Chapter 10 No.10

Extent and Effect of the Traffic at Flood Tide

In 1648 one-fourth of the buildings of New Amsterdam, or New York, were tap-houses.

In his notes on Virginia, Jefferson states that in 1682 there were in Virginia fifty-three thousand, two hundred and eighty-nine free males above twenty-one years of age and one hundred and ninety-one taverns. About this time their number was so great that they were limited by law in each county to one at the court house and one at the ferry.

The diary of Judge Sewall shows that in 1714 Boston had a population of ten thousand, with thirty-four ordinaries, of whom twelve were women; four common victuallers, of whom one was a woman; forty-one retailers of liquor, of whom seventeen were women, and a few cider sellers.

As soon as the white settlers had planted themselves at Pittsburgh they made requisition on Philadelphia for six thousand kegs of flour and three thousand kegs of whiskey. There were distilleries on nearly every stream emptying into the Monongahela.

The Chicago directory for 1830 classified its business interests as taverns, two; Indian traders, three; butchers, one; merchants, one; with a poll list of thirty-two voters.

So much seed sown from the earliest times produced a bountiful harvest. In 1633 Winthrop complains that workmen were idle in spite of high wages because they spent so much in tobacco and strong waters. About this time drunkenness greatly increased and deprived the custom of bundling of whatever innocence it may have had remaining.

Josselyn, in 1675, gives a graphic description of the extravagance and drunkenness of the cod fishermen, stating that at the end of each voyage they drank up their earnings. In this year Cotton Mather said every house in Boston was an ale house. In 1696 Nathaniel Saltonstall, of Haverhill, Massachusetts, a judge who had refused to sit in the Salem witchcraft cases, wrote a letter to the Salem court remonstrating against licensing public houses. In 1678 Dr. Increase Mather said: "Many of the rising generation are profane, drunkards, swearers licentious and scoffers at the power of godliness." Dankers and Sluyter, in 1680, comment on the puritanical laws and say, "drinking and fighting occur there not less than elsewhere and as to truth and true godliness you must not expect more of them than of others."

The Reverend John Miller, in his history of New York, says: "'Tis in this country a common thing even for the meanest persons as soon as the bounty of God has furnished them with a bountiful crop to turn what they can as soon as may be into money, and that money into drinks, at the same time when their family at home have nothing but rags to resist the winter's cold; nay if the fruits of their plantations be such as are by their own immediate labor convertible into liquor such as cider, perry, etc., they have scarce the patience to wait till it is fit for drinking but inviting their boon companions they all of them neglecting whatever work they are about, set to it together and give not over till they have drunk it off. And to these sottish engagements they will make nothing to ride ten or fifteen miles and at the conclusion of one debauch another is generally appointed except their stock of liquor fail them." In his history of New Haven Henry Atwater states: "A brew-house was regarded as an essential part of a homestead, and beer was on the table as regularly as bread." When in Stuyvesant's day it was reported that fully one-fourth of the houses in New Amsterdam were devoted to the sale of brandy, tobacco, and beer, Mr. Roberts observed:

"Their existence tells the story of the habits of the people. It was when Governor Sloughter was besotted with drink that he signed the illegal death warrant of Leisler; it was when the informer Kane was possessed by the fumes of liquor of the tavern, that he foisted upon the terrified colonists the lying details of the shameful negro plot; it was when the representative of the most powerful family in the province, Chief Justice DeLancey, and Governor Clinton, the proxy of the King, were 'in their cups' that a personal quarrel led to antagonisms that threatened the welfare of the colony. Indeed the deep hold that this vice had upon the morals of the entire colony seemed to repeat and emphasize the wisdom of the name which the earlier Spanish in an intercourse had fastened upon its leading town-Monafos-'the place of the drunken men.'"

