by Wayne Curtis
[ PRUNE WATER ]
In three cups of water, cook slowly for one half-hour one-quarter pound of PRUNES and a thin strip of LEMON PEEL. Add JUICE of one-half LEMON. Strain and sweeten to taste. Do not add RUM.
[ FROM ON UNCLE SAM’S WATER WAGON, A 1919 GUIDE TO “DELICIOUS, APPETIZING, AND WHOLESOME DRINKS, FREE FROM THE ALCOHOLIC TAINT.” ]
Chapter 6
[ DEMON RUM ]
Hear the happy voices ringing,
As “King Rum” is downward hurled,
Shouting vict’ry and hosanna,
In their march to save the world.
—WOMAN’S CHRISTIAN TEMPERANCE UNION SONG, LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY
In October 1884, a small but vocal group of Protestant clergymen gathered at a rally in New York City to show their support for the Republican presidential candidate, James G. Blaine of Maine. It was an impromptu meeting without an official sponsor or much of an agenda, and Blaine attended mostly to show his face and make a few encouraging comments to the pious group. Before Blaine rose to speak, though, an elderly, unremarkable Presbyterian minister named Samuel Burchard made his way to the podium. Little is known about Burchard, and by some accounts he didn’t even have the full attention of the assembled when he spoke. But one of Burchard’s lines would enter the lexicon. “We are Republicans,” he said, “and don’t propose to leave our party and identify ourselves with the party whose antecedents have been rum, Romanism, and rebellion.”
What came to be known as the “Burchard Alliteration” was not atypical for the times: Politicians and temperance leaders loved to set off a string of rhetorical firecrackers to get the attention of a crowd. In 1888, a temperance crusader attacked liquor dealers as those who destroyed society with “bombast, beer, and bombs,” and who were happy to substitute “anarchy for order, lawlessness for law, license for liberty.”
Burchard’s remarks caught the ear of at least one man, a journalist from the New York World. He jotted down Burchard’s remark and published it the next day in his account of the meeting.
“Rum, Romanism, and rebellion” turned out to be a hand grenade, an unexpected gift from Burchard to the Democratic Party. Blaine did not instantly distance himself from the comment, lending the impression that the Republican candidate would bring to Washington his elitist and bigoted friends who had little tolerance for Catholics—those Romanists—and their drinking, rabble-rousing ways. Large numbers of Catholics had immigrated in recent years, and most were fervent Democrats. The comment had the effect, in modern terms, of motivating the party’s base. Blaine struggled to control the damage, claiming that he had been weary after a long campaign swing through the West, that his attention was focused on preparing his own remarks during Burchard’s talk. He never even heard Burchard make his comment, Blaine said. The tepid disavowals didn’t slow the thunderhead of Democratic criticism from building. Three days later, Blaine finally stepped forward to loudly repudiate the remark, saying, “I am the last man in the United States who would make a disrespectful allusion to another man’s religion.”
His response came too late, and offered up too little. When voters went to the polls a few weeks later, James G. Blaine lost New York to Grover Cleveland by a little more than a thousand votes. The electoral college race was extremely close nationally—a situation familiar to those who voted in 2000 and 2004. Had Blaine won New York, he would have moved into the White House.
The meek Burchard was ever after known as “the man who opened his mouth and swallowed a presidency.”
To the drink historian, the most interesting question is, exactly what rum was Burchard referring to? Because by the late nineteenth century, rum had fallen out of fashion. It was rarely found in a proper home; and when it was, it was likely stashed in a hallway closet or under the front stairs, hunted up only when someone had bronchitis, or for holiday mince pie or eggnog.
By the late 1800s, rum was no longer just the stuff made from sugarcane and its leavings. It was a name used to describe all drink—whiskey and gin and cordials and beer and Madeira wine. Anything that got you drunk was “rum.”
