Chapter 1

“Our Enterprise Flows from the Gospel of Christ”

The Evangelical Reform Nexus Roots of Nineteenth-Century Temperance, 1785–1865

Nothing short of the general renewal of society ought to satisfy any soldier of Christ.

—William Arthur, The Tongue of Fire

On the eastern bank of the Shepaug River in western Connecticut lies the quintessential New England town of Washington, named for the nation’s “founding father.” It was the first Connecticut town incorporated after the 13 colonies issued their Declaration of Independence. Homes and farming plots spread out in all directions from the village green and its adjacent white clapboard Congregational meetinghouse. Originally settled in 1735, Washington’s citizens organized the First Congregational Church in 1741 and subsequently, as in other New England churches, experienced their share of conflicts over the pastor’s salary and the Half-Way Covenant. Future war hero Ethan Allen was married in the church in 1762. Ebenezer Porter became pastor in September 1796. The town’s exuberance over the young preacher is suggested by the decision to sponsor three ordination balls. Porter did not disappoint; he was a tour de force in Washington, a breath of fresh air for the little town whose previous pastor had served for 44 years. Porter quickly placed his mark on every religious and cultural institution within his reach. He taught in Washington’s high school, operated his own mini-seminary, organized a parish home missionary society, authored petitions against Sunday mail delivery, became Washington’s first superintendent of schools, led the church’s first revival, and preached America’s first recorded “temperance sermon” in 1805. Seeking to reproduce this passion in others, Porter held regular Monday evening meetings in his study for interested parishioners “for the purpose of promoting their own growth in piety, and their usefulness to others.” It is in this last, obscure practice that we find the origins of America’s organized national temperance movement.

When Ebenezer Porter left Washington in 1812 to become a professor at Andover Seminary, he continued hosting those Monday evening meetings, and although the participants were probably more spiritually mature, this meeting was similarly designed for the “purpose of devising ways and means of doing good.” Regular attendees included some fellow professors; Justin Edwards, pastor of Andover’s South Church; and some members of Edwards’s church. Porter’s friend William Hallock later recalled that these Andover meetings were “befitting the rising spirit of missions and other departments of benevolence which the great work of God at the beginning of the century had awakened.” Porter’s meetings were anything but academic bantering over abstruse theological issues; on the contrary, they were the womb in which the “Andover Circle” incubated various practical applications of contemporary Christian thinking. From this womb emerged such benevolent organizations as the Andover South Parish Society for the Reformation of Morals, the New England Tract Society (later renamed the American Tract Society), and the American Temperance Society. This Bible study was arguably the first “critical community” to define intemperance as an American problem.1

Ebenezer Porter’s meetings illustrate how the temperance movement was birthed by what I call the “evangelical reform nexus,” that unique intersection of religious practice, theology, and ideology which coalesced during the Second Great Awakening. Changes in evangelical Protestantism were at the root of the awakening, and key elements of the temperance movement that both reflected and fueled these changes remained prominent even in the postbellum South. This nexus produced the culture of the people who brought the temperance message to Black Atlanta; indeed, it produced the people themselves and the organizations that sent them. The organizations that emerged from this cultural intersection codified and perpetuated its values and practices, by carrying them to western settlers, non-Protestant immigrants in eastern cities, and the freed people after the Civil War.

This chapter explores the elements of theology, ideology, and religious practice that characterized temperance in both the antebellum era and in post-emancipation Atlanta. It concludes by introducing the major nexus organizations that brought temperance to Black Atlanta and showing how their reason for being and their temperance values were mutually reinforcing, thus making temperance virtually inseparable from each organization’s mission in the South. This is the historical backdrop against which temperance in Black Atlanta must be understood.

