Colonial Spirits by Steven Grasse

Author:Steven Grasse
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Abrams
Published: 2016-08-04T16:00:00+00:00

THE HANGOVER

Like any other form of mass psychosis, rum was a social fever that couldn’t help but break, eventually. The British tendency toward taxation without representation would see to it that taxes were placed on the importation of molasses so steeply as to strangle the New England distilling industry that relied upon it. That tendency, of course, led to the Revolutionary War, which would make getting drunk a concern secondary to the survival of man and country alike. The aforementioned Slave Trade Act, and more like it to follow, would throw a wrench right into the heart of triangular trade. Increase Mather’s call for temperance would segue into Cotton Mather’s flat-out, witch-hunting intolerance (and with him perhaps the invention of America’s religious right). So by the mid-1800s, America’s love affair with rum would come to something of an end; we’d become a more sober land.

Or at least, we pretended to be.

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