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by Iain Gately


  The Carolinas, where Blackbeard drank his last glass of liquor, were emblematic of the progress England’s colonies had made in the second half of the sixteenth century. Though none was a match for Barbados in terms of financial clout, they were all flourishing, and expanding in both population and number. The Virginia and the Massachusetts settlements had been joined by Maryland and Pennsylvania, the Dutch had been pushed out of New Amsterdam, which had been renamed New York, New Hampshire had been claimed and settled, and a “great port town” had been founded in Charleston in the Carolinas. Its first church, St. Philip Episcopal, was financed by a tax of two pence per gallon on rum and other imported spirits.

  Rum had a considerable impact on the drinking habits and trading patterns of the American colonies. Its influence was greatest in New England, which became a mercantile nation in its own right as a consequence of the rum trade. One of the first New Englanders to sail down to Barbados had noted that its inhabitants were “so intent upon producing sugar that they had rather buy foods at very deare rates than produce it by labor.” The phrase deare rates was music to the New England soul. In return for rum, molasses, and sugar, the Massachusetts settlements sent fish, flour, and timber in their own boats. A ship-building industry evolved to service this trade, and its captains ranged far and wide in pursuit of profits. As African slaving grew in importance, they entered into the business—indeed they had been involved right from the start. In 1644, John Winthrop of Boston had shipped a cargo of wooden staves to the Cabo Verde Islands, where they were exchanged for slaves, who in turn were traded for sugar in Barbados.

  New Englanders started slaving in earnest after it had been discovered that Caribbean rum commanded a premium in Africa. Their presence in the trade was made legitimate in 1689, when the monopoly that the Royal Africa Company held on English slave trading was terminated. Over the next quarter century “about one in seven English slave voyages began in the Americas rather than in England.” They loaded up with spirits for the outward journey—according to a current estimate, they carried 1.3 million gallons of them to Africa between 1680 and 1713, which they exchanged for approximately sixty thousand humans.

  Africa was a seller’s market. Its countries dictated the terms of business on their coasts. With the exception of the Portuguese settlement in Angola, no European nation established more than a toehold on the west coast of the continent before the nineteenth century. Their few forts and trading posts were stationed on islands, such as the English depot at Cape Coast Castle in Ghana, or on narrow, easily defensible peninsulas. Even these were insecure. Ships were regularly cut out, and Europeans were starved or massacred in their fortified settlements. Things had to be done the African way, or not at all. Africans were discriminating in their tastes in trade goods, and these changed from year to year. Their principal demand was for cloth, in very specific colors. The next most important item on their shopping list, more so than guns and gunpowder combined, was rum. It was no use turning up with the wrong goods and expecting to buy slaves. When, for instance, Captain George Scott of Newport arrived with a cargo of bonnets and ribbons, he found few takers, and confided to his diary: “I have repented a hundred times buying . . . dry goods. Had we laid out two thousand pound in rum, bread, and flour, it would have purchased more in value.”

  Rum was in demand because, as had been observed by the Portuguese two centuries before, sub-Saharan Africa was populated by drinkers. These consumed alcohol for cultural as well as hedonistic purposes. Most religions in the region postulated life as a voyage undertaken by a soul from and back to the spirit world, and alcohol was thought to ease each soul through the difficult parts of its journey, especially conception, birth, puberty, and death. It was offered to spirits via libations—sprinkled over the foreheads of newborn infants, or on the earth covering a fresh grave. Among the Akan tribe of the Gold Coast, for instance, when a woman gave birth, “all the people— men, women, boys, and girls—come to her. . . . They give the child a name upon which they have agreed, and swear upon it with the Fetishes and other sorcery . . . on which occasion they make a big feast, with merry-making, food, and drink, which they love.” A similar tradition prevailed at burials: “As soon as the corpse is let down into the grave, the persons who attended the funeral drink palm wine, or rum plentifully out of oxes horns; and what they cannot drink off at a draught, they spill on the grave of their deceased friend, that he may have his share of the liquor.” The dead were provided with further drinks at annual ceremonies in their honor. The Akans, who venerated their ancestral stools as being sacred representations of the individuals who once had occupied them, exhibited these heirlooms on specific days every year and splashed them with alcohol. Drink was offered to deities as well as the departed. The serpent gods of Whydah were appeased with gifts of rum, by both native devotees and latterly by visiting slavers, in deference to custom.

