Drinking History: Fifteen Turning Points in the Making of American Beverages

GEORGE GRENVILLE became Great Britain’s first lord of the treasury in April 1763, shortly after the country emerged from the Seven Years’ War. The war had pitted the alliance of Britain, Prussia, and Portugal against France, Russia, Austria, Sweden, and Spain. By the war’s end in February 1763, the British had captured French factories in India, slave stations in Africa, and several sugar islands in the Caribbean. In North America, British and colonial forces defeated the French in Canada. The Treaty of Paris, which ended the war, mandated that most of the captured territories be returned to the original mother countries, but the British kept Canada and several Caribbean islands. Great Britain was the world’s greatest colonial power.

To pay for the war, the British government raised taxes on its well-to-do citizens and doubled the country’s national debt. Maintaining the vast new empire that Britain acquired in North America required an additional 10,000 soldiers to garrison forts and monitor the American Indians, which had an annual cost of approximately £300,000.¹ Grenville did not believe that England’s wealthiest citizens would tolerate more taxes, nor did he believe that Britain could go further into debt to protect its newly acquired empire. He concluded that the prime beneficiaries of these expenditures—particularly the British colonies in North America—should shoulder some of the burden of “defending, protecting, and securing the said colonies and plantations.”²

The North American colonies had indeed reaped tremendous benefits from the war. New England merchants provisioned the British Army in North America. Merchants also profited by trading with French islands, including Martinique and Guadeloupe, after their capture by the British. New England began legally importing molasses from these former French possessions. By 1764, Rhode Island alone had imported 14,000 hogsheads of molasses, of which about 11,500 came from the French West Indies.³ Profits were made and businesses flourished during the Seven Years’ War.⁴ The most valuable boon to the colonies, however, was the elimination of their greatest and only real military threat—the French in Canada and the lands west of the Allegheny Mountains to the Mississippi, which after the war were potentially open for settlement.

Lord Grenville proposed that Parliament of Great Britain levy a tax on North American imports of five products, the most important of which was molasses (from which New Englanders made rum). A British tax on molasses had already been on the books for thirty years, but colonists had simply subverted the law by smuggling in molasses or bribing customs officials. Grenville’s proposed Sugar Act would actually lower the existing import duties from 6 pence to 3 pence on “every gallon of molasses or syrups, being the growth, product, or manufacture, of any colony or plantation in America, not under the dominion of his Majesty.”⁵ The tax would not pay for all of the added expenses of the British military in North America, but it would cover some expenses, which members of Parliament thought was only fair.

The passage of the Sugar Act generated minimal discussion in Parliament. Because it lowered the tax on molasses to be paid by American colonies, most members believed that the colonists would be happy with the law and reduced tax. No one in colonial America, however, had voted on the tax or for the representatives who established the tax. This fact provided the basis for the catchphrase “no taxation without representation” that reverberated throughout the colonies and subsequently into American history textbooks.

Colonial protests caused such a furor that the British Parliament repealed the law the following year. But the Sugar Act was only the first salvo of the tax war that would ignite the Revolutionary War in 1775. As John Adams, the future president of the United States, later wrote, “I know not why we should blush to confess that molasses was an essential ingredient in American independence. Many great events have proceeded from much smaller causes.”⁶ A historian later noted, “Commerce and politics were so inextricably mingled that rum and liberty were but different liquors from the same still.”⁷

Although rum would continue to be made in America for decades, its production and consumption would soon decline and almost disappear.

Sugarcane (Saccharum officinarum) was domesticated somewhere between New Guinea and Southeast Asia thousands of years ago. In prehistoric times, sugarcane was disseminated to India, then from India to China and eventually to the Mediterranean via Arab middlemen. Europeans first encountered sugar while on the Crusades. When European explorers arrived in the Caribbean in the sixteenth century, they brought sugarcane with them, and the plant thrived in the New World. Sugarcane cultivation is labor intensive, and European colonizers imported Africans to work the sugarcane fields as slaves. Estimates vary, but it is thought that at least 7 million Africans were eventually brought to the New World to work in sugarcane fields.

