A Renegade History of the United States Read online

  The simultaneous wars for independence and virtue then reached the point of no return. In 1775 the British military and colonial militias began firing at each other in the battles of Concord and Lexington and at Bunker Hill, and the Second Continental Congress convened in Philadelphia, where it elected John Hancock as its president and appointed George Washington general and commander in chief of the new Continental Army.

  The following year, one day after Congress endorsed the Declaration of Independence, John Adams wrote hopefully that greater hardships—for Americans—would ensue: “It may be the Will of Heaven that America shall suffer Calamities still more wasting and Distresses yet more dreadfull. If this is to be the Case, it will have this good Effect, at least: it will inspire Us with many Virtues, which We have not, and correct many Errors, Follies, and Vices, which threaten to disturb, dishonour, and destroy Us. The Furnace of Affliction produces Refinement, in States as well as individuals.” A few months later, Adams lamented that Americans had not yet suffered enough. “There is too much Corruption, even in this infant Age of our Republic,” he said. “Virtue is not in Fashion. Vice is not infamous.” In 1777 Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, participant in the Continental Congress, and surgeon general of the Continental Army, worried that the war would end before Americans had been forced to control themselves: “I hope the war will last until it introduces among us the same temperance in pleasure, the same modesty in dress, the same justice in business, and the same veneration for the name of the Deity which distinguished our ancestors.” And in the fall of that year, when British forces under General Howe appeared poised to invade Philadelphia, John Adams told his wife of his secret wish for the revolutionary capital to be captured by the British, for it “would cure Americans of their vicious and luxurious and effeminate Appetites, Passions and Habits.” One month later, British forces under General Howe did occupy Philadelphia, forcing Congress to relocate to York, Pennsylvania. But as we have seen, it did not “cure” Americans.

  In 1778 welcome news came from France, which entered the war on the side of the Americans. Yet troubling news came from the streets, where vast indulgences in pleasure continued to plague the revolutionaries. When Samuel Adams heard that Bostonians were dressing flamboyantly, he thought that such behavior alone could doom independence. “Luxury and Extravagance are in my opinion totally destructive of those Virtues,” he declared, “which are necessary for the Preservation of the Liberty and Happiness of the People.” Yet the shame initiated by the revolutionaries began to circulate among ordinary Americans and penetrate into their own identities.

  Many early American convicts applauded their own punishment as necessary for the control of “vice” and the preservation of the republic. In 1778 convicted murderers James Buchanan, Ezra Ross, and William Brooks hailed their impending hangings as a warning to Americans of the dangers of freedom and pleasure. They coauthored a statement “that we are indeed guilty … and that hereby we have forfeited our lives into the hands of public justice.” To avoid such a fate, American youth should avoid “bad company, excessive drinking, profane cursing and swearing, shameful debaucheries, disobedience to parents, [and] profanation of the Lord’s day.”

  The tide in the military conflict seemed to turn in favor of the British in 1779 and 1780, with the British capture of Savannah, Georgia, and Charleston, while the tide of commerce seemed to turn against virtue. Henry Laurens, a South Carolina delegate and president of the Second Continental Congress, seemed at times to be more concerned about the materialism of his countrymen than the loss of his native land to the British. “Reduce us all to poverty and cut off or wisely restrict that bane of patriotism, Commerce, and we shall soon become Patriots,” he wrote in 1779, “but how hard is it for a rich or covetous Man to enter heartily into the Kingdom of Patriotism?” Laurens particularly hated festive celebrations and believed that the Olympic Games “and other fooleries brought on the desolation of Greece.”

  THE SOBER HOUSE

  The Americans reversed the momentum of the military war in 1781 with decisive victories in North Carolina and at Yorktown, Virginia. A preliminary peace treaty was signed in Paris the following year, and in 1783 Britain officially ended hostilities. The Treaty of Paris, ratified in 1784, gave the Americans independence but precipitated a catastrophic economic depression in the former colonies. George Washington called for the “proper regulation” of trade, “freed, as much as possible, from those vices which luxury, the consequences of wealth and power, naturally introduce.” Many of the founders welcomed the economic crisis because it would force Americans to abandon the luxuries that Thomas Jefferson called a “more baneful evil than toryism was during the war.” At that time Jefferson and his compatriots also welcomed a comprehensive attack on drinking.

