This was the first prohibition experiment in America, and it was an unmitigated failure.
When the American west was opened up, and flatboats and keelboats and then steamboats began to appear upon its great rivers—the Ohio, the Mississippi, and the Missouri—there was free whiskey for the men who worked the boats. An open barrel, to the rim of which a tin ladle was tied, was placed in easy reach of all the crew, and any poler, fireman, or deckhand could refresh himself whenever he pleased. He had to keep his strength up, didn’t he? The stuff was usually Monogahela, from western Pennsylvania, although after a while some individuals began to insist on bourbon.
Then there was the problem of the Indian.
When Henry Hudson sailed the “Half Moon” into a New World bay at the mouth of a magnificent clean river that he hoped might prove to be the Northwest Passage to Cathay, he espied to starboard a large, flat, and heavily wooded island at the edge of which some red savages were fishing. He went ashore to make friends with these savages and to see whether he could learn, by sign language, anything about the source of the river. Of course he took with him a cask of Hollands gin. Every business discussion between familiar or alien parties started with a round of drinks. Anything else would have been discourteous.
The Indians liked the gin. They had never before tasted alcohol, and they asked for more. In fact, they had quite a party, roughly on the present site of Battery Park. Afterward the Indians decided to give the deserted island a name, something they had not previously thought about doing. They called it Manahachta-nienk, which meant “place where we all got drunk.” This was subsequently shortened to Manhattan.
The first explorers and settlers along the North Atlantic coast encountered red men who were nothing like the fierce, proud warriors their descendants were to meet farther inland. They were a sheepish, sickly lot, but when they partook of firewater they became savages indeed. Indians and liquor, the colonists soon learned, were an explosive mixture.
All the colonies had laws forbidding the sale of spirits to Indians. But the average man was willing to take great risks to obtain a bundle of pelts, especially if the transaction took place in the wilderness, where there would be no record of what actually occurred. It is safe to assume that all the laws at one time or another were broken.
CHAPTER THREE
The Vicious Triangle
Rum, molasses, and slaves—
Dr. Benjamin Rush—
The Whiskey Rebellion
The economy of New England and New York rested largely on rum and on an ingenious three-way trade that developed as soon as the colonies got away from England’s stifling commercial grip. Merchants, in particular those of Massachusetts and Rhode Island, sent ships to the Guinea coast of Africa and purchased slaves from the native kings. The slaves were then taken to the West Indies, where there was always a demand for them but where, because of harsh home-country restrictions imposed by France, England, and Spain, there was very little money. But there was plenty of molasses, especially in the French colonies of Martinique and Guadeloupe, because the brandy interests in Paris had seen to it that rum imports were forbidden in France. So the slaves were exchanged for molasses, which was taken to New England, where it was distilled into rum. Rum was everywhere.
By the early nineteenth century there were forty distilleries in Boston, twenty-one in Hartford, and eight in Newport, all making rum. Some of the rum was sold in the colonies, some was transported to Europe, and a generous quantity was drunk at home. The rest of the rum was shipped to the Guinea coast to pay for more slaves, who were then taken to the West Indies and traded for molasses, which was taken to New England and made into rum, which was sent to the Guinea coast to purchase slaves. ... So it went for many years. It was a vicious, but lucrative, triangle. Some of the stuffiest New England families owe their current affluence to this trade.
The man who inaugurated the Guinea coast slave trade, that stout old Elizabethan sea dog Sir John Hawkins of Plymouth, was granted in honor of his achievement a coat of arms featuring a Moor, as all Negroes were called then, in chains. Many a present-day Brahmin of Boston might well display a similar escutcheon, perhaps supplemented by a cask of rum.
It was largely because of this cunning commercial arrangement that “rum” came to be a generic word in the United States for all hard liquor, as in phrases like “demon rum,” “rum- pot,” “rum row.” It is not so used anywhere else in the world.
Dr. Benjamin Rush, the surgeon general of the Continental middle army during the Revolutionary War, was by all odds the best-known, most outspoken physician practicing in the colonies and later in the new United States. He had studied in London and Edinburgh. He was a friend of Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Paine, a member of the Second Continental Congress, a signer of the Declaration of Independence. When such a personage came forth with a formal statement on the health of the soldiers under his care during the war, remarking that the regular rum ration was not essential to the well-being of the troops, and in the long run might even be detrimental, it caused a shock. Few were convinced, but many were jolted. Dr. Rush was not a man whose assertions could be scorned.
It is possible that the appearance of a new drink in America, a liquor called whiskey, was in part responsible for Dr. Rush’s startling statement. The whiskey came from the mountainous western sections of Pennsylvania, Maryland, and North Carolina, and it was distilled from rye, barley, and corn in just about every cabin. It was the mountaineers’ money, their only means of buying supplies from the seaboard settlements. Of course they could have sent the grain itself, but a horse could carry five to six times the value in whiskey that it could in grain, so it made sense to distill the stuff first.
Some of this whiskey found its way into Continental Army camps, and when there was a shortage of rum for the usual daily ration the whiskey was passed out instead. A few of the men even said they liked it better.
Dr. Rush had nothing against whiskey, any more than he had anything against rum, but he persisted in his belief that hard liquor did not keep up the strength of the men, and he suggested that malt drinks or light wine might better quench the martial thirst. Milk or even water would do no real harm, he said. This would have caused a less illustrious person to be written off as balmy, but the doctor’s friends generously assumed that he was only having a bad moment. He would come to his senses soon.
Dr. Rush did not. In fact, in 1785, when he published a paper entitled Enquiry into the Effects of Spiritous Liquors upon the Human Body and Mind, it was clear that his opinions had not changed, only hardened. He still thought that liquor was bad for people and that its curative powers had been exaggerated. This time, however, the doctor found a few people who agreed, and he went on to become a major prophet of the American temperance movement.
That fervent fluid from the mountains was to trouble the new government of the United States early in its existence. During George Washington’s first administration, his sharp young secretary of the treasury, Alexander Hamilton, persuaded Washington and Congress to put a tax on all whiskey manufactured in the country, a tax he estimated would being in $826,000 a year. The tax range was only from nine cents to twenty-two cents a gallon, depending upon local conditions and the distance the whiskey had to be sent for sale, but the mountain men were furious. How could they pay a tax? They had no money and never expected to have any. A few revenue collectors, venturing into western Pennsylvania, were roughly handled, and at least one was treated to a dose of tar and feathers.
Hamilton took umbrage immediately. This was rebellion. It must be put down.
Washington wavered, hoping to take advantage of the counsel of some of his government associates. However, the attorney general was not available, and the secretary of state, Thomas Jefferson, was at Monticello for the summer. The only other member of the Cabinet, the secretary of war, had just resigned. Hamilton was not abashed. He proposed that he act as temporary secretary of war and, backed by Washington’s prestige, raise a large force of militia in eastern Pennsylvania. His intention was to lead the militiamen against the defiant mountaineers and bring them to heel. Washington acceded.
Alexander Hamilton