Drink

by Iain Gately

  The lethal reputation of water stands in contrast to the blessings alcohol was believed to bestow upon the human frame throughout America. From Rhode Island to New Orleans, Americans doctored themselves with alcohol, and were prescribed it by their physicians, to treat ailments ranging from bad breath to weak hearts. The new flood of immigrants from Europe, many of whom were unused to the dramatic swings in temperature between American summers and winters, considered alcohol to be absolutely necessary to the process of acclimatization and drank as a defense against the weather, whether it was too hot or too cold. Sufferers of sunstroke and hypothermia alike were treated with a good stiff drink. Moreover, alcohol was often the principal ingredient of American folk remedies. This new species of cure, concocted to replace the British patent medicines that had been popular before independence, kept many invalids drunk. Those who got the eyaws from gulping their medication could avail themselves of further folk remedies intended to cure the condition. The following example, from Kentucky, intended to be consumed in a single draft, probably worked its magic by fright alone:

  Recipte for the Eyaws:

  take 1 pint of hogs Lard

  1 handfull of earth worms

  1 handfull of Tobacco

  4 pods of Red pepper

  1 spunfull of Black pepper

  1 Race of Ginger

  Stew them well together, & when Applied mix Sum Sperits . . . with it

  “Sperits” dominated early nineteenth-century American drinking. As the country grew, and new states meshed with old, they were still the best way of carrying wealth from place to place, or of concentrating the grain harvest on an isolated homestead in a form that would improve in value with age. The volume of production was stupendous. In 1810 federal statistics show that the six main whiskey-producing states together distilled twice as many gallons of whiskey per annum as there were people in America. Ten years later, the notional per capita consumption had risen to more than five gallons per head per annum. According to a later analysis of who was doing the tippling, “Nine million women and children drank twelve million gallons” and three million men accounted for the other sixty million—i.e., by 1829 the average American metropolitan male was drinking as much hard liquor as the average Londoner at the height of the gin craze. If statistics could predict the effect of drink on a population, by rights Americans should have been languishing en masse in emaciated heaps, their birthrate and life expectancy should have collapsed, and crime should have exploded.

  That they continued to breed and to enjoy long, healthy, and prosperous lives is explained in part by the fact that they were substituting spirits for other types of alcoholic beverage. Beer, wine, and cider all lost ground to whiskey. The numbers for beer are instructive: In 1810, the same year that the average American man, woman, and child downed sixteen pints of whiskey, they drank only eight pints of beer. According to Treasury figures, America contained a mere 132 breweries, concentrated in Pennsylvania, New York, and Ohio, which together produced the modest total of 185,000 barrels, which was less than any single one of the five largest breweries in London.

  The American focus on spirits led to an explosion of creativity in the manner in which they were drunk. The cocktail was invented in the United States. Its appearance in the lexicon may be traced to the May 6, 1806, edition of a New York newspaper, The Balance and Columbian Repository, which published the drinks bill of a political candidate. The bill included “25 [glasses] cock-tail.” The next week, in response to a letter from a curious reader, the paper’s editor printed a clarification: “Cock tail, then, is a stimulating liquor, composed of spirits of any kind, sugar water, and bitters . . . it is supposed to be an excellent electioneering potion inasmuch as it renders the heart stout and bold, at the same time that it fuddles the head.” Cocktails were ideal for those who could not stomach whiskey solo in the morning. In 1822, breakfast in Kentucky was said to consist of “three cocktails and a chaw of terbacka.”