And “rum” was much, much more. It was evil in a glass—a dark force that infiltrated families and tore them asunder, that broke good men and left them derelict, that had seeped into the underpinnings of American democracy and was working to rot it from below.
In the nineteenth century, rum had become the devil incarnate.
* * *
—
In truth, rum hadn’t been quite itself since the American Revolution. The conclusion of the rebellion in 1783 and the return to a fitful peace was at first good news for the war-ravaged rum industry. Trading ships could resume their West Indian trade routes, and distillers could again import barrels of molasses to feed their stills. Rum soon flowed out of the northern distilleries, headed to taverns in the new nation and to traders sailing for coastal West Africa. Rhode Island, in particular, wasted little time in reclaiming its role as a center for the rum trade, and the treacly aroma of fermenting molasses again filled the seaports.
Rum’s recovery was brief. The chief problem was molasses—or the lack of it. Molasses proved harder to get after the war than before, and more expensive when it could be had. The trade with the British colonies never fully recovered after hostilities ended. The West Indian planters, who had remained loyal to the Crown when their northern compatriots rebelled, were still bound by the Navigation Acts, which prohibited direct trade between British colonies and nations other than England—which now included the newly minted United States. U.S. distillers could at first direct ships to obtain molasses from French and Spanish islands, but these doors, too, began to close. In 1783, Spain abruptly shut its Cuban ports to Americans and seized two U.S. ships in a spat over American settlers in Spanish Florida. French ports were also soon off limits, the fallout of Byzantine political intrigue involving the British. In any event, the French islands had by then invested more in its own rum industry, and molasses was no longer viewed as something to be cheaply bartered away for a few sticks of lumber. In what must have sounded like a death knell to North American rum distillers, in 1807 the United States passed the Embargo Act, which banned American trade with England and France. The rum industry couldn’t catch a break.
Trade opened up between the United States and the West Indies after the War of 1812, but by then the soils on the British islands were worn and depleted after two centuries of sugar production, and great amounts of manure were needed to maintain a decent yield. What’s more, the British had begun emancipating its slaves. Without a ready supply of forced labor, the once immensely profitable sugar plantations became uneconomical and tipped into a long decline. Rum soon lost its historic role as the cheap spirit that fueled international commerce and returned to its roots: a local commodity, produced by islanders and for islanders. By the mid-nineteenth century, a melancholy traveler to the British West Indies colonies wrote of the abandoned sugar estates, “It is difficult to exaggerate, and yet more difficult to define, the poverty and industrial prostration….” The islands at the center of the world for two centuries were consigned to the forgotten margins.
* * *
—
Finding enough molasses to keep the North American stills running was only part of the problem. There was also the matter of changing tastes, fueled by an animated American nationalism. American consumers had come to regard rum as an artifact of the ancient régime, a product associated with the imperious British, their fussy teas, and their high-handed ways. Rum had little role in the shaping of a new national political culture. Prior to the Revolution, drinking rum was a sign of the growing affluence and independence of the colonists. It demonstrated they were prosperous enough to purchase rum made abroad—and later to manufacture their own rum from raw materials acquired through trade of their lumber and livestock. But following the war, rum took on a whiff of national weakness an
d vulnerability, and became a small emblem of financial imprisonment. Why drink an imported product that aided one’s enemy when you could purchase a local product and advance your own economy?
Throughout the colonies, drinkers made the switch to other drinks. Some shrewdly saw opportunity for gain. Boston brewer Samuel Adams ran advertising that noted, “It is to be hoped, that the Gentlemen of the Town will endeavor to bring our own October Beer into Fashion again, by that most prevailing Motive, Example, so that we may no longer be beholden to Foreigners for a Credible Liquor, which may be as successfully manufactured in this Country.”
