The Great Illusion: An Informal History of Prohibition

By Herbert Asbury

"An absorbing and at times ironical humorous picture of the battle of Prohibition. Recommended." — Library Journal
With the passing of the Volstead Act, the United States embraced Prohibition as the law of the land. From 1920 to 1933, the well-intentioned ban of the manufacture, sale, and transportation of intoxicating liquors gave rise to a flourishing culture of bootleggers, gangsters, and corrupt officials. This witty and perceptive history by Herbert Asbury, the bestselling author of The Gangs of New York, offers a wide-ranging survey of the Prohibition era that covers not only twentieth-century events but also the movement's inception in colonial times and its transformation into a religious crusade.
A considerable portion of Americans viewed the end of liquor trafficking as an act of obedience to God's will and anticipated a new era of peace and prosperity. Instead, a vast criminal network of black market profiteers took root, promoting a spirit of lawlessness throughout the country. The Great Illusion charts all aspects of the period's moral decline, from the activities of rumrunners who supplied speakeasies to those of crooked politicians and police who profited from the failed experiment of Prohibition.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dover Publications
• Release date: Jul 18, 2018
• ISBN: 9780486832630

Book preview

THE GREAT ILLUSION

AN INFORMAL HISTORY OF

PROHIBITION

HERBERT ASBURY

DOVER PUBLICATIONS, INC.

MINEOLA, NEW YORK

Bibliographical Note

This Dover edition, first published in 2018, is an unabridged republication of the work originally published by Doubleday & Company, Inc., Garden City, N.Y., in 1950.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Asbury, Herbert, 1891–1963, author.

Title: The great illusion : an informal history of prohibition / Herbert Asbury.

Description: Mineola, New York : Dover Publications, Inc., 2018. | Reprint. Originally published in 1950.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017059555| ISBN 9780486824680 | ISBN 0486824683

Subjects: LCSH: Prohibition —United States.

Classification: LCC HV5089 .A74 2018 | DDC 344.7305/41 —dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017059555

Manufactured in the United States by LSC Communications

82468301 2018

www.doverpublications.com

TO MY WIFE

EDITH EVANS ASBURY

Contents

PART ONE

ONE THE GOOD CREATURE OF GOD,

TWO GENESIS,

THREE INTERPOSE THINE ARM,

FOUR WHIRLWIND OF THE LORD,

FIVE BORN OF GOD,

SIX THE DEVIL'S HEADQUARTERS ON EARTH,

SEVEN BURYING CONGRESS LIKE AN AVALANCHE,

PART TWO

EIGHT A NEW NATION WILL BE BORN,

NINE AN ERA OF CLEAR THINKING AND CLEAN LIVING,

TEN A NEW MORAL TONE FOR BROADWAY,

ELEVEN WHERE THE BOOZE CAME FROM,

TWELVE SMUGGLERS AFLOAT AND ASHORE,

THIRTEEN WHAT AMERICA DRANK,

FOURTEEN PROHIBITION'S FAIREST FLOWER,

FIFTEEN THE END OF THE NOBLE EXPERIMENT,

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE,

FOOTNOTES,

INDEX,

THE GREAT ILLUSION

Part 1

CHAPTER ONE

The Good Creature of God

The most intemperate era in American history began during the last half of the eighteenth century, when rum had become the principal medium of exchange in the slave trade and was nearing the peak of its importance as a factor of the colonial economy; and when whiskey, first distilled in western Pennsylvania, was beginning to be recognized as the easiest and most profitable way in which to market grain. It ended some fifty years after the Revolution, by which time American drinking habits had been somewhat modified by the first waves of European immigration, and the anti-liquor movement had begun to assume the character of a religious crusade, the basis of its strong appeal to the American people.

