Our readers may recall that in May I devoted a Timeless Review article to a review of Gentleman’s Progress 1744 by Alexander Hamilton. Well, rereading the book has rekindled my interest in drinking in Colonial America, a subject I worked on extensively about ten years ago for my first book, American Rum. I’ve therefore decided to return to two fundamental aspects of life in that era: clubs and taverns. Let’s begin with clubs, with the help of some exceptional drawings by Hamilton and the Introduction to Hamilton’s book by the noted historian Carl Bridenbaugh.
In order to fully understand what the world of the Clubs was really like, we can read a short, yet remarkably enlightening passage by Bidenbaugh concerning the social structure of the American Colonies. “Eighteenth-century custom assigned people to one of three established ranks: the gentry constituted ‘the better sort’; yeomen farmers and artisan composed ‘the middling sort’; and sailors, laborers, indentured servants and negro slaves made up ‘the inferior sort’. Transition from one class to another was not infrequent, but nonetheless distinctions between the groups were clearly made and defined. Concentration of land in the hands of a few of ‘the better sort’ and the presence of a large body of white bonded servants, transported convicts, and negro slaves in the Chesapeake tidewater society where Dr. Hamilton lived combined to buttress the barriers between classes to a greater degree than in the large commercial cities of the small-farms regions to the northward. As he traveled along, Hamilton became increasingly aware of the declining subordination of inferiors to superiors” Hamilton could not have realized it, but he provides evidence that the crisis of what many historians have called a Deferential Society had already begun. A crisis which, only a few decades later, would significantly contribute to the outbreak of the American Revolution.
The Clubs were the exclusive domain of “The better sort”. Here Gentlemen drank, unwound, debated, quarrelled, often got drunk and even came to blows. But rigorously behind closed doors, because when they stepped outside they carefully resumed the dignified, respectable façade that their high social rank required. “Club life was a prominent feature of colonial America. Especially was this in the larger towns and cities where gentlemen resorted almost nightly to a ‘set club’ consisting of a limited number and meeting at a stated time at their favorite tavern. ‘We meet, said Jonas Green, converse, laugh, talk, smoke, drink, differ, agree, argue, Philosophize, harangue, pun, sing, dance and fiddle together, nay we are really in fact a club.’ The portrait by Feke, Bridges, Wollaston, Coplley, and other colonial limners always show the gentry of eighteenth-century America in a pose of self-conscious dignity. When the clubs assembled, however, such stiffness vanished. Through the amateur drawings of Dr. Alexander Hamilton we are fortunately permitted a glimpse, as it were through the keyhole, of the gentlemen in a relaxed mood – and not infrequently with their wigs off. These seven sketches, which we may properly call The Clubman’s Progress, obviously take their cue from the great Hogarth, who was in these same years giving English pictorial satire its unity of style. …The very amateurish quality of the drawings gives them a greater realism than the imaginative subtleties of Hogarth. Collectively they provide a unique record of the colonial gentry at play, exhibiting their special blend of intellectualism, ribaldry and horseplay.”
As far as we know, it would seem that Hamilton drew these sketches at different times and for at least two different Clubs. Yet, with only a small, harmless stretch of the imagination, these sketches may be rearranged into a logical, chronological sequence, a sort of early example of comic short story, which shows us vividly what a Gentlemen’s Club meeting in mid 1700s’ Colonial America was really like.
The dignified opening of the meeting with the reading of the minutes; next, the installation ritual.
All this, however, is kept within the club, and when the reunion is over, the members sally forth into the public view looking affable and decorous.
Marco Pierini
