Whiskey Culture

charlesthrasher8
Oct 6
5 min read

Updated: Oct 9

1 of 3 on Prohibition

North Carolina has had a long, contentious relationship with liquor, a relationship muddled by religion and politics, rural culture, women’s suffrage, and racism.

Early in the Republic, “American whiskey was usually 50 percent alcohol; not aged; colorless; cheaper than coffee, tea, milk, or beer; and safer than water, since alcohol killed germs.” [1]

Scotch-Irish immigrants were already experienced distilling small batches of whiskey and brandy when they first settled in the mountains of North Carolina during the Colonial period. The English government, focused on collecting duties from liquor imports, especially rum, passing through the ports of New Bern and Bath, paid little attention to local production. Even had they wanted to tax local whisky, enforcement would have been challenging in the mountainous terrain of western North Carolina, as it proved over a century later during Prohibition.

Whiskey was a cash crop for the hardscrabble farmers in the east, distilled from corn they grew on small plots of land, less subject to spoilage than fruit or grain, and more easily transported. There was always a market for corn liquor, cash or trade.

The Whiskey Rebellion

The federal government first imposed a tax on distilled whiskey in March 1791. It’s sometimes called the “Whiskey Act,” and was applied uniformly across all states in the union. Stills had to be registered, and people cited for failure to pay the tax had to appear in Federal court. In 1791, the Federal court serving the mountain counties was most likely located in either Bath or New Bern, a long way to travel on bad roads.

The government’s interference did not sit well with many. In Pennsylvania, it ignited the Whiskey Rebellion. George Washington personally led 13,000 militiamen against several thousand-armed rebels. Washington prevailed and eventually pardoned the few men convicted of treason.

Opponents of internal taxes, including the whiskey tax, helped elect Thomas Jefferson to the presidency in 1800. By 1802, Congress repealed the distilled spirts excise tax and all other internal Federal taxes.

Whiskey, War & Taxes

North Carolina farmers were again free to make whiskey without hinderance. That would remain the case until the War of 1812 when a tax was imposed on carriages, sugar refining, and distilled spirts until after the war ended in 1815.

During the Civil War, the Confederacy outlawed the production and consumption of distilled liquor. North Carolina enacted distilling restrictions in January 1863. The government needed the copper from stills to make war material. The coiled copper tubing used during distillation was needed for percussion caps and artillery friction primers.

Predictably, the outlawing of legal whiskey drove a brisk black market trade, as it did in response to every attempt at prohibition. The cost of a black-market whiskey in the Confederate states rose to $40 a gallon by 1864 from an “affordable 25 cents” before the war. [2]

Drinking all the way from the cradle to the grave seemed to be the grand rule.

In 1917, The Food and Fuel Control Act outlawed the use of any grains or foodstuffs for producing distilled spirits. It was marketed as a wartime conservation measure but there was no serious food shortage. Then on November 21, 1918, the U.S. Congress passed the temporary Wartime Prohibition Act, which banned the sale of beverages having an alcohol content greater than 1.28%. It was supposedly intended to save grain for the war effort but was largely seen as a moral prohibition.

Then, on December 18, 1917, the Eighteenth Amendment (Prohibition) was propose. When ratified in 1919, the production or sale of liquor became illegal throughout the United States.

Jonathan Havens, a prominent businessman in Washington, NC.

Drinking Cradle to Grave

In 1889, Jonathan Havens, the man who built the gristmill that still stands on Washington’s waterfront, wrote about the whiskey culture in eastern North Carolina.

“Drinking all the way from the cradle to the grave seemed to be the grand rule. Dinah, the black nurse, as she swaddled the new-born infant, took a dram; Uncle Bob, the aged, gray-haired sexton, as soon as he had thrown the last spadeful of earth upon the little mound over the remains of a fellow mortal, turned to a neighboring bush upon which hung his green-baize jacket for a swing at the bottle. Even congressmen drank, and, what is queer, no one can fix the precise date at which they left off. So good were liquors considered that their attributed merits were fixed by pleasant names, the first dram of the morning was an ‘eye-opener,’ duly followed by the ‘eleven o’clocker’ and the ‘four o’clocker,’ while the very last was a ‘night-cap.’…If a friend called, he had been welcomed by the ‘social glass;’ if one had departed, a pleasant journey had been treated in a ‘flowing bumper;’ if a bargain had been made it had been rounded by a ‘liquid clincher;’ if a wedding had come off ‘a long and prosperous life;’ if a funeral had ensured, then alcoholic mixtures were a source of ‘consolation in affliction." [3]

Getting drunk and disorderly on the streets was scarcely a crime deserving punishment.

There was less public drunkenness, at least among white businessmen, than might be expected. They drank less at one time, drank over a longer period of time, even at work, and they had developed a tolerance from long practice. Drunken brawling among the less genteel, however, was commonplace.

Havens continued:

“Washington was a place of considerable commercial importance, and in my early days carried on a great coastwise and West India business. Consequently, the town was always filled with seafaring characters that were generally drinking men, and would ‘get on a spree’ when in port…Fights, the result of drunkenness, were a common everyday occurrence, and were considered a harmless kind of amusement, if weapons were not used; and ‘the delicate and entertaining diversion of biting and gouging,’ was often resorted to. …Getting drunk and being disorderly on the streets was scarcely thought a crime deserving of punishment by law.” [4]

It's deeply ironic that a state with an ingrained culture of distilling and drinking whiskey should have been the first southern state to adopt statewide prohibition a decade before the 18^th Amendment was ratified while simultaneously producing more bootlegged whiskey than almost any other state in the union.

How North Carolina came to legislate abstinence is a story that conflates politics, religion, and race.

See also Ballot in One Hand, Bottle in the Other and Blind Tigers & Monkey Rum for more information about North Carolina and Prohibition.