During this period of some eighty or ninety years, the good creature of God, as liquor was called in some of the colonial laws, was considered a prime necessity, an indispensable part of clean and healthy living. It was a common article of diet, in many places almost as much so as bread, while even physicians looked upon it as a preventative of all diseases and a specific for many. Everybody drank—both sexes and nearly all ages. The aged and infirm sipped toddies of rum and water—heavy on the rum; babies were quieted by copious doses of a mixture of rum and opium, and so spent their infancy in a happy fog; and able-bodied men, and women, too, for that matter, seldom went more than a few hours without a drink. The occasional abstainer was considered a crackpot and generally shunned. An article in the Old American Encyclopedia (1830 edition) thus described drinking customs in colonial times:

A fashion at the South was to take a glass of whiskey, flavored with mint, soon after waking; and so conducive to health was this nostrum esteemed that no sex, and scarcely any age, were deemed exempt from its application. At eleven o'clock, while mixtures, under various peculiar names—sling, toddy, flip, etc.—solicited the appetite at the bar of the common tippling-shop, the offices of professional men and counting rooms dismissed their occupants for a half hour to regale themselves at a neighbor's or a coffee-house with punch, hot or cold, according to the season; and females or valetudinarians, courted an appetite with medicated rum, disguised under the chaste names of Hexham's Tinctures or Stoughton's Elixir. The dinner hour arrived . . . whiskey and water curiously flavored with apples, or brandy and water, introduced the feast; whiskey or brandy and water helped it through; and whiskey or brandy without water secured its safe digestion, not to be used in any more formal manner than for the relief of occasional thirst or for the entertainment of a friend, until the last appeal should be made to them to secure a sound night's sleep. Rum, seasoned with cherries, protected against the cold; rum, made astringent with peach-nuts, concluded the repast at the confectioner's; rum, made nutritious with milk, prepared for the maternal office. . . . No doubt there were numbers who did not use ardent spirits, but it was not because they were not perpetually in their way. . . . The friend who did not testify his welcome, and the employer who did not provide bountifully of them for his help, was held niggardly, and there was no special meeting, not even of the most formal or sacred kind, where it was considered indecorous, scarcely any place where it was not thought necessary, to produce them. . . .

This sort of drinking was the fashion, not only in the South, but virtually everywhere else in America, even in New England. The Puritans passed laws forbidding nearly everything that gave the people pleasure, but let liquor alone, except for the usual regulatory statutes and the ordinances against drunkenness. Whatever their other faults, or virtues, may have been, the Puritans were hard drinkers, as well as being the first distillers of rum in this country. As early as 1630 John Winthrop, governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony, who arrived that year with seven hundred Puritan settlers, recorded in his journal that he had observed it a common fault with our grown people that they gave themselves to drink hot waters immoderately. A hundred and fifty years Boston manufactured and consumed more rum than any other city in America, while in the back country of Massachusetts the thirst for ardent spirits was so great that farmers frequently sold their wheat for rum in the fall and winter, and in the spring and summer traveled forty or fifty miles to get bread. An early colonial versifier wrote of the New Englanders, specifically of the men of Derry, New Hampshire:

It was often said, that their only care,

And their only wish, and only prayer,

For the present world, and the world to come,

Was a string of eels and a jug of rum.

The custom of closing offices and business establishments each morning at eleven o'clock so that everyone could get a drink—known as Leven O'clock Bitters—prevailed throughout the country, and in most of the colonies there was a similar stoppage of work at four in the afternoon. These practices were also observed when the people assembled for such public and communal tasks as haying, reaping, barn-raising, woodcutting, and building and repairing highways. On these occasions liquor was free to all, and enormous quantities were consumed. For instance, when a group of citizens of Schenectady, New York, held a woodcutting bee in 1748 to lay in the local minister's winter supply of fuel, the men who did the sawing and chopping drank five gallons of rum and a half gallon of wine.

Workmen commonly received part of their wages in rum or other ardent spirits, and were given stipulated days off for sprees, or, as most work agreements frankly phrased it, to get drunk. It was well-nigh impossible for a farmer who didn't provide plenty of liquor to get farm hands to work for him; it was generally agreed that no man could do a day's work on a farm without alcoholic stimulation. Slaves were likewise given large and regular rations of liquor. Business conferences began and ended with slugs of rum, while liquor flowed almost continuously at social functions. Grocers and other merchants kept barrels of rum on tap for customers who came in to settle their accounts or to buy large bills of goods; it was good manners to get groggy on these occasions. Meetings of town and village officials, and even court sessions, were frequently held in the taverns, so that the lawmakers and judges could be close to the source of inspiration. An old New Hampshire court bill, dated April 15, 1772, shows that on that day the judge had been supplied with a bowl of punch, two bottles of wine, and a mug of rum flip, at a cost of eight shillings twopence. A jury bill of the same date shows the expenditure of fourteen shillings fourpence for eleven dinners, five mugs of flip, and two mugs of cider. A mug of flip, incidentally, varied in quantity from a pint to a half gallon.

