hopeless drunkards. Thus temperance, like other evangelical reforms, was presented as a contest between self-control and slavery to one’s appetites. By encouraging
total abstinence, reformers hoped to stop the creation of new drunkards while the old ones died out. Even though Beecher pinned his hopes on self-discipline, he
wanted middle-class abstainers to spread reform through both example and coer-
cion. As middle-class evangelicals eliminated alcohol from their own lives, they
also ceased to offer it to their guests, buy or sell it, or provide it to their employees, and they encouraged their friends to do the same.
Beecher’s crusade gathered strength in the middle-class revivals of the 1820s
and 1830s. Charles Grandison Finney (see Chapter 10), in his revival at Rochester, made total abstinence a condition of conversion. Many other ministers and
churches followed suit, and by the mid-1830s, the evangelical middle class had
largely disengaged from alcohol and the people who drank it. Following a temper-
ance lecture by Finney’s coworker Theodore Dwight Weld, Rochester grocers Elijah
and Albert Smith rolled their stock of whiskey out on the sidewalk, smashed the
barrels, and let the liquor spill into the street. Other Rochester merchants threw their liquor into the Erie Canal or sold it off at cost. Hundreds of evangelical businessmen pledged that they would refuse to rent to merchants who sold liquor, sell grain to distillers, or enter a store that sold alcohol. Many of them made abstinence a condition of employment, placing ads that carried the line “None But Temperate
Men Need Apply.” Abstinence and opposition to the use of distilled spirits (people continued to argue about wine and beer) had become a badge of middle-class
respectability.
Among themselves, the reformers achieved considerable success. By 1835, the
American Temperance Society claimed 1.5 million members and estimated that
2 million Americans had renounced ardent spirits (whiskey, rum, and other distilled liquors); 250,000 had formally pledged to completely abstain from alcohol. The society further estimated that 4,000 distilleries had gone out of business, and that many of the survivors had cut back their production. Many politicians stopped
buying drinks to win votes. The Kentucky Whig Henry Clay, once known for keep-
ing late hours, began to serve only cold water when he entertained, and in 1833
members of Congress formed the American Congressional Temperance Society. The
U.S. Army put an end to the age-old liquor ration in 1832, and increasing numbers of militia officers stopped supplying their men with whiskey. The annual consumption of alcohol, which had reached an all-time high in the 1820s, dropped by
more than half in the 1830s (from 3.9 gallons of pure alcohol per adult in 1830 to 1.8 gallons in 1840).
chart
The Origins
In the middle 1830s, Whigs made temperance a political
of Prohibition
issue. Realizing that voluntary abstinence would not end
drunkenness, Whig evangelicals drafted coercive, prohibi-
tionist legislation. First, they attacked the licenses granting grocery stores and taverns the right to sell liquor by the drink and to permit it to be consumed on the premises. The licenses were important sources of revenue for local governments.
They also gave local authorities the power to cancel the licenses of troublesome
establishments. Militant temperance advocates, usually in association with local
The Politics of Alcohol
425
Whigs, demanded that the authorities use that power to outlaw all public drinking places. In communities throughout the North, the licensing issue, always freighted with divisions over religion and social class, became the issue around which local parties organized. The question first reached the state level in Massachusetts, when in 1838 a Whig legislature passed the Fifteen-Gallon Law, which decreed that
merchants could sell ardent spirits only in quantities of 15 gallons or more, thus outlawing every public drinking place in the state. In 1839, Massachusetts voters sent enough Democrats to the legislature to rescind the law.
The Whig attempt to cancel tavern licenses proved unenforceable because pro-
prietors simply operated without licenses or found ways to get around the laws.
While the Massachusetts Fifteen-Gallon Law was in effect, one Boston tavern
keeper painted stripes on a pig and charged patrons an admission fee of six cents (the old price of a drink) to view the “exhibition.” He then provided customers—
who paid over and over to see the pig—with a “complimentary” glass of whiskey.
Leading Democrats agreed with Whigs that Americans drank too much, but
whereas Whigs insisted that regulating morality was a proper function of govern-
ment, Democrats warned that government intrusion into areas of private choice
would violate republican liberties. The Democrats of Rochester, New York,
responding to the license issue, made the following declaration:
Anything which savours of restraint in what men deem their natural rights is sure to meet with opposition, and men convinced of error by force will most likely continue all their lives unconvinced in their reason. Whatever shall be done to stay the tide of intemperance, and roll back its destroying wave, must be done by suasive appeals to the reason, the interest, or the pride of men; but not by force.
In many communities, alcohol became the defining difference between Demo-
crats and Whigs. In 1834, for instance, a Whig campaign worker ventured into a
poor neighborhood in Rochester and asked a woman how her husband planned to
vote. “Why, he has always been Jackson,” she said, “and I don’t think he’s joined the Cold Water.”
The
Democratic voters held ambiguous attitudes toward tem-
Washingtonians
perance. Many of them continued to drink, while many
others voluntarily abstained or cut down. Yet almost with-
out exception they resented the coercive tactics of the Whigs and supported their party’s pledge to stop evangelical meddling in private matters. In 1830, when
Lyman Beecher’s Hanover Street Church in Boston caught fire, the volunteer fire
companies (which doubled as working-class drinking clubs) arrived, noted that it
was the hated Beecher’s church, and made no effort to put out the fire. Unbe-
knownst to the Reverend Beecher, the church had rented basement space to a
merchant who used it to store barrels of rum. According to a contemporary
report, the crowd that gathered to watch the church burn to the ground cheered
as the barrels exploded one by one.
Democrats, despite their opposition to prohibition, often spoke out against
drunkenness. Many craft unions denied membership to heavy drinkers, and hun-
dreds of thousands of rural and urban Democrats quietly stopped drinking. Then,
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