They must have been drunk all the time
- Alisa Kline
- Dec 13, 2024
- 9 min read
I had two interests when I began Wallace’s History of Canaan. The first was Noyes Academy and the second was apples. I'm surprised to discover that they seem to be connected.
The big lesson about Noyes that I learned from close reading of the Wallace History was to stop mapping those events onto the 1950s school desegregation story. Noyes wasn’t about education or even equality. It was 1835. The issues in play were slavery and keeping the Union.
Educating Black students at Noyes Academy wasn’t about providing a good education to every student regardless of race. It was about proving that people with melanistic skin were educable, were human. When Southern enslavers argued that Africans were not fully human, Northern abolitionists wanted to introduce them, and the rest of the country, to educated, erudite Black men and women.
The men who mobbed the school and destroyed it did so because they thought they were preserving their new country. They were right, in so far as the South did very much secede over the issue of slavery not thirty years later. They were also drunk.
Apparently everyone was drunk almost all the time. That is what reading about apples taught me.
My interest in apples stems from encountering the fact some years ago that Johnny Appleseed wasn’t driven on his quest to plant apple trees across America because he just loved apples. He was on that quest because people would not move anywhere they could not make alcohol. Apples at that time meant only one thing, cider. And cider was alcohol. Johnny Appleseed was paid to stage the European colonization of America by drawing settlers westward with cider.
I loved the idea that as a child in school, I was told stories of Johnny Appleseed like he was some sort of folk hero rather than the king of drunkenness. And I do not say that lightly. Until I started writing this blog post, I had no idea how much alcohol was being consumed in federal New England. Neither do you. When I saw the numbers, I was shocked.
They were all drunk much of the time. They drank cider like water. And it wasn’t sweet cider. That went bad. The alcohol in cider preserved it. Wallace makes the same point about apples that I encountered with Mr. Appleseed. Men won't live where they can't drink alcohol. Planting apple trees was always job one.
Page 430
The old orchards of Canaan were famous in their early maturity. The seeds were brought from Connecticut and Massachusetts. After building a house and clearing a spot of land, the next duty of the settler was to plant an orchard.
The farms laid out by the newcomers, almost without exception, were not considered complete until the apple trees were started. The soil was moist and rich, and well adapted to the growth of fruit trees. They grew rapidly in the new soil, enriched by the ashes from the burned forests, and they bore fruit so abundantly that cider mills were erected at convenient places all over town
Notice that there’s no mention of how tasty the apples were or how they were used in pies. Apples meant only one thing. Cider. Wallace's History is replete with notations of the apple harvest of this or that year. These numbers were the measurement of civic happiness.
Page 431
The year 1822 by those who remember it, has always been called the great apple year. Many hundred barrels of cider were made and many hundred bushels of apples rotted on the ground. […]Cider was everywhere. The difficulty being to find casks to hold it, it was free to all.
Men drank it and became ugly, both in body and mind—red noses, bleared eyes, and bloated bellies were the sights that marked the devotees to these frequent libations, and there was no man brave enough to rise up and cry out: “Taste not, touch not.”
Years went by and the same unhealthy signs traversed our streets, sometimes upright, sometimes on hands and knees, and this tippling was not all confined to one sex. It was well known that wives, mothers and maidens had appetites and often indulged them. Many good men and women regretted the slavery which, like fiery serpents, was winding itself about souls and bodies; but the remedy for it was not apparent.
And don’t imagine that this drinking took place only during the evening hours. People in Wallace’s History seemed to believe that alcohol was required when men undertook a task.
Page 434
The rum used to raise the buildings [the buildings in question are the Pinnacle House and a mill] came from Jesse Johnson’s at East Endfield, who for many years kept the only store in all the region round about.
The rum used to raise the building? Of course. Even today, we would not consider a house-building project without plenty of rum on hand. Rum, it seems, was also required for bridge building.
Page 83
[From the 1808 town meeting]
Some men were employed to build a bridge over the river near Josiah Clark’s mill. It required a gallon of Micaiah Moore’s rum to complete it, the workmen drank it all, and then asked the town to pay for it, which was declined with thanks.
Even our Meeting House was raised on rum.
Page 147
[About building the Meeting House]
On the day early in September, appointed for the raising, the people for miles around were present. “Everybody was there.” A barrel of rum had been procured from Jesse Johnson at East Enfield to steady the nerves and increase the emulation of the workmen.
It wasn’t just the laboring class who were heavy drinkers. The men and women Wallace wrote about, who were Canaan's elite, also drank more or less all the time. There was enough concern about the general drunkeness that one of the Noyes founders George Kimball wrote a public temperance pledge for all to sign. No one would sign it. As Wallace relates:
Page 432
Good old Elder Wheat could not sign it, because through all his long life he had used rum and it had given him courage and strength to work. Mr. Trussell would not sign it, although he was not a hard drinker, because it restrained a man in his liberty to do as he pleased— freedom in all things was his motto.
Bart Heath drank rum because he loved it; he knew it was good for him. His wife drank it also; and it was good for her, too. Now he wasn't going to throw away any good thing in this world, because it would be parting with his rights. Doctor Tilton would sign, with a mental reservation, that the pledges should be no bar to his present habits. Deacon Drake wouldn't sign it, because he didn't wish to submit himself to so powerful a temptation as an invitation to drink would subject him. George Kimball, the lawyer, was not a drinking man.
