And a Bottle of Rum, Revised and Updated

by Wayne Curtis

  Rum was often consumed straight up, followed by a chaser of water. It could be diluted with three parts water to one of rum to make the grog familiar to seamen, and two parts water to one of rum to make a sling. With shavings from a sugarloaf, rum and water were transformed into mimbo, a drink that was especially popular in Pennsylvania. With molasses instead of sugar, it was called bombo, named for obscure reasons after English admiral John Benbow.

  Tavern account books inventory casks of various flavorings. Lime juice was perhaps the most common, then as now, but there was also cinnamon water, clove water, and mint water, the last of which when mixed with rum was believed to strengthen one’s stomach. (Mint had long been used in Europe to treat various maladies.) Rum with cherry juice was cherry bounce, and when mixed with bilberries (similar to blueberries) it was called a bilberry dram. Warmed rum flavored with juniper berries was served at funerals in some middle colonies.

  Little was considered off limits in mixers. Rum with milk, sugar, and nutmeg was regarded as a refreshing summer drink, which Acrelius reported was “good for dysentery and loose bowels.” Warm milk with rum and spices was syllabub. Sweetened vinegars, called beveridge, switchel, or shrub, date back to the Roman army and mixed with rum to good effect. Rum went well with hard cider; a warmed combination of the two was called a sampson. Rum mixed with a little molasses was a blackstrap.

  Rum added to small beer made a drink called manatham. Spruce beer mixed with rum was a calibogus, a drink especially popular in Newfoundland and aboard ships. This could be further doctored by adding egg and sugar (to make an Egg Calli), or heated up (a King’s Calli). On Captain Cook’s voyage around the world, the crew made a drink similar to spruce beer from ingredients harvested at the Cape of Good Hope. To this beer they mixed rum and sugar, and reported that it tasted “rather like champagne.” They called it Kallebogus after the North American drink.

  But perhaps the most famous early American rum drink was flip. The first references crop up around 1690, and by 1704 an almanac published this paean:

  The days are short, the weather’s cold

  By tavern fires tales are told.

  Some ask for dram when first come in.

  Others with flip and bounce begin.

  After two decades, flip’s popularity bordered on a mania and would remain in demand for more than a century.

  To make the drink, a tavern keeper started with a large earthenware pitcher or an oversized pewter mug. This would be filled about two-thirds with strong beer, to which was added some sort of sweetener—molasses, loaf sugar, dried pumpkin, or whatever else was at hand. Then came five ounces of rum, neither stirred nor shaken but mixed with a device called a loggerhead—a narrow piece of iron about three feet long with a slightly bulbous head the size of a small onion. It was originally created for heating tar or pitch, with the bulb buried in the glowing coals until it blazed red-hot, then quickly withdrawn and plunged into the pitch to make it pliable. The instrument served a similar heating function when plunged red-hot into a beer-rum-and-molasses concoction. The whole mess would foam and hiss and send up a mighty head. This alcoholic porridge was then decanted into smaller flip tumblers, which could hold as much as a gallon each, a measure that attested to the great thirst of the early settlers.

  The searing loggerhead gave flip a bitter, slightly burned taste, which was much esteemed among the colonists. (This also distinguished it from the British variation of flip, which was made by heating the mixture in a saucepan, and which failed to develop a similar cult.) There were nearly as many variations of flip as there were taverns. It was sometimes made with cider rather than beer, and often a fresh egg would be added, in which case it was called bellowstop or battered flip. Several Massachussetts taverns, including Danforth’s in Cambridge and Abbott’s in Holden, were famous for their flip concoctions and became popular stage stops. The best-known flip, though, was made in Canton, Massachusetts, where the tavern keeper distinguished himself from the great mass of flip pretenders. He beat together a batch of cream, eggs, and sugar, which he would ladle into the pitcher with the other ingredients. Fans reported that this gave his flip a much vaunted creaminess.