Religion and the Rise of Organized Temperance

Organized antebellum temperance was rooted in evangelical, revivalistic Christianity, and gender, class, racial, and nativist prejudices notwithstanding, both contemporaneous commentary and professional scholarship abundantly attest to this fact. Temperance reformers viewed themselves as advancing a “peculiarly Christian” reform, according to Thomas Grimke, president of the Charleston, South Carolina Temperance Society; and the American Temperance Union announced, “our enterprise flows from the Gospel of Christ.” But it was an 1845 sermon by Reverend Lebbeus Armstrong that most vividly juxtaposed the temperance movement and the organized church. Drawing on the allegorical language of the twelfth chapter of the Book of Revelation, Armstrong argued that distilled liquors were the “flood” from the dragon’s mouth meant to destroy the woman (a type of the church), and that the “earth” helping the woman referred to the fact that a physician initiated the first temperance society. Invoking Isaiah 59:19 he argued that the temperance movement was the “standard” God raised up against the “flood” of the enemy attacking the church. According to Armstrong, temperance was the “cause of God” from the beginning, and temperance societies were God’s way to “show forth his power and glory by the choice of weak things of the world to confound the mighty” and in the end to “redeem the church from the curse of intemperance, and make this earth a sober world, preparatory to an entrance upon the enjoyments of the foreordained blessings of Millennial glory.” Contemporary evangelicals viewed such grandiose claims as anything but preposterous. During the antebellum years, and even into the postbellum period, it was normative for clergy and other temperance spokesmen to articulate the movement’s mission and vision in theological language.2

Nineteenth-century reformers credited Benjamin Rush, a Philadelphia physician and signer of the Declaration of Independence, with giving birth to the American temperance movement. In 1784 Rush published An Inquiry into the Effects of Spirituous Liquors on the Human Body and Mind, in which he outlined the negative physical, mental, social, and moral effects of drinking “ardent spirits.” Rush urged his readers to drink beer, wine, cider, and other drinks, which he labeled as “wholesome . . . compared with spirits.” While this was not the total abstinence message that eventually came to define the temperance movement, Rush was ahead of his time as one of the first to cite the deleterious effects of America’s rapidly increasing consumption of whiskey and rum. It took more than 20 years before people began rallying around Rush’s message. Perhaps the first person to be meaningfully inspired by Rush was his physician acquaintance Billy J. Clark. Clark had been practicing in the upstate New York town of Moreau for almost a decade when he decided to address the excessive drinking he regularly witnessed. In April 1808, Dr. Clark approached his Congregational pastor, the Reverend Lebbeus Armstrong, and within a few weeks they organized the nation’s first recorded temperance society, the Temperate Society of Moreau and Northumberland. Its 43 male charter members pledged themselves to drink neither distilled beverages nor wine, although wine drinking was permitted at public dinners and weddings, and as part of Holy Communion. The society met quarterly to hear speeches on temperance, with Reverend Armstrong giving the first such address on August 25. In subsequent years, thousands of societies founded on this model sprang up all across America, and they usually had some connection with a local church or clergyman.3

Temperance societies sought to mold public sentiment through the literature they distributed. Besides Rush’s Inquiry, which went through numerous editions, the main genre of temperance literature through the 1820s was the printed sermon. Nearly all the clergy incorporated Rush’s ideas because of his intellectual stature, but they were also deeply moved by their own personal encounters with drunkenness. Two of the earliest clergy to publish temperance sermons were Ebenezer Porter and Lyman Beecher. Finding a dead man with a whiskey bottle in the snow near his church inspired Porter to preach a temperance sermon in 1805. It was published in 1812. But Beecher, a protégé of Timothy Dwight, president of Yale University, was an even more influential temperance preacher. Like Porter, Beecher was also influenced by issues close to home. In his first parish, East Hampton, New York, Beecher witnessed merchants purposely making local American Indians drunk so they could take advantage of them in business transactions. Shortly after taking a pastorate at Litchfield, Connecticut, in 1810, just up the road from Ebenezer Porter’s church, he attended two ordination celebrations where he was disgusted by the extent of inebriation he witnessed among the clergy. Soon afterward he requested and chaired a clergy committee that called for, among other things, the circulation of Porter’s sermon and Rush’s pamphlet, and he urged church members to “cease to consider the production of ardent spirits a part of hospitable entertainment in social visits.” One thousand copies of this committee report were printed and circulated, but probably even more influential were the sermons he published after one of his early Litchfield converts became a drunkard. This so disturbed Beecher that he finally completed an unfinished sermon outline he had been neglecting, and it yielded six temperance sermons. Initially preached in the fall of 1825 and published in Boston in the spring of 1827, the Six Sermons on the Nature, Occasions, Signs, Evils, and Remedy of Intemperance quickly became a temperance best seller alongside Rush’s Inquiry. One writer has equated the influence of Beecher’s Six Sermons on the temperance movement with the influence his daughter Harriet’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin had on abolitionism. Although Rush clearly influenced Beecher, he said much more than Rush, for through these sermons he established himself as the prophet of the American temperance movement by calling for total abstinence from all intoxicating beverages (not just distilled drinks), national coordination of the temperance movement, and the creation of a public sentiment which would demand that ardent spirits cease to be a legal article of commerce. These elements became hallmarks of the movement for decades to come. Unbeknown to Beecher, the first national temperance organization formed only weeks after he preached his sixth sermon.4

