A temperance banner, circa 1850

Temperance was the great reform of the age. It may not appear so to us now, but contemporaries had no doubt. Abolition was a crusade led by fanatics. This was the consensus of opinion, North and South, up to and into the Civil War. Woman's Rights was as bad, according to majority opinion. The fact that many of the leaders of the woman's movement got their start in abolition was proof enough. Both movements threatened the foundations of society. Abolition put the Union at risk. Woman's rights jeopardized the family. Temperance, however, did not threaten. It promised. It promised a more prosperous society, more harmonious families, less crime, less insanity. Virtually every supporter of any other reform, from the eradication of slavery to banning capital punishment also supported temperance. A brief but compelling description of pre-temperance America is in the Rev. Charles R. Harding's manuscript autobiography.

As a movement temperance began as voluntary associations either of reformed drinkers or of non-drinkers. Both took "the pledge." This was an oath never to use alcohol. By the 1840s John Gough, a self-proclaimed "reformed drunkard," was appearing on lecture platforms across the North with thrilling and harrowing accounts of his own experiences with "Demon Rum." Churches gradually got on the temperance bandwagon. Respectable, middle-class opinion swung away from the use of alcohol, particularly in the North, throughout the 1840s. A good measure of this is Abraham Lincoln's Washington's Birthday Address of 1842 to the members of the Springfield Washingtonian Society. Washingtonians were reformed drinkers who had themselves taken "the pledge" to foreswear alcohol and who worked to persuade others to do the same. Lincoln credited the Washingtonians for the recent increase in temperance sentiment. He also criticized quite sharply earlier temperance advocates, particularly for their condemnation of dram sellers which he found both impolitic and unjust.

Lincoln's address was directly critical of the Evangelical style of reform. Evangelicals, however, soon recaptured the initiative from the Washingtonians and other advocates of "moral suasion." In 1850 Neal Dow succeeded in getting the Maine legislature to pass a measure prohibiting the sale of alcohol. Its success was, in effect, an abandonment of the Washingtonian approach and a return, with a vengeance, to the sort of temperance campaigning that Lincoln had criticized. Once again temperance advocates condemned the liquor seller as a minion of Satan. Once again they wrote off the drunkard as irredeemable. The "Maine Law" was copied, in varying forms of strictness, in other northern states and cities over the next several years. To its advocates prohibion promised, once and for all, to abolish the liquor trade and, with it, the hold of "Demon Rum." To its opponents it threatened not only to deprive moderate drinkers of a source of pleasure and an occasion for companionship but also to bring the power of the state to bear upon what they claimed were private and personal decisions. Nonsense, proponents rejoined. Alcohol was the great social evil, the source of innumerable blighted lives. No one had the right to destroy himself with drink, much less inflict suffering upon his innocent family or pass down his weakness for the bottle to his children. "Come Home, Father" was just one of many sentimental ballads which made this argument. "Father, dear father, come home with me now," pleads the dutiful and loving daughter. Father, intoxicated, ignores her prayers. Tragedy ensues.

This ballad was sufficiently popular to inspire a sequel in which Father sees the error of his ways. It is too late to save the life of his son, he sadly acknowledges. But he will strive to make it up to Mother and daughter. Temperance songs, and drinking songs, both proliferated during the 1850s.

Resources:

Rev. Charles R. Harding, autobiographical account of the temperance movement

Ichabod Washburn's autobiographical account of a "housing raising" without rum

Neal Dow, Fourth of July Oration (1829)

Abraham Lincoln, Washington's Birthday Address (1842)

Temperance and Drinking Songs (1850s)

Currier and Ives, Tree of Intemperance

World Temperance Convention(s), 1853

Who Killed John Robbins? (1855) -- conflicting accounts of the "Portland Riot" in which Mayor Neal Dow ordered the Rifle Guards, a voluntary militia, to fire upon an unarmed crowd.