The Temperance Movement and the Origins of Prohibition

LECTURE LEARNING OBJECTIVES

1. Describe the “alcoholic republic” of the early nineteenth century and explain why heavy drinking alarmed reformers.
2. Explain how the Second Great Awakening and the American Temperance Society turned abstinence into a moral and civic duty.
3. Compare the elite, clergy-led temperance societies with the working-class Washingtonian movement.
4. Analyze the shift from moral suasion to legal prohibition, including the Maine Law of 1851 and the opposition it provoked along lines of ethnicity, class, and region.
5. Evaluate how temperance gave women a public voice and helped lead some of them toward women’s rights.

Grounded in the Chapter 12 Lecture 3 materials and expanded with primary evidence and modern scholarship on American drinking, the temperance societies, the Washingtonians, the Maine Law, women’s temperance activism, and the later Woman’s Christian Temperance Union.

Introductory Framing

The lecture begins with a startling fact: Americans in the early nineteenth century drank far more alcohol than Americans do today. Whiskey, rum, hard cider, and brandy were part of work, meals, politics, and celebration. Reformers looked at this “alcoholic republic” and asked a question that tied personal behavior to the survival of the nation: could a free people, who governed themselves at the ballot box, also govern their own appetites?

The lecture’s thesis is that temperance evolved from moral persuasion into organized political reform, testing the moral foundations of democracy and offering women a powerful, if unofficial, public voice. It began in churches as a campaign to persuade individuals to drink less and then not at all. It was democratized in the 1840s by reformed drinkers who told their own stories. By the 1850s many reformers had concluded that persuasion was not enough and turned to the law, winning statewide prohibition in Maine and a dozen or so other states and territories. Along the way, temperance became a battleground over immigrant culture, working-class leisure, and the boundaries of women’s proper role.

Historians have approached the movement from several directions. W. J. Rorabaugh’s The Alcoholic Republic (1979) documents how much Americans drank and why. Ian Tyrrell’s Sobering Up (1979) connects temperance to the economic ambitions of a rising middle class. Joseph Gusfield’s Symbolic Crusade (1963) reads it as a struggle over whose culture would define respectability. Ruth Bordin, Barbara Epstein, and others show how women used temperance to enter public life. This essay draws on all of them while following the lecture’s arc.

Key Terms: Temperance, Moral Suasion, and Prohibition

Temperance originally meant moderation. Early reformers urged people to avoid distilled spirits such as whiskey and rum while tolerating beer, wine, and cider. By the mid-1830s the movement’s leaders had shifted to demanding total abstinence from all alcoholic drink, and the word “teetotal,” from an emphatic “T-total” pledge, entered the language.

Moral suasion means changing behavior by persuasion: sermons, pamphlets, testimonials, and pledges that individuals signed voluntarily. Prohibition means using the law to ban the manufacture and sale of alcohol. The movement’s central story is the shift from the first strategy to the second, and the central question that shift raises is whether virtue can be legislated or only chosen.

The Alcoholic Republic

By most estimates, American drinking peaked around 1830. Rorabaugh calculated that Americans aged fifteen and older then consumed, on average, the equivalent of roughly seven gallons of pure alcohol a year, most of it in the form of distilled spirits, about three times the level of the early twenty-first century. The averages hide enormous variation: many women and some men drank little or nothing, which means that heavy drinkers drank a great deal.

Several forces explain the pattern. Western farmers, cut off from distant markets by poor roads, turned surplus corn into whiskey, which was easier to ship and store. Whiskey became remarkably cheap, and in many places water was of doubtful safety while coffee and tea were relatively expensive. Alcohol was also woven into social life. Workers in shops, on farms, and on canal crews expected daily rations of spirits, often at set breaks in the workday. Militia musters, elections, barn raisings, weddings, and funerals all came with drink. Many Americans believed alcohol was healthful, a source of strength for hard labor and protection against disease and cold.

Reformers saw it differently. Dr. Benjamin Rush’s pamphlet An Inquiry into the Effects of Ardent Spirits upon the Human Body and Mind, first published in 1784 and reprinted many times, described habitual drinking of spirits as a disease and included a “moral and physical thermometer” that linked rising consumption to vices, diseases, and punishments, from idleness and quarreling to madness, the poorhouse, and the gallows. By the 1820s ministers, physicians, and employers were blaming drink for poverty, crime, domestic violence, and lost work. They also framed the problem in political terms. A republic depended on citizens capable of self-government; drunkenness destroyed self-control. Could the experiment in popular rule survive a population that could not master its own passions?