  In 1784, Benjamin Rush, America’s founding doctor, published An Inquiry into the Effects of Spiritous Liquors, which became one of the most important of the Founding Fathers’ many antipleasure manifestoes during the early national period. Over the subsequent decades, more than 170,000 copies were distributed. Rush, the new nation’s foremost medical authority, argued that drink and democracy could not mix. He also developed the idea that chronic drunkenness is a biological disease. “It belongs to the history of drunkenness to remark, that its paroxysms occur, like the paroxysms of many diseases, at certain periods, and after longer or shorter intervals.” Though in such cases “The use of strong drink is at first the effect of free agency,” it becomes a “necessity” and a “disease of the will.” Because it seizes and overwhelms its victims, only one remedy was available. “My observations authorize me to say that persons who have been addicted to them should abstain from them suddenly and entirely,” Rush declared. “ ‘Taste not, handle not, touch not’ should be inscribed upon every vessel that contains spirits in the house of a man who wishes to be cured by habits of intemperance.” These claims, though impossible to prove scientifically, became the basis not only for the temperance movement in the nineteenth century but also for the Prohibition movement in the early twentieth century, the “science” of addiction treatment in the late twentieth century, and, perhaps most significantly, the widely held belief that abstinence is the only cure for problem drinking. The idea of the modern-day rehabilitation center was also invented by Rush, who called for drunkards to be taken off the streets and locked up in a special asylum in Philadelphia called the Sober House. Interestingly, temperance reformers who followed Rush could not find a single medical or legal record of any loss of control due to drinking before Rush’s writings appeared.

  The Founding Fathers, who had done a substantial share of the drinking in America, nonetheless unanimously agreed that the bodily pleasures brought to the fore by alcohol had to be attacked and contained. David Ramsay, a South Carolina delegate to the Continental Congress, warned that “the temptations to drunkenness are so great and so common, as partly resulting from the climate, that great self-command, prudence and fortitude, and a strict discipline of the passions and appetites, are absolutely necessary to maintain the empire of reason over sense.” Just before delegates arrived at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787, Rush wrote that the conflict between the republic and the body was nothing less than war:

  The American war is over; but this is far from being the case with the American Revolution. On the contrary, nothing but the first act of the great drama is closed … The temple of tyranny has two doors. We bolted one of them by proper restraints; but we left the other open, by neglecting to guard against the effects of our own ignorance and licentiousness.

  Soon after the delegates drafted a constitution for the new nation, Alexander Hamilton circulated Federalist 12, one of the Federalist Papers encouraging ratification, in which he argued that a tax on liquor, “if it should tend to diminish the consumption of it … would be equally favorable to the agriculture, to the economy, to the morals and to the health of the society. There is perhaps nothing so much a subject of
national extravagance as these spirits.”

  Hamilton’s friend Tench Coxe expressed the hopes of many of the delegates to the Constitutional Convention that the encouragement of manufacturing would force Americans to restrain their desires for the pleasures of the body. Coxe, who served in the administrations of the first four presidents, stated that American industries would “lead us once more into the paths of virtue by restoring frugality and industry, those potent antidotes to the vices of mankind, and will give us real independence by rescuing us from the tyranny of foreign fashions and the destructive torrent of luxury.” And while the Constitution was being drafted, Thomas Jefferson, who railed against drink and luxury with as much vitriol as any of his compatriots, wrote to his daughter a paean to work that could have been penned by the most stringent of Puritans:

  It is your future happiness which interests me, and nothing can contribute more to it (moral rectitude always excepted) than the contracting a habit of industry and activity. Of all the cankers of human happiness, none corrodes it with so silent, yet so baneful a tooth, as indolence. Determine never to be idle. No person will have occasion to complain of the want of time, who never loses any. It is wonderful how much may be done, if we are always doing.

