“The Bottle,” part of a series of etchings by British caricaturist George Cruikshank published in the book The Bottle in 1847.
By the late 1830s, South Berwick native John W. Lewis had really hit his stride as a crusading Christian evangelist, abolitionist and temperance activist. After leading a literary society for African American youth in New York City and founding a Free Will Baptist Church and African American boarding school in Providence, Rhode Island, he was on to his next project: launching the first Black temperance society in New England.
In Lewis’ view, to raise free Black people from their degraded condition, if they wanted to win equal rights, education and abolition; they needed to live a healthy lifestyle and abstain from alcohol and tobacco. On Aug. 27, 1836, the abolitionist Liberator newspaper published a notice from Lewis and two other Providence men, Windsor Gardner and James W. Johns, announcing the formation of the New England Temperance Society of Colored Americans.
“We have no doubt that you have seen, with heartfelt sorrow, the wretchedness and deep degradation under which very many of our colored brethren are now laboring, from their unhappy and ruinous love of intoxicating drinks,” they wrote. “You, as well as we, would do your utmost to raise them from the mire of beastly indulgence. You will join with us in saying that a thorough reformation from their besotting vices must precede the success of any efforts to give a permanent elevation to their character. Every colored man laments the low and debased condition of his kind. Let us then rise in a body, and solemnly determine henceforth to put away the unclean thing from among us! We long to stand among men of our country, as fellow citizens, worthy of our country and human race.”
The three men called on their brethren to attend the society’s first convention that October in Boston. In a letter to the Liberator the following month, Lewis described how the “hydra-monster intemperance” sought to “blight the happiness and prosperity” of African Americans. He argued that “Temperance, Religion, Virtue, Patriotism and true Philanthropy, are the only principles” to lift the Black race in America. “Our enemies” he continued, would “rejoice to see us strike our flag and put back into the harbor the indolence and despondency.”
“To elevate our people, we must put down the grog shop, the gaming table, the brothel and the theatre, which are all linked together,” Lewis wrote. “This is what the N.E. Temperance and Moral Improvement Society is aiming to do — to put down every thing that degrades the character and reputation of the colored people.”
In those days, alcoholism in America had become an epidemic, and nowhere were people drunker than in Maine. In the Colonial Era, Mainers loved their hard ciders and farmers often kept an orchard of prized cider apples for fermenting. Colonial Mainers enjoyed a sprightly “frolic” with a little alcohol for social lubricant at weddings, funerals, births and elections. Life on the farm could be very isolating and lonely, but Maine farmers often broke the monotony by holding communal work parties where booze flowed freely. Neighbors were invited to participate in barn raising, quilting bees, wood chopping, corn husking and other large projects. Afterward there was usually a big supper and a barn dance.
Although alcohol was integrated into daily life in Colonial Maine, drunkenness was frowned upon. When rum replaced less potent drinks, many Mainers failed to moderate their intake and developed serious drinking problems. In Portland, the grog break was an established part of the day. In his autobiography, Neal Dow, the architect of Maine’s 1851 prohibition law, described how institutionalized this ritual had become.
“How the bells were rung at 11 a.m. as a call for grog, the bulk of the country ledgers taken up with rum entries,” he wrote. “The farms mortgaged for drink debts. The houses unpainted and the windows stuffed with old hats. There were 13 distilleries which poured out a flood of a million gallons of rum over a poor pioneer state.”
Dow recalled shopkeepers opening tubs of booze on the sidewalks for any passerby to plunge in a dipper and get right tippled. As husbands and fathers spent all their money on rum, women and children suffered. Families were forced into alms houses and poor farms. Alcohol-fueled domestic violence and poverty wrecked families. The temperance movement was seen as a progressive solution to the havoc caused by rampant alcoholism. However, the movement was more diverse in its membership and aims than most historians have recognized.
As Mark Lawrence Schrad, author of Smashing the Liquor Machine: A Global History of Prohibition, writes, the stereotypical image of a temperance activist is a “well-to-do, conservative, white, Victorian-era prude — pinky raised, sipping tea” and “browbeating Americans with Bibles.” It’s also common, he notes, to cast the whole movement as a “whitelash” of rural, white evangelicals seeking to “discipline” urban Catholic immigrants and African Americans.
It was true that the anti-Catholic Know-Nothing Party of the 1850s backed the temperance movement, and the Maine Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s strongly supported Prohibition. Maine presidential candidate and former U.S. House Speaker James G. Blaine was pilloried after one of his supporters in New York described Democrats as the party of “Rum, Romanism and Rebellion” — an obvious smear against the city’s Irish population — during the election of 1884.
However, Schrad points out that nearly every Black leader before World War I also supported temperance and prohibition, from Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth to Ida B. Wells, Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Dubois. Black leaders saw liquor trafficking as a predatory capitalist practice that allowed wealthy white men to profit from addiction and misery that disproportionately harmed the least powerful in society: women, African Americans and indigenous people.
“Prohibitionism wasn’t some reactionary cultural impulse to impose Christian morality or take away the ‘freedom to drink,’” Schrad wrote. “It was a progressive economic and political movement to emancipate entire communities from the worst excesses of predatory capitalism … just the same as abolitionism. The two movements were born of the same ethos, pursued the same liberation, and were relentlessly advanced by many of the same activists.”
Black leaders from across the Northeast arrived at the African Meeting House on Belknap Street in Boston for the first convention of the New England Temperance Society of Colored Americans on Oct. 26, 1838. Among the delegates were Lewis, activist Rev. Amos Beman of Connecticut (an occasional preacher at the Abyssinian Church in Portland) and Rev. George H. Black, an abolitionist Baptist preacher who had recently left Portland to become pastor of the First Independent Baptist Church at the historic African Meeting House in Boston. The men pledged to advocate for total abstention from intoxicating liquors that caused such “physical debasement, misery … degradation, suffering … upon unoffending wives and innocent children by cruel husbands and unnatural fathers.”
John F. Murray of Portland argued in favor of a resolution to let women join the Society, but it was withdrawn. Maine delegates found themselves on opposite sides of a resolution to also encourage the abstention of tobacco, with Rev. Beman and Murray opposing it. Lewis and Rev. Black spoke in favor of it, but the resolution was defeated because including tobacco was deemed “unconstitutional.”
For a time, Lewis was an agent for the Temperance Society, but shortly after he ended up moving to New Hampshire, where he became an agent for the state Anti-Slavery Society. He quickly gained renown as a powerful speaker on the anti-slavery lecture circuit in Northern New England. After attending an anti-slavery meeting in Concord, N.H., on Aug. 1, 1839, Nathaniel Peabody Rogers, editor of the abolitionist newspaper Herald of Freedom, described Lewis’ speech blasting the American Colonization Society as “at once logical and pointedly sarcastic … and the audience hung upon his words in breathless silence.”
“We never before heard Colonization receive such a lashing,” wrote Rogers. “It seemed to stand in our midst like a withered and blasted tree; which the audience started up, as though its death warrant were flaming out from the wall.” He continued, “Nobody thinks of colored inferiority, when they hear brother Lewis. But he disposes of pro-slavery ‘heaps upon heaps’ — and they flock to hear him from a dozen miles round, and they go home with this one grand truth, (which will knock out the one key-stone of slavery’s arch,) that the colored man is a man — a thing they did not dream of, till they heard him talk.”
When Lewis joined the Anti-Slavery Society, the movement was beginning to split into factions. By the late 1830s, moral suasion was not having the desired impact — convincing slaveholders to free their enslaved workers —and abolitionists continued to face violent protests when they spoke in public. Activists began reevaluating their tactics.
Nathaniel Rogers and William Lloyd Garrison, one of the movement’s founders, were becoming increasingly radical in their rhetoric and critical of religious authorities on the slavery question. Garrison called on abolitionists to leave churches that did not explicitly endorse anti-slavery — a strategy known as “come outism.” He also sought to fuse other reform movements, such as temperance, pacifism and women’s rights, with the abolitionist movement. Garrison opposed getting into electoral politics or forming a political party. His radical vision turned off some powerful, more conservative abolitionists, like New York businessmen Arthur and Lewis Tappan, who provided a lot of funding to the movement.
Lewis and other Black leaders tried to stay out of the fray, hoping both sides would resolve their differences. In a letter to Garrison in November 1839, Lewis defended the Liberator editor’s sharp rhetoric and controversial positions. “I can say without flattery to you, or any one else, I am the same in feeling toward you and the Liberator that I was when I first became acquainted with you, and as agent of the New Hampshire Anti-Slavery Society,” he wrote. “I shall maintain the old doctrines, and advocate them before all.”
As the 1830s came to a close, it became clear that this fierce debate was coming to a head, and it would soon be practically impossible to remain neutral.
Andy O’Brien is the communications director for the Maine AFL-CIO. You can reach him at andy@maineworkingclasshistory.com.
