Reviewed by Simon Middleton | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 61.2

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Reviewed by Simon Middleton | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 61.2 | The History Cooperative

Reviews of Books

Taverns and Drinking in Early America. By Sharon V. Salinger. (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. Pp. xi, 309. $ 42.00 cloth; $24.95 paper.)

Reviewed by Simon Middleton , University of East Anglia

Early Americans were profoundly ambivalent about their partiality for alcoholic beverages and the time they spent in taverns. As Sharon V. Salinger notes, "John Adams found nothing contradictory in beginning each day with a tankard of hard cider, even as he ruminated whether it was 'not mortifying ... that we Americans should exceed all other ... people in the world in this degrading, beastly vice of intemperance.'" Thomas Jefferson was similarly alarmed by the proclivity for cheap spirits that was "spreading through the mass of our citizens," yet he is credited with inventing the "presidential cocktail party" (pp. 2–3). Although some feared that heavy drinking encouraged immoral behavior, many more preferred beer and wine over regularly tainted drinking water, and by the mid-eighteenth century per capita consumption of rum and other spirits ran to four gallons per annum. Included among the few public spaces in early America free from express connection with either church or state, taverns, inns, and ordinaries provided a variety of services and were a ubiquitous feature of the colonial scene. In addition to food and accommodation for travelers, a living for their keepers, and a steady stream of income for the licensing authorities, taverns also served as meeting places for magistrates and merchants, post offices, clubs, and as venues for auctions, entertainment, and militia musters. Above all, however, taverns provided the setting in which the colonists indulged their seemingly insatiable appetite for public boozing.

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