The result of all this, of course, was a great deal of drunkenness. As the Old American Encyclopedia put it, sots were common in both sexes, of various ages, and of every condition. Some of the gentlemen seem to have been rare old topers. The Rev. Mason L. Weems, celebrated inventor of Washington legends, published in 1812 a curious pamphlet called The Drunkard's Looking-Glass, in which he reproduced a tavern bill, dated April 1, 1812, for one day's drinking and feasting by Mr. Thomas C——:

There was never any shortage of hard liquor; almost every tavern, except the backwoods joints, carried sufficient potables to satisfy even such splendid appetites as that of Mr. C., who was by no means unique. Applejack, better known as Jersey Lightning, was plentiful, and so was gin, popularly called Strip and Go Naked, or Blue Ruin, which sold for a few pence a quart. Because of its cheapness and startling impact—it was of a higher proof in those days—gin was the favorite drink of slaves and servants. It was frequently mixed with beer, and sometimes with a raw, cheap rum called kill-devil; or with blackstrap, a mixture of rum and molasses. These concoctions would have appalled even the most hardened veteran of prohibition speakeasies, but they were drunk with relish by those who couldn't afford anything better. They probably offered the quickest way to achieve temporary paralysis ever devised.

By far the most abundant liquor, however, was rum. The prosperity of New England, especially of Rhode Island and Massachusetts, was largely founded upon rum. The first rum used in this country was imported from the West Indies, where it was distilled to absorb surplus molasses production; domestic distillation on a large scale began when a shipload of molasses was brought into Rhode Island late in the seventeenth century. Distilleries were soon in operation throughout New England, and by the early years of the eighteenth century rum was being manufactured in great quantities for the slave trade. At first the dealers on the African slave coast sold a prime Negro for a few gallons of rum, but eventually, as rum became cheaper and more plentiful, the price of slaves rose to two hundred and fifty gallons each, and the business became unprofitable. Meanwhile rum had become an important article of commerce; during the few years preceding the Revolution more than six hundred thousand gallons were shipped abroad annually, while large supplies were sold for domestic consumption. The industry continued to expand, and as late as 1807, although whiskey had become popular in the East, forty rum distilleries were operating in Boston. At one time so much rum was available in the Massachusetts metropolis that it sold at retail for fourpence a quart. West Indies rum, supposed to be better than the New England product, was only twopence more.

2

The taverns and tippling houses, where the middle and lower classes did most of their heavy drinking, and where the rich bought the bulk of their supplies for home consumption, rapidly increased in numbers as liquor became cheaper and more plentiful. Time has cast a patina of glamour over the drinking resorts of early America; many historians appear to be under a compulsion to describe them as places of mellow charm, presided over by a fat and genial host, serving the choicest of food and drink, and frequented by the most important men of the day, who gathered before the great fireplace each evening to engage in wise and witty talk over bowls of flip and noggins of toddy.

Such a description may have fitted some of the taverns of the seventeenth century, when licenses were granted only to men of good character and reputation, and when the tavern keeper, operating the only place of public resort in the town or village, enjoyed great prestige and high social standing. In most places, in fact, he was ranked above the local clergyman. But the flood of rum changed the picture; when drinking became more profitable, the issuance of a license was determined by political and other considerations. A lower class of men gradually acquired control of the trade, and a new type of resort began to appear—the dramshop and the gin mill, housed in rude shacks and attracting thieves, ruffians, loafers, and other ornaments of a developing underworld.

