Were the Founding Fathers Alcoholics?

[DeSwiss]

Huffington Post
Stanton Peele
Posted: 06/15/10 09:00 AM ET

A recent bestseller has taken up the cudgels of a longstanding political and religious controversy: Were our founding fathers really religious and, more specifically, Christian? On the one side, humanists point out remarkably little specific mention of Christ in the fathers' (including Lincoln's) public utterances. Rather, they refer to an all-inclusive, generic deity. But advocates for Christianity maintain this should not be taken to dispute our founders' deep, underlying faith in God and belief in the divinity of Christ.

Leaving that contentious debate aside, I want to talk about how much the founding fathers drank. The answer: quite a bit. The New York Times on Sunday published an account of how Jefferson (according to writer Ann Mah he was "a lifelong oenophile&quot spent a lot of his time in France while representing the United States inspecting the vineyards of Burgundy. Was Jefferson a closet drinker? He had no reason to hide his love of wine -- no founding father thought it unusual in this pre-Temperance era to love the fruit of the vine or, for that matter, hard cider, beer, or even whiskey and rum.

Take Jefferson's primary rival, John Adams. According to a descendant of his, "To the end of John Adams' life, a large tankard of hard cider was his morning draught before breakfast." Get the man to the Betty Ford Center! How do we know the founding fathers as a group drank a lot? Well, for one thing, we have records of their imbibing. In 1787, two days before they signed off on the Constitution, the 55 delegates to the Constitutional Convention partied at a tavern. According to the bill preserved from the evening, they drank 54 bottles of Madeira, 60 bottles of claret, eight of whiskey, 22 of porter, eight of hard cider, 12 of beer and seven bowls of alcoholic punch.

That's more than two bottles of fruit of the vine, plus a few shots and a lot of punch and beer, for every delegate. Clearly, that's humanly impossible. Except, you see, across the country during the Colonial era, the average American consumed many times as much beverage alcohol as contemporary Americans do. Getting drunk - but not losing control - was simply socially accepted.

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- Drunkenness would explain the ''f's'' they wrote where ''s's'' were supposed to be.....

[JaneyVee]

1. Definitely loved hemp.

[dballance]

2. I think the F instead of S was a function of the printing press

I think that had to do with the presses of the day. You don't see that in the handwritten manuscripts.

[DeSwiss]

21. j/k :-/ n/t

[Igel]

39. In chancery writings you certainly do.

I had the misfortune of transcribing some old deeds and correspondence from the 1600s and early 1700s and the rules were pretty much the same for long-s as in typeset text. Mostly syllable final has long s unless word final, and in specific words and ligatures (which, when handwritten, weren't all that much ligatures).

It wasn't used nearly as often, as far as I can tell, in "progressive" or in private writings, and was fading out by the end of the 1700s in a lot of ways. If you were sufficiently cultured or educated and a bit nostalgic or old-fashioned, you could use it later. It was an old distinction that had been lost, and made a lot more sense before you had meaningful white space.

I wonder if the change in English syllable structure and spread of literacy also undermined the long s. With the spread of literacy came more people tossing their nib into the (ink)well, with more confusion and a tendency to level out odd distinctions like the two ss. Mergers spread at the expense of distinctions.

I also have to wonder if perhaps errors in the distribution--which made a lot of sense at one point--can be used to track the dephonologization of syllable cut and its replacement by ambisyllabicity in Modern English. (Then again, given the literature on syllable cut in English, that has probably been explored.)

[Brother Buzz]

3. Drinking water was a risky proposition back in those days

[XemaSab]

5. I can dig the all day beer buzz

but drinking that much liquor is pretty hardcore.

You're not drinking liquor to replace water, you're drinking it because FREEEEEEEDOOOOM! WOOOOOOOO!

[Brother Buzz]

18. I knew a man that drank 8-10 pints of scrumpy a day...

and he was a very productive worker, just not to swift. In the evenings, he went to the pub to drink beer for his buzz.

[X_Digger]

4. Cholera, dysentery, etc.. no wonder they didn't drink the water.

Tea was boiled, other drinks were safe due to alcohol content.

Other than the hard spirits, their alcoholic drinks were rather benign by today's standards.

[arely staircase]

6. don't know if they were alcoholics but they were big fucking drunks

so were Jesus and his disciples, but don't try telling a fundamentalist that.

[XemaSab]

8. Jesus's first miracle

was making more booze when it looked like the party was going to run out.

Trufax.

[arely staircase]

9. definition of a fundamentalist

someone who believes every word in the Bible is literally true except for the word "wine". In which case it really means "grape juice."

[ChairmanAgnostic]

29. LOL!

How true.

[Le Taz Hot]

37. Now THAT'S funny!

[Egalitarian Thug]

43. And slavery, don't forget slavery was not really slavery at all, or so I've

been told numerous times by the seriously deluded.

[jmowreader]

25. Jesus' second miracle was not getting killed by his own mother

When Mary told Jesus there wasn't any wine, his response was, "And what do you want from me, woman? My time is not yet come."

Show of hands: How many of you would have gotten the shit beaten out of you for talking to your mother like that?

[JVS]

7. Modern conceptions of sobriety have a lot to do with the demands of operating heavy machinery

[arely staircase]

11. that is the most profound statement I have heard in a while

so much I am about to make it my sig line. Let me know now if you invented it if you want credit.

[jberryhill]

35. Yep

Even on sailing ships, which have a lot of ropes, pulleys, etc., the British sailors were allotted a pint of rum a day.

[flamingdem]

10. Some were

like Ethan Allen.

He wasn't a signer however. (Couldn't hold the pen!)

[arely staircase]

13. clearly hancock was - based on the signature size

which just screams "hey redcoats, fuck all y'all!"

[flamingdem]

15. they were the cool rebels and

really hated the monarchy, and religion.

Ethan Allen used to shoot the church steeple of towns he rode into, edit: bing bash!

[Summer Hathaway]

26. As Bob Newhart once opined

in his early stand-up days re Hancock: "Pretty flamboyant signature for an insurance salesman."

[NoPasaran]

32. By the summer of 1776 Ethan Allen was a prisoner of the British

He'd been captured after an ill-conceived attempt to capture Montreal with a force of a hundred or so men.

Don't drink and invade Canada, kids!

[daleo]

12. From reading the Patrick O'Brian naval books

It certainly seems like boozing was no big deal in the Royal Navy at that general time. I imagine the same was true in the colonies.

[Brainstormy]

14. Getting drunk - but not losing control?

kinda' thought that the losing control part was the very definition of drunk. But, to slide the subject sideways, the relative alcoholism of famous people, especially creative people, is a favorite meme for doctoral work in grad school. Actually, I think there's something up with that. But they didn't have to contend with traffic much.

[oneshooter]

16. Many people, even children, drank alcohol back then.

Quite frankly brewing beer killed the germs and such in the water. A common drink was "small beer" which was a weak beer for children and women. It often took the place of coffee or tea in the morning.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_beer

[LWolf]

17. Everyone drank more beer than water then. nt

[arcane1]

19. If I were two days away from signing off on the Constitution, I would party too!

Jefferson enjoyed the beauty of wine.

Washington lamented that his next marijuana harvest will be full of seeds.

Franklin extolled having sex with older women.

The founding fathers partied. There can be no doubt

[MicaelS]

20. Read Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition

By Daniel O'Krent to find out just how much Americans drank back then.

http://www.amazon.com/Last-Call-Rise-Fall-Prohibition/dp/074327704X

http://www.pbs.org/kenburns/prohibition/roots-of-prohibition/

By 1830, the average American over 15 years old consumed nearly seven gallons of pure alcohol a year – three times as much as we drink today – and alcohol abuse (primarily by men) was wreaking havoc on the lives of many, particularly in an age when women had few legal rights and were utterly dependent on their husbands for sustenance and support.

Note that 7 gallons of pure alcohol would be the equivalent of 175 fifths of 80 proof whiskey annually, or 1 every 2 days. In beer terms that would be nearly 3,000 12 oz beers annually, or 8 beers a day.

[Brigid]

41. This is why . . .

The "drys" were so determined to get their way, and finally succeeded in 1920. The "drys" really did have a point; it was their idea of a solution that was qrongheaded. Believe it or not, many people did quit drinking in the interest of complying with the new law-- but those who did not, more than made up for it. And of course, Prohibition did nothing to solve the problem of alcoholism in the country.

[Egalitarian Thug]

44. As well as creating a criminal class with more wealth and influence than governments.

That's the double failure of all prohibitions.

[Brigid]

45. Yep, made millionaires out of two-bit thugs . . .

Like Capone.

[Egalitarian Thug]

46. And spawned Empires that are still in power all over this nation.

My state and town are still run by mob families that now pretend legitimacy because they are 3rd or 4th generation away from the gangsters wanted back east.

[NV Whino]

22. Tey were no different than anyone else in the civilized world in those days.

Probably even in the "uncivilized" world, too.

[cliffordu]

23. "Drunkenness would explain the ''f's'' they wrote where ''s's'' were supposed to be....."

Well played!

I'll drink to that!

[jmowreader]

24. The f is a German fraktur alphabet single s

There is also a double s, but the founders either didn't know or didn't like it. It looks like an "fz" ligature, but the base of the z curls under. The Germans quit using it somewhere between the death of dinosaurs and the first hominids.

[NoPasaran]

33. I wonder when the use of that character died out

We see it in print through the Colonial and Revolutionary periods, but by the early Nineteenth Century it seems to fade away. In handwritten script perhaps it lasted longer. Somewhere I have a photocopy of a letter home written by a soldier in Sibley's army that invaded New Mexico early in the Civil War. This Texas cavalryman uses "fs" for a double "s".

[Igel]

40. Wiki talks about that.

S.v. "long s".

1803, the Times of London dropped it.

The Congressional Record, in an act of unmitigated independence, dropped it the next year.

In German you still saw it after WWII in digraphs and it was only dropped in print in the last few decades. It was optional in handwriting and typists didn't use it much.

[WCGreen]

27. For a lot of people back then...

it was the safest beverage to drink. The water was starting to get polluted so drinking distilled spirits was a normal thing to do

[napoleon_in_rags]

28. Man, 2 bottles plus shots each? Imagine what would have been tweeted from that Tavern.

And the reactions from the news anchors today.

[Deep13]

30. That is a modern concept that ought not be read backward in time.

Americans in the 18th century drank a lot of booze: wine, cider, whisky, beer, and especially an apple whiskey. Booze was a way to preserve the value of crops without spoiling prior to refrigeration. I suspect that most of them did not live long enough to suffer from the most serious health consequences of heavy drinking. Plus, people physically were different then. There was no easily available food and they had to walk everywhere. And people with weak constitutions died as children. So that may have been a factor.

In the 19th century, advances in science encouraged scientists and doctors to classify people based on real or imaged disorders. One went from being someone who committed sodomy to being a homosexual, for instance. Similarly, one went from being some who was habitually drunk to an alcoholic (although that specific term may not have been used until the 1930s). The point is, that the concept of being an alcoholic rather than someone who drank a lot was unknown in the 18th c. In a society where everyone drank heavily, there was simply nothing abnormal about it.

[BainsBane]

31. They drank like fish back then

but since it was the norm, they were not considered alcoholics.

[hobbit709]

34. It was safer to drink alcohol than the water.

[Le Taz Hot]

36. Sounds like the boys could slam it down.

I LOVE you're last sentence.

[LuvNewcastle]

38. I wonder how people in the future will view some of our habits.

One thing that might be analogous to all the 18th century drinking is the amount of pills we take. A lot of us take anti-depressants and other daily meds that might be seen as dangerous for our bodies and society, not to mention pain pills. We haven't been taking a lot of these medicines long enough to do studies on the long-term effects of them and certain societal trends that might be associated with taking these drugs. I take some of them because they make me feel better overall, but I'm sure they'll eventually come up with drugs that do the same thing and are less harmful to the mind and body.

[Initech]

42. Thomas Jefferson's house had a winery and a brewery.

And most of our battles were planned in the pubs. Does that say a lot?

[felix_numinous]

47. Pursuit of happiness

is underrated these days.