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c h a p t e r o n e “It Was Being Too Abstemious That Brought This Sickness upon Me” Alcoholic Beverage Consumption in the Early Chesapeake Consider a day in the life of a small planter in the eighteenth-century Chesapeake. He awoke at daybreak and ate a quick breakfast of corn mush and a couple of mugs of hard cider. After several hot, laborious hours of weeding his tobacco field with his son and his servant, and drinking occasional swigs of cider, he returned to his two-room house. Lunch consisted of some spoon bread, some stew, and another mug of cider. If one of the quarterly meetings of the general court in Williamsburg was in session that day, and if our colonist lived close enough to court to attend, he rode to the session to visit with his friends and conduct some business . He stopped every four or five miles at a tavern to water his horse and refresh himself with a bowl of rum punch. When he arrived at court, he met some of his acquaintances, and they went to a tavern to compare tobacco prices and learn the news. Each took a turn buying toddy for the group. A few hours later our colonist returned home, where his wife gave him some boiled beef and apple brandy. Our small planter drank what sounds like an extraordinary amount of alcohol, and his wife drank almost as much. Their children had their share of alcoholic beverages too, perhaps in a weaker form called small ale,1 or, more likely, cider. His servant or slave received alcoholic beverages as well. Cider and rum were considered obligatory for servants. Indeed, indentured servants were guaranteed alcohol; the contracts they signed stipulated that planters provide shelter, clothing , food, and alcoholic drinks in exchange for four to seven years of labor. On average, a small-planter household in the eighteenth-century Chesapeake contained six people, and they consumed an estimated ninety gallons of cider and twenty-one gallons of distilled liquor per year. A large-planter household with twenty or so slaves might drink 450 gallons of cider and 105 gallons of distilled liquor each year. (Historians call such households “upper sort” because the con- cept of social and economic “classes” was not invented until the nineteenth century .) For example, the family, employees, and one hundred slaves of the Nomini Hall plantation in the Northern Neck of Virginia consumed 150 gallons of brandy and four hogsheads of rum annually, costing the plantation’s owner £100 per year independent of the expense for the plantation’s cider, wine, and whiskey. While today the average American drinks negligible amounts of cider, less than two gallons of distilled beverages, and one and a half gallons of wine per year; annual per capita consumption of alcoholic beverages in early America was fifteen gallons of cider and three and a half gallons of distilled spirits.2 Colonists drank, frequently in same-sex groups, because they came from a tradition of heavy drinking, because there was nothing nonalcoholic to drink, because alcohol offered one of the few ways to dull the pain of illness, and because alcohol was one of the few pleasures to be had in the early modern world. The tradition from which most white Chesapeake colonists came encouraged heavy drinking. During the Middle Ages in England, finding something to drink had become increasingly problematic. In 1388 Parliament passed a law against throwing garbage into English rivers, indicating that such a practice was common. By 1425, in Colchester, England, the local leather works and surgeon barbers had polluted the nearby rivers with blood. Rivers and local water supplies in England bathed the people and their animals, carried refuse and excrement, and teemed with disease. Insects infested the water, leading prescriptive literature and cookbook authors to offer remedies for the accidental ingestion of water creatures. For example, writer Richard Suflet recommended drinking large doses of strong vinegar with fleas to cure the illnesses that resulted from swallowing the horse-leeches that were common in drinking water.3 Not surprisingly, once the middling sort could afford ale and cider, they abandoned water. “Water is not wholesome soley by itself for an Englishman,” warned sixteenth-century physician Andrew Boorde. “If any man do use to drink water with wine, let it be purely strained, and then [boil] it; and after it be cold, let him put it to his wine.” By the fifteenth century, water-drinking had...

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