Chapter 2

The Message Trickles South

Introducing the Freed People to Temperance, 1865–1876

We have met one slav’ry boys, in blood we put it down;

Now the liquor slav’ry next, our bloodless arms shall crown;

We shall meet it face to face, despite its demon frown;

Down with the rum-curse forever!

—C. L. Shacklock, “Prohibition Battle Cry,” fourth stanza

The middle of the city is a great open space of irregular shape, a wilderness of mud, with a confused jumble of railway sheds, and traversed by numberless rails, rusted and splashed, where strings of dirty cars are standing, and engines constantly puff and whistle. In one place I saw beside the track a heap of bones and skulls of animals, collected from battle-fields and the line of march for some factory, moulding and blackening in the wet weather. Bricks and blocks of stone and other rubbish were everywhere. Around this central square the city was formerly built, and is now building again.1

If this was what Atlanta looked like to the tourist John Dennett on Christmas Day 1865, it must have not looked even this good when the AMA missionaries Frederick Ayer and his wife arrived in early November. Indeed, conditions improved slowly, as most city streets remained unpaved into the 1880s, and it took years before it could be truly said Atlanta had risen phoenix-like from the ashes. Ayer was born in Massachusetts in 1803 to a Presbyterian minister but grew up from two years of age in New York’s frontier region, where he experienced first-hand the fervor of the famed “burned over” revival region. Ayer was a young man in Utica when Charles Finney led his great revival there between October 1825 and May 1826, producing over two thousand converts and many revived Christians. Like many other young people in the area, he underwent a conversion experience during this time, and by 1829 his religious commitment moved him to make himself more “useful” by becoming a teacher in an Ojibwe Indian school established by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions on Mackinac Island, Michigan Territory. Ayer founded Ojibwe mission schools in various parts of Wisconsin and Minnesota over the years but always felt a special connection with Finney, so he visited Oberlin College in 1842, during Finney’s presidency. While there, Finney ordained Ayer, and the Oberlin community subsequently became so committed to Ayer’s work among the Ojibwe that it organized the Western Evangelical Missionary Society to help finance it. When that society merged with others to form the American Missionary Association, he left the American Board to affiliate with the AMA. Fortuitous for the cause of temperance in Black Atlanta was the fact that Ayer and his wife had witnessed and fought against the negative effects of alcohol abuse among the Ojibwe in the various stations where they worked, developing a particularly strong hatred for alcohol. The Ayers brought a wealth of cross-cultural educational experience with which to establish the AMA’s presence in Atlanta and soon became known for their extensive personal relief work among the freed people. Although he arrived as a gray-headed 62-year-old with a life-long respiratory ailment and died within two years, in that short period of time Frederick Ayer successfully organized a school, a six-hundred-member temperance society, and the city’s first Congregational church, and became one of the signers of Atlanta University’s charter application. Ayer was only the first of several Northerners under the auspices of evangelical nexus organizations to arrive in Black Atlanta with the temperance message.2

Fig. 2—Brown & Dwyer’s Saloon and Hagan & Co., two late 1860s Atlanta liquor purveyors. Kenan Research Center at the Atlanta History Center

Recently emancipated slaves led Atlanta’s postbellum demographic revolution. Between 1860 and 1870 the population of Atlanta more than doubled, and in line with the South’s ten largest cities so too did the percentage of blacks in that population. Between 1860 and 1870, blacks went from being 20 percent of Atlanta’s population to more than 45 percent. As in other Southern cities, black immigration eventually slowed, and white population growth soon surpassed black growth. After 1870 the relative size of Atlanta’s black population began a long, slow, steady decline lasting into the twentieth century, but Atlanta’s overall size relative to other Southern cities was increasing at the same time. In 1890 only New Orleans, Richmond, and Nashville were larger, and by 1900 only New Orleans and Memphis. Atlanta’s population growth was not unrelated to its boosters’ proud assertion that it was an exemplary “New South” city. Within Atlanta there were spaces—and a space—carved out for and by African Americans.3

Black Atlanta and Alcohol

Although difficult, life for blacks in post-emancipation Atlanta and the urban South, generally, was filled with exciting potential. Because whites believed blacks “naturally” belonged on plantations and wanted to keep them there, the presence of urban black migrants suggested they embraced a different vision for their lives. Many newly freed blacks considered city living a way to improve their standard of living for, as ex-slave and Atlanta immigrant Julie Tillory announced, her goal was “to ’joy my freedom.”4 Life in Atlanta possessed all the potential inherent in a fresh start in a new place, but also many challenges, because most black immigrants were illiterate and unskilled, or semiskilled workers at best. Throughout the South, young and old freed people avidly sought at least the rudiments of literacy, and cities were particularly appealing because Northerners often established schools in urban areas. Blacks viewed educational opportunity as a fundamental part of their freedom and essential to improving their standard of living. In addition, because Atlanta housed Union troops and a growing black population, it appeared to promise a degree of security, community, and respite from the white-on-black violence of rural areas. Urban population density also facilitated the creation of a network of black churches and fraternal organizations. After the war, these organizations had to be built from the “ground up,” unlike other Southern cities that boasted antebellum-era networks of black churches, schools, and societies. Because Atlanta’s pre–Civil War free black population was so small, it could only sustain one Methodist and one Baptist congregation, both of which were closely overseen by whites. Black Atlanta was the “wild west” of community development for any black with the gumption to move there. There was no elite class with which to network, or compete, so achievement was based on one’s skills, hard work, and luck—and what whites would permit.5

Where blacks lived in Atlanta immediately following the war was not as much a function of law or custom as it was of the housing shortage, its market-driven corollary of high rent, and their abject poverty. In 1866 one missionary observed that “a little shed” without a pane of glass went for $15 to $20 per month, while another lamented that “We find them in tents and shanties and cabins of all description made of old cloth, tin and tine, the remains of roofing of buildings destroyed by the army.” It is evident that the housing of most freed people improved slowly, for in 1879 the houses in the black neighborhood of Shermantown were still described as “huts.” Financial exigencies clearly trumped racial prejudice as the primary determiner of residential patterns in the early years after the war. Choosing the least expensive areas, the freed people clustered on the outskirts of the city near landfills and railroad facilities or on “bottom” lands prone to flooding, all of which the white residents avoided. This resulted in an “urban cluster” residential pattern. By 1880 Atlanta had about ten clusters ranging from 77 to 91 percent black, but freed people lived in all parts of the city, and most did not live in the clusters. The clusters, however, had an influence “far beyond” what the numbers of blacks living there might suggest, because their population density provided the demographic basis for the development of black institutions.6

Fig. 3—Shermantown, an 1879 sketch. Harper’s New Monthly Magazine. Kenan Research Center at the Atlanta History Center

The three largest and most well-known black-majority clusters were Summerhill, Jenningstown, and Shermantown. Following the war, William Jennings, a Republican lawyer, owned land in the Summerhill area south of the central business district that had many small houses previously occupied by slaves. Summerhill, which was adjacent to a city dump, had suffered extensive damage during the war. Since whites would not buy his houses, Jennings sold them to blacks for one hundred to $200 each and allowed them to make appealing $2.00 monthly payments. This was the perfect housing opportunity for the freed people, as the daily wages for unskilled labor at that time were less than $2.00.7 But as former slave dwellings, these houses constituted some of the worst housing in the nation. It was in the Summerhill neighborhood that the Methodist Freedmen’s Aid Society founded Clark College and where the infamous 1906 race riot primarily occurred.

Jennings was also the agent for a landowner whose property on the west side of the city contained the remains of Confederate fortifications. He began selling this land to blacks, too, and by July 1867 he had sold 130 of 300 lots in what came to be known as Jenningstown. A hilly area immune from flooding, Jenningstown represented some of the best land blacks could afford to own. Jenningstown also attracted blacks because of the anticipation created by the AMA’s 1867 announcement that it intended to build a university nearby. The third area, Shermantown, was originally an eight-block area between North Collins, Wheat, Harris, and Fort Streets. It developed east of the central business district on flood-prone lowlands. This area took its name from the fact that General William T. Sherman’s troops camped here during the war. Shermantown grew eastward down Wheat Street (now Auburn Avenue), as well as north and south, comprising much of the city’s Fourth Ward in the years after the war, which made it Atlanta’s only black majority ward.8

Fig. 4—Black Settlements, 1870. From Dana F. White, “The Black Sides of Atlanta: A Geography of Expansion and Containment, 1970-1870” Atlanta History Journal (Summer/Fall 1982): 210. Kenan Research Center at the Atlanta History Center

Some smaller black neighborhoods had also developed by the 1880s. They were Tanyard Bottom, near a city dump and tannery on the north side of town; Pittsburgh, near the roundhouses of the Southern Railroad to the southwest; and Reynoldstown, near another roundhouse east of Summerhill. By the 1890s a black neighborhood had also grown up around Spelman Seminary, which the Woman’s American Baptist Home Missionary Society founded in 1881 for African American girls. Whether large or small, all black majority neighborhoods were characterized by extreme poverty and municipal neglect. Atlanta’s white press portrayed the hardships of life in these neighborhoods in sarcastic, demeaning, and sensational language, sometimes referring to blacks as “cullud gentlemen” and “society ladies.” One headline read, “A Mulatto boy cuts the entrails out of a playmate with a razor,” while another article described Jenningstown as populated by “niggers, bobtailed dogs and babies,” whose “migratory” residents usually disappeared about rent day and turned up “again a few days afterwards.”9

Fig. 5—Black Settlements, 1880. From Dana F. White, “The Black Sides of Atlanta: A Geography of Expansion and Containment, 1970-1870” Atlanta History Journal (Summer/Fall 1982): 211. Kenan Research Center at the Atlanta History Center

According to the 1880 census no enumeration district was more than two-thirds black or more than four-fifths white. In white neighborhoods it was not unusual for black domestics to live in a house behind their employer or in adjacent narrow alleyways. But despite the relatively integrated housing and the apparently close proximity of the races, unpaved streets made the small distances that separated the races seem even larger than they were. Even within an urban cluster model there was a clear sense of where one neighborhood began and another ended.

