Comparative Studies in Society and History 2021;63(2):464–498.

0010-4175/21 © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Society for the
Comparative Study of Society and History
doi:10.1017/S0010417521000116

Ceremony, Medicine, Caffeinated Tea:

Unearthing the Forgotten Faces of the
North American Stimulant Yaupon
(Ilex vomitoria)
CHRISTINE FOLCH
Cultural Anthropology and Environmental Science and Policy, Duke
University, Durham, NC, USA

In spite of his advanced years, “Old Man” Scarborough was still able to work
the wooden machinery to chop, crush, roast, and cure the leaves of the yaupon
holly when North Carolina naturalist H. H. Brimley interviewed him in 1905.1
Scarborough, Brimley explained, was the Black owner of the only remaining
“yaupon factory,” located on the remote Outer Banks island of Hatteras,
North Carolina (see figure 1). The last practitioner of what had once been a
thriving industry all along the North Carolina coast, Scarborough extolled
the properties of yaupon tea to his visitor, who enjoyed a cup later that
evening instead of coffee or black tea. Half a century earlier, during the U.S.
Civil War (1861–1865), Walter Lenoir wrote to his mother of the
workaround for wartime scarcity that he and his company had found at
Camp Lee, South Carolina: “We have been out of coffee for some time, but
are doing very well without it, & have all become so fond of Yeopon tea
that we will continue to use it.”2 These happy experiences with the yaupon

Acknowledgments: I wish to thank Eduardo Kohn and Marcus Folch for their propitious remarks
on the similarities between yerba mate and yaupon, and the Duke Arts & Sciences Council
Committee on Faculty Research for research support. I also thank the anonymous CSSH
reviewers for their valuable comments and critical suggestions on previous drafts. Shortcomings
that remain are solely my own.
1
Herbert Hutchinson Brimley, “Yaupon Factory,” State 23, 15 (1955): 9–11.
2
Lenoir Family Papers, Personal Correspondence, 1861–1865 ca. 120 p., Inventory #426,
Manuscripts Department, Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill, Camp Lee, South Carolina, 2 Mar. 1862. A note on terms: There are various spellings of
“yaupon” and “cassina” that are geographically marked and also the result of varied literacy. I
have chosen to use the most common spelling of “yaupon” from North Carolina, where I live,
teach, and research. When I discuss a hot beverage made from yaupon, I sometimes refer to it as

464

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 C E R E M O N Y, M E D I C I N E , C A F F E I N A T E D T E A 465

FIGURE 1: Scarborough stands next to yaupon processing equipment, Hatteras, North Carolina,
1905. Photo by H. H. Brimley. Brimley Photograph Collection, North Carolina Digital Collections.

holly were just two of many encounters with the sole caffeinated beverage
native to North America: yaupon, sometimes called “cassina.” Not only was
it well known in the North American South; yaupon was once so popular in
Europe that throughout the eighteenth century it was traded in Paris and
London, and it was common enough that French visitors to Mississippi
recognized the drink as something they had already consumed. This presents
a puzzle: why did yaupon never become the caffeinated drink of choice in
the United States?
North American readers today who turn to plant products originally from
Asia or east Africa for their daily liquid effervescence may be surprised to learn
that this holly shrub, now used in the Southeast mostly as yard décor, has for
over at least a millennium been used to make a stimulant tea. The earliest
European writing on yaupon comes from Spanish explorer Álvar Núñez
Cabeza de Vaca, who shipwrecked on the populous coast of Texas in 1528.
His ethnographic account of the Indigenous communities included

“yaupon tea” with yaupon as a crucial modifier. Any other use of the word “tea,” unmarked, refers
to the beverage produced from Camellia sinensis, commonly called “tea” or “Chinese tea.”

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 466 CHRISTINE FOLCH

FIGURE 2: Ilex vomitoria. U.S. National Herbarium, Department of Botany, National Museum of
Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, by permission from G. A. Cooper.

descriptions of cookery techniques, smoking, and a notable drinking ceremony:

“They drink there another thing that they make from the leaves of trees like that
of the holly oak…. And that which they have drunk, they throw up, which they
do very easily and without any shame.”3 Chronicles of southeastern Indigenous
communities, including the Creek and Cherokee, regularly describe the “Black
Drink” ceremony that he observed. The contexts for the beverage continue to
today, though many of these ceremonies have been closed to non-Native
publics and participants. Efforts at commercializing yaupon date to at least
the late seventeenth century and reveal a series of fits and starts, failures and
reboots, that have coincided with scientific and medical interventions to
identify and describe the plant’s pharmacology. Since Cabeza de Vaca’s
brush with the beverage, yaupon has iterated between ceremony, medicine,
and caffeinated tea, as inhabitants of North America—Indigenous, settler
colonial, and Black—have wielded the leaf’s properties for different,
culturally situated purposes.
European expansion into the Western Hemisphere famously began as a
pursuit of exotic consumables, many with desirable psychoactive properties.
John Locke, a physician as well as a philosopher, writing in 1671 on behalf

3
Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, La relación, folio xxxvi, 1542, p. 72. At http://exhibits.library.
txstate.edu/cabeza/exhibits/show/cabeza-de-vaca/relacion/la-relaci--n---p-72 (accessed 17 Apr.
2019). All translations are mine unless otherwise indicated.

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 C E R E M O N Y, M E D I C I N E , C A F F E I N A T E D T E A 467

of the Lords Proprietors who oversaw the colonial settlement of Carolina,

requested that “Samples of Casini” be brought back to England as a potential
commodity in the colonies.4 Today, a number of small companies in Florida,
Georgia, and Texas have arisen to market organic, ethically harvested
yaupon to a new generation of drinkers, signaling a “rediscovery” of the tea.
In 2018 they formed the American Yaupon Association (tagline: “Discover
Yaupon: the American Native Superfood”).5 And yet, though yaupon has
much in common with more successful caffeinated drinks, it has never
become a global commodity, and we must ask why. Data regarding its
cultivation, pricing, and early trade suggest that, economically, it fared well
enough regarding the production end of the commodity chain. The barriers
have been on the other end, in the realm of consumption. I will argue that to
explain yaupon’s poor showing, we cannot understand it merely as a
commodifiable beverage: its ceremonial and medicinal identities are forces to
be reckoned with, the knowledge structures that people have built up around
it matter, and the identities of its consumers and producers have powerfully
inflected whether, and how, people have adopted it.
The story of how the drink has moved between ceremony, medicine, and a
caffeinated tea reveals contests between regimes of knowledge, the political
economy of colonialisms, and the complex intersections of identity and food.
Elsewhere I have argued that cuisine, as cultural production, can reveal
social status and priorities glossed as race.6 Here I will reverse the lens and
interpolate North American settler and imperial history through how yaupon
was treated in text. I will trace narratives, recipes, and medical descriptions
of yaupon from contact to the present, along with material and archeological
records, to examine the differences between settler and extractive colonial
encounters with indigenous psychoactive substances, and thus indigeneity.
That is, I explore how the French and British postures toward yaupon in
writings for primarily European publics via European imprints differed from
one another and from how white, Euro-descended settlers wrote about it in
the United States. But I also read the complex of sources to discern how
non-settler colonial groups—the original Indigenous inhabitants of North
America and Black communities, free and enslaved—wielded the powerful
drink.
Caffeinated beverages and other non-European food substances
influenced a shift in European medicine because they did not fit into the

4
“Captain Halsted’s Instructions,” 1 May 1671, Shaftesbury Papers (Charleston: South Carolina
Historical Society, 1897), Collections, vol. 5, p. 319.
5
American Yaupon Association website, https://www.yaupongrowers.com/ (accessed 17 Apr.
2019).
6
Christine Folch, “Fine Dining: Race in Prerevolution Cuban Cookbooks,” Latin American
Research Review 43, 2 (2008): 205–23.

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 468 CHRISTINE FOLCH

humoral medicine schematics proposed by Galen.7 By the mid-nineteenth

century, most of the major stimulant drinks were scientifically well-studied
and very popular in the North Atlantic world, but interesting differences
emerged because some of the plants were first scientifically described in
Europe, and others in the New World. A key area of research on the history
of medicine traces how plant knowledges have moved from the colonial
periphery to the North Atlantic core.8 Other important and contestatory work
in this realm has focused on not just knowledge, but ignorance. Londa
Schiebinger writes of the “nontransfer of important bodies of knowledge
from the New World into Europe” as she traces why awareness of the
abortifacient uses of West Indian plants did not make it to Europe even as
the plants themselves did, which she explores as “agnotology”—“the study
of culturally induced ignorances.”9 With yaupon, there are at least two
“ignorances” to be managed. The first is the ignorance of the
pharmacological effect of the plant in its very environs, as communities that
in the past would have known of its stimulant use have, over just a few
generations, lost that knowledge, even though the buzz from caffeine is licit
and highly desirable. The second is the insistent transmission of erroneous
knowledge as science professionals have reiterated the inaccurate report that
yaupon causes vomiting.
To see how yaupon was configured as ceremony-medicine-caffeinated tea,
I first turn to Indigenous uses of yaupon and early European encounters with it,
as well as the basic aspects of the plant, placing the drink in the context of Ilex
(holly) use in the Americas. I then describe how yaupon fits among other
caffeinated beverages that were entering the orbit of the North Atlantic world
at the same time, as their desirable psychoactive properties became a means
by which Western medicine itself was developed, via a struggle over
acceptable knowledge practices. I will conclude by describing yaupon
consumption and production among non-Indigenous communities as well as
multiple attempts to commercialize the drink. By asking how yaupon has
been positioned via the marginalization of its producers and consumers, I
argue that indigeneity, anti-Blackness, and anti-Southern cosmopolitanism
have all played central roles in how yaupon has been understood, and help
explain why a popular caffeinated product waned even at a time when
stimulants increased in use and when “proletarian hunger-killers” were on
the rise.10 The yaupon commodity chain serves as a foil for the rise of both

7
Ken Albala, Eating Right in the Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).
8
Abena Dove Osseo Asare, Bitter Roots: The Search for Healing Plants in Africa (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2014).
9
Londa Schiebinger, Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), 3.
10
Sidney Mintz, “Time, Sugar, and Sweetness,” Marxist Perspectives 2 (1979): 56–73.

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 C E R E M O N Y, M E D I C I N E , C A F F E I N A T E D T E A 469

the capitalist world system of commodities and hegemonic systems of Western

science and biomedicine. The failures and errors associated with Ilex vomitoria
expose ways in which these systems are leaky, unable to neatly contain even
those objects in their grasp.11 The question of why yaupon never became the
caffeinated brew of choice in North America may never be definitively
answered, but pursuing it elucidates how plants and human communities
form one another.

