The Rum Historian
A Tale of Rum 6. New England
Marco Pierini
Our long-time readers will forgive us, for they already know what they are going to read in this article. This is, in fact, a short summary of the long series of articles I devoted to American Rum some years ago. There is nothing new, but I couldn’t help returning to the subject: rum production and consumption in early America is too important and I have to include it in this Tale of Rum. Moreover, GOT RUM has been growing consistently and today there are many new readers. That said, let’s proceed and commence with the story of John Josselyn.
John Josselyn travelled to New England for the first time in 1638 for more than a year, and again in 1663 for eight years. Sadly, we know very little about him. He was born in Essex, England, in 1608 and surely was from a well-off family because he had received a good education and he could pay for his two expensive voyages. We also ignore the exact purpose of his voyages, while we know that a brother of his was an important planter in the colony. Back in England Josselyn wrote a book, “An Account of Two Voyages to New England”, published in 1674. He was a keen naturalist and observer, particularly interested in medicine and botany and the Account is one of our fundamental sources about New England in this early phase of settlement. He writes:
“The fourth and twentieth day [September 1639] being Munday, I went aboard the Fellowship of 100 and 70 Tuns a Flemish bottom the master George Luxon of Bittiford in Devonshire, several of my friends came to bid me farewell, among the rest Captain Thomas Wannerton who drank to me a pint of kill-devil alias Rhum at a draught”
As far as I know, this is the first mention of rum in to-day USA.
Later in his book, Josselyn gives us also an example of precocious yankee entrepreneurial spirit. Local fishermen spent long periods at sea, working hard on fishing grounds in the bitter cold of New England and, since they couldn’t go to the taverns, the taverns went to them: “at the end thereof comes in with a walking Tavern, a bark laden with the Legitimate bloud of the rich grape, which they bring from Phial, Madera, Canaries, with Brandy, Rhum, the Barbadoes strong-water, and Tobacco”.
An account of Two Voyages
Josselyn’s rum was imported from Barbados, but soon the New England settlers began to make it, fermenting and distilling molasses imported from the West Indies. We don’t know who eventually started to produce rum commercially. I like to think that it was a Thomas Ruck, from London, who arrived in New England in 1638. He was a skilled and enterprising merchant and a distiller too and we know that in 1648 he was sailing to and from Barbados and had direct commercial relations with James Drax, that very James Drax who had played a crucial role in the development of sugar-making in Barbados a few years before.
Anyway, a thriving grain distillation flourished in New England as early as the 1640s, alongside other manufacturing enterprises, and limited quantities of imported molasses reached the colonies perhaps at the same time. Then around 1660 they started importing molasses on a regular basis, mostly to make rum. During the first decades, distilleries were small craft enterprises, usually set up at home. Distillation was a means of supplementing a family’s income, and among the first distillers we can find merchants, inn-keepers, craftsmen and numerous widows. Gradually, though, things changed and by the beginning of 1700s a real distillation industry was thriving in Boston producing mainly rum, which had already become the typical local drink. At least 25 distilleries were operating in Boston in 1720, and 40 by the end of the decade. The population of the town in 1720 stood around 10.000 people, with one distillery for every 400 residents.
New England rum was considered of bad quality, but it was very cheap. The well-to-do drank imported West Indies rum, while those who could not afford it made do with local rum. It was also exported all over British North America and it became an important commodity in the trade with the Indians and in the slave trade.
Around 1740 in Boston the distilleries were no longer small-scale household activities but real factories and they represented one of the most important manufacturing sectors and one of the first examples of mass production in America. But there is more: beside their relevant direct importance, Boston’s distilleries contributed to the development of a complex production chain. It was necessary to build many barrels to carry molasses and rum and, of course, many ships to transport them. It is also thanks to rum that shipbuilding soon became the most important manufacturing industry in New England, and its merchant fleet grew rapidly, so that it could compete with the British merchant fleet itself. On top of that, the ships had to be armed, equipped, insured, etc. In short, rum production contributed strongly to the development of a complex, dynamic local economy, able to flourish independently of the mother country.
The success of Boston’s distilling industry did not go unnoticed; on the contrary, it set a precedent in the other colonies. In New York, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania and other colonies new distilleries were born and flourished and on the Eve of the Revolution Boston had lost its supremacy in rum production. Rhode Island in particular became an important producer and exporter of rum, even thanks to its large merchant navy and to its role in the slave trade.
Figures from pre-industrial times have to be taken with a grain of salt, but it is widely believed that in 1770 the Continental Colonies, with maybe about 1.700.000 white inhabitants, had more than 100 rum distilleries and a production of more than 4 million gallons of rum a year! More or less 4 millions of gallons more were imported from the West Indies.
What did American rum taste like? Of course we don’t know, but with the production techniques of the age, probably it was harsh, greasy, full of impurities and with a heavy smell, not to say stench. It’s quite likely that today we would find it undrinkable. It was not good, but it was plentiful, cheap and strong; that was enough for most drinkers. It should also be borne in mind, however, that at the time rum was not generally drunk neat, but in concoctions which hid its original taste with sugar, molasses, fruit and all kinds of ingredients. Anyway, all contemporary accounts agree, the quality was very poor. “The quantity of spirits which they distill in Boston from molasses which they import is as surprising as the cheapness at which they sell it, which is under two shillings a gallon; but they are more famous for the quantity and cheapness than for the excellency of their rum”, so Edmund Burke wrote around 1750.
The colonists drank a lot, and rum was the iconic American spirit, not whisky. In colonial life, rum was everywhere, playing an important part in the settlers’ daily routine. It was drunk at home, first in the early morning before work, then during the meals and finally after dinner, not only by men, but also by women and boys. It was consumed in taverns and also during work: a daily ration of rum was actually a part of many laborers’ wage. Many contemporary sources tell us stories of workers who used to drink too much, provoking the government to issue laws to forbid or to limit the habit of drinking at work. Usually with little success.
Moreover, according to the great majority of the colonists, rum, and actually spirits in general, were healthy; so ill or consumptive adults sometimes bathed in warm white rum and until at least the mid-nineteenth century, many mothers bathed their babies in spirits rather than water.
What’s more, on the eve of the Revolution, rum helped to ignite the spirits of the colonists against British authorities and to mobilize the mobs against them. Later, it was fundamental in keeping soldiers’ morale high in the long years of the war. In this sense, we may maintain that rum was the true “Spirit of 1776”.
Yet it was precisely with the victory of the Revolution that the decline of American Rum began. It was due to two main reasons: a new negative view of alcohol, drunkenness and spirits in general, among the cultivated classes; and the emergence of a powerful new competitor: whiskey.
A number of physicians had already become aware of the dangers associated with alcohol and after the Revolution this new image of alcohol was backed up by new arguments. Considerations of social control were also involved, similar to those that had in the past led to an attempt to limit the number and the business of the taverns. The strongest blow to the traditional vision of alcohol as something beneficial and health-giving came from the writings and militant work of physician and patriot Benjamin Rush, who had served for a time as surgeon general in the Continental Army. In 1784, he published the pamphlet “An Inquiry into the Effects of Spirituous Liquors”. Only a few pages, packed with information on the serious physical and moral damage caused by spirits. Rush writes: “I shall conclude what has been said of the effects of spirituous liquor … a people corrupted with strong drink cannot long be a free people. The rulers of such a community will soon partake of all the vices of that mass from which they are secreted, and all our laws and governments will soon or later bear the same marks of the effects of spirituous liquors which were described formerly upon individuals”. So, a free people cannot be enslaved by alcohol: this idea of republican virtue was to survive for a long time.
The pamphlet was a great success and Rush’s medical and social theories passed into the mainstream of the American elite, though not among the common people, who continued to drink as much as before, with consumption peaking, as we have seen, in 1830. But the work of Rush, and others, was not without consequence. It had planted the seeds of the Temperance movements and attracted attention to the economic and social costs of rum consumption, just as its central role in American life was vacillating in the face of new competition from whiskey.
In the war years, the Royal Navy blockaded American ports, and rum and molasses imports from the West Indies therefore became very scarce in the areas controlled by the Continental Congress. Whiskey distilled from relatively abundant local grain was used to fill the demand for spirits and the soldiers got accustomed to it.
After the war, rum distillers faced a new and unpleasant situation. Importers and distillers of rum and molasses continued to pay the import duties, and, adding the costs of its transportation within the country, their product became too high-priced to be competitive, except, for the moment, along the seaboard. Rum was expensive because made from imported molasses that paid a duty, whisky was cheap because it was distilled from cheap domestic grain, and at a time of great growth in alcohol consumption, production of American rum remained stagnant, while imports of rum from the West Indies collapsed.
Actually, whisky was very cheap. The Appalachian Mountains formed a barrier to the transport of grain from the new western settlements to east coast markets. Corn was so bulky that a horse could not carry enough across the Appalachian Mountains to provide its own feed. Some farmers shipped their grain to New Orleans along the Mississippi. As the cost of transportation made it impossible to take it to the east coast, transforming it into spirits was the logical choice: whiskey was worth more than grain, about six times as much for the same volume, and so a horse could carry enough whiskey to make a profit. Over the years the population increased, and so did production, and when transportation to the east coast became much more economical thanks to the earliest canals and steamboats, a river of cheap whiskey began to flow.
Last, but not least, the taxes on rum and molasses were easy to collect as these products landed at ports, while whiskey had a huge advantage: it was close to many customers and far from the tax collectors. Americans had never drunk New England rum for its taste; it was the alcoholic effect that people wanted. And now it was cheaper to get inebriated on whiskey than on rum.
Rum also suffered from the rising American nationalism. After the war, the US wished to affirm its national identity, its break with the colonial past, and its differences from other nations. A wave of nationalism swept American culture. In this new cultural climate, rum made from imported molasses became a symbol of colonialism, economic dependence and decadent tastes. Whiskey, on the contrary, made at home with American grain, meant national identity, independence, and honest habits. To conclude, around 1830 whiskey supplanted rum as the favorite spirit of Americans. Throughout the 1800s, rum production declined year by year, eventually becoming a minor item of the spirits industry. The golden age of American rum was over.