The character of the tavern likewise declined; there was so much quick money to be made in the sale of liquor that other features of the establishment were neglected. The taverns of the eighteenth century, except for a few first-class houses in the larger towns of the East, were usually dirty and frequently disorderly, while the accommodations were generally unsatisfactory. The food, nearly everywhere, lacked variety, and was poorly prepared and served. Private sleeping quarters were almost unknown; travelers customarily slept two, three, and even four together, removing only their coats and shoes and fighting a losing battle throughout the night with the original inhabitants of the bed, fleas and bedbugs. By the middle of the eighteenth century the places where liquor was sold in this country had already acquired many of the characteristics of their successor, the saloon, and had begun to present a problem which was destined to plague American lawmakers for two hundred years, and for which a solution, in fact, has not yet been found. A description of eighteenth-century drinking resorts which John Adams, second President of the United States, recorded in his diary in 1760, has a curiously modern note:

But the worst effect of all, and which ought to make every man who has the least sense of his privileges tremble, these houses are become the nurseries of our legislators. An artful man, who has neither sense nor sentiment, may, by gaining a little sway among the rabble of a town, multiply taverns and dramshops and thereby secure the votes of taverner and retailer and all; and the multiplication of taverns will make many, who may be induced to flip and rum, to vote for any man whatever.

In fifty years Adams could see no improvement. He wrote to a friend in 1811 that he was fired with a zeal amounting to enthusiasm against ardent spirits, the multiplication of taverns, retailers, dramshops and tippling houses, and grieved to the heart to see the number of idlers, thieves, sots, and consumptive patients made for the physician in these infamous seminaries.

3

Throughout the era when rum was so abundant, it was almost the universal beverage, especially of the middle classes. Rum was to be found everywhere. A jug of rum, flanked by a pitcher of water and a box of sugar, occupied the place of honor on every sideboard, and many taverns sold nothing else. The wealthy classes drank it, too, but they varied their liquid diet with imported brandy; arrack, a distillation of rice and molasses which came from the East Indies; and such famous wines as madeira, canary, port, and malaga, which were mixed with milk and sugar to form a summer drink called sillibub. Domestic wines were available in some localities, but were not first-class. Rum was used in a great variety of ways—straight, hot, and cold, buttered, with water and sugar, and as the principal ingredient of flip, sling, punch, and toddy. These were the most popular mixed drinks, although there was also, in the higher classes of society, a fairly large consumption of mead, a fermentation of honey and water; and of metheglin, made of honey and yeast.

The most famous of colonial drinks was rum flip, made by combining rum, beer, and sugar, about two-thirds beer. The mixture was then stirred with an iron poker, called a loggerhead, which had been brought to a cherry-red heat in the fireplace. When it began to boil, it was drinkable. Properly prepared, rum flip had a slightly bitter, burnt taste, and was very potent. An evening over a bowl of rum flip frequently ended in a brawl, and the loggerheads came in handy to settle disputes. From this came the expression at loggerheads. Rum sling was made of rum and water, about half and half, with a little sugar added. A toddy was basically the same as a sling, except that lemon juice was used if available. Punch was usually concocted of spices, rum, and lime or lemon juice, with sugar or sirup. It was served both hot and cold.

Cider was the second most popular drink, and was almost as plentiful as rum; a cider press was part of the equipment of every farm, and of many town and village households as well. Since the apple is not native to the American continent, cider was unknown in the colonies for a good many years, except for a few barrels imported from England. But extensive orchards were planted, and soon began to yield fruit. By the early 1700s cider sold in the larger towns at from six to eight shillings a barrel, retail. During the pressing season from six to thirty barrels of cider were laid in by each family, according to size and circumstances, for winter consumption. Very little was used sweet, except by the few moderate drinkers and total abstainers; most people considered that cider was scarcely potable until it had got hard; and the harder the better.

The date in which the distillation of whiskey began in this country has not been preserved, but it was probably around 1760, just in time to play a part in the great wave of intemperance. Whiskey first appeared in western Pennsylvania, where it was distilled by the farmers for their own use. Production on a fairly large scale started when the farmers discovered that a horse could carry four bushels of grain to market over the rough trails of the western country, but could carry the whiskey made from twenty-four bushels. At the time of the Whiskey Insurrection in 1794, which occurred when the federal government imposed an excise tax of nine cents a gallon on all distilled spirits, it was said that every family in western Pennsylvania operated its own still. Whiskey began to spread elsewhere in the country during the Revolution, when it was issued as a ration to troops of the Continental Army at times when good rum was unobtainable. Long before whiskey was used to any large extent in the East, it was a popular tipple throughout the West. In some localities prices of goods were quoted in whiskey, and the liquor was used as currency. A keg of whiskey was an important part of the provisions of every flatboat which went down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. It was placed in the center of the boat, with a tin cup chained to it, and any member of the crew, or any passenger, could help himself whenever he felt the need of stimulation. The flatboatmen, very rugged characters, always drank it straight, although it was as raw as any liquor could well be.

