Drunks

by Christopher Finan

  Baltimore, New York, and Boston became hubs, sending delegates to surrounding communities. The first society in Philadelphia was established by some of the men who were on their way home to Baltimore after their speaking engagements in New York. The Washington Total Abstinence Society of Boston sent delegates to 160 towns in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Maine, Vermont, and Rhode Island. William Wright, who had accompanied Hawkins to New York and Boston, toured upstate New York as far west as Buffalo in the summer of 1841 and later made several trips to Virginia. By early 1842, there were Washingtonian societies in Chicago, New Orleans, and Mobile, Alabama. New hubs emerged in Washington, DC, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Cincinnati, and St. Louis.

  The remarkable growth of Washingtonianism is partly explained by the enthusiasm of men whose lives had been saved by sobriety. A single delegate could work miracles. During a four-month tour of Georgia, one man visited 13 counties, delivered 142 addresses, and organized 31 societies. Among the 6,300 who signed the pledge, there were 600 reformed drunkards, 2,000 moderate drinkers, and 1,600 “temperate” men and 2,000 women. These figures are only suggestive. How were “drunkards” distinguished from moderate drinkers or “temperate” men? All we can say with certainty is that the country was in a temperance fever, and many of those who were running a temperature were alcoholics who believed for a time that they had a real chance for sobriety.

  The participation of women was a surprise. Women embraced the Washingtonian movement so strongly that they were often a majority of the audience at the meetings where reformed men spoke about their experience as drunks. They began to organize their own groups, often within days of the arrival of the Washingtonians. They were known collectively as Martha Washington societies, and the members called themselves Marthas. There was a precedent for female participation in the temperance movement, but like temperance men of the period, they were mostly middle- and upper-class women. The Marthas were from the working and lower-middle classes. Most were the mothers, wives, and daughters of alcoholics who had intimate knowledge of the devastation that drinking could cause. They could be seen at Washingtonian meetings urging their men to sign the pledge. Hawkins helped start a Martha Washington society during his trip to Boston and another in Paterson, New Jersey, on his way home to Baltimore. By 1843, there were thousands of Marthas around the country.

  Like the Washingtonians, the Marthas attempted to relieve the suffering of alcoholics and their families. Their groups met as often as every week, sewing and repairing clothing that they distributed to people who were almost naked. They also helped with furniture, bedding, and even cash. The Marthas were particularly interested in helping women alcoholics. While men were far more likely to be drunks, more than two hundred women were arrested for drunkenness in New York City every week. The Lady Mount Vernon Temperance Benevolent Society explained how it tried to help them:

  Instead of reproaching the fallen of our sex with harsh rebukes, we offer the friendship and confidence of our ladies. After signing the pledge, they are visited and their immediate wants supplied, as far as possible, and employment secured for them. Thus, real and efficient sympathy give them a motive for good action and rarely do they disappoint us.

  Marthas sometimes risked their lives trying to help. In Utica, New York, they knocked on a door that the neighbors were too frightened to try and discovered a drunken woman whose eyes were swollen shut from a beating administered by her inebriated husband. The woman promised to renew her broken pledge, and her husband signed, too. She may soon have been making calls herself. Martha Washington societies welcomed reformed drunks as members, including “inveterate cases.” Membership was no guarantee that a woman would stay sober, but the support of her fellow Marthas undoubtedly improved her chances.21

  Catholics also joined the Washingtonians. This was not a small matter. The many Protestant sects in the United States didn’t agree on much, but they all feared the Catholic Church. Rhode Island and Pennsylvania had been the only colonies that allowed Catholics to vote, and restrictions on the civil liberties of Catholics and Jews remained on the books as late as 1820. Fear of Catholics grew as they began to arrive in large numbers from Ireland and Germany in the 1820s and 1830s. In 1834, a mob burned a Catholic convent to the ground in Charlestown, Massachusetts. Anti-Catholic literature proliferated, including the notorious Awful Disclosures of the Hotel Dieu Nunnery of Montreal, which accused priests and nuns of sexual perversion. Lecturers carried the warning of the Catholic threat to every village, and attacks on Catholic churches became so frequent that insurers refused to issue policies for any buildings that were not constructed of brick. Hatred for Catholics also grew among white, native-born workingmen who competed for jobs with the foreigners. The competition only became more intense during the depression of 1837.

  The leaders of the temperance movement before 1840 were predominantly Protestant ministers who naturally shared the anti-Catholicism of their countrymen. But they were ready to embrace Catholics who signed the abstinence pledge. They were thrilled by news of the great temperance movement that was then sweeping Ireland under the direction of a Capuchin priest from Cork, the Reverend Theobald Matthew. Rev. Matthew began his crusade by founding the Cork Total Abstinence Society in 1838. He was soon conducting mass meetings and collecting pledges by the thousands—25,000 in Cork alone in just three months; the number reached 130,000 just a few months later. Rev. Matthew’s influence soon became apparent on the other side of the Atlantic. The Reverend John Marsh, the secretary of the American Temperance Union, reported in November 1839 that five thousand to ten thousand Irish immigrants had taken the total abstinence pledge.

