by Iain Gately
When the troops reached the heartland of the revolt they met no opposition. Any who harbored Tinkerish leanings had fled into the woods or down the Mississippi to Spanish New Orleans. The army occupied itself with a show of force and in ensuring that people swore they would pay the whiskey excise. Its officers were impressed with the civilized state of Pittsburgh, where they had a pleasant time, spent, according to one account “in Company with a great number of Gentlemen of and belonging to different Volunteer Corps, in singing and Drinking of Brandy, & C.” Less than three weeks later the army marched home. Thirty-three prisoners, some of whom were merely witnesses, were hauled off to Philadelphia and paraded through its streets in triumph. Church bells rang, cannons were fired, and the ships in port dressed themselves in flags. As a coda to the campaign, President Washington set aside February 19, 1795, as a day of national thanksgiving. According to later conspiracy theorists, the Whiskey Rebellion could not have been a more perfect excuse for the federalists to increase their power.
The peaceful conclusion to the Whiskey Revolt coincided with a treaty with Spain that gave America the right to trade on the Mississippi River, and which opened a vast potential market to its western settlements. The Mississippi was the notional limit of America territory. It was a boundary, an inland coastline, which led to the Gulf of Mexico and thence, via international maritime trade, to the rest of the world. Its potential, however, hitherto had been unrealizable. Unlike similar giants such as the Amazon or the Nile, which broaden into deltas as they approach the sea, the Mississippi narrows toward its mouth, and this was guarded by the French/Spanish town of New Orleans. This redoubt of Mediterranean culture had developed in a kind of splendid isolation, and its inhabitants had evolved a unique society, whose mores, dress codes, and drinking habits were utterly different from those of their neighbors upriver.
Founded in 1718 by Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne, Sieur de Bienville, New Orleans was intended to be the principal port and first city of the French province of Louisiana. Some forty-odd years after this territory had been explored and claimed for France, it was decided to establish a colony there to exploit the gold mines and pearl fisheries it certainly must possess. A joint stock company was formed, colonists were collected from the houses of correction in Paris, and a small fleet was sent to settle an area several times larger than France itself. While Parisian financiers sat back and waited for their investments to bear fruit, their colonists ran into trouble. There was no gold, the pearls were bad, and the local Indians were belligerent, had acquired immunity to many European diseases, and had learned to use guns. Moreover, the site chosen for New Orleans was infested with venomous snakes, mosquitoes, and alligators. It flooded nearly every year, at unpredictable times, sometimes making it impossible to plant and at others drowning crops just before they were ripe. To these natural difficulties were added imported problems. The caliber of recruits for the new colony was considered low even by the standards of the age. The soldiers were weak, badly armed, and short: Only two of them out of a total of three hundred were more than five feet tall. The few women who had been forced to accompany them to America had been obtained from prisons or hospitals and were either immoral, unhealthy, or both. When Lamothe Cadillac, the first governor of the new province, was petitioned by one of his clergy to return any female Louisianan who behaved in an depraved manner to France, he refused. In his opinion, if he sent away “all the loose females, there will be no women left here at all, and this would not suit the views of the king or the inclinations of the people.”
Despite such unpromising material, New Orleans, in the style of Jamestown a century before, hung on. By 1743 it had a population of nearly two thousand, including several hundred African slaves. In the same year it received a glamorous new governor, the Marquis de Vaudreuil, who introduced, through personal example, the manners, dress sense, love of pageant, and public corruption that have characterized the city ever since. Among other abuses of power, he allowed the military to corner the alcohol market, so that, for a few years, it resembled a petit Rum Regiment. Its officers wandered the streets in dressing gowns and nightcaps, sometimes still drunk from the night before. By 1751, the town had become so decadent that even its money was counterfeit and the languid governor was prompted into action. He instituted a strict criminal code and gave New Orleans its first licensing laws. There were to be six legal taverns, which were not permitted to trade on Sundays, holy days, or after nine in the evenings, and which were prohibited from serving soldiers, Indians, or slaves. In addition, two cantines, or liquor shops, were created for the benefit of the soldiers, from which they might purchase wine, brandy, and rum, at the discretion of their commanding officer. These laws were rather honored in the breach than the observance. Unlicensed cabarets (informal drinking houses) proliferated, and did a brisk trade in the sultry summer nights.