In January 1826 Porter’s Andover Circle called a meeting in Boston’s Park Street Church to discuss the temperance reform. This meeting issued a call for “more systematic and more vigorous efforts” by the “Christian public to restrain and prevent the intemperate use of intoxicating liquors.” In February the men approved the constitution of the American Society for the Promotion of Temperance, more commonly known as the American Temperance Society (ATS), and quickly set about producing and disseminating literature (at first printed by the American Tract Society), serving as a clearinghouse for the latest temperance news, and sending out agents to build sentiment by organizing local temperance societies. In 1829 the ATS launched the weekly Journal of Humanity and Herald of the American Temperance Society. The Reverends Nathaniel Hewitt and Justin Edwards, traveling agents for the Society, frequently discovered preexisting local temperance societies unknown to the Andover Circle, revealing the movement’s grassroots nature. Although by 1835 there were more than eight thousand ATS-affiliated societies, even that number does not represent all such societies in the nation at the time.

The ATS worked to strengthen temperance sentiment not to fight intemperance, and in many ways it simply codified what local societies had already been doing by drafting a pledge requiring total abstinence from distilled drinks, endorsing the moral suasion approach, and focusing on keeping the temperate “dry.” Justin Edwards once callously informed a friend that the organization did not seek to help inebriates, “but to induce all temperate people to continue temperate by practicing total abstinence; the drunkards, if not reformed, will die, and the land be free.” Such uncharitable attitudes did not go unnoticed, and the ATS proper never grew beyond a small umbrella organization, with just a few men in the Boston area, and never actually “directed” a “national” temperance movement.5

The ATS and its sequel, the American Temperance Union (ATU), organized in the 1830s, considered themselves and the movement unashamedly Christian. The masthead of the Journal of Humanity read, “Righteousness exalteth a nation; but sin is a reproach to any people,” a direct quote from Proverbs 14:34. The executive committee of the ATU asserted that God Himself was the “supporter and director” of the movement, and that temperance was a “mighty moral and religious movement, going forth from hearts imbued with the spirit of the Gospel.” In fact, the clergy’s involvement was so prominent that some opponents considered the movement nothing but pushy clergymen trying to control how individuals lived Monday through Saturday.6

The 1840s witnessed the rise of fraternal temperance lodges and juvenile temperance societies, most of which perpetuated the movement’s Christian emphasis. There were three main fraternal lodges: Sons of Temperance (est. 1843), the Independent Order of Good Samaritans (est. 1847), and the Independent Order of Good Templars (est. 1852). These groups, which operated like secret societies with formal rituals and regalia, required their members to sign abstinence pledges, held regular meetings to provide accountability and camaraderie, and sometimes offered the insurance benefits of a mutual aid or benevolent society. The Good Samaritans particularly focused on reforming drunkards. Because pledgers who had testified about their past life were known to break their pledge, shaming themselves and embarrassing the movement, the Sons of Temperance purposely kept any failures a secret and sought to gently restore backslidden brothers. These societies grew rapidly throughout the 1840s and 1850s and although their popularity fluctuated over the years, some experienced long-term success, existing until the early twentieth century. Some spread to the South, some incorporated African Americans, and some became international.7