  The Washingtonians welcomed Catholics as they did any man who wanted to quit drinking. It was a part of their creed that membership was open to adherents of any religion and no religion. While the overwhelming majority of Washingtonians were practicing Christians, they feared that evangelicals proselytizing for a variety of denominations would attempt to take over their movement, creating dissension and diverting their efforts to save drunks. For this reason, the Baltimore Washingtonians initially barred prayers from their meetings. This made them a target for criticism by the older temperance leaders as well as a growing nativist movement. In 1841, when the Washingtonians were drawing large crowds in Baltimore, a correspondent for the New York Herald criticized them for allowing a Philadelphia priest to address a meeting of two thousand. The reporter also referred scornfully to the audience as “including darkeys, women and children.” The reference to African Americans is significant because blacks outside the slave states were active in the temperance movement and apparently organized their own Washingtonian groups, although little is known about them.22

  According to his son’s biography, Hawkins was always ready to address a Catholic audience. During a tour of the South, he was approached by a priest in Savannah, Georgia, who told him that drunkenness was a big problem for his parishioners and urged him to speak at his church. Hawkins was surprised to find that every seat in the large church was filled. The sexton had placed a table below the altar. When the priest asked why, he replied, “And sure, sir, it is for the spaker [sic] to stand upon.” The priest ordered the table removed and told Hawkins to speak in front of the altar where he himself normally stood. The priest sat in the first pew and joined many in the audience in weeping as Hawkins described the sad fate of the alcoholic and his family. He jumped to his feet as soon as Hawkins had finished. “Fasten every door of the church,” he ordered. “Let not a man or a woman leave the house until you have all signed the pledge!”23

  In the winter of 1842, it appeared that the Washingtonians had permanently changed the nation. Temperance leaders estimated that a half-million people had signed the pledge during the preceding twelve months and that whiskey consumption had been cut in half. Many bars had closed: in Lynn, Massachusetts, only 3 of the 18 that had existed six months earlier were still operating; in Portland, Maine, only 24 of 130. Bars were closing even in n
eighborhoods that had once been notorious for drunkenness. “In one block, on Wednesday last, we counted ‘To Let’ on eight rum-shops, hardly a stone’s-throw from the Five Points,” reported a Washingtonian newspaper in New York City. Many hard-pressed retailers attempted to catch the prevailing wind by banning liquor from their premises. In Elyria, Ohio, General Griffith, the largest distiller and vendor in the area, had signed the pledge with his family and held a teetotalers’ dinner to celebrate the conversion of his inn into a temperance hotel.24

  Elaborate celebrations of the success of Washingtonianism were held throughout the country on February 22, 1843, Washington’s birthday. The largest celebration occurred in New York City, where the Washingtonians took over all four of the halls that had been built over one of the city’s largest public markets. Three thousand people thronged the doors, eventually making their way into an area the size of a modern football field. The space was so vast that speaking platforms were erected at both ends of the building to ensure that most of the crowd could hear. Reformed drunks dominated the early part of the evening. Hawkins spoke, and so did the young man who had pleaded for his help at the Greene Street church a year earlier. During the first break in the program, the crowd descended on the hundreds of tables filled with food that lined the walls, washing everything down with two thousand tumblers of clear, cold water. The evening ended with a round of toasts that were responded to with music, instead of drink. A temperance glee club sang, and recently reformed firemen entertained with “appropriate and animated songs.” The entire audience joined in three temperance anthems before the evening ended.25

  The Washingtonians celebrated in frontier towns as well as big cities. In Springfield, Illinois, a rapidly growing community of fifteen hundred, the Washington Temperance Society of Springfield invited State Representative Abraham Lincoln to deliver an address. Lincoln had moved to Springfield in 1837 when it became the state capitol and had begun to practice law. At six feet four, the swarthy and beardless twenty-eight-year-old never failed to make an impression on those he met. He made friends easily, relying on a seemingly limitless supply of jokes and stories to smooth the way. He was already a leader of the Whig Party in the state legislature.

  Lincoln seemed like a perfect choice to speak to the Washingtonians. He didn’t drink, and he fully supported the goal of temperance. “Whether or not the world would be vastly benefitted by a total and final banishment from it of all intoxicating drinks, seems to me not now to be an open question,” Lincoln told his Springfield neighbors. “Three-fourths of mankind confess the affirmative with their tongues, and I believe, all the rest acknowledge it in their hearts.” But Lincoln was not a prohibitionist. He was highly critical of the leaders of the temperance movement before the emergence of the Washingtonians. They assumed that drunks couldn’t be saved and consigned them to the devil, alienating potential supporters. “There is something so repugnant to humanity, so uncharitable, so cold-blooded and feelingless [sic], that it never did, nor ever can enlist the enthusiasm of a popular cause,” Lincoln said. He believed that helping drunks should be the main goal.26

  One of the great advantages the Washingtonians had over the old temperance leaders was that they recognized the humanity in every drunk. “Those whom they desire to convince and persuade, are their old friends and companions,” Lincoln said. “They know that generally, they are kind, generous and charitable, even beyond the example of their more staid and sober neighbors.”