  The loggerhead was sometimes called a flip-dog or a hottle. Through repeated reheatings it sometimes broke and had to be repaired by a blacksmith. The cost of the repair, we know from one Massachusetts tavern ledger, was ten ounces of West Indian rum. A person who was slightly dim would be referred to as a loggerhead—like comparing someone’s intellect today to a soap dish. (“I’m sure you never heard me say such a word to such a loggerhead as you,” muttered Captain Kidd, the accused pirate, to a former shipmate who had testified against him.) Loggerheads made convenient weapons during tavern brawls, when men in their cups would grab the lethal instruments and whale away at one another, often with bloody results. While flip has wholly vanished from today’s bar scene (and shouldn’t be confused with a more modern drink called flip), the drink lingers in ghostly fashion each time someone speaks of adversaries being “at loggerheads.”

  * * *

  —

  “It comes rolling in, hogshead after hogshead!” groused Rev. Samuel Niles of Braintree, Massachusetts, in his 1761 screed against the rise of rum and the proliferation of taverns. His was only one voice among many—although it would not be until the next century that they would all coalesce into the more organized temperance movement. In the eighteenth century, these attacks reflected the more narrow concerns of the ministry. Rum, it seemed, was quietly reshaping colonial society, and it was the ministers who had the most to lose.

  The rise of strong liquors in colonial America wasn’t an isolated phenomenon. Across the Atlantic in England, French brandy was coming ashore in record amounts (liquor imports would peak in England in 1733). When it was banned after an outbreak of hostilities between the nations, gin from Holland filled the gap and launched an enduring craze, with the demand soon met by British distillers. Cheap gin rampaged through the poorest urban neighborhoods, and the besotted state of London’s slums was captured most famously in the series of Gin Lane etchings by William Hogarth. Between 1729 and 1751, England struggled to stem the craze, passing a series of strict laws to limit gin sales and at last gaining some control over unbridled drinking.

  Rum was the gin of the New World. But it was more than a quick ticket to a fast drunk. Rum’s rise marked a rite of passage for the struggling colonists. Merely by drinking it, they effectively announced a change in their role on the global stage. They were no longer a people who made do with crude and rustic beverages concocted in their own kitchens. They could now pay for valued goods with the sweat of their labor. Rum not only appealed to the colonists’ love of speedy inebriation, but also brought a measure of status and suggested the first steps toward cultural independence.

  It also marked an increasing independence from the old order. While the “good creature” alcohol was a friend of the clergy in the form of beer, cider, and wine, it morphed into a formidable adversary when transformed into rum. The debauchery resulting from rum drinking in taverns was a challenge to the existing social order, perhaps nowhere as strikingly as in Puritan Massachusetts. By the early 1700s, ministers had already seen their stature begin to erode. Younger, native-born colonists were less mindful of the religious suppression that had prompted their elders to flee England and were more interested in bettering their own lives materially. They aspired not to the parsonage at the crossroads, but to the mansion near the docks. Merchants were building ostentatious homes that vastly outshone the humble houses of the ministry, and a growing number of ministers were forced to tend their own vegetable gardens in order to survive. They couldn’t have afforded to enjoy rum in the taverns even if they had been so inclined.

  Of course, few were so inclined. Rum was the enemy. Rum drinking, the ministers came to believe, led not only to a slackening of morals, but bred indolence and idleness, two afflict
ions that Puritans greeted as warmly as gout and consumption. “Idleness, the parent of every vice, has been introduced by the fatal and pernicious use of foreign spirits,” fumed a Connecticut resident in a letter to a newspaper in 1769. “Not one extravagance, among the numerous follies we have been guilty of, has been more destructive to our interests than tavern haunting, and gratifying our appetites with intoxicating liquors.” The harmless conviviality bred by beer, cider, and wine was supplanted by rum’s more intractable sullenness and addiction. Rum was the snake in the garden.