Religious Roots and the American Temperance Society

The Second Great Awakening, examined in Lecture 1, gave temperance its moral energy. Revivalists taught that individuals could choose salvation and that converted Christians should strive to live without willful sin. Drinking became a test of that commitment. If sinners could change, so could drinkers, and so could whole communities.

In 1826 Lyman Beecher delivered his Six Sermons on the Nature, Occasions, Signs, Evils, and Remedy of Intemperance, which called intemperance a national sin and urged total abstinence from spirits. The same year, a group of evangelical ministers and laymen in Boston founded the American Society for the Promotion of Temperance, soon known as the American Temperance Society. It was a classic Benevolent Empire organization: it hired agents to travel and lecture, printed tracts and reports, and encouraged the formation of local auxiliaries that asked members to sign a pledge. It grew with astonishing speed. By the mid-1830s temperance organizations claimed thousands of local societies and well over a million members.

In 1836 the national movement, reorganized as the American Temperance Union, adopted the total-abstinence pledge, which barred beer, wine, and cider as well as spirits. The shift split the movement. Some members, especially wealthier ones who drank wine at dinner, balked. But it also clarified the cause. Temperance was no longer about moderation; it was about drawing a bright moral line.

The campaign seems to have worked to a striking degree. Rorabaugh’s estimates show per capita consumption of alcohol falling by more than half between 1830 and the mid-1840s, one of the steepest declines in American history. Historians debate how much credit the movement deserves, as opposed to economic change and better transportation, but contemporaries had no doubt that the pledge was changing behavior.

Temperance as Civic Virtue and Women’s Cause

Reformers linked sobriety to republican self-government. A sober man could hold a steady job, support his family, and vote responsibly; a drunkard was a slave to his appetite and easy prey for demagogues who bought votes with liquor. Temperance was a civic duty as well as a religious one.

Women had particular reasons to care. Under the common-law doctrine of coverture, a married woman’s legal identity was absorbed into her husband’s. In most states, before the married women’s property acts that began in the late 1830s and 1840s, she could not own property in her own name, control her wages, make contracts, or easily obtain a divorce. If her husband drank away the family’s money or beat her and the children, she had few legal remedies. Drunkenness threatened household survival and household safety.

The ideology of separate spheres, which assigned men to the public world of work and politics and women to the private world of home and family, might seem to have kept women out of reform. In practice it often pulled them in. If women were the moral guardians of the home, then protecting the home from drink was their duty, and that duty could justify public action. By the 1830s women formed female temperance societies and auxiliaries. They gathered pledges, distributed literature, raised money, and visited homes. Temperance became one of the first doors through which large numbers of women entered what the lecture calls the moral public sphere.

The Washingtonians

In April 1840, six friends who drank together at a tavern on Liberty Street in Baltimore decided, half in jest, to send two of their number to a temperance lecture. They came back impressed and the group resolved to stop drinking. Naming themselves after George Washington, they formed the Washington Temperance Society and began holding meetings at which reformed drinkers told the story of their own fall and recovery. Within a few years Washingtonian societies had spread across the country and claimed hundreds of thousands of pledges.

The Washingtonians differed from the older temperance societies in important ways. Their members were mostly working men and artisans rather than ministers and merchants. They emphasized personal testimony, mutual support, and fellowship rather than sermons and condemnation. They welcomed drunkards as brothers rather than treating them as sinners to be lectured. Some of their speakers became celebrities, most famously John B. Gough, a bookbinder whose dramatic confessions, including of his own relapses, drew huge crowds. Women formed parallel Martha Washington societies, which supported meetings, visited the families of reformed men, and provided clothing and practical aid.

A young Illinois legislator named Abraham Lincoln addressed the Springfield Washington Temperance Society on February 22, 1842, Washington’s birthday. He praised the Washingtonians for treating drinkers with sympathy and gently criticized older reformers for denunciation that drove drinkers away rather than winning them over. The speech is a useful primary source for the contrast the lecture draws.

The movement faded by the mid-1840s, weakened by relapses, internal quarrels, and conflict with clergy who disliked its secular tone. Its members often moved into more structured fraternal orders such as the Sons of Temperance, founded in 1842. The lecture argues that its legacy endured: the Washingtonians anticipated modern ideas of recovery through peer support and confession, and historians often point to them as forerunners of Alcoholics Anonymous, founded in 1935.

From Persuasion to Law

By the late 1840s many reformers had grown frustrated. Pledges were broken, the Washingtonian surge receded, and taverns and grog shops still did business on every corner. Reformers increasingly blamed the liquor trade itself. As long as alcohol was legally manufactured and sold, they argued, persuasion would always be undone. The movement turned toward the law.

Some states had already experimented with local option laws allowing towns or counties to ban liquor licenses. The decisive step came in Maine. Neal Dow, a Quaker-raised Portland businessman and mayor, led a campaign for statewide prohibition, and in June 1851 the legislature passed what became known as the Maine Law, banning the manufacture and sale of intoxicating liquors except for medicinal, mechanical, and manufacturing purposes. The law gave officials broad powers to search for and destroy illegal liquor.

The Maine Law became a national model. Between 1852 and 1855, about a dozen states and territories, mostly in New England and the Midwest, passed similar laws. Women, though they could not vote, played a large role in these campaigns. They circulated petitions with thousands of signatures, met with legislators, wrote newspaper appeals, and organized public demonstrations. Temperance fiction also spread the message, most famously Timothy Shay Arthur’s melodrama Ten Nights in a Bar-Room (1854).

The laws proved hard to enforce and politically fragile. In Portland, Dow himself faced a crowd in June 1855 that gathered to protest a stock of liquor the city held for medicinal sale; militia under his command fired into it, killing one man, an episode remembered as the Portland Rum Riot. Courts struck down some state laws, legislatures repealed or weakened others, and by the time of the Civil War most had lapsed. Maine itself repealed and then restored its law in the 1850s.

Cultural Conflict Over Prohibition

Prohibition sparked fierce resistance, and the lecture organizes it along three lines.

Ethnicity

The 1840s and 1850s brought unprecedented immigration from Ireland and the German states. For many German immigrants, lager beer and the family beer garden were central to community life, and for many Irish immigrants the tavern was a social center. Temperance rhetoric often slid into nativism, portraying immigrants and Catholics as drunken threats to the republic. In the mid-1850s the anti-immigrant American, or Know-Nothing, Party frequently allied with prohibitionists. In Chicago in 1855, a Know-Nothing mayor raised liquor license fees and enforced Sunday closing against mostly German saloons, and the resulting protest, the Lager Beer Riot, ended in a deadly street clash between protesters and police. Immigrants saw prohibition as an attack on their culture.

Class

Temperance became a marker of middle-class respectability. For working men, the tavern was a place to rest, talk, find work, and hold union and political meetings. Historians describe it as a working-class institution of solidarity and autonomy. Middle-class reformers’ campaigns against it could feel like moral policing of workers’ few hours of leisure, and some employers favored temperance because sober workers were more productive.

Region

Southern evangelicals often favored personal piety and individual abstinence, but the South generally resisted organized, legal reform. Many white Southerners associated reform societies with Northern meddling and, by the 1840s and 1850s, with abolitionism. Statewide prohibition made little headway in the South before the Civil War.

Liberty and Interest

Opponents also made principled and economic arguments. Critics called prohibition moral tyranny, a violation of personal freedom and an overreach of government into private life. Brewers, distillers, tavern keepers, and grain farmers had obvious stakes. Some defended traditional masculine prerogatives, the right of a man to drink as he pleased. Reformers answered that the liquor trade destroyed families and that no one had a right to profit from others’ ruin.

Women, Temperance, and Political Awakening

Temperance taught women political skills and showed them the limits of power without political rights. Speaking before mixed audiences of men and women, which earlier generations had considered improper for women, became more common at temperance meetings. Women learned to petition, raise money, run societies, and coordinate campaigns.

Amelia Bloomer

Amelia Bloomer of Seneca Falls, New York, began publishing The Lily in January 1849 as a temperance paper for women. It is often described as one of the first American newspapers edited by a woman for women. Under the influence of her neighbor Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Bloomer increasingly used it to advocate women’s rights. In 1851 she championed the loose trousers worn under a shorter skirt, introduced by Elizabeth Smith Miller, that the press soon called “bloomers.” Ridicule of the costume eventually led most reformers to abandon it, but it illustrated how temperance, dress reform, and women’s rights overlapped.

Susan B. Anthony

Susan B. Anthony, a Quaker-raised schoolteacher from Rochester, entered public life through temperance. In 1852, when she tried to speak at a Sons of Temperance meeting in Albany, she was told that women had been invited to listen, not to speak. She and other women walked out and organized the Woman’s New York State Temperance Society, with Stanton as president. Stanton shocked many members by arguing that a wife should be able to divorce a drunken husband. In 1853 women delegates were again silenced at a world temperance convention in New York. Experiences like these convinced Anthony and others that without the vote, women’s moral influence would always be at the mercy of men. She went on to become one of the most important leaders of the woman suffrage movement.

Women also faced ridicule. Cartoons portrayed temperance women as ugly, aggressive, and neglectful of their homes. That backlash revealed how anxious many Americans were about changing gender roles, and how much was at stake when women claimed a public voice.

After the Civil War: The WCTU and the Road to the Eighteenth Amendment

The lecture follows temperance beyond the antebellum era to show its long legacy. After the Civil War, industrialization, urban growth, immigration, and the spread of the saloon renewed the crusade. In the winter of 1873–1874, women in Hillsboro, Ohio, and many other Midwestern towns staged the Woman’s Crusade, kneeling and praying in front of saloons until some closed. Out of that wave came the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), founded in Cleveland in November 1874.

Frances Willard, a former dean of women at Northwestern University, became the WCTU’s president in 1879 and led it until her death in 1898. Under her “Do Everything” policy, the WCTU worked not only against alcohol but for woman suffrage, prison reform, kindergartens, raising the age of consent, and labor reform. Willard justified suffrage as a “home protection” measure: women needed the vote to defend their homes against the saloon. The WCTU became the largest women’s organization in the United States in the late nineteenth century, and it trained a generation of women in what Progressive Era reformers called “municipal housekeeping,” the idea that women’s domestic concerns justified action in city government. Lecture 4 returns to its work on behalf of children.

Carrie Nation (1846–1911), a Kansas WCTU member, represented the movement’s militant fringe. Beginning in 1900 she attacked saloons in Kansas, where they were illegal under the state constitution but operated openly, first with rocks and then with the hatchet that became her trademark. She was arrested many times. Her “hatchetations” drew national attention, though many temperance leaders regarded her methods as embarrassing. The Anti-Saloon League, founded in 1893, pursued a more effective strategy of single-issue political pressure, and its campaign, together with the WCTU’s long work and the anti-German mood of World War I, produced the Eighteenth Amendment, ratified in January 1919 and in effect from January 1920. National prohibition lasted until the Twenty-first Amendment repealed it in 1933.

Conclusion: Can Virtue Be Legislated?

Return to the six Baltimore drinkers of 1840, sending two friends to a temperance lecture as a joke and building a national movement from the result. Their story captures what made temperance so powerful: it promised ordinary people that they could remake their own lives, and it linked that private transformation to the health of the republic. Within fifteen years, though, many reformers had decided that persuasion was not enough and that the state must enforce sobriety. That shift produced the Maine Law, riots in Portland and Chicago, and an enduring American argument about the limits of government and the meaning of personal liberty.

Temperance was arguably the largest mass reform movement of the antebellum era. It changed how Americans drank, gave women a public voice and a political education, and laid the foundation for the WCTU and, eventually, national prohibition. It also exposed the cultural fault lines of a diversifying nation, between native Protestants and immigrant Catholics, between middle-class respectability and working-class leisure, and between those who saw the law as a tool of moral improvement and those who saw it as a threat to freedom.

Interpretive Synthesis: Liberty, Virtue, and Social Control

The early republic drank heavily, and reformers inspired by the Second Great Awakening turned abstinence into a moral and civic duty through the American Temperance Society and its thousands of local auxiliaries. The Washingtonians democratized the cause in the 1840s with testimony and mutual aid. Frustrated by the limits of persuasion, reformers then won the Maine Law of 1851 and similar laws elsewhere, provoking resistance from immigrants, workers, and defenders of personal liberty. Women, working within and against the ideology of separate spheres, used temperance to gain organizational skills and public standing, and some, like Susan B. Anthony, moved on to demand the vote.

The open question is how to read the movement’s motives. Was temperance chiefly a humanitarian response to real suffering, especially of wives and children? A middle-class effort to discipline workers and immigrants? A symbolic struggle over whose culture would set the standard of respectability? The evidence supports each reading in part. The suffering was real, the class and ethnic tensions were real, and the movement’s meaning depended heavily on who was signing the pledge and who was being asked to.