  I believe, if we take habitual drunks as a class, their heads and hearts will bear an advantageous comparison with those of any other class. There seems ever to have been a proneness in the brilliant, and the warm-blooded, to fall into this vice.—The demon of intemperance ever seems to have delighted in sucking the blood of genius and of generosity. What one of us but can call to mind some dear relative, more promising in his youth than all of his fellows, who has fallen a sacrifice to his rapacity?

  In Lincoln’s opinion, the main purpose for normal drinkers to take the pledge was to provide moral support for the newly sober man. “[T]o break off from the use of drams, who has indulged in them for a long course of years, and until his appetite for them has become ten or a hundred-fold stronger . . . requires a more powerful moral effort,” Lincoln said. His neighbors and relatives could help by showing him there was no necessity for drink. “When he casts his eyes around him, he should be able to see all that he respects, all that his admires, and all that he loves, kindly and anxiously pointing him onward; and none beckoning him back, to his former miserable ‘wallowing in the mire.’”27

  Lincoln believed that the Washingtonians were succeeding not only because they were more sympathetic to the drunk but because they had found a way to appeal to the reason of men who appeared to have lost it forever. Convincing a drunk that you were his friend was the critical first step. “Therein is a drop of honey that catches his heart, which, say what he will, is the great high road to his reason, and which, when once gained, you will find but little trouble in convincing his judgment of the justice of your cause,” Lincoln said. No one was better suited for this job than another drunk. Reformed drunks had many lessons to teach about how to rebuild one’s life. But their greatest gift was hope:

  They teach hope to all—despair to none . . . And what is a matter of the most profound gratulation [sic], they, by experiment upon experiment, and example upon example, prove the maxim to be no less true in one case than in the other. On every hand we behold those who but yesterday were the chief sinners, now the chief apostles of the cause. Drunken devils are cast out by ones, by sevens, and by legions. And their unfortunate victims, like the poor possessed, who was redeemed from his long and lonely wanderings in the tombs, are publishing to the ends of the earth, how great things have been done for them.

  Lincoln believed that the Washingtonians had proved that anyone could get sober, although he would certainly have acknowledged that not all of them would stay sober.28

  Lincoln hoped the Washingtonians would do more than save drunken lives. The conflict over slavery was beginning to erupt in acts of violence. In Illinois, an abolitionist editor had been murdered by a proslavery mob. Lincoln believed the solution was for his countrymen to adhere to what he described in another speech as “cold, calculating, unimpassioned” reason. Temperance could help the nation subdue the growing passions over slavery:

  With such an aid, its march cannot fail to be on and on, till every son of earth shall drink in rich fruition the sorrow-quenching draughts of perfect liberty. Happy day, when, all appetites controlled, all passions subdued, all matter subjected, mind, all-conquering mind, shall live and move, the monarch of the world! Glorious consummation! Hail, fall of fury! Reign of reason, all hail!

  But the Washingtonians were already encountering strong headwinds.29

  There wasn’t a cloud in the sky on May 30, 1844, when Boston celebrated the third anniversary of the city’s first Washingtonian meetings. “It was a brilliant day, in the most beautiful of months,” John B. Gough, a reformed drunk, recalled. “The sun shone from a sky of cloudless azure, and the young May flowers rejoiced in his beams; the river sparkled as it flowed along, bearing on its broad bosom majestic barques decorated from trucks to main-chains with gay flags and streamers.” Boston was a thriving mercantile port and the state capital, but all private and government business had been adjourned, allowing thousands to converge on the route of a grand parade. Under colorful banners and strings of uncorked bottles hung upside down, the Boston Brigade Band led the parade playing “triumphant music.” It was followed by the Washington Light Infantry and then a four-horse carriage bearing Governor George Briggs and William K. Mitchell, who had helped launch the Washingtonians. Then came many members of local temperance societies, who formed a “long and imposing procession.” If any excitement was lost, it rekindled at the appearance of a corps of marching children. “Some were there who had once known the misery of having a drunken parent; who had long been strangers to the kin
d word and approving smile . . .,” Gough said. “[H]appily the little things trooped on, waving . . . banners, and shouting for very joy.” The marchers finally reached Boston Common, where a huge crowd was waiting to hear the governor and other dignitaries extol the rapid growth of the temperance movement.30

  Appearances were deceiving. Riding at the front of the parade with Governor Briggs and Mitchell was the Reverend John Marsh. Marsh had been a strong supporter of the Washingtonians in the beginning. They had given a lift to the temperance movement at a critical moment. But he saw troubling signs of decline. Fewer people were attending Washingtonian meetings, and the number of bars was rising again. The Journal of the American Temperance Union said that the public was growing bored listening to drunks tell their life stories. The Washingtonian “experience” meetings had produced “a new and most important era in the temperance reformation.” The Journal continued: