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Temperance, the crusade against strong drink, was by far the largest
reform movement of the early 1800s, and one of the most successful. It
was spearheaded by conservative Calvinist clergy who were concerned about
the social disorder that followed in the aftermath of the
Revolution—a disorder caused by the disruption of household
economies during the war,
by deaths of fathers and sons in the war, and by the wild inflation that
devastated returning farmers and artisans after the war. The movement
soon attracted a diverse collection of supporters, more so than any other
reform. Temperance advocates ranged from pious churchwomen to militant
feminists, from freethinkers to fundamentalists, from the high and mighty
to the lowly and degraded. As with other early reform movements and
charitable organizations, the movement's leadership shifted in the 1820s
from conservative to evangelical
ministers and lay people. By 1834 there were roughly 5,000 temperance
societies in the country.
While the movement was strongest in the usual
havens for reform—New England, New York, and among transplanted New
Englanders the Midwest—it also made headway in the South and West.
With
such a diverse following temperance advocates began to fractionalize
(following various agendas) and support for the movement declined in the
mid-1830s. But it surged again in 1837 after the financial panic, and the
long depression that followed accelerated the social problems of the
times.
Temperance reform, and the issues that led to the movement, may be
used with students to identify social problems and solutions in their own
world. Knowledge of such issues will help students (1) see the tangible
connections between past and present social conditions, (2) understand an
issue on the national and local levels, (3) see role(s) they can play
individually or collectively in addressing problems of their own times
(and in their own lives). The contextual discussion of reform will help
students to understand the causes of social problems and activism in the
past and help them identify the same in the present.
The Great Age of Reform
The period between the Revolution and the Civil War was tumultuous and
contentious, a time of unprecedented growth and change. In the Northeast,
industrialization, urbanization, and large-scale immigration brought new
challenges of diversity as well as increasing levels of poverty and
violence. In the South, the peculiar institution of slavery became more
entrenched even as it was abolished elsewhere in the country. Cultural
and political divides deepened dangerously between the regions, and new
conflicts arose as the country expanded westward. People in the Early
Republic were unsettled by uncontrolled fluctuations in the spreading
market economy, internal migration and the attendant loosening of family
and community ties and growing inequality. Many felt that they were no
longer
masters of their own fate. Some feared the young nation's democratic
experiment was in jeopardy.
Men and women throughout the country, but especially in the Northeast,
responded to chaos and change by organizing themselves into reform
movements. As the nation seemed to be falling apart in uncontrollable
ways, reformers—the social activists of the 1800s—strove to set it
aright. It was an era so electrically charged with activism that
historians call it the Age of Reform.
The Impulse for Reform
Religion was the primary motivating force behind organized reform. A
wide-sweeping religious revival known as the Second Great Awakening
galvanized Protestants, especially women, beginning in the 1790s. The
Awakening began in rural towns in the West, then spread across western
New
York, and continued to grow through the late 1840s. Under the sway of the
Second Great Awakening, the role of churches and ministers in community
life began to change. The Awakening was begun by conservative clergymen
who wanted to control and shape the direction of the young nation's
future. From their pulpits Calvinist ministers stressed the need for
self-improvement, female religious charitable societies, and temperance
societies. By the 1820s, leadership of the Second Great Awakening was
in the
hands of evangelicals who preached not from the pulpit, but outside under
tents or in open fields at what were called revivals. These were intense
affairs, full of fiery preaching, singing, tearful confessions, joyous
conversions, and pledges to be active in God's name—a religion of
the
heart, not the head. Revivals drew large numbers of people who became
charged with a moral imperative to act to right the wrongs of the world.
The Tools for Reform
While the impulse for reform was the essential first ingredient, the Age
of Reform could not have occurred without improvements in transportation
and communications. It also required the presence of a distinct
non-agricultural middle class; that is, people with relative leisure time
(farm families had virtually none) and a level of economic prosperity that
allowed for the life-long devotion to a cause. It was they who led reform
movements, while farmers and mechanics, and their wives made up the rank
and file.
The Imperatives for Reform
The reform spirit caught a range of social, moral, intellectual, and
political issues in its net. The lyceum movement focused on intellectual
stimulation and debate. Hydropathy, or water cures, drew national
attention. Sylvester Graham introduced a new diet void of meat and ardent
spirits. Clara Barton founded the American Red Cross. Dorothea Lynde Dix
improved treatment of the insane through the establishment of
asylums. Phrenology—the study of the head to determine a person's
character—gained wide popularity. Some took up the cause of dress
reform
for women (the fashion of tight corsets to create "wasp" waists actually
broke womens ribs and constricted their breathing.) Citizens formed
peace societies. Missionaries traveled far and wide to save souls in
foreign lands. Bronson Alcott and others established utopian communities
to escape the increasingly crass commercializing and industrializing world
around them. Horace Mann initiated major education reform. Young women
for the first time gained access to higher education with the founding of
Mount Holyoke College in 1837. Everywhere people were working to make it
a better world.
