Prologue

Prince Updike had strong, calloused hands and a lot of stamina.  He worked hard grinding thousands of pounds of chocolate in Newport, Rhode Island in the decades leading up to the American Revolution. 

Blisters came and went, leaving marks that reminded Prince and observers that this man labored with his hands.  Prince only rarely stopped working.  Day after day.  Week after week.  Month after month.  Year after year.  Prince ground chocolate.

Early modern technology could only do so much.  Even though mill stones could grind huge amounts of cocoa beans in the eighteenth century, they could not grind them fine enough to produce chocolate.  Skilled artisans called grinders still had to complete the process by hand. 

So, Prince carried heavy sacks of roasted, shelled and milled cocoa bean bits, or nibs, to his work area.  Then, he got to work.

He scooped handfuls of these nibs onto a curved smooth stone.  The stone was set on top a wooden cabinet.  Inside the cabinet was a small chaffing dish filled with burning charcoal.  Half of the cocoa beans consisted of a fat that liquefied at 90 degrees Fahrenheit.  Maintaining the charcoal underneath the stone helped Prince keep the paste in a liquid condition and facilitated the grinding process.

The muscles in Prince’s forearms ached and knotted after a day grinding chocolate by hand.  He used a metal rolling pin and pressed hard against the nibs and the stone.  Over and over.  Again and again.  Applying a lot of pressure to grind and crush the nibs eventually produced a thick paste, not a powder.  The liquefied fat in the nibs made sure of that.

Prince scooped and poured the paste into tin molds for hardening.  Eighteenth-century consumers preferred to purchase chocolate molded into bars, which they called cakes.  This way, consumers could cut shavings bit by bit to mix into beverages or baked goods.  Then, they could repackage the bars for storage.

Prince then delivered the solid rectangular bars, or cakes to the chocolate manufacturer who owned a mill, a store, and ships.  The manufacturer retailed the chocolate in his store, and he exported the trade good to markets across the Atlantic Ocean.  The manufacturer made most of the money from the sale of the chocolate.

In all, chocolate grinding was intense, physically exhausting, time consuming, and repetitive.  Prince worked long and hard.  Making chocolate did not pay well.  And it rarely ceased.

But, Prince could not stop. He was an enslaved African-American with little rights and few freedoms. And he was doing work in his spare time for a greedy manufacturer who locked vulnerable laborers such as enslaved chocolate grinders into service through rigid labor contracts, stiff financial penalties, and debt peonage.

Coming Soon!