It was to this space for blacks that Frederick Ayer and other Northern evangelicals came in the years following emancipation. And when they arrived, it did not take long for them to broach the issue of alcohol use. But was there an alcohol “problem” in Black Atlanta? Did the stresses related to emancipation soon inspire pathologies of alcohol abuse to which Northern missionaries were responding? How did alcohol use affect freed people’s lives? Alcohol abuse was of some consequence in Black Atlanta, but not in the ways one might initially anticipate. The remainder of this chapter explores the impact of alcohol abuse on Black Atlanta, assesses the freed people’s attitude toward alcohol use, and explores the first decade of efforts by the American Missionary Society, the American Tract Society, the National Temperance Society, and the AME Church to persuade African Americans to accept teetotalism.

“The Warden and his Deputy Both Stays Drunk Nearly Half the Time”: Law Enforcement, Criminal Justice, and Alcohol

Georgia’s notorious convict lease system is a helpful starting point for unpacking the above questions.10 Although Georgia’s Reconstruction-era government invented neither the convict lease system nor forced prison labor, in the postbellum years Georgia initiated what was to become a decades-long regional commitment to convict leasing. This system arose soon after the hostilities ended in 1865 from a convergence of governmental and corporate fiscal exigencies, labor supply shortages, and racist assumptions. In addition to cash-strapped Reconstruction governments and white paranoia that the freed people would refuse to work, the Southern infrastructure desperately needed rebuilding. The war’s physical and economic devastation made it difficult for state and local governments to raise enough cash to fund basic government services in the early postbellum years. In addition to providing basic services, governments also had to repair or rebuild much of the war-ravaged public infrastructure. This need was especially acute in Atlanta because General Sherman had burned so much of the city. From the 1870s through the 1890s railroad companies rebuilt their tracks to align them with Northern ones, and extractive industries feeding Northern industrialism like coal mining and lumbering experienced exceptional growth, creating a need for abundant cheap labor. Since this was low-paying and heavy manual labor, whites expected the freed people to provide the bulk of the workforce. Industrialists preferred to hire whites in factories, but then claimed that black laborers hired in the extractive industries so frequently changed their jobs or just did not report to work that they often had to keep as many as 50 to 75 percent more workers on the books than were needed to work on a given day. The combination of a strong demand for cheap labor (in both the public and private sectors) and governmental budget constraints resulted in the convict lease system. So states would not have to foot the costs involved with incarcerating prisoners, they cleverly converted their prison systems from an expense item to a revenue item and did it on the backs of disproportionately black convict laborers.11

A December 1866 law established Georgia’s convict lease system. Georgia’s first convicts were not leased, however, until 1868 when the Georgia and Alabama Railroad and the Selma, Rome, and Dalton Railroad each contracted for one hundred prisoners. These private companies assumed full responsibility for the prisoners, housing and feeding them in camps at the worksite, and hiring guards to secure them on the property. Although considered inmates of the state’s penitentiary, leased prisoners did not reside in the actual penitentiary unless they were deemed too ill to work, reducing it to little more than a hospital. As did former slave masters and overseers, private guards whipped prisoners for “slacking,” even though Georgia’s 1868 constitution prohibited it. In the first year of the program, the principal keeper of the penitentiary, who was responsible for inspecting prison camps, reported that the convicts’ “humane treatment” was “entirely ignored.” Similar observations were repeatedly reported to the state legislature throughout the duration of the convict least system. Eventually the state appointed a physician to visit the camps, but visitations did little to stem the abuse, for Georgia soon became dependent on convict leasing revenue. By 1870 Georgia’s penal system became a revenue-producing arm of government, earning $10,756.48 in 1875 and over $300,000 annually by the end of the century. Business owners, several of whom were political officials or their business associates, were pleased with the dependability of their workforce, labor costs far below that of free workers, and above all, their untold millions in profits. Profiting from criminal convictions thus became normative for Southern governments and businesses in the “New South.” As W. E. B. DuBois observed, convict leasing was the logical outcome of the mentality that “the black workman existed for the comfort and profit of white people.”12

But the convict lease system was not just about finding profitable ways to dispense with otherwise costly governmental obligations. It also served as the state’s primary means of controlling black labor, encouraging industrial development, and maintaining white supremacy in a post-emancipation society. Since slave owners had previously been personally responsible for punishing their slaves, it was a new thing for the state to assume responsibility for blacks who behaved criminally. Prior to the war it was rare for Georgia’s penitentiary to house black convicts, but by the end of 1865 it held large numbers of blacks, and after 1871 the prison population was always at least 85 percent black. Courts sentenced increasing numbers of black men, at progressively younger ages, and for longer periods of time. In the space of 40 years the total prison population increased ten times, and by the 1890s almost half of the prisoners were under 21. The racism of the system became so blatant that it was not unheard of for officials to use the words “prisoner” and “nigger” interchangeably. Typically, convicts were put to work in industries like railroad building and coal mining, building the “New South” about which Atlanta’s business and political leaders crowed so loudly. Convict leasing embodied the contradictions of the New South by reconciling economic development and racial subjugation.13

Police and judges fed men and boys into this convict lease system, and Atlanta’s law enforcers were among the most zealous. Unlike in some other Southern cities, Atlanta’s police force never employed black officers, so the suspicion of discrimination was implicit in virtually every act of law enforcement in Black Atlanta. Black Atlantans were not just sentenced disproportionately compared to whites, but Atlanta’s police also arrested blacks at a higher rate than police in other major Southern cities. The most frequent causes for arrest were vagrancy and petty misdemeanors, which likely reflected the large numbers of transient black migrants to Atlanta seeking work or housing. Drinking, to the extent it occurred, would have only exacerbated the situation. A little drinking, the loss of a game of craps, a heated conversation, or a perceived insult to someone’s honor could all preface an arrest. The limited extant police records show that 55–60 percent of all arrested individuals before 1890 were black, even though blacks never comprised more than 46 percent of Atlanta’s population during these years.14

Given the combination of housing shortages, unemployment, underemployment, racial prejudices, and the institutionalized racism of the criminal justice system, the last thing Black Atlanta needed was inebriated on-duty officers, but it had them too! Drunken policemen were a recurring problem, and they exacerbated Atlanta’s already tense race relations. Although patrolmen frequently faced charges of drunkenness, the worst year was probably 1873, when 20 percent of the police force (5 out of 26) was charged with being drunk on duty at least once. All were initially suspended pending a hearing, but the final outcomes were not always what would now be considered appropriate. Two received reprimands and a fine, two were dismissed, and one had the charges dropped and reclaimed his back pay. Law enforcement inequities agitated Black Atlanta so much that Howard Rabinowitz maintains, by the 1880s, probably more than in any other Southern city Atlanta’s blacks had entered into literal “warfare” with the police. Black crowds frequently harassed policemen escorting suspects to the station, hoping to free them. Police arrests of blacks were inlaid with a broad filigree of racism because policemen, all of whom were white, generally interacted only with the poorest and most desperate freed people, and their superiors tended to believe them rather than any charges of brutality and harassment coming from black citizens. Drunken police working under these conditions only made bad situations worse.15

The danger of alcohol use in such a racially hostile environment is suggested by an incident that occurred on July 30, 1883.16 White and black newspaper reports of this incident were so disparate that one almost thinks they are describing two different events, but this only indicates the vast gulf that existed between the white and black worlds of Atlanta. The Atlanta Constitution reported that Officer Holcomb Scarborough’s superiors asked him to speak to Eliza Richardson as part of an investigation into an arrest of another person. At some point he decided to arrest Richardson, but blacks mobbed Scarborough in an effort to prevent her arrest. In the ensuing ruckus Scarborough shot and killed Eliza. He was suspended, but an investigation the next day exonerated him. In the investigation Scarborough denied he had been drunk at the time of the shooting. Apparently little more than his race and status were needed to convince authorities of his integrity. The Constitution decried the “well-known” practice of black mobs interfering with arrests. In striking contrast, the black weekly, The Vindicator, reported simply that a drunken Scarborough shot indiscriminately into a black neighborhood and killed a pregnant Eliza Richardson and wounded a young boy named Willie Scott, whom doctors doubted would live. It then reviewed other examples of anti-black violence in Georgia in recent weeks. Shooting and killing an informer, witness, or a suspect, whatever the case may be, while conducting an investigation apparently did not damage Scarborough’s career, for by 1884 he had been promoted to detective, where his primary duty was to investigate crimes.17

Police brutality toward blacks was commonplace in Atlanta. It was not uncommon for police to beat blacks while arresting them. Black complaints to the city’s mayor in 1876 brought nothing more than a request that “patience and forbearance” should be exercised toward blacks. Between 1865 and 1885 city policemen shot and killed at least twelve blacks while conducting arrests. In only three of these cases were the officers prosecuted, and each time they were acquitted. In the early eighties the black newspaper The Weekly Defiance regularly criticized how the police and courts treated blacks. It condemned police who ignored reported assaults on blacks and shot at unarmed fleeing suspects. Police harassed blacks by purposely standing in the way of female pedestrians, forcing them to walk around them, and by making first-class ticket purchasers at the DeGives Opera House sit in inferior seats (before Jim Crow laws required it). In addition, the Defiance complained that blacks brought before the Recorder’s Court received higher fines than whites for the same crime. The low probability of black complaints about police brutality being taken seriously, the likelihood that charges of drunkenness would not result in meaningful discipline or job loss (only 40% in 1873), and the threat of black mobs undoubtedly all conspired to increase the likelihood of on-duty officers showing up inebriated in black neighborhoods.18 Policing of black neighborhoods might have been perceived as so undesirable that officers would drink to stiffen their resolve, perhaps not unlike lynchers who took a little alcohol to brace themselves in their efforts to “defend” white civilization. While rural Georgia blacks feared violence from the KKK and other vigilantes, Atlanta’s blacks feared the drunken police officer.19