  In 1788, while the states were ratifying the Constitution, Benjamin Rush recommended the elimination of fairs, horse racing, cockfighting, and Sunday amusements, which led to “gaming—drunkenness—and uncleanness” as well as “habits of idleness and a love of pleasure.” Moreover, taverns and “Clubs of all kinds, where the only business of the company, is feeding (for that is the true name of a gratification that is simply animal) are hurtful to morals.” The following year, Congress completed the establishment of an independent republic with the election of Washington as president and Adams as vice president, but most of the states had already formalized the conflict between the republic and bodily pleasures by declaring in their constitutions that the life of the nation depended upon “a firm adherence to justice, moderation, temperance, frugality, and virtue.”

  In 1790, when more than one hundred thousand Americans were living in tavern-filled cities, Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton succeeded in winning passage of an excise tax on the production of whiskey. Hamilton argued before Congress that it would serve the twin purposes of strengthening the federal government by opening a source of revenue for it while tightening the morals of the people:

  The consumption of ardent spirits particularly, no doubt very much on account of their cheapness, is carried to an extreme, which is truly to be regretted, as well in regard to the health and the morals, as to the economy of the community. Should the increase of duties tend to a decrease of the consumption of those articles, the effect would be, in every respect, desirable. The saving which it would occasion would leave individuals more at their ease, and promote a more favorable balance of trade.

  In the following year, the Bill of Rights was ratified and added to the Constitution, and Benjamin Rush published The Drunkard’s Emblem, a condemnation of heavy drinking. Rush also wrote to Thomas Jefferson that whiskey and rum were “antifederal” and “the companions of all those vices that are calculated to dishonor and enslave our country.”

  Though lower-class Americans continued to fill taverns, the class of men who led the Revolution were undergoing a radical self-reformation. Upper-class colonists had drunk just as heartily as their social inferiors before the War of Independence, but in the new nation, foreign visitors often commented that it was much more difficult to get a drink at an upper-class dinner party than it had been during the colonial era. American elites gave up drinking and flocked to coffeehouses. But the people did not follow. George Washington, James Madison, and Robert Morris were among many of the Founding Fathers who supported excise taxes on alcohol after the Revolution as a means to curb drinking. Virtually all of these attempts, however, were voted down or went unenforced. The government’s attempt in 1794 to enforce the national whiskey tax in western Pennsylvania resulted in what came to be called the Whiskey Rebellion, when renegades all over the region not only refused to pay up but also tarred and feathered tax collectors.

  For a time, it appeared as if the antidrinking campaign had failed. Average annual consumption of absolute alcohol for adults rose from 5.8 gallons in 1790 to 7.1 gallons by 1810. But the fight had begun in an enduring civil war over pleasure.

  A PURE NATION

  Revolutionary leaders believed—rightly—that sexual desire was an even greater threat than drunkenness to the new nation of self-regulating men. This was why, according to Jefferson, any American should be discouraged from visiting Europe, where “he is led by the strongest of all the human passions, into a spirit for female intrigue, destructive of his own and others’ happiness, or a passion for whores, destructive of his health, and, in both cases, learns to consider fidelity to the marriage bed as an ungentlemanly practice, and inconsistent with happiness.” Benjamin Rush best explained why America had to attack sensual pleasure. For much of his career, Rush wrote and spoke about the inherent conflict between sexuality and a republic of “free” men. In 1788 he wrote that the pleasure culture in the cities had a “pernicious influence upon morals, and thereby prepare our country for misery and slavery.”

  What followed was what historian Clare Lyons calls “the assault on nonmarital sexuality.”

  First came increased prosecution of illicit sex. The number of arrests for prostitution in Philadelphia grew by more than 60 percent over the first twenty years of independence. Then came “reform.” In Philadelphia in 1790, the Association of the District of Southwark for the Suppression of Vice and Immorality was the first of many antivice organizations to be established in the early years of the republic. These groups targeted gambling houses, brothels, dance halls, and lower-class taverns.