ILEX IN THE AMERICAS

Of the more than four hundred species of hollies distributed across the world,
three found in the Americas are known to possess caffeine and they have been
used continually from before European contact to the present: yerba mate (Ilex
paraguariensis) and guayusa (Ilex guayusa) in South America, and yaupon
(Ilex vomitoria) in North America.12 The name “yaupon” comes from a
Catawba word for “small tree”; and “cassina” from the Timucuan caçina
(assi in Creek/Muskogee is “leaf”); both carry meanings similar to the
original Guaraní name for yerba mate, “ca’a miri” (“small leaf”). A large
evergreen shrub capable of growing into a small tree, yaupon is naturally
found in the sandy soils along the North American coast from Virginia
Beach to Texas. Unlike yerba mate, yaupon cultivates easily, as attested by
its current distribution in the hilly inlands of the Carolinas, Georgia, and
Texas. The eighteenth-century writer James Adair noted that “the Indians
transplant [it] and are extremely fond of it.”13 A discontiguous population
exists in Chiapas in Mexico, where the tree is known as either tza’los te’ or
sakil winik te’ in Tzeltal (a Mayan language), perhaps indicating wider
precolonial consumption of the plant.14
Not only is the physical distribution of the plant a noteworthy indication of
human intentionality, but there are remarkable similarities in how yerba mate,
guayusa, and yaupon are prepared and used by Indigenous communities across
great geographical distances. All three caffeinated hollies are first dried before

11
Steven Topik, Zephyr Frank, and Carlos Marichal, eds., From Silver to Cocaine: Latin
American Commodity Chains and the Building of the World Economy, 1500–2000 (Durham:
Duke University Press, 2006).
12
Trace amounts of caffeine have now been discovered in some specimens of Ilex cassine, also a
North American holly, but that plant is not in use for popular consumption. See Adam L. Edwards
and Bradley C. Bennett, “Diversity of Methylxanthine Content in Ilex cassine L. and Ilex vomitoria
Ait.: Assessing Sources of the North American Stimulant Cassina,” Economic Botany 59, 3 (2005):
275–85.
13
James Adair, The History of the American Indians (London: Edward and Charles Dilly, 1775),
46.
14
Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), “Table 1: List of All
Threatened Forest Occurring Single Country Endemics—Part 9,” n.d., http://www.fao.org/3/
ad655e/ad655e17.htm (accessed 18 Apr. 2019); J. Rzedowski and S. Zamudio, “Etapa final de la
captura y catalogación del Herbario del Instituto de Ecología, AC, Centro Regional del Bajío,”
Bases de datos SNIB-CONABIO proyectos No. Q017, J097 y F014, (México, D.F, 2001).

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 470 CHRISTINE FOLCH

being boiled or steeped. The leaves and the tender shoots are used for yerba
mate and yaupon, while only the leaves are prepared for guayusa tea.
Yaupon has a pleasantly floral, honeyed flavor with strong leafy overtones
that mellow as it is roasted. Cabeza de Vaca’s account of yaupon includes
the detail that his Native hosts toasted the leaves over a fire, a method still in
use today for both yaupon and yerba mate and a means of preserving the
leaves. Compared to black tea or coffee, the Ilex drinks have slightly less
caffeine per gram, but this can be adjusted by the proportion of water to
product used and the method of extraction. Tea, for example, has more
caffeine per gram than does coffee, but the average cup of coffee contains
more caffeine than tea due to the different extraction methods, because
proportionally less water is used to brew it, and because coffee is typically
more finely ground. Yaupon also possesses theobromine (an alkaloid that
draws its name from chocolate and is also found in yerba mate and guayusa)
and theophylline (which is found in both tea and the Ilex drinks).15 These
and other properties make yaupon desirable.
Archaeologists have recently measured the residual presence of all three
alkaloids in drinking vessels and have determined that yaupon, and possibly
Black Drink ceremonialism, were present in the pre-Columbian city of
Cahokia (ca. 1040–1350) located in what is now southwest Illinois. This is
hundreds of miles outside of yaupon’s growing range, indicating a lively
trade in the leaf.16 The historical record corroborates this: John Brickell, an
Irish physician who composed a Natural History of North Carolina (1737),
wrote that Indigenous inhabitants of the coast of North Carolina “frequently
carry it [yaupon] to the Westward Indians, who give Deer Skins, and other
Necessaries they want for.”17 In 1763, British botanist Mark Catesby also
wrote of trade in yaupon throughout the southeast, and included an
important comparison to yerba mate: “The Indians on the sea-coast supply
those of the mountains therewith and carry on a considerable trade with it in
Florida; just as the Spaniards do with their South-Sea tea from Paraguay to
Buenos Aires.”18 Yerba mate has been a leading agricultural commodity in
South America since the early seventeenth century,19 and yaupon regularly

15
R. Y. Gan, D. Zhang, M. Wang, and H. Corke, “Health Benefits of Bioactive Compounds
from the Genus Ilex, a Source of Traditional Caffeinated Beverages,” Nutrients 10, 11 (2018):
1682, doi:10.3390/nu10111682.
16
Patricia Crown et al., “Ritual Drinks in the Pre-Hispanic US Southwest and Mexican
Northwest,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 112, 37 (2015): 11436–42.
17
John Brickell, Natural History of North Carolina (Dublin: James Carson, 1737), 399.
18
Mark Catesby, Hortus Britanno-Americanus (London: W. Richardson and S. Clark for J.
Ryall, 1763), 15.
19
Christine Folch, “Stimulating Consumption: Yerba Mate Myths, Markets, and Meanings from
Conquest to Present,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 52, 1 (2010): 6–36.

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 C E R E M O N Y, M E D I C I N E , C A F F E I N A T E D T E A 471

attracted comparison to its southern counterpart, especially in terms of its

commercial potential. Jessica Cattelino has argued that money, or the lack
thereof, was a crucial intellectual justification for dispossession of North
American Native groups.20 Although the understanding of Natives as having
no real economy was a vital stereotype, there is repeated mention of yaupon
trade, evincing a kind of economic value that European settlers would have
recognized, leading them to consider yaupon’s potential as an export
commodity for Europe’s newly developing caffeine fix.
The Black Drink ceremony (so named in English because of the color of
the liquid) immediately caught the attention of explorers, missionaries, and
military alike, who described the cultural context for yaupon drinking.21
Black Drink was taken during council meetings and before important events,
and notably during the annual Green Corn harvest celebration—the busk—
which featured prominently in American literature, including Thoreau’s
Walden. Women first heated water in which to boil the leaves. By pouring
the drink from one container to another, preparers frothed the liquid, from
which comes its other name, “White Drink.”22 The male leader of the
ceremony, a position of high prestige and honor, would then sing a series
of notes before partaking of the drink and then passing it around. Frothing
or foaming seems to have been an important part of preparing sacred
beverages throughout much of Indigenous America, including chocolate in
Mesoamerica.23
According to most early writers, women prepared yaupon as a decoction,
boiling the leaves in water for a set length of time rather than employing the
steeping or percolation common in coffee and tea preparation. Most, though
not all records assert that only certain adult men were allowed to drink it.
Cabeza de Vaca noted that his male hosts drank it in gourds; in sixteenth-
century Florida, French colonist Jacques Le Moyne depicted the Timucua
tribe using seashells to consume the decoction as well as the public
regurgitation (see figures 3 and 4). The colonial- and early national-era
writers analyzed for this article were all men, and they describe Black Drink
ceremonialism as a gendered ceremony with women as preparers and men as
singers and consumers. They give no indication as to whether there might
have been a context for female consumption. However, Florida historian

20
Jessica Cattelino, “From Locke to Slots: Money and the Politics of Indigeneity,” Comparative
Studies in Society and History 60, 2 (2018): 274–307.
21
Benjamin Hawkins, “A Concise Description of the Creek Country, with some Remarkable
Customs Practiced among the Inhabitants,” Medical Repository of Original Essays and
Intelligence, Relative to Physic, Surgery, Chemistry, and Natural History 4 (1806): 36.
22
Charles Hudson, “Introduction,” in Charles Hudson, ed., Black Drink: A Native American Tea
(Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1979), 1–9; Brian Stross, “Food, Foam and Fermentation in
Mesoamerica,” Food, Culture & Society 14, 4 (2011): 477–501.
23
Stross, “Food, Foam and Fermentation.”

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 472 CHRISTINE FOLCH

FIGURE 3: Jacques Le Moyne (published in 1591 by Theodore de Bry) depicts the Timucua tribe in
Florida in their Black Drink ceremony, using a nautilus shell for the beverage, circa 1564. French
observers are in the lower left. Plate XXIX. Image credit: P. K. Yonge Library of Florida History,
Special and Area Studies Collections, George A. Smathers Libraries, University of Florida,
Gainesville.

John Hann, based on his reading of Spanish Florida mission records, maintains
that women of a chiefly class were permitted to drink yaupon.24
But it was not the preparation that served as the focus of much colonial
writing. Instead, the focus was on what happened after imbibing: ceremony
participants easily and regularly regurgitated the Black Drink. The
association with ritualized vomiting captured the imagination of English-
speaking writers, in particular, though earlier Spanish explorers recorded it
as well.25 So strong is the rhetorical link between yaupon and regurgitation
that even now the U.S. Department of Agriculture Natural Resources
Conservation Service’s Plant Guides on yaupon contradict each other: one
asserts that its primary medical use is to induce emesis; the other emphasizes

24
Francisco Alonso de Jesus and John H. Hann, “1630 Memorial of Fray Francisco Alonso de
Jesus on Spanish Florida’s Missions and Natives,” Americas 50, 1 (1993): 85–105 n21. See also “A
Letter to Mr. Robert Davis, on the Tea Plant in Carolina,” 8 Apr. 1764, in Museum Rusticum et
Commerciale: Or, Select Papers on Agriculture, Commerce, Arts, and Manufactures, vol. 2 of 6,
no. 38 (London, 1764–1766).
25
Robert C. Galgano, Feast of Souls: Indians and Spaniards in the Seventeenth-Century
Missions of Florida and New Mexico (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2009).

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 C E R E M O N Y, M E D I C I N E , C A F F E I N A T E D T E A 473

FIGURE 4: Jacques Le Moyne (published 1591 by Theodore de Bry), “The Burial of the Timucua
chief.” Plate XL. Image credit: P. K. Yonge Library of Florida History, Special and Area Studies
Collections, George A. Smathers Libraries, University of Florida, Gainesville.

“modern findings of no emetic compounds.”26 In fact, yaupon is no more

emetic than are coffee or tea. Repeated scientific studies have tested
its chemical components and found no known emetics, and its users report
no emesis or even an urge to regurgitate.27 Moreover, the historical record
of yaupon’s use belies its emetic reputation: malnourished and hungry
Civil War Confederate soldiers simply would not have regularly drunk an
emetic.
Charles Hudson, in his extensive work on Black Drink ceremonialism,
asserted that the vomiting associated with the beverage was learned, and
more recent ethnographic research on guayusa usage supports this.28 Achuar
men in the Peruvian and Ecuadorian Amazon regularly drink guayusa in the

26
D. L. Immel, “Yaupon (Ilex vomitoria Ait.),” USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service,
National Plant Data Center Plant Guide, 2000, https://plants.usda.gov/plantguide/pdf/pg_ilvo.pdf
(accessed 10 July 2020). Like coffee and tea, yaupon has a mild purgative effect on some of its
users.
27
Matthew J. Palumbo, Stephen T. Talcott, and Francis E. Putz, “Ilex Vomitoria Ait. (Yaupon):
A Native North American Source of a Caffeinated and Antioxidant-Rich Tea,” Economic Botany
63, 2 (2009): 130–37.
28
Hudson, “Introduction.”