Bands of Hope were temperance societies for children that originated in England and spread to the United States. A Baptist minister organized the first Band of Hope in 1847 in Leeds, when over two hundred children pledged to abstain from intoxicating beverages. Local bands sprung up around the country and eventually organized the United Kingdom Band of Hope Union in 1864. The Union published a variety of materials to support juvenile temperance work. Local bands were organized with one or more adult overseers. Children as young as seven were admitted, and sometimes teenagers comprised a “senior” group. Membership required pledging total abstinence, and some bands also pledged never to smoke or use profanity. Each band had its own constitution and elected officers. Band meetings were well organized, sometimes bordering on the liturgical. Meetings included a mixture of praying, singing, an opportunity for visitors to sign the pledge, and some sort of exhortation to abstinence. Sometimes adult “superintendents” or older students would teach the younger ones from the Band of Hope Catechism, which indoctrinated students in all aspects of temperance thought using the traditional catechetical question-and-answer format. Teachers taught one question a week until students understood the answer. Logbooks listed all pledge signers, and sometimes a “Roll of Honor” poster graced the wall as a public witness. Those who broke their pledge could be removed. Members were constantly encouraged to invite their friends to attend meetings and to pledge, as well as to try to convince their parents to become abstainers. Band of Hope eventually became the generic term for children’s temperance societies in the U.S. and England, and several were formed among the freed people following the Civil War.8

These temperance organizations were not the result of legions of narrowly focused, one-issue activists. On the contrary, evangelical temperance reformers were almost invariably committed to a panoply of reforms directly or indirectly connected to their drive to win “souls” for Christ and advance the Kingdom of God. Central to this drive was the promotion of revivals, with which temperance workers were frequently involved. As revivalism and its supporting theology evolved, they developed practices and a discourse that melded naturally with the evolving temperance movement.

The Evangelical Reform Nexus Origins of the Temperance Movement

Alice Felt Tyler, one of the earliest professional historians of antebellum temperance, argues that temperance was “inseparable from the religious motif of the first half of the century.” The single most important element within that motif was the “reformist revivalism,” which was quickly becoming the “center of a national religious and political discourse.” Another scholar has not insignificantly observed that the only Protestant churches that opposed temperance also opposed revivalism. These observations are not meant to suggest anything near unanimity of temperance opinion in the pews of evangelical churches. In fact, the first targets of temperance reformers were their fellow pew occupants. But the fact that nearly all temperance reformers were part of the pro-revival evangelical tradition is significant. Revivals were periods when conspicuously large numbers of people expressed a deep concern for their spiritual state, professed a personal faith in Jesus Christ, and subsequently joined a local church. By the early nineteenth century these revival “seasons” were often purposefully worked up by preaching designed to produce conversions by directly challenging listeners to repent of their sins and turn to Christ. Revivalism and its related theology combined with a Christian version of republicanism to undergird and project the practices, language, and rationale of temperance reform into post-emancipation Black Atlanta.9

“The Revivalist and the Temperance Lecturer Were Often the Same Person”

From the 1810s onward, revivals and temperance were closely related.10 First of all, the connection was methodological in that the structure of temperance meetings mirrored that of a revival service. Like revival services, temperance meetings were designed to inform the mind, arouse sentiment, and climax with a challenge for individuals to make a public decision. Temperance speakers constructed their arguments from Scripture, history, medical science, and recently collected data about the social and economic nature, causes, and effects of intemperance. Some famous speakers were former drunkards, and they became quite adept at giving their testimonies in dramatic, passionate, and persuasive ways, while in other cases “the revivalist and the temperance lecturer were often the same person.” Some speakers played on emotions with melodramatic stories of the effects of intemperance on helpless and innocent family members. Temperance workers rewrote the lyrics of popular hymns for use during their meetings. All temperance societies closed their meetings with a challenge to sign a total abstinence pledge, reminiscent of the revivalist’s call for sinners to repent.