Blacks caught up in Atlanta’s alcohol-plagued law enforcement system were then sentenced to a convict lease camp and had more reasons to fear drunken white authorities. In the spring of 1883, state physician Dr. Thomas Raines visited the camps of the Dade Coal Company for a week. He stayed drunk the whole time, but that did not stop him from certifying as healthy 12 sick prisoners brought in on stretchers. Also, guards were sometimes drunk when they beat prisoners for violating camp rules. One prisoner, Charlie Bailey, complained that at his camp “The warden and his deputy both stays drunk nearly half the time” and claimed to have seen the warden “hit a man 200 licks and he was drunk at the same time.” The Durham Coal Company also had an alcoholic “whipping boss,” who was ironically named Captain Goode. (Drunken administrators of convict camps, however, could also be “nice” drunks, like the alcoholic superintendent who was so well liked by the convicts that they went on strike after his firing.) Inebriation normally exacerbated the inherent tensions between white law enforcement and black suspects and convicts. Eugene Genovese argues (and antebellum African American fiction writers depicted) that the biggest problem slaves had with alcohol was the drinking done by their masters, and these stories suggest that the freed people’s biggest problem with alcohol was its abuse by law enforcement officers, a striking parallel indeed.20

“An Astonishing Streak of Sobriety”: Black Atlantans’ Use of Alcohol

But most black Atlantans were neither convicts nor arrested by the police. What role did alcohol play in the lives of the majority of Atlanta’s blacks?21 What was the day-to-day reality of alcohol use and abuse encountered by missionaries like Frederick Ayer? Did black Atlantans drink as heavily as whites, adopting such common practices as taking a hot toddy before bedtime, or perhaps dram drinking?22 Were they so frequently inebriated that it interfered with their family life, employment, or citizenship responsibilities? Assuming that the prejudices of Southern whites and the temperance sentiments of Northern whites would give both groups a heightened sensitivity to black drinking patterns and abuse, I closely examined comments made in travel journals, the records of those who went south to work in Black Atlanta, and the city’s white press for any reference to freed people and alcohol, expecting abuse to be highlighted and minor incidents exaggerated or condescendingly editorialized. The findings were mixed, and occasionally surprising.

The uses of intoxicating beverages and the definition of inebriation are culturally determined, and we know that it was common in the African cultures from which American slaves came for power, status, and gender roles to determine who drank, when they drank, and how much they drank. Prior to leaving Africa, most Africans would have been familiar with alcohol in palm wine and beer. The way Africans consumed these drinks “taught the lessons of hierarchy” because higher status individuals usually profited from any sale of the beverage, and on special occasions they drank first and then determined the drinking order of other community members.23

The ways whites regulated enslaved and free blacks’ use of alcohol reinforced the “lessons of hierarchy” learned in Africa societies. During slavery, whites proscribed slaves’ and free blacks’ drinking by law and custom in cities and on plantations. Beginning in 1853 city ordinances not only prohibited Atlanta’s free and enslaved blacks from selling and buying alcoholic beverages but also forbade them from even entering a retail liquor establishment. Such laws were common in the antebellum urban South. Although it was illegal to sell liquor to enslaved or free blacks, many plantation owners gave their slaves several days off at Christmas time and provided liberal amounts of whiskey or beer. Masters permitted slaves to drink on other special occasions also. In Frederick Douglass’s experience, masters encouraged slave drunkenness between Christmas and New Years. Douglass thought masters did this to give slaves a perverted sense of liberty by making them think the alternative to slavery to man was slavery to drink. He hated this “grossest of frauds” because he claimed it tended to prevent slaves from thinking about ways to escape, thus perpetuating their bondage. But some masters would provide whiskey, brandy, eggnog, cider, or beer and then monitor their slaves’ drinking. According to fugitive slave, temperance speaker, and novelist William Wells Brown, drunken masters treated slaves worse than sober ones. His writings associated intemperance with slaveholders and portrayed sobriety as an instrument slaves used against whites. Charles Stearns, an abolitionist who purchased a plantation after the war, described at length the traits of the freed people, specifically noting that they were neither given to drink nor total abstainers. He found that the freed people did not like to spend money for liquor when they needed other things. The existence of laws prohibiting the sale of liquor to slaves, combined with masters’ self-interest in their workers’ sobriety, suggests that although slaves drank with and without permission, and sometimes to excess, whites’ proscriptions of slave drinking were generally effective. Most historians of the subject agree that the African cultural patterns that slavery reinforced changed only gradually following emancipation.24

Travelers in the postbellum South sometimes commented on drinking customs, but they tended to contrast whites’ heavy drinking with blacks’ lower levels of consumption. Although drinking declined throughout the nation by mid-century, the decline was less pronounced in the South, which had a particularly strong reputation for heavy drinking. Planters’ conception of gentility and the South’s rural culture meant that fewer Southerners shared the North’s evolving bourgeois work ethic, which combined with the evangelical reform nexus to make the practice of abstinence flourish. In late 1865, the Chicago Tribune correspondent Sidney Andrews toured Georgia and the Carolinas and declared whiskey drinking the “prevailing vice of the whole people.” Andrews noted that on Georgia’s trains people were more likely to bring along their favorite alcoholic beverage than lunch. A few years later, the Englishman Robert Somers concluded that Southerners held liquor-drinking “in greater social esteem” than any other people in the world, but he noticed that they mostly drank in saloons and taverns and seldom at home, a change from antebellum times. American Missionary Association field secretary E. P. Smith toured the South each winter specifically to observe the habits of the freed people, and in 1870 he reported that although they drank more than was good for them, they did not drink as much as whites. He said he never saw an intoxicated “Negro,” but that he had seen several intoxicated whites. Smith further asserted that stories of black mothers giving whiskey to their babies were greatly exaggerated. In 1867 the AMA missionary Edmund A. Ware equated the freed people’s attitude toward liquor with that of antebellum Northern whites. He said there seemed to be “much the same feeling, or rather—want of feeling on the subject that there used to be in New England before the agitation of the temperance question.” Just as Northern society had needed a reform movement to inform its conscience, so too did the freed people. But this was a fundamentally optimistic appraisal for it assumed blacks had the same ability to learn and change their habits as whites. Into the 1880s, outsiders who visited America agreed that Southerners drank more than others, and that whiskey was particularly popular, but negative reports of the freed people’s drinking practices were rare and usually referenced those in small towns and rural communities.25

The Englishman Charles Nordhoff is the main exception to these observations by outsiders. In the mid-1870s Nordhoff toured the South, and his writings reveal a generally unfavorable view of the freed people’s “progress.” In his book he quoted the following cynical words of an Atlanta newspaper: “In the matter of temperance has there been progress? Nay, in this respect the freedmen are a thousand percent worse off than they were in slavery. Rarely do we find a strictly temperate man. Very nearly all drink.” Nordhoff thought the paper was a little harsh, but accurate. Various things could account for his perspective. Perhaps Nordhoff expected to find much less drinking among freed people than he found, or perhaps he discussed black drinking practices with whites who ostensibly “knew their Negroes” and believed them to be heavy drinkers. It is also possible that his travels simply brought him into an exceptionally large number of incidences of inebriated freed people. Whatever the case, Nordhoff’s comments and newspaper excerpt confirm others’ observations that teetotalism was not a prominent African American value in the early post-emancipation years.26

Although explanations for silence in the historical record are seldom obvious, one silence on this matter seems noteworthy, and it comes from John W. Alvord, superintendent of schools for the Freedmen’s Bureau and colporteur for the American Tract Society-Boston during the war. As a Congregational minister, Oberlin alumnus, and onetime American Anti-Slavery Society agent, Alvord held impeccable antebellum reform nexus credentials. In 1869 the Freedman’s Bureau director General Oliver O. Howard sent Alvord on a tour of the South to report on the condition of the freed people. He sent back a series of letters, and in one of them he mentioned hearing reports of increased intemperance on the Sea Islands. But after five days in Atlanta in January 1870, Alvord made virtually no mention of intemperance there. Earlier, in 1867, in response to reports of intemperance among freed people in Virginia, General Howard had asked him to oversee the creation of temperance societies for the freed people. Given Alvord’s personal background, his notice of drinking in other places, and his responsibility to organize temperance societies for the freed people, it is not likely that he would have ignored patterns of intemperance anywhere in his travel report. In fact, in 1867 Alvord had written of intemperance among the freed people that “We do not find them notoriously given to this vice.” Given his background, Alvord would have had a relatively low threshold for defining “notorious” alcohol abuse. In the context of Alvord’s life and professional responsibilities, his omission of any reference to intemperance in 1870 Black Atlanta strongly suggests that it was not a glaring problem there.27

Atlanta’s newspapers also shed light on black drinking. The Mayor’s Court and Recorder’s Court columns in Atlanta’s newspapers did not indicate a court system swamped with drunken black criminals in the decade after the Civil War.28 Although they wrote in sarcastic and derogatory ways about the freed people, they did not report or complain about disproportionate numbers of inebriated blacks being dragged to court. Although no week passed without multiple arraignments for public drunkenness or the catch-all category of “drunk and disorderly,” the papers often did not indicate race, and when they did, as many whites as blacks were so charged.29 As might be expected, Atlanta had its coterie of habitual drunkards. When the Weekly Sun complained about an increase in crime in 1871 it did not mention alcohol as a factor, but by the 1870s white drinking on Independence Day seems to have been on the rise. On the first court day after July 4, 1870, there were 24 cases in the Mayor’s Court. The paper commented that “of course” the majority of the cases were “drunk and disorderly” charges from the “glorious fourth.” But the stories did not mention race. On July 4, 1873, the police only charged one of the three blacks they arrested with intoxication, while five of the twelve whites were so charged. In general, the newspapers’ court reporting did not create an image of drunken blacks filling Atlanta’s streets.30