The supply of beer in this country, before the Teutonic immigration began, was very spotty; it was plentiful in some places and scarce in others. This was due partly to recurrent shortages of barley and malt, and partly to a lack of skilled maltsters, although the establishment of malthouses was encouraged by the colonial governments. But Americans of those times were not greatly concerned over this and other shortages; there was a great deal of home-brewing and home-distilling. The people made brandies and cordials out of cherries and other berries, wine from wild grapes, and a variety of liquors from almost everything else that grew in the woods or on the farms. Their ingenuity in these matters was at least equal to that of their descendants of the twentieth century; and their products were probably more palatable than most of the stuff which burned its way down American throats during prohibition. As a contemporary verse put it:

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.

When difficulties of transportation and other factors are taken into consideration, the consumption of hard liquors in early America was truly extraordinary, especially during the thirty years or so that followed the turn of the nineteenth century. In 1792, when the population of the United States was a little more than four million, the per capita consumption of ardent spirits was estimated at approximately two and one half gallons, with a grand total, including imports, of 11,008,447 gallons. Of this quantity, about 5,200,000 gallons were produced in this country by 2,579 registered distilleries. By 1810 the number of distilleries had increased to 14,191 and the consumption had tripled, while the population had not quite doubled. In 1814 the Massachusetts Society for the Suppression of Intemperance published a report dealing with the consumption of distilled liquors in 1810, signed by Samuel Dexter, LL.D., president of the society and formerly Secretary of War and Secretary of the Treasury. It said:

The quantity of ardent spirits consumed in the country surpasses belief. By the marshals' return to the Secretary's office in 1810 of domestic manufacturers in the United States, it is ascertained that 25,499,382 gallons of ardent spirits were distilled in that year, of which 133,823 gallons were exported, leaving 25,365,559 gallons to be consumed at home. Considering the caution with which accounts of property are rendered to government through fear of taxation; considering, also, the quantities distilled in private families, of which no account may have been rendered, there is a high probability that millions might be added to the account rendered by the marshals. Let it stand, however, as it is, and add to it 8,000,000 gallons of distilled spirits in the same year imported, and the quantity for home consumption amounts to 33,365,559 gallons.

The report broke down these figures to obtain a per capita consumption for 1810, of four and seven tenths gallons. The population of the United States in that year was 7,239,903. Thirteen years later, in 1823, the Boston Recorder, a temperance journal, said that the total annual consumption of the country was seventy-five million gallons of liquid fire, although no detailed statistics were published. The first annual report of the Executive Committee of the Connecticut State Temperance Society, dated May 19, 1830, said that in one of the most moral and regular towns of Litchfield County, whose population is 1,586, the amount of distilled liquors retailed during the last ten years has been 36,400 gallons. These liquors were chiefly rum and gin, other kinds not being reckoned. The report also said that licensed retailers in Hartford County, Connecticut, exclusive of the city of Hartford, sold annually 178,000 gallons of hard liquors, or four and one fourth gallons per capita. In 1826 the nineteen hundred inhabitants of Dudley, Massachusetts, drank ten thousand gallons of rum. In 1827 the town of Salisbury, Connecticut, consumed twenty-nine and one half gallons of rum for each of its thirty-four families. Two years later, in 1829, Troy, New York, with a population of ten thousand, consumed 73,959 gallons of rum. Albany, New York, appears to have been the champion. According to a report of the Albany Temperance Society, which made a careful survey of the town, Albany's twenty thousand inhabitants in 1829 consumed two hundred thousand gallons of ardent spirits. This was an average of ten gallons for each man, woman, and child.

4

Nobody drank harder during the great era of intemperance than the clergy. The autobiographies and other writings of ministers who survived the ecclesiastical guzzling to become leaders of the temperance movement are filled with accounts of gigantic drinking bouts in the homes of their parishioners, at ordinations, funerals, and other religious exercises in which they participated, and elsewhere. There were few who didn't drink at every opportunity, and to excess, while many were engaged in the liquor business, owning interests in distilleries and taverns. Eliphalet Nott, president of Union College at Schenectady, New York, for many years, said in a famous series of temperance lectures in the late 1840s that not a few pioneer ministers were distillers and sold to their neighbors the products of their stills. The Rev. Nathan Strong, pastor of the First Church of Hartford, Connecticut, about 1800, and a noted revivalist who saved many souls by the fervor of his preaching, operated a prosperous distillery within sixty rods of his church. He was thus able to keep an eye on both his businesses at the same time. The authorities of many towns encouraged the establishment of drinking places conveniently near the churches, so that the preachers and their flocks might be able to refresh themselves before and after services.

A temperance historian of the 1880s, the Rev. Daniel Dorchester, D.D., quoted the Rev. Leonard Woods, a noted professor of theology at Andover Seminary, as saying that: I remember when I could reckon up among my acquaintances forty ministers, who were either drunkards, or so far addicted to drinking, that their reputation and usefulness were greatly impaired, if not utterly ruined. The same historian quotes another gentleman who said in a Boston newspaper that a great many deacons in New England died drunkards; he had a list of 123 intemperate deacons in Massachusetts, forty-three of whom became sots.¹ Edward C. Delavan of Albany, New York, who according to the 1891 edition of The Cyclopedia of Temperance and Prohibition amassed a fortune as a wine merchant and then became an ardent temperance worker, wrote to the governor of New York in 1857 that an aged divine, well acquainted with the clergy in Albany, had found that fifty per cent of the clergy, within a circuit of fifty miles, died drunkards. This was in the 1820s, when only one of Albany's twenty-eight preachers was willing to say a good word for temperance.

Drinking among clergymen was not confined to the towns and cities; it seems to have been even more prevalent in the country districts, and especially in such border states as Kentucky, Ohio, and Tennessee. The Rev. Peter Cartwright, a noted Methodist circuit rider who traveled the western trails around the turn of the nineteenth century, wrote in his autobiography, it was almost universally the custom for preachers, in common with all others, to take drams. . . . I recollect at an early age, he continued, at a court time in Springfield, Tennessee, to have seen and heard a very popular Baptist preacher, who was evidently intoxicated, drinking the health of the company in what he called the health the Devil drank to a dead hog. I have often seen it carried and used freely at large baptizings, where the ordinance was administered by immersion. Baptists were probably the most intemperate of the western preachers, but their church authorities do not appear to have been greatly worried about it. In fact, some of the Baptist sects lagged behind other Protestant denominations in espousing the anti-liquor cause; as late as 1854 Primitive Baptist congregations in Kentucky were expelling members who joined temperance societies.

The Methodists, however, had a great deal of trouble with drunken ministers, especially the local preachers who had been authorized to conduct religious services but were not ordained. Despite the exhortations and example of Bishop Francis Asbury, who occasionally tossed off a little ale and light wine for my health's sake but refused to drink ardent spirits even when ordered to do so by his physician, the local Methodist preachers continued to distill and to drink liquor in large quantities. Bishop Asbury finally called upon Peter Cartwright, James B. Finley, and other dependable circuit riders to examine the local preachers and dismiss from the connection such as were found guilty of drunkenness. Cartwright thus described the trial of a local preacher in eastern Tennessee:

I said: Brother W., do you drink drams?

Yes, said he.

What is your particular reason for drinking drams? I asked him.

Because it makes me feel good, he answered.

You drink till you feel it, do you? said I.

Certainly, said he.

Well, how much do you drink at a time?

He replied, gruffly, that he never measured it.

Brother, how often do you drink in a day?

Just when I feel like it, if I can get it.

Well, brother, there are complaints that you drink too often and too much; and the Saturday before my next appointment here you must meet a committee of local preachers at ten o'clock, to investigate this matter . . .