Whiskey as Money

In a large part of the territory now the United States the early settlers lived in the rudest kind of log cabins and knew no other money than whiskey and the skins of wild beasts. In 1780, after the collapse of the continental currency, it seemed there was no money in the country, and in the absence of a circulating medium there was a reversion to the practice of barter, and the revival of business was thus further impeded. Whiskey in North Carolina and tobacco in Virginia did duty as measures of value. In Pennsylvania what a bank bill was at Philadelphia or a shilling piece at Lancaster, whiskey was in the towns and villages that lay along the banks of the Monongahela river. It was the money, the circulating medium of the country. A gallon of good whiskey at every store in Pittsburgh, and at every farmhouse in the four counties of Washington, Westmoreland, Alleghany, and Fayette, was the equivalent of a shilling. And when, in 1797, the government began to coin new money for the people, the new coins did not, many of them, go far from the seaports and great towns. In the country districts, in the Ohio valley, on the northern border they were still unknown. The school-master received his pittance in French crowns and Spanish half-joes. The boatmen were paid their hire in shillings and pence, and if perchance some traveler paid his reckoning at a tavern with a few American coins, they were beheld with wonder by every lounger who came there to smoke and drink.

Temperance Societies

The first prohibitory law was that of Georgia, in 1733, and the first dawn of temperance sentiment was undoubtedly the pledge of Governor Winthrop, still earlier than this, when he announced his famous discountenance of health drinking. This first of all temperance pledges in New England is recorded in his diary in language as temperate as his intent:

"The Governor, upon consideration of the inconveniences which have grown in New England by drinking one to another, restrained it at his own table, and wished others to do the like; so it grew little by little, into disuse."

Lyman Beecher claims the Massachusetts temperance society formed in 1813 to be the first one, the pledge of its members being to discontinue the use of liquor at entertainments, funerals, and auction sales, and to abstain from furnishing laborers with grog during haying time, as was then the custom. John B. Gough, however, mentions the constitution of a temperance society formed in New York in 1809, one of whose by-laws was, "Any member of this association who shall be convicted of intoxication shall be fined a quarter of a dollar, except such act of intoxication shall take place on the Fourth of July, or any other regularly appointed military muster."

In 1817 a committee of New York citizens appointed to investigate the causes of pauperism reported that seven-eighths of the paupers were reduced to abject poverty by the sale of liquor. As far back as 1809 the Humane Society found eighteen hundred licensed dramshops scattered over the city, retailing liquor in small quantities, and offering every inducement to the poor to drink.

New Hampshire required a selectman of each town to post the names of tipplers in every tavern and fined anyone ten dollars who sold them liquor. About this same time the legislature of Pennsylvania passed a law authorizing the governor to appoint a commission of nine to investigate the causes of pauperism in Philadelphia, and to report to the next legislature. The farmers of Upper Providence township, Pennsylvania, met in the school house just before harvest time and agreed not to give liquor to their harvest hands, nor to use it in the hay field or during harvest, nor to allow any one in their employ to use it. A general movement for temperance swept over the Atlantic states. The Portland Society, auxiliary to the Massachusetts Society for Suppressing Intemperance, reported that out of eighty-five persons in the workhouse, seventy-one became paupers through drink. A grand jury at Albany drew a picture of their city quite as dismal, and presented the immense number of dramshops and corner groceries where liquor was retailed by the cent's worth as an evil and a nuisance to society.

One of the most interesting documents in early temperance agitation is the letter of the mayor of Philadelphia in 1821, showing the condition of the liquor traffic at that time. He pointed out the dangers of the tippling houses and corner groceries, where liquor was sold by the cent's worth to children five years old, and paid for often with stolen goods.

The liquor traffic left an indelible impress upon the geography of the country. The oldest American reference to the word RUM is in the Massachusetts statute of 1657 prohibiting the sale of strong liquors "whether known by the name of rum, strong water, brandywine, etc." The Dutch in New York called rum brandywine, and it conferred its name upon the river which in turn gave its name to one of the most famous battles of the Revolution. Among places may be found such names as Rumford, Wineland, Winesburg, and others.

When in 1828 Mr. Garrison assumed the editorial control of the Journal of the Times at Bennington, Vermont, he distinctly avowed that he had three objects in view, "The suppression of Intemperance and its associate vices, the gradual emancipation of every slave in the Republic, the perpetuity of the national peace." He contributed to the third object; he accomplished the second; the first problem he left unsolved as a bequest to this generation.

Transcribers' Notes

Punctuation and spelling were made consistent when a predominant preference was found in this book; otherwise they were not changed.

Simple typographical errors were corrected; occasional unbalanced quotation marks retained.

Ambiguous hyphens at the ends of lines were retained.

Page 84: "seargeant" was spelled that way.

Page 115: The closing quotation mark for the phrase beginning 'and "Tom the Tinker was shortly evolved' probably should follow 'the Tinker', but was printed at the end of the sentence, and has not been moved.