INTOXICATION AND EMPIRE: DISTILLED SPIRITS AND THE CREATION OF ADDICTION IN THE EARLY MODERN BRITISH ATLANTIC by KRISTEN D. BURTON Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Arlington in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT ARLINGTON December 2015 Copyright © by Kristen D. Burton 2015 All Rights Reserved ii Acknowledgements Many describe writing a dissertation as an isolating task, and yet, so many people make the creation of this work possible. Guidance from my committee helped me as I shifted through an array of ideas and resources. My mentor, Christopher Morris, provided essential assistance as I wrangled what was once a bewildered narrative. Elisabeth Cawthon, John Garrigus, and Sarah F. Rose also helped me pull together, first, cohesive chapters, then an organized manuscript. Insightful conversations with Frederick H. Smith were remarkably helpful. I also owe him my thanks for offering his time as an outside reader. Fellowships from the Massachusetts Historical Society and the Fred W. Smith National Library for the Study of George Washington supported a large portion of my research. My deepest thanks to Conrad E. Wright, Daniel Hinchen, Sarah Georgini, Sarah K. Myers, Mark Santangelo, Neal Millikan, Michele Lee, and Mary V. Thompson for all your help in guiding my research. I owe thanks also to Douglas Bradburn for his mentorship during my stay at Mount Vernon. Finally, to my colleagues, family, and friends, your enduring support helped me to see this to the end. My parents, and my dear husband, Daniel, never wavered in their support. I give all my love and thanks to you for standing by my side during this crazy adventure. November 19, 2015 iii Abstract INTOXICATION AND EMPIRE: DISTILLED SPIRITS AND THE CREATION OF ADDICTION IN THE EARLY MODERN BRITISH ATLANTIC Kristen D. Burton, PhD The University of Texas at Arlington, 2015 Supervising Professor: Christopher Morris This dissertation exams how the spread of imperialism in the British Atlantic led to the mass production and consumption of distilled spirits during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Through transatlantic colonization, distilled liquors, once produced as medicinal remedies, developed into a thriving industry by the beginning of the eighteenth century. This change in the purpose and use of distilled spirits prompted political, religious, and medical leaders to ask new questions about the effects and possible threats of consuming such spirits. This dissertation is a study of perceptions; it examines how spirits became the means through which people evaluated the place and proper behavior of women, the iv working poor, indigenous peoples, enslaved laborers, and backcountry famers, among others. While alcohol was thought by many to be spiritually and physically nourishing, mass production and distribution of rum in the mid- seventeenth century created new questions and concerns among elites about intoxication, bodily health, and the perceived threat of lost control over the laboring poor in England, and over indigenous communities and enslaved peoples throughout the empire. Social elites constructed narratives around new notions of inebriation based upon the loss of physical, as well as moral, control. Through these narratives, physicians came to create new theories of habitual drinking as a compulsive act. Altered perceptions, constructed from unprecedented eighteenth-century drinking practices, redefined alcohol as an intoxicant. This established the framework of what became early addiction theory, which emerged during the initial decades of the modern era. Eighteenth-century imperial, medical, and religious debates over distilled spirits, in turn, established the foundation for early ideas of alcoholism and transatlantic movements advocating temperance. v Table of Contents Acknowledgements .................................................................................... iii Abstract ...................................................................................................... iv List of Illustrations ...................................................................................... vii Introduction: Slow, Yet Sure Poison ........................................................... 1 Chapter 1: Aqua Vitae .............................................................................. 31 Chapter 2: Of Beast and Man ................................................................... 71 Chapter 3: Gin-Crazed and Rum-Flodded .............................................. 116 Chapter 4: Spirits of Resistance ............................................................. 176 Chapter 5: Savagery and Civilization ..................................................... 249 Conclusion: A Disease of the Mind ......................................................... 325 References ............................................................................................. 343 Biographical Information ......................................................................... 366 vi List of Illustrations Figure 1: "Mary's Bath," detail (1528) ....................................................... 37 Figure 2: The expert doctors dispensatory (1657) .................................... 54 Figure 3: Daniel Defoe standing in the pillory ........................................... 80 Figure 4: Heywood, Philocothomista, frontispiece (1635) ........................ 86 Figure 5: A seventeenth-century French sugar plantation ........................ 98 Figure 6: Greenwood, Sea Captains Carousing in Surinam ................... 149 Figure 7: Hogarth, "A Midnight Modern Conversation" (1730) ............... 154 Figure 8: Hogarth, Beer Street and Gin Lane (1751) ............................. 158 Figure 9: "Interior of a Distillery on Delaps Estate Antigua" .................... 186 Figure 10: "Penn's treaty with the Indians at Shackamaxon" ................. 260 vii Introduction: Slow, Yet Sure Poison On November 30, 1800, Charles Adams, son of revolutionary founder and second President of the United States, John Adams, died after a long-endured illness caused by habitual drinking. Charles’ brother, Thomas Boylston Adams, notified fellow sibling, John Quincy Adams, in a somber note sent December 6, stating, “We have lost our Brother at New York. He expired after a lingering illness... We have long been looking for the catastrophe, which it was not in human power to avert. Let silence reign forever over his tomb.”1 Charles’ decline and death remained a source of great pain for his family. For years, his mother, Abigail, worried about the effect his behavior had on his life and health. As Charles commenced his studies at Harvard College in 1785, Abigail expressed her concerns in a letter to her sister, stating, “How difficult to recover the right path when the feet have once wandered from it. How much resolution is necessary to overcome evil propencities? More particularly a habit of intemperence.”2 Such behavior was familiar to Abigail, as her brother, William Smith, also suffered an early death due to habitual drinking. As Abigail watched her son succumb to his illness, she recorded her pain 1 Thomas Boylston Adams to John Quincy Adams, 6 December 1800. Adams Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston. 2 Abigail Adams to Mary Smith Cranch, 11 September 1785. Adams Family Correspondence, Volume 6. Adams Papers, Digital Edition. Made available through the Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston. 1 through indirect references in an effort to keep the details private. Following Charles’ death, Abigail wrote to her sister, Mary Smith Cranch, “He was beloved, in spight of his errors, and all spoke with grief and sorrow for his habits.”3 In the midst of the Adams family members’ sorrow for Charles’ tragic end, their descriptions of the destructive nature of alcohol reveals the vast changes that occurred by the turn of the nineteenth century in the way people understood how habitual drinking affected one’s body. Abigail wrote of Charles’ affliction as a disease, stating, “His constitution was so shaken, that his desease was rapid, and through the last period of his Life dreadfully painfull and distressing.”4 John Adams, too, framed Charles’ suffering in similar terms, as he stated in a letter to his son, Thomas, sent in the weeks after Charles died, “The melancholly decease of your brother is an affliction of a more serious nature to this family than any other. Oh! that I had died for him if that would have relieved him from his faults as well as his disease.”5 By the beginning of the nineteenth century, the understanding of habitual, excessive drinking as a disease began to take 3 Abigail Adams to Mary Smith Cranch, 8 December 1800. New Letters of Abigail Adams, 1788-1801, edited by Stewart Mitchell (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1947), 261-262. 4 Ibid. 5 John Adams to Thomas Boylston Adams, 17 December 1800. Adams Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston. 2 hold in response to radical changes in the nature of alcohol production and consumption that occurred throughout the preceding century. The notion that habitual drinking – what physicians beginning in 1852 would call ‘alcoholism’ – was hereditary also appears in John’s letter to his son.6 Having lost a brother and a son to excessive drinking, the destructive nature of alcohol consumption stuck out to members of the Adams family. William Smith and Charles Adams would not be the last family members to