by Iain Gately
—Frederick Douglass
When there shall be neither a slave nor a drunkard on the earth—how proud the title of that Land, which may truly claim to be the birthplace and the cradle of both those revolutions, that shall have ended in that victory. How nobly distinguished that People, who shall have planted, and nurtured to maturity, both the political and moral freedom of their species.
—Abraham Lincoln
Many American visitors to the Universal Exhibition in Paris in 1855 were likely to have carried one or both of two recent publishing sensations as reading material for the transatlantic voyage. While one of these books, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), by Harriet Beecher Stowe, was also a best-seller in Europe, the other, Ten Nights in a Bar-Room (1854), by T. S. Arthur, was famous only in America, where four hundred thousand copies were in circulation. A strangely compelling and stridently Prohibitionist novel, Ten Nights in a Bar-Room was indicative of the differences in attitudes toward alcohol that had developed between the United States and France. Its readers were concentrated in the eastern and old western states, where the myriad temperance organizations founded in the first half of the nineteenth century had succeeded in turning their cause from a moral into a political issue. The debate had moved on from Communion wine to coercion. Drink was bad, and since people were too weak to resist it, it must be denied to them. Wherever there was alcohol on sale there would be drunkards and wherever there were drunkards there was poverty, squalor, and violence. The only way, therefore, to forestall impending chaos was to outlaw drinking places. Temperance candidates stood at every election, great or small, with the aim, if successful, of prohibiting the retailing of alcohol.
The temperance platform was dramatized in Ten Nights in a Bar-Room, most of whose action takes place in the Sickle and Sheaf Tavern in a small town named Cedarville, which the narrator visits over a period of ten years, during which time the inhabitants of the once-pretty settlement are gradually ruined by the malevolent influence of the drinking house in their midst. The book features all the established emblems of temperance noir writing—the corruption of youth, several murders, a drunk redeemed at his daughter’s deathbed, d.t.’s-inspired hallucinations (including a giant toad under the bedclothes), and so on; it also rehearses protemperance arguments by placing them in the mouths of casual drinkers, as the following example, masquerading as a conversation about politics between strangers, illustrates:
“Did not you vote the anti-temperance ticket at the last election?”
“I did,” was the answer; “and from principle.”
“On what were your principles based?” was inquired.
“On the broad foundations of civil liberty.”
“The liberty to do good or evil, just as the individual may choose?”
“I would not like to say that. There are certain evils against which there can be no legislation that would not do harm. No civil power in this country has the right to say what a citizen shall eat or drink.”
“But may not the people, in any community, pass laws, through their delegated law-makers, restraining evil-minded persons from injuring the common good?”
“Oh, certainly—certainly.”
“And are you prepared to affirm, that a drinking-shop, where young men are corrupted, aye, destroyed, body and soul—does not work an injury to the common good?”
“Ah! but there must be houses of public entertainment.”
“No one denies this. But can that be a really Christian community which provides for the moral debasement of strangers, at the same time that it entertains them? Is it necessary that, in giving rest and entertainment to the traveler, we also lead him into temptation?”
The discussion ends with the temperance advocate predicting an apocalypse for the United States unless action is taken against taverns:
Of little value, my friend, will be, in far too many cases, your precepts, if temptation invites our sons at almost every step of their way through life. Thousands have fallen, and thousands are now tottering, soon to fall. Your sons are not safe; nor are mine. We cannot tell the day nor the hour when they may weakly yield to the solicitation of some companion, and enter the wide open door of ruin. And are we wise and good citizens to . . . hesitate over some vague ideal of human liberty when the sword is among us, slaying our best and dearest? Sir! while you hold back from the work of staying the flood that is desolating our fairest homes, the black waters are approaching your own doors.
The other great political issue of the day was slavery, the principal theme of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Superficially, the prohibition and abolition movements had much in common. Each perceived their cause as being a moral crusade, and a number of individuals served both. The Reverend Henry Ward Beecher, for example, brother of the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, preached temperance and raised funds to arm abolitionists in Kansas. However, many temperance agitators thought it more important to free the southern states from the curse of drinking than to encourage them to free their slaves, and they indulged in shameful equivocations in order to keep abolition and abstinence apart. According, for example, to John Gough, the Washington celebrity, alcoholism was by far the worst kind of servitude: “Ah, yes, physical slavery is an awful thing,” he noted in Platform Echoes, a volume of memoirs, but a “man may be bought or sold in the market and yet be a freer man than he who sells him.”