Rather than report daily examples of black drunkenness, Atlanta’s newspapers were more likely to spotlight black decorum during holiday celebrations, and Independence Day and Christmas were traditionally heavy occasions for heavy drinking.31 Although the press’s condescending comments mocked the showiness of black-dominated Independence Day celebrations, the press never reported violence, public drunkenness, or criminal behavior at these events. Instead, in the early years following the war, the press considered them to be little more than Republican rallies with politicians addressing integrated crowds sometimes as much as one-fourth white. In 1868 the Atlanta Constitution was so impressed with blacks’ decorum that it ended its description by saying “the negroes deserve great credit for their orderly demeanor during the exercises as well as during the night of ‘The glorious Fourth.’” In 1871 when black benevolent societies participated, the Daily New Era reported nothing negative about the celebration. On Emancipation Day 1872, an event irregularly celebrated in Atlanta,32 the Grand United Order of Odd Fellows held a parade, and the paper described them as “very orderly” and “composed of the very best class of the colored people.” Later that year when 19 railroad cars of blacks came to Atlanta to celebrate Independence Day, a tradition that would continue for many years, the press found nothing negative to report. As late as July 1885, the papers said of Independence Day celebrants that the “darkies took little liquor” and that most of the 62 drunks arrested were whites. If anything, the white press showed that it was whites, not blacks, who had a problem with public intoxication on holidays.33

Some signs indicated, however, that as early as 1875 the trend was beginning to reverse itself. Following Christmas the newspapers reported many liquor-related crimes and highlighted those committed by blacks. The rise in crime was partly attributable to the new mayoral tradition begun that year to free all prisoners held in the city jail on municipal charges. Most prisoners were black, and as the papers tell it, clemency made Christmas a busy day for the police. After each Christmas the Atlanta Constitution ran a “Christmas Crimes” column. “Christmas time and cheap whisky developed an amount of rascality among our darkies which we must confess we were unprepared for,” the Constitution reported in 1875. “The clemency of Mayor Hammock in releasing from the guard house the roughs and disorderly persons the police had arrested, proved to be a mistake.” The police charged blacks in various stages of inebriation with three assaults with attempt to murder, plus multiple lesser crimes, several occurring in saloons. But this report is the exception that proves the rule. The reason the city was “unprepared” suggests that up to this time blacks were rarely known for these public displays of drunkenness. The practice of freeing Atlanta’s mostly black jail population at Christmas, which continued for years, is perhaps analogous to the liberty some slave owners used to give slaves during the week between Christmas and New Year’s. For Christmas 1876, police restricted the use of firecrackers, creating a quieter city, but reporters claimed they saw more intoxicated men and boys on the streets than they had seen in six months. Seventy-five cases, several times more than usual, appeared on the Recorder’s Court docket on December 26. The papers could not report on all of these arrests, but they highlighted black crimes. In 1877 there was so little alcohol-related crime that it prompted the Constitution’s editors to exclaim, “You would hardly have known it was Christmas.” While blacks did not seem to drink nearly as much as whites in the early years after emancipation, their drinking likely increased with time. For Southern whites, emancipation had raised all sorts of racial control “fears,” and thus the parallels between the policies of slave masters and the new postbellum governments toward African Americans could be eerily similar at times.34

An event that occurred in Atlanta on Independence Day in 1866 illustrates the nature of the freed people’s problem with alcohol in the early years after emancipation. In Atlanta, as in other Southern cities in 1866, blacks dominated public Independence Day celebrations. This year they began with a procession led by a band and a grand marshal, followed by uniformed, banner-carrying members of two groups who have since been lost to history: the Order of the Golden Rod and Rising Generation and the Order of the Hickory Rod and Fallen Generation. The Golden Rod banner depicted Charles Sumner giving a speech from Plymouth Rock, and the Hickory Rod banner had the motto “My God, My Duty, and My Self.” Although men and women belonged to both groups, and both participated in the procession, they marched separately. A captain adorned in red, white, and blue on a white stallion preceded the parade, and it ended with a female “Genius of America” dressed in tattered clothes and a gaudy hat, with an old can filled with dirty cotton attached to her neck. Atlanta’s blacks had turned the national holiday into a celebration of the end of slavery and the mentality that supported it, for the hickory rod and the “fallen generation” likely referred to the near-death caning of the Republican Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner by South Carolina representative Preston Brooks and the military defeat of his enthusiastic supporters in the Civil War. Sumner was obviously being honored for his presumed faithfulness to the highest ideals of America’s Puritan founders. Such celebrations revealed the freed people’s readiness to imagine their own narrative of national events.

The procession ended in an oak grove near the city’s Oakland Cemetery with speeches and picnicking. After the clubs positioned their banners and took their seats, the audience heard speeches from three black speakers before feasting on corn bread, custard, sweetmeats, and a variety of other foods. Joseph Wood, pastor of the Bethel AME Church, was master of ceremonies. Although the white press reported the whole affair in a conspicuously mocking tone, nowhere did it mention alcohol was part of the celebration or that any celebrants became inebriated, even though the saloons were open.35

Before the war whites had commonly celebrated the Fourth publicly, with “big dinners” and “big drinks”—and getting at least a little tipsy—but in 1866 any celebrations by whites were done quietly at home. The Daily Intelligencer explained the absence of the heavy drinking by whites with a quote from a well-known temporarily sober local drunkard named “Jones.” Jones said that because the Fourth was a “day we of the South have agreed to surrender up to the niggers, Yankee school-marms, and such like, if a Southern gentleman gets drunk, friends might think he is celebrating the day, and I wish to be above suspicion” (emphasis in original). The humor of a drunkard self-identifying himself as a “gentleman” who wanted to be “above suspicion” made light of the truth that just as excessive drinking before the war held important social meaning for whites, so too did abstinence in the wake of losing the Civil War. Alcohol use itself was quickly becoming racialized, as most Southern whites segregated themselves from public celebrations of national holidays.36

While Southern whites could appreciate Jones’s logic, unfortunately for blacks, it was lost on Northern white soldiers stationed in Atlanta. As the mostly black celebrants returned from the cemetery, two drunken soldiers exchanged some heated words with a few members of the crowd, and a row followed, with the soldiers firing shots that injured some blacks. Enlisted men under the direction of a sergeant arrived to restore order, but a little later an inebriated, mounted lieutenant showed up to assume command. As the lieutenant marched the men away from the scene they began balking at his orders, and the sergeant, siding with the infantry, knocked the lieutenant off his horse. Although the newspaper in 1866 downplayed these and other “disturbances of a trifling character” among the soldiers, the following year the commandant of the post ordered the mayor to close all saloons on July Fourth. In 1867 the paper expressed the hope that it would prevent a repetition of the previous year’s “disgraceful events.”37

This overview suggests the subtle truth that alcohol abuse was not so much a problem in Black Atlanta as it was for Black Atlanta. Although Atlanta’s white press and outside observers had plenty of opportunities to expose heavy alcohol use or abuse in the black community, they seldom reported either. While Atlanta’s blacks were clearly drinkers, little evidence suggests anything near epidemic levels of abuse in the early years of freedom. As late as the eve of the 1885 local option campaign, the Atlanta Constitution observed that the freed people were “not specially given to intemperance” but, rather, had developed “an astonishing streak of sobriety.” Atlanta’s blacks apparently entered freedom without a widespread custom of heavy drinking, or a significant number of alcohol abusers, but also without a natural tendency toward teetotalism. Even with that being the case, there is no reason to doubt that a significant number of black convicts were drunk at the time they committed their deed, just as was the case with whites. In fact, it was not unheard of for individuals who leased convicts to oppose prohibition, evidently fearing a decreased pool of labor. But in the early years of freedom, the average freed person was likely more pragmatic than ideological in his or her approach to beverage alcohol. For the vast majority of blacks, the excitement and challenges of creating a new life in freedom overrode tendencies toward dissipation, but this was not enough to prevent Northern missionaries from finding an alcohol “problem,” for they could easily construe the mere lack of teetotalism as a “liquor problem.” The missionaries arrived in Black Atlanta with a religious and cultural predisposition to preach abstinence even if they did not witness public drunkenness on every street corner and were not bombarded with tales of alcohol-induced violence.38

“Intemperance Will Soon Lay Hold upon Their Excitable Natures”: Northern Missionaries and Roots of Temperance Sentiment in Black Atlanta

The attitude of the missionaries and the nexus organizations toward the freed people was analogous to their attitude toward western settlers and eastern urban immigrants in the antebellum period. In each case their Christian republican worldview discerned a threat to republican government in the masses of uneducated, unchurched, and presumably unvirtuous citizens; this time, those citizens just happened to be of a different race and in the part of the nation that had recently failed to secede from the union. As in antebellum days, this threat was not seen as a cause for hand-wringing but, rather, as a new opportunity to make oneself “useful” in God’s kingdom. Using almost the same republican language with which they had previously targeted unchurched whites, evangelical Northern missionary agencies now turned their attention to the freed people. “In their intelligence, Christian culture, and sobriety is the future welfare of the Republic in no small degree involved,” opined the National Temperance Advocate editor in 1873. Speakers at annual meetings of the AMA and ABHMS, and their annual committee reports, regularly spouted Christian republican tropes when describing their Southern mission work. One AMA speaker reminded his audience that “liberty can not live in this country without Christian morality,” while another argued that a “more Christian citizenship” was needed to prevent “our experiment in self-government” from shipwreck.39

The North’s victory in the war emboldened those committed to the values of the antebellum evangelical reform nexus. Arrogance set in, and James McPherson has aptly labeled this postbellum attitude of Northern missionaries “culturalism,” a belief in the intrinsic superiority of Northern evangelical culture over all others. This prejudice equally targeted Southern blacks and whites. Missionaries criticized the freed people who claimed to be Christian but found it easy to justify lying and petty theft, although some did recognize this for what it was, namely, a learned response to the exigencies of life under slavery and the hypocrisies of their white Christian owners. But Northern missionaries also took issue with the Christianity of the former slave masters. “We can not trust the cause of Christ to the Judas who has betrayed it,” one Northerner charged. Southern Christians were too corrupted by the “spirit of slavery” and “tainted with sympathy for the rebellion” to be entrusted with morally rebuilding the South. Such attitudes obviously only added to the existing tensions between the missionaries and local whites during Reconstruction.40

