Alcohol, Enlightenment, and Revolutions
In 1797, Benjamin Rush, physician, vineyard investor, temperance advocate, and signatory to the American Declaration of Independence, published what has become one of the best-known documents in the history of American alcohol: “A Moral and Physical Thermometer: A scale of the progress of Temperance and Intemperance—Liquors with effects in their usual order.” This “thermometer” divided beverages into two categories, those that fostered “Temperance” and those that fostered “Intemperance,” and it showed the supposed effects of drinking each. Under Temperance, Rush first listed water and gave its effects as “Health and Wealth.” Next came milk and water (consumed together) and “small beer,” all of which resulted in “Serenity of Mind, Reputation, Long Life, & Happiness.” They were followed by cider and perry (pear-based cider), wine, porter and “strong beer,” which resulted in “Cheerfulness, Strength and Nourishment, when taken only in small quantities, and at meals.”
These positive attributes changed dramatically when Rush turned to the drinks associated with Intemperance. The least harmful, punch, was portrayed as leading to idleness, gambling, sickness, and debt. Most of the other alcohols, such as “Toddy and Egg Rum,” “Grog—Brandy and Water,” and “Drams of Gin, Brandy, and Rum, in the morning,” led to vices such as quarreling, fighting, horse-racing, lying, swearing, perjury, burglary, and murder; to diseases that included tremors of the hands in the morning, puking, inflamed eyes, sore and swelled legs, madness, and despair; and to consequences that encompassed jail, black eyes and rags, hospital, poor house, state prison for life, and the gallows.1
The “Moral and Physical Thermometer” was an eye-catching graphic that set out more clearly than ever the distinction between good alcohol and bad alcohol and the positive and negative consequences of each. Although its language might strike us as quaint and some of the effects of drinking spirits seem more than a little far-fetched as generalizations, it reflected a common view that drunkenness was often the first link in a chain of sins and crimes. In the late seventeenth century, Owen Stockton’s A warning to drunkards had described drunkenness as “the root of all evil, the rot of all good” that “disposeth a man to many other great and crying sins,” from blasphemy to murder.2 This view, that most pathological behavior could be traced back to alcohol, flourished well into the twentieth century and underlay much of the support for temperance and prohibition policies in the nineteenth century.
But Rush introduced some interesting concepts and made an important distinction between Temperance alcohols (cider, wine, and beer) and Intemperance alcohols (distilled spirits). The former were described as good and healthy when consumed in small volumes with meals, but there was no such allowance for the modest enjoyment of whiskey or rum. Instead, Rush implied that while people could enjoy wine, cider, and beer moderately, the same was not true of spirits. The consequences Rush listed as flowing from alcohol—crimes and their punishments—were what others attributed to drunkenness, suggesting that, in Rush’s mind, one sip of alcohol inevitably led to more and to eventual inebriation. While “temperance” and “intemperance” refer to human drinking behavior, Rush attached the terms to categories of alcohol (although there was no appreciation at the time that alcohol was common to all these beverages). Rush clearly regarded gin, brandy, rum, and other distilled alcohols as inherently addictive, in the sense that it was not possible to drink them moderately. To put it another way, the explanation of drunkenness (and what would later be called “alcoholism”) lay not only with the consumer but also with the nature of the type of alcoholic beverage itself.
Benjamin Rush was born in the mid-1740s and wrote during the late 1790s. He was able to survey the social landscape of much of the eighteenth century, and we can assume that his work on alcohol was informed by his experiences as a physician and public figure. Clearly, he was concerned about the extent and patterns of alcohol consumption in America around the time of the Revolution. But it is difficult to determine what alcohol consumption was like at that time, in America or elsewhere. Except for a few periods (such as the phase of gin-drinking in some English cities, discussed in Chapter 6), there is no good evidence as to whether alcohol consumption rose or fell (or both) during the eighteenth century. A number of themes emerge that sometimes associated alcohol consumption with the social elites, unlike in the following century (discussed in Chapter 9), when the focus was primarily on the working classes.
In the eighteenth century, two types of fortified wine (wine whose alcohol level is raised by the addition of brandy or distilled grape spirit) from Portugal became popular among the English and American upper classes. One was madeira, named for the Portuguese-owned island in the Atlantic Ocean where it was made. Madeira, now generally a sweet wine in the style of some sherries, was virtually invented during the eighteenth century. At the beginning of the 1700s, it was an undistinguished and inexpensive table wine, but within a hundred years it had become an expensive fortified beverage that only the well-to-do could afford.
The initial attraction of Madeira’s wine was strategic rather than sensory. The island of Madeira was a popular port of call for ships on several Atlantic routes from Europe to Africa, India, the Caribbean, and North America, and during the 1500s, many would take on casks of the island’s wine, mainly as cargo but also for consumption by the crew during the voyage. Until the early 1700s, typical Madeira wine was made from white grapes to which juice from black grapes was added to give the wine varying shades of pink and red. But the wine, exposed to summer heat and rough seas, often spoiled, and by the middle of the eighteenth century, some of Madeira’s winemakers began to add distilled grape spirit to the wine (thus fortifying it) as a stabilizer. On one occasion, some barrels of this fortified wine returned to Madeira still full, and the producers discovered that it not only had survived the demanding sea voyage but had been improved by it. From mid-century, some producers began to ship their wine back and forth across the Atlantic and even as far as India before selling it, and wine labeled vinha da roda (wine that had made the round trip) commanded a premium price. Eventually, producers built storerooms under the roofs of their wineries, or special hothouses, where madeira could age in the heat. Barrels were rocked back and forth, later by steam-powered machines, to simulate the action of waves.
