ILLUSTRATIONS "You may as well preach to the Indians against rum as to our people". Benjamin Franklin's Punch Barrel . "Drams, grog and sotting were not diminished" A slave kaffle "Evidently primed with flip and toddy" PAGE 9 19 28 "Did Peter slap his fair round belly and chuckle when he named the snow Jolly Bachelor?" 85 Map of the west coast of Africa, reproduced from an engraving made in 1791. . . 117 "The cloaking of insidious and inhuman practices with the white mantle of religion". 121 Captive negroes, secured by bamboo withes 135 Plan of the Brookes, showing how negroes were stowed between decks. 169 Shackles and Instruments of Torture used on Slave Ships . 175 "Ready at all times for fight or flight". 193 INTRODUCTION Quite aside from the political and social significance of Prohibition, rum (that specific beverage and not its current, all-inclusive meaning), has had an astonishing influence on the history of the United States. With that thought in mind, I set about to marshal all of the well-known and most of the little-known facts concerning rum. The resultant, formidable and copious notes, I found to be closely connected, one to another, so that it required much less of the narrator's magic than I had expected, to weave them into the warp and woof of romantic historical whole-cloth; cloth, it is true, that turns out to be the same old material, but with a different texture and sheen. Throughout our history, from Columbus to the Civil War, we are constantly confronted with rum or its social, political and economic by-products. It runs through the events of that epoch as an everrecurrent theme, though I have found no one who has until now attempted to use it as the primary theme. Throughout our early history flows the stream of mellow rum. Whether for good or evil, it is there, and we are forever coming upon short, decisive comments by competent authorities regarding its significance. Woodrow Wilson wrote, "Out of cheap molasses of the French Islands, she [New England] made the rum which was the chief source of her wealth-the rum with which she bought slaves for Maryland and the Carolinas, and paid her balances to the English merchants." John Adams wrote: "General Washington always asserted and proved that Virginians loved molasses as well as New Englanders did. I know not why we should blush to confess that molasses [the raw material for making rum] was an essential ingredient in American independence. Many great events have proceeded from much smaller causes." Rum has done much to stimulate the pages of history, for where we find rum, we find action, sometimes cruel, sometimes heroic, sometimes humorous, but always vigorous and interesting. Introspecting and honest New Englanders summed up a phase of contemporaneous hypocrisy, the religious cloak wrapped around their slave-trading, with the phrase "Missionaries on deck and rum in the hold." And Cowper played with a similar thought, in verse: "I own I am shocked at the purchase of slaves; And fear those who buy them and sell them are knaves; What I hear of their hardships, their tortures and groans; Is almost enough to draw pity from stones. |