Evangelical missionaries’ racial attitudes are best described by the term “romantic racialism.” Romantic racialism emerged from the nineteenth century’s emphasis on passion and feeling and the growing tendency to believe in intrinsic racial traits. Evangelicals accepted the idea of intrinsic racial differences but argued that the supposedly inherent traits of black people—docility, expressiveness, impressionability, and religiosity—were childlike, even Christian, because of their supposedly nonaggressive and non-threatening nature. Although these traits were deemed generally positive, blacks’ “impressionable” and “emotional” natures presumably made them more “susceptible” to vices such as intemperance. This thinking underlay the AMA’s 1867 warning about the freed people: “All evil influences are springing swiftly into activity within and around them. Natural depravity, with instinctive force, will germinate its bitter fruits rapidly; intemperance will soon lay hold upon their excitable natures.”41

Significantly, the missionaries did not consider intellectual capacity a racially inherent trait but, rather, believed that given equal religious, educational, and political opportunities blacks would become as virtuous, as economically productive, and as politically responsible as whites. Henry L. Morehouse, secretary of the American Baptist Home Mission Society, argued that blacks had “essentially the same nature and endowments as the white man” and the same ability to become “self-reliant, aspiring, [and] cultured.” An editorial in the Baptist Home Mission Monthly expressing this view was appropriately titled “Culture is Colorless.” Because Northern missionaries assumed blacks had the same ability to assimilate Northern evangelical culture as other peoples, they were the most racially progressive thinkers of their day. Although it is tempting to dismiss such paternalistic thinking as “racist,” to do so obscures the fact that the evangelical missionaries’ belief in the pernicious effects of the system of slavery made them theological and ideological forerunners of the Social Gospel movement and twentieth-century “public” Protestantism, which traditionally attributes social injustice and racism to inequitable systems and structures of power rather than to individual acts of discrimination or personal moral failures. AMA missionaries derived from the abolitionist theological camp, which developed the concept of “social sin,” a key element in the hermeneutical foundation of today’s liberal Protestantism.42

Many Americans at the time viewed the Civil War as a clash of opposing civilizations or cultures, and evangelical missionaries widely believed that the North’s victory would not be complete until their culture dominated the South. The freed people’s supposedly tractable nature made them the logical starting point for remaking all Southern society, thereby completing the Union victory. One can see the centrality of culture as a driving force in Northern missionary thought in these comments by the AMA’s corresponding secretary Michael E. Strieby about starting Congregational churches among Southern whites:

There is undoubtedly a large mass of white people in the South as unlettered, impoverished, and shiftless as the blacks. To them we must come with sympathy, education, and the gospel. There is no power like an intelligent Christianity to arouse men from indolence, poverty, and vice. With this gospel thus brought to the lowliest class, it may be uplifted, and its uplifting will move the masses above it.

Northern missionary organizations committed themselves to a long-range plan to conquer the South with New England culture and religion, and they chose to begin with the freed people.43

Frederick Ayer was the vanguard of the AMA’s cultural uplift effort. On November 27, 1865, he assumed control of a school of 75 students being run by two former slaves, James Tate and Granithan Daniels.44 The next day he had one hundred students. During the first year, Ayer taught in a reconstructed army chapel he had shipped from Chattanooga, and in the war-damaged building of the Bethel AME Church, the city’s oldest black congregation. At the time, a smallpox epidemic was raging, especially among the refugees streaming into the city. Employed freed people, who quickly turned to self-help efforts, did the best they could to fund an infirmary for black smallpox victims, but white Atlantans considered the hospital a nuisance and made the city relocate it beyond the city limits. Events like this inspired one missionary to report on racial attitudes: “The whites, generally do not seem disposed to favor them, any farther than it benefits themselves. Still they do not seem to be discouraged.”45

The AMA’s commitment to temperance as part of its culturalism was evident from the moment it established its presence in Black Atlanta. To begin with, all AMA missionaries had to sign a teetotal pledge. Three of the first five AMA missionaries in Atlanta were former Oberlin students: the sisters Lucy and Rose Kinney, who arrived in November 1865, and Jennie Barnum, who arrived a few weeks later. Lucy returned to Oberlin in 1866, but in 1867 Eliza Mitchell arrived, and more “Oberliners” followed. Whether or not AMA teachers were Oberlin alumni, they all had a personal commitment to abstinence that showed in their teaching and missionary work. One example of how a teacher’s personal commitment to abstinence could affect her teaching is the AMA missionary in South Carolina who wrote a mnemonic verse about the presidents for her students. When she wrote the line for Franklin Pierce, she conveniently forgot his effective lobbying for the controversial Kansas-Nebraska Act and instead turned his personal life into a moral lesson by calling him “A drunkard whom we blush to name.” As always, the teacher was the most important element in a child’s education; but the influence of the educational literature itself should not be overlooked.46

Textbooks were even more central to education in the nineteenth century than they are today, and Northern evangelicals sought to capitalize on this fact. Because rote memorization was the pedagogical norm, students regularly suffered through their “recitations,” making the textbook the sine qua non of education. Well aware of the textbook’s importance, during the war the newly independent American Tract Society-Boston published a series of readers for the freed people called the “Educational Series,” as well as other literature, most of which seems to have circulated in Atlanta after the war. The ATrS-Boston modeled its readers after the popular New England readers of the day but added special religious and civil emphases that betrayed their culturalism and romantic racialism. Just as much as they taught literacy, they conveyed cultural values that Northerners believed the schoolhouse of slavery had ignored, twisted, or contradicted.47

Early Temperance Literature for the Freed People

ATrS literature initially arrived in Atlanta despite the best intentions of Gilbert S. Eberhart, Georgia’s first superintendent of schools for the Freedmen’s Bureau (October 1865–September 1867). In order to gain the confidence and cooperation of Georgia’s Southern whites, Eberhart had announced that blacks would not be taught social equality and suffrage in Bureau schools. Accordingly, he adopted the A. S. Barnes & Co. readers, which, compared to ATrS-Boston texts, included relatively few exhortations on civic duties or warnings about vice, and no references to the war, Southerners, or the new civil rights of the freed people. Despite Eberhart’s decision, the ATrS-Boston sent him more than five thousand books and other educational materials during his first year on the job, and he consented to distributing the literature throughout “half” of the state. It is not clear which areas received the literature or whether Atlanta was included. But regardless of what Bureau schools did, Frederick Ayer founded an AMA school, and he chose to use ATrS publications. Less than two months after Frederick Ayer arrived, he received 50 copies of The Freedman and 20 copies of Freedman’s Journal, two small monthly newspaper-readers produced by the ATrS-Boston not only for students but also for families to use at home for literacy training and moral instruction. The Freedman, first published in 1864 and the simpler of the two publications, included writing lessons and stories geared for young children, while the Freedman’s Journal contained facts about the government, nature, history, and current events (relevant to the freed people) written for slightly more literate and mature audiences. Both journals printed stories and sometimes direct messages from “friends” of the freed people like Methodist layman and temperance advocate General Clinton Fisk, urging such virtues as sobriety, honesty, thrift, and self-reliance. The Freedman and Freedman’s Journal immediately attracted some interest, and within a month 15 blacks wanted to purchase their own subscriptions at 25 cents per year. Ayer thought there was enough interest—and literacy—for him to distribute more than a hundred copies each month, so the AMA began placing monthly orders with the ATrS on his behalf.48

“The Cure of the Drunkard,” in the January 1866 issue of The Freedman, was probably the first printed temperance message to arrive in Black Atlanta. In this little vignette the character John Abbot signed a pledge to abstain from intoxicating beverages for one year. At the end of the year he renewed his pledge, this time for 999 years. A few days later John visited the tavern where he used to drink, and he told the keeper, as though he were in pain, that he had a lump on his side. The proprietor said the lump was the result of his abstinence. John asked if drinking would take away the lump, and the tavern keeper said yes, and then poured him two glasses of whiskey. John replied, “‘I guess I won’t drink, especially if keeping the pledge will bring another lump; for it isn’t very hard to bear after all’; and with this he drew the lump, a roll of greenbacks, from his side-pocket, and walked off, leaving the landlord to his reflections.” The story was shrewdly designed to cause its readers, most of whom were living from hand to mouth, to engage in some practical “reflections” of their own. Stories of this nature graced the pages of both publications on multiple occasions.49

Both newspapers presented a consistent temperance message with a wide variety of arguments, consistent with antebellum ATrS tracts. The Freedman actually never cited Scripture in defense of teetotalism, instead emphasizing the unhealthy effects of drinking and arguing that it was a waste of money. It also warned children that tobacco was a gateway to worse substances, like liquor. The Freedman’s Journal, however, on occasion did use Bible verses. In “What You Cannot Afford,” Clinton Fisk listed first that “you cannot afford to drink any kind of spirituous or malt liquors.” He then quoted several Bible verses and warned that drinking would squander people’s money and destroy their self-respect. The Journal also printed a short dialogue called “Drinking by the Acre.” When Tim McMoran asks John Nokes to have a drink, the following conversation ensues :

“I’ve made up my mind that I can do better with land, than to drink it.”

“Who’s asked you to drink land, I’d like to know.”

“Well, I find, that every time I drink sixpence worth of liquor, I drink more than a good square yard of land worth three hundred dollars an acre.”

Whether rural or urban, blacks placed a high priority on land ownership, and it is easy to imagine this pragmatic approach resonating with many. By the end of the century, the assets of several of Atlanta’s more well-off blacks were based on land ownership because it was a way to improve one’s status that whites’ discriminatory practices could do little to prevent.50

More important than these monthly papers, however, were the ATrS-produced classroom readers (textbooks) that AMA missionary-teachers began using almost immediately, for they also incorporated a strong temperance message. In the first three “classes” of the Freedman’s Spelling-Book students were taught one-letter words, two-letter words, and then three-letter words and syllables.51 Even at such a rudimentary linguistic level, the authors could include a clear condemnation of drinking:

It is a sin to sip rum.

