Molasses: Historical Significance

Wits may laugh at our fondness for molasses, and we ought all to join in the laugh with as much good humor as General Lincoln did. General Washington, however, always asserted and proved, that Virginians loved molasses as well as New Englandmen did. I know not why we should blush to confess that molasses was an essential ingredient in American independence. Many great events have proceeded from much smaller causes.
John Adams to William Tudor, 11 August 1818

From The Works of John Adams, Second President of the United States: with a Life of the Author, Notes and Illustrations, by his Grandson Charles Francis Adams. Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1856. 10 volumes. Vol. 10.

Molasses, of course, was sought by those in New England because it was the principal ingredient in the manufacture of rum. The 1733 tax to which Adams alludes was a protective measure designed to render importation of molasses from French plantations so prohibitively expensive as to eliminate French sources. New England rum distillers would thus be forced to secure molasses from Barbados, Jamaica, and other British islands in the Caribbean.

Matthew Parker, The Sugar Barons: Family, Corruption, and War in the West Indies (New York: Walker Publishing, 2011), 241, 400 attributes "[m]olasses was an essential ingredient in American Independence" to Novanglus (vol. 4 in The Works of John Adams). Parker also spells his source Novangulus.