We are at present fast hold of a project for making all people in this country, and in all other countries, temperate; or rather, a plan to induce those who are now temperate to continue so. Then, as all who are intemperate will soon be dead, the earth will be eased of an amazing evil.
Not all temperance leaders were so pessimistic about the possibility of recovery. One leader, Gerritt Smith, presented case studies of how temperance had improved the lives of thirty-eight of his neighbors in a small town in upstate New York, including men and women who were certainly alcoholic.5
But no one expected to see the day when an alcoholic like John Hawkins would step on a public stage and proclaim his intention to save other drunks. Hawkins certainly never expected it. He had been struggling with alcoholism for half of his life. Hawkins’s father, a tailor in the Fell’s Point section of Baltimore, died when John was thirteen. Hawkins had already displayed a “daring, brave and restless spirit” in frequent clashes with the minister who had been given the responsibility of educating him. During the War of 1812, at the age of sixteen, he picked up a gun and rushed to meet invading British troops during the Battle of North Point. Later, to help curb his adventurous spirit, Hawkins was apprenticed to a hatmaker. Although his master was strict, Hawkins took to the work eagerly. During his apprenticeship, he began to drink regularly. Employers served their workers alcohol during the workday, and apprentices received the same liquor as adults. Hawkins later described his first place of employment as “perfect a grog-shop as ever existed.” He said that eight of his twelve fellow apprentices “died drunkards.”6
After Hawkins completed his apprenticeship, he was unable to find work. Like so many other young men, he decided to look for opportunity in the West. He arrived in Pittsburgh after ten days of travel by foot, stagecoach, and boat. He found a job, but two months later, he was on the move again, traveling south along the Ohio River to Cincinnati. Hawkins wrote to his mother that it was “a beautiful place” of fourteen thousand people. He found a job there, too, but left after just a couple of weeks to join relatives in Madison, Indiana. “I have had sore conflicts since I left home,” he wrote his mother, without providing any details. His relatives were more forthcoming. They told his mother that Hawkins was drinking. “As soon as I was away from parental care, I gave way; all went by the board, and my sufferings commenced,” Hawkins explained later.7
With hard times spreading west, he found little work over the next two years. For six months, he had only the clothes he wore and no shoes. But if jobs were dear, liquor was cheap. By the time he made it back to Baltimore, his health was beginning to break. “John, I am afraid you are bloated,” his mother said. His stomach may have been distended by malnutrition. It is also possible that he was suffering from a swollen liver that had been damaged by heavy drinking.8
Hawkins was able to stop drinking for extended periods. He returned to the Methodist Church and married. He tried to tackle the West again, loading his wife and three children into a Conestoga wagon. Thirteen months later, the covered wagon returned to Baltimore. Business had been slow, and his wife was in poor health. Hawkins was also drinking again. When his wife died, leaving him with three young children, he got sober again. For four years, he enjoyed the luxury of steady work and remarried. Even a new wife and his religious faith could not prevent another relapse.
Hawkins had never known such hard times. In 1837, the country entered a depression that would last for six years. Unable to work in his own trade, he was forced to take any job he could find. A job in a bakery paid just a dollar for a day of work that started just after midnight and continued almost nonstop until seven or eight at night. He had to quit after three weeks because he could not stand the pace. “You cannot imagine the trouble of mind I have and am still passing through for the want of employment at my own business,” he wrote his parents.9
Poverty did not stop Hawkins’s drinking. His consumption of alcohol was actually increasing. By June 1840, he was buying whiskey by the gallon and drinking a quart and a half a day. On the morning of June 12, Hawkins was in agony as he lay in bed listening to the sounds of his family preparing breakfast below. “I was a wonder to myself; astonished I had any mind left; and yet it seemed in the goodness of God uncommonly clear,” he said.
I laid in bed long after my wife and daughter were up, and my conscience drove me to madness. I hated the darkness of the night, and when light came I hated the light. I hated myself, my existence. I asked myself, “Can I restrain? Is it possible? Not a being to take me by the hand and lead or help me along, and say, ‘you can.’” I was friendless, without help or light; an outcast.
