Drink (24 page)

In New England, in contrast, American-made alcoholic drinks were commonplace. Attitudes toward drunkenness were also different: The population was more densely concentrated in villages, towns, and their surrounding farms, and hence opportunities for convivial intoxication were far more numerous, and drunkards were much more visible. Moreover, the reigning Puritan caste had become increasingly antagonistic toward drinking. Instead of perceiving it as a sign of success, indicative of agricultural surpluses and leisure time, they considered it un-American. The pilgrim fathers had got by with cold water and hard work, what now the need for boozing?

An attack was launched on some of the traditional English drinking practices that had been imported to New England, beginning with the custom of paying workers part of their wages in alcohol. In 1645, the “allowance of liquors or wine every day, over and above their wages,” was forbidden by the general court of the colony.
¹⁹
The Puritans’ next target was the excessive drinking that accompanied such communal exercises as raising a barn or meetinghouse, and quasi-public ceremonies, especially weddings and funerals. A supply of alcohol was considered obligatory on all such occasions— witness the funeral bill for David Porter of Hartford, who drowned in 1678:

The charge against English-style inebriation while working, marrying, and burying was led from the pulpit. In 1673, Increase Mather (later to preach against another sort of spirits in the Salem witch trials) published his electrifying sermon “Wo to Drunkards,” which warned colonial inebriates, in medieval imagery, that while they might succeed in drinking their consciences into comas, when their souls awoke “in the midst of eternal Flames, all the wounds received by this sin will be felt with a witness.” His words of wisdom seem to have fallen on deaf ears, for in 1708 his son, Cotton Mather, felt compelled to publish a similar tract against alcohol entitled “Sober Considerations on a Growing Flood of Iniquity.”

At the same time as they fulminated against old-fashioned English drunkenness, the Puritans directed their ire against the ordinaries that were popping up like mushrooms all over the country around Massachusetts Bay. While these were impossible to eradicate, since every settlement needed somewhere where visitors might stay, it was possible to limit what people drank in them. In 1645, the Massachusetts General Court forbade ordinary keepers “to suffer anyone to be drunk or drink excessively, or continue tippling above the space of half an hour in any of their said houses.” To “drink excessively” was defined as more than half a pint of wine in any one sitting. Transgressors, whether excessive or leisurely drinkers, and the tavern owners who served them, were to be punished with fines.

The enforcement of such remarkable laws was entrusted to a special class of colonial officials, known latterly as
tithingmen,
who were zealous in their duties. Amazed foreign visitors commented on how they had been told to stop drinking, and advised their home audiences to expect unnatural and ill-mannered restraints on their consumption when visiting New England. John Josselyn, writing of Boston in 1663, expressed his disgust at being hounded by one such monitor, who would “thrust himself into the company uninvited, and if [anyone] called for more drink than the officer thought in his judgment he could soberly bear away, he would presently countermand it, and appoint the proportion beyond which he could not get one drop.”

Moreover, the licensing procedure for ordinaries was tightened up in 1681. In Boston, the principal town of the region, whose population doubled between 1700 and 1718, the number of taverns grew at a far slower rate—from sixty-three to seventy-four. Thereafter, however, official pressure on the chapels of Satan in New England eased. They were found to be useful venues for discussing British imperial incompetence, and as the merchant element of Boston grew in importance, they were used, like coffee shops in London, as trading centers where bargains could be struck and confidences exchanged.

A measure of the change in priorities, and the balance of power, is apparent in the failure of the “Act Against Intemperance Immorality, and Prophaneness, and for Reformation of Manners,” which was approved by the Boston Assembly in 1712, and which included a ban on the sale of distilled liquors in taverns. A glance at the excise levies of subsequent years reveals that taverns continued to sell spirits by the bucket load and that they had enough in their cellars to withstand a siege. In 1715, for example, Thomas Gilbert had 218 gallons of rum, 319 of wine, and 982 of cider in his Boston tavern; and in 1725, Thomas Selby of the Crown Coffee House had nearly 700 gallons of rum and more than 6,000 gallons of wine to hand, which equated to almost a half gallon of wine for every inhabitant of Boston—in one pub. By the time that Selby was storing such prodigious quantities of booze, the number of taverns in Boston had leapt to 134, or one per hundred head of population, i.e., a higher density than that which had prevailed in Elizabethan England.

The excise lists of tavern stocks show, by the relative quantities of various kinds of alcoholic beverage, the prevailing tastes in drink in early eighteenth-century New England. The most popular tipple, in terms of volume, was locally produced cider. Even little settlements produced huge quantities of cider. In 1721 a Massachusetts village of forty families made three thousand barrels—enough for a hundred pints for each family every week throughout the year. In the event, cider became too common and overproduction forced prices down from six shillings per barrel around 1700 to three shillings in 1730. Throughout much of this period, cider served as a currency, like tobacco in Virginia. It was used to pay salaries and levies, and the prices of goods and services were often quoted in barrels of cider.

The cider itself was sometimes transformed into
applejack
by freeze distillation—i.e., by leaving barrels of it outdoors in the winter. This elixir, perhaps the same fluid as Anglo-Saxon
beor,
was easily made by accident in icy New England. It was a farmer’s drink, strong, rough, and toxic—applejack hangovers could kill—and was seldom found in taverns, where the most popular liquor was rum. According to
A Trip to New England
(1699) by the English hack journalist Edward Ward, “Rum, alias Kill Devil, is as much ador’d by the American English as a dram of brandy is by an old Billingsgate. ’Tis held as the comforter of their souls, the Preserver of their bodys, the Remover of their Cares and Promoter of their Mirth; and is a Soveraign Remedy against the Grumbling of the Guts, a Kibe-heel or a Wounded Conscience, which are three Epidemical Distempers that afflict the Country.” By the time that Ward was writing, New Englanders were making their own rum in Boston. Slave traders found it was less expensive to buy molasses and distil it themselves than to purchase the finished Caribbean spirit. Boston rum had a very poor reputation—a visitor summed up its qualities as “cheap.” In 1738 it cost less than two shillings a gallon or about half the price of a similar quantity of beer in Virginia.

