by Wayne Curtis
Merchants trusted their onboard masters sailing abroad to contract for the best quality rum, although fraud and bait-and-switch gambits were endemic. George Moore, an eighteenth-century trader on England’s Isle of Man, larded his letters with references to being swindled. One batch was “deficient in every of the known qualities of Barbados rum.” After a Scotsman sold him five thousand gallons of “good Barbados,” Moore found that he ended up with “very bad, not merchantable Barbados rum.” Poor-quality rum lingered in the shops and taverns and could be sold only for less than the merchant had paid for it.
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Rum came, and rum went, often alighting only briefly in Boston or Newport before being shipped to other coastal colonies. Among the more popular destinations were the British fishing villages that ringed the island of Newfoundland (where cold, damp fishermen eagerly swapped rum for dried cod) and the tobacco plantations of Virginia (whose owners were notorious for promising payments that would never be made). Rum also moved inland to the frontier and far from the thin coastal veneer of European colonial society. Some colonists packed rum to keep warm while hunting and trapping. But an increasing number discovered it more profitable to cart casks of rum to remote forts and trading posts, where it could be traded to great advantage with the Indians.
The first European settlers found much to fault in the appearance, manners, and morals of the natives they first encountered along North American shores. But what may have irked them most was their stubborn lack of interest in becoming consumers. The eastern woodland Indians simply didn’t have vast needs—they made what they wore and hunted or grew what they ate.
The Indians were tremendously skillful hunters, able to amass great stocks of beaver and mink pelts that colonial traders coveted. Furs in the seventeenth century were, like sugar, a luxury item reserved for noblemen who sought to convey their lofty social status. Indians were at first willing to swap pelts for trifles like beads, glass, mirrors, woven blankets, combs, and kettles. But the thrill of gazing at one’s neatly parted hair in a mirror evidently wore off quickly, and the demand for baubles dried up. Traders needed something else to exchange for furs, something easy to obtain that would create its own demand.
Rum would be the ticket.
Tribes in southwestern North America—parts of Mexico and what would become the southwestern United States—were passingly familiar with alcohol even before the great overland Spanish expeditions lumbered through with their brandy. Many knew how to brew a drink of fermented corn, which was used chiefly in ceremonies. The eastern Indians, on the other hand, had no tradition or truck with any sort of alcohol. Fiery rum, like wine and beer, was as bizarre as it was magical, and the first sip must have been as startling and powerful as hearing the first report of a rifle. New words had to be invented to describe it and the behavior it provoked.
At prevailing rates of exchange, a trader might be able to double his money by trading furs for blankets or cookware. Rum was far more profitable—it could be traded for at least four times what it cost. Even better margins could be had by watering it down—a keg could be diluted by one-third without raising a fuss. Traders so clamored for rum that for years it cost more in New York, a major base for fur traders heading up the Hudson, than it did in Boston or Philadelphia.
In the late seventeenth century, rum dribbled into the mountains and woodlands, but by early the next century it had swelled into a torrent. A glass of rum would open negotiations between traders and Indians as a sign of friendship and good faith, and it would close negotiations to seal the deal. Rum also was often consumed during the business at hand, if for no other reason than the Indians asked for it, and the traders—having dispensed with the friendship and good faith part of the transaction—preferred to barter with someone whose power of reasoning was compromised. (John Lederer, in his 1672 account of trade with the Indians, boasted that with liquor one could “dispose them to a humour of giving you ten times the value of your commodity.”) Rum was also brought out for feasts and toasts: Indian traders were often happy to toast to King George, whomever he might be. An agent to the Choctaws estimated that liquor accounted for four-fifths of trade with the natives in 1770, and superintendent of Indian affairs in the southeast estimated in 1776 that ten thousand gallons of rum was moving in trade to the Indians every month. Most was exchanged for furs, but traders often held back a few bottles for buying sex with young “trading girls,” the exact cost of which was negotiated with the tribal leader.
For their part, shrewder Indians tried to bargain for goods other than rum, but the colonial traders often proved adept at convincing them to settle for spirits. “When our people come from Hunting to the Town or Plantations and acquaint the traders & People that we want Powder and Shot & Clothing, they first give us a large cup of Rum,” complained Aupaumut, a Mohican, to the governor of New York in 1722. As a result, “all the Beaver & Peltry we have hunted goes for drink, and we are left destitute either of Clothing or ammunition.” In 1754, Governor Arthur Dobbs of North Carolina hosted eleven hundred Indians at a trading session, and provided them with meat and abundant liquor. “By repeated presents and liquor,” the governor reported, the Cherokees were persuaded to relinquish their claims on lands toward the Mississippi to the British Crown.
Rum also served broader strategic purposes, underwriting the equivalent of a Great Wall that arced from northern New England down the Appalachian Mountains. The wall protected the British from the meddlesome French, who had settled along the St. Lawrence River in present-day Canada and moved freely on the west side of the Appalachian Mountains. By providing the Indians with rum, the British diverted them from allying with the French, who were proving increasingly deft in their incursions on British settlements. Without the free flow of rum, Indians might have turned to the French for brandy. Some historians have suggested that a general preference for the taste of rum over brandy actually kept some tribes from defecting to the French.