New Englanders in the business of distilling rum did what Americans often do best in times of economic change: They retooled. The more adept distillers switched to other products. In Providence, the illustrious Brown family had constructed a new rum distillery after the war in an attempt to revive their business. But they abandoned that endeavor by 1791, and regrouped to open one of the nation’s first gin distilleries, placing ads in newspapers to reach growers of rye, barley, buckwheat, and juniper berries. Rum, they concluded, was a relic of the old economy, like sperm whale candles or coarse red-clay pottery.
Rum makers who lacked the capital or desire to retool simply shuttered their distilleries and walked away. By 1794, the number of distilleries in once-thriving Boston had dwindled to a handful, and of those not many were operating at even half capacity; by 1800, American distilleries were producing only 45 percent of rum made just a decade earlier. The trend was inexorable; by 1888, Boston was down to three rum distilleries.
If rum was of the spirit of the past, what was the spirit of the future? Without question, it was whiskey.
* * *
—
Whiskey wasn’t wholly unfamiliar to the taverngoers of the early nineteenth century, but it was rare compared to rum. The first native whiskey had been produced in the northern colonies in the seventeenth century, but was made out of valuable grain that had to be transported by inefficient wagons from inland farms. Molasses was produced a much greater distance away, but cheap shipping ensured that it was far less expensive.
After the Revolution, Americans emigrated in increasing numbers from crowded seaboard cities, across the Appalachians, to the Ohio River Valley and beyond. Here they found fertile soils and ideal growing conditions for grains and corn. Forests fell, crops blossomed, and the new settlers found they could produce more than they could consume or sell locally. This presented a logistical problem. Americans had two markets for agricultural commodities such as wheat and corn. One was east of the Appalachians at the seaboard cities. The other was far downriver in New Orleans, where the cargo would be shipped to cities in the United States, West Indies, and Europe. Shipping barrels of wheat or corn by buckboard overland across the mountains was expensive and impractical. (This was ameliorated somewhat in 1825, when the Erie Canal opened between the Great Lakes and the Atlantic.) New Orleans was a much greater distance away, but it was cheaper to ship bulk products by boat.
One other alternative existed. With a modest investment, farmers could convert their grain to a commodity that could be more affordably shipped east.
The arithmetic was appealing. One horse might be able to haul four bushels of wheat milled into flour. But if that grain or corn were run through a still and the whiskey put in casks, the same horse could haul the equivalent of twenty-four bushels. So farmers bought and built stills in great number. One traveler in western Pennsylvania observed that at least one farm in thirty had an operating still. Great torrents of whiskey flooded across the mountains and began to inundate the cities along the eastern coast.
* * *
—
The surplus of grain and corn was an essential ingredient in the nineteenth-century whiskey boom, but the new liquor was greatly aided by technology. As America embarked on its industrial revolution, inventors tinkered endlessly to improve the old ways of doing things. Americans were especially keen to advance the science of distillation. Between 1802 and 1815, more than a hundred patents were granted by the government for distillation devices—or about one in every twenty patents issued. Printers published articles and pamphlets to aid journeyman distillers, with titles like the 1824 “Essay on the Importance and the Best Mode of Converting Grain into Spirit.”
The most radical change came with the invention of new stills that could run continuously. The process and equipment used to separate alcohol from water had been largely unchanged for five hundred years. A distiller placed a fermented, low-alcohol brew into a pot, boiled it, captured the steam, condensed it, emptied out the pot, and then ran another batch. This was time-consuming and slow, since the pot had to be cleaned between each batch to avoid spoiling the spirit.
The new stills changed all that. The first variation was the “perpetual still,” an ingenious device involving a condensing globe (rather than a copper cooling coil) housed inside a sealed tank. The wash was continually piped into the tank and around the globe. This still not only could be run nonstop, but it used the wash to cool the condensate, thereby preheating it and reducing the need for fuel in boiling off the alcohol.