Abstinence-minded revivalist preachers yielded their share of temperance workers. Five such influential antebellum revivalists were Timothy Dwight, Asahel Nettleton, Lyman Beecher, Charles Finney, and E. N. (Edward Norris) Kirk. Timothy Dwight, president of Yale from 1795 to 1817, presided over five student revivals but was most influential in mentoring revivalists such as Asahel Nettleton and Lyman Beecher, and in bequeathing to them certain key theological emphases. Dwight deemphasized complex and controversial doctrines in favor of a life of active Christian service. He preached one of the early published sermons attacking habitual drunkenness. Asahel Nettleton was Connecticut’s first and only full-time evangelist during the 1810s. Nettleton was himself converted during the revivals that swept America in 1800 and remained staunchly conservative in his style, theology, and disposition throughout his career. Preaching mostly in smaller Connecticut towns, he opposed emotionalism yet consistently produced converts through a combination of sermons on traditional Calvinist doctrines and intense personal follow-up. Lyman Beecher was an energetic Dwight protégé who pastored both Presbyterian and Congregational churches in New York, New England, and Ohio and served as the first president of Lane Theological Seminary in Cincinnati. Charles Finney, a Presbyterian, was the most prominent antebellum revivalist. He initially made a name for himself in the 1820s in upstate New York through his successful “new measures” revivals, but he also preached throughout the Northeast and served as professor of theology and president of Oberlin College in Oberlin, Ohio. E. N. Kirk, an 1826 graduate of Princeton Theological Seminary, initially itinerated for the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions in the South before pastoring in Albany and Boston. An active participant in many reforms of the period, Kirk was a great fit as president of the American Missionary Association during Reconstruction. The most renowned late-nineteenth-century evangelist Dwight L. Moody was converted under his ministry.

Fig. 1—Evangelist Charles Finney, who claimed to have made temperance an “appendage” of revivals. Portrait by Samuel Waldo and William Jewett. Courtesy of Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College, Ohio, Gift of Lewis Tappan, 1858

The preaching of Nettleton, Finney, and Kirk produced converts who played leading roles in bringing temperance to Black Atlanta. William E. Dodge, wealthy businessman and founding president of the National Temperance Society and Publication House, was converted under Nettleton’s preaching, and under his leadership the society flooded post-emancipation Black Atlanta with temperance literature. Charles Finney was the primary spiritual influence in the life of Frederick Ayer, the man who organized Black Atlanta’s first temperance society. Ayer was inspired to become a missionary under Finney and was ordained by him. John Dougall became a radical reformer after exposure to E. N. Kirk’s preaching and distributed free of charge his reform paper, New York Weekly Witness, to Black Atlanta clergymen.

“Bringing Men to Reflection”: Temperance as Prelude to Revivals

The methodological and personal connections between revivalism and temperance were enmeshed in an intricate web of theology, ideology, and discourse largely designed to defend the practices of revival preachers from theological conservatives, enlightenment-inspired rationalists, and surging Methodism.11 Revivalists climaxed their services by challenging listeners to repent of their sins and turn to Christ, but America’s historically dominant theology—Calvinism—had long held that individuals could not make that choice for themselves.12 To address this conundrum, several prominent preachers crafted a revised, pro-revival Calvinism by mixing into the revered theology certain elements of enlightenment thought. At the same time, Methodism, which completely rejected the most disputed tenets of Calvinism, fully embraced revivalist practices and was experiencing almost exponential growth, presenting its own challenge to traditionally Calvinist groups like the Congregationalists. Eventually, pro-revival Calvinist theology evolved to the point that it became indiscernible in practice from Methodist theology because they both placed so much emphasis on human ability in the conversion process. The logic of this newly ascendant theology justified—even demanded—temperance. A brief theological overview will set the background.

