Alcohol and Teetotalism: Eighteenth-Century Drinking and Temperance

While the American colonies did not often see the widespread alcoholism of Hogarth’s London, there were enough problems to produce the first American temperance movements toward the end of the century. In some cases these were branches of temperate British denominations, such as the Methodists, but a nondenominational temperance movement began around the time of the American Revolution, with a 1788 convention that suggested using only beer and cider, under the slogan “Despise Spiritous Liquors as Anti-Federal.” People who did not want to use fermented beverages at all could drink water, tea, coffee, sweet cider in season, diluted fruit vinegars, and milk—more popular in the colonies than in England or even Holland. Sweet cider is mentioned as a substitute for wine in mince pie in American Cookery by Amelia Simmons (1795), suggesting that this temperance movement recipe was already in use. Alcohol was an important preservative in mincemeat, and sweet cider would not have been used except as an effort at temperance.