  The more devout led a campaign to encourage settlers to abandon rum and return to beer and cider. This, they hoped, would reverse the drift into dispiriting (if spirited) secularism and would roll back the clock to the allegedly more wholesome and industrious time of the forefathers. In the first book printed by Benjamin Franklin, in 1725, Francis Rawle complained that because of “the Depravity and Viciousness of our Palates and the so frequent use of Spirits, there has not been due Care in the Brewing of beer.” He called for higher duties on imported liquor, and the elimination of all taxes on beer and cider, thereby encouraging a return to that imaginary period of pastoral grace.

  Cities like Boston actively encouraged brewers and cider makers to offer an alternative to rum. But such measures were too late. The old order had been deposed. The tavern keepers, the de facto governors of the Republic of Rum, had no intention of relinquishing their power.

  * * *

  —

  A taverngoer in the early eighteenth century had to endure a great many inconveniences—rancid meat, surly company, and (if overnighting) thin straw mattresses filled with biting insects. A more insidious hazard was getting caught up in endless rounds of toast making.

  The practice of toasting the health of one’s king, host, or mistress—or even a stranger who has just walked through the door—apparently dates back to Elizabethan England. The origins are murky, as is the case with many rituals associated with drinking. Toasts were so popular in the late seventeenth century in England that they provoked a backlash: Pamphlets were printed attacking the practice as sacrilegious. “How can any man drink another’s health,” asked one, quite sensibly, in 1682, and “by what new kind of transubstantiation can his health be converted into a glass of liquor?” The pamphlet went on to describe more than one hundred instances in which health drinkers suffered from the wrath of a put-upon God, including one group who toasted “in a strange manner” and soon after all died mysteriously.

  Among the short-lived tavern regulations was one to outlaw toasts. But like the bans against rum sales to Indians, it was blithely ignored. A late-eighteenth-century French visitor to Philadelphia lamented the “absurd and truly barbarous practice, the first time you drink and at the beginning of dinner to call out successively to each individual, to let him know you drink his health.” As a result, before the toast is concluded, the person with glass held aloft is “sometimes ready to die with thirst.” Another traveler noted that dining room doors might be bolted to prevent guests from fleeing during toasts.

  According to tavern historian Peter Thompson, toasts were an effort to draw all present into an agreeable fellowship, whether they wanted to be drawn in or not. At its best, the practice knitted together people from different classes into a comity of good cheer. At worst, they actually sowed conflicts by prompting those who disagreed to insult the others present by not raising a glass.

  Whether taverngoers of different classes managed to bond, the early taverns were relatively egalitarian. Since regulations prevented raising prices to discourage riffraff, tavern owners sought to boost their sales by encouraging any and all to drink. As the traveling physician Alexander Hamilton learned, there was no telling who you’d find yourself sitting next to in a tavern. Congregationalists drank with Anglicans, and blacksmiths with attorneys. (One group was notably absent: women. Those who were present were mostly travelers in search of lodging.)

  The tippling rooms at taverns tended to be cozy, with privacy at a minimum. As such, the business of one was the business of all. Taverns were cramped places, often low-ceilinged, and smoky from pipes and fireplace backdrafts. They became a place for the spread of pestilence, like yellow fever, which swept through the colonies with deadly regularity. But the taverns were also places in which new ideas were fermented—ideas for a new republic, in which no person should be subject to “taxation without representation.”

  Despite the nostalgic portraits of some historians, taverns weren’t all bonhomie and genteel discussion. They were more often a place of constant low-grade conflict, where wildly clashing ideas ricocheted around the room. Colonists learned when to keep quiet, when to speak up, when to go along for the sake of consensus, and when to make a stand and defend it—with loggerheads, if needed. The taverns, in short, offered training in policy debate and the grooming of future leaders. “Commerce and politics were so inextricably mingled that rum and liberty were but different liquors from the same still,” wrote historian Frederick Bernays Wiener in 1930.