Madeira came in many styles, each customized to the preferences of a specific market, the way champagne was to be marketed in the following century. Madeira wine exported to Caribbean plantation owners was sometimes sent unfortified but accompanied by red grape must (unfermented juice) and brandy, so that the recipients could color, flavor, and fortify it to their own liking. Customers in South Carolina and Virginia preferred a dry, white, heavily fortified madeira; Philadelphians sought a sweeter, gold-colored madeira with less brandy, and New Yorkers wanted a reddish color with even less brandy and more sweetness.3
As madeira gained in popularity, it was sold as a wealthy person’s drink, and barrel-aged madeira in particular became one of the eighteenth century’s luxury products; from about 1780, producers marketed older wines (more than ten years old) as especially suitable for “intelligent” consumers—“the older the wine, the more distinguished its drinker,” as one historian puts it.4 In line with its luxury status, the price of madeira rose steadily. In the first decade of the eighteenth century, a pipe (a barrel holding about 435 liters) of madeira fetched about £5 on the island for export, but by the 1720s the price had risen to £8, by the 1740s to £22, and by the early 1800s to £43. Taking inflation into account, the price of madeira tripled in 100 years, a period that saw it transformed from the least to the most expensive wine on the Kingston (Jamaica), Boston, and London markets.5 One sign of its status was widespread counterfeiting, and some markets were flooded with wine that had been fabricated to taste like madeira.
Although it was popular throughout Britain and its empire, madeira’s greatest success was in North America and the Caribbean, where it was the alcohol of choice among wealthy colonists. An account of the liquid elements of one Barbados sugar plantation owner’s breakfast at the end of the eighteenth century ran, “a dish of tea, another of coffee, a bumper of claret, another large one of hock negus; then Madeira, sangaree.”6 Its prestige was great enough that madeira was used to toast the work of the First Continental Congress in 1775 and to launch the Constitution, one of the first frigates of the U.S. Navy, in 1797.
Port, the other fortified wine to gain a following in the eighteenth century, also came from Portugal, but from the mainland. It was first made in the 1600s when spirits were added to red wines from the Douro Valley to stabilize them for shipping. The alcohol was added not to the finished wine, however, but during the fermentation process, thus raising the alcohol level to a point that killed the yeasts and stopped the fermentation before it was complete. The remaining unfermented sugar gave sweetness to the wine, while the added alcohol contributed alcoholic strength, thus producing the character of most modern port: a sweet red wine with an alcohol level higher than the range common in unfortified wines.
There was no standard alcohol content during the eighteenth century, and the volume of spirits added to the wine rose over time. In the early 1700s, producers added 10 to 15 liters of brandy to each 435-liter barrel of wine (about 3 percent), but the volume rose to 10 percent and then 17 percent toward the end of the century. By 1820 it had stabilized at 22 percent.7 Modern port producers, such as Taylor Fladgate, add about 115 liters of alcohol to each 435-liter barrel of wine (26 percent of its volume), suggesting that for most of the eighteenth century, port contained less alcohol than it does today (usually 20 percent).
The 1703 Methuen Treaty between England and Portugal allowed the importation of port at low levels of duty to compensate for the decline of imports of French wine and brandy while France and England were at war. The flow of port into England grew rapidly, and by 1728 some 116,000 hectoliters of the wine—the equivalent of more than 15 million standard bottles—entered the country. The demand created a problem of supply because port came only from one part of the Douro Valley and could therefore be produced only in limited volumes. As in Madeira, enterprising producers in the Douro Valley began to fabricate port by using wines from other regions. They then “improved” the wines to bring them up to the flavors and quality expected on the English market, by blending inferior with superior wines and by adding sugar and more alcohol for sweetness, crushed elderberries to give color, and spices such as cinnamon, pepper, and ginger to enhance the flavor.
These concoctions were soon discovered by English importers and consumers and were denounced as dangerous to health. Demand fell off quickly, and imports declined from the 116,000 hectoliters of 1728 to 87,000 hectoliters in 1744 and to 54,000 hectoliters by 1756. The bottom fell out of the price of port on the London market: a barrel that had fetched £16 in the late 1730s could be bought for just over £2 in 1756. Faced with disaster, the Portuguese government introduced one of the world’s first comprehensive wine laws to regulate the production of port. It specified the area of the Douro Valley where port could be produced, making it one of the world’s first officially delimited wine regions, and regulated the winemaking process. The addition of substances to add color and flavor was prohibited, and to prevent temptation, the government ordered all elderberry bushes in the Douro region to be ripped out.8
Although it was impossible to ensure that there were no fraudulent practices, these decisive actions restored confidence to the English market, and imports and prices rebounded. By the 1770s, 160,000 to 180,000 hectoliters of port entered England each year, and in 1799, imports reached 440,000 hectoliters, the equivalent of almost 60 million bottles. The population of England was about 9 million, so there was enough port that year for 6 bottles for every man, woman, and child.
But children did not drink port, and even though it was culturally identified as a man’s drink (thus eliminating women from its consuming market), most men could not afford it. Those who could clearly consumed more than 6 bottles a year, and many might well have gone through 6 bottles a week, for the century is known for “3-bottle men”—men who could down 3 bottles of port in one session. What is now decried as “binge-drinking” was admired in British eighteenth-century upper-class male circles, and the ability to drink vast volumes of port was among the attributes of contemporary masculinity. Some who overachieved—“6-bottle men”—included the playwright Richard Sheridan and a prime minister, William Pitt the Younger. John Porter, a classical scholar at Oxford University, is said to have been able to drink 13 bottles of port at a sitting—the sitting presumably being part of the achievement.9
Port underpinned a culture of heavy drinking that seems to have become widespread among upper-class British men in the later eighteenth century—although it is possible that heavy drinking was not so much a new phenomenon as a continuity that was more openly discussed in the eighteenth century as drinking became associated with elite masculinity. The drinking careers of the Scottish writer James Boswell are well known, and it is possible that Boswell’s “indulgence in port” and other beverages so disabled him that he was almost unable to complete his famous Life of Samuel Johnson.10 So closely were elite males linked to heavy drinking that the term “drunk as a lord” seems to have become entirely literal in its force. In 1770 the Gentleman’s Magazine listed 99 ways to call a man drunk, including the genteel “sipping the spirit of Adonis” and the cruder “stripping me naked.”
Yet port was not the only beverage that gentlemen drank, nor did they all necessarily drink to get drunk. Cyril Jackson, dean of Christ Church, Oxford, thanked his wine merchant in 1799 for sending some French brandy: “For myself I confess to you that it is something so very much beyond anything I have ever tasted before, that I keep it sacredly to be used only in case of illness.”11 Dean Jackson might indeed have believed that excellent flavor made for a more therapeutic beverage, but it is interesting that he felt the need to assure his wine merchant that he did not intend to guzzle alcohol the way that so many of his contemporaries appear to have.
Dean Jackson might well have been enjoying one of the higher-quality brandies that were produced in the 1700s. In the early part of the century, brandy was made in many parts of France, but the Charente region, near the Atlantic coast north of Bordeaux, began to take off. Fewer than 7,000 barrels of brandy were shipped from Charente annually in the early 1700s, but the number rose to 27,000 barrels by 1727, 50,000 by 1780, and 87,000 by 1791—a twelvefold increase during the century. Like madeira, brandy rose from rags to riches. Although it was initially an affordable beverage for seamen, soldiers, and the poor and was originally distilled from the worst surplus wines, brandy soon appealed to the upper classes, and a hierarchy of brandies emerged. By the 1720s, brandy from the Cognac district of Charente was selling for about 25 percent more than brandies from other regions.12 As with madeira and port, so with brandy: success led to counterfeiting, and in 1791 Charente’s producers formed an association to regulate their industry and to guarantee the provenance and quality of their brandy, especially the higher-end brandies destined for better-off consumers.
The other alcohol industry that took off in the 1700s was whiskey distilling, in Scotland. It was practiced as a cottage industry in the Highlands but was virtually unknown in Lowland areas before the 1780s. During that decade, however, a number of large distilleries were constructed. One, at Kilbagie, cost the huge sum of £40,000 to construct and equip, employed 300 workers, and raised 7,000 cattle and 2,000 pigs on the spent grains left over after distilling.13 Exports of Scottish whiskey to England rose at a staggering rate, from a mere 2,000 gallons in 1777 to more than 400,000 gallons by the mid-1780s. Like port, whiskey was often associated with excessive drinking.14
In this period, too, elite males began to flaunt their wine cellars. Voltaire, who hosted sumptuous dinners on his estate at Ferney, bought large volumes of beaujolais (his favorite), burgundy (which he used to top up his barrels of beaujolais), and Spanish wine from Malaga. The cellar of the Duke of Tavanes was mainly stocked with hundreds of bottles of wines from Beaune and Médoc, but he also had wines from Cyprus and Hungary. The first president of the Parlement (royal law court) of Dijon seems to have been loyal to his locality: most of his fine wines were burgundies from estates such as Chambertin, Vougeot, and Montrachet.
Quite possibly the wine they drank improved in quality as the century progressed, just as their brandy might have, because in many parts of France there was growing interest in improving the quality of wines. The Academies of Bordeaux and of Dijon (representing Burgundy) sponsored several competitions for treatises dealing with winemaking techniques. Wine producers began to pay more attention to the grape varieties they used, to the ripeness of the grapes, and to the fermentation and aging processes. By the middle of the century, the wines of some of the great Bordeaux estates (not yet known as châteaux), such as Haut-Brion, Lafite, Latour, and Margaux, were already well known, and wines from prestigious Burgundy estates, such as Romanée and Montrachet, attracted the highest prices—always a good guide to reputation, if not to quality.
New techniques, many of which are well known to modern winemakers, were introduced. One was the addition of sugar to the must (grape juice) before fermentation, in order to increase the potential alcohol content of the finished wine. The process is now called “chaptalization,” after Jean-Antoine-Claude Chaptal (a chemist and, later, minister in one of Napoleon’s governments), who advocated the process in a work published in 1801. But adding sugar to must was practiced well before that date. The article on wine in the Encyclopedia (1765) recommended using sugar, and a succession of French scientists recommended adding sugar, honey, or sugar-syrup as a means of starting the fermentation process as quickly as possible. As an experiment, one chemist, Pierre-Joseph Macquer, added sugar to the sour juice of underripe grapes from the 1776 harvest and declared that it tasted as good as any other wine from that vintage: there was nothing syrupy about it and no sensory evidence that the juice had been artificially sweetened.15
The vast amount of research on wine, all directed toward improving quality, involved scientists from a number of fields, and it was summarized in a book, The Art of Making Wine according to the Method of Chaptal, which Napoleon’s government distributed to grape-growers throughout France in 1803. (It was part of an attempt to stimulate France’s economy and exports following the setbacks of the Revolutionary period.) The book drew not only on scientific research but also on the experience of grape-growers, as Chaptal had sent questionnaires to leading producers. It summarized what was known about soil (pointing out the benefits of the light, porous soils found in the best areas of Bordeaux), climate, and winemaking techniques. If these approaches and practices were being widely adopted in France during the 1700s, the overall quality of the top-tier wines ought to have improved steadily.
Needless to say, quality did not extend to the wine consumed by the poorer members of French society, many of whom must, in any case, have had no choice but to drink whatever potable water was available. Voltaire might have enjoyed his beaujolais and burgundies, but he cultivated his own vineyard and gave his servants homemade wine, which he described as “my own bad wine, which is by no means unwholesome.”16 Little wonder that (as Voltaire complained) his servants stole his good wine from time to time. The wine consumed by the poor, who made up a third or more of France’s population, must have been thin, flavorless, and acidic. In 1794, the Paris authorities took samples of wine from sixty-eight restaurants and bars and declared that only eight could reasonably be described as wine. While it is true that the Revolutionary period brought particular challenges and hardships, it is likely that much of the wine that circulated before the Revolution was equally suspect. Wine has historically included many styles and levels of quality (however quality is judged), but it is possible that improvements in winemaking in the eighteenth century led to a wider gap than ever before between the best and the worst of wines.
The cultural meaning of wine and other alcoholic beverages might have varied among social classes and between genders during the eighteenth century, but alcohol retained its widespread attraction. Whether they sipped and enjoyed it for its sensory pleasures or gulped it down as an anesthetic against poor conditions of life and work (these are only two stereotypes of drinking behavior and motivation), eighteenth-century men, in particular, drank deeply, and drunkenness seems to have been a pervasive condition. As we have seen, heavy drinking in homosocial contexts such as clubs and being able to hold one’s drink were marks of upper-class masculinity. The point was distilled in Dr. Johnson’s famous comment, “Claret is the liquor for boys; port for men; but he who aspires to be a hero . . . drinks brandy.”17 Although there is no mention here of how much brandy was heroic, it was unlikely to have been a nip. This sort of attitude worried many commentators, such as Benjamin Rush, who regarded intemperate consumption as the beginning of a chain of actions that included sins such as Sabbath-breaking and blasphemy and crimes that ranged from theft to murder.
But during the eighteenth century, in England at least, upper-class commentators began to draw a distinction between drunkenness by the wealthy and by the poor. This class-specific distinction marked a shift away from the undifferentiated condemnation of drunkenness as sinful and as a first step on a life of immorality and crime. By the mid-eighteenth century, elite drunkenness was more likely to be seen as a private vice that had no social consequences (and which society and the law might therefore overlook), while heavy drinking by the working poor (the very poor and the indigent could not afford to drink alcohol, let alone drink enough to get drunk) was associated with crime and social disorder.18
This perspective emerged from a vigorous debate, coinciding with the so-called gin-craze in the first half of the 1700s, about the legal consequences of drunkenness. There was some recognition of, if little sympathy for, the conditions that might drive people to drink. The Dutch philosopher Bernard Mandeville referred to the poverty-stricken wretch who “drowns his most pinching cares, and with his reason all anxious reflexion on brats that cry for food, hard winters’ frosts, and horrid empty home.” Like most other commentators of the period, Mandeville explicitly focused on the poorer strata of society. Henry Fielding, the writer whose work as a magistrate gave him a privileged and particular view of crime in London, blamed drink for increasing criminality by “the very dregs of people.”19
Drunkenness among the well-off, which many commentators readily acknowledged was widespread, was perceived as having different consequences. If the poor were socially disruptive when they drank too much, and therefore invited and deserved intervention by the authorities, the intoxicated well-off were guilty of moral weakness that, no matter how deplorable, was beyond the legitimate reach of the law. The direct issue here was not whether a crime had been committed—a murder was essentially a murder, whether committed by a drunk lord or a drunk laborer—but the meaning attached to drunkenness. Heavy drinking by the wealthy might be morally objectionable, but it was a private problem. Heavy drinking by the poor was a social threat that could be identified: drunk men neglected their work and their family responsibilities, while women (who were seen as especially vulnerable to drunkenness) neglected their families and their children. It is clear that this discourse had emerged by the gin-craze of the early to mid-1700s, with its emphasis on women and children (see Chapter 6).
The question of crime was also important, and jurists debated the meaning of criminal responsibility when a crime was committed by an intoxicated person. What came into play was the tension between accepting, on one hand, that drunkenness could deprive a person of reason and thus lead him or her to behave out of character and, on the other, believing that even a drunk person should be held accountable for his or her actions. There was no formal provision in English law for pleading drunkenness as an extenuating condition when one committed a crime, but some defendants tried to excuse their behavior that way. Legal authorities generally agreed that the courts should reject such pleas: Matthew Hale argued that a defendant “shall have no privilege by his voluntarily contracted madness,” while William Blackstone, the eighteenth century’s greatest jurist, called it a “weak excuse.” For his part, John Locke argued that only insanity could be an exception to the rule of responsibility because a judge or jury could not verify a drunk person’s state of mind at the time he or she committed a crime.20
In practice, few defendants tried to claim drunkenness as a mitigating condition. Between 1680 and 1750, less than 2 percent of defendants at London’s central criminal court (the Old Bailey) did so, and in only a few cases did the drunkenness defense seem to have played a part in either acquittal or conviction on a lesser charge.21 But as the century progressed, some defendants were more likely to allege that drink had effected a change in their normal character such that they had committed the offense without any malicious intent. The murder of a friend in a tavern fight was a prime example of this sort of plea. Other defendants conflated drunkenness and insanity, as did one Elizabeth Lawler who, charged with stealing a carcass of lamb, “pleaded that she was disordered in her head and crazy, and did not know what she did.”22
Defendants in some divorce cases in France during the 1790s also argued that their responsibility was diminished when they were drunk. One told a court that “he admits having ill-treated his wife, that he has no complaints about her behavior, but that the abuse, harsh words and threats he directed at her . . . often occurred when he was drunk.”23 Women plaintiffs complained that men often returned home drunk and assaulted them, and many women associated the worst episodes of ill treatment with religious festivals, such as Easter and Pentecost, when men were able to drink all day. On the other hand, one woman in Rouen complained to a divorce court that “her husband gets drunk every day and profits from his drunkenness to abuse her.” Where married women were alleged to have been drunk, their husbands associated it not with violence but with sexual immorality. One woman was said to have “drunk and become intoxicated to such an extent that she gave herself up to the greatest immorality possible.”
If the family was a common location for the effects of drunkenness to be played out, a specific and highly stratified site for alcohol consumption was the military. There, drunkenness could lead not only to immorality, violence, and crime but also to military-specific problems of insubordination, indiscipline, and reduced efficiency. Little wonder that there was particular concern about the extent of heavy drinking in the British army, where ordinary soldiers had ready access to as much alcohol as they wanted and could afford, whether from the merchants who provisioned armies, from taverns, or even from their officers. Additional alcohol—usually rum—was served before battles, after victories, and on special occasions, such as royal births or anniversaries.24 The official provision of alcohol appears to have risen during the 1700s, and by the time the British army fought in the American War of Independence, rum rations were no longer reserved for special occasions and generally amounted to a gill (about 5 ounces) a day, or about a gallon each month. But there appear to have been no hard-and-fast rules, and one officer seems to have provided his men with half a pint of rum a day.25 Because it was so inexpensive in North America, rum was the liquor of choice there, but other beverages were popular elsewhere: in Britain, whiskey and gin, along with beer and ale (depending on cost), and in India, arrack, which was distilled from various fruits and grains or from the fermented sap of coconut flowers, and which was much less expensive than beer.
But the British army’s alcohol rations paled against those provided to sailors while at sea. The standard daily allotment was a pint of wine or half a pint of brandy or rum (served with water) or, on shorter voyages, a gallon of beer. Although these amounts were more than those doled out to soldiers, sailors at sea did not have the opportunity to purchase additional supplies (although they did smuggle extra alcohol onboard), and they were under the continuous surveillance of the ship’s officers. Soldiers, on the other hand, were seldom under strict surveillance. Although they might be involved in campaigns for extended periods, most of the time they were stationed at forts or garrisons, where they seldom lived in barracks. Billeted in barns, private houses, and taverns, and far from the watchful eyes of their officers, they could drink as they wished.
The extent of heavy drinking and drunkenness in the eighteenth-century British army is a matter for speculation. Unrestricted supplies were generally available, and the main limitation on access was cost. Ordinary soldiers received very little cash, but they obtained alcohol by theft, bartering their (and sometimes their colleagues’) other provisions and possessions. In the West Indies, soldiers traded their rations of older rum for greater volumes of new, stronger rum.26 Some might have curtailed their drinking out of a sense of responsibility, and soldiers who could read might have been influenced by a tract, The Soldier’s Monitor, that was widely distributed to soldiers during the eighteenth century. Written by Josiah Woodward, an Anglican social reformer, it directed the usual warnings about alcohol toward soldiers. Intemperance, Woodward wrote, “perfectly bereaves the brave Soldier of all that is great and noble in his Character. A very Child exceeds him in Strength, and an Idiot is his Equal in Discretion.”27
There are plenty of reports that British soldiers drank deeply and often. A surgeon’s mate wrote in 1744 that soldiers in the Flanders campaign were “reeling about continually drunk with gin brandy etc that they got at Bruges.” There was some discussion about the relative drunkenness of English and Irish troops. Lord Castlereagh thought the English abused whiskey more, but an army surgeon pointed out that Irish soldiers were far more likely than the English to suffer from ulcerated legs as a result of heavy drinking.28
The consequences of heavy drinking by soldiers spanned issues of health, morality, crime, and military efficiency. Military doctors warned of the physical dangers of alcohol abuse and even warned that drinking new rum (as distinct from the older rum that comprised military rations) could be fatal—a possibility, because much new rum was contaminated with lead. One officer reported in 1762 from Martinique: “Upon my arrival here I found the troops very Sickly, many dead, & the Sick list increasingly dayly, chiefly owing to the bad rum they got on shore.”29 Of equal concern was the breakdown of discipline under the impact of alcohol. General Wolfe noted in 1758 that “too much rum necessarily affects the discipline of an army. We have glaring evidence of its ill consequences every moment. Sergeants drunk upon duty, two sentries upon their posts and the rest grovelling in the dirt.”30
Alcohol seems, then, to have posed challenges to all military forces in the eighteenth century. In the early years of the Fortress of Louisbourg, on Canada’s Cape Breton Island, soldiers garrisoned there had access to unlimited supplies of wine and brandy. But widespread illness, problems with military discipline, and a 1717 report from the governor that “the inn-keepers are completely ruining the colony” made the authorities rethink their alcohol policies.31 Until the end of the colony, in the 1750s, there were continual attempts to distance soldiers from alcohol. Some regulations forbade the sale of alcohol to soldiers on workdays; others limited the number of drinking places in the colony, while others were directed at the troops themselves, such as one that prohibited soldiers and sailors from trading their clothes for drink.
Although no general policies were adopted to curb drunkenness by soldiers, various local solutions were adopted by individual commanders. Some tried to restrict the availability of spirits entirely, while others merely forbade drinking while on sentry duty. Yet other officers adopted more draconian policies and attempted to prevent soldiers’ having access to any spirits other than the rations issued by the army, although this effectively involved confining the troops to barracks. In 1759 the commander of British forces in Quebec canceled all licenses to sell liquor to the troops and ordered any soldier found drunk to receive twenty lashes a day until he revealed where he had obtained the liquor. In addition, his rum ration was stopped for six weeks. Drunkenness alone, even when not aggravated by insubordination or other misbehavior, was a punishable offense in the British army. The penalties were generally extra duty or drill, but more serious consequences followed on breaches of discipline and other offenses committed while inebriated. Incidences of this kind appear to have been more common among troops stationed in the Americas because of the ready availability of inexpensive rum.
These policies were directed almost exclusively toward distilled spirits, mainly rum, gin, and brandy. Little attention was given to beer and ale, and even less to wine, even though all led to intoxication if consumed in sufficient volumes. John Bell, a medical officer who was generally opposed to the military providing liquor rations and even questioned the medical orthodoxy that wine had specific therapeutic qualities, was relatively positive about wine and beer as everyday drinks. Wine, he thought, should be given to troops on a regular basis because of its general health-promoting properties, while beer was “an invigorating, antiseptic, salutary beverage . . . highly nutritive.” As for liquor, Bell allowed that it might be given to cold or fatigued soldiers but not to others.32
Soldiers must have hydrated themselves with beer (they could not do it with spirits alone) or with water, and it is noteworthy that all references to drunkenness in the British army assume that it resulted from liquor consumption, not from heavy beer-drinking. It is quite possible, though, that eighteenth-century soldiers drank more water than historians have generally thought. Hector McLean, a medical officer in the West Indies, recommended that hard-worked troops should be allowed to drink only water or lemonade, although he advised that officers should drink wine moderately for their general health.33 In 1780 the commander of the Royal Artillery in Charleston received a petition from some of the troops complaining that they had been deprived of their rum ration. They wrote that rum is “an Article we humbly conceive to be essentially necessary to the health of Labouring Men in this sultry Climate. . . . Neither can it be thought that [we] can work hard from 6 o’Clock in the Morning to 6 in the Evening on simple Water, which is peculiarly bad in this Town.”34 There is a report of an eminent physician who cured several people of habitual drunkenness by progressively diluting their liquor until they were drinking pure water.35
In his “Moral and Physical Thermometer,” Benjamin Rush recommended drinking water decades before governments began to construct systems for providing their citizens with regular supplies of potable water. But elsewhere Rush cautioned against drinking cold water in hot conditions or drinking too much water. He noted that “few summers elapse in Philadelphia in which there are not instances of many persons being affected by drinking cold water. In some seasons four or five persons have died suddenly from this cause, in one day.” These deaths usually occurred among “the labouring part of the community,” who drank from the public pumps “and who are too impatient or too ignorant, to use the necessary precautions for preventing its morbid or deadly effects upon them.”36 The impact of very cold water on a warm body, Rush wrote, resulted in such symptoms as dimness of sight, staggering and collapsing, difficulty breathing, a rattle in the throat, and cold extremities. Death could follow in four or five minutes. In less serious cases, people who drink very cold water while warm would suffer chest and stomach spasms.
But in Rush’s view, the problem was not water in itself but the relative temperatures of the water and the consumer’s body and the volume of water consumed. He pointed out that the same problems could occur when punch or beer were drunk under the same conditions. The “precautions” that Rush referred to were to mitigate the shock of cold water. If drinking from a cup or bowl, drinkers should hold their hands around it for a while to warm the water. If drinking directly from the stream or a pump, they should splash the cold water on their hands and faces to accustom their body to its temperature before drinking any.37 Yet nowhere, unlike many of his contemporaries, did Rush actually advise against drinking water.
Although water was an effective way of hydrating, alcohol was culturally embedded, and it would have been as difficult to deprive soldiers of it as it would civilians. In 1791 an army surgeon stationed in Jamaica noted that if rum were withheld for a single day, “discontent immediately begins to shew itself among the men. If with-held for any length of time, complaints sometimes rise to a state of mutiny, and desertions become notorious.”38 In fact, apart from sporadic attempts by some officers, there was little interest in depriving soldiers of liquor. A culture of drinking was as embedded in the officer corps as among their men, and alcohol was believed to have medical properties and to be advantageous in hot and cold weather and when soldiers faced trying conditions.
Soldiers who failed to perform their tasks or were insubordinate because of drinking were dealt with, but drinking itself—even heavy drinking—was widely tolerated because there were few alternatives. From this perspective, the army did not quite parallel civilian society. By the middle of the eighteenth century, the upper classes had determined that the simple act of drinking liquor by the working poor was morally problematic. In the military hierarchy, the officers tended to accept drinking by their men and to take action only when drinking led to behavior that undermined military discipline and efficiency.
