The Temperance Songs of Stephen C. Foster

Beginning around 1840 and continuing to the ratification of the National Prohibition Act in 1920, temperance reformers in the United States produced an astounding number of songs published in hundreds of temperance songsters and as sheet music. These songs were sung at temperance meetings and festivals, in schools, and at home. Temperance reformers understood the power of music and freely utilized songs in the battle against “demon rum.” Writing early in the movement, Mary Dana exclaimed in The Temperance Lyre, “How wonderfully great is the influence of music! … Use this weapon freely, my brothers and sisters; tune your cheerful voices till you charm away the evil spirits which have so long troubled this beautiful world.” Such views continued through the history of the movement. Just a few years prior to prohibition, John Clements echoed Dana’s enthusiasm in his preface to Shaw’s Campaign Songs: “Once the nation gets to singing the message of temperance, the greatest single stride has been taken toward the birth of the new day that sees whisky banished forever from our land.”¹

Although temperance lyricists often set mediocre texts to popular tunes, a few professional songwriters, notably Mrs. E. A. Parkhurst, George F. Root, Henry C. Work, and Stephen C. Foster, have been credited with contributing several of the best temperance songs.² While Parkhurst, Root, and Work were better known during the last decades of the nineteenth century than Foster both for their temperance and their Civil War songs, Foster almost certainly influenced the other three. Ironically, millions of people sang Foster’s songs during his lifetime without knowing who wrote them, but today he is remembered as America’s first great popular songwriter.³ Beyond his enduring legacy as a songwriter, Foster also stands apart from the other composers in this group because of his known struggles with alcohol.

Figure 1.

Portrait of Foster, in The Melodies of Stephen C. Foster (Pittsburgh: T. M. Walker, 1909), [6].

Foster was born on July 4, 1826, the fiftieth anniversary of independence from Britain and the day when a population prone to alcohol consumption had even more reason to drink.⁴ In 1825 the average alcohol consumption in the United States for those fifteen years and older was estimated at seven gallons per year, more than three times the average for the late twentieth century.⁵ The severity of the problem led to the formation of numerous temperance organizations over the course of the century, and many drinkers, including Foster’s father, William, pledged to abstain from intoxicating beverages. William joined the Pittsburgh Temperance Society in 1833 and, later, the Washingtonian Total Abstinence Society when it reached Pittsburgh in 1841. Such was his dedication to the cause that he once spoke at three Washingtonian meetings in a single day, publicly proclaiming himself a reformed drunkard.⁶

Like his father, Stephen Foster also developed a taste for alcohol, although opinions vary on the severity of his drinking problem and when it first began. All of Foster’s major biographers address the alcohol problem at some point, but their observations generally rely on reports from sources first introduced in Harold Vincent Milligan’s biography.⁷ Family friend, druggist, and amateur singer Robert P. Nevin refers to Foster’s drinking problem in an 1867 Atlantic Monthly article. He states that Foster “wrestled with an earnestness indescribable, resorting to all the remedial expedients which professional skill or his own experience could suggest, but never entirely delivering himself from its inexorable mastery.”⁸ Further, Nevin adds the parenthetical observation that no one knows better than he about Foster’s struggles with drinking, suggesting Foster personally consulted with him.⁹

Since Nevin’s article was written a few years after Foster’s death, neither Milligan nor later biographer John Tasker Howard places this comment in the context of those years when Nevin was more closely associated with Foster, and both suggest Foster’s alcoholism began in the 1860s.¹⁰ William W. Austin, Ken Emerson, and Joanne O’Connell, however, suggest that Foster’s drinking problems began in...