Southern Prohibition: Race, Reform, and Public Life in Middle Florida, 1821–1920 by Lee L. Willis (review)

In 1915, about four years before national prohibition became law with the passing of the Eighteenth Amendment, Florida’s state legislators were mulling over the Prohibition Submission Bill. If passed by voters, the measure would make Florida a dry state. Ultimately, the bill failed, but Lee L. Willis argues that its existence marked the culmination of a century of temperance reform that had heavily influenced Florida’s political culture. In Southern Prohibition: Race, Reform, and Public Life in Middle Florida, 1821–1920, Willis examines how the temperance movement evolved in Florida’s plantation belt and center of political life–the panhandle region between the Suwannee and Apalachicola Rivers–from the territorial period of the early nineteenth century through the Progressive era. Willis’s small area of focus allows him to blend newspaper, manuscript, and legal sources in great detail. Although he finds that Middle Florida’s reform movement was fraught with complications, Willis argues that temperance and prohibition became important mechanisms for social and moral control that heavily influenced Florida’s political culture through the long nineteenth century. By doing so, he proves that temperance and prohibition were indeed national, not just northern, phenomena, even before the Civil War. Likewise, his decision to track the temperance movement over the course of the century helps to reframe temperance scholarship, which so often focuses on either the ante- or post-bellum movements.

In Middle Florida, both race and class influenced legal measures to curb drinking in the decades before the Civil War. In the territorial days and even in the early decades of statehood, Florida’s laws prohibited Native Americans and African Americans (free and enslaved) from drinking. Until the 1840s and 1850s, the association of prohibition with race control made evangelical temperance reform, based on the notion that alcohol consumption is inherently immoral, a hard sell among whites. In territorial Florida, as in other parts of the United States, taverns and communal drinking facilitated democratic political culture, and it was not until the 1850s, when drinking establishments became more commonly separated by class, that temperance reform took root. Although middle-class temperance organizations popular in the North never gained traction in Florida, Willis points out that the Washingtonians and the Sons of Temperance had many members in Middle Florida. Beyond that, Willis argues that the region’s debates over the morality and effectiveness of license laws show a reforming culture moving increasingly toward legal suasion (using laws to control access to alcohol) in the 1850s—similar to reform movements in the North. Specifically, Florida’s reformers found themselves frustrated with existing license laws and implemented “high license” measures (also popular in other states) to control sales and consumption by making licenses prohibitively expensive for all sellers except for the most “respectable” business owners. At the same time, Willis notes that reformers had “to create a pathological reputation for alcohol and the alcohol trade” to convince Floridians that sober citizens were essential to a respectable and civilized society (47–49).

Complications from the Civil War and Reconstruction prevented reforming Floridians from marching straight toward statewide prohibition, but Willis shows that by the 1870s, efforts to curb the consumption of alcohol and other drugs using local and state laws were again underway in Middle Florida, generally with the biracial support. In Florida, as in other states, the war and Reconstruction disrupted legislative prohibition. Nevertheless, Willis finds evidence that the appeal of sobriety as a form of social control remained. Confederate generals such as Braxton Bragg used temperance to facilitate discipline in the ranks and to improve chances for victory. During Reconstruction, both Republicans and Democrats found uses for prohibition as well. Republicans thought temperance might curb violence perpetuated by the Ku Klux Klan. Democrats, on the other hand, believed prohibiting freed people from drinking would improve race relations. But after 1868, prohibition became more than an effort to control racial...