Freshmen vs. Incumbents: Congressional Voting Patterns on Prohibition Legislation during the Progressive Era

Abstract

pioneered by reformers a decade earlier. In short, the campaign launched in 1812 by the Connecticut General Association and the Presbyterian General Assembly, and the greatly expanded crusade of the late 1820s and 1830s, constituted the same movement at different stages of development. This raises important questions about the origins of entire abstinence. The standard view that abstinence was a response to industrialization and the growth of a market economy must be carefully qualified. Such developments undoubtedly contributed to the growing receptiveness to temperance in the 1820s, but they cannot account for the origins of the movement's ideology. To understand why a mass crusade against liquor emerged in early republican America we will have to learn more than we now know about social developments in the decade preceding the War of 1812. Students of temperance need to broaden their vision. In the future we must examine carefully the long-ignored moral societies that dotted the American landscape during the 1810s, the expanding domestic mission movement that provided much of the initial leadership for the temperance crusade, and the hopes and fears of average evangelicals in such remote pockets of the country as Austinburgh, Ohio, and Livingston County, Kentucky.