by Iain Gately
Very good in its way
Is the Verzenay
Or the Sillery soft and creamy;
But Catawba wine,
Has a taste more divine,
More dulcet, delicious, and dreamy.
While Dickens passed through Cincinnati, which he loved (and where he probably met Longworth among its “intelligent, courteous, and agreeable” society), rather than praising its wine in his American Notes, he remembered the city with a description of a temperance rally. Although associated through his writing with the same cause in Britain, Dickens chose to emphasize the comical aspects of the marchers and their “banners out of number.” His favorite was one portraying “a temperate man with ‘considerable of a hatchet’ (as the standard-bearer would probably have said), aiming a deadly blow at a serpent which was apparently about to spring upon him from the top of a barrel of spirits.” He was also captivated by the appearance of “a huge allegorical device, borne among the ship-carpenters, on one side whereof the steamboat Alcohol was represented bursting her boiler and exploding with a great crash, while upon the other, the good ship Temperance sailed away with a fair wind, to the heart’s content of the captain, crew, and passengers.”
Dickens had little time for the American antialcohol movement. Although he spent much of his tour visiting orphanages, lunatic asylums, and other benevolent institutions, he did not honor any of the thriving temperance societies with his company. In retrospect, this neglect was surprising, for temperance was fast becoming the most popular issue in the United States. Its principal activist organization, the American Temperance Society (ATS), claimed one and a half million members by the time of Dickens’s visit. The ATS promoted temperance in the sense of abstinence. In 1836 it had published research conducted by the chemist William Brande that proved, as Livesey had demonstrated with his Malt Lecture, that weak drinks, in this case wine, contained the same intoxicating substance as whiskey: “The man who drinks wine, drinks alcohol, as really as the man who drinks distilled liquor; and if he drinks his wine clear, and his distilled liquor mixed with water, he may drink quite as much alcohol in one case as in the other.”
The news that wine was an ardent spirit in disguise caused consternation in the ranks of temperate Americans, most of whom had been recruited to the cause through their churches. Surely Jesus had not intended his disciples to celebrate his divinity with hard liquor? Many answered this question in the negative and supported their decision by questioning traditional interpretations of the use, and abuse, of wine in the Scriptures. They found themselves on shaky ground. From the days of Noah, the place of wine in Judeo-Christian societies had been a magnificent one, buttressed by divine associations. To rid Christianity of alcohol was a daunting challenge in revisionism. What, for example, about the Eucharist? While most of the sects in America had Protestant roots, and did not believe in the actual transubstantiation of communion wine, it was still served in numerous chapels throughout the country, mocking, as it were, the supposed compatibility of teetotalism and Christianity. Moreover, the Good Book was full of positive thoughts about wine. Of 212 mentions in the Old Testament, the vast majority speak well of “the gift of God.” The fact, however, that wine occasionally received a prophet’s curse gave hope to the temperance lobby. The Bible was reexamined by Moses Stuart in 1840, and he discovered that wine always meant the “liquid fruit of the vine,” i.e., unfermented grape juice, on the occasions when it was referred to as a blessing from heaven; whereas when it appeared as Satan’s potion and rendered kings or patriarchs unconscious, it meant alcoholic wine.
These imaginative glosses on the Word of the Lord provoked a bitter debate. Dr. John Maclean, professor of ancient languages at the College of New Jersey, took up his pen against revisionism in an 1841 essay, “Bacchus and Anti-Bacchus.” It was not merely bad scholarship, he argued, to pretend that the Jesus had not meant alcoholic wine when he made it “the symbol of his shed blood, in the most sacred rite of his holy religion” and commanded “all his disciples to drink of it in remembrance of him” but also bad theology. Despite such principled and erudite opposition, some of the so-called New School Presbyterians switched to nonalcoholic juice of the fruit of the vine for divine service. Together, they created sufficient demand to constitute a target market for entrepreneurs, who invented and promoted tailor-made products with which they might perform their rites. In 1840, for example, The Charleston Observer ran an advertisement from Daniel Pomeroy of New York, who offered unfermented grape syrup, guaranteed to remain free of alcohol, for sale to any New School temperates who wished to stay dry in the house of God.