Research Notes and Historiographical Guide

Course materials / lecture script, outline, and slide deck. Supply the core narrative in this order: the alcoholic republic, religious roots and the American Temperance Society, temperance as civic virtue, why women led, the Washingtonians, the turn from persuasion to law and the Maine Law, cultural conflict, women’s political training, leaders, Carrie Nation, opposition, legacy, and post–Civil War continuity. The essay expands that framing and qualifies several numbers and superlatives in the instructor notes.

W. J. Rorabaugh, The Alcoholic Republic. The essential study of early American drinking, with consumption estimates.

Ian R. Tyrrell, Sobering Up; Joseph R. Gusfield, Symbolic Crusade. Temperance as middle-class economic ambition and as a struggle over cultural status.

Ruth Bordin, Woman and Temperance; Barbara Leslie Epstein, The Politics of Domesticity. Women, the WCTU, and the gender politics of temperance.

Jack S. Blocker Jr., American Temperance Movements; Thomas R. Pegram, Battling Demon Rum. Concise syntheses of the movement across two centuries.

Daniel Okrent, Last Call. A readable narrative of national prohibition and its origins, useful for the post–Civil War slides.

Selected Primary and Contemporary Sources

• Benjamin Rush, An Inquiry into the Effects of Ardent Spirits upon the Human Body and Mind (1784; many later editions).
• Lyman Beecher, Six Sermons on the Nature, Occasions, Signs, Evils, and Remedy of Intemperance (1826).
• Permanent Temperance Documents of the American Temperance Society (annual reports, 1830s).
• Abraham Lincoln, address before the Springfield Washington Temperance Society, February 22, 1842.
• John B. Gough, An Autobiography (1845).
• Maine, “An Act for the Suppression of Drinking Houses and Tippling Shops” (1851).
• The Lily (Seneca Falls, NY), 1849–1856.
• Timothy Shay Arthur, Ten Nights in a Bar-Room, and What I Saw There (1854).
• Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage, eds., History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 1 (1881), on the 1852–1853 temperance conventions.
• Frances E. Willard, Glimpses of Fifty Years (1889).

Selected Scholarship

• Blocker, Jack S., Jr. American Temperance Movements: Cycles of Reform. Boston: Twayne, 1989.
• Bordin, Ruth. Woman and Temperance: The Quest for Power and Liberty, 1873–1900. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1981.
• Epstein, Barbara Leslie. The Politics of Domesticity: Women, Evangelism, and Temperance in Nineteenth-Century America. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1981.
• Gusfield, Joseph R. Symbolic Crusade: Status Politics and the American Temperance Movement. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1963.
• Okrent, Daniel. Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition. New York: Scribner, 2010.
• Pegram, Thomas R. Battling Demon Rum: The Struggle for a Dry America, 1800–1933. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1998.
• Rorabaugh, W. J. The Alcoholic Republic: An American Tradition. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979.
• Tyrrell, Ian R. Sobering Up: From Temperance to Prohibition in Antebellum America, 1800–1860. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1979.

Instructor Notes on Accuracy and Teaching

Historical accuracy: The essay follows the deck’s order while qualifying several points: “whiskey cheaper than milk” and “workers paid in alcohol” are rephrased in terms Rorabaugh documents; the count of states with Maine-style laws is given as “about a dozen states and territories”; The Lily is “one of the first” women-edited papers; Carrie Nation’s role in national prohibition is placed alongside the Anti-Saloon League; and consumption figures are presented as Rorabaugh’s estimates. “Largest mass movement of the antebellum period” is presented as “arguably,” since membership counts were self-reported.

Historiographical balance: The interpretation combines Rorabaugh’s account of real drinking problems, Tyrrell’s and Gusfield’s readings of class and status, and Bordin’s and Epstein’s gender analysis, avoiding both a purely heroic and a purely social-control story.

Narrative potential: Strong teachable scenes include Rush’s moral thermometer, six Baltimore drinkers founding the Washingtonians, John B. Gough confessing his relapses on stage, Lincoln’s 1842 speech, Neal Dow and the Portland Rum Riot, Chicago’s Lager Beer Riot, Anthony told to listen rather than speak in Albany, and Carrie Nation’s hatchet.

Historical-thinking spine: Context explains the alcoholic republic and revivalism; Cause links frustration with persuasion to prohibition laws; Consequence appears in falling consumption, cultural conflict, and women’s political awakening; Evidence can be modeled through Rush, Beecher, Lincoln, the Maine Law, and The Lily. The open question about whether virtue can be legislated connects the antebellum story to the Eighteenth Amendment and beyond.