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 474 CHRISTINE FOLCH

pre-dawn morning, socializing and debating community life, after which they
regurgitate the drink.29 Among the Achuar, at-will vomiting is a learned skill,
taught to prepubescent boys via the use of a feather or a finger. Blood samples
from Achuar men having partaken in the wayus ceremony show that vomiting
helps modulate caffeine intake, allowing participants to drink guayusa for
extended periods of time. While Hudson’s assessment that regurgitation was
learned may be right, it was also a result of deliberate mixture. Spanish
chroniclers noted that the Asao mixed salt water with yaupon to make it
emetic in late sixteenth-century Florida and today Indigenous communities
in the Southeast mix sweet gum with yaupon for that purpose.30 Vomiting,
like frothing, seems to have been understood as purifying.31 Interestingly,
Spanish writers tended to omit mention of emesis and instead connected
yaupon to the traditional ball game played by North Florida’s Indigenous
inhabitants.
Public ritualized regurgitation disrupted anglophone notions of gentility
and were instrumental and instrumentalized to depict Native Americans as
savage. Early nineteenth-century Methodist missionary William Capers
writes of the Creek chiefs that “none drink without spitting or puking when
they have done … they drink and puke with equal readiness—perhaps with
equal ease … they seem to drink to puke; and puke to drink again.”32
Regurgitation as cultural practice was configured as cultural inferiority: “A
general emesis might be a bond of misery among a council of Indians, but
would hardly suit the average sipper of Bohea [Chinese tea].”33 Coffee was
popularized in Europe in the early seventeenth century as part of an
institution, the coffeehouse, with its practices of public fellowship. Tea
drinking soon followed as a new product featured in a London coffeehouse,
and was soon associated with the highly ritualized East Asian tea ceremony.
Their lesson for yaupon is that the manner of imbibing affects the reception
of a product. Settler colonial writings on an Indigenous stimulant, because of
proximity, made it harder to disentangle the beverage from its local method
of consumption and from the social hierarchies that relegated Indigenous
groups as culturally inferior.

29
W. H. Lewis et al., “Ritualistic Use of the Holly Ilex guayusa by Amazonian Jívaro Indians,”
Journal of Ethnopharmacology 33 (1991): 25–30.
30
Andrés de San Miguel, Account of the Difficulties That the People of a Ship Called the Lady of
Mercy Endured and about Some Things That Occurred in That Fleet, 1595, John H. Hann, trans.
Personal communication (name and tribe omitted), Jan. 2020.
31
Stross, “Food, Foam and Fermentation.”
32
William Capers, “Mission among the Creek Indians: Extract from the Journal of the Rev.
William Capers to Tustunnuggee Opoi, Tustunnuggee Thlucco, General M’Intosh, and all the
Chiefs of the Creek Nation,” Methodist Magazine 5, 1 (1822): 272. See also David B. Rollin,
“Extracts from Mr. Rollin’s Journal. Indian Harvest Feast. Creek Disturbances,” Baptist
Missionary Magazine 17, 1 (1837): 22.
33
“Editorial: The American Tea,” Philadelphia Medical Times 4, 52 (26 Sept. 1872): 823.

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A politics of disgust and revulsion accompanied what literature scholar Ed

White calls the “colonial tradition of ‘national literature,’” by which he means
imperial (pre-U.S. independence) writing on the Indigenous nations, especially
through “that favored genre of colonization, the ethnography, the detailed
description of the manners and customs of Indians.”34 There is an extensive
literature on how settlers have used ecological practices, from planting Old
World crops in the New World to enacting conservation legislation on
contested territory, as ways to legitimate their claims to nativeness (and thus
land) and disavow the foundational and ongoing violence in settler
colonialism.35 It was in part through how settler ethnographic writing
depicted the culinary in North American Native communities that settler
communities distinguished themselves as civilized and worthy inhabitants of
the land. By treating Indigenous yaupon consumption as disgusting, settler
literature obviated the troubling questions of value in Black Drink
ceremonialism. Yet, the need to portray Native consumption as inferior was
at odds with the impulse to commodify yaupon.
Settler colonial writing betrays a longstanding fascination with the
imagined grotesque in Indigenous consumption. Native communities “ate
wrong” by eating what Rebecca Earle calls “un-food”—frogs, spiders,
insects, reptiles, et cetera.36 Earle makes a careful and compelling argument,
tracing how food was central to how bodies were imagined, especially under
humoral medicine, and thus how a kind of race-thinking about Indigenous,
European, and African bodies emerged. Interestingly, though European
settlers for the most part rejected Indigenous proteins, they embraced fruits
and vegetables. Because of yaupon’s strong association with Indigenous
spirituality and with a specific ceremony, it was treated differently from
other culinary goods like corn, beans, squash, buffalo, or turkey, all of which
were also spiritually inflected. Those were inserted into familiar European
food categories such as grains, vegetables, and meats. Here the experience of
tobacco and chocolate might be more instructive since these products created
new consumption categories in Europe, which Marcy Norton argues
included the transmission of Amerindian cultural practices and priorities

34
Ed White, “Early American Nations as Imagined Communities,” American Quarterly 56, 1
(2004): 49–81, 68.
35
James J. A. Blair, “Settler Indigeneity and the Eradication of the Non-Native: Self-
Determination and Biosecurity in the Falkland Islands (Malvinas),” Journal of the Royal
Anthropological Institute 23, 3 (2017): 580–602; Lesley Head, “Decentring 1788: Beyond Biotic
Nativeness,” Geographical Research 50, 2 (2012): 166–78; Lorenzo Veracini, “The Other Shift:
Settler Colonialism, Israel, and the Occupation,” Journal of Palestine Studies 42, 2 (2013): 26–42.
36
Rebecca Earle, The Body of the Conquistador: Food, Race and the Colonial Experience in
Spanish America, 1492–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). See also R. W.
Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of
Plants (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2013).

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 476 CHRISTINE FOLCH

surrounding the substances to Europe.37 Regurgitation, too, was seen as

disordered eating and framed yaupon as a kind of un-food, which situated
Indigenous practitioners as having a disordered relationship with nature.
Nonetheless, politicians and writers around the time of Independence
recognized and appreciated the importance of the Black Drink. In a 1775
speech to the “Beloved Men, Head Men & Warriors of the Cherokee
Nation” on the eve of war, one of the “Beloved Men of South Carolina,”
Justice William H. Drayton, appealed to the Black Drink when trying to
convince the federation to ally with the revolutionaries instead of the British:
“And in particular they ordered, that if we drink Tea, we must pay so much
money to the Great King.—I must tell you, this Tea is somewhat like your
black drink—But as we know that this order is contrary to our agreement;
and also, as we know the evil consequences of our paying this money, so
your Brothers the white people in America have resolved that they will not
pay it.”38 Drayton’s usage of the term “beloved” is notable and likely arises
from Cherokee practices around the word. “Beloved Woman” Nancy Ward
(1738–1822), a Cherokee political leader and heroine in later accounts of
U.S. history because she advocated conviviality between the Cherokee and
European settlers, was a noted preparer of the Black Drink ceremony.39
According to Pennsylvania naturalist William Bartram, who visited the
Cherokee Nation in 1776, the Cherokee called yaupon the “beloved tree.”40
Ward died just a few years before Andrew Jackson ordered the Cherokee
removed to west of the Mississippi along the Trail of Tears.
In one 1789 post-Revolutionary War encounter between the Creek and the
emissary Commissioners for Indian Affairs in Southern Department of the
newly founded U.S. Government, Creek Chief Alexander McGillivray
invited U.S. government representatives to meet at the Black Drink
ceremony before transacting business.41 The famous Seminole warrior

37
Marcy Norton, Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures: A History of Tobacco and Chocolate in the
Atlantic World (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008).
38
“Mr. Drayton’s Talk to the Cherokees, 25 September, 1775: A Talk from the Honourable Will
H. Drayton Esq One of the Beloved Men of South Carolina to the Beloved Men, Head Men &
Warriors of the Cherokee Nation at the Congarees, Sep 25, 1775,” Historical Magazine, and
Notes and Queries Concerning the Antiquities, History, and Biography of America (1857–1875)
1, 5 (May 1867): 280.
39
Pat Alderman, Nancy Ward, Cherokee Chieftainness—Her Cry Was all for Peace (Johnson
City, Tenn: Overmountain Press, 1990[1978]); Duane H. King, ed. The Memoirs of Lt. Henry
Timberlake: The Story of a Soldier, Adventurer, and Emissary to the Cherokees, 1756–1765
(Cherokee, N.C.: Museum of the Cherokee Indian Press, 2007), 122.
40
William Bartram, Travels through North & South Carolina, Georgia, East & West Florida,
the Cherokee country, etc. (Philadelphia: James & Johnson, 1791), 359.
41
“Alexander McGillivray to Commissioners for Indian Affairs in Southern Department,
September 24, 1789,” in Walter Lowrie and Matthew St. Clair Clarke, eds., American State
Papers: Documents, Legislative and Executive, of the Congress of the United States, vol. 4,
Indian Affairs, 38 vols. (Washington, D.C.: Gales and Seaton, 1832).

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 C E R E M O N Y, M E D I C I N E , C A F F E I N A T E D T E A 477

FIGURE 5: George Catlin, Os-ce-o-lá, The Black Drink, a Warrior of Great Distinction, 1838, oil
on canvas. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Mrs. Joseph Harrison, Jr., 1985.66.301.

Osceola’s name also comes from the drink. Non-anglicized it is “Asi Yahola,”
literally “Black Drink Singer” (recall that “assi” is the name for yaupon in
Creek/Muscogee), presumably because of his involvement in the ceremony
as one who sang a series of notes before taking from the cup and passing it
around (see figure 5). Even after the forced removals onto reservations and
into the boarding schools, contexts for the Black Drink ceremonialism
continued.42 Today, utensils for Black Drink consumption continue to be
crafted and yaupon is still prepared for ceremony, though many of these
ceremonies have been closed to the public.43 The Department of the
Interior’s 1883 Code of Indian Offenses, known as the “Religious Crimes

42
Frank E. Brandon, “Seminole Indians of the Florida Everglades,” Indian School Journal 18, 8
(1918): 294–301; Fred S. Clinton, “Oklahoma Indian History,” Indian School Journal 16, 4 (1915):
175–87.
43
Personal Communication (name and tribe omitted), Apr. 2019; “Black Drink Dipper,”
Cherokee.Org, https://webapps.cherokee.org/SpiderGallery/Products/Details/1759#item1759, n.d.
(accessed 28 Oct. 2019).