In 1763, as part of a post-Seven Years’ War global reshuffle of European possessions, New Orleans became Spanish. Its first governor was Don Alexander O’Reilly, an Irishman who had distinguished himself in the military service of the king of Spain. O’Reilly arrived accompanied by a fleet of twenty-four warships and imposed stringent new laws and taxes: It was death to insult the Virgin Mary in New Orleans, and all taverns, cabarets, billiards halls, ballrooms, and cafés had to buy licenses. The variety and number of drinking establishments the city possessed is indicative of the negligible influence that de Vaudreuil’s laws had had. The Spanish rebuilt what is now the French Quarter, in their usual colonial style, and added a monumental church to the town. Scarcely had they beautified the place than France took it back, as part of the spoils of the Napoleonic wars. Three years later, in 1803, Napoleon sold it and Louisiana to America for fifteen million dollars, or roughly three cents per acre.
At last, the Mississippi was open, without limitations, to American trade. The pent-up demand was immense. Even without the Louisiana purchase, which doubled the official size of the United States, the country had been expanding at a breakneck rate. Not only did its territory grow but also its population: Whereas in 1800 there had been 5,308,843 Americans, by 1810 there were 7,239,881, and in 1820, 9,638,453. In the same period of time, Ohio, Louisiana, Indiana, Mississippi, Illinois, Alabama, and Missouri (1821) had been added to the union. American territory had been extended further through the occupation of Spanish-owned Florida by General Andrew Jackson, and the acquisition via battle and treaty of substantial Indian lands. These new holdings were sold or given to anyone white who wanted them. By the standards of any historical civilization before, or since, the ease of acquiring ownership of land was extraordinary. To Europeans of the time, it was an opportunity that nothing in their history had prepared them for. They took it in their hundreds of thousands and fed the western flow into new states.
The drive west was a matter of amazement to dispassionate observers, who found it strange that immigrants would bypass land that was cheap and scantily settled, by European standards, in favor of a wilderness. A French professor advanced the theory that this was because “man, like the squirrel in a cage, is irresistibly impelled to step westward by reason of the earth’s rotation eastward.” By 1825 three million Americans had migrated west of the Alleghenies. Together they generated a considerable surplus—of whiskey, tobacco, flour, hogs, and beef; and the forests that they cleared to grow these things produced vast quantities of lumber. The principal outlet for these commodities was New Orleans.
An extraordinary variety of craft took to the Mississippi, carrying the products of the western states to their market. Since this was downstream, no motive power was required for the outward journey. The river did the work—in theory—for its currents were treacherous and dragged boats onto sandbanks or over snags that tore them open. People built rafts, flatboats, keelboats, longhorns, pirogues, and floated themselves and their goods down the Mississippi. Some settled en route, but most did their business in New Orleans, sold their boats for firewood, then traveled home by land. Prior to steam power,
taking a boat back upriver was slow work. Craft had to be punted, towed, or winched, five hundred feet at a time, by their crews. The return journey could take five months.
As traffic on the river increased, the men who steered the boats downstream and dragged them back against the current evolved into a distinct class, renowned for their physical strength and their hard drinking and brawling both ashore and afloat. The largest river craft carried a hundred crew, who received free access to whiskey as part of their wages. Their favorite was Monongahela rye, aka Nongela, and every boat kept a keg of this ambrosia on its deck, with a tin cup attached by a chain, so that crew members might refresh themselves as they felt the need. After boozing, their principal recreation was fighting, which they developed into a highly ritual pursuit, at least in the preliminaries to combat. Challengers took it in turns to dance and boast of their prowess, prior to exchanging blows, kicks, bites, head butts, and knife wounds. Many of them were missing ears, eyes, or noses from prior fights. The champion of each boat wore a red turkey feather in his cap, which entitled him to fight similar paragons. They also fought anyone ashore who would take them on, but these were few.