  Not only was alcohol a trade good in its own right, but it was also an essential lubricant of slave trafficking. Time and time again, European merchants found they could not do business without first making presents of rum or similar to local rulers or their representatives. According to a participant in the trade, the African slave seller “never cares to treat with dry Lips.” Once lips had been wetted and negotiations concluded, the newly bought slaves were led off to dungeons or holding pens, and thence to the waiting ships. One of them has left us an account of his feelings as he stepped on board in his shackles:

  When I looked round the ship and saw a large furnace or copper-boiling, and a multitude of black people of every description chained together, every one of their countenances expressing dejection and sorrow, I no longer doubted of my fate; and, quite overpowered with horror and anguish, I fell motionless on the deck and fainted. When I recovered a little I found some black people about me. . . . They talked to me in order to cheer me, but all in vain. I asked them if we were not to be eaten by those white men with horrible looks, red faces, and loose hair. They told me I was not: and one of the crew brought me a small portion of spirituous liquor in a wine glass; but, being afraid of him, I would not take it out of his hand. One of the blacks therefore took it from him and gave it to me, and I took a little down my palate, which, instead of reviving me, as they thought it would, threw me into the greatest consternation at the strange feeling it produced, having never tasted any such liquor before.

  Some African customs relating to alcohol survived the journey over the Atlantic and took root in the Americas. Slaves on the Caribbean islands were given rum rations by their owners, and although these were meager by the standards of free people—only a gallon or two per head per annum—they managed to hoard some for traditional uses. They were also permitted patches of land on which to grow provisions, and could trade what they grew for drink if they so desired. It seems that when they bought alcohol, they did so to keep their native culture and sense of hospitality alive. Their dedication to these causes was commented on by J. B. du Tertre, a French missionary in the sugar island of Martinique: “I have seen one of our negroes slaughter five or six chickens in order to accommodate his friends, and spend extravagantly on three pints of rum in order to entertain five or six slaves of his country.” Du Tertre also noted that slaves celebrated the birth of their children with drinks and would sell “everything they own” to purchase rum for the occasion. They likewise hoarded alcohol to give the soul a proper sendoff on its journey back to the spirit world at death. In Jamaica, slaves buried their own kin with “a pot of soup at the head, and a bottle of rum at the feet.” An account of one such funeral shows the persistence of African perceptions of the worth of drink: “Taking a little of the rum or other liquors, they sprinkle it [on the grave], crying out in the same manner, ‘Here is a little rum to comfort your heart, good-bye to you, God bless you.’” The toast was returned, on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, by the Dahomey nation of the slave coast, who chanted:

  “The English must bring guns. The Portuguese must bring powder. The Spa
niards must bring the small stones, which give fire to our fire-sticks. The Americans must bring cloth and the rum made by our kinsmen who are there, for these will permit us to smell their presence.”

  It was as well that slaves preserved their own ideologies, for they were debarred from participating in the free drinking culture of the English colonies in continental America, where they were prohibited from entering taverns and ordinaries, lest their presence contradict the spirit of equality that was supposed to rule such places. In order to ensure their absence, tavern owners who served them were fined. While slaves were kept more or less dry, free colonists became increasingly bibulous during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Their drinking habits were not homogeneous—a north/ south divide was apparent in the kind of alcohol people consumed and in their respective tolerance of drunkenness.