Temperance Reform
The facts
Was there a problem, a need for a crusade against strong
drink? In a word, yes. Drinking was the way of life, at all hours and
for any reason. It was more widespread than it is today. Generally
speaking, men liked to drink— particularly whiskey, rum, and hard
cider. They drank on all occasions—in the fields, at the shop or
office,
at a house raising, when socializing or debating at the tavern, at
harvests, at elections, at commemorative celebrations. Women of refined
classes tended not to drink in public, but many regularly took
alcohol-based medicines. Both sexes enjoyed wine and fortified wines at
all times of the day. Women from the lower classes sometimes paralleled
male behavior in the consumption of hard liquors (this is dramatized in
the movie Oliver, based on Charles Dickens novel, which students
may be
familiar with). Children also drank cider, both sweet and hard, wine, and
medicinally prescribed dose of whiskey. (Milk—now the common drink
for
children—was available only from the birthing of calves in April until
November, when the cows dried up until the next season of calving, and
families generally limited their home consumption of this beverage because
milk, in the forms of butter and cheese, was an important market
commodity.)
Since the earliest days of settlement drinking had always been an integral
part of life in America, but the amount of alcohol consumed greatly
accelerated in the 1780s and 1790s, when out-of-control inflation caused
financial chaos and ruin for many. Revolutionary War soldiers came home
with worthless Continental dollars and many found themselves hopelessly
mired in debt as a result of their prolonged absence. Creditors
foreclosed on farms and committed men to debtors prison, further
undermining social and economic stability. Under very real pressures,
public intoxication became even more widespread and binge drinking reached
new proportions. This trend continued well into the 1800s. Moreover,
immigration brought people to this country for whom drinking was a way of
life. Levels of alcohol consumption, which peaked in 1830, were so high
in the early nineteenth century that historians have dubbed the era the
"Alcoholic Republic."
The goal of early leaders of the temperance movement—conservative
clergy
and gentlemen of means—was to win people over to the idea of temperate
use
of alcohol. But as the movement gained momentum, the goal shifted first
to voluntary abstinence, and finally to prohibition of the manufacture and
sale of ardent spirits. Shifting goals in the temperance movement
coincided with shifting leadership of the Second Great Awakening from
conservative clergy to evangelical preachers. In 1826, adherents to the
cause founded the American Society for the Promotion of Temperance, its
purpose being to urge people to sign a pledge of abstinence. The Society
soon became a pressure group that lobbied for state-level prohibition
legislation. By the mid-1830s there were roughly 5,000 state and local
temperance societies in the country, and more than a million had signed
the pledge. The message was directed to people of all ages and hundreds
of thousands of children joined the movement, enlisting in what was called
the "Cold Water Army."
Temperance reform proved effective. After peaking in 1830 (at roughly
five gallons per capita annually), alcohol consumption sharply declined by
the 1840s (to under two.) The movement enjoyed some legal successes. By
the mid-1850s, laws prohibiting its manufacture and sale other than for
medicinal purposes had passed in New England, Ohio and Northwest
territory, New York, and Pennsylvania—legislation that foreshadowed
national prohibition in the early twentieth century.
Of course, not all who supported temperance reform advocated total
abstention, and not all who supported voluntary abstinence supported the
legislation of morality. And there were opponents of the organized
movement who supported self-regulated temperate consumption. In addition,
advocates of abstention did not necessarily adhere to what they preached,
even on such public occasions as temperance conventions. It was not a
black-and-white issue. As Christopher Columbus
Baldwin, a young lawyer and later librarian of the American
Antiquarian Society, explained in a diary entry, when the State Temperance
Convention
met in Worcester in 1833 some of the nearly five hundred delegates showed
clear signs that they had not converted to the doctrine of abstinence that
they professed. While he expressed pleasure at efforts to reform the
besotting practices of drunkenness, he personally believed in
moderation. Expressing the sentiments of many, he further observed:
I am not a member of a temperance society, contenting myself with the
practice of virtue without extra preaching it to others. It is one of
the faults of the day to
occupy so much of our time in recommending the practice of virtue that we
have no time left us to perform it. So true it is that when mankind
undertake a reformation they are always running into extremes.
The Diary of Christopher Columbus Baldwin, 1829-1835
(Worcester: American Antiquarian Society, 1901), 212-13.
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