History of Drinking in America

"Drink is in itself a good creature of God, and to be received with thankfulness, but the abuse of drink is from Satan, the wine is from God, but the Drunkard is from the Devil".

Increase Mather, Wo to Drunkards (1673)

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Chapter One

The "Good Creature of God": Drinking in America.

Plymouth, 1621

The Mayflower's crew belonged to this tradition. Moreover, the sailors knew that if they continued to share their meager beer supplies with this band of religious dissenters, there would probably be no alcohol left for the voyage home. They were not prepared to take that risk, and matters came to a head. William Bradford, the faithful diarist of Plymouth and for years its able governor, recorded the scene. The settlers "were hasted ashore and made to drink water," he lamented, "that the seamen might have the more beer." Bradford's pleas from the shore for just a "can" of beer brought refusal. If he "were their own father," one sailor responded, "he should have none." It was an inauspicious beginning to the new venture. (Most versions of the Pilgrim story pass over the beer crisis in favor of the traditional tales of Plymouth Rock and the first Thanksgiving. The modern brewing industry has overlooked an advertising bonanza.) The suffering on the beach finally became too much for the Mayflower's captain; he sent word that there would be "beer for them that had need for it," particularly the sick, even if it meant his drinking water on the way back to England. His humanitarian gesture assured the Pilgrims that as they faced the "starving time" of Plymouth's first winter, they would have an occasional taste of the Old World.

But the basic problem remained. The last major source of beer disappeared with the Mayflower, and over the rest of the winter alcohol became scarce indeed, nonexistent for many. There was a small supply of gin and other spirits, but not enough to go around, and most of the settlers quickly learned to drink water. The logic that dictated liquor rations aboard ship, however, remained compelling in Pilgrim eyes and prompted efforts to secure a reliable flow of alcohol for Plymouth. This real concern ultimately was shared by all the early colonists.

It was clear from the start that the only sure solution lay in local production. Relying exclusively on imports was impractical on a number of counts. England was a long way off, and in the early colonial period contacts with home were irregular at best. Shipping costs were also high, a problem compounded as second- and third-generation settlers moved inland, away from the coastal ports. Besides, the colonial population-even that of tiny Plymouth-quickly grew too large to supply through ordinary shipping channels. In the early 1620s there were only two or three thousand people scattered throughout Virginia and New England. With the Great Migration of the 1630s and forties, the American population rapidly climbed upward (as many as seventy thousand people left England for the New World; many went to the considered themselves until the Revolution - dearly loved their beer. By the time the Mayflower sailed, the most popular brew was a dark, hearty drink, about 6 percent alcohol, that was made from barley malt and flavored with hops (this potion evolved into modern porter and stout). The beers carried to America, then, were hardly similar to the pale brews preferred in the United States today, but they were the most popular beverages in the colonies in the years following the arrival of the first settlers.

Local brewing began almost as soon as the colonists were safely ashore. Colonial wives incorporated brewing into their household routines, and beer became a dietary staple. "Common brewers," who sold wholesale and retail, appeared in short order as well, and many tavern owners also produced their own supplies. In addition, the evolution of commercial ties with the Old World generally made some imported beer available to those who could afford it. But while it was soon apparent that nobody was going to die of thirst, quality control was a persistent problem. Although brewers used traditional ingredients when they could, hops and malt from the parent state were not always available, especially inland. Accordingly, the provincials used whatever domestic substitutes they had on hand to fill the gap, even if this meant doing considerable violence to English recipes. A verse from the 1630s applauded this early ingenuity:

If barley be wanting to make into malt,
We must be content and think it no fault,
For we can make liquor to sweeten our lips,
Of pumpkins, and parsnips, and walnut-tree chips.

One suspects that the beers produced from such recipes were little better than the poetry. Certainly, however, the new American beer rapidly became a highly diverse creature. Tastes varied sufficiently to provoke an official response by the mid-1600s, as local governments, concerned over uniform quality, stepped in more than once to regulate the ingredients of commercial brews. Most beer, however, was made at home, and no government could dictate a housewife's recipe.