Sugarcane, which has the highest sugar content of any plant, was cultivated mainly for the production of table sugar. Once cane is cut, however, it begins to ferment, and people who lived near and worked in cane fields drank mildly alcoholic cane-based beverages. In the seventeenth century, cane juice was subjected to distillation, a process that increases its alcohol content exponentially. By this processing of sugarcane, rum was born.

The first steps in sugar manufacturing were to crush the cane to release its juice and boil the juice down to a thick syrup. The syrup was then transferred to a new pan and boiled again to remove impurities; this process was repeated several times. With each boiling, the syrup became thicker until finally the sugar crystallized, leaving behind a thick and dark byproduct called molasses. Molasses has a relatively high sugar content, and it can be used as a preservative because it does not ferment. When molasses is diluted with water, however, it ferments and turns into a type of beer, which was avidly enjoyed by slaves and laborers. By using a still and other equipment, molasses can be transformed into a very strong alcoholic beverage, estimated at 67 percent alcohol (134 proof).

European colonies in the New World produced different types of alcoholic beverages from sugar and its byproducts. In Portuguese Brazil, the beverage was cachaça. In the French West Indies, it was rhum—a word most likely originating from Barbados, where the beverage was variously called kill-devil, rumme, and rumbullion. Eventually, these terms were shortened simply to “rum.”

Large sugarcane plantations thus emerged on the British and French West Indian islands. Growers paid their expenses by selling molasses and rum to England or the English colonies in North America. The sale of these byproducts meant that the islands’ prodigious sugar production was pure profit, according to Adam Smith. Growers made huge fortunes in sugar production; many owners left overseers to run their plantations and returned to England, where they purchased estates. These sugar growers and their merchant allies emerged as a powerful political force that influenced the English Parliament throughout the eighteenth century, and often their self-interest diverged from the interests of those in the British colonies in North America.⁸

To sustain the rapidly expanding slave populations in the West Indies, food and other essentials had to be imported, much of it from British North America. Some sugar and rum were shipped from the West Indies to the North American colonies, but the primary export item was molasses, which was used as a sweetener.⁹ (Molasses remained the primary sweetener used in America until the early twentieth century.) Molasses also was used to make mildly alcoholic beverages. The early-eighteenth-century historian Robert Beverley recorded that colonists in Virginia used molasses to make a type of beer for the “poorer sort.” It was often flavored with bran, corn, persimmons, potatoes, pumpkins, and even Jerusalem artichokes.¹⁰

In New England, molasses imported from the West Indies was used to make rum, which quickly became the distilled beverage of choice in the North America. New England was ideally suited for rum production: the region had access to the metal and skilled workers needed to make the stills, an abundance of ships to transport the bulky molasses from the Caribbean, and plenty of wood for fueling the stills and making barrels for the rum.

From its beginnings, rum was condemned by religious leaders. Reverend Increase Mather, president of Harvard College, noted in 1686 that rum was “an unhappy thing that of later years a kind of Strong Drink hath been common amongst us, which the poorer sort of people, both in Town & Country, can make themselves drunk with, at cheap & easy rates. They that are poor and wicked too (Ah most miserable creatures), can for a penny or two make themselves drunk.” He elaborated on the “Strong Drink,” reporting that “Reverent Mr. Wilson once said in a Sermon, there is a sort of drink come into the country, which is called Kill-Devil, but it should be call’d Kill-men for the Devil.” Increase’s son, Cotton Mather, a highly influential Puritan minister, also cautioned about the dangers of rum: “There is a Hazard lest a Flood of RUM, do Overwhelm all good Order among us.”¹¹

Despite concerns, the number of New England distilleries multiplied. By 1737, Boston had 177 taverns and retail shops that sold alcoholic beverages;¹² by 1763, the region had 159 distilleries making rum.¹³ Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut became the centers of rum manufacturing in the eighteenth century. Rum was sold throughout the colonies. By the 1760s, kegs of rum were carried on horseback over the Appalachian Mountains to the western parts of Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Virginia, where the spirits served two functions—to buck up soldiers in widely scattered forts and to supply American Indians with the alcohol that would contribute to the destruction of their societies.

