by Iain Gately
Distillation on a commercial scale was also being carried out in New York, which had experienced rapid growth since it passed into English hands in 1664. Manhattan Island had several breweries and produced raw materials for them—hops and barley—in its numerous farms and market gardens. In contrast it imported its wines, for while many had experimented, none had succeeded in making good wine out of native grapes or in keeping foreign vines alive for long enough to produce a vintage. Its inhabitants nonetheless distilled a “brandy” made from grain spirit from 1640 onward, and by the time they had become English subjects “three out of the five breweries in New York also made whisky.” However, demand for grain for the stills raised prices to such an extent that there was scarcely enough left for baking into bread, and in 1676 Governor Edmund Andros20 banned distillation, except with damaged grain. Thereafter, New Yorkers relied on molasses for their stills, whose output was slight in comparison to the volume of rum imported from the West Indies. Like Boston, New York developed large taverns that served as meeting places for its merchants and politicians as well as watering holes for the community at large. In the 1730s, for instance, New York Assembly committees did their business at D’Honneur’s Tavern. The size and general layout of such institutions may be gauged from Manhattan’s oldest surviving building, Fraunces Tavern, which was built as a house in 1719 and converted to a drinking place in 1762.
The drinking culture of eighteenth-century New York was similar to that which prevailed in the fast-expanding town of Philadelphia, which had been founded in 1682 by William Penn to be the capital of his proprietary colony of Pennsylvania. Its Quaker owner and his coreligionists were peaceful, serious people, who believed in personal communication with, and occasional possession by, the divinity. While they were conscientious investors who would not trade in weapons or participate in war, they accounted wealth no sin and had become a significant force in the English brewing industry.
Penn included a brewery in his own mansion at Pennsbury and recorded, with evident pleasure, that in 1685 an “able man” (William Frampton) had “set up a large Brew House,” in Philadelphia, “in order to furnish the People with good Drink.” Ten years later there were four or five large brewing operations in the town. The beer they produced was reckoned to be “equal in strength to that of London” and was being exported to Barbados, where it fetched a higher price than the English equivalent. While Pennsylvania quickly achieved self-sufficiency in beer, its wine was imported. Like many other European colonists before them, the Quakers had tried and failed to make wine from the native grapes. William Penn planted two hundred acres of his estate with imported vines, but they died, from causes unknown, and the experiment was abandoned. The failure was blamed on the climate, and Philadelphia bought its wines from Europe, the Canary Islands, and Madeira.
The drinking habits of the town were observed, and quite probably shaped, by Benjamin Franklin. Journalism was the first outlet for his energetic genius, and drinking was one of the first topics he addressed. While still a teenager in New England, and writing in the guise of Mrs. Silence Dogood, Franklin contributed a letter to The New-England Courant, run by his elder brother, which shows a natural wit, an effective style, and a tolerant approach to alcohol that was to characterize his later work. Its conclusion is typical of Franklin’s early style and ordered mind:
It argues some Shame in the Drunkards themselves, in that they have invented numberless Words and Phrases to cover their Folly, whose proper Significations are harmless, or have no Signification at all. They are seldom known to be drunk, tho they are very often boozey, cogey, tipsey, fox’d, merry, mellow, fuddl’d, groatable, Confoundedly cut, See two Moons, are Among the Philistines, In a very good Humour, See the Sun, or, The Sun has shone upon them; they Clip the King’s English, are Almost froze, Feavourish, In their Altitudes, Pretty well enter’d, &c. In short, every Day produces some new Word or Phrase which might be added to the Vocabulary of the Tiplers.
Franklin moved to Pennsylvania and, after a short spell in London, took over and edited The Pennsylvania Gazette, to which he also contributed under aliases. His best-loved alter ego was Poor Richard, in whose name an almanac was published every year between 1732 and 1767. The almanac was immensely popular—Poor Richard was the voice of America of his age. In addition to providing weather forecasts and horoscopes for the coming year, the almanac was noted for its aphorisms, which set out in plain English useful behavioral guidelines for the farmers and other colonists who bought it in their thousands. These included maxims about drinking, such as “Take counsel in wine, but resolve afterwards in water”; and “He that drinks his Cyder alone, let him catch his Horse alone.”
Franklin also continued to demonstrate an interest in drinking slang. In January 1736 he published the Drinkers Dictionary, the most comprehensive collection ever attempted of words and phrases used by drinkers to “cover their Folly.” This work, and the aphorisms of Poor Richard, may be taken as being representative of eighteenth-century colonial attitudes to alcohol. Notwithstanding the opposition of a few New England Puritans, occasional drunkenness was viewed with humor and even affection. It was a happy state of relaxation, which might cause people to make temporary fools of themselves, but which did not interfere with their general ability to act as responsible members of the community.
There was, however, one category of drinker whom Franklin felt should be kept away from alcohol at all costs. The Native Americans continued to show an inability to get groatable without losing all self-control. This was perceived as a problem throughout the colonies, and Indians, like slaves, were barred from taverns in most places. Numerous laws prohibiting the sale of alcohol to Indians were enacted in various colonies over time: in New Amsterdam in 1643, in Rhode Island in 1654, in Massachusetts in 1657, in Connecticut in 1669, in Pennsylvania in 1701, in New York in 1709.
The problem of Indian drinking worsened as spirits became ubiquitous in colonial America. Since the native tribes had no place for alcoholic drinks in their cultures or diets, they still conceived of them as stimulants and so had a preference for the hard stuff. In 1670 it was reported “that they wonder much of the English for purchasing wine at so dear a rate when Rum is much cheaper & will make them sooner drunk.” The same correspondent noted that because they felt the only point in drinking was to become utterly fuddled, if a group of warriors did not have enough to all get drunk, they would choose one person and give their entire stock to him and, if he passed out before finishing it, would hold open his throat and pour in the remainder.
This all-or-nothing attitude was also recorded by French missionaries in Canada. To the Indians, there was “only one sort of drunkenness worthwhile, the sort which they call ‘Gannontiouaratonseri,’ complete insobriety. And when they begin to feel the effects of the brandy they rejoice, shouting, ‘Good, good, my head is reeling.’” The tribespeople themselves acknowledged that alcohol was ruining them. A Delaware Valley Indian, speaking in 1685, lamented that “when we drink it, it makes us mad. . . . We do not know what we do, we abuse one another; we throw each other into the fire, Seven Score of our People have been killed, by reason of the drinking of it, since the time it was first sold [to] us.”
The problem was exacerbated by cultural factors. The Native Americans considered drunkenness to be an excuse for any crime— even murder: “A drunken man is a sacred person. According to them it is a state so delicious that it is permitted, even desirable, to arrive at; it is their paradise. Then one is not responsible for his acts.” Some observers accused Indians of taking advantage of this exemption, claiming that they got drunk “very often on purpose to have the privilege of satisfying old grudges.”
Despite the evident damage that alcohol, especially spirits, was causing to Native Americans, and despite colonial laws against selling it to them, they continued to receive it by the keg. Booze was as essentialto the fur trade as to slaving, and the fur trade was likewise a seller’s market. The English colonies and the French in C
anada competed to buy pelts and found they had to offer rum or brandy in order to secure business. The issue was the subject of an exchange of letters in 1668 between a French official and Governor Dongan of New York. The Frenchman appealed to his rival, on the grounds of piety, to rein in the fur traders who sold liquor to Indians: “Think you, Sir, that Religion will progress whilst your merchants supply, as they do, Eau de Vie in abundance which converts the savages, as you ought to know, into Demons and their cabins into counterparts and theaters of Hell?” Governor Dongan’s parry-riposte made the issue one of liberty: “Certainly our Rum does as little hurt as your Brandy and in the opinion of Christians is much more wholesome: However, to keep the Indians temperate and sober is a very good and Christian thing, but to prohibit them all strong liquors seems a little hard.”