Nor did official scrutiny discourage some truly searching experiments to replicate the original English product. In 1662, for instance, John Winthrop, Jr., governor of Connecticut and son of Governor John Winthrop of Massachusetts, brewed a palatable beer from Indian corn. This novel contribution ultimately got the younger Winthrop elected to the Royal Society of London -perhaps the highest honor the

From the beginning, distilled spirits were potent enough to raise concerns over misuse. Aboard the Arbella Puritan elders noted that some of the youth were ' rone "to drink hot waters very immoderately." But spirits had real advantages in the colonial view. Those who moved inland, for example, could carry a potent beverage with relative efficiency; one cask of hard liquor could have as much absolute alcohol as ten casks of beer and would keep as long as the travelers refrained from drinking it up. The premium placed on distilled beverages also allowed them to be used as wages in the early years. In fact, when the town fathers of Boston moved to halt the practice in the 1640s-it seemed to them that workers became somewhat less productive after a few sips of their "wages" -one group of laborers responded with what may have been America's first strike. The authorities backed down and restored their liquor. So while strong drink was not as popular as beer in the first decades of American settlement, many colonists liked it better than did their Old World brethren.

Some of this so-called strong water was probably gin, which, like beer, had deep roots in English culture. Unlike beer, however, gin had a dubious reputation. Introduced in the 1530s by soldiers returning to England from the Low Countries, gin-grain spirits flavored with the juniper berry-was produced cheaply and easily and became highly popular among the urban poor (a profitable mass market for distillers, who could sell gin at prices lower than those of good beer). Gin drinking grew to an alarming extent and, in the view of many Englishmen, was thoroughly out of control by the 1730s. The "gin epidemic" ravaged the poorer districts at least until 1751, when a vexed government stepped in and placed controls on sales. By then, however, the problem, immortalized in Hogarth's Beer Street-Gin Lane series of prints, had caught the public imagination. Gin itself was never again wholly respectable with the middle and upper classes. The drink retained a number of faithful imbibers throughout England, but it never caught on in the colonies: The early colonists drank some, and so did the Dutch in New Amsterdam and elsewhere, but seventeenth-century America lacked a large urban population, the traditional stronghold of gin. (This spirit remained a relative pariah until the twentieth century, when combined with vermouth and optional olives or onions it came into its own as the martini.)

As the colonists turned to distilling hard liquor, they proved as adaptable as they had been in their search for bee. In fact, it was technically easier to use local ingredients - grains or fruits - in producing quality spirts than it was in getting a consistenly good beer. In addition of making home brew, many colonial households began to opeate backyard stills called "limbecs." This not only assured a supply of distilled liquors but also generally diffused the skills necessary in production. And as the colonials started to standardize their distilling operations and to introduce their own beverages, a preference for hard liquor developed.

The movement toward strong waters in domestic production ws evident by the late 1600s, as witnessed in the rise of respectabel regional liquors, some of which later became popular throughout much of North America. In New England, pears emerged from the vat as "perry", while settlers in the territory that ultimately became Vermont distilled honey into a mead so good, as local tradition had it, that drinkers could bear the buzzing of the bees (indeed, after a quart of so one could probably hear all sorts of buzzing). In the Back Country, which ran down the eastern slopes of the Appalachians from New England to Georgia, grains like corn and rye (as well as potatoes and berries) offered a "buzz" of their own (these grain liquors assumed a central role in shaping American drinking patterns in the eighteenth century - a story to which we will return).

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Even the apple provided a major impetus in distilling. The fruit was not native to North America, but European seeds did well in the hospitable climate, and orchards flourished. Hard cider, naturally fermented to about 7 percent alcohol content, became especially popular in the Northern provinces (although Tennessee took a liking to it later on as well), where the drink ultimately rivaled beer in popularity. By the early 1700s, and probably before, Anglo-Americans were distilling their cider into a potent applejack. Applejack found a particularly loyal following in the Middle Atlantic colonies, and the best came from New Jersey. "Jersey Lightning" was stuff fit for the serious drinker: Too much could bring on "apple palsey," although one aged connoisseur recalled that he downed a quart a day over the years "without the slightest inconvenience."

In the South, particularly in Virginia and Georgia, the peach -introduced into Florida by the Spanish and spreading north over the decades -also became a distilling staple. Peach brandies emerged as great favorites, and a bit of this popularity still lingers.