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 478 CHRISTINE FOLCH

Code,” banned “old heathenish” dancing, ceremony, and other sacred practices
deemed “a great hindrance to the civilization of the Indians.” It gave Bureau of
Indian Affairs agents authority to imprison and punish violators, which
facilitated the suppression of the Ghost Dance and the massacre of more
than three hundred Lakota by the U.S. 7th Cavalry at Wounded Knee in
1890.44 Many Native spiritual practices subsequently went underground as a
matter of survival. And while we cannot presume that present-day Ilex
practices are the same now as they were precontact, similarities over vast
expanses of terrain and linguistic differences point to Indigenous cultural
resilience in the face of genocide.
There is, of course, a fundamental problem in reading colonizer texts to
understand Indigenous practices. Instead of claiming to represent, for
example, Creek practices around the Black Drink, these texts instead reveal
the priorities of European colonizers and their descendants. What the texts
do allow us to conclude is that Black Drink ceremonialism was central to
how settlers interacted with and imagined Indian nations in southern North
America. In these texts we also hear Indigenous individuals extending
welcome and attempting to explain the significance of the Black Drink to
settler publics. As a British government emissary to the Cherokee between
1761–1762, Henry Timberlake tasted the Black Drink during a ceremony
overseen by Nancy Ward, and found it surprisingly pleasant, “having a
strong taste of sassafras,” though he writes with disdain of the ceremony as
full of “dreadful howling, yelling, and hallowing.”45 Misrecognition of
Indigenous ceremony and hospitality because of an overlay of cultural
superiority was a hallmark of European colonialism and, at least in
Timberlake’s case, the honor being bestowed by the invitation to participate
was experienced with ambivalence at best.46
Indigeneity presented an existential problem for settlers, especially
because of the fundamental challenge Indigenous groups posed to European
claims to land.47 The early yaupon documents show Europeans grappling to
understand the value held within and transferred via the Black Drink
ceremony, even as they highlight the existence of intentional cultivation and
trade in the leaf. The underlying questions of value and of how to gauge the

44
“Rules Governing the Court of Indian Offenses,” Department of the Interior, Office of Indian
Affairs, Washington, 30 Mar. 1883.
45
King, Memoirs, 40.
46
Frederic W. Gleach, “Pocahontas and Captain Smith Revisited,” in William Cowan, ed., Actes
du Vingt-Cinquième Congrès des Algonquinistes (Ottawa: Carleton University, 1994), 167–86.
47
Philip J. Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998); Vine Deloria,
“Forward: American Fantasy,” in Gretchen M. Bataille and Charles L. P. Silet, eds., The Pretend
Indians: Images of Native Americans in the Movies (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1980),
ix–xvi; Shari Huhndorf, Going Native: Indians in the American Cultural Imagination (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 2001).

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 C E R E M O N Y, M E D I C I N E , C A F F E I N A T E D T E A 479

importance of ceremony are set amid a broader perception of Indigenous

spiritual practice as morally and culturally inferior. Just like a supposed lack
of real economy served to justify European dispossession of Native property
and wealth, so too was the supposed disordered diet of Indigenous groups
central to constructing a cultural hierarchy. Focusing on that aspect of
yaupon which seemed so utterly other effectively suppressed nuanced
understandings of the leaf and the ceremony and the destabilizing challenge
posed by the obvious Indigenous economic networks constructed around it.

M E D I C I N E A N D T H E U N F O R T U N AT E V O M I T O R I A

European expansion coincided with the robust development of science and

medicine as respected regimes of knowledge in the North Atlantic world, so
much so that the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw the coalescing
of the scientific expedition as a central mode of imperial governance.
Science as a way of thinking and biomedicine as an application of
knowledge came into being in part as a result of the practice of naming and
describing the flora and fauna Europeans encountered in imperial journeys.
The psychoactive properties of stimulating drinks lent them particular
importance to eighteenth-century researchers: coffee, tea, and yaupon were
being carefully tended in British and French botanical gardens by the start of
that century (though not yerba mate, a sign of imperial boundaries among
stimulants). Carl Linnaeus himself scientifically described coffee, giving it
the binomial name Coffee arabica in his 1753 Species Plantarum botanical
masterwork. There he also gave tea the name Thea sinensis, which is
frequently used today to describe the plant, though the standard
nomenclature of Camellia sinensis is more common.
Linnaeus also listed yaupon as a variant of Ilex cassine, which now
denotes the dahoon holly, a plant with a similar range.48 Because all of the
world’s major caffeinated drinks, including yaupon, came into European
orbit at about the same time, they caught the attention of European scientists,
merchants, and the drinking public alike, as all three groups contended with
the distinctive psychoactive properties of the stimulating drinks. The same
twists and turns that marked the process of identifying tea and coffee
extended to yaupon, but conspiracy and corporate sabotage may have come
into play. Because North America’s southern coast was for centuries divided
between French, Spanish, and British rule, imperial divisions arose within
the different scientific treatments of yaupon and its biomedical study.
Though the Spanish and French chroniclers wrote about yaupon first,
William Aiton, head botanist at the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew,

48
Caroli Linnea, Species Plantarum, vol. 1 (Stockholm: Laurenti Salvi, 1753), 125.

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 480 CHRISTINE FOLCH

recognized yaupon and dahoon holly as entirely different species, and in 1789
he gave the former its unfortunate scientific name, Ilex vomitoria.49
The choice of the term is curious, not only because the leaf had been
marketed to a British public for decades under the moniker “Carolina Tea,”
but because yaupon had been cultivated in Britain since 1700, as Aiton
himself noted, and was cultivated at Kew Gardens under his care at that very
time.50 Though some may see in Aiton’s word choice the influence of
British imperial writing, which prioritized the ritualized regurgitation of the
Black Drink ceremony, University of Florida applied ecologist Francis Putz
portrays the move as a kind of economic sabotage. Putz claims that Aiton
was “secretly in the employ of Ceylon tea merchants” who feared
competition from Carolina Tea and deliberately gave it a name designed to
invoke disgust.51 After all, yaupon was at the time consumed on both sides
of the English Channel—if he had been curious, Aiton could have verified
the emetic properties of the drink. Whether or not Aiton was secretly
employed by conflicting tea interests, his proximity to the Royal Society
(botanist Daniel Solander, who worked with him on the cataloging project,
was a fellow) meant that he had regular contact with the East India
Company, which turned to the society for advice on the latest scientific
developments. Despite Aiton’s official description, many writers misapplied
Ilex cassine to denote yaupon throughout the nineteenth century, perhaps as
an attempt to distinguish yaupon from its emetic reputation,52 and scientists
debated the plant’s correct scientific name well into the twentieth century.53
Carolina Tea, or “cassiny,” likely first came to the attention of an
anglophone public not as a tea replacement but because of its supposed
curative properties. In 1695, London physician John Peachey published the
paper “Some Observations made upon the HERB Cassiny, Imported from
CAROLINA: SHEWING Its Admirable VIRTUES in Curing the SMALL

49
William Townshend Aiton, Hortus Kewensis: Or a Catalogue of the Plants Cultivated at the
Royal Botanic Garden Kew, vol. 1 (London: George Nicol, 1789), 170.
50
Ibid.
51
Francis E. Putz, “Yaupon Tea Has a Bad Name,” Gainesville.com (8 Apr. 2010), https://www.
gainesville.com/article/LK/20100408/News/604146341/GS/ (accessed 11 June 2019); Alisha E.
Wainwright and Francis E. Putz, “A Misleading Name Reduces Marketability of a Healthful and
Stimulating Natural Product: A Comparative Taste Test of Infusions of a Native Florida Holly
(Ilex vomitoria) and Yerba Mate (I. paraguariensis),” Economic Botany 68, 3 (2014): 350–54.
52
See Edwin M. Hale, “Bulletin no. 14” (Washington, D.C.: Government Print Office, Division
of Botany, 1891); F. P. Venable, “Analysis of the Leaves of Ilex Cassine,” American Journal of
Pharmacy (Aug. 1885): 389.
53
Shiu Ying Hu, “The Botany of Yaupon,” in Charles Hudson, ed., Black Drink: A Native
American Tea (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1979), 10–39; Richard Evans Schultes,
“The Correct Name of Yaupon,” Botanical Museum Leaflets, Harvard University 14, 4 (1950):
97–105.

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 C E R E M O N Y, M E D I C I N E , C A F F E I N A T E D T E A 481

POX,” which claimed yaupon could cure the disease.54 It would be two
decades before Lady Mary Wortley Montagu famously had her daughter
inoculated for smallpox using a technique she had witnessed in the Ottoman
Empire, popularizing vaccination in the North Atlantic world, so combatting
the disease was a priority for medical researchers. Peachey described
multiple successful interventions in which a tincture of yaupon cured
smallpox.55 He recounted anecdotes of other physicians using the same
technique and mentioned earlier writers, describing how yaupon “promotes
genuine easie sweats, and mild friendly transpirations, preserving the Mind
serene and the Body active and lively a long while after, without any other
Nourishment, and none but Persons of great Quality are permitted to use this
Noble Beverage, which they drink as we do Tea in Carolina.”56 Later
researchers found yaupon had no such attributes, and Peachey was clearly
describing the bodily effects of caffeine: mental focus, increased sweating
and blood flow, hunger suppression, and increased wakefulness. If he is
correct that other physicians were using yaupon at the time, then many in
England would have recognized its similarity to tea.
Though Peachy does not mention emesis, Mark Catesby’s Hortus
Britanno-Americanus, a 1763 English-language account of North American
plants easily adaptable to “the soil and climate of England,” details yaupon
and the various methods through which both Indigenous groups and colonists
consumed it. Catesby’s book would have alarmed English tea merchants
worried that yaupon could displace tea. He states that the emesis was due to
Indigenous ritualized consumption practices and was not necessarily a
property of the plant per se. Catesby writes, “American Indians … drink large
quantities, both for health and pleasure, without sugar or other mixture; they
drink it down and disgorge it with ease, repeating it very often, and
swallowing many quarts: they say it restores lost appetite, strengthens the
stomach, and confirms their health, giving them agility, and courage in war,”
but he also notes that “in [North Carolina] it is as much in use amongst the
White People as among the Indians; and especially among those who inhabit
the sea-coasts.”57 He speculates that yerba mate and yaupon might be the
same species growing on opposite sides of the equator. And even after
yaupon and yerba were definitively classified as different species, their
botanical similarities continued to impress scientific writers, especially in
light of the notable commercial differences between the two.

54
John Peachey, Some Observations made upon the HERB Cassiny, Imported from CAROLINA:
SHEWING Its Admirable VIRTUES in Curing the SMALL POX (London, 1695).
55
Ibid., 4.
56
Ibid., 7.
57
Catesby, Hortus Britanno-Americanus, 15.

