Every Home a Distillery: Alcohol, Gender and Technology in the Colonial Chesapeake (review)

Recent years have seen growing interest (both in North America and in Europe) in the history of the alcohol industry—a subject too long neglected, despite its significance for economic development, government, and social policy. Even now research tends to be fragmented—looking at drinking houses (or types of drinking house), the brewing industry, the spirits trade, or the social and public order problems that drinking spawned. What is instructive about Sarah Hand Meacham's book is that it examines the whole landscape of drink production and consumption in the eighteenth-century Chesapeake and explores the linkages between domestic and commercial output, the tavern trade and the nature and impact of alcohol drinking. Meacham argues that alcohol consumption was high in the early Chesapeake, as across the colonial American and European worlds. Unable or unwilling to drink water or milk—frequently polluted—colonists, whether young or old, women or men, "drank at meals, and at religious and secular celebrations, as well as for medicine and for the purposes of health and beauty." In colonial America, per capita consumption ran at 15 gallons of cider and 3.5 gallons of distilled spirits annually. Meacham argues that where colonists in the more urbanized northern colonies increasingly drank beer from commercial breweries, Chesapeake settlers tippled homemade cider and to a lesser extent domestically distilled spirits. This she explains by reference to the difficulties of the import trade in wine and beer, the technological backwardness of the region, the lack of towns, heavy specialization in tobacco cultivation, and the climate (beer deteriorated quickly before refrigeration). In the early eighteenth century, Chesapeake cider—raw, naturally fermenting, made from apple pears and persimmons—was largely manufactured by women, the wives of small planters—continuing the older tradition in England before the rise there of male-dominated commercial brewing and cider production in the seventeenth century. Yet if women managed the extensive small planter output, larger scale manufacture was already a feature of the big plantations. At least some of this surplus drink was retailed at Chesapeake taverns, which Meacham shows had important economic, political, and sociable functions, as elsewhere. At least some of the taverns were owned by plantation merchants—rather similar to the way that southern German taverns selling wine were owned by the vineyard-owning nobility. Meacham draws attention to the key role of women in tavern dynasties of the period.

From the 1760s, important changes occurred in the Chesapeake alcohol trade. Imports, especially of rum, rose as Scottish traders increasingly penetrated the tobacco trade. Commercialization expanded with the spread of market places in towns, and towns themselves grew. By the 1770s, major landowners had turned alcohol production, especially distilling, into a profitable big business, employing modern technology and techniques and using a male labor force. The old female-dominated cider industry faded away. Meacham devotes a final chapter to discuss problems of consumption and argues that official toleration of drunkenness and disorder in the early eighteenth century gave way in the later eighteenth century to increasing regulation and control, at a time when members of the elite started to abandon alcohol consumption in favor of tea and other polite drinks. This is not wholly convincing and underplays the general growth of social control and moral reform in the later eighteenth century both in England and in America that encouraged the subsequent decline of public drinking by the male elite (though not of course private boozing). Overall, however, this is an interesting, well-written book that makes an important contribution to the literature, though economic and business historians may feel it lacks sufficient quantitative analysis.