As a weapon, rum came up short in one major respect: It tore apart the Indian civilization it sought to recruit. In his history of South Carolina and Georgia (1779), Alexander Hewatt noted that the downfall of the impressive Indian nation was due to many colliding forces: capture and enslavement to the West Indies; smallpox infection; denying access to coastal lands and fertile soils; and warfare with other tribes after Europeans forced them to share ever-shrinking territory. “But of all the causes,” Hewatt continued, “the introduction of spirituous liquors among them, for which they discovered an amazing fondness, has proved the most destructive.”
Few of those who encountered eastern Indians in the colonial era failed to remark on the effect of alcohol. Intoxicated Indians were variously likened to “mad foaming bears, “many raging devils,” and “a gang of devils that had broke loose from hell.” Nicholas Cresswell wrote in his journal during travels in Ohio and Indiana in 1775 that the Indians he encountered were “inclined much to silence, except when in liquor which they are very fond of, and then they are very loquacious committing the greatest outrages upon each other.” In the early 1770s, a British official visiting the Choctaws reported that he “saw nothing but Rum Drinking and Women Crying over the Dead bodies of their relations who have died by Rum.”
What’s likely the most quoted account of Indians and alcohol was written by Benjamin Franklin, who was among those negotiating a treaty with a large delegation in Pennsylvania. The Indians asked for rum during the negotiations; Franklin resisted, believing that they would become “very quarrelsome and disorderly” and derail the talks. But Franklin assured them after business was concluded, they’d have “plenty of rum.” He was good to his word. As he recalled in his autobiography, they
claim’d and receiv’d the rum; this was in the afternoon; they were near one hundred men, women, and children, and were lodg’d in temporary cabins, built in the form of a square, just without the town. In the evening, hearing a g
reat noise among them, the commissioners walk’d out to see what was the matter. We found they had made a great bonfire in the middle of the square; they were all drunk, men and women, quarreling and fighting. Their dark-colour’d bodies, half naked, seen only by the gloomy light of the bonfire, running after and beating one another with firebrands, accompanied by their horrid yellings, form’d a scene the most resembling our ideas of hell that could well be imagin’d; there was no appeasing the tumult, and we retired to our lodging. At midnight a number of them came thundering at our door, demanding more rum, of which we took no notice.
Some colonists could not ignore the wrenching effect of rum on the tribes and tried to restrict the trade. This was less altruism than self-defense—colonists believed that rum-sodden Indians were more likely than sober Indians to attack settlements. In 1772, an agent to the tribes reported to his superintendent, “Unless there is a stop to sending Rum in such large quantities amongst the Indians no man will be safe among them.”
The tribes themselves also pushed to ban the rum trade. “Rum,” said Shawnee chief Benewisco in 1768, “is the thing that makes us Indians poor & foolish.” Another Shawnee chief wrote that the white people “come and bring rum into our towns, offer it to the Indians, and say, drink; this they will do until they become quite beside themselves and act as though they were out of their heads….The white people [then] stand, point at them with their fingers, laugh at them and say to one another, see what great fools the Shawanose are. But who makes them so foolish, who is at fault?”
Efforts to curb the trade started early. Trading liquor with Indians was made illegal in Massachusetts in the 1630s, in New Hampshire in the 1640s, and in New Netherland in 1643. (The ban did not sit well with Dutch traders, who thought that “to prohibit all strong liquor to [the Indians] seems very hard and very Turkish. Rum doth as little hurt as the Frenchman’s Brandie, and on the whole is much more wholesome.”) Rhode Island banned the trade in 1654, Pennsylvania in the 1680s. South Carolina banned the sale of liquor to Indians on their own lands in 1691, and banned rum trade to all Indians in 1707, in an “Act Regulating the Indian Trade and Making it Safe to the Publick.” Indians were also banned from taverns throughout the colonies.
Although they varied from colony to colony, the restrictions were dealt with in a uniform manner: They were revoked, watered down, or simply ignored. The interests of the merchants, traders, and settlers in the remote regions outweighed concerns about intoxicated rampages or the destruction of Indian culture.
“Little Turtle petitioned me to prohibit rum to be sold to his nation for a very good reason,” wrote former president John Adams to a friend in 1811. “He said, I had lost three thousand of my Indian children in his nation in one year by it. Sermons, moral discourses, philanthropic dissertations, are all lost upon this subject. Nothing but making the commodity scarce and dear will have any effect.” Adams was shrewd enough to know that steep prohibitory taxes on liquor would go nowhere, and critics “would say that I was a canting Puritan, a profound hypocrite, setting up standards of morality, economy, temperance, simplicity, and sobriety that I knew the age was incapable of.” Rum continued to flow. And the eastern native cultures were weakened to the point of collapse, and then beyond.
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Rum had a profound if less final impact on European colonial life. By the late eighteenth century (based on imprecise figures), the average American over fifteen years of age consumed slightly under six gallons of absolute alcohol each year—the equivalent of about seventy-five fifths of rum at 80 proof, or about five shots of rum per day. (Historian John McCusker more generously estimates consumption at about seven per day.) “If the ancients drank wine as our people drink rum and cider,” wrote John Adams, “it is no wonder we hear of so many possessed with devils.”