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 482 CHRISTINE FOLCH

English authors like Catesby and Peachey saw in yaupon a medically

useful plant that could be transplanted to Europe for extensive use. But the
British Empire was not the only one with extensive holdings on North
America’s southern coast. Whereas the English-language ethnographic and
scientific literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries prominently
featured the Black Drink ceremony’s ritualized emesis, the French writings
did not. In them, yaupon was associated with excitement and preparations
for war, likely because one of the first French written source on the beverage
was the sixteenth-century account of Dominique de Gourgues’ 1568
expedition for the “recapture of Florida” from the Spanish. It describes
Gourgues’ Indigenous allies taking the drink (without mention of emesis)
before setting out for the fateful battle.58 French Huguenot explorer René
Laudonnière, in his extensive account of three voyages to North America,
described Timucuan use of “cassena” (incorporating the Spanish
nomenclature of caçina) in northern Florida several times, and never
mentioned any ritualized emesis in ceremony. He clearly implied that he
himself had tasted the drink multiple times.59
By the early eighteenth century, yaupon was known as “apalachine” in
French literature, because, “This plant is abundant in Mississippi from which
it derives its name from the Apalache, an Indian nation which makes great
use of it.”60 “Mississippi” here referred to the region from the mouth of the
river eastward through the Florida panhandle and, presumably, “Apalache”
referred to the Apalachee inhabitants of the peninsula’s panhandle. In a 1733
medical dictionary, French physician Nicolas Lemery described apalachine’s
use for combating “gout and nephritic syndrome” and its beneficial effect on
urine, but said nothing of emesis.61 Le Page du Pratz’ 1758 natural and
cultural history of Louisiana described a hunt followed by “the drink of war:
it is made of a quantity of apalachine leaves boiled in enough water to be
cooked despite their hardness” and, again, does not refer to regurgitation
(see figure 6).62 Lamarck himself wrote of the ability of apalachine (which

58
“Dominique de Gourgues 1568 ‘Recapture of Florida,’” Jeannette Thurber Connor, trans., in
Charles E. Bennett, compiler, Settlement of Florida (Tallahassee: University of Florida Press,
1968).
59
René Laudonnière, Three Voyages, Charles E. Bennett, trans. (Tuscaloosa: University of
Alabama Press, 2001).
60
Charles-Louis-François Andry, Matière médicale extraite des meilleurs auteurs, et
principalement du Traité des médicamens de M. de Tournefort, et des leçons de M. Ferrein, vol.
1 (Paris, 1770), 425–26.
61
Nicolas Lemery, Dictionnaire universel des drogues simples, 3d ed. (Paris: Veuve d’Houry,
1733), 53.
62
Antoine-Simon Le Page du Pratz, Histoire de la Louisiane, contenant la découverte de ce
vaste pays; sa description géographique; un voyage dans les terres; l’histoire naturelle; les
moeurs, coutumes & religion des naturels, avec leurs origins (Paris: chez De Bure, 1758), vol.
2, 425.

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 C E R E M O N Y, M E D I C I N E , C A F F E I N A T E D T E A 483

FIGURE 6: Antoine-Simon Le Page du Pratz (1758), Histoire de la Louisiane: contenant la

découverte de ce vaste pays, sa description géographique, un voyage dans les terres, l’histoire
naturelle, les murs, coûtumes & religion des naturels, avec leur… (Paris: Chez de Bure),
“Apalachine,” p. 45. Image credit: Biodiversity Heritage Library, https://www.biodiversitylibrary.
org/item/159012#page/84/mode/1up.

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 484 CHRISTINE FOLCH

he also called “cassine de la Caroline”) to cure gout and nephritic syndrome

and its use in war, but, again, emesis is not mentioned.63 An interesting
exception to the trend is the 1775 Dictionnaire reigne universal, which says
the drink “has the property of making them vomit”—but, curiously, the
author solely called the plant “cassine” (more common at that time in the
anglophone world) rather than the standard “apalachine.”64
The associations between apalachine, war, gout, and diuresis, but not
emesis, were lodged in the French scientific literature for more than a
century. By the mid-nineteenth century, French writers knew that apalachine
had the “same” energizing effects as tea.65 French medical dictionaries began
to regularly incorporate the British focus on emesis only in the 1860s,
decades after the 1803 Louisiana Purchase and later annexations transferred
control of yaupon territory from French to U.S. hands, and French writers
had lost direct access to yaupon-producing lands. Le règne végétal (1865)
gives the description of “apalachina” (note the spelling difference from
previous usage) as that “which is produced from Ilex vomitoria aiton … a
little dose is purgative and even emetic,” but also adds “one attribute of the
leaves is to calm hunger.”66 That is, once Aiton’s scientific designation of
vomitoria entered French usage, so too did the emetic associations.
Misconstrued ethnographic observation became biomedical property for
yaupon, even in the face of contrary material evidence—non-Indigenous
users of yaupon did not regurgitate after consumption. Even in the United
States the cultural priorities of observers shaped biomedical findings and the
dominant scientific narrative, though scientific experiment or direct
ethnographic inquiry would have disproven the association. Southern
scientists tried to correct the mistake by writing to pharmaceutical
publications, but their expertise was not taken as being as authoritative as
that of northern writers who had no contact with yaupon.67 For example, in

63
Jean-Baptiste de Monet de Lamarck, Dictionnaire encyclopédique de botanique (Paris: Hôtel
de Thou, 1789), 653.
64
Jacques-Christophe Valmont de Bomare, Dictionnaire raisonné universel d’histoire naturelle,
vol. 8 (Paris: Brunet, 1775), 621.
65
Apollinaire Bouchardat, Manuel de matière médicale, de thérapeutique comparée et de
pharmacie, 3d ed. (Paris, 1856), vol. 2, 366.
66
A. Dupuis, F. Gerard, O. Reveil, and F. Herincq, Le règne végétal: divisé en traité de
botanique générale, flore médicale et usuelle, horticulture botanique et pratique, plantes
potagères, arbres fruitiers, végétaux d’ornement, plantes agricoles et forestières, histoire
biographique et bibliographique de la botanique. Flore médicale, vol. 2 (Paris: T. Morgand,
1865), 307. See also Alphonse Ardoin, Le Dictionnaire des écoles: Nomenclatures raisonnées
des termes d’agriculture, architecture, arithmétique et algèbre, art militaire, astronomie, blason,
botanique. Étude de la langue française par les raciness (Paris: Grandremy et Hénon, 1880–
1881), 69; Théophile Mongis, Toute plante porte son remède, ou La santé par les plantes:
causeries sur la médecine usuelle et les remèdes tirés du monde végétal, suivies d’un
vocabulaire explicatif (Nantes, 1885), 123.
67
John Redman Coxe, American Dispensatory, 8th ed. (Philadelphia: Carey & Lea, 1830), 166–67.

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 C E R E M O N Y, M E D I C I N E , C A F F E I N A T E D T E A 485

1833, Pennsylvania physician Robert Eglesfeld Griffith wrote that Ilex

vomitoria and Ilex dahoon (i.e., I. cassine) “are possessed of strongly
marked emetic qualities, and form the principal ingredient of the black drink
of the southern Indians, used before commencing their religious rites and
great councils.”68 The error persisted into the late twentieth century; the
authors of Common Poisonous Plants and Mushrooms of North America
noted that “yaupon can be made into a mild tea, but if drunk in a
concentrated brew can cause hallucinations and vomiting.”69 Schiebinger’s
portrayal of “culturally induced ignorance” within plant science is helpful
here because this persistent belief that yaupon was emetic calls into question
the very status of Western science. The error was not accidental, but rather a
result of a belief that the travel writings of anglophones could substitute for
scientific experimentation, especially when the voices of dissent (white
Southern, Indigenous, and Black communities) were marginalized.
Confusion about the scientific name led to multiple discoveries of caffeine
in yaupon in 1872, and then again in 1885.70 For the sake of comparison,
Friedlieb Ferdinand Runge discovered caffeine in coffee in 1819 in
Germany, theine was identified in tea in 1822 in France, and only a few
years later French scientists confirmed that theine and caffeine were
chemically identical. In 1843, caffeine was identified in yerba mate in
Britain.71 Not only was yaupon a latecomer, but it was studied in the United
States rather than in Europe, and within the United States there was more
accurate scientific work on and biomedical knowledge of yaupon in the
South.72 Though British, French, and even U.S. medical writings labelled
Ilex vomitoria as emetic, popular writing in the U.S. South remained more
nuanced. The popular coastal North Carolinian newspaper New Berne Daily
Times wrote, “The emetic effects were more probably due … to the large
quantities of the very strong and bitter decoction than to any peculiar active
emetic principle contained in the Yaupon.”73 In the end, because Ilex
vomitoria was neither a great purgative nor an emetic, nor a cure for
smallpox, and because other sources existed for its most important properties
(caffeine), yaupon’s importance in medicine receded.

68
R. Eglesfeld Griffith, “On the Vegetable Emetics of the United States.” Journal of the
Philadelphia College of Pharmacy 4 (Jan. 1833): 276.
69
Nancy J. Turner and Adam F. Szczawinski, Common Poisonous Plants and Mushrooms of
North America (Portland: Timber Press, 1991), 156.
70
Henry M. Smith, “Yaupon,” Scientific American 26, 14 (30 Mar 1872): 209; Henry M. Smith,
“Yaupon,” American Journal of Pharmacy (May 1872): 216. Venable, “Analysis of the Leaves.”
71
M. Oudry, “Note sur la Théine,” Nouvelle Bibliothèque Médicale 1 (1827): 477–79; Friedlieb
Ferdinand Runge, Neueste phytochemische Entdeckungen zur Begründung einer
wissenschaftlichen Phytochemie (Berlin: G. Reimer, 1820), 144–59; John Stenhouse, “On
Theine and Its Preparation,” Memoirs and Proceedings of the Chemical Society 2 (1843): 215–21.
72
Putz, “Yaupon Tea Has a Bad Name”; Venable, “Analysis of the Leaves.”
73
“The Yaupon or ‘Tea Holly,’” New Berne Daily Times, 24 Apr. 1872: 2.

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 486 CHRISTINE FOLCH

C O M M O D I F I C AT I O N : A PAT R I O T I C T E A , A S O U T H E R N D R I N K ,
A BLACK DRINK

Yaupon was consumed in the North American South long before Walter Lenoir
wrote to his mother of the privations experienced during the Civil War. But the
plant also circulated around the circum-North Atlantic. Multiple attempts at
commercializing yaupon had to contend with caffeinated competition, as
well as with intersections of identity and usage. In a 1722 letter, Pierre
Francois Xavier de Charlevoix wrote of yaupon’s presence in Paris:
“Cassine, otherwise called Apalachine, grows here [Biloxi] every where in
abundance: it is a very small shrub, the leaves of which, infused like those
of tea, are a good solvent and an excellent sudorific, but its main quality is
in being diuretic. The Spaniards make great use of it over all Florida: it is
even their ordinary drink. It began to be in some repute at Paris when I left
it….”74 Half a century later, Thomas Skinner announced his intention to
auction a 1775 shipment of “the Leafe and Good-will of the CAROLINA
TEA” at Deptford-Bridge in London.75 Both before and after U.S.
independence, northern ports along the east coast of North America, like
New York and Halifax, regularly received bundles of yaupon from sailors
hailing from or having stopped at ports in North Carolina.76
Provenance was key to yaupon’s branding and the plant was tightly
identified with geography, including through the names “Carolina Tea” or
“apalachine.” Yet, yaupon did not become a global caffeinated commodity
like coffee or tea, or even a regional one like yerba mate. Information we
have about the scale of early cultivation and production, as well as pricing,
suggests that yaupon possessed many of the qualities necessary to succeed
on the market. When John Locke specifically asked for yaupon samples as
part of his 1671 inquiry into the “healthynesse, richnesse & other Propertys
of ye soyle” and the “usefull Productions of ye Countrey,” tea had been on
the English market for less than twenty years.77 Coffee had been introduced
to England only a few years before that, in the 1630s. Europe was only
commencing its caffeine habit and countries had not yet developed firm
preferences for a particular product.