  The movement against renegades gained institutional teeth in the second decade of the United States with the rapid growth of reformatory asylums. The Magdalen Society was founded in Philadelphia and New York with the mission of “relieving and reclaiming unhappy females who have Swerv’d from the paths of virtue.” Members of the society visited not only prostitutes but also women who were simply promiscuous in prisons and almshouses and attempted to persuade them to enter the society’s asylum, where in exchange for free room, board, and medical care, they would give up a life of sexual license for a program of chastity, domestic labor, regimentation, and moral instruction. The objective of these asylums was to make the “fallen women” into wives and mothers. Many women took the deal as the only means to obtain treatment for venereal disease. Once inside the asylum, however, inmates found that they could not leave: the doors remained locked, and the grounds were enclosed by a fence. Only the managers decided who could be discharged. Some women escaped by climbing the fence, but most stayed until they were told they were properly “respectable” and ready to enter society as “pure” women. This process of purification took from several months up to a year.

  On the streets after the Revolution, arrests increased for cross-racial sexuality. Whereas for most of the eighteenth-century copulation across the color line flourished largely unpunished, in the early national period, many women were arrested simply for having sex with men of another race. Barbara Clifford was arrested in Philadelphia in 1801 for “being caught in Bed with a Black man.” Elizabeth Flanagan was charged in 1802 with “frequently going to Bed with different black men.” Margaret Fisher committed a grave crime in 1803, that of “being found in bed with a Negro man and with a white man at another [time].” Managers of brothels were suddenly charged with the specific crime of sexual race mixing. In 1802 Rachel White was arrested for “keeping a bawdy house by letting black men and white women go to bed together.” Rosanna Grovis, a black madam, also committed the crime of “keeping Girls of Different Colours” in her brothel.

  Most tellingly, in the decades after the Revolution, a raft of medical literature appeared that counseled against all forms of nonmarital—and e
ven many forms of marital—sex. Various behaviors were described in great detail and labeled as “deviant.” Men were advised to redirect their sexual energies into work, and women were told that females were naturally nonsexual and that “good” women were pure and chaste. In the 1810s and 1820s, Benjamin Rush authored a series of sexual manuals for the new nation in which he declared that indulgence in bodily pleasures, “when excessive, becomes a disease of both the body and mind.” Too much sex could cause not only vertigo and epilepsy but also “seminal weakness, impotence … pulmonary consumption, hypochondriasis, loss of memory … and death.” Even self-pleasure was suddenly dangerous, as a number of doctors claimed. One of the most prolific fields of invention in the young United States was anti-masturbation. By the middle of the nineteenth century, one could purchase a wide variety of devices and medication to control the desire to play with oneself, including penis cases and sleeping mitts. More than twenty patents were awarded for devices to keep women from spreading their legs.

  As for the principal regulator of sexuality—marriage—colonial governments for the most part had treated divorce as a matter between husband and wife and perhaps involving the local community, not as a matter of interest to the government. But spurred on by the Founding Fathers, during the early national period the states replaced the few and vague divorce laws of the colonies with laws tightly and specifically regulating divorce. This ended the massive eighteenth-century trend of self-divorce. As the historian Nancy Cott puts it, “Post-Revolutionary legislators wanted to reassert their authority over what (some) people had done under the aegis of local tolerance.” Granting divorce rights has often been seen as a move toward individual freedom, but the state of Georgia knew better. The state’s legislators understood that it was actually a move toward greater control of intimate life. Acknowledging its inability to control “circumstances” that “may require a dissolution of contracts founded on the most binding and sacred obligations,” in 1802 the state enacted a law regulating divorce because “dissolution [of a marriage] ought not to be dependent on private will, but should require legislative interference; inasmuch as the republic is deeply interested in the private business of its citizens.” After independence, a marriage remained legally binding until, according to Cott, a plaintiff for divorce proved to the court that he or she had upheld “ideal spousal behavior” and that the spouse was adulterous, sexually dysfunctional, or chronically absent. No longer could an unhappy wife or husband simply walk away from a marriage. “A wife petitioning for divorce had to show how attentive, obedient, and long-suffering she had been (and, of course, sexually faithful) while she was being victimized. A husband’s adequacy rested in economic support.”