Drink (36 page)

The
New Orleans
completed her maiden voyage to her namesake on January 12, 1812. She sank on her fourth trip, to the satisfaction of her critics, but her limited success had set an example others rushed to follow. By 1820, 60 steamers were in service on the Mississippi; by 1834, 230. While their design and journey times improved greatly over the period, their safety record remained woeful. In consequence, the superstructures of the boats were as flimsy as stage props, and equally gaudy. They were expected to have short lifespans—on average only three years—and they were built to be pretty rather than sturdy. They did not have to face the ocean and no hull of the time could withstand the force of an exploding boiler, so instead of investing in seaworthiness, competing builders focused on creature comforts. The results were floating versions of the palatial exchanges in New Orleans. They were the most complicated and aesthetic structures that Americans born along the riverbank had ever seen.

Their interiors were as fanciful as their exteriors. Their principal feature was a long slim saloon, elliptical in shape, with cabins around its perimeter. Here, from a man intimately familiar with Mississippi steamboats, is a description of the interior of a typical example: “She was as clean and dainty as a drawing room; when I looked down her long gilded saloon, it was like gazing through a splendid tunnel; she had an oil painting, by some gifted sign-painter, on every stateroom door; she glittered with no end of prism fringed chandeliers; the clerk’s office was elegant, the bar was marvelous, and the barkeeper had been barbered and upholstered at incredible cost.” The barkeepers on steamboats were usually freelance. They rented their position and made themselves rich by joining forces with professional gamblers, who, alongside exploding boilers and collisions with sandbanks, were the principal source of entertainment onboard. Indeed, the reputation of a boat was determined in part by the length of its drinks list, which could extend to a dozen or more types of cocktail, domestic and imported spirits, and vintage wines. These potions served to while away the monotony of a long river journey and to tempt passengers into gambling.

Conditions on the main deck of these boats below their salons, where most immigrants traveled together with their luggage and livestock, were primitive in contrast, and the only beverages were whiskey and river water. The latter, despite being laden with sediment, had its fans, as the following conversation from a traveler’s journal illustrates. The writer, an easterner, has just been offered a glassful of the Mississippi:

Water drinking was on the rise throughout the United States in the first quarter of the nineteenth century. Piped water had appeared in some cities, following the example of Philadelphia, which had introduced the resource in 1799. Such municipal munificence was rewarded with suspicion: The Philadelphians retained a colonial-era prejudice against water and cautioned newcomers that it was a killer, especially if the drinker gulped it down. According to a French visitor to the city, handbills were distributed each summer to alert people to its dangers: “Strangers especially are warned either to drink grog or to add a little wine or some other spirituous liquor to their water. People are urged to throw cold water on the faces of those suffering from water drinking, and bleeding is also suggested. Sometimes notices are placed on the pumps with the words: ‘Death to him who drinks quickly.’”

The lethal reputation of water stands in contrast to the blessings alcohol was believed to bestow upon the human frame throughout America. From Rhode Island to New Orleans, Americans doctored themselves with alcohol, and were prescribed it by their physicians, to treat ailments ranging from bad breath to weak hearts. The new flood of immigrants from Europe, many of whom were unused to the dramatic swings in temperature between American summers and winters, considered alcohol to be absolutely necessary to the process of acclimatization and drank as a defense against the weather, whether it was too hot or too cold. Sufferers of sunstroke and hypothermia alike were treated with a good stiff drink. Moreover, alcohol was often the principal ingredient of American folk remedies. This new species of cure, concocted to replace the British patent medicines that had been popular before independence, kept many invalids drunk. Those who got the eyaws from gulping their medication could avail themselves of further folk remedies intended to cure the condition. The following example, from Kentucky, intended to be consumed in a single draft, probably worked its magic by fright alone:

“Sperits” dominated early nineteenth-century American drinking. As the country grew, and new states meshed with old, they were still the best way of carrying wealth from place to place, or of concentrating the grain harvest on an isolated homestead in a form that would improve in value with age. The volume of production was stupendous. In 1810 federal statistics show that the six main whiskey-producing states together distilled twice as many gallons of whiskey per annum as there were people in America. Ten years later, the notional per capita consumption had risen to more than five gallons per head per annum. According to a later analysis of who was doing the tippling, “Nine million women and children drank twelve million gallons” and three million men accounted for the other sixty million—i.e., by 1829 the average American metropolitan male was drinking as much hard liquor as the average Londoner at the height of the gin craze. If statistics could predict the effect of drink on a population, by rights Americans should have been languishing en masse in emaciated heaps, their birthrate and life expectancy should have collapsed, and crime should have exploded.

That they continued to breed and to enjoy long, healthy, and prosperous lives is explained in part by the fact that they were substituting spirits for other types of alcoholic beverage. Beer, wine, and cider all lost ground to whiskey. The numbers for beer are instructive: In 1810, the same year that the average American man, woman, and child downed sixteen pints of whiskey, they drank only eight pints of beer. According to Treasury figures, America contained a mere 132 breweries, concentrated in Pennsylvania, New York, and Ohio, which together produced the modest total of 185,000 barrels, which was less than any single one of the five largest breweries in London.