IN THE MONSTER’S CLUTCHES. Body and Brain on Fire.
Not only did the temperance movement place politics before humanity, it also rejected an entire community of potential supporters. African Americans, free or in bondage, were staunch opponents of alcohol. Drink had grim historic links with their presence in the United States—many had ancestors who had been traded for a keg of rum. Furthermore, slaves with drunken owners often suffered arbitrary acts of brutality, which contributed to their loathing of alcohol. Finally, drink was used as an instrument of oppression on the plantations. At Christmas, slaves were given “holidays,” supplied with spirits, and encouraged to get drunk, in the belief that if allowed to indulge themselves every now and then, they would see their enslavement as less cruel. According to Frederick Douglass, the aim of this practice was to “disgust the slave with freedom, by allowing him to see only the abuse of it.”
Sobriety, alongside education and domestic economy, had been recognized at the 1831 First Annual Convention of the People of Color, held in Philadelphia, as a key attribute most likely to raise African Americans to “a proper rank and standing amongst men.” They were, however, forced to form their own temperance organizations, and these were sometimes the objects of racist violence, as for example in 1841, when a white mob attacked the members of the Moyamensing Temperance Society who were celebrating the final manumission of slaves in British dominions. Despite such harassment, free blacks kept faith with abstinence, hoping by their sobriety to prove they were worthy of equality.
The pursuit of temperance in the United States was sidelined by its Civil War, during which a laissez-faire approach to drinking prevailed. Convictions pro and contra alcohol were held with equal force and were equally tolerated by each side. Lincoln was a teetotaler, as was Confederate general Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson, who explained his abstinence thus: “I like strong drink—so I never touch it.” General Ulysses S. Grant, in contrast, was very nearly an alcoholic. Whether or not a man took liquor was up to him, and if it helped him to function better, it was accepted as a harmless idiosyncrasy. The spirit of the times is reflected by the response of Abraham Lincoln to a complaint that General Grant drank too much. Rather than promising to make him abstain, Lincoln vowed that he would ask “the quartermaster of the army to lay in a large stock of the same kind of liquor, and would direct him to furnish a supply to some of my other generals who have never yet won a victory.”
Both sides supplied their troops with alcohol. An unofficial whiskey ration was issued to the Union army,51 and the Confederates supplied their men with spirits from time to time. In terms of supply, the Union armies w
ere ahead. Despite the Maine law and its cohorts, there were still more distilleries north of the Mason-Dixon Line than in the Rebel states. Moreover, after it had assumed command of the ocean and the Mississippi River, the Union could import at will and deny the South the same resource. This blockade, in combination with the deliberate despoliation of agriculture in Confederate territory, dried up the Rebel supply of alcohol, so that by the time of the war’s conclusion many Confederate soldiers had become temperate through force of circumstance. Indeed, fluctuations in the supply of alcohol in the South closely reflected its fortunes in the war.
At the beginning of the conflict, the mood of the Confederate volunteers who had flocked to its banner had been buoyant. Sixty percent of them were farmers or their sons, in the majority from small communities, who had seldom, if ever, seen a city or a crowd. A holiday atmosphere prevailed as they assembled and traveled to the front. The excitement of events led many who had been temperate at home to experiment on the way to war and to fall “into the delusion that drinking was excusable, if not necessary, in the army.” The initial elation, and a ready supply of alcohol with which to sustain it, alarmed the Confederate command. In 1861 General Braxton Bragg prohibited the sale of alcohol within five miles of Pensacola, where his troops were stationed. Drunkenness, in his opinion, was causing “demoralization, disease, and death” among them: “We have lost more valuable lives at the hands of the whiskey sellers than by the balls of our enemies.” His example was recommended to his fellow officers, and similar prohibitions were installed in other Rebel camps. They do not seem to have been enforced with any great severity. Alcohol was smuggled into camp, at times blatantly, at others discreetly—injected into a watermelon (a large one could absorb a half gallon of whiskey) or tipped down the barrel of a musket that was held at present arms until its bearer reached his tent. Punishments for carrying liquor into camp were not, by military standards of discipline, severe. No one was flogged or shot for drinking. Private Henry Jones, for instance, found guilty of drunkenness at his post in Tullahoma, Tennessee, was made to spend two hours a day, every day for a month, standing on the head of a barrel with an empty whiskey bottle hanging from his neck.