  Kentuckians were not the only Americans to start the day with spirits. Indeed, the entire nation was acquiring a reputation for dawn-till-dusk tippling. This trend toward the hard stuff had been detected in its infancy by President Jefferson, who did not wish to see his country become a nation of sots. His years in France, and his love for its wines (he bought over twenty thousand bottles for the use of himself and future presidents), had convinced him that Americans would be better people if they drank vintages instead of spirits. To this end, he argued for reduced duties on imported wines and set out on a quest for an American substitute. Despite sequential setbacks, he never gave up hope that some vigorous native vine might be capable of producing a palatable drink. His persistence is testament to his strength of character: He had watched as the vines he had selected in France, shipped over the Atlantic, and planted in the most promising soil on his own land had died without any clear cause—yet had remained optimistic. He decided that the solution lay in careful hybridizing of native vines. His first all-American hope was the scuppernong of North Carolina. It had the potential, he believed, to be “distinguished on the best tables of Europe, for its fine aroma, and chrystalline transparence.” He regretted, however, that the “aroma, in most of the samples I have seen, has been entirely submerged in brandy.” Sadly, without added brandy, scuppernong was undrinkable. Its grapes gave a tang to wine that experts describe as “foxy.”31

  Whether fortified or not, the crystalline scuppernong did not succeed in weaning Americans off their cocktails. Nor did Jefferson managed to persuade Congress to lower import duties on wine. A decade after first advocating the latter cause, he was still pleading the case. However, in 1818, the legislature appeared to be ready to resolve the matter in his favor. In order to force judgment Jefferson set out his moral and fiscal arguments side by side: Heavy duties on wine were “a prohibition of its use to the middling class of our citizens, and a condemnation of them to the poison of whiskey, which is desolating their houses. No nation is drunken where wine is cheap; and none sober, where the dearness of wine substitutes ardent spirits as the common beverage. Wine is, in truth, the only antidote to the bane of whiskey.”

  Jefferson was not alone in calling attention to the dangers posed by the rise in whiskey drinking. The Philadelphia College of Physicians, under Dr. Benjamin Rush, a signatory to the Declaration of Independence, had advocated punitive duties on whiskey during the taxation debates in Congress in 1791. Rush considered spirits to be qualitatively different from other kinds of alcoholic beverage and, like Jefferson, was alarmed that Americans were drinking them in preference to beer and wine. When his attempts to win Congress over to his point of view failed, he decided that the only way to battle spirits was by enlisting religion in the fight and addressing “the heads and governing bodies of all the churches in America upon the subject.”

  To this end, he gathered together a series of articles he had written on the matter into a tract entitled an Essay on the Effects of Ardent Spirits upon the Human Constitution, which was published in 1794 and reissued continuously till 1804, by which time its message had begun to take root. The tract was graced with a pictorial representation of the benefits and dangers of alcohol, captioned “A Moral and Physical Thermometer,” which divided the world of drinking into two categories—Temperance and Intemperance. Daringly for the time, it suggested that water drinking was conducive to “Health and Wealth.” The thermometer evoked Dante in its numerology, setting out, in the temperance section, seven ranks of virtue and, on the intemperance scale, seven descending levels of hell. True to its title, the physical as well as moral consequences of consuming anything more potent than strong beer or wine were provided and, if they were accurate observations of drinkers at that time, suggested that most Americans suffered from “tremors of the hands in the morning, puking, bloatedness, red noses, jaundice, dropsy, and epilepsy.”

  Rush’s thermometer

  The accompanying essay, despite being styled as a calm appeal to the reason of its readers, was alarmist in its ton
e and hyperbolic in its phrasing: “Were it possible for me to speak with a voice so loud as to be heard from the river St. Croix to the remotest shores of the Mississippi . . . I would say, ‘Friends and fellow citizens! avoid the habitual use of those seducing liquors! ’” Rush proposed that “to avert this evil,” Americans should “unite and besiege the general and state governments with petitions to limit the number of taverns—to impose heavy duties upon ardent spirits—to inflict a mark of disgrace or temporary abridgement of some civil right upon every man convicted of drunkenness; and finally to secure the property of habitual drunkards, for the benefit of their families, by placing it in the hands of trustees appointed for that purpose by a court of justice.”