Distillation on a commercial scale was also being carried out in New York, which had experienced rapid growth since it passed into English hands in 1664. Manhattan Island had several breweries and produced raw materials for them—hops and barley—in its numerous farms and market gardens. In contrast it imported its wines, for while many had experimented, none had succeeded in making good wine out of native grapes or in keeping foreign vines alive for long enough to produce a vintage. Its inhabitants nonetheless distilled a “brandy” made from grain spirit from 1640 onward, and by the time they had become English subjects “three out of the five breweries in New York also made whisky.” However, demand for grain for the stills raised prices to such an extent that there was scarcely enough left for baking into bread, and in 1676 Governor Edmund Andros
²⁰
banned distillation, except with damaged grain. Thereafter, New Yorkers relied on molasses for their stills, whose output was slight in comparison to the volume of rum imported from the West Indies. Like Boston, New York developed large taverns that served as meeting places for its merchants and politicians as well as watering holes for the community at large. In the 1730s, for instance, New York Assembly committees did their business at D’Honneur’s Tavern. The size and general layout of such institutions may be gauged from Manhattan’s oldest surviving building, Fraunces Tavern, which was built as a house in 1719 and converted to a drinking place in 1762.

The drinking culture of eighteenth-century New York was similar to that which prevailed in the fast-expanding town of Philadelphia, which had been founded in 1682 by William Penn to be the capital of his proprietary colony of Pennsylvania. Its Quaker owner and his coreligionists were peaceful, serious people, who believed in personal communication with, and occasional possession by, the divinity. While they were conscientious investors who would not trade in weapons or participate in war, they accounted wealth no sin and had become a significant force in the English brewing industry.

Penn included a brewery in his own mansion at Pennsbury and recorded, with evident pleasure, that in 1685 an “able man” (William Frampton) had “set up a large
Brew House
,” in Philadelphia, “in order to furnish the People with good Drink.” Ten years later there were four or five large brewing operations in the town. The beer they produced was reckoned to be “equal in strength to that of London” and was being exported to Barbados, where it fetched a higher price than the English equivalent. While Pennsylvania quickly achieved self-sufficiency in beer, its wine was imported. Like many other European colonists before them, the Quakers had tried and failed to make wine from the native grapes. William Penn planted two hundred acres of his estate with imported vines, but they died, from causes unknown, and the experiment was abandoned. The failure was blamed on the climate, and Philadelphia bought its wines from Europe, the Canary Islands, and Madeira.

The drinking habits of the town were observed, and quite probably shaped, by Benjamin Franklin. Journalism was the first outlet for his energetic genius, and drinking was one of the first topics he addressed. While still a teenager in New England, and writing in the guise of Mrs. Silence Dogood, Franklin contributed a letter to
The New-England Courant,
run by his elder brother, which shows a natural wit, an effective style, and a tolerant approach to alcohol that was to characterize his later work. Its conclusion is typical of Franklin’s early style and ordered mind:

Franklin moved to Pennsylvania and, after a short spell in London, took over and edited
The Pennsylvania Gazette,
to which he also contributed under aliases. His best-loved alter ego was
Poor Richard,
in whose name an almanac was published every year between 1732 and 1767. The almanac was immensely popular—Poor Richard was the voice of America of his age. In addition to providing weather forecasts and horoscopes for the coming year, the almanac was noted for its aphorisms, which set out in plain English useful behavioral guidelines for the farmers and other colonists who bought it in their thousands. These included maxims about drinking, such as “Take counsel in wine, but resolve afterwards in water”; and “He that drinks his Cyder alone, let him catch his Horse alone.”

Franklin also continued to demonstrate an interest in drinking slang. In January 1736 he published the
Drinkers Dictionary,
the most comprehensive collection ever attempted of words and phrases used by drinkers to “cover their Folly.” This work, and the aphorisms of Poor Richard, may be taken as being representative of eighteenth-century colonial attitudes to alcohol. Notwithstanding the opposition of a few New England Puritans, occasional drunkenness was viewed with humor and even affection. It was a happy state of relaxation, which might cause people to make temporary fools of themselves, but which did not interfere with their general ability to act as responsible members of the community.

There was, however, one category of drinker whom Franklin felt should be kept away from alcohol at all costs. The Native Americans continued to show an inability to get
groatable
without losing all self-control. This was perceived as a problem throughout the colonies, and Indians, like slaves, were barred from taverns in most places. Numerous laws prohibiting the sale of alcohol to Indians were enacted in various colonies over time: in New Amsterdam in 1643, in Rhode Island in 1654, in Massachusetts in 1657, in Connecticut in 1669, in Pennsylvania in 1701, in New York in 1709.

The problem of Indian drinking worsened as spirits became ubiquitous in colonial America. Since the native tribes had no place for alcoholic drinks in their cultures or diets, they still conceived of them as stimulants and so had a preference for the hard stuff. In 1670 it was reported “that they wonder much of the English for purchasing wine at so dear a rate when Rum is much cheaper & will make them sooner drunk.” The same correspondent noted that because they felt the only point in drinking was to become utterly fuddled, if a group of warriors did not have enough to all get drunk, they would choose one person and give their entire stock to him and, if he passed out before finishing it, would hold open his throat and pour in the remainder.