Commerce was more important than sobriety. When François de Montigny, bishop of Quebec, intervened on the Indians’ behalf in 1660 and excommunicated a pair of traders who sold spirits to them, he set off a power struggle with the civil authorities, who insisted that if traders could not offer brandy to Indians there would be no trade at all. The bishop responded with further excommunications in 1662, and in 1668 went one step further by declaring that all brandy sellers were mortal sinners. In the event, pragmatism triumphed over dogma and sales continued.
As the eighteenth century progressed and the Europeans entered into more or less continuous treaty negotiations with various tribes, it became a tradition to offer alcohol as a gift or sweetener, so that in many cases the officials of colonies that prohibited the sale of drinks to Indians broke their own laws when attempting to enlarge their territories. Benjamin Franklin has left a picture of one such encounter— the negotiations held with the Delaware tribe at Carlisle in 1753—which illustrates, with a certain black humor, the double standards of the age. The Indians were told “if they would continue sober during the Treaty, we would give them Plenty of Rum when Business was over.” The colonials kept their word, and once negotiations had ended, the Indians set to painting the town red: “They had all made a great Bonfire in the Middle of the Square. They were all drunk Men and Women, quarrelling and fighting. Their dark colour’d Bodies, half naked, seen only by the gloomy Light of the Bonfire, running after and beating one another with Firebrands, accompanied by their horrid Yellings, form’d a scene the most resembling our Ideas of Hell that could well be imagined.” The Indians sent a delegation of elders to apologize the next day, who also offered an explanation for their behavior, as follows: “The Great spirit who made all things made every thing for some Use, and whatever Use he design’d any thing for, that Use it should always be put to; Now, when he made Rum, he said, LET THIS BE FOR INDIANS TO GET DRUNK WITH. And it must be so.”
13 GIN FEVER
A new Kind of Drunkenness, unknown to our Ancestors, is lately sprung up amongst us, which, if not put a stop to, will infallibly destroy a great Part . . . of our People.
—Henry Fielding
The Native American obsession with self-destructive drinking was considered by Europeans to be a significant point of difference between their respective cultures. It was unthinkable that white Christians could surrender en masse to the same style of inebriation. However, the unthinkable happened in London in the first half of the eighteenth century, when a significant percentage of its population took to drunkenness with an abandon that would have made the most fanatical Native American inebriate wince in shame.
In 1700, with 575,000 inhabitants, London was the largest metropolis in Europe. It was an amalgamation of two cities: London itself, the commercial capital comprising the square mile within the Roman walls, and Westminster, where the court and Parliament were based. The space in between was built over gradually, creating both slums and elegant squares. Affluence and poverty existed side by side in London, especially in its West End, where real estate was booming and mansions and tenements were being thrown up in the few remaining fields. The wealthy found themselves neighbors to laborers: “A Tallow Chandler shall front my Lord’s nice Venetian Window; and two or three naked Curriers [leather dressers] in their pits shall face a fine lady in her back closet, and disturb her spiritual thoughts.”
London was not just the largest, but probably also the most exciting city in the West. It sent ships to India, Finland, Zanzibar, Canada, New England, and the Caribbean, some for commodities, others for luxury goods. It was packed with places to drink, including pleasure gardens, theaters, and its traditional inns, alehouses, and taverns. The Tabard, from which Chaucer had launched his pilgrims, still brewed ale and rented rooms; the Boar’s Head, the favorite of Falstaff, still sold sack in Eastcheap. Such now-venerable institutions were augmented by a host of new hostelries, for the collective thirsts of Londoners seemed unquenchable. Beer had overtaken ale as the people’s choice, and the average English man, woman, and child got through seventy-five gallons of it each year.
The British prided themselves on their drinking. John Bull was born in 1712 from the pen of John Arbuthnot, and a penchant for inebriation was a part of his and the national character. Foreigners marveled at their consumption. A Swiss traveler wrote home: “Would you believe it, though water is to be had in abundance in London, and of fairly good quality, absolutely none is drunk? The lower classes, even the paupers, do not know what it is to quench their thirst with water. In this country nothing but beer is drunk. . . . It is said that more grain is consumed in England for making beer than for making bread.” The same correspondent also listed the kinds of brew that Londoners drank, which ranged from small beer at a penny a pot, to a new brew named porter, which was a “thick and strong beverage” as potent as wine, and cost threepence the pot.
This passion for alcohol was lampooned in The Spectator, a daily newspaper founded in 1711 and dedicated to “merriment with decency,” which chronicled contemporary manners and foibles in its pages. It documented the drinking preferences of various social classes in a series of articles on English clubs. Londoners rich and lowly were forming convivial associations—aristocrats and intellectuals patronized the Beefsteak and the Kit Cat; the Freemasons were a growing force among tradesmen. The Spectator added a few of its own invention, including the Everlasting Club, whose hundred members organized a duty rota so that the club was open for drinking 24/7, 365 days per annum. “By this means a Member of the Everlasting Club never wants Company; for tho’ he is not upon Duty himself, he is sure to find some who are; so that if he be disposed to take a Whet, a Nooning, an Evening’s Draught, or a Bottle after Midnight, he goes to the Club and finds a Knot of Friends to his Mind.” Over the century that the Everlasting was supposed to have been in existence, its members had “smoked fifty Tun of Tobacco; drank thirty thousand Butts of Ale, One thousand Hogsheads of Red Port, Two hundred Barrels of Brandy, and a Kilderkin of small Beer.”
Both British and foreign perceptions of their drinking habits were that they drank hard but could hold their liquor, and that drunkenness, though common, was a benign or comical condition. However, this bibulous idyll of clubs and alehouses, of red noses and good cheer, was wrecked in the 1720s by the appearance of a new kind of reckless and nihilistic drinking, centered on the consumption of gin. Gin was the English name for Dutch Genever, a distilled spirit flavored with juniper, which had been perfected in Holland around 1650 and introduced to England after the Glorious Revolution (1688), when William of Orange was placed on the throne and the Catholic James II ousted.
England had a glut of grain at the time—prices had collapsed after a series of plentiful harvests, to the detriment of England’s landowners. Since these comprised the voting class, and new King William owed his throne to them, measures were necessary to prop up their incomes. William had witnessed the phenomenal demand Genever could create for grain in his native Holland and hoped the same might occur in his new kingdom. An “Act for the Encouraging of the Distillation of Brandy and Spirits from Corn”21 was passed, which allowed anyone in England to distil alcohol using English cerea
ls, upon ten day’s notice to HM Excise and payment of a small fee.
The act was a great success, and stills sprang up all over the country. In 1710, the London Company of Distillers issued a celebratory pamphlet, which declared that “the Making of [spirits] from Malted Corn and other Materials, hath greatly increased, and been of service to the Publick, in regard to her Majesty’s Revenue, and the Landed Interest of Great Britain.” Not only did the new appetite for gin support the general price of corn, it also utilized the damaged grain that bakers and brewers would not buy, thus increasing farmers’ and landowners’ returns. This useful function encouraged Parliament in 1713 to make explicit the freedom of absolutely anyone to produce spirits: “Any person may distil . . . spirits from British Malt.” All sorts of people tried their hands, using facilities ranging from purpose-built copper stills to converted washtubs. Among them they produced a torrent of gin, which was sold from shops, houses, the crypts of churches and inside prisons, from kiosks, boats, wheelbarrows, baskets and bottles, and from stalls at public executions. In the London parish of St. Giles-in-the-Fields, whose fields were now slums, one house in every five retailed gin. Most of it was offered by the dram, or quarter pint. It was generally drunk neat and often downed in one. Gin was a cheap, and above all a quick, way of getting drunk. Why work your way through porter at three pence a pot when the same money would buy a pint of gin?
In 1700, the average English adult drank a third of a gallon of gin per annum. By 1723, statistics suggested that every man, woman, and child in London knocked back more than a pint of gin per head per week. This alarmingly high level of consumption generated shocking levels of drunkenness in the capital. Liquor shops were all over town: