American Discord : The Republic and its People in the Civil War Era

Northern Temperance Reformers, Slavery, and the Civil War

MEGAN L. BEVER

In December 1860, the American Temperance Union (ATU) rejoiced at the election of Abraham Lincoln and Hannibal Hamlin, both of whom were “thorough temperance men.” From the perspective of John Marsh, the editor of the Journal of the American Temperance Union: And the New-York Prohibitionist (JATU), supporters of temperance from all over the United States—regardless of “politics or . . . local interest”—should “look up and be thankful that there is one placed at the helm who will, never, through the wine bottle, lose his reckoning and run our noble steamer into Dundrum Bay.” That Lincoln was a teetotaler was of upmost importance to the temperance community. They believed firmly that there was “not safety to any government,” nor was there “permanent prosperity to any people, but in the temperance principle.”1 For the United States to prosper, the entire nation needed to embrace total abstinence. In fact, many members of the New York–based ATU were convinced that temperance was the primary issue of the 1860 presidential election. When southern subscribers to the Journal balked at its endorsement of the Republican ticket, ATU president Marsh believed that southerners would quickly calm down and continue to “stand bravely for the temperance flag as the only flag of the Free.”2 After all, Lincoln, Hamlin, and the Republican Party offered them the best chance to achieve their main political goal, which, of course, was prohibition.

With the benefit of hindsight, it would seem that northern temperance reformers were wildly out of step with the major political debates that engrossed the American public during the 1860 presidential campaign. Contrary to Marsh’s optimism, southern temperance reformers insisted that the movement’s alignment with the Republican Party was absurd. While most Americans focused on debates over the expansion of slavery into the territories during the 1850s, the temperance community remained obsessed with ridding the United States of the liquor traffic. Even as the sectional crisis erupted into secession and war, northern temperance reformers remained preoccupied with the problem of drunkenness. For these reformers, saving the Union became inextricably linked to prohibition. Because of this, they monitored slavery’s demise closely. On one level, reformers firmly opposed slavery and believed that, like intemperance, it threatened national well-being. But in their view, emancipating the slaves was only the first step toward saving the Union. Reformers insisted that rum was the most harmful evil facing the nation and that the emphasis on ending chattel slavery was a distraction. Drunkenness, in their minds, had caused the sectional crisis to erupt into war, and in order to save the nation, prohibition, not simply emancipation, had to be enacted.

The connection between temperance and antislavery reform that appeared in the JATU reveals how temperance reformers understood the fight for the Union. Historians of reform have identified the war as a pivotal point for the temperance community. Specifically, Holly Berkeley Fletcher argues that the movement became more concerned with the national community than individual drunks during the 1860s. Looking closely at how reformers spoke of “saving the Union” builds on her findings.3 For teetotalers, saving the Union was not a new concept in 1861. Antebellum reformers, steeped in evangelical beliefs, believed that they were on a crusade to save their nation from vice (and from hell) in order to protect the integrity of the political system and to usher in the millennium.4 During the secession crisis and war, temperance advocates became convinced that sobriety was a key to the Union’s survival.

This idea of saving the Union has in recent years recaptured the attention of historians. Gary Gallagher has demonstrated that the idea of the Union could exist independently of other war aims, though other scholars have argued that ending slavery and saving the Union often went hand in hand even before the Emancipation Proclamation.5 Temperance reformers—like most evangelicals—understood the fight for the Union in providential terms. Salvation, for them, required reforming the soul of the nation, not just preserving the Constitution and the political system. The war, for them, was a holy crusade.6 To be certain, there were many reformers who were members of both the temperance and abolitionist movements. But reformers whose primary concern was fighting the liquor traffic did not always believe that slavery was the sin most threatening the nation. In fact, they initially believed that the hullabaloo surrounding slavery and its expansion was a distraction from the real crisis—drunkenness. Early in the war they came to view slavery and intemperance as twin evils. After the Emancipation Proclamation was issued, reformers turned their full attention back to intemperance, labeling it a national sin worse than chattel slavery. They argued that in order to save the Union—both politically and religiously—Americans needed to sober up.

The pages of the JATU reveal how reformers linked slavery, prohibition, and saving the Union. Although published in New York, the JATU reprinted articles and reports from temperance publications across the northern and western states. Membership in the American Temperance Union was on the decline in the 1850s and 1860s (in part because Americans were not consuming as much alcohol). The movement had counted more than a million followers in the antebellum decades, about 12 percent of the free US population. As many temperance societies and publications petered out during the war, the JATU persisted and even reached Union soldiers, thousands of whom read its contents.7 Nevertheless, Americans who supported prohibition and perceived drunkenness to be the greatest calamity facing the United States in the 1860s were, admittedly, a minority. Still, because prohibition would emerge as a powerful political force in the decades following the Civil War, the ATU’s understanding of the conflict is important for understanding the changes taking place within the temperance movement.

For members of the ATU, the fight to save the soul of the nation in many ways began decades before the 1860s, when they embarked on their political crusade to rid their communities of the demon rum. In the antebellum decades, membership in the temperance and abolitionist movements overlapped significantly, but northern temperance advocates sometimes remained quiet about slavery so as not to offend their southern counterparts.8 During the sectional crisis and the war, however, white northern temperance reformers became increasingly vocal about slavery—both because they were concerned about its evil and because they were angry about its distraction from temperance. By the 1850s, when the United States as a whole became engrossed in a fight over the expansion of slavery into the territories, temperance reformers were preoccupied with a different battle: prohibition laws. In 1851, the state of Maine passed prohibition. By 1855, twelve additional northern and midwestern states had followed suit. Prohibition sentiment was even more widespread. In all states north of the Ohio River, prohibition found support among Democrats and Whigs, even if the states did not vote to go dry. Despite prohibition’s seeming popularity, the issue proved divisive in both political parties—neither was willing to fully incorporate prohibition into its platform for fear that it would alienate proliquor voters. As the second party system collapsed over slavery’s expansion, prohibitionists continued to find themselves without a party firmly devoted to their priorities (although they tended to vote American, Free-Soil, and, eventually, Republican). They grew exasperated, believing that any compromise on the liquor question acquiesced to sin.9 Compounding their frustration was the fact that by the late 1850s, a series of court cases struck down portions of the various state laws, and most early supporters lost their zeal for prohibition when they realized that it was simply unenforceable. Hard-line supporters of prohibition, however, doubled down and became angry when the Republican Party refused to incorporate support for prohibition into its state and national platforms in the 1850s. From the perspective of John Marsh and others, prohibition was being sidelined in favor of building a large antislavery coalition. They did not understand that, regardless of the slavery question, prohibition had simply lost public support.10

Understanding how prohibitionists perceived the political climate of the 1850s is essential for explaining how they interpreted slavery as it related to their antiliquor crusade. In July 1860, James Black of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, anticipated that the end of the presidential election would bring about “an active movement against the Liquor Traffic.” Black argued that the passing of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854 (rather than the 1854 decision of the Massachusetts Supreme Court, in Fisher v. McGirr, which had ruled components of the state’s prohibition law unconstitutional) had stymied the antiliquor crusade.11 Black believed that northerners were consumed with fear of “Slavery aggression” on the part of southerners. If Lincoln won, he assumed, the political threat of slavery would subside. After November, surely “the arrested labor will re-commence with vigor in the States that have not adopted the principle of prohibition, and the States which have that principle embodied in their law, will also see to a better enforcement of it than now exists.” As Black saw it, there was “no other evil in our midst . . . so burdensome and afflictive” as the liquor traffic because it threatened all families.12

Reformers took the stance that alcohol posed the greatest threat to Americans, but even before the war began, they understood their crusade to be linked to abolitionism—legislatively and morally. Both abolitionists and prohibitionists targeted state and federal laws they believed sanctioned sin (slavery and drunkenness). What prohibitionists wanted in the late 1850s was for their states to take a moral stance against alcohol by eliminating it. As prohibition was repealed state by state, it had been replaced by a series of license laws that regulated the selling and consumption of liquor. These license laws, from the perspective of temperance reformers, represented the states’ implicit approval of drinking. A reverend Mr. Hawley of Cazenovia, New York, explained that license laws were “wicked” because they took “advantage of man’s natural reverence for law, and thus, through a false standard for his conscience enlists him on the side of crime.” As a matter of comparison, Hawley pointed to slavery, another sin that had been protected by law for centuries. Referring to slavery “as a licensed curse,” Hawley argued that the law’s condoning of slavery caused “the criminal and his victim [to be] seen through a false medium, and the moral judgment is grossly perverted, and Satan triumphs.”13 In other words, members of the American Temperance Union were profoundly uncomfortable with laws that sanctioned—in their minds—sins. More importantly, they believed that the state should have the power to regulate morality.

