Drunks

by Christopher Finan

  Handsome Lake sought to live peacefully with whites. This may have had something to do with the fact that the Iroquois resided on reservations encircled by whites, and thus they had no military options. But it also appears that he had never become embittered by whites. He disagreed with those who believed that the newcomers were trying to exterminate the Indians. He viewed whites as neither good nor bad. Indians and whites were different. Their religions were not opposed: the Christians followed the teachings of Jesus Christ, and the Indians had the Gaiwiio, and the two gospels did not appear to conflict. Handsome Lake even seemed willing to allow Christian Indians to keep their new religion as long as they were faithful to its moral code. This tolerance may have reflected his experience with the Quakers, who did not seek to judge the character of any man’s faith. Handsome Lake was grateful for the Quakers’ efforts to help his people and supported most of their economic reforms. In general, Handsome Lake believed that the Great Spirit wanted mutual respect between races and individuals. In time, he came to regret his attack on witches.

  Handsome Lake saw that many of the Indians’ problems were the result of a breakdown in their sense of obligation to each other and to the community. Some members of the younger generation had lost respect for their elders, provoking arguments between fathers and sons. Some mothers were interfering too much in the lives of their daughters and disrupting the relationship between husbands and wives. Too many men were refusing to marry in order to avoid responsibility for raising children or were “putting aside their wives” through divorce. Women were sometimes guilty of being jealous of other women and brutal to their children. Much of Handsome Lake’s visions bore on the importance of strengthening the bonds between family members. Husbands must be the heads of their families. It was no longer enough to participate in the hunt and spend the rest of the year in idleness. They must “harvest food for [the] family” and take care of the livestock. Women must be good housewives, caring for their husband and children, welcoming guests, and looking out for orphans. Mothers-in-law should mind their own business.

  It was obvious to Handsome Lake that alcohol worsened all of the Indians’ problems. Alcohol had played a key role in defrauding Indians of their lands. Heavy drinking was a major source of violence in the community and contributed to a decline in economic productivity, while undermining some families by increasing philandering, fueling arguments between husbands and wives, and occasionally leading to child abuse. But where other prophets blamed the white men for using drink to destroy the Indians, Handsome Lake explained how they were destroying themselves:

  Good food is turned into evil drink. Now some have said that there is no harm in partaking of fermented liquids.

  Then let this plan be followed: let men gather in two parties, one having a feast of food, apples and corn, and the other have cider and whiskey. Let the parties be equally matched and let them commence their feasting at the same time. When the feast is finished you will see those who drank the fermented juices murder one of their own part but not so with those who ate food only.

  Handsome Lake was offering his people an alternative: they didn’t have to drink. A white man later asked an Onondaga man why his people had suddenly stopped drinking when they had been urged to do it for years. “[T]hey had no power,” he replied. “[B]ut when the Great Spirit forbid such conduct by their prophet, he gave them the power to comply with their request.”

  The Quakers were the first to notice the change in the Seneca. Henry Simmons had been living in Cornplanter’s Town when Handsome Lake and his drunken compatriots had torn it up. Soon after Handsome Lake’s first vision, Cornplanter told Simmons that the Allegheny Seneca “now drank much less than formerly.” Over the next year, “the Indians now became very sober, generally refraining from the use of strong liquor, both at home and abroad among the white people,” Simmons said. One of them told another Quaker, “no more get drunk here, now this two year.”

  In 1803, Handsome Lake suffered the first of several setbacks, losing his title as the supreme leader of the Six Nations to Red Jacket, the leader of the Seneca in the Buffalo Creek reservation. But the loss of political power did not undermine Handsome Lake’s moral authority. He made annual visits to many of the Seneca reservations where his following continued to grow. A Quaker delegation that toured Handsome Lake’s stronghold in the Allegheny Valley discovered that white settlers in the area were amazed that the Seneca “entirely refused liquor when offered to them. The Indians said . . . that when white people urged them to drink whiskey, they would ask for bread or provisions in its stead.”