The first Christmas of the war was celebrated in the South with spirits and song. Whiskey acquired the nickname among some Rebels as “Oh-be-joyful,” under which guise it pops up in their letters home. Quality, however, was on the wane: “The general Davis sent up a barrel of whiskey to the camp,” reported one trooper, “but it was such villainous stuff that only the old soakers could stomach it.” The following year whiskey could still be found to celebrate the Nativity, but shortages of other supplies rendered its enjoyment imperfect. One Texan rebel’s diary entry for December 25, 1862, lamented the absence of eggs to make eggnog and observed, “If it was in my power I would condemn every old hen on the Rio Grande to six months confinement in close-coop for the non conformance of a most sacred duty.” By 1863, however, not only the mixers but also oh-be-joyful was in short supply. Post-Vicksburg, the Mississippi was controlled by the Union, thus cutting off Taos Lightning and other such delicacies, and within the Confederate heartland stills were being broken up for their copper, which was used to forge bronze cannon.
At the same time that supplies of liquor were diminishing, the temperance movement began to appear in force in Southern camps. While Bibles had been issued to every soldier by various benevolent societies at the start of the conflict, these were neglected in initial years, when it seemed that the next Rebel victory would force the Union to sue for peace. However, as reverses on the battlefield increased, a religious revival took place among the Confederate ranks, which was supported by a plethora of religious tracts, whose publishers maintained a more efficient distribution network than the suppliers of such secular comforts as clothing and rations. These tracts provided moral as well as spiritual guidance to the Rebel troops and sought to arm them against the evils of swearing, gambling, and drinking. One such, Lincoln and Liquor, put a new spin on the slave-to-alcohol argument—why fight for freedom from Washington, only to surrender to the whiskey bottle? The pamphlet also predicted crop failures if they continued to be wasted in the manufacture of “distilled damnation.” The revival and the pamphleteering seem to have diminished demand for now-scarce alcohol. One rebel soldier wrote to his mother and sister from the front thanking them for various gifts, including some whiskey, but warning them, “The Whiskey you may depend will be used moderately as I belong to the Temperance society of whom Gen Braxton Bragg is president.”
Throughout the conflict Southern officers had better access to alcohol than their men and did not experience the same vicissitudes in supply. Not all of them followed the example of Bragg; indeed, some abused the privilege. This was resented in the ranks, whose scorn for inebriated superiors is apparent in the diary entry of an anonymous Louisiana soldier for October 25, 1863, apropos of his new brigadier: “From what I can tell [he] is better able to command a bottle of whiskey than anything else.” Confederate physicians also had privileged access to alcohol. It was employed as a panacea against ailments ranging from camp itch to malaria, and when supplies of anesthetics dried up, it served as an analgesic during surgery. The Civil War created nearly half a million cripples. Fear of wounds turning gangrenous made amputation the operation of choice, and accounts from both sides describe the horror of seeing cartloads of freshly severed human limbs stacked up outside operating tents. More often than not the only sedative a wounded Confederate received before his arm or leg was sawn off was a mouthful of spirits. Like the officers, the physicians were suspected of exploiting their advantages. Indeed, some confessed to drinking a fair proportion of their own medicine under the strain of work.
While the South burned, the cocktails still flowed in Washington. Nathaniel Hawthorne advised visitors to Willard’s Hotel, which served as an informal center of operations in the capital, to “adopt the universal habit of the place, and call for a mint julep, a whiskey skin, a gin cock-tail, a brandy smash, or a glass of pure Old Rye, for the conviviality of Washington sets in at an early hour, and, so far as I had an opportunity of observing, never terminates at any hour.” Moreover, as victory for the North became inevitable, there was no equivalent religious revival in the Federal camps and no attendant blip in temperance. Indeed, the movement received a serious setback when a tax was imposed on beer and distilled spirits in the Union states, thereby conniving at their manufacture and sale.
