This established the character and standing of the business, which in many instances derived additional lustre from the character and standing of the men engaged in it, for it is an indisputable historical fact that many brewers and taverners not only occupied prominent civil and military positions, but became influential leaders, distinguished alike by valor in the field and wisdom in council, and transmitting to their off-springs (by heredity, perhaps, no less than by the formative power of example) that spirit of patriotism which gave birth to our Nation.
In the course of this narrative, this subject will again be adverted to; but for the present, in order to put our readers in a receptive mood, the mere mention of a few historical names will doubtless suffice. Such names, for instance, as that of Samuel Adams, one of the foremost of our Revolutionary forefathers, the son of a brewer and himself a brewer, as proud of his calling as doubtless were the Revolutionary generals Putnam, Weedon and Sumner, who also brewed and sold beer. General Putnam distinguished himself alike by the ardor of his patriotism and his undaunted courage and masterly generalship. In addition to tilling his own lands, he carried on the two-fold business of brewing and tapping until, obeying his country’s call for brave hearts and stout hands, he joined the Revolutionary army, in which he won great honor and lasting fame. After the war he returned to his old home in Brooklyn, Connecticut, resuming his old business and retaining control of it to the end of his days.
The average Vermonter of our times, who up to 1904 had lived under a prohibitory law and become accustomed to look upon brewing and tapping as callings to be shunned by decent people, may possibly find it difficult to realize that the first Governor of the Green Mountain Republic, Thomas Chittenden, the man who fills a larger place in the history of Vermont, and who has done more for the independence and civic welfare of his people than any other, was a brewing tavern-keeper—a man whose unselfishness, patriotism, courage and wisdom won for him unstinted praise at home and abroad.
A modern historian (Rowland A. Robinson in “American Commonwealths”), with a keen perception of the fitness of things, concludes his work with these words: “The history of Vermont is one that her people may well be proud of. Such shall it continue to be, if her sons depart not from the wise and fatherly counsel of her first Governor (Chittenden) to be ‘a faithful, industrious and moral people,’ and in all their appointments ‘to have regard to none but those who maintain a good moral character, men of integrity and distinguished for wisdom and abilities.’”
One cannot mention Chittenden without thinking of his friend, Captain Stephen Fay, the landlord of the Catamount Tavern, who had five sons in the Battle of Bennington, and left one of them dead upon the bloody field. It was in the council chamber of this Catamount Tavern that the leaders of the Green Mountain Boys, among them Ethan Allen, met after the Battle of Lexington and determined to “unite with their countrymen” against the common enemy.
Nearly every liberty-pole in revolutionary and prerevolutionary days stood before a tavern, the headquarters of the Sons of Liberty; and not infrequently the tavern-keeper was the leader of the band. In her “Stage Coach and Tavern Days,” Miss Alice Morse Earle has a chapter on the “Tavern in War,” which opens with this paragraph:
“The tavern has ever played an important part in social, political and military life, has helped to make history. From the earliest days when men gathered to talk over the terrors of Indian warfare; through the renewal of these fears in the French and Indian Wars, before and after the glories of Louisbourg and through all the anxious but steadfast years preceding and during the Revolution, these gatherings were held in taverns and ordinaries. What a scene took place in the Brookfield tavern! The only ordinary, that of Goodman Ayers, was a garrison house as well as a tavern and the sturdy landlord was commander of the train band.”
Miss Earle cites many such examples and we might readily add a score of illustrious names borne by tavern-keepers and brewing tapsters who distinguished themselves in the Revolution and whose deeds form some of the most brilliant chapters of our history.
If the British considered the taverns as the hot-beds of sedition, as in fact they did, the Patriots with equal justice regarded them as the nurseries of liberty; and it is not at all unlikely that in the tavern of his father-in-law, where he so often made himself useful as a tapster, Patrick Henry imbibed the ideas which culminated in his soul-stirring utterance, “Give me liberty or give me death.”