The perpetual still was a precursor to an even more magnificent breakthrough—the continuous column still. Around 1826, Aeneas Coffey, a distillery worker in Dublin, Ireland, separated alcohol from water using two tall copper columns, each divided horizontally by a series of perforated plates. Steam was piped into the bottom of each column, and this heated the upper plates enough to boil off alcohol but not water. So the wash was pumped into the top of the first column, and then trickled down through the heated plates. Vapors rich with alcohol evaporated first and were piped into the second column, where it went through the process again. The highly alcoholic steam was then captured and condensed. The less-alcoholic water vapors would condense lower in the column and would flow as waste out the bottom.
One problem arose with the brilliant efficiency of this process. The alcohol that emerged from the column still was so astoundingly pure, and so devoid of the trace elements that lent each liquor its distinctive taste, that whiskey and rum and other spirits from these stills proved all but impervious to improvement through aging. A distiller could put the liquor into a barrel and age it, and five years later it came out as hot and harsh as it went in. Coffey had, it turned out, invented the process for distilling neutral spirits—pure alcohol. All but the most committed topers found it medicinal and unpleasant. Some years later, a workaround was devised when a distiller figured out that he could mix the pure alcohol from a column still with a smaller amount of heavier, and more aromatic, pot-stilled liquor and put the blend up in barrels. The resulting liquor aged nicely. This discovery gave the ancient pot still a new lease on life. To this day, many rums are made with a blend of rums from pot stills and column stills. (Modern column stills have also been fine-tuned so that more of the spirit’s essential elements can be captured, reducing the need for the pot still.)
* * *
—
The year 1802 was a good one for American liquor, especially whiskey. An ill-advised whiskey tax imposed some years earlier by Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton—which triggered the short-lived Whiskey Rebellion in western Pennsylvania—was at last repealed. Americans now had the tacit blessing of their government to produce and consume more liquor. The United States was home to an estimated eighteen thousand distilleries, and over the next three decades American consumers found themselves awash in whiskey. It was available everywhere, from country stores to city taverns, and made by everyone from large producers to one’s neighbors. Ever pragmatic, Americans made an even stronger commitment to drink than their besotted colonial ancestors. And few Americans were too poor to drink. “During the first third of the nineteenth century the typical American annually drank more distilled liquor than at any other time in our history,” writes liquor historian W. J. Rorabaugh. Americans of the era outdrank the English, the Irish, a
nd the Prussians. (They fell short, however, of the Swedes.) By conservative estimates, the average American in 1830 drank the equivalent of five gallons of absolute alcohol annually—close to three times current levels. The average American didn’t really exist, of course. Those doing the drinking were mostly over fifteen years old, and mostly male. And even within this group, not all drank. So the drinkers really drank. Rorabaugh estimates that half of the adult males in the nation were responsible for downing about two-thirds of the spirits. Historian Norman Clark estimates that in the early nineteenth century, drinkers actually swilled about ten gallons of pure alcohol each year—or more than two bottles of 90 proof liquor each and every week.
America’s love affair with strong drink fascinated and scandalized visiting Europeans. An Englishman who traveled down the Mississippi in the 1820s noted that in every corner he visited, “north or south, east or west,” he found “the universal practice of sipping a little at a time, but frequently.” In 1824, essayist Samuel Morewood noted the impact of inexpensive whiskey: “From the extraordinary cheapness with which spirits can be procured in the United States, averaging scarcely more than thirty-eight cents the gallon, the people indulge themselves to excess, and run into all the extravagancies of inebriety.” Drink permeated all levels of society, from the gutter to the ballroom. At Andrew Jackson’s 1829 inaugural gala, the guests guzzled booze with such ardor that the White House staff feared the official residence would be trampled into a ruin. They devised a simple solution: The staff hauled the whiskey out to the lawn, and when the great herd of guests followed, closed and bolted the doors behind them. Frances Trollope’s Domestic Manners of the Americans, first published in 1832, noted that for all the exalted talk of democracy’s promise, she most often heard it “in accents that breathe less of freedom than onions and whiskey.”
