substituted privileges and rewards for punishment and emphasized rehabilitation
over profit making. They provided religious instruction; they improved food and
working conditions; and they cut back on the use of flogging. When Democrats
took back the statehouse in the 1842 elections, they discovered that the Whigs’
brief experiment in kindness had produced a $50,000 deficit, so they swiftly reinstated the old regime.
Asylums
The leading advocate of humane treatment of the insane was
Dorothea Dix, a Boston humanitarian who was shocked by
the incarceration and abuse of the insane in common jails. She traveled throughout the country, urging citizens to pressure their state legislatures into building asylums committed to what reformers called “moral treatment.” The asylums were to be clean and pleasant places, preferably outside the cities, and the inmates were to be treated humanely. Attendants were not to beat inmates or tie them up, although they could use cold showers as a form of discipline. Dix and other reformers wanted the asylums to be safe, nurturing environments in which the insane could be made well.
By 1860, the legislatures of 28 of the 33 states had established state-run in-
sane asylums. Whig legislators, with minimal support from Democrats, approved
appropriations for the more expensive and humane moral treatment facilities.
Occasionally, however, Dorothea Dix won Democratic support as well. In North
Carolina, she befriended the wife of a powerful Democratic legislator as the
woman lay on her deathbed. The dying woman convinced her husband to support
building an asylum. His impassioned speech won the approval of the lower house
for a state asylum to be named Dix Hill. In the North Carolina senate, however,
the proposal won the votes of 91 percent of the Whigs and only 14 percent of the
Democrats—a partisan division that held in state after state.
THE POLITICS OF ALCOHOL
Central to party formation in the North was the fight between evangelical Whigs
who demanded that government regulate public (and often private) morality and
Democrats who feared both big government and the Whig cultural agenda. The
most persistent issue in that argument was the question of alcohol—so much so
that in many places the temperance question defined the differences between
Democrats and Whigs.
The Alcoholic
The years 1790–1830 witnessed a dramatic rise in alcohol
Republic
consumption. Americans had been drinking alcohol since the
time of the first settlements. (The Puritan flagship Arabella
had carried three times as much beer as water.) But drinking, like all other “normal” behaviors, took place within a structure of paternal authority. Americans
tippled every day in the course of their ordinary activities: at family meals and around the fireside, at work, and at barn raisings, militia musters, dances, court days (even judges and juries passed the bottle), weddings, funerals, corn huskings—
even at the ordinations of ministers. Under such circumstances, drinking—even
drunkenness— seldom posed a threat to authority or to the social order.
The Politics of Alcohol
423
That old pattern of communal drinking persisted into the 19th century, but
during the 50 years following the Revolution, it gradually gave way to a new pat-
tern. Farmers, particularly those in newly settled areas, regularly produced a surplus of grain that they turned into whiskey. In Washington County in western Pennsylvania, for example, 1 family in 10 operated a distillery in the 1790s. Whiskey was safer than water and milk, which were often tainted, and it was cheaper than coffee or tea. It was also cheaper than imported rum, so Americans embraced whiskey as
their national drink and consumed extraordinary quantities of it. Per capita con-
sumption of pure alcohol in all its forms increased from three to four gallons annually between 1790 and 1830, and most of the increase was in the form of cheap and potent whiskey. By 1830, per capita consumption of distilled spirits was more than five gallons per year—the highest it has ever been, and three times what it is in the United States today. The United States had become, as one historian has said, an
“alcoholic republic.”
The nation’s growing thirst was driven not by conviviality or neighborliness
but by a desire to get drunk. Most Americans drank regularly, although with
wide variations. Men drank far more than women, the poor and the rich drank
more than the emerging middle class, city dwellers drank more than farmers,
westerners drank more than easterners, and southerners drank a bit more than
northerners. Throughout the nation, the heaviest drinking took place among the
increasing numbers of young men who lived away from their families and outside
the old social controls: soldiers and sailors, boatmen and other transport workers, lumberjacks, schoolmasters, journeyman craftsmen, college students. Among such
men, the controlled tippling of the 18th century gave way to the binge and to
solitary drinking. By the 1820s, American physicians were learning to diagnose
delirium tremens—the trembling and the paranoid delusions brought on by with-
drawal from physical addiction to alcohol. By that decade, social reformers
branded alcohol as a threat to individual well-being, domestic peace, public order, and the republic itself.
Ardent Spirits
Drinking had been a part of social life since the beginnings
of English settlement, but the withering of authority and
the disruptions of the Market Revolution led to increased consumption, in-
creased public drunkenness, and a perceived increase in alcohol-fed violence and
social problems. Beginning in the 1790s, physicians and a few clergymen at-
tacked not only habitual drunkenness but alcohol itself. For a short time after
1812, Federalist politicians and Congregational clergymen formed “moral soci-
eties” in New England that discouraged strong drink. Their imperious tone and
their association with the old seats of authority, however, doomed them to
failure.
The temperance crusade began in earnest in 1826, when northeastern evangeli-
cals founded the American Society for the Promotion of Temperance (soon renamed
the American Temperance Society). The movement’s manifesto was Lyman
Beecher’s Six Sermons on the Nature, Occasions, Signs, Evils, and Remedy of In-
temperance (1826). Addressing the churchgoing middle class, Beecher declared
alcohol an addictive drug and warned that even moderate drinkers risked becoming
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