His wife, Ann, came upstairs and asked Hawkins to come down to breakfast. He told her he would, but he remained in bed, trying to decide whether to drink his last pint of whiskey. “I knew it was life or death with me, as I decided,” he said. His thirteen-year-old daughter Hannah appeared at the door next. Hannah was her father’s favorite. When he stumbled home at night, collapsing in the hallway, she fetched a blanket and pillow and watched over him until he was sober enough to drag himself to bed. She also bought him liquor. “[S]he was a drunkard’s friend—my only friend,” Hawkins said.10
Hannah also tried to get her father to come down to breakfast, but she added a new plea. “Father, don’t send me after whiskey today,” she said. Hawkins was stung. “I was tormented before, but this was unexpected torture,” he said. He ordered her from the room, and she left in tears. Hawkins pulled the bedcovers over his head, but a short time later, he heard someone enter the room. Peeping out, he saw that Hannah had returned. Filled with remorse and shame, he called to her. “Hannah, I am not angry with you, and I shall not drink any more,” he said. “She cried, and so did I.” There was still a pint of whiskey in the bedroom cupboard. As he rose and dressed, Hawkins looked at the bottle several times. “Is it possible I can be restored,” he asked himself. He was sure that if he drank it, he was doomed. “I suffered all the horrors of the pit that day,” Hawkins said. But his family supported him. “Hold on—hold on,” Ann said.11
Hawkins had quit drinking on a Friday. By Saturday, he was feeling better, but there was no guarantee that he could remain sober. Ann must have been alarmed when he left the house on Monday night without telling her where he was going. Soon after, he arrived at his first meeting of “the society of drunkards.” The men in the room included the founders of the Washington Temperance Society. He also found some old friends. “We had fished together—got drunk together,” he said. “One said, ‘There is Hawkins, the “regulator,” the old bruiser,’ and they clapped and laughed.” Hawkins was not in a laughing mood. “I was too sober and solemn for that,” he said.
One of the goals of the Washingtonian meeting was to persuade newcomers to sign a pledge not to drink alcoholic beverages of any kind, whether distilled or fermented. “The pledge was read for my accommodation; they did not say so, and yet I knew it,” Hawkins said. “They all looked over my shoulder to see me sign my name. I never had such feeling before. It was a great battle.” At home, Ann listened for her husband’s return, fearing the worst. She was astonished to see him sober when he opened the door. “I told her quick—I could not keep it back—’I have put my name to the temperance pledge never to drink as long as I live!’” Their celebration woke Hannah, who joined in the tears.12
After a life of misfortune, Hawkins had finally gotten lucky. The Washingtonian movement was only two months old when he decided to get sober. The whole thing had started in a bar. On the evening of April 2, 1840, six friends sat in the Chase Tavern in Baltimore discussing a lecture by a well-known temperance advocate that was scheduled for later that night. They met at the tavern almost every night and often drank to excess. One of them, William K. Mitchell, would later say that he had been trying to control his drinking for fifteen years without success. Four of the party decided to go hear what the temperance advocate had to say. They were impressed. “After all temperance is a good thing,” o
ne said when the group had returned to the bar. They decided to form their own temperance society and to make Mitchell the president.13
Two days later, on a Sunday, the six men met again and discussed the project over drinks. Mitchell, who had not attended the lecture, agreed to serve as president and to draft a pledge. On Monday, he carried the pledge to his friends, finding the first still in bed nursing a hangover. On the evening of April 5, they held the first meeting of the Washington Temperance Society in the home of one of the members.
The number of Washingtonians grew rapidly. With the exception of Mitchell, who owned his own tailoring business, all of the founders were workingmen—two blacksmiths, a carpenter, a coach-maker, and silver-plater. Members were required to participate in recruitment, and they found many prospects among their heavy-drinking friends. Anyone could join by signing the pledge; a significant number were not drunks. They joined out of sympathy for the cause and because the meetings were so interesting. Mitchell suggested that the way to keep the meetings lively was for members to stand and describe their problem with alcohol. Mitchell was the first to tell his story, and soon several men were sharing at every meeting. John Zug, an early historian of the movement, described the meetings: “[A]fter their regular business is transacted, the several members rise promiscuously and state their temperance experience for each other’s warning, instruction and encouragement. . . . To hear the tales of degradation, woe, and crime, which some describe as the condition to which they had reduced themselves by strong drink, is enough to melt the heart of stone.”14
When the meetings grew too large to be held in private homes, the Washingtonians held their first public meeting in the Masonic Hall on November 19. Zug estimated that in just eight months, the Washingtonians had recruited three hundred members, including as many as two hundred “reformed drunkards.” A subscription campaign was launched to raise funds for the construction of a permanent home for the movement.