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"Wo to Drunkards ": Early Use and Abuse

All these drinks had their partisans, and drinking constituted a central facet of colonial life. Indeed, two of the key characteristics of early drinking patterns were frequency and quantity. Simply stated, most settlers drank often and abundantly.

Most colonial drinking was utilitarian, with high alcohol consumption a normal part of personal and community habits. In colonial homes, beer and cider were the usual beverages at mealtime. In fact, alcohol was more common at the family table in the colonial era than in our own; even children shared the dinner beer. This practice of taking beer or cider at dinner made steady drinkers of most Americans, a pattern reinforced by activities outside the home. In New England, communal projects such as clearing the common fields or raising the town church seldom proceeded without a public cask of spirits to fortify the toiling citizenry. Private labor also called for a steady pull at the jug. Farmers typically took a generous liquor ration into the fields historian of the late nineteenth century, took a dim view of such customs. "You may easily judge the drunkenness and riot," he noted soberly, "on occasions less solemn than the funerals of old and beloved ministers" like ordinations, for instance. After Thomas Shepard was ordained head of the church at Newtowne, Massachusetts, the celebration that followed would have made Dorchester cringe. Attended by local parishioners and civil and clerical dignitaries, the celebrants feasted for

The drinking habits of the Founding Fathers attracted the attention of nineteenth-centur ' y temperance advocates, a concern demonstrated in these Currier and Ives prints. In thefirst engraving, from 1848, Washington bidsfarewell to his officers over a toast; a supply of liquor rests on the table. A reengraved versionfrom 1876 reflects the influence of the temperance movement: A hat now graces the table and Washington no longer clasps a glass.

The Old Tun Tavern, Philadelphia. The Old Tun was considerably biLT-aer and more elaborate than were small-town drin"i 9 establishments, but it was typical of colonial taverns in that it Offered not only food and drink but also lodgings and aforumfor public gatherings.

and they served as rallying points for the militia and as recruiting stations for the Continental army. Innkeepers ideally reflected the high public status accorded their establishments, and in reality they often did. Publicans were commonly among a town's most prominent citizens and not infrequently were deacons. And if they were good hosts, they did their best to make patrons comfortable. While some taverns were only rude structures with plank bars -there were a lot of these in port towns like New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston and on the sparsely settled frontier-others were well-appointed, pleasant places to spend time. The Reverend Dorchester is again helpful at this point, describing a tavern scene common any time between the late seventeenth and the early nineteenth century -although we can doubt that he intended to make the picture as appealing as he did. In the winters, alcoholism did not exist. People have developed problems from drinking only beer and wine (we note in this regard that in 1975 the average American consumed less absolute alcohol overall than the average colonial consumed through only beer and cider). So the potential for alcohol addiction was certainly present.

The social standards of the day had an important restraining effect on intemperance. As we have seen, much, if not most, colonial drinking was family and community oriented. And family and community conduct fell under the governance of social norms inherited, like drinking behavior, from England and the rest of Europe. These norms defined a largely traditional society whose members shared a common loyalty to and an identity with the community and its standards of individual conduct. People were taught to accept their stations in life without complaint and to defer in matters of leadership to society's "betters,' whether seventeenth-century Puritan "saint" or eighteenthcentury Southern planter 'aristocrat." In sum, prerevolutionary America more often than not represented a traditional deferential society.

Most colonials willingly conformed to community values, and if some refused to do so voluntarily, the majority accepted the community's right to compel prescribed behavior. Thus, anything deemed inimical or offensive to the community, be it drunkenness, sexual promiscuity, or even Roman Catholicism, could be restrained for the good and safety of all. Viewed from an egalitarian perspective, the world was inflexible in many ways. Deference, however, characterized the age, although its strength varied in degree from region to region and was probably weakest on the frontier. And it had its advantages: If individual behavior was circumscribed, residents had the security of knowing where they stood in society, of enjoying its protection from internal and external threats (both spiritual and physical), and of knowing what their local communities and leaders permitted or expected of them.