  The Indians’ main tool for enforcing the ban on alcohol was community pressure. Occasionally, they resorted to threats, like the one they issued to a white trader who sold cider to some Seneca without telling them that it contained alcohol. When the fraud was discovered, sober Indians told him that they would break his barrels if he did not get out of town, which he promptly did. With their own people, the Indian enforcers confined their efforts to verbal harassment. If the chiefs discovered that someone had gotten drunk “when they were out in the white settlements, they were sharply reproved by the chiefs on their return, which had nearly the same effect among Indians, as committing a man to the workhouse among white people.”

  Handsome Lake recognized that it would not be easy for his people to keep away from sin, and he showed tolerance for their weakness. He endorsed public confession as a way of relieving guilt and was willing to meet with individuals privately if their behavior had been particularly heinous. He preached that even people who confessed on their deathbeds could save themselves from damnation. So the community never concluded that a drunk was beyond saving. In 1809, the Quakers were told by residents of the Cattaraugus reservation that all the men there had stopped drinking. “[B]ut there were yet three women who would sometimes become intoxicated, yet they did not intend to cease labouring with them till they become reformed.”

  Sobriety spread beyond the Seneca to other Iroquois tribes. The Onondaga chiefs who had scared the whiskey trader Webster on their way home from the grand council in 1801 succeeded in their goal of carrying the Prophet’s words to their people. Two years later, a missionary wrote that the Onondaga had “for two years greatly reformed in their intemperate drinking.” The Oneida, who were divided between native and Christian factions, were somewhat less successful. But Handsome Lake’s message was preached even to the Christian Indians. Their white minister acknowledged that the native religion “absolutely forbid the use of rum, and assert[ed] that no Indian can be a good man who takes even a spoonful.”

  Seven years after Handsome Lake’s visions, the Indians had begun to recognize the full extent of the damage that alcohol had done to their people. At a Seneca reservation, the leaders told William Allinson that “since they had got their eyes open to see they were sensible that strong drink had done them a great deal of mischief and kept them poor but now they had got hold of it and was determined never to let it raise again.” Allinson was one of the Quakers who were encouraging the Iroquois to accept white values, and he praised the Seneca for embracing the profit motive. “They are naturally avaricious and saving & not being so liable to Imposition as when they drank Spirits, some of them are growing rich.”

  Handsome Lake never succeeded in reforming all of the Iroquois or even all of the Seneca. Red Jacket, the leader of the large Seneca reservation at Buffalo Creek, remained a political foe. While he denounced demon rum, he was known to drink. There were also small Seneca reservations along the Genesee River that lay close to white settlements. In these places,” we are almost discouraged about our Brothers,” Handsome Lake admitted. But these were the exceptions. Every year, Handsome Lake walked hundreds of miles to visit his followers and make new converts. It was obvious to all but the most cynical observers that a great change had occurred among the Iroquois. In 1809, Quaker Jacob Taylor attended a meeting of the Council of the Six Nations at Buffalo Creek. “I think I never saw so many Indians togeth
er before that conducted with so much propriety—the number could not be well ascertained, but it was thought there were about One Thousand, and I don’t remember seeing one Drunken Indian among them,” he said.

  Handsome Lake died on August 10, 1815, at the age of sixty-six. It had been sixteen years since he launched his campaign to save the Iroquois people by preaching the Gaiwiio. He had been making his annual tour, when he received an invitation to speak at the Onondaga reservation in central New York. Although it was 150 miles away, he made the journey by foot, speaking at villages as he traveled. He was sick and depressed by thoughts of death by the time he arrived at Onondaga. The meeting that he had hoped to address had to be canceled, but he emerged from the small cabin to make a final address:

  I will soon go to my new home. Soon I will step into the new world for there is a plain pathway before me leading there. Whoever follows my teachings will follow in my footsteps and I will look back upon him with outstretched arms inviting him into the new world of our Creator. Alas, I fear that a pall of smoke will obscure the eyes of many from the truth of the Gaiwiio but I pray that when I am gone that all may do what I have taught.