American drinking habits shifted in the aftermath of the Civil War. Lager beer replaced whiskey as the national beverage of the working-man. The change was caused by a number of factors. The excise tax introduced by the Union to help pay for its armies had pushed up the price of spirits, so that they were no longer much cheaper than sodas. The price of beer, meanwhile, was traveling in the opposite direction. Although it had likewise been subjected to a tax (of one dollar per barrel) the net effect of the imposition over the following decade was to focus brewers on making the production, distribution, and sale of their merchandise vastly more efficient. Attendant benefits in both quality and availability resulted in a surge in consumption. Whereas in 1860 there had been 1,269 breweries in the United States, with a total output of one million barrels, by 1867 output had risen to six million barrels, and by 1873, 4,131 brewers produced nine million barrels of beer among them. Most of this growth was accounted for by lager beer, in the pilsner style, and much of it came from towns in the old West such as Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Milwaukee, and Chicago.
The switch to lager from colonial favorites such as ale, porter, and stout resulted partly from demographics, and partly from changing tastes among consumers. The flood of German immigrants in the mid-nineteenth century had created a naturalized American market for lager. Over the next two decades Teutonic entrepreneurs established large breweries dedicated to their native brews in towns where fellow Germans had settled in numbers. Some of their enterprises remain household names: In 1855 Frederick Miller took over the M
enomonee Valley Brewery in Milwaukee, and lent the enterprise his name, the following year Joseph Schlitz started brewing in the same town, and in 1857 Eberhard Anheuser acquired a small brewery in St. Louis, which, with the assistance of his son-in-law Adolphus Busch, he converted to the production of Anheuser-Busch pilsner. In addition to introducing German beer to America, immigrants also established Bavarian-style beer gardens where they might gather in their leisure hours. The Bowery district of New York was graced with a number of these institutions, which won the approval of the press of the city for the orderly conduct of their patrons. They were “immense buildings, fitted up in imitation of a garden,” which could accommodate “from four hundred to twelve hundred guests. Germans carry their families there to spend a day or an evening.” These drinking places usually provided music to entertain their clients, which was judged to be “exquisite in some places, especially in the Atlantic Garden.” However, they also attracted criticism for being foreign to the American way. They were child-friendly, did their best business on Sundays, and were notoriously peaceful places where, despite the quantity of alcohol consumed, good humor and decency prevailed. Such qualities provoked both the ire of the temperance movement, who reviled the clientele of beer gardens for Sabbath breaking and for drinking in front of their wives and children, and the prejudice of non-German Americans, who held up the different customs of the minority for ridicule.
After lager and beer gardens, German immigrants introduced a third innovation to American drinking: organization. When the Civil War tax on beer was introduced in 1862, thirty-seven New York lager brewers had arranged a national convention to consider the matter, which was attended by brewers from other Union states. The convention was repeated the following year, and the next, by which time it had acquired a title—the United States Brewers Association (USBA)— and a mission, which was to influence America’s elected politicians in favor of beer. From the start, the members of the USBA had been diligent in paying their taxes and asking that they might be reduced. They were also conscientious in documenting their financial contribution to the war, and to postwar reconciliation, and this record formed the bedrock on which the beer lobby was raised. In addition to singing the praises of liquid bread, the USBA launched a preemptive strike on temperance, whose resurgence it feared. According to its secretary, speaking at the 1866 convention, “Just now a note of war is heard coming against us by fanatics who, in pretending to support Sunday and temperance laws, are in fact trying to annihilate the self-respect and independence of mankind, and liberty of conscious, and of trade.” Its response, made formal in Chicago in 1867, was the resolution: “That we will use all means to stay the progress of this fanatical party, and to secure our individual rights as citizens, and that we will sustain no candidate, of whatever party, in any election, who is any way disposed towards the total abstinence cause.”