By the 1830s the vast majority of revivalists came to accept the idea that individuals were able and obligated to respond to God’s moral laws, and that failure to do so justified God in punishing mankind, whether temporally through the instrumentality of human government or eternally in hell. This “moral government of God” theology taught that God sought mankind’s obedience to moral laws by appealing to his reason through persuasion, not coercion. People were “free moral agents” who, because of their natural, commonsense reasoning capacity, could choose to obey God if they would. Moral government doctrine denied that people were born with a sinful nature, instead arguing that all sin was willful disobedience to God’s laws. God had the greatest good of humanity in mind when promulgating his moral law because obedience to his law would remove sin, and by extension, human misery. Likewise, all human efforts designed to persuade people to cease sinning would reduce human misery and, by definition, be virtuous or benevolent acts. Methodist preachers embraced much of this teaching also, so clerical references to God’s moral government and man’s free moral agency became ubiquitous among pro-revival evangelicals.

Acceptance of the moral government of God doctrine suggested two practical implications for lived Christianity. First, since individuals had the ability to repent, and the Bible nowhere supports a gradual turning away from sin, it soon came to be understood that immediate repentance was a duty after hearing and understanding the Gospel message. This new teaching created in many Christians a sense of obligation to remove all obstacles to understanding the Gospel. Intemperance was clearly one such obstacle. Second, if individuals could repent of their sins, they could certainly choose to stop sinning. One Oberlin Evangelist writer explained the relationship between this theology and the temperance movement with exceptional clarity:

Who does not know that the Temperance Reform finds its very foundation pillars in the doctrine that men have natural ability to cease from sinning? . . . The doctrine that no mere man is able to cease from sinning in the present life has had no agency in working out this glorious reform. . . . It has been held that every drunkard not only can reform but is solemnly bound to do so.

A minority of evangelicals carried this thinking to its logical conclusion, arguing that, if people could cease from some sin, they could cease from all sin, and this led to the rise of perfectionism, sometimes called the holiness movement. Perfectionism (of both the evangelical and secular varieties) created some of the most radical leaders of immediate abolitionism and teetotalism, known to some as “ultraist” reforms. The abolitionist poet John Greenleaf Whittier clearly understood this connection between theology and ultraist reforms: “We do not talk of gradual abolition, because, as Christians, we find no authority for advocating a gradual relinquishment of sin. We say to slaveholders—‘Repent NOW—today—immediately’; just as we say to the intemperate—‘Break off from your vice at once—touch not—taste not—handle not—from henceforth forever.’” Of all the pro-revival theologies, holiness was considered the most extreme, and throughout the century its detractors opposed the theology, but nevertheless, holiness believers were leading reformers into the postbellum years. Pro-revival theology had caused the affinity between temperance reform and revival efforts to blossom into a full-scale symbiotic relationship, a veritable two-member mutual aid society.13

By the early 1830s, reformers were touting temperance as a prelude to revivalism. Contemporaries observed that wherever temperance sentiment spread, revivalism followed, and that individuals who had first pledged to abstain were more likely to convert. Albert Barnes experienced a revival in his Morristown, New Jersey, church on the heels of preaching and publishing his Essays on Intemperance in 1828. Thomas Hunt, a North Carolina preacher, claimed that revivals occurred in “every neighborhood” that first embraced temperance. In Charles Finney’s Lectures on Revivals of Religion he called intemperance, or opposition to the temperance movement, one of 24 things that could stop a revival. John Marsh, a key leader of the American Temperance Union, urged parents to see to it that their children were converted because, he said, the “wickedness” that “blasts revivals . . . flows from drinking habits” formed in one’s youth. Theodore Cuyler attributed the 1866 revival at his Lafayette Avenue Presbyterian Church (Brooklyn, New York) largely to the influence of the temperance society he had organized the previous year. Justin Edwards once counted 300 communities that developed thriving temperance movements and found 275 of them were shortly thereafter “visited with the special influences of the Holy Spirit.” But E. N. Kirk presented the most comprehensive articulation of the temperance-then-revival connection in his 1838 sermon The Temperance Reformation Connected with the Revival of Religion and the Introduction of the Millennium. After recounting several instances in which revival followed a surging temperance movement, Kirk concluded, “In short, so manifest is the connection between Temperance and revival of religion in this country that we no more expect the latter where the former does not exist.” Reformers and preachers alike became convinced that temperance reform was a necessary prelude to revivalism. This is what the General Convention of Congregational Churches of Vermont meant when they declared that “the success of the temperance reformation [is] of vital importance to the interests of religion.” Temperance publications such as the annual ATS reports, and pro-Finney publications like the New York Evangelist, were filled with references to the temperance-as-prelude phenomenon in the early 1830s, but they tailed off in the latter half of the decade.14