  Handsome Lake was buried in the center of the council house in Onondaga.

  When the news reached the outside world, the Buffalo Gazette published an obituary that began by carefully distinguishing between Handsome Lake and Tenskwata. It called him “the Peace Prophet” and recounted how a fifty-year-old man who was “remarkable only for stupidity and beastly drunkenness” had experienced his great dream. “The chief immediately abandoned his habits, visited the tribes—related his story—which was believed, and the consequence has been, that from a filthy, lazy drunken set of beings, they have become cleanly, industrious, sober, and happy,” the obituary said.

  A few months before his death, Handsome Lake had experienced his final vision. He was walking in a field of corn. “Suddenly a damsel appeared and threw her arms about my neck and as she clasped me she spoke saying, ‘When you leave this earth for the new world above, it is our wish to follow you,’” he recalled. “I looked for the damsel but saw only the long leaves of corn twining around my shoulders. And then I understood that it was the spirit of the corn who had spoken, she the sustainer of life.”

  So I replied, “O spirit of the corn, follow not me but abide still upon the earth and be strong and be faithful to your purpose. Ever endure and do not fail the children of women. It is not time for you to follow for the Gaiwiio is only in its beginning.”

  Handsome Lake knew he had fulfilled his mission.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Out of the Gutter

  THE METHODIST CHURCH on Greene Street in New York City was packed on the wintry evening of March 23, 1841. New Yorkers had been hearing reports from Baltimore that a group of drunks had gotten themselves sober and had launched a movement to save the lives of alcoholics. The reformed drunks were members of the Washington Temperance Society and called themselves Washingtonians to identify their struggle against the slavery of alcohol with the nation’s war of liberation from British despotism. There was some trepidation among New York temperance advocates about inviting even sober drunks to address one of their meetings. They feared that tales of debauchery would offend the middle-class audience. But the full pews of the church revealed the enormous curiosity to hear their stories. John H. W. Hawkins, an unemployed hatter who had been sober less than a year, was the first to speak.

  Hawkins would become the Washingtonians’ greatest orator, but he had made his first speech only a few weeks earlier. At the age of forty-three, he was not a young man, and his nose was too large for a handsome one. He had large expressive eyes and dark bushy eyebrows. As he spoke in the Greene Street church, his audience was struck by the simplicity and sincerity with which he told about his terrible degradation and nearly miraculous recovery. They were also moved by his passionate commitment to saving the lives of alcoholics by getting them to sign a pledge not to drink alcoholic beverages. “If there is a man on earth who deserves the sympathy of the world it is the poor drunkard,” Hawkins said. “He is poisoned, degraded, cast out, knows not what to do, and must be helped or he is lost. . . . I feel for drunkards. I want them to come and sign the pledge and be saved.”1

  Suddenly, Hawkins was interrupted by a voice from the gallery. “Can I be saved?” a man asked. “I am a poor drunkard. I would give the world if I was as you.” “Yes, there is, my friend,” Hawkins replied. “Come down and sign the pledge, and you will be a man. Come down and I will meet you, and we will take you by the hand.” A minister who was present later described the scene for William George Hawkins, John’s son and biographer. There was silence as the man made his way to the stairs and began to descend. “Your father sprang from the stand, and, followed by others, met the poor man literally half way, escorted him to the desk, and guided his hand as he signed his name . . .,” the minister wrote. “[T]hen such a shout broke forth from the friends of temperance as must have reached the angels above.”2

