ed. William S. Hadaway (White Plains, NY: Westchester County Historical Society, 1926), 36-37.

[2] Macdonald, The McDonald Papers, Part 1, Chapter 1, 39.

[3] John Macdonald, interview with Talman Orser, October 17, 1850, Hufeland Manuscripts, Book 1, vol. 7, 1020-1022, Westchester County Historical Society, Elmsford, NY.

[4] Thomas S. Wermuth, “‘The Women! In This Place Have Risen in a Mob’: Women Rioters and the American Revolution in the Hudson River Valley,” The Hudson River Valley Review 20, no. 1 (2003): 69.

[5] John Macdonald, The McDonald Papers, Part 1, Chapter 1, 35–39; Thomas S. Wermuth, “The Women! In This Place Have Risen in a Mob’: Women Rioters and the American Revolution in the Hudson River Valley,” The Hudson River Valley Review 20, no. 1 (2003):69

[6] Macdonald, The McDonald Papers, Part 1, Chapter 1, 35-39.

[7] John Arthur advertisement, The New-York Journal; or, The General Advertiser (New York), May 4, 1775, 1. Advertisement identified by Sarah Wassberg Johnson, Philipse Manor Hall State Historic Site.

[8] John Macdonald, interview with Jesse Ryder, October 20, 1848, Hufeland Manuscripts, Book 1, vol. 5, 736-737; John Macdonald, interview with Samuel Washburn, November 6, 1849, Hufeland Manuscripts, Book 1, vol. 6, 933, Westchester County Historical Society, Elmsford, NY.

[9] Ossining Historical Society Museum, ‘Aertsee: Orser Family Genealogical Research Sheet,’ Ossining, NY.

[10] James A. Roberts, comp., New York in the Revolution as Colony and State, 2nd ed. (Albany, NY: Press of Brandow Printing Company, 1898), 204–5, listing “Jonas Orsor” as a captain and “Orcer Elbert” among the men of the First Regiment, Westchester County Militia.

[11] Ron Crawley, ‘Biographical Sketch of James Dunlop,’ Southern Campaigns of the American Revolution Online Library; James Dunlop to Sir Henry Clinton, October 29, 1779, Sir Henry Clinton Papers, William L. Clements Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

[12] ‘The Biles Island Lottery,’ The New-York Journal; or, The General Advertiser (New York), April 1773, advertisement dated Powles Hook, April 15, 1773; ‘To Be Sold,’ The New-York Journal; or, The General Advertiser (New York), April 8, 1773, advertisement concerning the house occupied by John Dunlap near the Fly Market; ‘To Be Sold, at Public Vendue,’ The New-York Journal; or, The General Advertiser (New York), December 1773, advertisement for the Queen Street house and lot occupied by John Dunlap.

[13] Account of John Dunlap and order of discharge, August 17, 1776, in New York in the Revolution as Colony and State, Supplement (Albany, NY: J. B. Lyon Company, 1901), 135.

[14] T. H. Breen, The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 199-200.

[15] James R. Fichter, Tea: Consumption, Politics, and Revolution, 1773-1776 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 34-35.

[16] Benjamin L. Carp, ‘Did Dutch Smugglers Provoke the Boston Tea Party?’ Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 10, no. 2 (Spring 2012): 341; Kenneth Morgan, ‘Anglo-Dutch Economic Relations in the Atlantic World, 1688-1783,’ in Dutch Atlantic Connections, 1680-1800: Linking Empires, Bridging Borders, ed. Gert Oostindie and Jessica V. Roitman (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 133.

[17] Victor Enthoven, ‘That Abominable Nest of Pirates: St. Eustatius and the North Americans, 1680-1780,’ Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 10, no. 2 (Spring 2012): 282-288; Morgan, ‘Anglo-Dutch Economic Relations,’ 124-133.

[18] Carp, ‘Did Dutch Smugglers Provoke the Boston Tea Party?’ 335-359.

[19] Mary Beth Norton, Liberty’s Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750-1800 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1980), 157-159, 225; Linda K. Kerber, Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), 39-42.

[20] The New-York Journal; or, The General Advertiser (New York), February 9, 1775, 1; March 9, 1775, 1.

[21] Fichter, Tea, 192, 235, 240-241.

[22] Barbara Clark Smith, ‘Food Rioters and the American Revolution,’ William and Mary Quarterly 51, no. 1 (January 1994): 3-38.

[23] Macdonald, The McDonald Papers, Part 1, Chapter 1, 39. On the coercive limits of revolutionary crowd action and slavery in the author’s broader research, see Matthews, The Golden Rock and the Hudson Hollows.

[24] “Dunmore,” The New-York Gazette; and the Weekly Mercury (New York), December 18, 1775, 2, Library of Congress, accessed April 7, 2026.