Author and historian Brooke Barbier says the role of alcohol in the story of America's founding has often been played down — or simply ignored. In her new book, Cocked and Boozy, An Intoxicating History of the American Revolution, she writes that America's founding generation drank a staggering amount of beer and booze by today's standards, and that influenced their politics, particularly here in New England where the Revolution started.
Barbier spoke with NHPR's Rick Ganley about this intoxicating chapter of early American and New England history.
Related: Read more of NHPR's coverage of America's 250th birthday
Below is a lightly edited transcript of their conversation.
You write that attitudes about drinking were quite different in colonial times. How much were people drinking as opposed to today?
It's really hard to quantify, unfortunately, but it's a lot more than we do today. Perhaps maybe double, and they'd be drinking throughout the day. They weren't always drinking hard alcohol. The beer could be a lower alcohol by volume content, like 1%.
Whereas today's beers might be 5, 6, 7%, something like that.
Exactly.
So you write that attitudes about drinking were quite different. How so?
It was a part of everyday life and it was understood to be a vital part of the economy. The production of alcohol, particularly here in New England where we produced a lot of rum, was integral to the financial growth of the colonies, and there wasn't a stigma around it.
Eventually in the 1770s, 80s, and 90s, you do start to see a temperance movement. It is small, but starting to identify that people do struggle with alcohol.
Well, Ben Franklin and John Adams, who figure prominently in this book, had different attitudes about drinking and the culture around taverns in particular. Yet they did work together as founders of the country. Can you tell us about their relationship?
When both Benjamin Franklin and John Adams were young men, they tried to shut taverns down — in Braintree, Massachusetts for Adams, and in Philadelphia for Franklin — seeing them as places of undue influence and dissipation. Franklin, though, from a young age understood that alcohol increased sociability, and was a way to bring people together. He even writes openly that in one instance when he needed military support, by serving a lot of wine to the governor, he was able to get what he wanted. And the more wine the governor drank, the more support they got. So Franklin understood that important role of alcohol to colonists' sociability.
John Adams, however, did not. He was more of a grump, he would be in taverns and not be enjoying the music or the dancing the way everyone else was.
But we really see a marked change with him in 1774 and 1775. He's in the First and Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia, and he really begins to, it seems, enjoy drinking and enjoy that connection that it can bring in a way that he hadn't experienced in his life earlier.
Once the Revolutionary War started, booze was used as an enlistment tool, wasn't it?
That's right. All soldiers in the Continental Army, which was the new army for the colonies and in the United States, received alcohol rations, and that was established as soon as the army was established.
Tell me about the Whiskey Tax. You write that Representative Samuel Livermore of New Hampshire was an enthusiastic supporter. He thought the tax would “be agreeable to his countrymen because they will consider it as drinking down the national debt.”
This is an interesting one, because Alexander Hamilton wants to pay down the new country's debt and proposes a tax on whiskey. And as we've said, alcohol was vital to the economy. So even if it didn't directly affect Hamilton or Livermore of New Hampshire, it affected the people who produced it and consumed it.
I think Livermore's quote is so charming. He says, 'Oh, they'll embrace it because they'll think of it when they're drinking, that they're drinking down the national debt.' But that's not how people saw it at all. They saw it as an infringement on their rights, and for those in the western part of the United States, now I'm talking the West in the 1790s is, like Western Pennsylvania and Kentucky and Ohio — they relied on whiskey for their local economy. It was one of the goods that they could make and reasonably ship over east. This is what sparks the Whiskey Rebellion, primarily from folks in the western part of the United States.
So Livermore's quotation, while charming, does not go down in history that well.
Yeah, after all, we were fighting the Revolution against an empire that had unfairly taxed us.
I know, it's a peculiar thing. It just shows a real lack of short-term memory because John Adams said after the American Revolution, ‘I know not why we should blush to confess that molasses was an essential ingredient in American independence.' He means two different things here: One, he means that molasses was the first item taxed when we think of that 'no taxation without representation' timeline that you just referenced in 1764: The first tax was a tax on foreign molasses. Molasses was used almost entirely to make rum. Boston and Massachusetts were some of the first locations to protest the Sugar Act because they were the leading rum producers.
So then, when you have a proposal for a whiskey tax, not even 30 years later, and in this new country, it's surprising that they thought people would go along with this willingly.
Why do you think historians have downplayed the role of alcohol in American history?
I think there's some taboo about it or potential shame, but the colonists themselves weren't shy about it. They understood that alcohol was a part of everyday life, that it could increase sociability, that it could increase belligerence and aggression too: That there was this sort of dual nature of alcohol.
I think as long as historians or folks don't think of it as like, 'Oh, ha ha ha, they were drunk all the time, they liked to party,' [but] that it is more complex than that.
