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Introduction
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
Introduction ➻➹ “Do you know Jack?” begins some Jack Daniel’s distillery websites and brochures. Readers learn that “Mr. Jack” bought his first still at the age of thirteen in 1863 and founded the “nation’s oldest registered distillery” three years later. Readers are told that “Mr. Jack” always dressed in “a formal knee-length frock coat and a broad-brimmed planter’s hat.” Thus America’s largest distilling company suggests that its whiskey is really the offering of an elite southern planter. Consumers who drink Jack Daniel’s whiskey are invited to fantasize that, by imbibing, they too become grand southern planters with the wealth and leisure required for the home distillation of whiskey and the appreciation of it. In this fantasy there are no inconvenient lower-class men or women or enslaved laborers—only a wealthy planter who has made some whiskey and shares it with his equally wealthy guests as a sign of ease, generosity, and intimacy.1 In reality, large planters were unlikely to distill their own alcoholic beverages by the 1860s, and they were very unlikely to share them for free. The whiskey that they drank, and the enslaved men who made it, were recent interlopers in the history of alcoholic beverage production. Distilling remained a rather new and stilluncertain technological process and had but a short while earlier been almost exclusively the work of women. This book investigates the world of alcoholic beverage production from the late seventeenth century to the late eighteenth century in the Chesapeake, the increasingly settled portions of Virginia and Maryland that touched the Chesapeake Bay and its rivers. Alcoholic drink was one of the few items that colonists could not live without. In a place where the water was unsafe, milk was generally unavailable , tea and coffee were too expensive for all but the very wealthy, and soda and nonalcoholic fruit juice were not yet invented, alcoholic beverages were all that colonists could drink safely. Even so, colonists imbibed startling amounts of alcohol. By 1770, the average adult white man drank the equivalent of seven shots of rum per day, and an average white woman drank almost two pints of hard cider per day. Children consumed alcoholic drinks daily, as slaves likely did as well. White servants were guaranteed alcoholic beverages by their employment contracts . Apprentices took daily breaks for drinks with their masters. Men running for office wooed voters with alcoholic concoctions. Women not only consumed alcoholic drinks, but they also cleaned houses and babies with them and used them as beauty products. Men and women, white and black, used alcoholic mixtures as medicine in attempts to cure headaches, lockjaw, melancholy, and colds. Colonists drank alcoholic beverages during church services, in courtroom proceedings , in the House of Burgesses, at quiltings, at home, at taverns, at weddings, and at funerals. They drank raw ciders of apples, peaches, persimmons, and other fruits; they drank ciders that had been distilled into apple and peach brandies and cherry “bounce”; they drank molasses made into rum, and, occasionally, a little wheat made into ale. And toward the end of the eighteenth century, they turned corn into whiskey. And yet, despite the obvious importance of alcohol to Chesapeake colonists, historians do not know how they acquired all these drinks. The significance of alcoholic beverage consumption in the American colonies emerges from several excellent books. One scholar has demonstrated that Massachusetts colonists used taverns to contest, first the authority of the Puritan elite, and then the authority of the English, helping to foment the American Revolution. Another found that tavern-going helped spread revolutionary ideas in Philadelphia as well, although with the ironic twist that, while republican men spouted notions of equality, the taverns they patronized were increasingly stratified by class. A third study established that Europeans courted trade with Native Americans by selling them alcohol , which Indians then adopted into their mourning and other rituals. Finally, a fourth scholar focused on the temperance movement from the 1780s to the 1830s and determined that the movement began as a reaction against cheap corn whiskey made by western settlers. All of these works offer nuanced and persuasive accounts of alcoholic beverage consumption in early America, but Every Home a Distillery is the first book to examine how colonists actually acquired their alcohol in the eighteenth century.2 Just how colonists came by their drink turns out to be a complex and revealing story. The limited materials related to alcoholic beverage production that have survived...