“All Great Reforms Go Together”—Temperance and Abolitionism

This chapter begins with the starting point of conventional temperance narratives: Lyman Beecher’s Six Sermons on Intemperance (1826), and the American Temperance Society (ATS). Rather than being an admonishment against drinking, his sermons condemned the selling of drink, thus underscoring how the modern temperance movement always tilted against the profit motive of the liquor traffic rather than against booze itself. Understanding prohibitionism as a weapon of the weak, this chapter examines the overlooked role of black temperance at a time when abolitionism and temperance were virtually synonymous. In 1851 Maine rescinded all liquor-selling licenses, making it the first prohibition state: a move applauded by Frederick Douglass and black activists, who equated the bonds of addiction with the bonds of slavery. Even the great emancipator himself—the famously temperate Abraham Lincoln—was instrumental in passing Illinois’s “Maine Law” while a state legislator.