After the Republican Party won the presidency in 1860, northern temperance reformers prepared to pick up their prohibition crusade, rejoicing that the election had most assuredly put the slavery question to rest. “What Next?,” asked the JATU in December 1860. Certainly, it would be “a revival of the Temperance Cause.”14 The “political excitement” of the election had passed, explained the editors of the Templars’ Magazine, and there was “nothing of general interest to engross the public.” It was time for temperance men to fill that void, now that the distraction of the campaign season had ended.15 It was time for churches to take a stand in favor of prohibition, which was “a moral, a Christian enterprise.” And it was time for the state to “help . . . by getting out of our way” and “by coming directly to our aid.”16

When the secession crisis, not temperance reform, became the issue engrossing the public in the months following the election, temperance reformers’ anger toward the Republican Party and the abolitionist movement erupted. In December 1860, reformers in Boston decried that their state legislature had implored them to “wait till we have knocked off the shackles in Southern climes . . . ;—see that wife in the Sunny South whose husband is toiling under the beautiful Palmetto tree,—we must first give liberty to him.” With the reference to the lovely palmetto trees, reformers seemingly wanted to emphasize that the toll inflicted by southern chattel slavery was not as severe as the toll inflicted by the liquor traffic. They went further, though, explaining that they could not “understand it, that while there is such an indignation through all the North against Southern slavery, there should be almost none at all against the rum power, which is binding at least fifty, if not an hundred thousand, husbands, fathers, and sons in the rum-seller’s chains.”17 As the secession crisis gathered steam, temperance advocates continued to implore the Republican Party to “oppose the slavery of rum” by supporting prohibitory laws. As one reformer of Jefferson County, New York, explained in 1861, “The evils of secession, and even permanent separation, are incomparably less than those inflicted by our present license laws.”18 In contending that the liquor trade threatened national well-being more seriously than slavery or the ripping apart of the states, he was not alone among prohibitionists.

The JATU lashed out at secessionists and liquor dealers with even more fervor than it critiqued Republicans. Reformers regularly articulated the threat of the “rum power” in much the same way that antislavery northerners referred to the Slave Power. It is clear that prohibitionists believed that the rum power (read: liquor sellers) threatened the nation’s democratic institutions. This notion had existed for decades among reformers. If representative self-government were going to succeed, it needed sober voters and sober men holding office. Mixing liquor and the ballot paved the way for corruption and degradation.19 Reverend John Marsh (editor of the JATU), in a January 1860 article entitled “Saving the Union,” acknowledged the brewing sectional hostilities but reminded his fellow teetotalers that they had been working a long time to save the Union from a drunken Congress. Liquor was fueling the political fires in Washington, including the debate over slavery’s expansion, and Marsh predicted that if there were “fighting and bloodshed . . . King Alcohol will have much to do with it.”20 One New Yorker, C. A. Hammond, was more specific about the ways that liquor was fueling sectional tensions. In early 1861, he reminded his fellow reformers that it was “the rum and rowdy power” that had “been making a characteristic demonstration of devotion to the kindred curse of slavery, by sending out their forces to mob down free speech against that national pet ‘Institution.’” Rum, he intimated, had been fueling the violent attacks against abolitionists in the North.21 In February 1861, the JATU labeled “the uprising and rebellion of our brethren at the South . . . A WHISKEY REBELLION; because whiskey flows freely . . . whenever men are congregated for agitation, discussion or extreme action.”22 Drunkenness, in other words, was causing the violence, discord, and threats to the Constitution. From the perspective of Marsh and others, the best method for saving the Union was to save the population from the sin of intemperance. Sobriety would allow the United States to remain at peace.23

Temperance reformers’ concern for the soul of the nation only increased when the secession crisis devolved into civil war. It was bad enough, from their perspective, that rum had interfered with the political process. But in the summer of 1861, reformers believed that conflict would expand the threat of drunkenness to the nation. Specifically, they worried that the threat of vice in camps would bring about the ruin of the Federal army, and they cautioned young men “to beware of the enemy of appetite.” Believing that rum could be just as deadly as the rebels, reformers set to work raising money to distribute thousands of tracts and tried to get soldiers to sign temperance pledges.24 Their concerns did not dissipate at any point during the war. When it came to intoxicated officers, reformers feared that habitual drunkenness could bring the patriotic young men to “dangerous and fatal courses.”25 Reformers were not simply worried that young soldiers were sinning when they imbibed (although that was certainly part of their fear). They believed that “Generals” who relied on “the bottle for stimulus or base gratification” would “not unfrequently become, in the hour of greatest peril, utterly incapable of discharging their high trust.”26 Quite literally, reformers thought, alcohol would cause the Union army to lose the war by making them poor fighters. Furthermore, advocates of prohibition were certain that concern over soldiers’ behavior and performance would cause more Americans to join their legislative crusade against alcohol. How could anyone object to prohibitory laws at a time when the fate of the nation rested with an army of drunks? Temperance reformers believed that more Americans would see the problems with license laws when the fate of the Union was at stake.27