A sot is a bad man.

Do not get in a pet.

A la-zy man can not get a job.

God is ho-ly; he can see if men sin.

If a man sin, he is bad.

A sot has rum or gin in his jug.

In this simple lesson, students were introduced to the concept of sin, given examples of good and evil, taught about God’s nature, and repeatedly warned about the evil of intemperance—and all that within the limits of a three-letter-word vocabulary! As the lexical and syntactic complexity increased, the author conveyed more complex messages, such as this one with strong undertones of pro-revival theology and a hint of Christian republicanism: “Strong drink not on-ly stim-u-lates: it stu-pe-fies the sens-es and the mind, and leads one to vi-o-late du-ty, and per-pe-trate hor-rid crimes.” The passages also incorporated a millennial optimism: “When we dine we drink no wine, in nine-teen hundred and nine-ty nine.”52

The Second and Third Readers used short readings to teach new vocabulary words, proper pronunciation, and lessons about abstinence. One story from the Second Reader, “Mary and the Drunkard’s Children,” contained a list of five new words with their definitions. The story told about a drunkard’s family who had recently moved to town. His two children came to Mary’s house looking for food. Mary and her mother fed them breakfast, and Mary’s mother promised to look after them in the future and hoped to be able to convince their father to become sober. “Sober” was one of the words defined at the end of the story. The second and third readers mixed poetry with prose. For example, “Bertie Rand’s Temperance Pledge” was a three-stanza poem:

Though I am only ten years old,

Said little Bertie Rand,

Upon the side of Temperance

I proudly take my stand;

And naught that can intoxicate

My lips shall ever pass:

For there’s a serpent slyly coiled

Within the drunkard’s glass.

Poor Allen Benton’s little Will,

In tattered garments clad,

Whose blue eyes oft are full of tears,

Whose heart is seldom glad,

Has learned, through fear of angry blows,

His father’s face to shun.

It must be very, very hard

To be a drunkard’s son!

When others round their wine shall sit,

I’ll never bear a part,

And thus disgrace my father’s name,

Or break my mother’s heart

But I am weak; not of myself

Can I resist this sin:

The Savior aids the weakest child

That putteth trust in him

This little poem caused students to pledge every time they recited the poem, reminded them of how drunken fathers made their families miserable, and taught them that only through faith in Jesus Christ can one hope to overcome the temptation to drink. This last point was as old as the temperance movement itself. Through practice sentences, stories, and poems, American Tract Society readers and newspapers served purposes beyond just teaching reading—and temperance was one of them.53

But ATrS publications reached not only African Americans enrolled in missionary schools. Although Eberhart did receive and distribute thousands of “school books and papers” from the American Tract Society, and in 1868 Georgia received more ATrS-New York literature than any state except Virginia, as far as Atlanta is concerned, it is also important to note that AMA missionaries Frederick Ayer, Malvina Higgins, Lizzie Stevenson, and Cyrus W. Francis each received free shipments of ATrS literature, and that from 1871 to 1874 the ATrS sponsored colporteurs in Fulton County. After school and on the weekends, missionary-teachers conducted home visits in Black Atlanta, during which time they distributed primers, copies of the Freedman’s Journal, and tracts, and of course, colporteurs were doing the same thing. Children used these materials before enrolling in school, for Malvina Higgins reported that the primers she distributed during her visits were so effective that some students enrolled in school having already taught themselves up to the third reader in the A. S. Barnes & Co. series. Many who could not attend school also achieved a basic level of literacy using these materials in their own homes.54

Among the items missionaries and colporteurs distributed were temperance tracts designed specifically for the freed people. A handful of such tracts were published between 1863 and 1873. The American Temperance Union published the Temperance Tract for the Freedmen during the war, which was probably distributed by AMA and ABHMS missionaries working behind Union army lines along the Atlantic coast. No evidence exists that the National Temperance Society reprinted it after the war, so it probably never reached Atlanta. In 1863 Isaac Brinckerhoff, a former colporteur and the first ABHMS missionary to work with the freed people, published with the ATrS-New York a tract titled Advice to Freedmen, in which he directly addressed temperance, among other issues, using traditional Christian republican language and pro-revival theology. He warned that although they were under army control at the time (he was working on St. Helena Island, South Carolina) and did not have much access to liquor, there would come a time when they would have access, and that they should abstain from drinking because it would deprive them of the use of their reason and “blight” their “prospects for usefulness.” He called ignorance an “evil” imposed by slavery and urged them to get an education that would make them “useful, virtuous, and Christian.” Although it was written in the context of the war, Frederick Ayer received copies of this tract for distribution in 1866. At the end of the war, the ATrS-New York published another Brinckerhoff tract, A Warning to Freedmen against Intoxicating Drinks, which discussed how the temptation comes, how to overcome it, and the consequences of yielding to the temptation and ended with an abstinence pledge for readers to sign. Among other arguments, again Brinckerhoff warned that drinking “unfits” one for the “required heart power and mental power necessary to escape from the wrath to come,” traditional revivalist language about one’s need to have uncompromised reasoning abilities to respond to the Gospel in order to escape God’s judgment at the end of the world. Colporteurs undoubtedly distributed this tract in Black Atlanta. In addition to receiving Brinckerhoff’s tracts from the ATrS, by 1867 the National Temperance Society was also sending tracts to Frederick Ayer, although it is not clear what they sent since their first tract for the freed people, Freemen, or Slaves, was not published till 1868.55

Following emancipation, the freed people pursued literacy at an almost frantic pace, and Northerners’ distribution of these various readers and tracts played well into this passion for education, the existence of which has been thoroughly demonstrated by Herbert Gutman and Heather Andrea Williams, among others. Before the war, slaves “stole” an education anyway they could, and as freedom spread during the conflict they rushed to establish schools, with or without the help and sanction of whites. Freed people’s drive for literacy underlay their push for enfranchisement, financial sacrifices for their children’s education, multiple conflicts over control of black schools, and the beginning of public education in the South. According to Gutman, Georgia’s blacks led the way in education. He maintains that “between 1865 and 1867, black people in Georgia did more to educate their children than those in any other Southern state.” One Atlanta manifestation of this drive was the school operated by former slaves James Tate and Granithan Daniels that Ayer found upon his arrival. They learned anywhere they could, from whomever they could, and free literature in their homes on any subject, even temperance, only facilitated this passion. At the same time, this literature introduced the freed people to the timeworn discourse of temperance that had previously targeted northern and western white audiences.56

Temperance Societies in the Freed People’s Schools

In 1866 the nexus organizations began appropriating Abraham Lincoln for the temperance cause among the freed people. Both The Freedman and the Freedman’s Journal printed a story of the night Lincoln first received the Republican nomination; it was a story subsequently made popular by temperance reformers. Lincoln was not at the convention when nominated, so a party of men brought him the news. Lincoln declared that such an occasion called for treating his guests, which he purportedly did with cold water because “it is the only beverage which our God has given to man; it is the only beverage I have ever used or allowed in my family, and I can not conscientiously depart from it on the present occasion.” In the wake of emancipation, there could be no more influential temperance spokesman in the eyes of the freed people than the “Great Emancipator” himself.57 Also in 1866 the AMA asked the NTS to compose a “Lincoln” Temperance Pledge card. The AMA openly admitted that they named it the “Lincoln” Temperance Pledge “to make it attractive as well as more impressive” to the freed people. The card was handsomely designed, with the pledge printed over a shadow image of an interracial group of adults and children gathered around a table watching a black man sign the pledge. The Emancipation Proclamation and a likeness of Abraham Lincoln hung over the scene. Five of the most popular pro-abstinence Bible verses framed it. NTS president William E. Dodge donated $100 toward the printing and distribution of the pledges.58

The power of Lincoln’s image was not lost on Frederick Ayer either. In December 1866 the AMA opened a new school building, the Storrs School, named for the Reverend Henry M. Storrs, the Cincinnati pastor whose church had made the initial donation. The former building was rented to the Methodist Freedman’s Aid Society, which operated the Summer Hill School out of it. For many years black Atlantans regarded the Storrs School as the best school in Atlanta for their children. The school included a four-hundred-seat chapel in which Frederick Ayer taught Sunday school. Images of Jesus blessing the children and of President Lincoln flanked each side of its platform. This iconographic juxtaposition undoubtedly seemed entirely appropriate to both missionary and student. In January and February 1867, under the watchful gaze of both “saviors,” Ayer taught a series of temperance lessons that resulted in more than three hundred students signing the pledge and the creation of a temperance society whose membership exceeded six hundred by the time Ayer died in September. Within two years of emancipation black Atlantans had their first temperance society.59

Fig. 6—The Storrs School, opened in December 1866. In the chapel in the rear, missionary Frederick Ayer organized Black Atlanta’s first temperance society in February 1867. From Harper’s Weekly, March 30, 1867. Courtesy of HarpWeek

In the early years of Reconstruction the lines between the evangelical missionary organizations and the federal government’s Freedmen’s Bureau were blurred, and in terms of temperance work they were effectively an interlocking directorate. For example, John Alvord worked as a colporteur for the ATrS-Boston with the Union army during the war and afterward was made general superintendent of education for the Bureau; Edmund A. Ware was an AMA missionary before being appointed the Bureau’s superintendent of schools for Georgia; and General O. O. Howard, the commissioner of the Freedmen’s Bureau, simultaneously served on the AMA’s executive committee and was a vice president, and later president, of the National Temperance Society.