The American focus on spirits led to an explosion of creativity in the manner in which they were drunk. The
cocktail
was invented in the United States. Its appearance in the lexicon may be traced to the May 6, 1806, edition of a New York newspaper,
The Balance and Columbian Repository
, which published the drinks bill of a political candidate. The bill included “25 [glasses] cock-tail.” The next week, in response to a letter from a curious reader, the paper’s editor printed a clarification: “Cock tail, then, is a stimulating liquor, composed of spirits of any kind, sugar water, and bitters . . . it is supposed to be an excellent electioneering potion inasmuch as it renders the heart stout and bold, at the same time that it fuddles the head.” Cocktails were ideal for those who could not stomach whiskey solo in the morning. In 1822, breakfast in Kentucky was said to consist of “three cocktails and a chaw of terbacka.”

Kentuckians were not the only Americans to start the day with spirits. Indeed, the entire nation was acquiring a reputation for dawn-till-dusk tippling. This trend toward the hard stuff had been detected in its infancy by President Jefferson, who did not wish to see his country become a nation of sots. His years in France, and his love for its wines (he bought over twenty thousand bottles for the use of himself and future presidents), had convinced him that Americans would be better people if they drank vintages instead of spirits. To this end, he argued for reduced duties on imported wines and set out on a quest for an American substitute. Despite sequential setbacks, he never gave up hope that some vigorous native vine might be capable of producing a palatable drink. His persistence is testament to his strength of character: He had watched as the vines he had selected in France, shipped over the Atlantic, and planted in the most promising soil on his own land had died without any clear cause—yet had remained optimistic. He decided that the solution lay in careful hybridizing of native vines. His first all-American hope was the
scuppernong
of North Carolina. It had the potential, he believed, to be “distinguished on the best tables of Europe, for its fine aroma, and chrystalline transparence.” He regretted, however, that the “aroma, in most of the samples I have seen, has been entirely submerged in brandy.” Sadly, without added brandy, scuppernong was undrinkable. Its grapes gave a tang to wine that experts describe as “foxy.”
³¹

Whether fortified or not, the crystalline scuppernong did not succeed in weaning Americans off their cocktails. Nor did Jefferson managed to persuade Congress to lower import duties on wine. A decade after first advocating the latter cause, he was still pleading the case. However, in 1818, the legislature appeared to be ready to resolve the matter in his favor. In order to force judgment Jefferson set out his moral and fiscal arguments side by side: Heavy duties on wine were “a prohibition of its use to the middling class of our citizens, and a condemnation of them to the poison of whiskey, which is desolating their houses. No nation is drunken where wine is cheap; and none sober, where the dearness of wine substitutes ardent spirits as the common beverage. Wine is, in truth, the only antidote to the bane of whiskey.”

Jefferson was not alone in calling attention to the dangers posed by the rise in whiskey drinking. The Philadelphia College of Physicians, under Dr. Benjamin Rush, a signatory to the Declaration of Independence, had advocated punitive duties on whiskey during the taxation debates in Congress in 1791. Rush considered spirits to be qualitatively different from other kinds of alcoholic beverage and, like Jefferson, was alarmed that Americans were drinking them in preference to beer and wine. When his attempts to win Congress over to his point of view failed, he decided that the only way to battle spirits was by enlisting religion in the fight and addressing “the heads and governing bodies of all the churches in America upon the subject.”

To this end, he gathered together a series of articles he had written on the matter into a tract entitled an
Essay on the Effects of Ardent Spirits upon the Human Constitution,
which was published in 1794 and reissued continuously till 1804, by which time its message had begun to take root. The tract was graced with a pictorial representation of the benefits and dangers of alcohol, captioned “A Moral and Physical Thermometer,” which divided the world of drinking into two categories—Temperance and Intemperance. Daringly for the time, it suggested that water drinking was conducive to “Health and Wealth.” The thermometer evoked Dante in its numerology, setting out, in the temperance section, seven ranks of virtue and, on the intemperance scale, seven descending levels of hell. True to its title, the physical as well as moral consequences of consuming anything more potent than strong beer or wine were provided and, if they were accurate observations of drinkers at that time, suggested that most Americans suffered from “tremors of the hands in the morning, puking, bloatedness, red noses, jaundice, dropsy, and epilepsy.”

The accompanying essay, despite being styled as a calm appeal to the reason of its readers, was alarmist in its tone and hyperbolic in its phrasing: “Were it possible for me to speak with a voice so loud as to be heard from the river St. Croix to the remotest shores of the Mississippi . . . I would say, ‘Friends and fellow citizens! avoid the habitual use of those seducing liquors! ’” Rush proposed that “to avert this evil,” Americans should “unite and besiege the general and state governments with petitions to limit the number of taverns—to impose heavy duties upon ardent spirits—to inflict a mark of disgrace or temporary abridgement of some civil right upon every man convicted of drunkenness; and finally to secure the property of habitual drunkards, for the benefit of their families, by placing it in the hands of trustees appointed for that purpose by a court of justice.”