  In the western states, where the excise was considered an abridgement too far of civil rights, and ardent spirits were the staple drink, his message fell on deaf ears. In the East, however, where the old Puritan disapproval of drunkenness was alive and well, he found listeners and even disciples. In 1805, America received its first temperance sermon from the lips of Reverend Ebenezer Porter in Washington, Connecticut. His text was Isaiah 5:11: “Woe unto them that rise up early in the morning, that they may follow strong drink; that continue until night, till wine inflame them.” According to the Reverend Porter, the prophet Isaiah had had America in mind when he issued his warning to the Israelites. Moreover, “this infant country has reached a maturity in this shameful vice which is without parallel in the history of the world. Probably no nation, ancient or modern, in proportion to its whole population, ever had so many male and female drunkards as this. Certainly in no other have the means of intoxication been procured with so much faculty and used with so little restraint by all sorts of people.” It is important to note that, notwithstanding the hyperbole, Porter was advocating temperance with a small t—he did not expect his congregation to give up drink entirely, merely to refrain from spirits and inebriation.

  Words were followed by deeds: In 1808, the first American temperance society “with a Constitution and by-laws organized for the specific purpose of promoting temperance” appeared. The little town of Moreau, in Saratoga County, New York, had the honor of its birth; Dr. Billy J. Clark, the distinction of paternity. Clark had read Rush, had witnessed the deleterious effects of whiskey drinking on his fellow Moreauvians, and, after wrestling with his conscience in front of a fellow divine one stormy night, felt called to act. He drew up a set of articles and persuaded a number of his flock to subscribe to them. Article IV set out the ground rules of the new society:

  No member shall drink rum, gin, whiskey, wine, or any distilled spirits, or compositions of the same, or any of them, except by advice of a physician, or in case of actual disease; also, excepting wine at public dinners, under a penalty of 25 cents; provided that this article shall not infringe any religious ordinance.

  The society anticipated disobedience in its members. A second section of its articles imposed a penalty of fifty cents on any member found intoxicated, and Article XI created an obligation to inform on miscreants. The society held its inaugural meeting on August 25, 1808, and elected Dr. Rush as an honorary member.

  18 ROMANTIC DRINKING

  Gie him strong drink until he wink,

  That’s sinking in despair;

  An’ liquor guid to fire his bluid,

  That’s pressed wi’ grief an’ care:

  There let him booze an’ deep carouse,

  Wi’ bumpers flowing o’er,

  Till he forgets his loves or debts,

  An minds his briefs no more

  —Robert Burns “Solomon’s Proverbs,” xxxi, 6,7

  The steamboats that plied their way up and down the Father of Waters might have served as a metaphor for the United States in the first part of the nineteenth century—progress and optimism rushing headlong through the wilderness, bearing an ark’s worth of livestock and provisions, and a complete spectrum of humanity—planters, preachers, slaves, gamblers, land speculators, merchants, each on a personal mission to occupy and tame the new land. The steamboats were, moreover, representative of progress, in the sense of the advance of technology, and part and parcel of the Industrial Revolution, which had been gathering momentum as the century unrolled.

  Industry had begun its forward march in England in the 1780s, bringing significant changes to not only naval architecture but also to the production of alcoholic beverages, beer in particular. Breweries were among the earliest modern industrial enterprises. As had been evident since medieval times, there were economies of scale to brewing: The bigger the brew kettle, the more could be made in one go without having to increase the workforce. Moreover, machinery might replace the workhorses which, harnessed to turn-mills, provided most of the mechanical power of the average British brewery. As a consequence, the industry was quick to embrace the age of steam. In 1784, the Red Lion Brewhouse in Wapping installed the first steam engine to be used in brewing, coincidentally the first such device in London. This four-horsepower model, built by Boulton & Watt, was used to grind malt and to pump beer between vats. Within five years every other major London brewer had followed suit.