Tavern account books indicated a preference for rum over all other drinks. In 1728, a group of backcountry surveyors in North Carolina reported finding rum nearly every place they ventured and marveled that some settlers even used it in the cooking of bacon. One tavern keeper’s books for 1774 in North Carolina showed that of 221 customers, some 165 had ordered rum by itself, and another 41 ordered drinks that contained rum. In Philadelphia, the sales at the One Tun tavern for five months in 1770 show that drinks made with rum, including toddy, grog, and punch, outsold beer and wine combined.
Rum’s chief channel of distribution was the tavern. Taverns were an established part of the American landscape from the late seventeenth century through the nineteenth century, when hotel bars displaced them. Few villages were without a public house, where travelers and locals alike could find a meal, a bed, a dram of rum, a place by the fire in winter, and drinking companions year-round.
In 1656, Massachusetts made it mandatory for every town to have a licensed tavern. This ensured judges riding the circuit a place to sleep and dine. (In New York and Maryland, laws required that some of the rooms have “good feather beds,” presumably to accommodate the magistrates.) Throughout the colonies, taverns could be found near virtually every courthouse, and court sessions in winter were often held inside the taverns, since they were nicely preheated. Taverns could always be found near ferry landings, where they provided a place to eat and drink while awaiting the ferryman.
Taverns occupied a motley array of buildings, ranging from establishments that were almost regal (like the Blue Anchor in Boston), to crude wooden shacks with swaybacked benches in the hinterlands of the Carolinas. Tavern account books suggest that an average tavern was a converted two- or three-story home that looked not unlike nearby private homes; not until after the American Revolution was it usual to construct a building specifically for drinking. They were typically run by men, but widows were often granted licenses to convert their homes to profit-making enterprises, in large part to keep them from burdening the town with requests for charity.
Almost every aspect of tavern keeping was subject to regulation. A taverner needed a license. The vessels in which drinks were served had to be branded with its actual capacity—a tradition still seen on glasses in British pubs but long since lost in the United States. Prices for drinks were set by local officials and had to be prominently displayed in a common room. In Pennsylvania, justices of the peace set “reasonable rates” four times each year, and these were proclaimed by the town crier and then posted on the courthouse door. Local jurisdictions could be even more restrictive. The liquor license granted by the Massachusetts Bay colony to one vendor noted he could “sell strongwater at retail only to his own fishermen.” In South Carolina, tavern keepers were permitted to sell strong drink to seaman for just one hour out of any twenty-four.
Since prices were tightly regulated, ambitious tavern keepers striving to increase their income had to make their establishments more enticing than the one next door. Some hosted freak shows, with traveling curiosities paraded out for the astonishment of locals. In 1796, a “great curiosity” was paraded at “Mr. Buddy’s” tavern in Philadelphia—“a man born entirely black” and who at age thirty-eight started to become white. (“His wool is coming off his hands, face, and arms, and long hair growing in place similar to that of white persons.”) A two-foot-tall “satyr” was put on display in Philadelphia (“like a human being, observable to anyone with a shilling”). Exotic animals also made for popular diversions, and for a penny or two taverngoers might gape at moose, lions, cougars, polar bears, eight-legged and two-tailed cats, or a camel. (“It is impossible to describe the creature…,” read a newspaper advertisement for the latter. “A Curiosity never before seen, and very likely never again.”) Drinking contests were not unknown. At the Red Lion in Philadelphia, a man named Thomas Apty bet other customers that he could suck down twelve pints of fortified cider in a half hour. He won, but failed to collect his winnings, as he promptly keeled over stone dead.
Another tavern attraction, traveling waxworks, became a small mania. Popular figures inc
luded the royal family, the bishop of New York, George Washington, and a mechanized figure of a madwoman named Moll who attempted to strike those who neared her. Perhaps most famous of the mechanized waxworks was one that depicted grisly scenes from the French Revolution. As described by one newspaper, after the waxen king lays his head on the guillotine, the blade drops, “the head falls into a basket, and the lips which are at first red, turn blue. The whole is performed to life by an invisible mechanism.”
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Tavern keepers had one other way to distinguish themselves. They concocted unique drinks that attracted a devoted following.
The Swedish clergyman Israel Acrelius arrived in the colonies in 1749 as provost of the Swedish congregations. He traveled widely and published his observations in 1759, after his return to Sweden. What he observed was drinking. He cataloged forty-five different drinks, noting them as carefully as a naturalist enumerating beetles. Of these, eighteen were made of rum.
The modern cocktail is often said to owe its lineage to the nineteenth century and Jerry Thomas, regarded as the nation’s first notable bartender. (He wrote the first American bar guide.) While Thomas deserves to be recognized, his lionization gives short shrift to the remarkable creativity of the colonial tavern keeper, who had access to great amounts of rum, many interesting ingredients to employ as mixers, and vast amounts of time in which to experiment.