Alcohol was everywhere present. And the temperance movement was gathering steam. At least a little steam. But like the battle against slavery, the moralistic movement against alcohol was slow to make progress.
Page 433
They looked about them and saw three stores and two taverns on the Street where rum was sold over the counter by the glass. Several other taverns about town offered facilities for indulgence. Not a day passed but some one or more men staggered home from these resorts, either too drunk to be civil, or too stupid to reflect whether their appetites might be more dangerous to their liberties than the pledge which had been offered them.[…]
These sad sights and scenes presented themselves daily to the world, and one by one a generation of drunkards went down to the grave, some of them lingering along life’s road, like decaying pine stumps, rotten and ragged, waiting for the slow tread of time to crush out their strong vitality.
Even as Wallace writes in the 1880's, he notes that things still hadn't changed all that much from Kimball's day to his own.
But the words spoken at that first temperance meeting were like good seed scattered broadcast over the earth; and through all the years have yielded an annually increasing harvest down to this day.
Wisdom, folly, philanthropy and fanaticism, since that day have taken a hand in the crusade against rum. Something has been gained, but the worm of the still is undying, crushed out today; tomorrow it shows its leprous features in another place. The combined and concentrated wisdom of all our law-makers, and of all the political philanthropists for the suppression of the sale of liquors from that day to this, has resulted in the conviction that men will have it.
Wallace might have taken some solace in that today, we still drink, but not nearly as much. Not nearly. These statistics come from the Wine Project of Oispo County. I have confirmed them elsewhere. These were the drinking habits of Americans in the era of Noyes Academy.
In 1830, American adults drank an average of 7 gallons of pure alcohol per year: the modern equivalent of 1.7 bottles of 80 proof liquor per person per week. [I might add, that it is very doubtful that the women consumed alcohol at the rate of men, so the average man was likely drinking quite a bit more even than this.]
In 1826, the 1,900 residents of Dudley, Massachusetts drank 10,000 gallons of rum.
In 1829 Albany, New York’s population of 20,000 drank 200 gallons of alcohol, an average of 10 gallons for each man, woman, and child.
The CDC defines “heavy drinking” for men as drinking 15 drinks or more a week. You can make 16 drinks from a bottle of scotch, so everyone more or less exceeded the CDC criteria for heavy drinking. They were all drunks.
This explains many things, but most especially it explains the predilection for forming violent mobs like the one that tore Noyes Academy from its foundation. Being really drunk helps when you want to be really violent. Violent mobs were one of the signature features of that era. It can’t be coincidence that massive drunkenness was also signature feature of that era.
In his telling of the events of the Noyes Academy being pulled down Canaan Street, Wallace includes this:
Page 276
A little before noon they had reached our store where they halted in front, and at once demanded that a barrel of rum should be rolled out or they would demolish the doors. Mr. C. and myself thought it best to yield to their threats, but William said "No, he would sooner die than yield an inch to these fanatical villains." He backed himself against the door, determined to resist to the last. But he was removed after much struggling, and they had the rum. Do you believe we did not wish it might be hell fire to their bodies?
I sometimes despair over the futility of abolitionism in its endless peaceful pressure. Those men and women for years, wrote and spoke and took personal risks, and had few accomplishments to show for it. Even the ultimate end of slavery came as a byproduct of the Civil War and was not the cause of it. The cause of it was that the South seceded. Over slavery. And not even the abolition of slavery, just a few limits on the practice.
But honestly, so much is so very much better than it was in the mid 1800s its hard to argue that the three great social movements of that era were not massively effective. Abolitionism, Temperance, and Women's Suffrage were intertwined. The supporters of one were in support of the others. And all of them seem to have very much shifted the ground on which they fought. As trite as it seems, Margaret Meade may very well have been correct, "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed individuals can change the world. In fact, it's the only thing that ever has."
I have the very great pleasure of visiting Gary Hamel in his studio each week and each week I am stunned at the volume of work he is producing. I snapped a few photos that give an idea of what his studio is like and also a bit of a glimpse into his process.
Gary almost always starts with photos. You can see boxes of them in the lower left of the photo above with Gary holding an unfinished work. The boxes are labeled "Men, Women, Farming, Etc." They contain old photos. The photos are critical because they are images of the past not encumbered by copyright. Most images of the past are already someone's work. Gary isn't looking to invent people so much as find them. So, the beginning is a photograph. Someone real. Someplace real.
This is a next step. The cutout of a man's photo is on Gary's work surface. He's put a face on someone else's body and added a rather large moustache and, I think a beard, although that might have been in the original. Is that even his mouth?
This fellow will make it into a bunch of paintings over time. Like this one below that is unfinished. He's the fellow on the left. Notice that his beard seems to have disappeared. The next time you see this paining it will be finished and somehow layered with meaning as Gary paints over the work he's already done to build these people into men and women with lives I am always curious about.
I didn't realize it at the time, but looking back, the man in the two paintings in this week's blog post are the same fellow. Arms folded. Expression solomn. As I spend time with Gary's invented men, they start to seem like neighbors or members of a large extended family. When I run into their faces in other places, it's like seeing a neighbor at the hardware store or walking down the road. I know these men. They are Gary's.
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