Interestingly, the debate was most intense in Pennsylvania and Kentucky, where temperance flourished at a rate that would have had the Whiskey Boys of 1794 spinning in their graves. In these former frontier states, in whose creation booze had played so central a role, not only was sacramental wine a controversial issue, but so was whether people who sold or manufactured any sort of alcoholic drink could be acknowledged as Christians at all. No, said the synod of Pittsburgh in 1841, and anyone who traded in intoxicating beverages should be excommunicated from its congregation. This scorched-earth approach was opposed by William L. Breckinridge, pastor of the First Presbyterian Church in Louisville, who pointed out that biblical lands in recorded history had never produced alcohol-free wine. After adding that Jesus Christ had never forbidden or even criticized drinking per se in any version of the Bible yet published, he concluded “either that we live in a very enlightened age, or that all this is profane and blasphemous irreverence toward the Son of God.”
While American divines grappled with the theological challenges of abstinence, the nation’s drinkers took up the cudgel against alcohol and beat themselves vigorously. They were inspired by the example of half a dozen Baltimore barflies, who had attended a local temperance meeting to laugh but had left as converts. These proceeded to found the Washington Temperance Society, named in honor of America’s first president, who had led the country to independence from a monarch, and whose spirit they wished to imitate by freeing the United States from the rule of King Alcohol. The Washingtonians, as they styled themselves, carried the parallel further in a manifesto published in 1841, which parodied the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident;—that all men are created temperate; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain natural and innocent desires; that among these are appetites for COLD WATER and the pursuit of happiness!”
Alongside issuing revolutionary propaganda, the Washingtonians staged confessional meetings like those of the northern British teetotalers, at which reformed drinkers would trumpet their prior degradation and present salvation, and which were a novelty in America. While some commentators found their antics disgusting and labeled them as a “scurrilous army of ditch-delivered reformed drunkards (whose glory was in their shame),” their melodramatic assemblies were immensely popular. Within a year, their membership numbered one hundred thousand, and by 1843 there were half a million Washingtonians, 37 whose leaders were pan-American celebrities. Principal among these was John Bartholomew Gough, a former actor and drunkard, who was renowned for delivering gruesome speeches about inebriates ruining themselves and hurting others. One of his favorite topics was the withdrawal symptoms suffered by alcoholics, which he would demonstrate as he described them: “Did you ever see a man in delirium tremens, biting his tongue until his mouth was filled with blood, the foam on his lips, the big drops on his brow? Did you ever hear him burst out in blasphemy which curdled your blood, and see him beat his face in wild fury?”
Despite its immense popularity, the Washingtonian movement proved short-lived. Away from the excitement and fervor of its meetings, many converts to abstinence relapsed, including Gough, who was discovered dead drunk in a brothel in New York after a weeklong binge. Although Gough tried to paint himself as a victim, claiming that his cherry soda had been spiked with drugs, his authority was diminished and the torch of abstinence passed b
ack to the ATS. The latter was joined in its fight against alcohol by a number of new organizations, including the American Temperance Union (ATU) and the Sons of Temperance.38 While these eschewed theatrical or confessional meetings, they nonetheless encouraged melodrama in temperance writing. The ATU resolved to use works of fiction in the battle against alcohol in 1836, and within a decade temperance had become a stand-alone literary genre. The works published in the field fell into two categories: propaganda, such as the Good Boys’ and Girls’ Alphabet (Philadelphia, 1841), whose readers were taught to hate inebriates via “D is for Drunkard”; and books with genuine commercial appeal. It was the age of penny dreadful newspapers, which focused on true stories of violent crime, and accounts of the sordid activities of drunkards could tap into the same market, provided that they were sufficiently gruesome in their details. The Glass; or The Trials of Helen More. A Thrilling Temperance Tale, by Maria Lamas (1849), is an exemplar of the commercial variety of temperance writing. It features (a rarity) a female alcoholic who shuts her son in a closet while she goes out on a spree and returns to find that he has eaten himself alive: “I unlocked the clothes room door, and there—oh! there bathed in his blood, lay the mangled corpse of my child—murdered by his mother. There he lay, poor slaughtered innocent! starved! starved! starved! His left arm gnawed to the bone—gnawed till the artery had been severed, and he had bled to death.”