  In Virginia, the huge volume of shipping involved in the tobacco trade carried on its outward voyage a variety of British and continental beers, wines, and spirits to tempt the palates of the planters. The colony also imported Caribbean rum. A certain amount of brewing was carried out locally, but Virginian-made beer was reckoned by its inhabitants to be inferior. In 1666 its price was fixed at four shillings or forty pounds of tobacco per gallon, whereas the imported variety cost three times as much. Poor white Virginians made home brews from molasses, corn, potatoes, pumpkins, and Jerusalem artichokes, but otherwise the Virginians produced little alcohol of their own. They were nonetheless creative drinkers, famed for their penchant for combining different liquors to make a variety of flips, punches, and coolers, each of which was credited with special medicinal or stimulatory powers.

  Virginia’s little sister, Maryland, had similar drinking habits. The emphasis, once again, was on imports. In 1663, it was reported that the Marylanders did not brew at all. As in Virginia, foreign brews were purchased with tobacco. Because of the scarcity of locally brewed beer, both Virginians and Marylanders drank proportionally more spirits than the colonies to the north, and this bias was also evident in the Carolinas. In all three places, there was little or no stigma attached to hard drinking. Each was characterized by small settlements, widely dispersed along rivers rather than roads, so that people gathered together less frequently, and when they visited each other, they vied in demonstration of Southern hospitality.

  In New England, in contrast, American-made alcoholic drinks were commonplace. Attitudes toward drunkenness were also different: The population was more densely concentrated in villages, towns, and their surrounding farms, and hence opportunities for convivial intoxication were far more numerous, and drunkards were much more visible. Moreover, the reigning Puritan caste had become increasingly antagonistic toward drinking. Instead of perceiving it as a sign of success, indicative of agricultural surpluses and leisure time, they considered it un-American. The pilgrim fathers had got by with cold water and hard work, what now the need for boozing?

  An attack was launched on some of the traditional English drinking practices that had been imported to New England, beginning with the custom of paying workers part of their wages in alcohol. In 1645, the “allowance of liquors or wine every day, over and above their wages,” was forbidden by the general court of the colony.19 The Puritans’ next target was the excessive drinking that accompanied such communal exercises as raising a barn or meetinghouse, and quasi-public ceremonies, especially weddings and funerals. A supply of alcohol was considered obligatory on all such occasions— witness the funeral bill for David Porter of Hartford, who drowned in 1678:

  By a pint of liquor for those who dived for him—1s

  By a quart of liquor for those who bro’t him home—2s

  By two quarts of wine and 1 gallon of cyder to jury of inquest—5s

  By 8 gallons & 3 qts. wine for funeral £1 15s

  By Barrel cyder for funeral—12s

  1 coffin—12s

  Winding Sheet—18s

  The charge against English-style inebriation while working, marrying, and burying was led from the pulpit. In 1673, Increase Mather (later to preach against another sort of spirits in the Salem witch trials) published his electrifying sermon “Wo to Drunkards,” which warned colonial inebriates, in medieval imagery, that while they might succeed in drinking their consciences into comas, when their souls awoke “in the midst of eternal Flames, all the wounds received by this sin will be felt with a witness.” His words of wisdom seem to have fallen on deaf ears, for in 1708 his son, Cotton Mather, felt compelled to publish a similar tract against alcohol entitled “Sober Considerations on a Growing Flood of Iniquity.”

  At the same time as they fulminated against old-fashioned English drunkenness, the Puritans directed their ire against the ordinaries that were popping up like mushrooms all over the country around Massachusetts Bay. While these were impossible to eradicate, since every settlement needed somewhere where visitors might stay, it was possible to limit what people drank in them. In 1645, the Massachusetts General Court forbade ordinary keepers “to suffer anyone to be drunk or drink excessively, or continue tippling above the space of half an hour in any of their said houses.” To “drink excessively” was defined as more than half a pint of wine in any one sitting. Transgressors, whether excessive or leisurely drinkers, and the tavern owners who served them, were to be punished with fines.