Such was the context of early American drinking. The colonials had assimilated alcohol use, based on Old World patterns, into their community lifestyles. As long as mores remained intact, communities held drinking excesses largely in bounds. (Whether these norms could have restrained intemperance in a population favoring distilled beverages, however, is debatable.) Society would simply not allow things to get out of hand, even though it permitted plenty of drinking at the same time. Most people restricted their consumption primarily to the use of beer and cider; they very rarely became problem drinkers. Even

Each colony developed an extensive legal code to combat all aspects of liquor violations. These laws told tavern owners, for example, what they could sell, to whom, when, and even at what prices. Plymouth forbade sales to chronic drunkards, and Virginia, pursuing a similar goal, made any credit innkeepers extended topers unrecoverable by law. Authorities also frowned on breaches of the peace in the taverns. In an attempt to maintain decorum, Pennsylvania once outlawed the drinking of toasts. An even more serious expression of concern emanated from Boston in the 1670s, when the town exiled Alice Thomas after the courts had had her jailed, flogged, and fined for permitting conduct in her tavern so scandalous that it resulted in the first Massachusetts law against prostitution.

Strictures against individual tipplers could be severe. Drunkenness was a crime throughout the colonies, and the penalties against such behavior were potentially extreme. In order to emphasize community control, magistrates could (and did) set examples with jailings, fines, the stocks, and the lash. Recidivism brought heavier fines and longer imprisonments -or brutal corporal punishment. In Massachusetts, the unregenerate ways of one Robert Cole, perhaps a spiritual ancestor of Hawthorne's Hester Prynne, finally provoked the colony to disfranchise him and order him to wear a scarlet "D," for drunkard. Clearly, then, colonial statutes gave officials the power, if they chose to exercise it, to deal sternly with alcohol related infractions.

Even drinking at home could become an official concern, especially in New England. The early Puritans stressed the importance of well-ordered families in maintaining stable, godly societies, and they were not about to let excessive drinking disrupt their world. Massachusetts expressly forbade drunkenness in homes in 1636 and again in 1654. But the law apparently had little impact, so in 1675 the Bay Colony established the post of tithingman. These officers, who as "sober and discreet men" were to oversee the conduct of ten or twelve families each, were to report on any liquor violations they found. Later, convinced that the roots of social vice lay in family sin, authorities directed the tithingmen to record infractions of all types. These men, however, were neither primitive secret police nor spies; rather, they did their jobs openly and were appointed to their positions at public meetings. Their neighbors knew who they were, and it is doubtful that they proved effective in checking drunkenness, which perhaps explains why the office was not long continued.

The tithingmen were probably unnecessary anyway. As we already Coales for his calling." In spite of other drinking violations, he received at least one other opportunity to cut wood on public lands. We do not know if he stopped drinking. He is found on a list of "disparat debts" in 1680 (a debt he might have paid, since he was not on the following lists). The point here is that Puritan selectmen rarely applied the harsh letter of the law. Dorchester authorities looked closely at Birch's conduct and, instead of constant punishment, found understanding just as effective not only in helping him, but also in maintaining good order in the community. And the Birch case was not an isolated instance: Alice Thomas and Robert Cole were examples of others who had regained the good graces of local New England magistrates.

One would suspect that the Southern colonies, lacking in well-ordered communities by comparison to New England, were more given to individualistic behavior. However, the evidence on early drinking patterns in that region suggests a strong desire to control the drunkard and "unseasonable drinking." During the 1620s in Virginia, for example, the General Court (and later the county courts) focused squarely on excessive drinking as a threat to peace and harmony among the widely dispersed settlers. Indeed, the fact that settlements were not compact may have made the early Virginians as concerned as New Englanders about controlling deviant behavior.

A number of General Court cases are revealing. A decision in 1624, for instance, went against John Roe, James Hickmote, and Nathaniell Jeffreys for "having kept company in drinking, and committing of a riot." It was the rioting that bothered the court, and each man had to pay a heavy fine. In a case heard in 1625, Robert Fytts and John Radish faced not only the charge of drunkenness but also that of being so "disorderd in drink" that they were not "able to go home contrary to the proclamation made against drunkenness." Radish also had to stand up on the charge that he, at an "unseasonable time of the night," had taken Sir George Yeardley's servants to his house "and there gave them entertainment and made them drink." Fytts had to pay a stiff fine. Radish, who must have been the instigator of the reveling, also was fined. Finally, the court mandated that Radish "lie neck and heels or . . . make a good and sufficient pair of stocks" for punishing yet other disturbers of the peace.