  Into these mini maelstroms, aspiring politicians and budding revolutionaries mingled, increasingly riled by the tone-deaf actions of the British Crown. John Adams was a young lawyer in the coastal Massachusetts town of Braintree in the 1760s. He launched an early and abortive crusade against taverns, of which there were a dozen in Braintree. “Few things have deviated so far from the first design of their institution, are so fruitful of destructive evils, or so needful of a speedy regulation, as licensed houses,” he groused, siding with ministers who wanted tighter reins on the rum sellers. But as Adams’s prominence grew, he came to realize that taverns were a habitat in which those in search of influence could thrive. “You will find the [tavern] full of people, drinking drams, phlip, toddy,” Adams wrote. A leader had to learn to “mix with the crowd in the tavern” and develop his popularity by “agreeable assistance in the tittle-tattle of the hour.” Influence or elective office was not automatically granted those with breeding, religion, education, or connections, but by entering into the rummy world of the tavern and showing what stuff you were made of. As the Hessian mercenary Baron Friedrich Adolph Riedesel noted, “New Englanders all want to be politicians, and love, therefore, the tavern and the grog bowl, behind the latter of which they transact business, drinking from morning till night.”

  As conflict with Britain loomed, a new wave of tavern reformer briefly appeared on the political landscape—those who wished to fan the flames of armed rebellion against England but were fearful that rum-addled colonists would be ill-prepared to stand up against King George. They agitated vainly to shutter the taverns to ensure a sober fighting force that was ready for resistance.

  As it turned out, they had no cause to worry. Rum would prove to be the spirit of ’76.

  [ BOMBO ]

  In a short glass, pour two ounces RUM and two ounces fresh WATER. Add one-half teaspoon MOLASSES. Dust with NUTMEG.

  Chapter 4

  [ MEDFORD RUM ]

  I know not why we should blush to confess that molasses were an essential ingredient in American independence. Many great events have proceeded from much smaller causes.

  —PRESIDENT JOHN ADAMS

  Paul Revere was late. “He’s always late,” said Thomas Convery. Convery was eating a Danish as he peered out on the street from behind a curtain inside the Gaffey Funeral Home in Medford, Massachusetts. It was Monday, April 21, Patriot’s Day, and the morning was sunny, windless, and sixty degrees. Some dozen members of the Medford High School marching band in mailbox-blue uniforms were playing “Louie, Louie” on the sidewalk with more enthusiasm than expertise. The crowd numbered about 250. Parents in baseball caps and windbreakers held small video cameras and instructed their kids to keep a respectful distance from the yellow plastic tape, which held a space open in front of the funeral home. Two or three cell phones rang out, followed by shouts to friends: Paul Revere was crossing the bridge and in a fe
w minutes would gallop into town.

  “Crowds are getting thinner every year,” Convery said. “When I was in high school, the band had one hundred and one pieces. And we always celebrated Patriot’s Day on April 19. Not two days after, but on the nineteenth. Now it’s the twentieth, the twenty-first, whenever.” His voice trailed off, as if creeping Monday-ism was a sad and incurable disease. Convery, who was seventy-eight years old, liked tradition. He was wearing his VFW hat studded with a great many pins, and had written two forthrightly titled books of local history: When I Was a Kid and I Remember When. Convery is the one to talk to if you need to know anything about Medford As She Was.

  I had called Convery a few weeks earlier to ask about the account in several history books that Paul Revere, partway into his famous midnight ride, had stopped at Isaac Hall’s home and downed a dram or two of rum to fortify him on his mission to Lexington. H. F. Willkie, the brother of former presidential candidate Wendell Willkie, wrote that the rum Revere drank in Medford was strong enough to make “a rabbit bite a bulldog.” In 1944, the fact-checkers of The New Yorker magazine signed off on a story that reported “Paul Revere had a stiff snort before starting on his midnight ride.” Another account claimed that Revere lingered long enough for “several stirrup-cups of rich, tawny Old Medford Rum,” which imparts an image of Revere making favorable comments to his host about the richly caramelized hues before mounting up and galloping off to the first battle of the American Revolution. These accounts notwithstanding, for someone as famously in a hurry as Paul Revere, it seemed an odd time for a social drink. Was it true? Convery said I should come to Medford on Patriot’s Day and see for myself.