When the boatmen terminated their downstream trip in Dixie (their nickname for New Orleans, after the Creole slang for a ten-dollar note), their wants were simple—drink, sex, and fighting, in no particular order. These were catered for in an area known as the Swamp, after the terrain in which it was situated. The Swamp was good value: “For a picayune (six cents) a man could get a drink, a whore, and a bed for the night.” It was also, literally, lawless. For the first few decades of its existence, convention, or common sense, dictated that no policeman would enter the area. It averaged half a dozen murders per week. The bodies were thrown into ditches, or left where they fell in bars, for the amusement of customers. The most infamous establishment in the Swamp was the House of Rest for Weary Boatmen, a gambling joint where anyone who won too much was killed and left to rot in situ as a reminder of the fickle nature of fortune.
On occasions, the boatmen practiced their Nongela-fueled mayhem beyond the Swamp and terrorized the saner parts of New Orleans. In 1818, for example, several crews banded together and destroyed Gaetano’s Circus, which had been a popular family attraction and a fixture of the town since 1804. The attack commenced midperformance. The boatmen were armed with weapons they had captured from the town’s constables en route; gentlemen in the crowd fought back with the sword sticks they carried from habit. The river-men won the day, destroyed the circus ring and its tiers of seats, and as the pièce de résistance, Bill Sedley, a champion fighter with several red feathers in his cap, clubbed its tame tiger and pet bison to death.
The drinking habits of the permanent residents of New Orleans were strikingly different from those of the boatmen. The example set by the elegant Marquis de Vaudreuil was still followed, and while both France and Spain had failed to turn the city into an economic powerhouse, they had introduced a class system, ballroom dancing, opera, theater, and similar trappings of European civilization. Moreover, the city possessed a substantial population of free colored people, who made a significant and vibrant contribution to its culture. The diversity of New Orleans was further increased by the arrival in 1810 of ten thousand Santo Domingans, refugees from slave revolts at home, and latterly Cuba, who were fanatics for etiquette and ostentation.
This splendid mixture of citizens, who looked to France or Spain rather than New England for their fashions, and who thought dressing up and going out to be preferable to hacking themselves farms out of the wilderness, did their drinking in cafés, ballrooms, and other such civilized meeting places, some of which are still extant. The Absinthe House, in operation from 1826 onward, as its name suggests specialized in the new French spirit and long, cooling drinks. The Café des Émigrés was the haunt of the Santo Domingans and other glamorous exiles. It was famous for a cordial called le petit gouave. In addition to such legendary watering holes, New Orleans possessed a series of exchanges—giant bars-cum-auction-houses, where the businessmen of the town, and its politicians and newspaper editors, assembled every day. The most venerable of these institutions was Malpero’s Exchange, renamed Hewlett’s Exchange in 1838. Its principal competitor as a place to do business was the City Exchange, which opened not long after. This was a giant double-storied building with a central rotunda and ballrooms on the second floor. Gumbo, the traditional dish of New Orleans, is said to have been invented in its kitchens; numerous cocktails, including the Crusta and Santini’s Pousse-Café, were created behind its bar. It was also responsible for the institution of the free lunch—whereby food was given for nothing to anyone who bought a drink.