Early Virginia cases demonstrate that magistrates did not worry about drinking but rather about drunkenness and its impact on cornmunity stability. The strange case of Thomas Godby serves to under canons of wedlock. In the end, the drinking bout and its aftermath had not threatened the public peace, and there was really no basis for judicial action in the name of community stability.

It is very important to recognize that colonial magistrates, in both the North and the South, rarely let concerns over excesses in drinking spill over into attacks on the consumption of alcoholic beverages in general. No one, at least no one willing to put themselves on the public record, considered a broad legal prohibition as necessary for communal harmony. That argument would have flown in the face of the entire European heritage. If people denounced cases of individual intemperance, they did not directly intimate that the fault lay in liquor itself; the problem was one of isolated deviants misusing what society viewed as a wholesome, healthful, and even necessary product.

The Exceptions: Indians and Blacks

While English colonists remained comfortable about alcohol for themselves, they did not see it as a "good creature" for some other groups. In fact, they could be very leary of liquor in the wrong hands. As we have seen, in closely supervised colonial communities, drinking sometimes was associated with social disorder and violence; and colonial leaders feared that drinking-related problems in groups potentially beyond community control could have serious implications.

In the port towns, for example, the authorities occasionally had trouble with sailors who did not share the common social concern over chronic intoxication. Plymouth once temporarily revoked all tavern licenses in Yarmouth when some mariners got particularly rowdy; the inns reopened after the seamen sailed away. There was also concern over the behavior of those who slipped beyond the control of established communities to the frontiers. But, most of all, white colonials worried about Indians and blacks-groups not only racially and culturally different but also frequently hostile. The colonists feared that alcohol consumption among these peoples could be dangerous to over all societal stability.

The Indians of eastern North America were unfamiliar with beverage alcohol before the invasion of the whites. Most tribes got their first taste from the explorers and adventurers who preceded the influx of settlers, just as they learned about other aspects of European culture from these initial harbingers of change. In some early cases, Indian

drinking did not seem to pose a problem. Some Indians appreciated the colonial beverages and did not drink to excess. Samoset, for instance, the tribesman who helped the Pilgrims survive their first winter, was particularly fond of beer. The first Thanksgiving saw red and white men happily downing gallons of liquor together. But the picture changed rapidly as the settlers became convinced that Indians, for reasons the Europeans could not explain, were especially prone to drunkenness. Alcohol seemed to hit Indians hard and fast, and they allegedly became unpredictable and even violent-at least it so seemed in the eyes of whites. The colonial view of Indian drinking, that red men could not hold their liquor, was in fact the beginning of a long-standing stereotype of the impact of alcohol on the tribes. Many early settlers believed Indians to be uncivilized -nothing more than "savages"; therefore, any sign of intemperate behavior served to confirm that image. Some modern anthropologists have termed the so-called Indian drinking problem the "firewater myth." This stereotype not only followed the white frontier line to the Pacific but in many respects has survived into the present.

Modern research has failed to explain the firewater myth. Some Indian groups today do have unusually high rates of alcoholism, while others do not. There is no positive evidence indicating a greater physiological propensity to alcoholism in Indians than in whites, nor is it absolutely clear how cultural conditioning factors may have distinguished Indian drinking reactions from those of other groups. Thus, it is difficult to say why the first reports of convivial Indian drinking in early Plymouth (and almost everywhere else) soon gave way to a litany of recorded abuses.

One possible explanation is that some tribes learned to drink from the wrong whites: fur traders, explorers, or fishing crews, all of whom drank hard and, frequently, in a fashion not condoned by the social no ' rms in traditional, settled colonial communities. This model might have inclined the Indian-without prior experience with the effects of alchohol-toward problem drinking from the very beginning. But even if true in some instances, this represents at best only a partial explanation of the situation. Indeed, evidence suggests that both reactions to alcohol and drinking behavior varied markedly among tribal groups. At any rate, we know too little about the role of alcohol in initial white-red contacts to reach any solid conclusions. Nor can one be sure that the colonists were not exaggerating their accounts of Indian drunkenness. Perhaps they misunderstood Indian drinking behavior

11 , "I ,) I)olel liquor, and Indians. Scenes similar to this provoked the Plymouthraid against Thomas Morton @ band at Merrymount.