74
Pierre Francois Xavier de Charlevoix, Journal d’un Voyage Fait Par Ordre du Roi Dans
L’Amerique Septentrionnale (Paris: Chez Rollin Fils, Libraire, Quai des Augustins a S. Athanase
& au Palmier, 1744), vol. 6, letter 33, 5 Apr. 1722.
75
Daily Advertiser (London) 13767, 3 Feb. 1775: 1.
76
“A Paragraph of a Letter from a Gentleman in Halifax, Nova-Scotia, to His Friend in Boston,”
Boston Gazette, 8 May 1769: 1; “The Medical Repository of Original Essays and Intelligence,
Relative to Physic, Surgery, Chemistry, and Natural History,” Medical & Philosophical News 3
(1806): 305; [no author], “Yapon-Tea, Or Black Drink,” Medical Repository of Original Essays
and Intelligence, Relative to Physic, Surgery, Chemistry, and Natural History (1800–1824), vol.
3 (1806): 305.
77
“Captain Halsted’s Instructions,” 319.

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 C E R E M O N Y, M E D I C I N E , C A F F E I N A T E D T E A 487

We have seen that writings of early European visitors to and settlers in

Carolina show that Native communities on the seacoasts cultivated yaupon
for their own use and for an extensive precolonial trade in the leaf. Indeed,
Indigenous yaupon practices influenced those of settlers. Southern writers
asserted that prior to the U.S. Civil War “nearly every plantation and farm ha
[d] what is termed a yopon nursery.”78 Late eighteenth- and prewar
nineteenth-century wills and deeds from coastal Currituck county in North
Carolina, for example, show that plantation forced labor camps had “yopon,”
“yewpon,” and “yeopon” nurseries that could be acres in size.79 In all
likelihood, the European settlers and Africans and their descendants who
planted these yaupon nurseries learned the cultivation technique from the
original Indigenous inhabitants of the land. So, even though seventeenth-
century yaupon production was not oriented toward the international market
as was Chinese tea, Carolina’s Indigenous and non-Indigenous residents
knew how to grow and harvest it in large quantities.
In addition to closer proximity to Western European markets (and thus
lower transportation costs), yaupon also enjoyed a price advantage compared
to coffee and tea for the North Atlantic market. Nineteenth-century yaupon
prices ranged from $.50 to $1.00 a bushel, or $.05 to $.10 a pound in the
United States; a pound of tea at the time cost 54 pence in Britain and
anywhere from $.50 to $1.25 in the United States.80 But price differentials
could have been even greater. As a result of significant redesigns of export
centers in Southeast Asia and improved shipping techniques, tea prices had
dropped from 614 pence per pound in 1690 to 54 pence per pound in 1850
in Britain, a decline of 91 percent, suggesting that yaupon pricing would
have been even more competitive before the nineteenth century.81 One might
wonder if yaupon’s problem was not its price compared to tea but rather that
it earned less than other crops that could be grown on the same land. Yet,
early nineteenth-century cotton prices ranged between $.10 and $.135 per
pound; that is, within the range of yaupon prices. While we still have no
firm numbers on yaupon’s yield-per-acre to compare it with the South’s
premiere crops of tobacco, rice, and cotton, its yield is probably similar to
tea given their physical similarities (i.e., both can be harvested annually and

78
Henry E. Colton, “Yaupon Teas of Carolina—Mate of Paraguay,” Scientific American 22, 9
(26 Feb. 1870): 136.
79
William Beasley, 15 May 1819–Feb., term 1822, Currituck County Will Book 3, pp. 126–28;
Thomas Bernard, 7 Apr. 1788, Currituck County Deed Book 6, p. 3; Willoughby White, 18 Sept.
1824–Feb., term 1825, Currituck County Will Book, 3, pp. 179–81.
80
[No author], “Yapon-Tea or Black Drink,” 332; Thomas Hill, “Materia Medica Indigenous to
North Carolina,” Carolina Medical Journal 37 (1896): 90–97; Colton, “Yaupon Teas,” 136; “Tea
Price Listing, The Great American Tea Company (New York),” Harper’s Weekly 12 (30 May 1868):
351.
81
Gregory Clark, “The Price History of English Agriculture, 1209–1914,” Research in
Economic History 22 (2004): 41–123.

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 488 CHRISTINE FOLCH

grown as either a smaller plant or a large shrub).82 The key to the

commodification puzzle, then, is not to be found strictly in the production or
circulation links of the commodity chain.
Instead, consumer identity had a critical role to play. During the outcry
against the 1767 Townshend Acts and the 1773 Tea Act prior to the U.S.
Revolution, yaupon was marked as an “American” beverage consumed as a
manner of protest against the East India Company and British attempts to tax
tea consumption. As a later U.S. history book for schoolchildren recounted,
“The Americans were not contending for a little money, but for a principle,
and they refused to receive the tea. They began to drink tea made of
sassafras-roots, sage, raspberry-leaves, yaupon, and other American
plants.”83 But once the conflict faded, so too did the motivation to drink
yaupon as a manner of defiance and a newly forged patriotism. Trade in
yaupon appears to have subsided at this time, and the southern plant became
a solidly southern drink: “Almost all the southern coasters who frequent the
port of New-York, are in the constant use of Yapon-tea made from this
vegetable,” wrote the New York-based Medical Repository in 1806.84
Through its geographical association with the U.S. South, yaupon moved
from being a cultural stand-in for things (and people) indigenous to things
(and people) southern.
U.S. settler ethnographies of Indigenous communities during the first half
of the nineteenth century, many of them by missionaries, focused on yaupon as
ceremony or on the plant’s medical and scientific importance. But the U.S.
Civil War remapped race, region, and cuisine in important ways. Francis
Porcher’s 1863 Medical Botany of the Confederate States catalogued plants
that might be useful in the Confederacy and was particularly attentive to
those that substituted for products previously accessed from the North or
abroad. Porcher wrote of yaupon using the South Carolinian nomenclature:
“The inhabitants of North Carolina purify brackish water by boiling in it
Cassina leaves. In North and South Carolina much use is made of the leaves
of cassina for making tea.”85 Rumors of yaupon usage during the Civil War
made their way to the Union. A letter to the editor of Scientific American
asserted, “Messrs. Editors: In consequence of the scarcity of tea at the South,
the Southerners are said to be reviving the use of the Yopon or Yaupon (Ilex

82
Gavin Wright and Howard Kunreuther, “Cotton, Corn and Risk in the Nineteenth Century,”
Journal of Economic History 35, 3 (1975): 526–51.
83
Edward Eggleston, A History of the United States and Its People, for the Use of Schools
(New York: D. Appleton & Company, 1888), 165.
84
[No author], “Yapon-Tea or Black Drink”; see also A Backwoodsman Botanist, “Botanical
Notices of Interesting Plants,” Southern Literary Messenger 12, 4 (Dec. 1838): 800.
85
Francis Peyre Porcher, Resources of the Southern Fields and Forests, Medical, Economical,
and Agricultural: Being also a Medical Botany of the Confederate States (Charleston: Evans &
Cogswell, 1863), 393.

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 C E R E M O N Y, M E D I C I N E , C A F F E I N A T E D T E A 489

Cassine), of which the North Carolina Indians made their ‘black drink,’ and
which has been more or less used ever since in that region, though mainly
by the poorer classes.”86 In her manuscript memoirs after the war, Texan
Lillie Barr Munroe recalled the day-to-day hardships experienced during the
war, writing, “and one of the clearest memories I have of them is that
mother had no tea, we gathered the leaves of Upon [yaupon] shrub … they
made a substitute, but only a substitute.”87 Writing shortly after the war,
North Carolina geologist Henry E. Colton advocated for yaupon to be
commercialized and even urged that “if the people there will not enter this
new field, let Northern capital and enterprise occupy it,” a surprising
statement made so soon following hostilities.88
Yaupon became, for both the North and the South, a hallmark of wartime
suffering in the South, which may help explain why it was treated as a second-
rate substitute to be abandoned once opportunity arose. Northern cosmopolitan
disdain toward white Southerners, with attendant stereotypes around
intelligence, violence, and domesticity, attached to yaupon drinking after the
war. One writer in Pennsylvania insisted upon the veracity of an exchange
between an unidentified Southern man and his wife over the size of a
yaupon gourd in which she served the drink: “‘Is that the gourd you gave
me my yaupon in to-night?’ ‘Yes, honey.’ Up sprang the invalid and gave
his wife striking proofs of his vitality. ‘It’s a two quart gourd,’ he shouted,
‘and you skeered a fellow to death. One quart is my allowance, and you
know it. I thought when I couldn’t go my gourd of yaupon that I myself was
a goner.’”89 The husband, having been served yaupon in a two-quart gourd
(which, apparently, he could not distinguish in size from a one-quart gourd),
thought his inability to finish the drink was a sign of illness, and when the
mistake was discovered he beat his wife in anger. The account was part of a
yaupon-skeptical article entitled “Spurious Substitutes,” which argued
against yaupon presumably in reaction to attempts to encourage consumption
and commercialization of the Southern leaf. Notably, denigrating humor
about domestic violence and white Southern ignorance form the backbone of
this sketch, part of what James Cobb describes as “an already well-
established tendency among northern whites to see the South as a primitive
and exotic land distinctly apart from the rest of America.”90 The link

86
M.S.B., “Letter 7” [no title], Scientific American 5, 15 (1861): 230. Note the misapplication of
Ilex cassine to yaupon, which is Ilex vomitoria.
87
B. P. Gallaway, ed., Texas, the Dark Corner of the Confederacy: Contemporary Accounts of
the Lone Star State in the Civil War (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994), 185.
88
Colton, “Yaupon Teas.”
89
“Spurious Substitutes,” Public Ledger (Philadelphia), 4 June 1873: 1.
90
James Cobb, Away Down South: A History of Southern Identity (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2007), 1.