By the 1820s, New Orleans was exporting its elegant style of consumption upriver—a counterculture advancing against the current of whiskey and fighting. This was achieved via steamboats, which commenced operation in 1811. The first example was built from the keel up in Pittsburgh and was named the New Orleans after her intended destination. She was an experiment, albeit on a grand scale—148 feet long, capable of carrying seventy-five passengers and twice as many tons of freight. Her maiden voyage commenced on October 20, 1811. The very same week a massive earthquake hit Louisiana, reversing the flow of the Mississippi. This event was interpreted as an act of revulsion by the Father of All Waters, as the river was known to the Indian tribes who had lived along its banks, against the appearance of a mechanical vessel upon its surface.
The New Orleans completed her maiden voyage to her namesake on January 12, 1812. She sank on her fourth trip, to the satisfaction of her critics, but her limited success had set an example others rushed to follow. By 1820, 60 steamers were in service on the Mississippi; by 1834, 230. While their design and journey times improved greatly over the period, their safety record remained woeful. In consequence, the superstructures of the boats were as flimsy as stage props, and equally gaudy. They were expected to have short lifespans—on average only three years—and they were built to be pretty rather than sturdy. They did not have to face the ocean and no hull of the time could withstand the force of an exploding boiler, so instead of investing in seaworthiness, competing builders focused on creature comforts. The results were floating versions of the palatial exchanges in New Orleans. They were the most complicated and aesthetic structures that Americans born along the riverbank had ever seen.
Their interiors were as fanciful as their exteriors. Their principal feature was a long slim saloon, elliptical in shape, with cabins around its perimeter. Here, from a man intimately familiar with Mississippi steamboats, is a description of the interior of a typical example: “She was as clean and dainty as a drawing room; when I looked down her long gilded saloon, it was like gazing through a splendid tunnel; she had an oil painting, by some gifted sign-painter, on every stateroom door; she glittered with no end of prism fringed chandeliers; the clerk’s office was elegant, the bar was marvelous, and the barkeeper had been barbered and upholstered at incredible cost.” The barkeepers on steamboats were usually freelance. They rented their position and made themselves rich by joining forces with professional gamblers, who, alongside exploding boilers and collisions with sandbanks, were the principal source of entertainment onboard. Indeed, the reputation of a boat was determined in part by the length of its drinks list, which could extend to a dozen or more types of cocktail, domestic and imported spirits, and vintage wines. These potions served to while away the monotony of a long river journey and to tempt passengers into gambling.
Conditions on the main deck of these boats below their salons, where most immigrants traveled together with their luggage and livestock, were primitive in contrast, and the only beverages were whiskey and river water. The latter, despite being laden with sediment, had its fans, as the following conversation from a traveler’s journal illustrates. The writer, an easterner, has just been offered a glassful of the Mississippi:
As thirsty as I was, I hesitated to drink the thick muddy water, for while standing in our tumblers, a
sediment is precipitated of half an inch. Oh, how I longed for a draft of cool spring water, or a lump of Rockland lake ice! While drinking, one of the ladies advanced for the same purpose.
“Dear me! What insipid water!” she said. “It has been standing too long. I like it right thick.”
I looked at her in surprise. “Do you prefer it muddy to clear?” I asked.
“Certainly I do,” she replied. “I like the sweet clayey taste, and when it settles it is insipid. Here, Juno!” calling to the black chambermaid who was busy ironing, “Get me some water fresh out of the river, with the true Mississippi relish.”
Water drinking was on the rise throughout the United States in the first quarter of the nineteenth century. Piped water had appeared in some cities, following the example of Philadelphia, which had introduced the resource in 1799. Such municipal munificence was rewarded with suspicion: The Philadelphians retained a colonial-era prejudice against water and cautioned newcomers that it was a killer, especially if the drinker gulped it down. According to a French visitor to the city, handbills were distributed each summer to alert people to its dangers: “Strangers especially are warned either to drink grog or to add a little wine or some other spirituous liquor to their water. People are urged to throw cold water on the faces of those suffering from water drinking, and bleeding is also suggested. Sometimes notices are placed on the pumps with the words: ‘Death to him who drinks quickly.’”