The Chicago directory for 1830 classified its business interests as taverns, two; Indian traders, three; butchers, one; merchants, one; with a poll list of thirty-two voters.

So much seed sown from the earliest times produced a bountiful harvest. In 1633 Winthrop complains that workmen were idle in spite of high wages because they spent so much in tobacco and strong waters. About this time drunkenness greatly increased and deprived the custom of bundling of whatever innocence it may have had remaining.

Josselyn, in 1675, gives a graphic description of the extravagance and drunkenness of the cod fishermen, stating that at the end of each voyage they drank up their earnings. In this year Cotton Mather said every house in Boston was an ale house. In 1696 Nathaniel Saltonstall, of Haverhill, Massachusetts, a judge who had refused to sit in the Salem witchcraft cases, wrote a letter to the Salem court remonstrating against licensing public houses. In 1678 Dr. Increase Mather said: "Many of the rising generation are profane, drunkards, swearers licentious and scoffers at the power of godliness." Dankers and Sluyter, in 1680, comment on the puritanical laws and say, "drinking and fighting occur there not less than elsewhere and as to truth and true godliness you must not expect more of them than of others."

The Reverend John Miller, in his history of New York, says: "'Tis in this country a common thing even for the meanest persons as soon as the bounty of God has furnished them with a bountiful crop to turn what they can as soon as may be into money, and that money into drinks, at the same time when their family at home have nothing but rags to resist the winter's cold; nay if the fruits of their plantations be such as are by their own immediate labor convertible into liquor such as cider, perry, etc., they have scarce the patience to wait till it is fit for drinking but inviting their boon companions they all of them neglecting whatever work they are about, set to it together and give not over till they have drunk it off. And to these sottish engagements they will make nothing to ride ten or fifteen miles and at the conclusion of one debauch another is generally appointed except their stock of liquor fail them." In his history of New Haven Henry Atwater states: "A brew-house was regarded as an essential part of a homestead, and beer was on the table as regularly as bread." When in Stuyvesant's day it was reported that fully one-fourth of the houses in New Amsterdam were devoted to the sale of brandy, tobacco, and beer, Mr. Roberts observed:

"Their existence tells the story of the habits of the people. It was when Governor Sloughter was besotted with drink that he signed the illegal death warrant of Leisler; it was when the informer Kane was possessed by the fumes of liquor of the tavern, that he foisted upon the terrified colonists the lying details of the shameful negro plot; it was when the representative of the most powerful family in the province, Chief Justice DeLancey, and Governor Clinton, the proxy of the King, were 'in their cups' that a personal quarrel led to antagonisms that threatened the welfare of the colony. Indeed the deep hold that this vice had upon the morals of the entire colony seemed to repeat and emphasize the wisdom of the name which the earlier Spanish in an intercourse had fastened upon its leading town—Monafos—'the place of the drunken men.'"

Whiskey as Money

In a large part of the territory now the United States the early settlers lived in the rudest kind of log cabins and knew no other money than whiskey and the skins of wild beasts. In 1780, after the collapse of the continental currency, it seemed there was no money in the country, and in the absence of a circulating medium there was a reversion to the practice of barter, and the revival of business was thus further impeded. Whiskey in North Carolina and tobacco in Virginia did duty as measures of value. In Pennsylvania what a bank bill was at Philadelphia or a shilling piece at Lancaster, whiskey was in the towns and villages that lay along the banks of the Monongahela river. It was the money, the circulating medium of the country. A gallon of good whiskey at every store in Pittsburgh, and at every farmhouse in the four counties of Washington, Westmoreland, Alleghany, and Fayette, was the equivalent of a shilling. And when, in 1797, the government began to coin new money for the people, the new coins did not, many of them, go far from the seaports and great towns. In the country districts, in the Ohio valley, on the northern border they were still unknown. The school-master received his pittance in French crowns and Spanish half-joes. The boatmen were paid their hire in shillings and pence, and if perchance some traveler paid his reckoning at a tavern with a few American coins, they were beheld with wonder by every lounger who came there to smoke and drink.

Temperance Societies

The first prohibitory law was that of Georgia, in 1733, and the first dawn of temperance sentiment was undoubtedly the pledge of Governor Winthrop, still earlier than this, when he announced his famous discountenance of health drinking. This first of all temperance pledges in New England is recorded in his diary in language as temperate as his intent:

"The Governor, upon consideration of the inconveniences which have grown in New England by drinking one to another, restrained it at his own table, and wished others to do the like; so it grew little by little, into disuse."