This fear that drunken armies would hasten the Union’s ruin colored temperance reformers’ understanding of the war, and it shaped their framing of the slavery question. Reformers wanted to end slavery in order to end the war because the war made intemperance worse. As such, they themselves were filled with abolitionist fervor during the war’s early years. As they had during antebellum decades, northern temperance reformers argued that slavery violated God’s laws and chastised white southerners for perpetuating slavery by persuading the federal government to protect the institution. That the nation as a whole had benefited economically from the system of slavery for decades did not keep some northern reformers from lambasting southern slaveholders. As a Wisconsin newspaper explained in 1861, the “North, by abandoning the evil, has not only cleansed her own skirts from the guilt, but acquired the right to condemn in others that sin” of slavery.28 Others admitted that the North had been the “accomplice of the South” in the past and that they themselves had “submitted” so as not to jeopardize the temperance cause. After southerners seceded, however, New York’s temperance community no longer felt compelled to offer any defense of the institution of slavery. As these reformers understood it, white southerners had seceded to protect slavery. Secession threatened the nation by causing a war. And reformers believed that “slavery must perish” in order for the nation to be saved.29

Reformers had never denied that slavery was a moral evil, but temperance activists argued that drunkenness and the liquor traffic created an equal—if not more severe—threat to national well-being. Referring to the “two giant sins” and “the twin scourges” of the nation, reformers likened drunkenness to the “kindred curse of slavery” and referred to the United States as a “rum and slave benighted country.”30 On one level, temperance rhetoric simply named slavery and drunkenness as the causes of the war—it was drunkards who harassed abolitionists, and it was drunkards who had seceded.31 But on another level, temperance reformers offered a larger critique of American society—particularly American economic development—when they linked the sins of slavery and drunkenness. The liquor traffic, reformers insisted, was as immoral as the slave trade. In at least one instance, the JATU went so far as to link the origins of the trades, pointing out that the “slave dealers . . . c[a]me on to their coasts with rum to buy men for horrid bondage.”32 Comparing the rum trade with the African slave trade, reformers argued that while the slave trade brought “subjection,” the rum trade brought “disorder and crime.”33 Both the slave and rum trade were exploitative and antithetical to the goals of a free-labor society. Both traffics also thwarted reformers’ millennialist goals. Temperance activists, then, made it clear that they were fighting to rid the country of both vices in order to bring about a more perfect nation.34

By linking the evils of chattel slavery and drunkenness, temperance reformers, who interpreted the war in millennial terms, understood the conflict as a crusade to free the nation from all forms of sin. Activists even went beyond simply labeling slavery and intemperance the “twin scourges” of the land. They declared that drunkenness itself was a form of slavery, and they insisted—as the Bostonians had during the secession crisis—that this slavery was much worse than the slavery that existed in the southern states. James Brewster of New Haven, Connecticut, explained that while “there are four millions of human beings held in bondage” in the South, “a much larger number of persons, are under bondage to a great evil . . . that of intemperance.” From his point of view, the comparison of evils was not simply an issue of numbers, either. Brewster argued that “because slavery does not involve a moral wrong on the part of the slaves; because it is involuntary” it was not as immoral—at least from the enslaved person’s perspective—as intemperance. Drunkenness was “voluntary throughout, involving moral guilt and depravity, both with the vendor and the receiver.”35 In the 1860s, Brewster’s fellow reformers would have undoubtedly engaged him in a lively debate over whether “the receiver” acted as voluntarily as “the vendor,” as most reformers put the blame for intemperance on the trafficker rather than the drunk.

Nevertheless, Brewster’s use of the imagery of the bondage of slavery to describe habitual drunkenness would have been familiar; referring to an individual as being a “slave to the habit” still exists as a way to describe addiction or vice, including intoxication. Antebellum temperance reformers were particularly fond of this image, using it often to describe alcohol’s victims (as they perceived them).36 The idea that intoxication robbed an individual—in most cases, a man—of control over his actions had taken root in the decades preceding the Civil War. In an era of economic growth, men needed to be sober in order to succeed as industrious, hardworking, independent individuals. Therefore alcohol could ruin a man and destroy his family.37 Throughout the war, reformers continued with this reasoning, arguing that the “slaves of a blind and foolish custom” lost their “individuality,” and while drunkards may have initially “lacked the moral element to . . . shield them from temptation,” the blame for their plight rested with alcohol itself and, more importantly, with “Satan’s vilest slaves—the grogsellers,” who “hunted and enticed” young men.38 Because sheer greed led liquor dealers to do Satan’s bidding, temperance reformers believed that only prohibitory laws would put an end to the traffic. Moral suasion was not always successful. Excise laws worsened the problem. Legal prohibition was necessary to rescue “slaves” from the chains of rum and rum sellers.

Early in the war, members of the American Temperance Union were content to fight against the twin evils of liquor and slavery. But because they were intently focused on their own goal—prohibition—reformers reacted to Lincoln’s preliminary Emancipation Proclamation in the fall of 1862 with great interest. Primarily, they expressed joy that slavery was finally out of their way. Responding to the proclamation in October, the editors of the JATU exclaimed: “And now if slavery is dead and the Republic is to rise to life of freedom and justice, let us who are engaged in a warfare against that other enemy of God and man, take courage and press on in the conflict. . . . Now is the time to drive out and crush that other horrid traffic, which is a traffic in the souls and bodies of men.”39 Selling liquor once again took center stage as the nation’s greatest sin.

While emancipation had been a moral victory and a necessary war measure, temperance reformers remained convinced that alcohol itself prolonged the war and threatened the ability of the Union to prevail. Citing slavery as the root cause of the war, reformer C. S. Nichols exclaimed in 1862 that the “slave rebellion has slain its thousands, but this heaven-denounced and God defying rum rebellion its hundreds of thousands!”40 Other reformers shared his concerns. “How can God be for us amid all the drunkenness and profanity prevalent among us?” asked the journal’s editor.41 The war—just like the sectional crisis of the 1850s—caused “the danger and guilt of intemperance [to be] lost sight of.” While Americans were “struggling to save the country in its peril, we have lost sight of the greater obstacle to our success, and the greatest evil under which the land mourns.”42 Victory and the preservation of the Union required God’s blessing, and emancipating the slaves alone was not enough. The liquor trade had to be abolished because saving the Union required saving the souls of the Union’s citizens, specifically by sobering them up.

On this crusade, temperance reformers believed that Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation helped their cause. If slavery and drunkenness were related national sins, getting rid of one (slavery) surely provided clues for eradicating the other (drunkenness). As historian Gaines Foster has argued persuasively, the abolition of slavery was a watershed moment for American moral reformers. From their perspective, it appeared that the federal government was finally willing to throw its weight behind moral causes. This left reformers, in general, and prohibitionists, specifically, ready once again to fight their righteous crusades in the legislatures and the courts.43 This line of reasoning emerged in the pages of the JATU quickly after the Emancipation Proclamation took effect. In March 1863, reformers were certain that the “power that will destroy slavery will destroy rum. The power that will emancipate millions from cruel taskmasters, will emancipate millions from more cruel rumsellers.” Americans had risen up to defend their country and free the enslaved. This momentum, reformers believed, would carry over to prohibition.44 By emerging as “the nation’s greatest foe,” by “endangering and bringing certain ruin upon the nation’s army of defense,” the liquor traffic became more alarming. Marsh hoped that within the context of war, “all complaints of prohibitory law as unconstitutional and an interference with the liquor dealers’ rights” would be “rendered contemptible.”45 Surely Americans who had previously thought that drinking was a private choice would be convinced that drunken soldiers endangered the welfare of the entire nation.

In other words, with slavery being eradicated, temperance reformers could devote the remainder of the war to their crusade against intoxication. And they conflated the spiritual salvation of the Union with the literal preservation of the nation. Temperance reformers, with the help of the Union army, were “fight[ing] for the American Union” (July 1863) and for the “maintenance of the Union” (September 1865).46 And, to temperance reformers, to preserve the Union meant also to preserve liberty and the Declaration of Independence.47 Anticipating the war’s end in the summer of 1864, John Marsh explained why drunkenness was antithetical to liberty. “A nation of drunkards must be a nation of slaves,” he warned, and thus temperance reformers (and Americans) needed to work toward a national future free of intoxicating drinks.48 Sobriety would lead to liberty for all American citizens.

In May 1865, temperance reformers celebrated the end of the war, marking it as “one of the great eras in the world’s history, from which is to be dated some of the most important movements toward millennium.” Northerners had shown that they were willing to sacrifice everything in order “to save the nation, to break the yoke of rebellion, and to redeem four millions of human beings from the yoke of servitude.” Yet the struggle was not over because intemperance continued to drag “fifty thousands” of Americans to poverty, crime, and insanity.49 Union victory had preserved the nation, but for temperance reformers, the task of saving the country was still incomplete. As Connecticut governor William Alfred Buckingham put it in September 1865, “The rebellion has shown us the power of law—let it be exercised on the side of Temperance.”50 By the late 1860s, temperance reformers, still riding the momentum and hope embedded in emancipation, had formed a national Prohibition Party because they believed that the federal government had emerged from the war with enough power to rid their nation of rum.51 Yet, in 1865, reformers were only cautiously optimistic. Demon rum retained the power to “curse this nation more than slavery ever cursed it” because “intemperance, which is the slavery of the soul, is infinitely worse than chattel slavery.”52 If liquor were not eradicated quickly, the Union might face future calamities even greater than the ones it had just survived.

Notes

1. Journal of the American Temperance Union: And the New-York Prohibitionist (hereafter JATU) 24 (December 1860): 184.

2. “Our Southern Brethren,” JATU 25 (February 1861): 25.

3. Holly Berkley Fletcher, Gender and the American Temperance Movement of the Nineteenth Century (New York: Routledge, 2008), 58–78.

4. Clifford S. Griffin, Their Brothers’ Keepers: Moral Stewardship in the United States, 1800–1865 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1960), 81–98.

5. Gary W. Gallagher, The Union War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011); for scholarship on the evolving conceptions of “Union,” as well as its relationship to slavery and emancipation both during and after the war, see James Oakes, Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861–1865 (New York: W. W. Norton, 2013); Melinda Lawson, Patriot Fires: Forging a New American Nationalism in the Civil War North (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002); Chandra Manning, What This Cruel War Was Over: Soldiers, Slavery, and the Civil War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007); David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2001); Barbara A. Gannon, The Won Cause: Black and White Comradeship in the Grand Army of the Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011); John R. Neff, Honoring the Civil War Dead: Commemoration and the Problem of Reconciliation (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2005).

6. In this way, temperance reformers fit into the war as framed by religious historians such as George C. Rable and David Goldfield. See George C. Rable, God’s Almost Chosen Peoples: A Religious History of the American Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010); and David Goldfield, America Aflame: How the Civil War Created a Nation (New York: Bloomsbury, 2011).

7. It is difficult to find hard data to determine how many subscribers the JATU had in the 1860s. Millions of temperance pamphlets, tracts, and periodicals circulated throughout the Northeast in the antebellum decades, and the American Temperance Society and American Temperance Union had more than a million members in their heydays. See W. J. Rorabaugh, The Alcoholic Republic: An American Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 197–202; Jack S. Blocker, American Temperance Movements: Cycles of Reform (Boston: Twayne, 1989), 14. Blocker’s numbers are for membership in the ATU and do not include Americans who joined the Washingtonian or Sons of Temperance movements. Clifford Griffin estimates that thousands of Union troops read the JATU while serving in the ranks; see Their Brothers’ Keepers, 247. Frank Luther Mott lists the JATU as the only temperance journal to publish throughout the Civil War, but he does not provide subscriber information for the journal or any other temperance publication; see Mott, A History of American Magazines, 1741–1930 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1938), 2:210.

8. Fletcher, Gender and the American Temperance Movement; Ronald G. Walters, American Reformers, 1815–1860 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978); Griffin, Their Brothers’ Keepers.

9. Ian R. Tyrrell, Sobering Up: From Temperance to Prohibition in Antebellum America, 1800–1860 (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1979), 260–269. Prohibition had less support in southern states, but it is worth noting that many southerners joined the antiliquor crusade in some form or fashion. Ian R. Tyrrell, “Drink and Temperance in the Antebellum South: An Overview and Interpretation,” Journal of Southern History 48 (November 1982): 485–510; Ellen Eslinger, “Antebellum Liquor Reform in Lexington, Virginia: The Story of a Small Southern Town,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 99 (April 1991): 163–186; Douglas W. Carlson, “‘Drinks He to His Own Undoing’: Temperance Ideology in the Deep South,” Journal of the Early Republic 18 (Winter 1998): 659–691; Bruce E. Stewart, “‘This County Improve in Cultivation, Wickedness, Mills, and Still’: Distilling and Drinking in Antebellum Western North Carolina,” North Carolina Historical Review 83 (October 2006): 447–478; Bruce E. Stewart, “Select Men of Sober and Industrious Habits,” Journal of Southern History 73 (May 2007): 289–322; Bruce E. Stewart, “‘The Forces of Bacchus Are Fast Yielding’: The Rise and Fall of Anti-Alcohol Reform in Antebellum Rowan County, North Carolina,” North Carolina Historical Review 87 (July 2010): 310–338.

10. Tyrrell, Sobering Up, 290–309.

11. Ibid., 290.

12. “Mr. Delavan has forwarded to us the following letter from James Black, Esq., of Pennsylvania, for publication, which we give with pleasure, Lancaster, Pa, 25, July, 1860,” JATU 24 (September 1860): 130.

13. “Letter from Rev. Mr. Hawley—State Agent, Cazenovia, December 2, 1859,” JATU 24 (January 1860): 12.

14. “What Next?,” JATU 24 (December 1860): 184.

15. Templars’ Magazine (Cincinnati) quoted in JATU 24 (December 1860): 188.

16. “What Next?,” JATU 24 (December 1860): 184.

17. “Boston, December 11, 1860,” JATU 25 (February 1861): 24.

18. “Remarks of Hon. Mr. Bell, of Jefferson County, New York, In the Senate, February 21st, on the concurrent resolutions proposing to prohibit the Liquor Traffic by constitutional enactment,” JATU 25 (April 1861): 51.

19. Bruce Dorsey, Reforming Men and Women: Gender in the Antebellum City (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), 14–28; Jed Dannenbaum, Drink and Disorder: Temperance Reform in Cincinnati from the Washingtonian Revival to the WCTU (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984), 106–155; for fear of “rum power,” see 131.

20. “Saving the Union,” JATU 24 (January 1860): 11.

21. C. A. Hammond, “The ‘Higher Law’ in New York, Petebboro, N.Y. Feb. 4, 1861,” Higher Law 1 (February 28, 1861): 67. (This was a weekly newspaper not solely devoted to temperance.) According to Benjamin Sevitch, an antiabolitionist riot in Utica, New York, in 1835 may have been fueled by alcohol. See “The Well-Planned Riot of October 21, 1835: Utica’s Answer to Abolitionism,” New York History 50 (July 1969): 257.

22. JATU 25 (February 1861): 25.

23. It was not simply that liquor incidentally fueled the violence of the already corrupt proslavery faction. Reformers believed that an increasingly organized rum power “controlled the elections” in northern states and that “each political party feared to curb its power.” Liquor dealers’ associations had been forming since the 1850s to advocate for regulations that secured the interests of distillers and merchants. Advocates of prohibition believed that it was this special interest—the rum power—that undercut the will of the people (prohibition) in favor of license laws. See “A Scrap of History,” JATU 24 (August 1860): 113. See also Tyrrell, Sobering Up, 296–297.

24. “War Items: Michigan Soldiers,” JATU 25 (June 1861): 90; see also JATU 25 (June 1861): 88; “Tracts for the Army,” JATU 25 (June 1861): 96 (packages of one thousand tracts could be sent for free to a quartermaster of a regiment, or they could be sent by express for two dollars); “Growth of Intemperance,” JATU 28 (March 1864): 36.

25. “The Drunken Officer,” JATU 27 (December 1863): 186.

26. “A Nation’s Call,” JATU 27 (May 1863): 65–66.

27. Rev. John Marsh, D.D., “Twenty-Eighth Anniversary,” JATU 28 (June 1864): 83; for secondary material on the problem of drunkenness in the Union army see Griffin, Their Brothers’ Keepers; Bell Irvin Wiley, The Life of Billy Yank: The Common Soldier of the Union (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1951); Rable, God’s Almost Chosen Peoples; Steven J. Ramold, Baring the Iron Hand: Discipline in the Union Army (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2010).

28. Henrietta Costolo, “Communication: Pleasant Hill, PA, December 17, 1860,” JATU 25 (January 1861): 7; “Slavery at the North & South,” Higher Law 1 (January 9, 1861): 10.

29. From the Gasparin, “Costliness of Human Progress,” JATU 26 (December 1862): 177; J. W. Love, “A Subscriber Offended,” JATU 26 (July 1862): 106.

30. P. Osterhaut, “Correspondence: Schoharie, Oct. 9, 1861,” JATU 25 (November 1861): 163–164; JATU 26 (March 1862): 40; Love, “A Subscriber Offended,” 120; C. A. Hammond, “The ‘Higher Law’ in New York, Petebboro, N.Y. Feb. 4, 1861,” Higher Law 1 (February 28, 1861): 67.

31. Hammond, “The ‘Higher Law,’” 67; “Gubernatorial Election,” JATU 26 (November 1862): 169.

32. Love, “A Subscriber Offended,” 105–106. Rorabaugh has pointed out this connection between the slave trade and the rum trade in antebellum temperance literature; see Rorabaugh, Alcoholic Republic, 214–215; Robert H. Abzug has noted this as well in Cosmos Crumbling: American Reform and the Religious Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 81–104.

33. “Twenty-Fourth Anniversary: Report,” JATU 25 (June 1861): 82.

34. “Gubernatorial Election,” 169.

35. Letter from James Brewster of New Haven, October 14, 1862, JATU 26 (November 1862): 165.

36. The specific phrase “slave to the habit” appears multiple times throughout the war in the JATU. See “Stimulant and Irritant,” JATU 24 (March 1860): 41; “Quiet Workers for Temperance,” JATU 28 (May 1864): 71; George W. Bungay, “Mustered Out—Now Look Out,” JATU 29 (June 1865): 93.

37. Fletcher, Gender and the American Temperance Movement; Walters, American Reformers; Elaine Frantz Parsons, Manhood Lost: Fallen Drunkards and Redeeming Women in the Nineteenth-Century United States (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003).

38. “Dash Away the Ruby Cup,” JATU 28 (April 1864): 54; Rev. S. Barrows, “The Relations of the Ministry to the Temperance Reforms,” JATU 27 (November 1863): 163. Drunkards are also compared to the insane and to women and children—all dependent and helpless—in the journal; see Rev. John Marsh, D.D. (editor), “Important Inquiry Answered: A sermon for Connecticut, preached by request in the Centre Church, New Haven, the Sabbath evening previous to the Annual Meeting of the State Temperance Society, Nov. 16,” JATU 24 (January 1860): 1; Albert Conkling, “Correspondence: Conkingville, Saratoga, Co., N.Y., October 23, 1861,” JATU 25 (November 1861): 165.

39. “Wonderful Workings of Providence: President’s Proclamation: Liberty to the Enslaved,” JATU 26 (October 1862): 152.

40. C. S. Nichols, “A Solemn Fact,” JATU 26 (November 1862): 164.

41. JATU 26 (November 1862): 168.

42. “Address of Hon. S. C. Pomeroy, U.S. Senator from Kansas,” JATU 27 (June 1863): 85.

43. Gaines M. Foster, Moral Reconstruction: Christian Lobbyists and the Federal Legislation of Morality, 1865–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002). While Foster focuses on a number of postwar reform movements, Holly Berkeley Fletcher focuses on the temperance movement itself. Like Foster, Fletcher also views the war as a pivotal moment for prohibition because it refocused the goals of reformers and made them more nationalistic. See Fletcher, Gender and the American Temperance Movement, 58–78.

44. JATU 27 (March 1863): 40.

45. Marsh, “Twenty-Eighth Anniversary,” 83.

46. JATU 27 (March 1863): 40; “Fifth National Temperance Convention: Second Day Proceedings,” JATU 29 (August 1865): 122; American Temperance Union, “The Sick Soldier, Thoughts of Home: A New Tract for the Army,” JATU 27 (July 1863): 101; “A SHORT AND POINTED TEMPERANCE SPEECH,” (from Zion’s Herald), JATU 29 (September 1865): 144.

47. “A SHORT AND POINTED TEMPERANCE SPEECH,” 144.

48. Marsh, “Twenty-Eighth Anniversary,” 84.

49. “Address to the People of the United States,” JATU 29 (May 1865): 72.

50. “A SHORT AND POINTED TEMPERANCE SPEECH,” 144.

51. Foster, Moral Reconstruction, 27–46. It is interesting to note, however, that temperance reformers still did not find a comfortable home in either the Republican or Democratic Party in the postwar decades. See Paul Kleppner, The Third Electoral System, 1853–1892 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979), 240–257.

52. “A Word to Ministers” (from Zion’s Herald), JATU 29 (September 1865): 135.