Temperance was, emancipation of the slaves alone excepted, the most important "reform" not just of the 1850s but of the entire century between the 1930s and the repeal of Prohibition in 1933. In the early 1830s, as the campaign against alcohol was getting underway, it borrowed the tactics of other "benevolent" movements. There were leaflets, tracts, sermons. Most denounced drinking and "rumselling" in the most unmeasured terms. Later, a group of reformed "drunkards" established the Washingtonian Society. They stressed the drinker's need for help and the horrors of alcohol's hold over him. The most influential Washingtonian was John Gough of Boylston, Massachusetts, a farming town just outside of Worcester. Gough told of his own drinking, of his battles with delirium tremens when he first attempted to quit. He gave the drunkard a human face. Thousands claimed they stopped drinking after one of Gough's lectures. It was a process like conversion with Gough as the revivalist but with a message of sympathy rather than damnation.

Lincoln, in his 1842 Washington's Birthday Address, commended this way of advancing the cause of temperance and sharply criticized those who assailed the drinker and the rumseller. It was not politic, he claimed, and it was not morally correct either. Just a few years before, he pointed out, everyone considered the use of alcohol as perfectly permissible. In seeking to work so great a change in the public mind, it made no sense to condemn those who continued to cling to ideas everyone had once accepted. Further, the condemnations just drove potential converts away. Yet the Washingtonian approach, often called "moral suasion," soon lost ground to the very approach Lincoln had criticized. The pivot of the change was the passage in 1850 of the so-called Maine Law, the first prohibition measure. Other states across the North and West quickly passed similar bills. Why the shift from suasion to coercion? One crucial reason was the increasing flow of immigrants, particularly the Irish, into the those areas. They were indifferent to appeals from English-speaking Protestants. It was not coincidence that prohibition and nativism gained political power in tandem. Nor would the link between the two break in the ensuing decades. National Prohibition and immigration restriction were kindred measures, supported by the same coalition. [for a more detailed examination of this link, see "A Frame for Understanding the 1850s."