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 490 CHRISTINE FOLCH

between yaupon and Southernness transferred the negative valences of the

latter to the former.
Even within the South, yaupon suffered from strong geographical
association. As early as the eighteenth century, yaupon consumption among
white settlers was a marked characteristic of the Carolina seacoasts, and this
continued for centuries.91 North Carolina’s Outer Banks are steeped in
historical lore about their isolation from the mainland even though they were
the first sites of incursion. Here, the Roanoke Colony vanished and most
likely relocated to the island of Hatteras and intermarried with the
Indigenous community on the island.92 Centuries of distance resulted in
linguistic and cultural distinctives (notably, the Hoi Toider dialect of
American English), including the use of yaupon. In the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries, yaupon consumption was both a feature of the
Outer Banks and part of derogatory stereotypes of island inhabitants as
“hillbillies.”93 The term “choppers”—from “yaupon-choppers,” as part of
processing the leaf—was an insult used against islanders by North Carolina
mainlanders, and children in Avon on Hatteras Island were taunted with
phrases like “Kinnakeeter, yaupon eater.”94
But perhaps most importantly for Northern and Southern whites, yaupon
was slated as a Black drink. In 1864, the New York-based Farmer’s Club
featured a small update on yaupon with the detail: “The leaves of these
shrubs have been in use by the aborigines of that district from time
immemorial, and the Ilex cassine or Yaupon, constitutes the tea in universal
use there among the negroes, which has given currency to the common
negro adage, ‘Fried hominy, possum fat, and Yaupon tea is too good.’”95
The association of “possum fat” with yaupon is illuminating. Nicholas
Proctor makes a case that there were (and remain) “racially ordered
preferences” when it came to cuisine from the perspective of whites in the
United States and the perceived inferiority of the consumption of racial
minorities and particularly Black communities. Opossum as Black game and
a Black meal is a repeated trope which appears in both Twelve Years a Slave

91
See Catesby, Hortus Britanno-Americanus; Thos C. Harris, “On the Carolina Banks,” Youth’s
Companion 64, 45 (5 Nov. 1891): 571.
92
Baylus C. Brooks, “John Lawson’s Indian Town on Hatteras Island, North Carolina,” North
Carolina Historical Review 91, 2 (2014): 171–207.
93
Barbara Garrity-Blake and Karen Willis Amspacher, Living at the Water’s Edge: A Heritage
Guide to the Outer Banks Byway (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017), 49.
94
Ibid.; David E. Whisnant, All that Is Native and Fine: The Politics of Culture in an American
Region (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009[1983]), xxx.
95
American Institute of the City of New York, Proceedings of the Farmers’ Club, together with
the Rules and Regulations Adopted by the Committee of Agriculture (Albany: Comstock & Cassidy,
Printers, 1864), 78–384, 98.

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 C E R E M O N Y, M E D I C I N E , C A F F E I N A T E D T E A 491

and Frederick Douglass’ Narrative.96 Proctor writes that in the mid-1840s,

“English naturalist Charles Lyell wrote that although he considered raccoon
and opossum meat ‘too coarse and greasy for the palate of a white man …
the negroes relish them much.’”97 Moreover, opossum and raccoon hunting
were nocturnal activities and thus would not interfere with daytime duties.98
If possum and yaupon were parallels, as the dubiously “common negro
adage” implies, then the very Black taste for yaupon may have dissuaded a
white public from consuming it.
This strong association continued into the Reconstruction and Jim Crow
periods. A Hatteras Democratic leader complained to a local Democratic
congressman in 1898 that “the backbone of the Republican Party here are
‘Yeopon-choppers.’”99 Perhaps “chopper” as an insult for Outer Banks
residents carried racial undertones. By the time Brimley visited
Scarborough’s yaupon factory the art of processing the leaf was fading,
though Scarborough’s entire family, which Brimley noted was the sole Black
family in the community, worked with him.100 Even in 1923, Nature
Magazine featured an article on yaupon processing and use among Black
communities on South Carolina’s Sea Islands with photographs of young
women stripping leaves from twigs and adult men operating ovens and
machinery to dry and chop the leaves.101 Important details from both pieces
suggest a strong cultural continuity between island forms of preparing
yaupon and Indigenous techniques. An 1806 article about the Creek and the
1905 account of Scarborough describe the same process: after being chopped
with a hatchet, the yaupon is placed into a barrel and covered with hot
stones to sweat and toast the leaves before they are laid out to fully dry.102
Although Brimley mentions yaupon’s supposed emetic and purgative
qualities, Scarborough commended the drink to him for the “smooth and
easy way in which the drinking of his tea would remove fevers from the
system with a guarantee of no bad after-effects.”103 But even the praise from
Scarborough fit into a pre-structured dismissal of Black medical knowledge
in the South, which Sharla Fett argues was shaped both by “social relations

96
Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (New York: Cosimo
Classics, 2008), 43; Solomon Northrup, Twelve Years a Slave (New York: Miller, Orton and
Mulligan, 1855), 201.
97
Nicolas W. Proctor, Bathed in Blood: Hunting and Mastery in the Old South (Charlottesville:
University Press of Virginia, 2002), 131.
98
Scott E. Giltner, Hunting and Fishing in the New South: Black Labor and White Leisure after
the Civil War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008).
99
Gary Seamans Dunbar, “Historical Geography of the North Carolina Outer Banks,” PhD diss.,
Louisiana State University, 1956, https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_disstheses/167, 118.
100
Brimley, “Yaupon Factory,” 10.
101
James Henry Rice, “The Story of a New Drink,” Nature Magazine 62, 2 (1923): 53–54.
102
Brimley, “Yaupon Factory,” 10; [No author], “Yapon-Tea or Black Drink,” 305.
103
Brimley, “Yaupon Factory,” 10.

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 492 CHRISTINE FOLCH

of slavery and the cultural heritage of African herbal practitioners.”104 Black

knowledge of plant medicine grew from day-to-day laboring practices under
slavery and from contact with Indigenous groups. The documents analyzed
for this article that describe southern Indigenous life frequently mention
individuals of African descent (free and enslaved) living with the Creek,
Cherokee, and Seminole.105 Even into the twentieth century, writers asserted
that “Cassina or Black Drink is still prepared (1924) by the natives and
negroes along the coast wherever the source-plant is abundant.”106 The
structures of slavery meant that Black communities frequently managed their
own medical wellbeing clandestinely, and herbalism was a crucial part of
everyday health-maintenance for African-descended communities despite
disparagement by white advocates of biomedicine.107 While familiarity with
yaupon’s pharmacological prowess has faded from the medical mainstream,
knowledge around use of the plant is still retained in Black coastal
communities in the South. A recent master’s thesis, “Our Grandmothers’
Ways: Complementary and Alternative Medicine Use by the Gullah-Geechee
in McIntosh County, Georgia,” records about yaupon, “Herbal Medicine
Prevents the Onset of Colon Cancer.”108
Reading between the lines of these texts suggests that Africans and their
descendants on the Carolina-Georgia coasts and probably farther inland
adopted yaupon processing from Indigenous groups that lived on those same
shores. While Indigenous usage of the plant attracted much attention from
white settlers, there are surprisingly few descriptions of Black practices in
the archival record aside from the mentions above. And yet, perhaps it is
possible to link what we know about the psychoactive properties of yaupon
with what we know about familiarity with yaupon in Black communities, the
popularity of yaupon in the South before and immediately after the Civil
War, and the physical preponderance of yaupon even today in the Carolinas
and Georgia far from the coast. Yaupon remains a popular decorative shrub
in the South; recall that plantations and farms often possessed yaupon
nurseries. Might one reason for yaupon’s material prevalence be that

104
Sharla M. Fett, Working Cures: Healing, Health, and Power on Southern Slave Plantations
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 60.
105
See also Andrew K. Frank, “Red, Black, and Seminole: Community Convergence on the
Florida Borderlands, 1780–1840,” in Andrew K. Frank and A. Glenn Crothers, eds., Borderland
Narratives: Negotiation and Accommodation in North America’s Contested Spaces, 1500–1850
(Gainesville : University Press of Florida, 2018), 46–61, 57.
106
Ralph Holt Cheney, Coffee: A Monograph of the Economic Species of the Genus Coffea L.
(New York: New York University Press, 1925), 207.
107
Fett, Working Cures, 65.
108
Roman Johnson, “Our Grandmothers’ Ways: Complementary and Alternative Medicine Use
by the Gullah-Geechee in McIntosh County, Georgia,” MA thesis, Georgia State University, 2016,
61. See also Faith Mitchell, Hoodoo Medicine: Gullah Herbal Remedies (Columbia: Summerhouse
Press, 1999).

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 C E R E M O N Y, M E D I C I N E , C A F F E I N A T E D T E A 493

Africans and their descendants intentionally planted it specifically for its

psychoactive properties? After all, the caffeine-bearing kola nut had been
widely used, cultivated, and traded across West Africa from at least the
thirteenth century C.E.109 Sidney Mintz argued for the importance of
caffeine products added to sugar in the florescence of industrial factories in
the North Atlantic—a combination he dubbed “proletarian hunger killers,”
inexpensive combinations that suppressed hunger in workers and gave them
the boost to labor extra hours at extremely low wages.110 Yaupon, as a
caffeine-bearing leaf, could have served as a hunger killer for enslaved
communities.
Neither the documents studied for this article nor a preliminary
ethnographic survey of adult and elderly African Americans in North
Carolina111 have yielded precise evidence for this argument. And yet,
multiple pieces of the puzzle are in place and the story of yaupon has been
one of forgotten knowledge. The textual silences are easily explained by
social structures of racially ordered preferences in consumption in the United
States as well as the tendency of white writers to dismiss Black herbal
knowledge. Perhaps, too, the loss of the specific context for yaupon
consumption with the end of chattel slavery and (again, perhaps) a negative
association between yaupon consumption and the hardships of enslavement
contributed to its decline.
Whatever the reasons for yaupon’s post-Civil War ebb, the long twentieth
and the twenty-first centuries have seen repeated attempts to popularize the
beverage for consumption, but only recently with success. The question with
which I opened this article puzzled many—why had yaupon not taken in the
United States?—has puzzled many before me.112 Chicago physician Edwin
Hale wrote an 1891 booklet on the history of yaupon for the U.S. Department
of Agriculture with an aim to resuscitate its use and “inquire into its possible
economic value.”113 Hale compared the leaf to tea and yerba mate, but then
reflected, “The use of the shrub above mentioned has been almost abandoned
by our native Indians and by the white people who once partially adopted it as
a beverage.” The booklet caught the attention of agricultural experts.114 Hale
never mentions Black use, and though he follows botanical, chemical, and

109
Paul E. Lovejoy, “Kola in the History of West Africa,” Cahiers d’Etudes Africaines 20, 77–
78 (1980): 97–134.
110
Mintz, “Time, Sugar, and Sweetness.”
111
I have reached out to many African American churches to query their senior Bible study
members on their memories of use of this plant.
112
“Holly Tea,” Chambers Journal of Popular Literature, Science, and Arts 10, 487 (29 Apr.
1893): 262.
113
Hale, “Bulletin no. 14,” 7.
114
George G. Groff, “A Forgotten Plant,” Independent 44, 2 (5 May 1892): 38; Hale, “Bulletin
no. 14,” 7.