This interlocking leadership meant that signs of intemperance among the freed people were as much of a concern to the federal Freedmen’s Bureau as they were to the nexus organizations. About the same time that the AMA began using its Lincoln Temperance Pledge cards, General O. O. Howard received reports from Virginia and South Carolina of increasing intemperance among the freed people as well as reports that the Sons of Temperance insisted on segregating its black members into separate chapters. In June 1867 Howard ordered Bureau agents to organize local “Lincoln Temperance Societies” and “Vanguards of Freedom” for children enrolled in Bureau schools. Together the societies comprised the Lincoln National Temperance Association, an interracial organization designed to “suppress intemperance among the colored people” and “such white persons as may choose to unite with them.” Howard found “great appropriateness” in calling them “Lincoln” societies because of Lincoln’s character and the “love the freedmen bear him.” Howard then ordered John Alvord to request of the AMA a donation of five thousand copies of their Lincoln Temperance Pledge for the Bureau’s teachers and agents. The AMA gladly obliged. Howard appointed John Alvord to the executive committee of the national association and made A. E. Newton, involved in a non-religious relief organization, general secretary of the Vanguard. Newton promptly tweaked the Band of Hope Manual to turn it into the Manual of the Vanguard of Freedom, which the NTS published in December. The manual explained how to organize a society and included a sample constitution, a pledge, and suggestions for conducting “interesting” meetings. While Bureau agents never reported functioning Vanguard chapters in Atlanta, in 1869 the NTS reported “several” black temperance societies in Atlanta, which may have been local Vanguard chapters. It is possible that teachers at the AMA’s Storrs School and the Methodist Freedmen’s Aid Society’s Summer Hill School were pushing the message so effectively on their own that no need for Vanguards existed in Atlanta. Whether or not they were Vanguard chapters, many young black Atlantans were surely receiving the temperance message. When they were not hearing it in their classrooms from their teachers, they heard it with their families in church.60

The First Congregational Church and Temperance

Frederick Ayer’s last major initiative was to organize the First Congregational Church in the Storrs School chapel on May 26, 1867. The congregation began with three missionary families and several students and was intended to be an interracial church. After Ayer’s death in September, his colleague Cyrus W. Francis assumed the pastorate until 1873. He was followed by a succession of Northern white pastors into the 1890s. The AMA viewed the church and their schools as complementary institutions in their effort to “raise” the freed people to their level of culture. As an appendage to the Storrs School and Atlanta University, First Congregational’s existence created some friction with Atlanta’s black-pastored Methodist and Baptist congregations. Northern missionaries were accused of steering their students toward attendance at First Congregational and of criticizing traditional Southern black worship styles, but despite chafing at these expressions of interdenominational rivalry and paternalism most black pastors shared the same commitment to temperance that First Church’s white pastors did.

First Church, as it was called, maintained high expectations for its members and excommunicated members for persisting in less than “pure” behavior after receiving correction and exhortation. In the early months the church was mostly young single males, and Reverend Francis found it challenging to keep them focused. Because drinking was undoubtedly an issue he had to deal with, he was quite pleased when in the summer of 1868, following a period of revival, the members of the church’s literary society decided to turn their group into a temperance society also. Francis praised them for “awakening” a much needed interest in abstinence. By the 1880s it was becoming routine for all new members to sign abstinence pledges in First Church, as well as in other Congregational churches. As temperance became increasingly associated with middle-class values, First Congregational’s strictness in this area strengthened its reputation as a church for the better class of blacks.61

Fig. 7—First Congregational Church, founded by AMA missionary Frederick Ayer. From Henry Proctor Papers, Amistad Research Center at Tulane University, New Orleans, Louisiana

First Congregational is the only Black Atlanta church from this period whose discipline records are extant, and a review of its alcohol-related cases is illustrative of the ways the AMA missionaries worked through churches to reinforce their temperance message. In traditional AMA fashion, its missionary-pastors worked to create a church as free from sin as possible. Church discipline was a serious matter, and nearly every one charged with violating church standards suffered the ultimate penalty of excommunication. Between its founding in 1867 and 1876, 205 people became members of First Congregational. Of those members, 22 came under church discipline charges, and 21 (10 men and 11 women) experienced excommunication, with one being successfully restored. Only 5 of the 21 excommunicated members faced alcohol-related charges. Members’ behavior was judged against the church’s covenant. Although the first members did not sign abstinence pledges, membership entailed subscribing to the church’s covenant, which included some of the basic evangelical doctrines and the following sentence: “I promise to live a holy life to strive against sin in my heart and in my conduct to be temperate, pure, and prayerful.”62

All of the liquor-related charges were against men, reflecting the contemporary reality that men drank more than women and did so in public places. The first person excommunicated for drinking was Styles Dougherty, who had been a member for less than 18 months. The public statement of his excommunication quoted from the portion of the church covenant he had violated and said he had “repeatedly” violated his temperance pledge and often been angry, used abusive language, skipped services for no good reason, and generally failed to perform “even the outward duties of a Christian.” Worse still, when confronted, he exhibited no remorse or desire to change his ways.63 Appearing on virtually all excommunication statements, lack of remorse was the ultimate reason for this most extreme form of discipline. On September 29, 1869, the same day that Dougherty was excommunicated, William Duncan and George Payne, who joined the church in April 1868 during a revival, were both suspended because of intemperance, profanity, and association with people of “bad character.” Suspension was considered temporary, an opportunity for individuals to reform their ways. The church was particularly “long-suffering” with Duncan and Payne. In February 1871 Duncan confessed his sins and was received back into full fellowship, but in April 1871 Payne was excommunicated after a committee reported that it had failed to get Payne to “abandon his evil ways.” William Duncan, however, apparently lapsed again, and being unrepentant, was finally excommunicated in November 1875. James King was excommunicated in December 1871 because he “publicly” violated his “publicly” signed temperance pledge and then refused to show up to a meeting to respond to the charges.64

But First Church did more than insist on teetotal members. Bradford Garner, whom the church “esteemed so highly as a Christian,” apparently disagreed with the church’s stand that bartending was “not consistent” with the church covenant. A bartender, Garner repeatedly resisted attempts to persuade him to change his livelihood, and he was subsequently excommunicated. A few years later he left bartending to become a railroad porter, but he never rejoined the church. Finally, the church also charged Perry Kieth with selling liquor. The church held an incredible seven meetings about his case in the summer of 1871. Kieth initially defended himself and was suspended for four weeks. Later he confessed his sin and was restored to full communion. Kieth subsequently relocated to Alabama, and the church gave him a letter to transfer his membership.65

Of the almost two hundred blacks who voluntarily submitted themselves to the spiritual oversight of First Congregational’s white AMA missionary-pastors before 1876, only 2 percent were ever charged with inebriation, suggesting that alcohol abuse was not a major problem for the church. First Congregational’s disciplinary procedures seemed to have followed a relatively conservative pattern in that charges were not brought until the evidence was overwhelming and excommunication was sure. Most members were not charged and removed until they had already voluntarily absented themselves from services for an extended period of time, developed a widely known sinful lifestyle, and could be charged with multiple violations of the church covenant. Then they usually refused to change their ways and were excommunicated. The high rate of conviction under these circumstances suggests that First Congregational’s pastors were genuinely concerned with removing those who had become members in name only and were tarnishing the church’s image and not with divisive witch hunts based on members’ peccadilloes. Although the reason is not clear, the annual rate of excommunications declined beginning in 1877. From 1873 to 1888 the church regularly excommunicated a lower percentage of its membership than the average for other churches in its regional conference. AMA missionaries probably would have attributed this lower rate to the effect of the Storrs School and Atlanta University because many, if not most, of First Church’s black members were also students in one of these schools, and this would have validated the AMA’s policy of founding schools and churches in tandem. At the 1880 Georgia Congregational Conference, former pastor C. W. Francis presented a paper on “The Object and Method of Church Discipline.” In his paper Francis maintained that church discipline is a statement to a “member who walks unworthily . . . that such is the fact, and is a recognition in formal action of that state of things which in fact exists before such action.” Such a decision must be made by all of one’s brethren, not the minister or some committee drawn from the membership, he argued. Congregational church discipline undoubtedly differed in important ways from that of other churches because studies show that other denominations convicted a much lower percentage of those charged or a lower percentage of their membership.66 Although no discipline records from individual black-pastored churches are extant, we know that many black pastors proclaimed the message of abstinence in the early years following emancipation.

AME Churches and Temperance

Northern blacks could share the same culturalism embraced by Northern whites. AME Bishop Daniel A. Payne was well-known for his insistence on an educated clergy and his opposition to emotional African American worship practices such as the ring shout. Payne was born free in Charleston, South Carolina, but had moved north in 1835 to pursue his education, eventually earning a degree at a Lutheran seminary. He joined the AME church in 1840 and was ordained a bishop in 1854, but his stance on congregational worship and an educated clergy created its share of friction between him and others within the church. Following emancipation, Payne wrote that the brightest freed people should be trained up North in “northern sentiments” so they could return to the South as “propagandists of these sentiments” and admitted to dreaming about a time when “New England ideas, sentiments, and principles” would rule the “entire South.”67

In May 1865, while he was president of Wilberforce University, the AME church sent Payne to organize the denomination in South Carolina and Georgia, but he also traveled with financial backing from the AMA. Payne was one of several agents sent by his church to enroll preexisting Southern black Methodist congregations. On May 15 he organized the South Carolina Conference and immediately commissioned nine missionaries to traverse South Carolina and Georgia to enroll congregations and establish AMA schools. One of the missionaries Payne sent out was William Gaines, a native of Georgia and brother to the better- known future AME bishop Wesley J. Gaines. The Gaines brothers had grown up on plantations in various Georgia “black belt” counties.