The two great revolutions of the eighteenth century had quite distinct impacts on alcohol, but in both the American and French cases, taxation was a mediating influence. One of the major challenges facing the newly founded United States was financing the debt it had incurred from the War of Independence. Like many politicians before and since, Alexander Hamilton, the first secretary of the treasury, looked to taxes on alcohol as a rich and permanent revenue stream. Even though we cannot quantify consumption with any reliability, all accounts suggest that Americans were heavy drinkers in that period. One often-cited source suggests that in 1790–1800, Americans of drinking age consumed more than 6 gallons of pure alcohol from all sources (spirits, wine, and beer) per capita. The same source suggests a level of consumption about a third of that 100 years later (2.2 gallons in the 1890s),39 and somewhat less than half 100 years after that (2.5 gallons in 2003–5).40 If such calculations are correct, it is hardly surprising that Hamilton cast a covetous fiscal eye on his compatriots’ drinking habits. Taxing alcohol must have seemed less likely to provoke a reaction than the English government’s attempts to tax tea, and Hamilton and others were probably influenced by their sympathy for temperance ideas.
At the same time, Hamilton might have noted the problems the English government had faced when, financially exhausted by the American War of Independence, it had tried to increase alcohol revenues. Receipts were notoriously undermined by widespread smuggling and other forms of tax avoidance, and Prime Minister William Pitt attempted to impose new taxes on the steady stream of whiskey entering England from Scotland. Various systems of taxing whiskey were tried, including simple licensing and levies on the volume of fermented “wash” a distillery prepared for distilling. But the various methods set Lowland distillers against their Highland counterparts and both against London distillers, who wanted to keep Scottish whiskey out of England. It also raised issues of England’s constitutional relationship with Scotland.41
In March 1791, Congress passed a law enabling the federal government to collect taxes on distilled spirits. Spirits produced in the United States from imported ingredients (such as rum made from molasses imported from the Caribbean) were taxed at a lower rate than imported spirits (such as French brandy), and spirits produced in the United States from local ingredients were taxed at an even lower rate. Distinctions were made between large- and small-scale distillers. Several states already had such taxes on spirits (some at the retail level rather than on production), although they are thought to have been inconsistently applied. Much of the whiskey (by far the main form of distilled alcohol) was produced in small volumes by corn farmers in remote frontier regions. Far from centers of population, these farmers turned grain into alcohol for more efficient and cheaper overland transportation, sold much of their whiskey locally, and used it as a means of exchange to purchase goods for their own use. The 1791 tax was imposed not only on whiskey made for these commercial purposes but even on what farmers produced for their own consumption. Moreover, rather than being levied on receipts from the sale of whiskey, the tax could be imposed in advance; rural producers had to pay an annual fee based on the capacity of their stills, or 9 cents a gallon of whiskey distilled. It meant that producers, many of whom were farmers of modest means, paid taxes on everything they produced, even if some was lost (by leakage or spillage) while being shipped, reducing their revenue at the point of sale.42
The government saw the tax as necessary and fair. It was far lower than similar taxes imposed in other countries, and the fact that the tax on all-American spirits was much less than that imposed on imports gave local distillers a competitive advantage. But farmers viewed distilling as a way to get by rather than as a commercial operation, and they considered the new tax grossly unfair. It targeted farmers who were just trying to survive, and it threatened to drain the frontier regions of hard currency, which was already in short supply. Avoiding the tax entailed further hardships, as anyone charged with evasion would be tried in Philadelphia, far from their homes. Overall, the spirits tax, imposed on westerners by easterners, smacked of earlier taxes imposed on colonists by the English.43
At first, protests against the tax took the form of letters to newspapers and petitions, but in the autumn of 1791 (despite a concession by the government that reduced the tax from 9 to 7 cents a gallon), opposition escalated into what has become known as the Whiskey Rebellion. Refusal to pay the tax spread, and the initial reaction was to threaten, beat, and even tar and feather the agents who came to farmers’ properties to collect the tax. From 1792, actions against tax collectors intensified, especially in western Pennsylvania but also in other states. In 1794, when the government sent a U.S. marshal and forces led by a general to charge several distillers, a battle between federal soldiers and local militiamen led to deaths on both sides. The tax resisters were given an opportunity to abandon their cause and declare their loyalty to the U.S. government and its laws, and when they refused, President George Washington raised a militia force of 13,000. Accompanied by Hamilton and by Washington himself, the soldiers marched into the region where resistance to the whiskey tax was strongest, and in the face of armed force, the insurgents dispersed. Several dozen were seized, and although two were convicted of treason and sentenced to death, Washington pardoned them.
The Whiskey Rebellion not only highlighted conflicts between regions and classes in the early United States but showed the importance of distilling at the time. The same source that shows Americans of drinking age consuming more than 6 gallons of pure alcohol a year around 1800 suggests that half the alcohol came from distilled spirits. Beer came second, while wine trailed a poor third. For example, of 6.6 gallons of pure alcohol in 1800, 3.3 gallons came from spirits, 3.2 from beer, and 0.1 from wine.44Alexander Hamilton justified the 1791 whiskey tax in part as a deterrent to drinking; because producers could pass the tax on to consumers, a higher price might lower consumption. Hamilton noted that the use of spirits seemed “to depend more on relative habits of sobriety or intemperance than on any other cause.”45
It could be said that Hamilton’s whiskey tax embodied a tension: the expectation of sufficient revenues to help the U.S. Treasury rested on the very drinking he deplored. In the end, although the tax led to higher prices for all kind of spirits, domestic and imported, demand continued to grow. Whiskey tax revenues from Pennsylvania, the state at the heart of the rebellion, more than doubled between 1794–95 ($66,401) and 1797–98 ($123,491).46 Although some of the increase might have been due to more efficient collection, it is likely that demand and consumption expanded.