dane poetry in which he satirized the Pilgrims with as free a hand as he gave the Indians drink. Then he went too far; he gave his Indian friends guns. For most colonists, savages with alcohol were bad enough, but redmen with alcohol and guns were intolerable. "0, the horribleness of this villainy!" Bradford wailed, and, after obtaining the support of other settlements, he dispatched Captain Standish (Morton called him "Captain Shrimpe") to clean out Morton's nest. There could have been a nasty fight at Merrymount. When the "invasion force" arrived, Morton's men were under cover and well armed, but they were also so drunk that they could not handle their weapons. Morton was taken and shipped in chains back to England (where he was ultimately freed). Merrymount was finished, but its demise illustrated the gravity of the problem of Indian-colonist relations.

Although the authorities fined and jailed many colonists over the years for illegal beverage sales, in general white officials were very inconsistent in enforcing regulations. While they sought to restrain private liquor trade with the Indians, they were not above entering the traffic directly when it suited their purposes. Often they saw to it that

Colonial governments also kept a watchful eye on drinking among blacks. The floodgates of black slavery had opened in the English mainland colonies by the end of the seventeenth century. Drinking patterns, like most other aspects of slave life, were largely a matter of what white masters would allow. Like the Indians, blacks were perceived in terms of heathenism. Even more threatening, they lived among the whites, so that the consequences of violence were omnipresent and internal rather than sporadic and external (as in the case of the Indian nations). Furthermore, blacks played a functional role in providing back-breaking labor for whites, while Indians came to be viewed as a menace to be removed or exterminated.

But masters did permit a certain amount of controlled drinking among their chattel laborers-normally on special occasions. In the South, the end of harvest and the Christmas season generally saw holiday celebrations, with slave owners providing a day off for music, dancing, extra food, and drinking (largely of cheap distilled spirits). Some masters also used liquor to reward slaves for special service; still others, if they allowed their slaves time to work for themselves, let them purchase spirits with part of their wages (the extent of this practice remains unclear).

Unless a master specifically granted his slaves -or for that matter, his white indentured servants as well -permission to drink, the general rule was to keep the alcohol away. The demands of discipline in the slave and indentured labor forces necessitated such a policy. An imbibing slave did less work and was worth much less as a chattel. Thus, from the owner's point of view, keeping the slaves and servants sober was. an exercise in protecting his investments and property while avoiding disruption of the labor force, particularly if drunken slaves fell to fighting among themselves. Overall, bonded laborers probably received just enough alcohol to keep them healthy -as defined by the wisdom of the day -but there were laws to prevent them from getting more than what was minimally medicinal. For example, lest either slaves or indentured servants spend time away from their masters in the taverns, local authorities carefully regulated the circumstances under which they could enter inns and, quite often, barred them altogether. Nor were these regulations confined to the South. A Connecticut statute of 1703, typical of New England policy, called for the flogging of slaves, indentured servants, and apprentices caught in taverns without their masters' permission. Other Northern statutes levied fines (some as high as E 30) on whites selling liquor to any blacks, free or slave groups. They also represented further testimony that if alcohol was all right for the white community, others could only drink by permission. Social control and societal stability remained the preeminent values among free whites attempting to conquer the North American continent.

The slave trade, as depicted in a nineteenth-century Print. While historians now doubt the existence of the "triangle trade, "rum and other liquor didfigure in the international commerce in human chattels.

Library of Congress

has generally received most of the credit for weaning the colonials, once and for all, from the tastes of the Old World. It would be easy to overstate this case, however. Distilled drinks, such as applejack and other fruit brandies, were already popular, as was cider, and many of the colonial beers were not good replicas of those brewed in England. So the triumph of cheap rum seems hardly surprising in retrospect, but it was important nevertheless: This trend indicated that the AngloAmericans were evolving as a separate people, discarding some of their most familiar European cultural baggage. In fact, by the dawn of the eighteenth century (if not earlier), Americans were a people becoming confirmed in their love of hard liquor.

