Whoe’er has traveled life’s dull round,
Where’er his stages have been found,
May sigh to think he still has found
His warmest welcome at an inn
Cherubimical, nimptopsical, oxycrocium. No, you haven’t found the judge’s list for the next round of the spelling bee. Nor have you come across the medical profession’s cheat sheet for the newest bout of pandemic illnesses.
This trio of nonsensical words is among the 228 “round-about” words or phrases for drunkenness that Ben Franklin published in The Pennsylvania Gazette in the winter of 1737.1 America’s founders were “anguished and perplexed” about alcohol.2 Their anguish and perplexity didn’t keep them from drinking spiritous liquors, however. John Adams is said to have enjoyed a tankard of hard cider for breakfast. Thomas Jefferson invented the presidential cocktail, according to Rorabaugh, who adds that the Founding Fathers feared that America would be destroyed in a flood of alcohol.
Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
Foreign travelers, Rorabaugh says, were “surprised and shocked” at the amount of alcohol taken in by Americans. One visitor told of a “general addiction to hard drinking,” while another said that intoxication pervaded all of the social classes of the new nation.
And where did this intoxication happen? At home, of course, but increasingly over time at a central location where the drinkers could commiserate with each other over any number of subjects and where, at times, mail was picked up, goods were bought and sold, religious ceremonies were conducted, judicial courts were held, and newspapers were read to the illiterate.
As one author proposes, religion was the driving force that propelled our forbears to the shores of North America. Alice Morse Earle, whose near-drowning in 1909, at the age of thirty-five, led to her early death two years later, wrote in one of her many treatises on life in 17th century New England that “they possessed another trait …evident in their records as their piety…with them their neighborliness was as ever present and as sincere as their godliness. Hence the establishment of an hostelry,—an ordinary it was usually called,—for the entertainment of travelers and for the mutual comfort of the settlers, was scarcely second to their providing a gathering place for the church.”3
Coupled with a desire to accommodate travelers was the felt need to regulate the sale of intoxicating liquors. As early as 1644, the colonial courts required each community to maintain a public house, and established financial penalties for those that did not. Incentives, such as exemptions from school taxes or land grants, were offered to residents to establish an inn or tavern, the two operations often melding into one. In 1668, Newbury, Massachusetts, encouraged the opening of an ordinary on “high moral grounds.”
According to Earle, the early taverns were not opened wholly for the convenience of travelers; in fact, she says, “the importance of the tavern to its local neighbors was far greater than to travelers,” for the exchange of news and opinion, the sale of “solacing” liquors, and the “incidental sociability.”
Even so, the courts placed restrictions on the operations of taverns, as they continue to do today. Landlords had to give the names of any strangers staying with them to the local equivalent of the city council, called the selectmen. If the latter considered the stranger’s presence in the community a detriment, they would warn them to leave town. No landlord could “knowingly harbor in house, barn, or stable, any rogues, vagabonds, thieves, sturdy beggars, masterless men or women.”
The local judges also hampered landlords in the operation of their establishments. They were not allowed to sell “sack or strong waters.”4 They could, at times, not have dancing or singing at their place. They could not have games played. Sometimes they were not even allowed to sell breads. They were even ordered to provide simple meals to “pore people.”
We customarily consider taverns as off-limits for women and children. A woman found in an inn was considered to be a prostitute. However, some of the finer, higher-class places did allow women to enter without disapproval. These establishments had a separate area for women that included good food, soft beds, and a fire in each room during the coldest months.
In addition, forty percent of early colonial taverns were operated by women, often the widow of the original keeper.5 The local magistrates preferred widows who knew the tavern business because they didn’t want the fatherless family to become a drain on local resources.
“Community center” might be the most concise and accurate simple definition of the colonial tavern or inn. Other than the church, it was the only place in the early days in the New World where people could gather to discuss the issues of the day, get their mail, provide for road-weary travelers, hold court, have a sociable drink with friends, and carry on daily life outside the home.
- There is some debate about whether Franklin was the first to come up with the list ↩
- W. J Rorabaugh. The Alcoholic Republic : An American Tradition. Oxford University Press USA – OSO 1981. https://public.ebookcentral.proquest.com/choice/publicfullrecord.aspx?p=5836791. Accessed 17 Jan. 2023. ↩
- Alice Morse Earle, Stage-Coach and Tavern Days.1901. ↩
- Sack refers to a fortified white wine imported from Spain or the Canary Islands ↩
- Dorothy A. Mays. Women in Early America : Struggle Survival and Freedom in a New World. 2004 ↩
Brandywine Banks 