"The Art of Getting Drunk" in Colonial Massachusetts

Abstract

“The Art of Getting Drunk” in Colonial Massachusetts Peter C. Mancall (bio) David W. Conroy. In Public Houses: Drink and the Revolution ofAuthority in Colonial Massachusetts. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1995. xiii + 351 pp. Illustrations, tables, notes, appendix, bibliography, and index. $35.95 (cloth); $15.95 (paper). Colonists liked to drink. In fact, according to one widely cited estimate, per capita consumption among colonists in 1770 was 3.7 gallons of distilled spirits per year, or approximately seven shots a day. That estimate does not include the beer or hard cider that colonists routinely drank in addition to rum, the most popular distilled beverage available in English America. Drinking took place in the countryside and in the cities—to such an extent that Benjamin Franklin printed a “Drinker’s Dictionary” in the Pennsylvania Gazette in 1737, a listing of 228 terms used for drunkenness in Philadelphia. Yet however much colonists drank, their society did not collapse. Most men and women got up and went to work each day, creating a booming economy. By the mid-eighteenth century this legion of drinkers had managed to create a well-functioning political system. They had also become so well-versed in Anglo-American intellectual history and culture that they managed to articulate an effective critique of growing Parliamentary authority. That protest movement, much of it emerging from Boston and its environs, often took shape among citizens whose favorite meeting place was a tavern. Here were people who possessed what Boswell had termed in his life of Johnson “the art of getting drunk”: they could consume liquor to the point of intoxication but apart from an occasional hangover or some drink-inspired violence, society prospered. 1 Most of the existing historical literature on alcohol use in America analyzes not the consumption of liquor but the organization of opposition to drink. These studies tend to focus on problems that drunkenness apparently caused and the rise of effective temperance campaigns to combat that evil. 2 All historians of temperance now owe a debt to David W. Conroy for his history of drinkers and the drink culture of colonial and Revolutionary Massachusetts. [End Page 383] By taking advantage of sources ranging from Puritan sermons to diary entries to probate inventories, Conroy reveals the patterns of belief that motivated both criticism of drinking and the rising importance of the tavern in colonial society. This is social history informed by recent developments in intellectual and political history as well as material culture. In Conroy’s skilled hands, the result is a depiction of a vital institution where the keepers of high culture often jostled with the people whom they were supposed to govern. In some ways, Massachusetts was an unlikely place for taverns to become centers of public life. According to Conroy, this province “more than any other colony was committed to the strict control of drink” (p. 224). The effort to control consumption emerged forcefully in the seventeenth century, soon after the founding of the province. The most articulate spokesmen against taverns were, not surprisingly, Puritan clerics. They delivered sermon after sermon—many of which were subsequently published—decrying what they termed the “haunting” of taverns by otherwise sensible men (and, to a lesser extent, women). Still, the ministers were not early American pioneers of a “just say no” to alcohol campaign. They recognized that taverns were necessary for travelers and that the consumption of moderate amounts of beer and ale posed no real threat to society. In this sense the clerics understood well their English heritage and the vital role of the consumption of alcohol in villages and cities throughout the realm, a subject ably explored elsewhere by the English historian Peter Clark. 3 Yet though the ministers recognized that some consumption of alcohol was tolerable, many of them feared that their Bible commonwealth was teetering on the edge of moral collapse by the latter decades of the seventeenth century. The signs of decline seemed to be everywhere, from the death of the patriarchs who had founded the colony to the need for the Halfway Covenant of 1662. In this climate of dwindling religiosity and...