In France, wine rather than spirits attracted the attention of reformers. The French Revolution of 1789 made a significant impact on wine and set the stage for the development of the modern French wine industry, not least by fostering consumption by removing many of the taxes imposed on it under the old regime. The grievance lists drawn up before the Revolution in 1789 show widespread detestation of taxes of all kinds, including those on consumer goods such as wine. One community in the Menetou region of the Loire Valley complained that the tax on wine “is perhaps the most harmful to all people and the least profitable to the king,” while another noted that it was even impossible for a charitable person to send a bottle of wine to the home of some “unfortunate” without some zealous official trying to tax it. The taxes were said to lead to all manner of criminal 'font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman",serif;color:blue'>47
One of the most burdensome taxes was the duty imposed as wine entered cities. In Paris, whose half-million inhabitants were by far France’s largest urban consumer market, wine was subjected to duties at the city gates and at posts on the River Seine. Although they were initially fairly light, the duties on wine rose until by 1789 they effectively tripled the initial cost of the wine. Moreover, because taxes were levied by the barrel, regardless of quality and value of the wine, consumers of less-expensive, poor-quality wine ended up subsidizing the drinking preferences on their better-off fellow citizens. One result of the higher urban prices was a regular migration of Parisians, especially on Sundays and other holidays, to taverns and bars outside the city walls, where they could enjoy duty-free alcohol. One of the most popular taverns, Le Tambour Royal, was said to have sold about 1.3 million liters of wine a year.
The people of Paris employed a variety of subterfuges to lessen the impact of the taxes in the city itself. Merchants brought high-alcohol wine through the gates, then diluted it so as to lessen the impact of duties. More wine—probably great volumes, but we can never know for certain—was smuggled into the city by hiding barrels under other goods on the carts as they passed through the gates. Smaller volumes of brandy could be concealed under the voluminous skirts of women smugglers. Then there were the tunnels and channels—lined with wood, iron, leather, or lead—that were drilled through the city walls. In 1784, the authorities decided to extend the perimeter of the city walls in order to encompass the growing population outside the existing ones. The project was unpopular—not least because it would push the cheaper taverns outside the walls even farther from the center of the city—and officials found and closed eighty wine tunnels drilled through the new walls by 1788.
Opposition to duties on wine and other goods grew in France during the late 1780s as prices rose steadily, employment fell, and the mass of the population came under increasing pressure. As political, economic, and social crises mounted toward the end of the decade, violence broke out in Paris, and on the night of July 12–13, 1789, most of the customs barriers at the city gates were destroyed or burned by angry crowds. It was not wanton and random violence but the precise targeting of institutions that threatened the living standards of common citizens, the livelihoods of vine-growers, and even merchants. Although the beginning of the French Revolution is conventionally marked by the storming of the Bastille, on July 14, the destruction of the customs barriers has as good a claim. The Bastille, a royal prison, was as hugely symbolic as its great bulk, but the sacking of the customs barriers represented the struggle of ordinary Parisians to destroy institutions that were driving them deeper and deeper into poverty.
Yet the early years of the Revolution were disappointing for wine-drinkers in Paris and elsewhere. The city needed the tax revenues from wine and completed the new walls in 1790, and national taxes were retained until a new tax code was developed. But in 1791, the Revolutionary government abolished all indirect taxes, including those on wine, and as soon as the policy went into effect at midnight on May 1, a convoy of hundreds of carts entered Paris carrying 2 million liters of wine. Patriotic Parisians partied all night with wine that sold at 3 sous a pint. Huge volumes of brandy were sold off the same way, and similar scenes played out throughout France. Even though prices rose during the 1790s, largely because of poor harvests, and although indirect taxes were reintroduced by the impoverished government in 1798, wine remained less expensive during the Revolution than it had been before.48
It is likely that the consumption of wine rose during the Revolution, not only because the price was lower, but also because there was an increase in the land under vines and in wine production. The statistics are uncertain, but one estimate has an increase from 27.2 million hectoliters before the Revolution to an average of 36.8 million in the period 1805–12, an increase of a third in about twenty years. It had to be the result of increased vineyards, higher yields, or both, and it represented much more rapid growth than the population, meaning that per capita consumption of wine must have risen. At this time, wine exports were minimal, as France was at war with its export markets for most of the period.
Taken as a whole, the eighteenth century saw the emergence of clearly defined, class-based drinking cultures and a much starker differentiation between elite and popular drinking. Not only did the better-off, whether in North America, Britain, or Europe, drink beverages like port, madeira, and brands of wine that carried social cachet, but they more explicitly and frequently distinguished their drinking cultures from those of the common people. In stressing not the volumes concerned but what was drunk and how it was drunk, the elites echoed the alcohol ideologies of the Greeks and Romans centuries before, as they condemned beer-drinking peoples as “barbarians.” Meanwhile people in the lower echelons of society defended what they perceived as their rights to alcohol at a fair price. In this sense, we might see the burning of the customs barriers around Paris in July 1789 and the Whiskey Rebellion in the United States five years later as sharing the same source of inspiration.