After their overwhelming reception in New York, Hawkins and his comrades returned to Baltimore to join a celebration of the first anniversary of the group’s founding. More than six thousand men paraded on crowded streets, marching to the music of brass bands under temperance banners that, in some cases, had been sewn by the wives of reformed men. Hawkins, who estimated that half of the marchers had quit drinking in the past year, described what the day had meant to them and their families. After years of suffering poverty and shame, they had emerged from their garrets to conquer the city:
[W]here were our wives on that occasion? at home, shut up with hungry children in rags, as a year ago? No, no! but in carriages, riding round the streets to see their sober husbands! My family were in a hack, and I carried apples, cakes, &c. to them, and my wife said “How happy all look; why, husband, there is——all dressed up; and only think, I saw old——in the procession, as happy and smart as any of them.” . . . We cut down the rum tree that day in Baltimore, under ground . . . roots and all!
Hawkins was not home for long. Washingtonian delegates were carrying the news about their movement to major cities around the country, and he headed to Boston.15
Hawkins and another Washingtonian, William E. Wright, encountered packed houses everywhere. They spoke at the Odeon, on Thursday, April 15, where 82 signed the pledge; 279 signed on Friday, 141 on Saturday, and 429 on Sunday. The biggest meeting yet was held at Faneuil Hall, known as the “cradle of liberty” for the role it had played in rallying Bostonians during the American Revolution. The circumstances of the meeting were not ideal. President William Henry Harrison had died in office two weeks earlier, and the hall was hung with black bunting. The city had also been hit by a storm that brought heavy rain. But the large hall was full, men occupying the seats on the main floor and women in the galleries along the side walls and rear of the room.
Hawkins’s speech shared nothing of the gloom and melancholy of his surroundings. He began by confessing his amazement to find himself on such a famous stage. “When I compare the past with the present, my days of intemperance with my present peace and sobriety, my past degradation with my present position in this hall, the Cradle of Liberty—I am overwhelmed,” he said. “It seems to me holy ground.” At the same time, it was the perfect place to make a second declaration of independence:
Drunkard! Come up here; you can reform;—take the pledge in the Cradle of Liberty and be free! Delay not. I met a gentleman this morning who reformed four weeks ago, rejoicing in his reformation. He brought a man with him who took the pledge, and this man has already brought two others. This is the way we do the business up in Baltimore; we reformed drunkards are a Committee of the Whole on the State of the Union! are all missionaries—don’t slight the drunkard, but love him. No; we nurse him as the mother does her infant learning to walk. We go right up to him and say, How do you do? and he remembers our kindness.
Hawkins told the story of one Baltimore drunk—“a real wharf rat” whose family was starving, their clothes “not fit for paper rags.” The Washingtonians persuaded his brother to lend him the money to buy a horse and cart. “He has paid for his horse and cart, his family and himself are well clothed, cellar full of wood, a barrel of flour, and he has become a Christian gentleman. All this in one short year,” Hawkins said.16
Hawkins explained that the Washingtonians were not a new class of philanthropists. They saw the problem through the eyes of drunks. They knew all the tricks of the “grog-sellers,” who put out free plates of salted fish, cheese, herring, and crackers. “Well the stuff is very apt to stick in the throat, so it is washed down, and then the breath must be changed, and a little more fish or cheese is taken, and that must be washed out of the throat; and so it goes,” he said. Hawkins added that the tavern keeper was not the only one guilty of mistreating the drunk. When a man finally developed an unquenchable thirst for alcohol, he found himself an outcast:
This making the drunkard by a thousand temptations and inducements, and then shutting him up in prison, is a cruel and horrible business. You make the drunkard, and then let him come into your house, and you turn him out; let him come to the church, and you turn him out; friends cast him off; the grog-seller turns him out when his money is gone, or midnight comes. When he serves his time out in the prison, he is turned out with the threat of a flogging if he is ever caught again; and yet you keep open the place where he is entangled and destroyed.
The Washingtonians were able to help drunks because they knew their problems and because they continued to need help themselves. “I tell you that we keep close watch of each other,” Hawkins said. At times, this meant being in smelling distance. “We are very loving, and we take care to get along-side the mouth and know what has been going on there.”17
The Washingtonians were missionaries to the wider world as well. They were fully committed to the philosophy of teetotalism. They believed that alcohol had made them drunks and that abstinence was the only way to avoid the danger of alcoholism. “Is there a moderate drinker who says he can use ‘a little,’ or ‘much’ and ‘quit when he pleases?’” Hawkins asked.
I tell him from experience he can’t do it. Well, he can if he will, but HE WON’T WILL! that is the difficulty, and there is the fatal mistake. Does he want to know whether he can? I ask him to go without his accustomed morning bitters or his eleven-o’clock, tomorrow, and he will find how he loves it! We have come up out of the gutter, to tell him how much he loves it, and how he can escape.
Hawkins warned against “the pretty drink, the genteel and the fashionable.” Hawkins spoke for over an hour, his powerful voice reaching every corner of the great hall. He then introduced a local man named Johnson, a shoemaker who had only recently quit drinking. Johnson was speaking publicly for the first time and was apparently too nervous to talk for more than a few minutes. Applause filled the hall. “Everybody manifested joy at his perfect emancipation from the slavery of intemperance, and wished him ‘God speed,’” a reporter for the Mercantile Journal wrote. With three cheers, the meetin
g was adjourned, and “pledges were then taken in great numbers.”18
Hawkins and his partner delivered dozens of speeches in all kinds of venues during their two-week visit. One Sunday, Hawkins addressed three hundred men in the state prison in Charlestown. “He was listened to with closest attention when he described what he knew of the evils of intemperance, of the terrible effects it had produced upon himself and his family . . .,” a reporter wrote. “[H]e showed that the drunkard, although by many regarded as incorrigible, and treated as an outcast from society, can be reformed, and become a respectable and useful member of society.”
Those convicts seemed to feel the force of this language; this appeal to their feelings, to their better nature, was not in vain. All of them seemed to regard him as a friend, as a monitor, who came among them to fortify their souls against crimes; and many of them wept, yes, those rough-looking despised men, wept like children, and those were precious tears.
A week later, Hawkins started for home, speaking and collecting pledges as he went: 318 in Worcester, Massachusetts; 520 in Norwich, Connecticut; 315 in Paterson, New Jersey. On the dock in Philadelphia, preparing to board a boat to Baltimore, Hawkins was arrested for an old bar bill. But he paid his tab and was soon on his way. The money probably came from donations collected at the meetings he addressed. Hawkins never returned to his trade as a hatter. He supported himself and his family with speaking fees.19
It seemed that nothing could stop the headlong progress of the Washingtonians. In Baltimore, membership nearly doubled to more than twenty-two hundred in 1841, leading to the formation of new weekly meetings around the city and plans to construct a central meeting place that would hold twenty-five hundred people. The growth of the Washingtonians was even more explosive in New York, the largest city in the nation. “The reformed drunkards are becoming missionaries—scouring the streets and lanes, penetrating the haunts of vice, and by encouraging words and kindness are pressing persuasion, leading the poor, wretched inebriate up to the pledge,” the New York Herald reported in August 1841. Six months after the Greene Street meeting, there were fifty Washingtonian societies meeting around the city. Washingtonians claimed as many as twenty thousand members. A number of prominent merchants, professionals, and master craftsmen who owned their own shops helped lead the New York societies, but the majority of members were workers. Bakers, butchers, hatters, printers, and shipwrights established their own societies, helping make New York the “banner city” of Washingtonianism.20
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