Rum found a major competitor as settlement spread to the frontiers. Both molasses and finished rum were too bulky and expensive to ship far inland, and as the eighteenth-century settlement line advanced, frontiersmen shifted their loyalties to grain whiskeys. Indeed, whiskey was particularly suited to the frontier. Grain was plentifulmuch more was harvested than farmers could eat or sell as food -and a single bushel of surplus corn, for example, yielded three gallons of whiskey. This assured a plentiful liquor supply for Westerners and gave them a marketable commodity, which both kept longer and was easier to transport to market than grain. The advantages of whiskey were, therefore, such that it rapidly eclipsed rum as the staple drink in the Back Country. The arrival of the Scotch-Irish, who flocked to the frontier beginning in the 1730s, dealt rum a further blow. These immigrants had enjoyed reputations as whiskey lovers in their northern Irish homes, and they brought their distilling skills across the Atlantic with them. By the late 1700s they had given American grain spirits a new quality in taste.

The American Revolution also accelerated the shift from rum to whiskey. During the war years, the Royal Navy blockaded American ports, and both rum and molasses imports from the West Indies (much of which was British and thus enemy territory) became scarce. Domestic grain whiskey stepped in to fill the demand for spirits. And the demand, for both civilian and military purposes, was huge. Profits were handsome indeed, and so much grain ended up as whiskey that the Continental Congress, fearing food shortages, occasionally moved (although in vain) to limit distilling.

One of the biggest whiskey consumers was the Continental army, which attempted to provide a daily liquor ration of roughly four ounces. Spirits rations were normal in the armies and navies of the pe-

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tionally legislated end of the slave trade in 1808, and thus of the commerce in rum associated with it, also hurt. So by the end of the eighteenth century, rum had passed its zenith; whiskey was fast becoming the premier American beverage.

It must be noted that the distiller's art was a highly varied phenomenon. Some vats turned out perfectly awful stuff. "Red-eye" was the slang for much of it, probably after Proverbs XXIII: "Who hath redness of eyes? They that tarry long at the wine." On the other hand, there were excellent spirits whose partisans have become legion over the years.

In this latter category, the first distinctly American whiskey was rye. While we do not have the original recipe (if indeed there ever was a formal first one), this whiskey today is distilled from a combination of rye, corn, and barley malt, with at least 51 percent of the mixture rye. Who distilled the first batch is also obscure. One version gives credit to farmers in western Maryland and Pennsylvania-Scotch-Irish territory. On the other hand, a more pleasing account honors none other than George Washington. One of Washington's overseers, a Scot, supposedly persuaded him to plant some otherwise unprofitable land in rye for the express purpose of distilling. The resulting spirit is said to have made a fine impression on Mount Vernon's guests, including the Marquis de Lafayette. Rye whiskey then spread to Maryland, so this story concludes, when the overseer set up shop there after Washington's death. In any case, Maryland and Pennsylvania soon became national centers of rye production.

Corn also made fine whiskey. Frontier Kentucky made the best, although colonists since the earliest years at Jamestown had distilled limited amounts. Corn whiskey itself is about 80 percent corn, with a balance of rye and barley malt. Before use, the distillate is stored in oaken barrels to make a clear beverage, but corn whiskey has never been as popular as bourbon, a whiskey of 65 to 70 percent corn and a distinctive flavor and dark color imparted through aging in charred oak barrels. Bourbon was born in Kentucky, taking its name from Bourbon County, where it was first produced in 1789. Allegedly, the original distiller was the Reverend Elijah Craig, and Kentuckians quickly took a liking to his innovation. By the early nineteenth century, bourbon had become an important regional industry, and the renown of the liquor became such that, as much as any single beverage could, it assumed the mantle of the indigenous American national drink. Kentucky still retains a special place in America's heart for its bourbon.

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necessary places, but under the influence of hard liquor and a "prevailing depravity of manners throughout the land" they were fast becoming nothing more than dens of iniquity. The future president readily admitted that his concerns carried little weight. In fact, he thought that they were earning him the "reputation of a hypocrite and an ambitious demagogue."

If the public generally disregarded the thinking of men like Oglethorpe or Adams, concern over the social ill effects of strong drink soon became more clamorous. In 1774, Anthony Benezet, a Philadelphia Quaker with numerous philanthropic interests, published The Mighty Destroyer Displayed-the first full-scale assault on American drinking habits. Benezet argued that distilled liquor was not only unhealthy but also degrading and ultimately immoral for individuals and society. The Mighty Destroyer was widely read, although with undetermined effect. However, we know that by 1784 both the Quakers and the Methodists had urged their members to abstain from hard liquor and to take no part in its manufacture or sale. Like Benezet, they drew clear connections among drinking, personal moral decline and health complications, and social instability.

The bitterest denunciation of distilled spirits came in the immediate aftermath, and as part of the zeitgeist, of the Revolution. The Revolutionary period witnessed heightened concern that society's traditional values were being lost -that luxury and vice were threatening public virtue and liberty itself. A great many people traced these unwanted developments to American links with the British nation, which supposedly had grown increasingly decadent over the years, thus representing a corrupting influence on America. The result was what Revolutionary leaders often described as a rise in social dissipation and a decline in public spirit. The most zealous in this view were the ideological republicans-men like Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and Patrick Henry-who finally came to agree that national salvation lay only in independence. They hoped that the Revolution would represent a cleansing process for Americans and that it would fire a rebirth of individual and public virtue.

"Virtue" was the catchword of republicanism. It dictated that citizens act, vote, and think not out of hopes for personal gain but out of a sense of public duty and concern for the general good. A nation founded on this premise had to maintain traditional concerns about order and stability, and republicans believed that true liberty could exist only in a society composed of such a virtuous people. Providence,

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as a Pennsylvania delegate, and served for a time as Continental army surgeon general. Rush enjoyed a reputation after the war as perhaps the new nation's foremost physician. His interests ranged widely- his writings on mental illness earned him the title "Father of Psychiatry" but most Americans of his time came to know him for his work on behalf of temperance. Rush had spoken out publicly against the use of hard liquor since at least 1772, but his masterpiece was the Inquiry.

The tract represented a radical challenge to previous thinking; it assaulted the old dictum that alcohol was a positive good. Rush had no quarrel with beers and wines, which he believed healthful when consumed in moderate amounts, but he correctly pointed out that Americans were now drinking primarily "ardent spirits," and, he argued, these did more than cause drunkenness. Consumed in quantity over the years, they could destroy a person's health and even cause death. More important was how alcohol went about its lethal business: For Rush was the first American to call chronic drunkenness a distinct disease, which gradually, but through progressively more serious stages, led drinkers to physical doom. In fact, he described an addiction process and specifically identified alcohol as the addictive agent. As Rush claimed, once an "appetite," or "craving," for spirits had become fixed in an individual, the victim was helpless to resist. In these cases, drunkenness was no longer a vice or personal failing, for the imbiber had no more control over his drinking -the alcohol now controlled him. In Rush's view, the old colonial idea that drunkenness was the fault of the drinker was valid only in the early stages of the disease, when a tippler might still pull back; once addicted, even a saint would have a hard time controlling himself.

The Inquiry was a powerful indictment, and it conveyed a sense of urgency. The threat of hard liquor, Rush believed, called for immediate action. As a doctor, he was genuinely concerned about personal health. Drinking habits as they were, many people did risk addiction and a host of related medical complications. Long-standing friendships with Anthony Benezet and early Methodist leaders had also convinced Rush of the moral and social threats posed by hard liquor. His republican ideology, moreover, had so affected his reactions to public behavior that he saw clearly in American drinking patterns what others had only hinted at and what we have traced in retrospect: The Americanization of drinking -that is, the movement from beer, cider, and other light alcoholic beverages to distilled spirits-had not resulted in new social controls to limit drinking excesses. Not only was

A MORAL AND PHYSICAL THERMOMETER.

Gallows.

The "Moral and Physical Thermometer" of temperance and intemperance. Rush did not insist that particular levels of drinking corresponded precisely to the matching vices and medical and legal complications. Ivevertheless, he did try to convey, in a way that a popular readership could understand, the progressive nature of alcohol addiction and its personal and social implications. In this regard, Rush @ news come strikingly close to modern conceptions of alcoholism.

gressive nature of alcohol addiction, outlining the disease's social, medical, and moral complications. Rush wrote other tracts on temperance, and he made some headway in pressing his views on the Protestant churches. A minority of the American elite, certainly citizens of republican leanings themselves, adopted his position on strong drink and either banned it from their homes or limited its use. There was some comfort in knowing that men like James Madison had also denounced "the corrupting influence of spiritous liquors" as "inconsistent with the purity of moral and republican principles."