Tag Archives: alcohol

Shakers and Alcohol

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With a group, particularly a religious group, that has had such a long history, I think there is a tendency to see them as they are and extrapolate backwards. Attitudes toward drinking alcohol have changed so dramatically in the intervening few centuries that that approach is impossible.

Rees’s period, the Federalist period in American History, was a hard drinking age. Ale was used almost like water and was consumed by women and children as well as by men. Cider, which was usually hard cider (it could hardly be anything else without refrigeration) was a common breakfast drink. Many of our founding fathers took a glass of cider first thing in the morning in the same manner we drink our orange juice. Rum was used as part of sailors’ wages. (Rum is made from molasses, a byproduct in the refining of sugar. The more molasses in the sugar, the browner. Sugar has a dark history. Planting and harvesting the cane required more slaves. Cane exhausts the soil so more land was needed. And of course we are all familiar with the health risks of sugar. But I digress.) In any event, rum was the drink of the Colonies. After the Whiskey Rebellion of 1793, whiskey became more popular, more American if you will, just like coffee did in comparison to tea.

The Shakers brewed cider and like the society around them drank ‘spirits’. It was the custom for every Brother and Sister who wished to take a glass in the morning before breakfast and then through out the day. For dinner the Brothers were permitted two gills and the Sisters two thirds of a gill. (Does anyone but me wonder about the livers of all those drinkers?)

But with the Millennial Laws, especially from 1845 (and the rise of the temperance movement) the drinking of spirits (along with coffee and tea – that would have killed me) was forbidden. No cider was made and no liquor was brewed. One of the primary sources I read discussed the struggle among the Family about brewing beer for the hired men.  (More about hired men in another post.)

Eventually spirits had to be offered medicinally from the Doctor and then were banned all together. Like other cultural changes, however, this prohibition changed again and later on the Shakers both made and consumed wine with meals.

So the Shakers, like the World around them, changed as prevailing attitudes changed.

A Heavy Drinking Age – Shakers and Spirits

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Spirits, or distilled liquor, were consumed so enthusiastically during the 1790’s (and before and after) that tourists and important men alike began to decry the habit. The U. S. was a nation of drunkards. Even George Washington, a whiskey distiller himself, referred to the heavy drinking as the ruin of half the workman.

Where did we get into such a pickle? Well, part of it was cultural. Cotton Mather (he of Puritan fame) declared “Drink itself to be a creature of God.”

Water tended to be dangerous. It could be contaminated or just plain unappetizing. In Natchez water from the Mississippi River had to be set aside so the sediment could settle. (Yum!) Milk was unpasturized and if the cow ate jimson weed it was poisoness. Alcoholic beverages, and I include hard cider, were safe. Also, corn and rye could be transported from the western frontier (like Pittsbugh in 1793) to the east in the form of whiskey and sold for four or more times the price for the grain itself. And without much more cost in transportation.

In times where the food supply could be erratic. alcoholic beverages accounted for a significant proportion of the day’s calories. In the early days of the eighteenth centure, the favorite tipple was rum; sweet and alcoholic. But after the Revolution, it was declared unpatriotic and people switched to whiskey. Rum was made from molasses and while distilled in Maine and Massachusetts at first, began to be distilled in the West Indies. Whiskey, on the other hand, was All-American; the grain grown in the US and distilled here as well.

Everyone drank. Ben Franklin is quoted as saying If God wanted men to drink water He would not have given him an elbow to bend the wine glass. Toddlers were put to sleep with whiskey or given the sugary residue in the bottom of the glass. (This makes my hair stand on end!) But of course there was a double standard. Women were not to been seen intoxicated.

Some primary sources quote men like John Adams complaining about the length it took to get something built. One day’s work earned a man enough to stay drunk all week. So they worked one day out of seven.

As might be expected, early opposition to drink came from the Quakers, most particulary from Anthony Benezet who attacked slavery and rum at the same time. Quakers had already begun to practice restraint before him and by 1777 they were ordered to no longer sell distilled spirits nor to distill them. The Methodists saw drinking as a barrier to purifying the church and society so they joined the Quakers. The Shakers, as a splinter group, also practised retraint and drank mainly water (that they trusted). The Shakers were famous for their cider which went from ‘kind’ to hard’ very rapidly in an age before refrigeration.

The chorus against such heavy drinking began to grown, spurred by Dr. Benjamin Rush, a Philadelphia doctor who concentrated upon the health benefits of abstinence. Another doctor, a Dr. Thomas Calawalder, had identified rum as the cause of an illness called the Dry Gripes. The rum that was aged in lead casks caused lead poisoning. Interestingly enough, the doctors recommended drinking cider (which is still alcoholic) and beer (which is more complicated to make than you might think.

For more information, both depressing and fascinating, read “Alcoholic Republic: An American Tradition” by W. J. Rorabaugh.