  More drunks now rose and came forward—“five or six others of this miserable class . . . and some 30 or 40 others, well known as hard drinkers and drunkards,” the Reverend John Marsh, secretary of the American Temperance Union, reported. News of the Greene Street meeting soon spread through the city. The Washingtonians addressed “immense meetings” in the largest churches every night for the next two weeks. Three thousand people heard them at a meeting in City Hall Park. More than twenty-five hundred signed the Washingtonian pledge. “The victory was now gained,” Marsh said. “The work of redemption among the poor drunkards had commenced.”3

  The Washingtonians were an exuberant expression of America’s most optimistic age. The ideas of the European Enlightenment were expressed in the Declaration of Independence: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by God with inalienable rights, including the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The American Revolution did not produce a democracy immediately, but in the following decades, the advocates of rule by the high born and well educated lost ground to those who believed that the common man should govern. In 1828, universal manhood suffrage helped elect President Andrew Jackson. The United States was growing rapidly, both economically and geographically, and experiencing its first great wave of immigrants. In such a dynamic society, most Americans agreed that change was a good thing.

  Changes in American religion contributed strongly to this dynamism. For more than a century, Protestant ministers had endeavored to convince believers that they were naturally sinful and that most people were destined for hell. But this bleak philosophy was challenged by a series of revivals that were sweeping the country. The sermons preached by the revivalists were no less frightening in evoking the horrors of damnation. Before large meetings, often held outdoors to accommodate the crowds, they did their best to create an emotional response that caused people to scream, fall to the floor, jerk uncontrollably, even bark like dogs. But the revivalists offered their listeners the promise of salvation. If they let God enter their hearts, the revivalists said, they would shed their evil nature and become new, guaranteeing eternal life.

  As Americans became increasingly hopeful about improving their condition, they embraced reform. By the 1830s, they acknowledged that they had many problems to confront. Rapid growth had made many men rich, but it had also created a growing class of impoverished workers who had nowhere to turn during the frequent recessions. Crime was a growing threat to social order. Yet Americans believed in progress. If man was essentially good, then social problems were not inevitable. “It is to the defects of our social organization . . . that we chiefly owe the increase of evil doers,” declared Dorothea Dix, a pioneer in seeking more humane treatment for the mentally ill. She was joined by a generation of reformers who sought to improve conditions through education, universal peace, prison reform, equal rights for women, and the end of slavery.4

  During this period of hopefulness, the movement to curb the consumption of
liquor emerged. In 1808, as Handsome Lake worked to spread sobriety among the Iroquois in western New York, a doctor and a minister started the first temperance society in the small town of Moreau in eastern New York. The first state temperance organization, the Massachusetts Society for the Suppression of Intemperance, was organized a few years later. The meaning of “temperance” would evolve in the following decades. At first, it meant abstinence from rum, whiskey, and other distilled liquors. Many who signed a temperance pledge continued to enjoy their glass of beer or wine in good conscience. The predominant role that the clergy would play in the temperance movement throughout its history is apparent in the fact that the Massachusetts society addressed itself to the problems of Sabbath breaking and profanity as well as drinking whiskey.

  The movement grew rapidly after the launch of a national organization, the American Society for the Promotion of Temperance, which soon included a thousand local temperance groups with a membership of a hundred thousand. In 1835, the American Temperance Society claimed that more than two million people had signed pledges promising that they would not drink distilled liquor, forcing four thousand distilleries to close. Alcohol consumption fell from seven gallons per person in 1830 to slightly more than three gallons in 1840, the biggest decline during a ten-year period in American history. This amazing success convinced the leaders of the temperance movement that the goal of national sobriety was within reach. But the movement stalled when a split developed between those who opposed only hard liquor and those demanding total abstinence (“teetotalers”).

  Worried temperance leaders saw the emergence of the Washingtonians as almost miraculous. For centuries, it had been assumed that little could be done to help alcoholics, and the temperance movement had directed its energy to preventing the creation of new drunkards, rather than the reclamation of those who were afflicted. The Reverend Justin Edwards, a founder of the American Temperance Society, explained: