The American Nation A History of the United States, Combined Volume (14th Edition)

The Abolitionist Crusade 281

union set out to persuade people to “sign the pledge”
not to drink liquor. Primitive sociological studies of
the effects of drunkenness (reformers were able to
show a high statistical correlation between alcohol
consumption and crime) added to the effectiveness of
the campaign.
In 1840 an organization of reformed alcoholics,
the Washingtonians, set out to reclaim alcoholics. One
of the most effective Washingtonians was John B.
Gough, rescued by the organization after seven years
in the gutter. “Crawl from the slimy ooze, ye drowned
drunkards,” Gough would shout, “and with suffoca-
tion’s blue and livid lips speak out against the drink!”
Revivalist ministers like Charles Grandison
Finney argued that alcohol was one of the great barri-
ers to conversion, which helps explain why Utica, a
town of fewer than 13,000 residents in 1840, sup-
ported four separate temperance societies in that year.
Employers all over the country also signed on, declar-
ing their businesses henceforward to be “cold-water”
enterprises. Soon the temperance movement claimed
a million members.
The temperance people aroused bitter opposi-
tion, particularly after they moved beyond calls for
restraint to demands for prohibition of all alcohol.
German and Irish immigrants, for the most part
Catholics, and also members of Protestant sects that
used wine in their religious services, objected to being
told by reformers that their drinking would have to
stop. But by the early 1840s the reformers had
secured legislation in many states that imposed strict
licensing systems and heavy liquor taxes. Local option
laws permitted towns and counties to ban the sale of
alcohol altogether.
In 1851 Maine passed the first effective law pro-
hibiting the manufacture and sale of alcoholic bever-
ages. The leader of the campaign was Mayor Neal
Dow of Portland, a businessman who became a pro-
hibitionist after seeing the damage done by drunken-
ness among workers in his tannery. By 1855 a dozen
other states had passed laws based on the Maine
statute, and the nation’s per capita consumption of
alcohol had plummeted to two gallons a year.

Beecher,Six Sermons on Intemperanceat
myhistorylab.com

Drinking & the Temperance Movement in
Nineteenth-Century Americaatmyhistorylab.com

The Abolitionist Crusade

No reform movement of this era was more signifi-
cant, more ambiguous, or more provocative of later
historical investigation than abolitionism—the drive
to abolish slavery. That slavery should have been a
cause of indignation to reform-minded Americans

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was inevitable. Humanitarians were outraged by the

master’s whip and by the practice of disrupting fami-

lies. Democrats protested the denial of political and

civil rights to slaves. Perfectionists of all stripes

deplored the fact that slaves had no chance to

improve themselves. However, well into the 1820s,

the abolitionist cause attracted few followers because

there seemed to be no way of getting rid of slavery

short of revolution. While a few theorists argued that

the Fifth Amendment, which provides that no one

may be “deprived of life, liberty, or property, without

due process of law,” could be interpreted to mean

that the Constitution outlawed slavery, the great

majority believed that the institution was not subject

to federal control.

Particularly in the wake of the Missouri

Compromise, antislavery Northerners neatly compart-

mentalized their thinking. Slavery was wrong; they

would not tolerate it in their own communities. But

since the Constitution obliged them to tolerate it in

states where it existed, they felt no responsibility to

fight it. The issue was explosive enough even when lim-

ited to the question of the expansion of slavery into the

territories. People who advocated any kind of forced

abolition in states where it was legal were judged irre-

sponsible in the extreme. In 1820 presidential hopeful

A photo of Frederick Douglass in 1847, having escaped from slavery

nine years earlier. He attracted large audiences as an antislavery

lecturer, though his white supporters worried that he neither looked

nor sounded like a former slave. Lest audiences think him an

imposter, William Lloyd Garrison counseled him to not sound too

“learned.” Another thought it would be better if he had “a little of

the plantation in his speech.” Douglass rejected such suggestions.