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 494 CHRISTINE FOLCH

FIGURE 7: A yaupon tasting of “cassina mate,” prepared by the U.S. Department of Agriculture,
“Drinking Cassina, a South American drink, made in Department of Agriculture,” Harris and
Ewing, photographer, July 1924, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division
Washington, D.C., control number 2016887376. Note the erroneous attribution of cassina to
South America.

physiological analyses of yaupon with an admirable historical recompilation of

its use among Indigenous groups from Cabeza de Vaca onward, he never
makes a connection between the genocide of Indigenous communities and its
effects on ceremony. Hale speculated that intermarriage between Europeans
and natives in South America accounted for the extended use of yerba mate in
that region, in contrast with the lack of intermixing of Indigenous groups with
the French and English who settled in southern North America.115
Hale’s was not the only Department of Agriculture report on yaupon. The
U.S. Bureau of Chemistry (part of the Department of Agriculture and a direct
antecedent to the Food and Drug Administration) prepared a circular in 1922 to
advocate for the production of beverages from yaupon, and even tested soft
drinks made from the plant at the Charleston County Fair (see also figure 7).
The bureau’s explicit mission was applied research—combining scientific
inquiry with economic aims. The writers enthusiastically stated: “It was
found during these experiments that these products can be produced very

115
Hale, “Bulletin no. 14,” 22.

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 C E R E M O N Y, M E D I C I N E , C A F F E I N A T E D T E A 495

cheaply in comparison with commercial tea because of the fact (1) that unlike
tea, all the leaves on the plant contain the active principle, caffeine, (2) that
unlike tea, all the leaves can be removed from the pruned branches with live
steam, (3) that the number of steps in the process of production can be
substantially reduced, and (4) that in the preparation of cassina a very small
amount of hand labor is necessary.”116
Yaupon might have definite advantages over imported tea, but just at that
time Coca Cola was on its ascent and the newly public company was
capitalizing on Prohibition plus a sophisticated advertising scheme that
extended to the shape of its bottle and even the modern image of Santa
Claus. Charles Fairbanks, in the edited volume Black Drink: A Native
American Tea, directly attributes the rise of Coca Cola to the “cultural
integration” of the ten-minute break (first invented by Stonewall Jackson to
keep Confederate troops refreshed) and an exuberance of soda fountain
recipes for a public keen on carbonated drinks.117 Whatever cultural space
there might have been for a new (old) caffeinated beverage was filled by ice-
cold soft drinks.
For most of the twentieth century yaupon was treated as a mere curiosity
associated with the Carolina and Georgia islands, but more recently new
companies have emerged seeking to do what Hale and others had
recommended: put yaupon on the U.S. stage. They are located within the
growing range of Ilex vomitoria in the United States: Yaupon Brothers in
Central Florida, CatSpring and Lost Pines in Texas, and Asi Tea in Georgia.
The difference in brand names signals the lack of standardization of the
plant’s nomenclature, which is still very regionally dependent. That none of
these companies prominently feature the scientific name reveals an enduring
ambivalence about Ilex vomitoria. The newly formed American Yaupon
Association highlights permaculture, an emergent eco-agricultural model that
balances “profitability and environmental stewardship.”118 Permaculture,
which prioritizes sustainability through mixed-method cultivation, is but one
of several agricultural/food movements that have arisen in response to
climate change and resource scarcity. They seek to mitigate the impacts of
the Anthropocene, operating within the constraints of capitalism but also
working to transform it.

116
George Mitchell and J. W. Sale, “Beverages Produced from Cassina. Reproduced from Type-
Written Copy” (Washington, D.C.: USDA, Bureau of Chemistry, 1922), 2.
117
Charles Fairbanks, “The Function of Black Drink among the Creeks,” in Charles Hudson,
ed., Black Drink: A Native American Tea (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1972), 120–49, 144.
118
American Yaupon Association website; Lost Pines, “Post,” Permaculture subreddit, Reddit,
n.d., https://www.reddit.com/r/Permaculture/comments/3sks7b/wed_love_your_opinion_on_our_
company_lost_pines/ (accessed 14 Mar. 2019).

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 496 CHRISTINE FOLCH

The business models of the new yaupon companies directly address both
the labor excesses and the land impacts of extensive and intensive caffeine
commodity production. This approach has been a distinguishing mark of
elite coffee and tea products and it now predominates in most yaupon
manufacturing.119 Much of the yaupon sold by U.S.-based companies is
organic—it is a popular hedge partly because it is endemic and requires no
fertilizers, herbicides, or pesticides and little to no watering—and is foraged
or grown in small plots (even in Central Florida’s backyards). CatSpring
offers employment to people in workforce transition, the formerly
incarcerated, and sex-trafficking survivors, indicating that social and
ecological responsibility are core to its messaging and mission.120 The
anxiety about indigeneity has disappeared and all the companies
conspicuously mention yaupon’s Native past. It has proved a marketing boon
and there seems to have been a blunting or even transfer of indigeneity:
“native” has shifted from describing Indigenous peoples to describing the
plant. The new yaupon endeavors redeem the mistakes of coffee, tea, and
chocolate production, and consumption also has a transformative effect on
drinkers by committing them ethically to proper relationships with the land
and with other people.

CONCLUSION

Yaupon found, lost, and found again raises important questions about
colonialisms, plant knowledge, and plant use. Within North America, and
particularly after the formation of the United States, different groups, sharing
more or less the same space, conceptualized the agentive nature of the plant
differently. I have shorthanded this here as ceremony versus medicine versus
tea, but the differences go deeper. For the Timucua, Creek, Cherokee, and
other Indigenous groups yaupon seems to be both a beloved plant and an
actor with spiritual-social power. For Black communities, yaupon is potent
and, per Fett’s larger description of plant knowledge among African-
descended populations, fits into a cosmology of spiritually active physical
substances.121 Neither of these perspectives, writ large, coincides with the
impersonal, a-personal treatment of plants characteristic of modern Western
approaches. Yaupon reveals the botanical roots of modern medicine,
including the struggles between the transfer of plant knowledge and the
development of scientific institutions to handle that knowledge. I argue that

119
William Roseberry, “The Rise of Yuppie Coffees and the Reimagination of Class in the
United States,” American Anthropologist 98, 4 (1996): 762–75.
120
Catspring, “People First,” n.d., https://www.catspringtea.com/working-with-dignity
(accessed 2 Nov. 2019).
121
Fett, Working Cures.

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 C E R E M O N Y, M E D I C I N E , C A F F E I N A T E D T E A 497

yaupon is more than a drink—it is a way to “think” “America,” and has been
since the sixteenth century.
In becoming a kind of un-food, yaupon resisted commodification even
though it came into European awareness at the same time that European and
North American settler colonial markets were developing a robust caffeine
habit, showing that capitalist incentives are not necessarily the most
powerful forces acting on an object. Instead, the complex of plant and
human communities highlighted through competing knowledge priorities,
discussed in this article, structured the possibilities of yaupon in the past.
These texts present a case of overlapping transmission methods: orality
versus writing. Both Indigenous and Black communities frequently
transmitted information orally and materially, whereas the European/settler
preference was for writing. This led to a challenge of knowledge
conservation. The better-preserved practice also featured in a social power
dynamic as imperial and hegemonic, politically invested in silencing,
erasing, or appropriating the knowledges and even the physical presence of
marginalized communities. The uses that must be approached obliquely are
those of Indigenous and Black groups, communities that seem to have
incorporated yaupon more deliberately and extensively. But writing and even
literacy itself are problematic here; Europeans rejected the pre- and early
contact writings of Mesoamerica as such and instead relegated them as
“paintings,” or they destroyed precolonial codexes as “demonic.”122
Teaching an enslaved individual to read was illegal in the Southern states of
the United States. For this article I have, therefore, assembled a kind of
yaupon archive that incorporates archeological and material plant evidence
as signals of human intentionality. In addition to taking the documents at
face value, because of their place within an imperial project I have read them
against the grain in order to better understand subaltern uses of yaupon.
Similarly, that yaupon is commonly used as yard décor—its place in
southeastern landscaping—raises the question of how to ethnographically
read cultural landscapes.
Making judgments concerning the “disordered” eating practices and un-
food of Indigenous groups and racially ordering eating preferences vis-à-vis
Black communities were parallel and proximate moves for white settlers and
their descendants. The coffeehouse and the tea ceremony could be
domesticated and resignified with markers of European cultural respectability
in part because the Middle East and East Asia were so geographically

122
Elizabeth Hill Boone, “Introduction: Writing and Recording Knowledge,” in Elizabeth Hill
Boone and Walter Mignolo, eds., Writing without Words: Alternative Literacies in Mesoamerica
and the Andes (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994), 3–26.

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 498 CHRISTINE FOLCH

distant; that yaupon grows in North America and was used by marginalized
groups meant that the broader associations attached to those communities
could not be so easily divorced from it. It remains to be seen whether, in the
face of ongoing climate and ecological crises, these very qualities that
contributed to yaupon’s decline will contribute to a new ascent. The newest
makers of commercial yaupon have positioned the plant as a solution to
systemic problems in caffeine commodity chains, from production to
consumption. Yaupon—as Indigenous, as ritual rediscovered, and requiring
no pesticides or fertilizers—may yet find new life as the stimulating drink
that remedies the maladies of the Anthropocene.

Abstract: Yaupon (the unfortunately named Ilex vomitoria) is a holly commonly

used as yard décor in the southeast United States, but many North Americans will
be surprised to learn that it is the source of a stimulant tea that has been in
continuous use for nearly a millennium. Yaupon is more than a drink; it is a
window into questions of identity, community belonging, and how the New
World was inserted into the global economy. From Cabeza de Vaca’s sixteenth-
century brush with the beverage, yaupon has iterated between ceremony,
medicine, and caffeinated tea as inhabitants of North America—Indigenous,
enslaved, and settler colonial inhabitants of North America—have harnessed
the leaf’s properties to different, culturally situated aims. This article traces
narratives, recipes, and medical descriptions of yaupon from contact to the
present, and compares these against material and archeological records to
explore differences between settler and extractive colonial encounters with
Indigenous psychoactive substances (and thus indigeneity). The story of
yaupon reveals contests between regimes of knowledge, the political economy
of colonialisms, and the fraught intersections of identity and cuisine. Despite
abundant ethnographic, documentary, and scientific evidence to the contrary,
the scientific and medical literature long mislabeled yaupon as emetic. This
raises questions about how knowledge is transferred and how scientific
authority is constructed. I argue that indigeneity, race, and class have steered
how yaupon has been understood, and help to explain why a popular
caffeinated product waned at a time when the use of stimulants was increasing,
and “proletarian hunger-killers” were on the rise.

Key words: commodity chains, plant relations, scientific knowledge and

ignorance, Ilex drinks, Atlantic world, settler colonialism, indigenous food,
caffeine

https://doi.org/10.1017/S0010417521000116 Published online by Cambridge University Press