The Revolution thrust to the forefront of politics debates over whether local or national authorities should take steps to bolster household independence and protect Americans’ livelihoods by limiting price increases. Economic dislocations sharpened the controversy. To finance the war, Congress issued hundreds of millions of dollars in paper money. Coupled with wartime disruption of agriculture and trade and the hoarding of goods by some Americans hoping to profit from shortages, this produced an enormous increase in prices. The country, charged a letter to a Philadelphia newspaper in 1778, had been “reduced to the brink of ruin by the infamous practices of monopolizers.” “Hunger,” the writer warned, “will break through stone walls.”
Between 1776 and 1779, more than thirty incidents took place in which crowds confronted merchants accused of holding scarce goods off the market. Often, they seized stocks of food and sold them at the traditional “just price,” a form of protest common in eighteenth-century England. In one such incident, a crowd of 100 Massachusetts women accused an “eminent, wealthy, stingy merchant” of hoarding coffee, opened his warehouse, and carted off the goods. “A large concourse of men,” wrote Abigail Adams, “stood amazed, silent spectators of the whole transaction.”