  The enforcement of such remarkable laws was entrusted to a special class of colonial officials, known latterly as tithingmen, who were zealous in their duties. Amazed foreign visitors commented on how they had been told to stop drinking, and advised their home audiences to expect unnatural and ill-mannered restraints on their consumption when visiting New England. John Josselyn, writing of Boston in 1663, expressed his disgust at being hounded by one such monitor, who would “thrust himself into the company uninvited, and if [anyone] called for more drink than the officer thought in his judgment he could soberly bear away, he would presently countermand it, and appoint the proportion beyond which he could not get one drop.”

  Moreover, the licensing procedure for ordinaries was tightened up in 1681. In Boston, the principal town of the region, whose population doubled between 1700 and 1718, the number of taverns grew at a far slower rate—from sixty-three to seventy-four. Thereafter, however, official pressure on the chapels of Satan in New England eased. They were found to be useful venues for discussing British imperial incompetence, and as the merchant element of Boston grew in importance, they were used, like coffee shops in London, as trading centers where bargains could be struck and confidences exchanged.

  A measure of the change in priorities, and the balance of power, is apparent in the failure of the “Act Against Intemperance Immorality, and Prophaneness, and for Reformation of Manners,” which was approved by the Boston Assembly in 1712, and which included a ban on the sale of distilled liquors in taverns. A glance at the excise levies of subsequent years reveals that taverns continued to sell spirits by the bucket load and that they had enough in their cellars to withstand a siege. In 1715, for example, Thomas Gilbert had 218 gallons of rum, 319 of wine, and 982 of cider in his Boston tavern; and in 1725, Thomas Selby of the Crown Coffee House had nearly 700 gallons of rum and more than 6,000 gallons of wine to hand, which equated to almost a half gallon of wine for every inhabitant of Boston—in one pub. By the time that Selby was storing such prodigious quantities of booze, the number of taverns in Boston had leapt to 134, or one per hundred head of population, i.e., a higher density than that which had prevailed in Elizabethan England.

  The excise lists of tavern stocks show, by the relative quantities of various kinds of alcoholic beverage, the prevailing tastes in drink in early eighteenth-century New England. The most popular tipple, in terms of volume, was locally produced cider. Even little settlements produced huge quantities of cider. In 1721 a Massachusetts village of forty families made three thousand barrels—enough for a hundred pints for each family every week throughout the year. In the event, cider became too common and overproduction forced prices d
own from six shillings per barrel around 1700 to three shillings in 1730. Throughout much of this period, cider served as a currency, like tobacco in Virginia. It was used to pay salaries and levies, and the prices of goods and services were often quoted in barrels of cider.

  The cider itself was sometimes transformed into applejack by freeze distillation—i.e., by leaving barrels of it outdoors in the winter. This elixir, perhaps the same fluid as Anglo-Saxon beor, was easily made by accident in icy New England. It was a farmer’s drink, strong, rough, and toxic—applejack hangovers could kill—and was seldom found in taverns, where the most popular liquor was rum. According to A Trip to New England (1699) by the English hack journalist Edward Ward, “Rum, alias Kill Devil, is as much ador’d by the American English as a dram of brandy is by an old Billingsgate. ’Tis held as the comforter of their souls, the Preserver of their bodys, the Remover of their Cares and Promoter of their Mirth; and is a Soveraign Remedy against the Grumbling of the Guts, a Kibe-heel or a Wounded Conscience, which are three Epidemical Distempers that afflict the Country.” By the time that Ward was writing, New Englanders were making their own rum in Boston. Slave traders found it was less expensive to buy molasses and distil it themselves than to purchase the finished Caribbean spirit. Boston rum had a very poor reputation—a visitor summed up its qualities as “cheap.” In 1738 it cost less than two shillings a gallon or about half the price of a similar quantity of beer in Virginia.

 

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