As New England ramped up rum production, its price declined. In Boston, for instance, rum dropped from 3 shillings, 6 pence per gallon in 1722 to 2 shillings in 1738.¹⁴ As rum became more affordable, it also became America’s ardent spirit of choice. By 1748, Massachusetts distilleries alone produced 2.7 million gallons of rum annually.

Most colonial rum stayed in North America; some was exported to England, but the English preferred rum made in Barbados, which was stronger and better tasting. Some rum was sold, given, traded, or exchanged with American Indians, who had had no previous exposure to distilled alcohol. One result was that drunkenness contributed to the social and economic collapse of many Indian tribes from the Appalachians to the Mississippi. Indian spokesmen regularly complained to colonial legislatures about the harm caused by rum. As one Iroquois leader lamented to officials in Albany, New York, “You may find graves upon graves along the Lake, all which misfortunes are occasioned by Selling Rum to Our Brethren.”¹⁵

Colonial legislatures passed laws against giving or selling rum to Indians, but these statutes were habitually ignored. The offer of a few barrels of rum was a cheap way to get Indians to sign a peace treaty or sign away their land. Benjamin Franklin wrote of one case in which he refused to hand over the rum until after the Indians had signed the treaty; this way, the Indians could not claim that they were drunk when they signed it. After the signing, Franklin gave the rum to the Indians, and almost immediately they became inebriated. Franklin wrote:

Barbados was uninhabited when the English colonized the island in 1627. The island was settled by English and Scots-Irish farmers who tried to grow tobacco and other saleable crops on small farms. Plantations needed labor—preferably cheap labor—and there was little available in the Caribbean, so plantation owners purchased and shipped slaves from West Africa. However, the mainland North American colonies had a better climate for growing tobacco, and the colonists in Barbados could not compete. When sugarcane was introduced into the island beginning in 1642, large sugar plantations dominated the island. Many more slaves were needed to plant and harvest sugarcane and convert it into sugar and rum. What would later be called “triangular trade” developed: ships acquired sugar and rum in Barbados and other British West Indian islands and transported them to England, where finished goods were acquired. The ships then took these goods and part of their rum cargo to West Africa, where they were exchanged for slaves. Once the slaves were procured in Africa, the slavers then proceeded to the West Indies, where the human cargo was exchanged for sugar and rum.

Rum played such an important role in the slave trade that it became a medium of exchange in Africa. To save space on the voyage from Barbados, rum was concentrated by running it through a still a few additional times, which markedly raised its alcohol content. When the barrels of concentrated rum were unloaded in Africa, water was added to bring the liquor down to a standard proof; this reconstituted rum was traded for slaves. In 1759, slavers could purchase a male slave for 90 gallons of rum; by 1774, the price had jumped to 230 gallons. A female slave cost 66 gallons of rum in 1768/1769, but that price almost tripled to 180 gallons in 1773/1774.¹⁷

Textbook discussions of “American” triangular trade state that ships from New England picked up molasses in the Caribbean and brought it to New England, where it was converted to rum. The rum was then shipped to Africa and traded for slaves, who were transported to the Caribbean. Some American ships participated in all legs of the triangular trade.¹⁸ The best estimate is that North American ships carried 145,000 slaves to the New World prior to 1808—slightly less than 5 percent of the total number of slaves transported on British ships. Although American rum was traded, it was inferior to rum made in the Caribbean or England. The average amount of alcohol on American ships engaged in this slave trade was approximately 3 to 7 percent of a ship’s total cargo, meaning that many other goods were also exchanged.¹⁹ Although American ships were engaged in the slave trade, American rum was a minor part of this exchange.