William Gaines arrived in Atlanta in the summer of 1865, several months before Frederick Ayer, and he enrolled the Methodist congregation named Bethel, that had been worshiping separately from whites since the 1840s. Joseph A. Wood, the group’s leader since 1855, was ordained as an elder in 1866. In 1866 a group of blacks from the Summerhill neighborhood requested an AME church, so Wood began holding meetings there, organizing what was initially called Wood’s Chapel (its name was changed to Allen Temple in the mid-1880s), and pastored there from 1867 to 1869, and again from 1879 to 1883. Wesley J. Gaines was first ordained in 1866 by Daniel Payne when he organized the state of Georgia into its own annual conference. From 1867 to 1869 Gaines pastored Bethel and built a 2,000-seat building in Shermantown, which at the time was the largest black church in the South. The church soon became known as “Big Bethel.” Gaines went on to pastor churches in Athens, Macon, and Columbus before returning to Atlanta in 1881. Black Atlanta’s continued population growth had led to the founding of Shiloh AME in 1872, and in 1874 the Georgia Annual Conference was divided into the North and South Georgia annual conferences because of the rapidly increasing number of congregations.68

Atlanta’s AME leaders frequently spoke out against intemperance. The first bishop of the Georgia Annual Conference was John M. Brown, a free-born black from Delaware who was educated in several Northern schools, including Oberlin College. During one annual conference sermon he warned his ministers not to stand around street corners smoking but, rather, to become teetotalers and early risers. Elders Wesley J. Gaines and Joseph Wood were committed teetotalers, as was Henry McNeal Tuner, who, free-born in South Carolina, lived in Maryland and Washington, D.C., until after the war and was appointed superintendent of Upper Georgia in 1866, ordained bishop in 1880, and made his home in Atlanta. Undoubtedly these men endorsed abstinence on multiple occasions, even if it might have been just one of many points in a sermon. At the Fifth Georgia Annual Conference, held at Big Bethel in 1871, the clergy engaged in a lengthy discussion of temperance. More than ten clergy denounced alcohol, each seeking to outdo the previous speaker. This is the first year for which evidence exists that the Georgia Conference had a temperance committee. The committee’s resolution stated, “That the Holy Scriptures are a testimony against the use of intoxicating liquors” and that their church discipline also testified against it. The strength of their Methodist tradition, dating back to the eighteenth century, was not lost on these men. Reverend J. W. Randolph pushed the cause a step further by asking all conference members to cease using “tobacco, snuff, and cigars” as well as intoxicating liquors. Wesley J. Gaines, Henry M. Turner, and F. J. Peck, a future Bethel pastor, were among those who spoke in favor of abstinence. The following year Gaines suggested that the tobacco ban again be included with the Temperance Committee report, and it was. This report also ordered pastors to preach quarterly temperance sermons and called on them to “reclaim” inebriates through both precept and example. It is not possible to know to what extent ministers complied with this directive, but Atlanta’s AME adherents were potentially hearing four temperance sermons a year in the early 1870s, as well as being disciplined by abstinent church leaders.69

At the first meeting of the North Georgia Annual Conference (1874) a standing temperance committee was organized. For some unexplained reason, the first thing the committee did was to lower the standard for pastors by requiring only “one or more” sermons on alcohol each year. Perhaps pastors had been ignoring the earlier directive or opposing it for some reason, and the clergy thought that lowering the standard would elicit greater compliance. Perhaps members were complaining about what they perceived as an overemphasis on temperance. Or, more optimistically, perhaps the ministers perceived a reduced need for such sermons. At the same time, the conference created a temperance society, with Joseph Wood as president. The conference minutes do not make clear what the society’s function was or how long it existed. In 1876 the temperance committee reinstituted the call for quarterly temperance sermons, which suggests the ministers perceived an increased need for them.70

Literate AME adherents in Atlanta would have also encountered temperance in their church library. As a service to their members, many of whom lived in poverty or on the edge of it, and to encourage literacy, AME churches maintained lending libraries. By 1871 Wood’s Chapel owned 250 volumes, and Big Bethel 500. Big Bethel’s library doubled in size in the next year, and undoubtedly some of these books promoted temperance. In these libraries members could also find the most recent copy of the AME Church’s stridently pro-temperance Christian Recorder.71

The only AME Church discipline statistics for Atlanta-area churches are found in the 1890 Minutes of the North Georgia Annual Conference. According to these minutes, Bethel AME excommunicated 6 out of 2,100 members (0.03%) and Allen Temple excommunicated 16 out of 735 members (2.18%). No reasons for excommunication are provided. Although we do not know the number of members charged, the percentage excommunicated is only a fraction of the 10 percent evicted at First Congregational. It seems that in these early years of establishing black churches, any tendencies toward strict disciplinary standards would have been checked by the overwhelming economic, educational, and political needs of their people, as well as the low literacy rates, which would have complicated efforts to maintain formal written records.72

How many black Atlantans actually heard this temperance message in the early post-emancipation period? A close review of the evidence presented in this chapter suggests that the American Missionary Association, American Tract Society, National Temperance Society, and African Methodist Episcopal Church reached relatively large numbers of black Atlantans early in their efforts. Between 1866 and 1876 Black Atlanta’s population grew from roughly 8,000 to roughly 13,000. In 1867 the AMA had 1,900 students enrolled in its day school classes, 225 enrolled in night school, and 1,200 enrolled in its Sunday school, but many of the Sunday school children also attended the day school. In 1870 there were 2,000 children attending AMA schools. One can reasonably suppose that each child represented a household of several individuals, because underemployment and high immigration rates encouraged the creation of extended families and multi-generational households.

In addition to teaching, AMA missionaries also conducted family visitations where they distributed literature. Elizabeth Ayer reported that, in addition to Bibles, every Sunday during her home visitations she distributed about 50 “papers,” and these would have included literature from the American Tract Society and National Temperance Society. It is not clear whether these visitations included only the families of their students, but in all likelihood at least some other families were visited. It seems reasonable, then, to imagine AMA missionaries personally reaching perhaps as much as half of Black Atlanta’s population with the temperance message. While the Summer Hill School records during these years are very limited, it is reasonable to assume that its Methodist teachers were also instructing their charges in abstinence at this time.

As for the AME Church, in 1872 the combined membership of both Atlanta congregations was 1,460 parishioners, and two more congregations organized that year. Bishop Payne estimated that the number of people influenced by the denomination’s work was three times its actual membership. If this optimistic estimate was near correct, it suggests that AME teachings alone could have reached more than 40 percent of the black population. Many AME families were likely exposed to temperance from multiple sources because their children attended AMA schools and heard the message there, as well as at church. One must also consider the receptivity of children to the temperance materials, combined with their influence on their own parents who themselves were scrambling to learn to read and function successfully in their new and trying circumstances. One Alabama AMA missionary told of a boy in her school who excitedly reported that he was able to single-handedly convince his mother to forgo eggnog one Christmas and his father to stay “dry” the whole holiday season. There is no telling how often children persuaded their parents to stop drinking because they had been taught its evils at school. Scenes like this were probably repeated in more homes than we can ever know.73

But hearing a message is not the same as accepting it. From the freed people’s perspective it is unlikely that many of them perceived a need for teetotalism. In the first few years following emancipation, given their immediate food and shelter needs, grinding poverty, limited literacy, and harassment by law enforcement, temperance qua temperance could not have been a primary concern. Increasing rates of incarceration and the drunken policemen and security officers likely troubled blacks more than any inchoate liquor-related pathologies. Despite the rise of missionary-run primary schools for blacks (and public schools in the 1870s), there were never enough seats for all of Black Atlanta’s school-age children. Illiteracy remained high throughout this period, and even with all the literature being distributed, missionaries repeatedly complained they did not have enough to go around.

It is true that reports of temperance societies existed in Black Atlanta in the late 1860s, but we will never know how many joined them and maintained their pledges over the long run. What is certain is that those attending the Storrs School, First Congregational, Big Bethel, and Wood’s Chapel during these years received a consistent, and perhaps constant, temperance message. But this was a relatively small percentage of Black Atlanta. These factors suggest that although relatively large numbers of freed people may have been exposed to the temperance message, for most of them its strength was mitigated by the harsh exigencies of daily living and limited contact with Northern institutions, and thus it probably gained little traction during the early post-emancipation years.74

While by most standards Black Atlanta likely did not have a “drinking problem,” that reality did little to influence the strength of the temperance message brought by Northern evangelicals. It is clear that Northern evangelical missionaries arrived in Atlanta with their own worldview and its inherent biases. Given their pro-revival and Christian republican language, perfectionist theological proclivities, culturalism, and romantic racialism, they did not need to see widespread alcohol abuse to teach temperance. All they needed to see was the lack of teetotalism, and that is what they saw. Everything about their collective and individual pasts predisposed missionaries to teach temperance, whether or not the freed people themselves perceived a need for it or wanted it. Because the missionaries embraced their own evangelical culture of revivalism and reform so enthusiastically, temperance inevitably arose as part of their mission to educate and Christianize, regardless of actual on-the-ground conditions.

From time to time evangelicals succumbed to their urge to be alarmist about the less than teetotal ways of the freed people. Perhaps it was because they could not shake their culturalism, or maybe it was because of their need to attract donations. In February 1867, the same month the AMA warned about intemperance and the freed people’s “excitable natures,” the editor of the AME Church’s Christian Recorder reminded all AME ministers to form temperance societies “everywhere, that intoxicating drink may not find victims among our people.” It was also in 1867 that General Howard ordered the creation of the Lincoln National Temperance Association. These early concerns remained relatively latent during the first decade or so following emancipation but increased as the freed people became more socioeconomically stratified and the national political climate changed. As Northern whites wearied of the politics of Reconstruction, the Freedmen’s Bureau closed up shop, and the non-religious freedmen’s aid societies withdrew, Northerners from evangelical nexus organizations found themselves the only ones left working among the freed people. Beginning in the mid- to late 1870s, temperance rose again in the national consciousness with the presence of a national Prohibition Party, the successes of the Ohio Women’s Crusade, and the notable rise of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union. By the early 1880s the temperance movement was advancing in every region of the nation and at every level of government, with more and more to show for its efforts. Temperance once again became the primary concern of many Northern evangelicals, and this quantitatively transformed their delivery of the message to the freed people. We now turn our attention to that transformation.75

Right in the track where Sherman

Ploughed his red furrow,

Out of the narrow cabin,

Up from the cellar’s burrow,

Gathered the little black people,

With freedom newly dowered,

Where, beside their Northern teacher,

Stood the soldier, Howard. . . .

And he said: “Who hears can never

Fear for or doubt you;

What shall I tell the children

Up North about you?”

Then ran round a whisper, a murmur,

Some answer devising;

And a little boy stood up: “General,

Tell ’em we’re rising!”

—John G. Whittier, “Howard at Atlanta,” first and fifth stanzas