I had hard work to get a committee that were not dram-drinkers themselves. The trial came on, the class leader brought evidence that the local preacher had been intoxicated often, and really drunk several times. The committee found him guilty of immoral conduct, and suspended him till the next quarterly meeting; and the quarterly meeting, after hard debate, expelled him. . . . The poor local preacher, I fear, lived and died a drunkard. . . .²

Actually, the preacher in colonial times and during the early years of the Republic was in a difficult position; even if he had wanted to do so, he could scarcely have remained temperate and still performed, satisfactorily, the duties of his office. In those days the clergyman was a man of great importance in the community; to offer him a drink was to show respect and esteem. If he refused it, he was looked upon as a hypocrite, and the donor felt insulted, or at least slighted. If he consistently abstained, he was believed to hold unsound views about everything else, and was lucky to retain his pastorate. If he couldn't hold his liquor, he was a weakling and no true man of God. When he stepped into a store or business office, he was called upon to respond to as many toasts as there were men present. When he called upon a member of his flock, the gratified householder met him at the door with a mug of rum or hard cider. Drinks were served almost continuously during his visit, and when he departed he was expected to quaff a good-by cup. If he made twenty calls in one day, he went through, or tried to go through, the same procedure at each place. It is small wonder that many preachers were continually in a more or less pleasant state of befuddlement.

The Rev. I. N. Tarbox, D.D., a noted temperance lecturer of the 1870s, once said that ordinations were seasons of festivity, in which copious drinking had a large share, and an ordination ball often ended the occasion. He was being somewhat conservative; in reality many ordinations were drunken routs, at which everybody got well plastered. Funerals were likewise occasions of considerable jollity; once the corpse had been disposed of, everybody pitched in to drink up the potables that had been provided. Sometimes they got away with huge quantities of liquor; for instance, when the funeral of a preacher's widow was held in Boston in 1678, the mourners drank fifty-one and one half gallons of malaga wine. In Virginia it took four thousand pounds of tobacco to pay the liquor costs of a single funeral. The bill for liquor consumed at an ordination was usually paid for by the church, while the costs for liquid refreshment at a funeral were footed by the family of the dead person, or by the town or village if the deceased was a pauper. The custom of drinking at funerals began to decline in the early part of the seventeenth century, and by 1750 had virtually ceased.

At ordinations and other religious functions where liquor was on tap, the preacher was expected to lead the assault upon the jugs and bottles. Even the renowned Cotton Mather, an inveterate foe of intemperance, and of almost everything else, imbibed, though moderately, at such gatherings. In describing a meeting, a private fast, held ten days after his ordination in Boston, Cotton Mather noted in his journal that following two sermons and four prayers, one of which ran for an hour and a half, some biskets and beer, cider, wine, were distributed. The Lord, he wrote, hear in Heaven his dwelling place.

On May 4, 1784, at the ordination of a new pastor of the South Society in Hartford, Connecticut, twenty-four preachers drank 3 bitters, 15 boles punch, 11 bottles wine, 5 mugs flip, 3 boles toddy, 3 boles punch. At the ordination of the Rev. Edwin Jackson at Woburn, Massachusetts, in 1729, the people drank six and one half barrels of cider, twenty-five gallons of wine, two gallons of brandy, and four gallons of rum. According to the old record, this bill was paid by the town. At an ordination in New England in 1785, in addition to a goodly supply of cherry rum, the celebrants drank thirty bowles of punch before they went to the meeting, ten bottles of wine before they went to the meeting, forty-four bowles of punch while at dinner, also eighteen bottles of wine and eight bowles of Brandy. The Rev. Lyman Beecher, one of the great figures of the early temperance movement, thus described an ordination at Plymouth, Massachusetts, in 1810, soon after he had become pastor of the Congregational Church at Litchfield, Connecticut:

. . . the preparation for our creature comforts, besides food, was a broad sideboard covered with decanters and bottles and sugar and pitchers of water. There we found all the various kinds of liquor then in vogue. The drinking was apparently universal. The preparation was made by the society, as a matter of course. When the Consociation arrived, they always took something to drink round, also before public services, and always on their return. As they could not all drink at once, they were obliged to stand and wait as people do when they go to mill. There was a decanter of spirits also on the dinner table to help digestion, and gentlemen partook of it through afternoon and evening as they felt the need, some more and some less; and the sideboard, with its spillings of water and sugar and liquor, looked and smelled like the bar of a very active grog-shop. . . . And, silently, I took an oath before God that I would never attend another ordination of that kind. . . .³

The custom of drinking heavily at ordinations declined rapidly during the first quarter of the nineteenth century, partly because church members protested against the cost of such indulgence, and partly because many preachers were becoming interested in the temperance movement. As late as 1825, however, when the Rev. Leonard Bacon was installed as pastor of the Congregational Church at New Haven, Connecticut, the church bought drinks for all