When temperance societies found they could promote their version of moral ascendancy and make money at the same time, they commissioned both established and up-and-coming authors to create for them. The Washingtonians, for example, in their glory years, paid Walt Whitman to write Franklin Evans or, the Inebriate—whose motto was: “Within that cup there lurks a curse.” The result was a convoluted tale of drunkenness, Indian wars, and miscegenation, whose orphan hero was redeemed by its sponsors. It had, however, hints of De Quincey, including incitements to voyeurism and flaunting of wounds, in its confessional style of narrative, perhaps because (so Whitman claimed) it had been completed “in three days for money under the influence of alcohol.”
The flood of temperance writing resulted in a trickle of new ideas in literature. The psychopathic inebriate became a stock-in-trade character, especially for writers in the gothic style. This creature was an altogether more complex type than the bumbling and parasitical individual depicted by Dickens in his groundbreaking “The Drunkard’s Death.” Active rather than passive, prone to spectacular hallucinations when not drinking, the improved stereotype had wonderful potential. He could kill, go mad, rape his infant daughter(s), repent, suffer the anguish of guilt, digress and forget himself, relapse, and die, shaking, in a maelstrom of nightmares, all in the same book. The promise of such a fictional individual was realized by Edgar Allan Poe in “The Black Cat,” whose narrator, addressing the reader from the shade of the gallows, describes the sequence of events that will terminate with his imminent execution. While the plot is ridiculous, the characterization is spectacular: The narrator is a psychopath as well as a drunkard, who murders his pets and feeds his rage with liquor.
Poe knew his business when writing about inebriates. He was as famous, in his lifetime, for his drinking as his composition. Not even his opium addiction could save him from a drunkard’s death, around which there remains a mystery similar to those in his best stories. Like the Washingtonian Gough, he vanished for five days, at the end of which period he was found drunk, disheveled, and sick. He died before he sobered up. A theoretical solution to the mystery has Poe captured by the agents of a political party, forced to drink whiskey, then compelled to make multiple votes for their candidate, day after day, until he collapsed, but this was only the most probable of many conjectures.
During the forty years that Poe had lived, American temperance had evolved from a marginal activity practiced by a handful of eccentrics to a mainstream political cause. In addition to indulging in biblical revisionism, and introducing monstrous dipsomaniacs39 to American fiction, the country’s temperance organizations had taken advantage of the federal nature of the United States to propose legislation against drink at the state level. Early victories made them bold. In 1838 they pressured Maine into passing a Fifteen-Gallon Law, so-called because it prohibited the sale of ardent spirits in any lesser quantity. This tactic—which aimed to squeeze out small retailers and casual tipplers by putting strong drink beyond the reach of their purses—had been tried before in England at the height of the gin craze and had failed. In the event, the Fifteen-Gallon Law also failed and was repealed within two years as being antidemocratic. The rich drank wine, which was unaffected by the law, and could, if they so desired, scrape together the four dollars or so required to buy fifteen gallons of whiskey. The poor, in contrast, were denied access to their favorite solace.
This setback did not deter the abolitionists nor harm their cause. New temperance societies sprang up like weeds. The Sons of Temperance were joined by the Independent Order of Rechabites, the Sons of Jonadab,40 the Daughters of Temperance, the Templars of Honor and Temperance, the Colored Temperance Society, and a host of other local, regional, and national organizations dedicated to ridding the United States of alcohol. The ubiquity of the movement was a matter for satirical comment among the majority of Americans who still drank, to whom it seemed that the country was being overrun by the T-word. According to one observer, a typical small town in the East had “temperance negro operas, temperance theaters; temperance eating houses, and temperance everything, and our whole population, in places, is soused head-over-heels in temperance.”