Historically, expensive imported brandy and Madeira (a fortified wine from the Portuguese archipelago of the same name) were the alcoholic beverages of choice for the American elite. Hard cider, beer, and ale—which were cheaper and lower in alcohol content—were traditionally drunk by members of the middle and lower classes. Rum was in a class by itself—cheap but strong. During the eighteenth century, rum was very popular in the British North American colonies; some colonists drank it straight, but it was usually diluted with water. Rum mixed with water—a drink called grog—was the mainstay of sailors. It was also favored by the pirates who plundered throughout the Caribbean during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In the harbor towns of North America, unsavory “grog shops” were frequented by sailors of all stripes.

Rum was quaffed in quantity by the less affluent and even slaves, when they could get it. However, people in the higher echelons of society looked down on the consumption of rum; they considered rum drinkers to have “vulgar taste.”²⁰ This is not to say that wealthier and more sophisticated Americans did not also drink rum; but rather than drinking rum straight or watered down in the form of low-class grog, they served it in more “refined” ways, such as in punches that combined rum with citrus juices (orange, lemon, and lime). Dozens of rum drinks with amusing and memorable names were popular. Hard cider mixed with rum was called stonewall. Cherry bounce, a potent combination of cherry juice and rum, was made by soaking cherries in a cask of rum for a year. A calibogus (or just bogus) was a combination of rum and spruce beer; molasses was sometimes added. Switchel (stitchel or swizzle), a refreshing summer beverage, was a combination of rum, vinegar, molasses, and ginger or some other aromatic flavoring. A manhattan (unrelated to today’s cocktail of that name) consisted of rum, beer, and sugar. A bombo was rum, sugar, water, and nutmeg; without the nutmeg, such a drink was called a mimbo or mamm. A flip was a combination of rum, milk, eggs, and sugar. Rum combined with bilberries was called a bilberry dram; mixed with warmed cider, it was called a Sampson. A doctor was fresh milk mixed with rum, whereas a toddy was rum with egg yolks and sugar and usually served hot. A sling consisted of two parts water for each part of rum. A julep, usually made with brandy (or later with bourbon), was also made with rum. Tafia, a low-grade rum and water drink, became popular in New Orleans in the nineteenth century. In addition to being served as a beverage, rum was used for medicinal purposes. In the South, rum combined with bitter bark was called morning bitters. A mintwater, made from rum and mint, was considered to be soothing to upset stomachs.²¹

Rum also was consumed by children. Dr. Johann David Schöpf came to America as a physician for a Hessian regiment fighting alongside the British during the American Revolution. When the war ended in 1783, he toured the new nation, noting that “spirituous drinks being so universally in use, nobody thinks it harm to give them to children as well.” American women often gave rum and other ardent spirits to their children to stop their crying. On one occasion, Schöpf observed that “our host’s five-year-old child seeks to get hold of rum or grog wherever he can, and steals furtively to the flask; we saw him almost every day staggering and drunken; he was besides weak and thin as a skeleton, just as another very young child of a neighbor, addicted to the same vice. The parents observed this but were at no pains to prevent it; and the servants and other people appeared even to be amused at the drunken children and to egg them on.”²²

The British approach to trade, called mercantilism, required that all the sugar produced in their colonies be shipped first to England or other English colonies, and from there sold and transported to other countries. Because the West Indian sugarcane growers had a monopoly on selling sugar to England and English colonies, they could raise the price as much as they pleased, guaranteeing themselves the maximum profit.

Plantation owners and merchants in the British West Indies used most of the molasses from their sugar production to make high-quality rum, which they exported to England or sent to Africa to be traded for slaves. Little molasses remained for export to British colonies, and what was available was marked up considerably to generate even more profits. The French government, however, did not want Caribbean rum imported into metropolitan France, where brandy producers objected to the competition. Because the French did not use molasses as a sweetener, the French West Indies ended up with massive surpluses of the sweet syrup. Rather than toss it in the ocean, the French government permitted its colonies to sell molasses to anyone who would buy it, and the obvious market was the British North American colonies. In the French West Indies, molasses cost 60 to 70 percent less than the molasses from the British West Indies, so New England colonial ships acquired it in bulk from the French Caribbean islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe.²³ By 1700, the New England was buying more molasses from the French colonies than from British colonies.

In exchange for the molasses, New England merchants sent lumber, fish (mainly salt cod), and other provisions. In addition, shipyards built large and fast ships, which were occasionally armed with cannons, and sold them to sugarcane growers in the French West Indian colonies so they could safely and easily transport their sugar, molasses, and rum to New England or Europe.²⁴ Because of this trade, the British West Indian sugar growers lost much of their business; as a result, in 1716 they urged the British Parliament to pass a law that would greatly restrict New England from importing sugar, molasses, and rum from the French and other European colonies in the Caribbean. This would give the British West Indies a monopoly on the sugar, molasses, and rum trade, thus allowing the sugarcane growers to charge whatever they wanted for those products. Parliament did not pass the law that year, but sugar growers kept up the pressure and the Molasses Act was finally passed in 1733. The law placed a duty of 6 pence per pound on sugar, molasses, rum, and spirits imported to the North American colonies from non-British islands.²⁵

The intent of the Molasses Act was to force New Englanders to trade only with the British colonies in the West Indies; the goal of the large West Indian sugar growers was to end rum manufacturing in New England, which competed with their own rum production. Had the Molasses Act been enforced, it likely would have crippled New England’s fishing and lumber businesses, which produced the products sold to the French and Dutch West Indian islands in exchange for their excess molasses. Enforcement also would have greatly handicapped the slave trade, in which some New Englanders were also involved. But passing the Molasses Act and enforcing it were two different things. The only enforcement provision of the law was for customs officials to collect the tax, but there were thousands of coves where goods could be landed that could not be patrolled by the few custom officials; therefore, New Englanders began massive smuggling operations for the heavily taxed products. It was a major misstep to pass the Molasses Act but not enforce it—a blunder that would have serious repercussions thirty years later.²⁶

When Parliament permitted growers in the British West Indies to trade sugar directly with any country in Europe, the growers’ fortunes changed and they stopped pressing for enforcement of the Molasses Act. Even so, the law remained on the books for the next thirty years, and molasses was openly smuggled into North America by respectable merchants—including John Hancock—who would later become leaders of the American Revolution.

The Sugar Act, passed by the British in 1764, was intended to help defray the cost of the French and Indian War. It was less onerous than the Molasses Act passed thirty years earlier because it levied only 3 pence per gallon on imported molasses. However, the law provided for stronger enforcement, including sending British warships to American ports to enforce the collection of the import duty. American colonials, especially those in New England, took great exception to the Sugar Act. As a committee in the Massachusetts colonial House of Representatives reported:

New England’s legislatures, merchants, and distillers believed that an enforced molasses tax would destroy the rum-making business, which was the region’s second most important industry after shipbuilding. What distinguished this law from previous legislation was the inclusion of forty-one provisions for enforcement. Customs officers were sent from England, and the Royal Navy was directed to implement the law and prevent smuggling. Previously, apprehended smugglers were tried in colonial courts before juries of their peers, who routinely exonerated the smugglers. Under the new laws, smugglers were to be tried in British vice admiralty courts, which had no juries.²⁸

Twenty-seven British warships were assigned to enforce the Sugar Act, and the presence of these ships sharply curtailed smuggling. Because this was a major colonial economic activity, particularly in New England, enforcement harmed merchants, depressed the distilling business, irritated colonial assemblies, and significantly reduced New England’s imports and exports of all goods. Colonists held protest meetings, merchants boycotted imported British goods, and colonial assemblies vigorously protested the Sugar Act. Because it was not easy to defend smuggling, the target of the colonial protest was the tax levied by the British Parliament, which at the time was solely elected by men (mainly property owners) in Great Britain.

Colonial protests against the Sugar Act, which was repealed, set the stage for even bigger protests against the next bill approved by Parliament—the Stamp Act, passed in 1765. This new law included “certain Stamp Duties, and other Duties, in the British Colonies and Plantations in America, towards further defraying the expenses of defending, protecting, and securing the same.”²⁹ In response to this law, large numbers of colonials vigorously opposed it. Parliament heeded the colonial protests and repealed the Stamp Act in 1766. Parliament also reduced the tax on molasses to 1 penny per gallon on imports from either British or foreign colonies. This lower tax could easily have been paid without any disruption to New England’s economy, and many merchants did comply. However, old smuggling patterns continued, and roughly one-third of the molasses coming into New England continued to be smuggled in from French, Dutch, and Spanish colonies in the Caribbean.

Although the British Parliament repealed the Stamp Act, it still asserted its right to tax the North American colonies, which caused continual friction with many colonial leaders. In 1767, Parliament passed the Townshend Acts, which imposed duties on certain goods, such as paint, lead, glass, and tea. The taxes were minor, but from both the British and American standpoints they set a precedent. The revenues were intended, in part, to pay the expenses of Royal governors so that they would not be dependent on or beholden to colonial legislatures. Agitation against the Townshend Acts led to the Boston Massacre on March 5, 1770, in which three men were shot and killed by British soldiers. Parliament responded by rescinding all the taxes except for the tax on tea; colonial opposition to this led to the Boston Tea Party in 1773—and, subsequently, to the American Revolution.

Virtually all of America’s founding fathers had some connection with rum. Nineteen-year-old George Washington had traveled to Barbados in 1751 and toyed with the idea of remaining there; Washington enjoyed his rum, and on at least one occasion he used his supply of the beverage to influence his election to the Virginia House of Burgesses. Another time, Washington sent an unruly runaway slave on a ship bound for the Caribbean, with a note requesting that the captain of the ship trade the man at any Caribbean port for a hogshead of the best rum and another of molasses, plus other goods.³⁰ Washington requested allotments of rum for his Continental Army during the Revolutionary War; sufficient quantities could not be secured, however, so the soldiers had to find other forms of alcohol with which to warm, embolden, and divert themselves.

Thomas Jefferson also drank rum, and his plantation was kept well stocked with it. John Hancock, the Boston merchant who signed the Declaration of Independence with the boldest signature, smuggled in molasses from the Caribbean to make rum. Although Benjamin Franklin preferred other alcoholic beverages, he frequently drank rum. Paul Revere enthusiastically enjoyed his rum. Moreover, rum was the prevailing drink in taverns where colonials upset with British policies congregated, and it was in these taverns that the Revolution began.³¹

During the American War of Independence (1775–1783), trade between the North American colonies and the Caribbean was disrupted, and rum became scarce. At the end of the war, Great Britain initially refused to permit direct trade between the British West Indies and the newly independent nation; imports of molasses from the British Caribbean declined, but French, Dutch, and Spanish Caribbean possessions made up for the loss. When the United States was formed in 1788, one of the provisions in the new Constitution was that all states agreed to end the international slave trade in twenty years. American rum exports to Africa escalated as the deadline neared. In 1806, Rhode Island alone sent 831,588 gallons of rum to Africa.³² In 1808, it became illegal to import slaves into the United States. Great Britain had outlawed the slave trade the previous year, and Britain and the United States stationed warships off the West African coast to suppress the slave trade. The outlawing of the international slave trade ended rum’s connection with slavery and its role as a medium of exchange in Africa. When the international slave trade ceased, rum production in the United States tanked.

It was not just the end of the slave trade that slowed rum production: Great Britain and France were at war intermittently from 1789 to 1815, and the War of 1812 between the United States and Britain made it difficult for Americans to acquire rum, sugar, or molasses. American rum makers substituted maple sugar for imported molasses. By the early nineteenth century, according to a British writer, maple sugar was “the basis of a large proportion of the rums at present manufactured by the Americans, to the great injury of the British colonies, as is manifest from the great decrease in the exports of these articles from thence to the States.”³³ But maple sugar was also used as a sweetener, and it was much more expensive than molasses. The price of rum escalated while at the same time the price of whiskey declined. Whiskey became the ardent spirit of choice by most Americans. Rum continued to be imported and manufactured in the United States, but its market share dropped precipitously.

Rush believed that hard liquor and drunkenness gave rise to such vices as lying, swearing, fraud, anarchy, murder, and suicide. He declared that drinking strong alcohol would bring on various diseases, including tremors, epilepsy, dropsy, jaundice, apoplexy, and madness—and that excess consumption of alcohol was invariably fatal. He believed that the repercussions of rum drinking included debt, hunger, black eyes, and death on the gallows, to name a few.³⁴ Rush also expressed concern about the consumption of even small amounts of spirits. He described a man who might start out with a taste for a toddy—a combination of a little rum, water, and sugar—and then progress inevitably to grog, with a greater proportion of rum to water: “After a while nothing would satisfy him but slings made of equal parts of rum and water, with a little sugar. From slings he advanced to raw rum, and from common rum to Jamaica spirits.” The drinker, Rush predicted, “soon afterwards died a martyr to his intemperance.”³⁵

Rum became less and less a part of American life in the nineteenth century, but it continued to be served at many functions. In writing about Vermont in the 1820s, Horace Greeley, founder of the New York Tribune, recalled the following:

As the temperance movement picked up steam, rum remained a symbolic target even as it faded from favor in America. The phrase “demon rum” gained currency during the late 1840s, when it became a rallying cry of the temperance advocates. In this case, however, “rum” was used generically to represent ardent spirits. Rum again surfaced in the election of 1884, which pitted Grover Cleveland, governor of New York, against James G. Blaine, a former congressman and senator from Maine who was the incumbent secretary of state. A week before the election, Blaine decided to wind up his campaign in New York, which appeared likely to support him in the election. One of the functions Blaine attended was a public meeting of the Religious Bureau of the Republican National Committee, where he was welcomed by the eighty-two-year-old Reverend Samuel D. Burchard. Speaking on behalf of a group of Protestant clergy, Burchard proclaimed that the antecedents of the Democratic Party were “rum, Romanism, and rebellion”—a nice alliteration that branded Democrats as opponents of temperance who were pro-Catholic and disloyal to the Union. The Catholic vote had been leaning toward Blaine, but when the candidate did not immediately disavow Burchard’s statement, Democrats reprinted it and circulated it to Catholic precincts in New York and other cities. Although Blaine subsequently distanced himself from Burchard’s statement, the damage had been done. Blaine lost New York and three other states by slightly more than 1,000 votes each, and he lost the election, making Grover Cleveland the first Democrat elected to the presidency since before the Civil War.³⁷

Beginning in the late 1940s and 1950s, Americans began to vacation in the Caribbean, Latin America, and the South Pacific, where they too became acquainted with rum. For those unable to vacation in these tropical paradises, theme restaurants serving rum-based tiki or boat drinks emerged. Polynesian-themed establishments such as Trader Vic’s, Don the Beachcomber, and myriad “tiki bars” nationwide popularized rum drinks such as the daiquiri, pink flamingo, mai tai, planter’s punch, and zombie. With the introduction of jet air travel and modern air conditioning, American tourists flocked to the Caribbean and returned to the United States with an increased appreciation for rum. Latin American cocktails, such as the piña colada, Cuba libre, and mojito, became very popular, and rum manufacturers, such as Bacardi, Captain Morgan, Don Q, and Ron Rico, have vastly expanded their operations and sales in the United States. Aged rums have gained adherents; flavored rums, such as raspberry, vanilla, banana, spice, and coconut, have gained the attention of younger drinkers. This renewed interest encouraged the construction of boutique rum distilleries once again in New England. Rum aficionados now talk of single malts, aged rum, and “upmarket mixologists specify premium brands for their cocktails where the flavours are important,” reports Ian Williams.³⁸

Rum enabled the colonists to destroy many American Indian societies, permitting a rapid expansion westward beyond the Appalachian Mountains. The British tax on molasses contributed to the American Revolution. Rum was a key element in the slave trade, which enslaved millions of men, women, and children; slavery, in turn, was a major cause of the Civil War, in which hundreds of thousands of Americans died. Finally, drunkenness associated with rum was a precipitating factor in the rise of the temperance movement, which led to Prohibition in the twentieth century.