  Improved efficiency, and larger brew kettles, resulted in the production of heroic quantities of beer. This was fermented and matured in immense vats, some of which had a capacity of a million or more pints. They were built from plate iron, encircled with cast iron hoops, and resembled giant metal firkins. Engravings from the period, usually with a diminutive man at their base standing atop a ladder, convey a sense of industry triumphant. One such behemoth, at the Meaux Brewery near Tottenham Court Road in London, was the cause of an early and sensational industrial accident. On October 17, 1814, the twenty-two-foot-tall vessel began to shed its hoops. Shortly afterward, it burst, releasing a tsunami of porter, which flooded the cellars of the surrounding slums, killing eight women and children and demolishing several houses.

  In time, however, the Meaux Brewery disaster, when set against the growing casualty register of industrial accidents, appeared unremarkable. Moreover, the loss of a few slum dwellings was soon eclipsed by the wholesale destruction of areas of great natural beauty in the name of progress. People were horrified as much as thrilled by the deforestation and pollution that accompanied the Industrial Revolution, and by the sound of machinery turning, stamping, grinding, day and night. In consequence, a counterculture arose—the Romantic Movement—which lamented progress rather than celebrated it. The poets, philosophers, and painters who marched under its banner elevated the environment over engineering, inspiration above patient endeavor, and valued the impulsive behavior of children more than the pedantic logic of adults. Romantic thinking had an important influence on people’s perception of alcohol, why they drank it, and what they drank. Certain beverages became popular for their associations as much as for their strength, taste, or effects, and advances made in manufacture, packaging, and distribution by evil industrialization enableddrinkers to indulge their fancies. Thus a Parisian might sip on Scottish whisky and imagine himself to be roaming heather-covered moors, or an English poet drown himself in French wine in order to inspire dreams of the “warm, blushing south.” Moreover, there were clear parallels between Romantic values and Bacchic values. Untamed landscapes, the wild-child god, ecstatic self-expression, and other elements of the legend of Dionysus were also part of the Romantic canon.

  The roots of Romanticism can be traced to France and Germany. In France, the Swiss émigré Jean-Jacques Rousseau championed the natural goodness of humanity. His two popular romantic novels, Julie, or the New Heloise (1761) and Emile, or on Education (1762), advocated rustic simplicity, the celebration of mountain scenery, and the superiority of intuition to discipline, especially in the fields of religion and learning. In Germany, the early work of the polymath Johann Wolfgang Goethe, in particular The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), likewise praised nature and elevated emotion above reason. Its sensitive, passionate hero compares his excitability to inebriation and upbraids his contemporaries for being
boring and staid: “I have been drunk more than once, and my passion often borders on madness, and I regret neither. Because, in my own way, I have learned to understand that all exceptional people who have created something great, something that seemed impossible, have to be decried as drunkards or madmen. And I find it intolerable, even in our daily life, to hear it said of almost everyone who manages to do something that is free, noble, and unexpected: He is a drunkard, he is a fool. They should be ashamed of themselves, all these sober people!”

  Werther’s favorite reading was Fragments of Ancient Poetry or The Poems of Ossian (1760) by James Macpherson. The verses it contained, which sang of mythical Scottish heroes tearing up and down mountains with their deerhounds, falling in love with blondes, and shedding each other’s blood in abandon, struck a chord throughout northern Europe. They took the reader away from the artificial manners and obsession with reason that prevailed around them to a landscape where vigor and passion ruled. The Scottish Highlands, in which these fantasies were set, became fixed in minds all over Europe as the ideal romantic landscape. The worship of things Scottish extended to its drinks, which were presumed to be the uisge-beatha of the Highland clans, rather than the claret that had been the favorite of the heroes of the Scottish enlightenment. Uisge-beatha (“whisky” in Gaelic) was thought to contribute to the poetic physiques typical of the people who inhabited the Highlands, an illusion corroborated by an exciseman in the region, writing before Ossian was published: “The ruddy complexion, nimbleness, and strength of these people is not owing to water drinking but to the aqua vitae, a malt spirit which serves both for victual and drink.”