The issue even found its way onboard Yankee ships and penetrated American nautical fiction. In Moby Dick (1851) Herman Melville made space for arguments pro and contra temperance, albeit largely contra. The subject was raised under the pretext of a discussion as to what was the correct refreshment for a harpooner, while he was guarding the carcass of a whale against sharks. When Dough-Boy, the cabin steward in the book, produces ginger tea for just such an occasion, he is assaulted by the ship’s mate:
“We’ll teach you to drug a harpooneer; none of your apothecary’s medicine here; you want to poison us, do ye? You have got out insurances on our lives and want to murder us all and pocket the proceeds, do ye?”
“It was not me,” cried Dough-Boy, “it was Aunt Charity that
brought the ginger on board; and bade me never give the harpooneers any spirits, but only this ginger-jub—so she called it.”
“Ginger-jub! you gingerly rascal! take that! and run along with ye to the lockers, and get something better . . . it is the captain’s orders—grog for the harpooneer on a whale.”
While Americans were being depicted in fiction squabbling over temperance in the distant whaling grounds, at home its proponents continued to press for legislation at the state level. In 1855 they succeeded in persuading the voters of Maine to ban the manufacture or sale of alcohol for public consumption. This partial prohibition, which had little effect on the drinking of its inhabitants, may be seen as both a public demonstration of virtue and a concession to a fad. Thirteen other states in the Northeast and Midwest followed suit, as did counties in various others. The impact of such laws was varied, as were their provisions. Maine voters were free to import as much liquor as they wished and might also take advantage of exemptions for cider, and alcohol for medicinal use. Pennsylvania limited its prohibition to sales of less than a quart of any alcoholic beverage at a time; Michigan, in order to placate its German immigrants, exempted “beer and wine of domestic manufacture.” Its legislators were pilloried for preferring votes to morality by the Reverend J. S. Smart in his Funeral Sermon of the Maine Law and Its Offspring in Michigan (1858): “It is a pity that a few drunken Germans should be allowed thus to rule the thousands of American born citizens in our state. Here, to secure the votes of a few foreigners . . . we have imposed upon us the legal reopening of thousands of dens of drunkenness in the form of ‘Dutch wine halls’ and ‘lager beer saloons.’”
T
he intransigence of immigrant voters was not the only obstacle temperance reformers faced at the polls. American elections were notoriously wet events. Just as Athenian citizens in the days of Plato had received free wine on important civic occasions, so American voters were rewarded by candidates to office for participating in the ballot with as much whiskey as they could hold. The association of alcohol with elections stretched back to colonial days. It derived from Britain, where it had long been customary to treat voters with food and drink. The custom was continued in America, notably in Virginia, where failure to intoxicate potential voters was regarded as mean-spirited in a candidate and therefore a sign that they were unsuitable for public office. An indication of the importance of alcohol to colonial elections is provided by the entertainments bill run up by George Washington in 1758 when he stood for office for the first time in the Virginia House of Burgesses:
Dinner for your Friends £3 0s 0d
13 gallons of Wine at 10/ £6 15s 0d
3 pts of brandy at 1 ⁄ 3 £4s 4d
13 gallons of Beer at 1 ⁄ 3 16s 3d
8 qts Cyder Royal at 1⁄6 12s 0d
30 gallons of strong beer at 8d £1 0s 0d
1 hhd and 1 barrel of Punch, consisting of 26 gals.
Best Barbados rum at 5/ £6 10s 0d
12 lbs S. Refd. sugar at 1⁄6 18s 9d
10 Bowls of Punch at 2/6 each £1 5s 0d
9 half pints of rum at 7d each £0 5s 7d
1 pint of wine 30 1s 6d
In return for such extravagance, Washington was elected with 307 votes. His supporters received, on average, a pint of rum, a pint of beer, and a glass of wine each.41 This method of encouraging voters continued postindependence, indeed, gained fresh momentum, for the American states had larger franchises, and more frequent elections, than anywhere else in the world at the time. And far from casting their vote in accordance with their convictions or consciences, citizens tended to give them away to inappropriate candidates on the spur of the moment for a few drinks.