Pro-revival theology provided a ready-made explanation for this temperance-as-prelude-to-revival phenomenon. Because intemperance would “darken the understanding, sear the conscience and pollute the affections,” it interfered with one’s reason, rendered the means of grace “ineffectual,” and destroyed one’s natural ability to respond to the revivalists’ plea, effectively nullifying their “moral sense,” their God-given free moral agency. This horrified revivalists and their supporters because the call for immediate repentance presumed the existence of natural ability, free moral agency, and reasoning capacity, and anything that compromised this capacity mitigated the force of the preacher’s plea. Conversely, temperance-induced sobriety aided the revivalist by “bringing men to reflection” and causing them to feel their “personal responsibility for personal actions.” Justin Edwards put it this way: “Facts . . . show conclusively that the use of ardent spirit tends strongly to hinder the moral and spiritual illumination and purification of men; and thus to prevent their salvation.” E. N. Kirk argued that intemperance kept people from church, and even if they went, it made them unfit to respond to the Gospel; it “stupefied” them and “deadened” their “religious sensibilities.” The effect of abstinence was reportedly so powerful that even men who became dry through the explicitly non-religious working-class Washingtonian temperance movement were reportedly at an increased susceptibility to the revivalist’s pleas.15

Becoming “Useful”: Temperance as Postlude to Revivals

The focus on human ability in the conversion process fueled an increased emphasis on Christian “usefulness” following conversion. Lyman Beecher in his sermons The Practicality of Suppressing Vice by Means of Societies Instituted for that Purpose (1803) and A Reformation of Morals Practicable and Indispensable (preached in 1812, first published in 1813), as well as in his 1812 committee report on temperance, established the theological foundations for Christian involvement in moral reform societies. These sermons were classic jeremiads in that Beecher warned of divine judgment if the nation did not turn from its sins, but he also creatively appropriated the doctrine of God’s moral government to hold out hope for change. One way he defended the practicality of moral reform efforts by saying that God’s Word commanded people to turn from their sins, and if God commands something of people they must be able to do it. “The commands of God, are the measure and the evidence of human ability. . . . We conclude, therefore, that reformation is practicable, because it is the unceasing demand of heaven that nations, as well as individuals, do turn from their evil ways.” Beecher was arguing that even the unregenerate could change their behavior based on the three restraints on human behavior: fear of God, public opinion, and the force of law. Moral reform societies could help align public sentiment with God’s laws and, thereby, assist into right living those who did not fear God but at least loathed public shame. Beecher preached A Reformation of Morals Practicable and Indispensable on the evening he cofounded with his mentor Timothy Dwight, the Connecticut Society for the Suppression of Vice and the Promotion of Good Morals. But Beecher was just one of the earliest preachers to extrapolate from pro-revival theology the Christian’s obligation to pursue an active faith. Charles Finney taught that new converts should “aim at being useful in the highest degree possible . . . if they see an opportunity where they can do more good, they must embrace it, whatever may be the sacrifice to themselves. . . . How else can they be like God?” Following his renowned Rochester, New York, revival Finney became convinced that the “very profession of Christianity implies . . . an oath to do all that can be done for the universal reformation of the world.” Even in private letters reformers attributed the slow increase in temperance sentiment to a lack of that “self-denyng, self-sacrificing benevolence inculcated in the Holy Scriptures.”16

From this theology and concerns about settlements in the western river valleys emerged what scholars have termed the “Benevolent Empire,” an interconnected group of national, ecumenical evangelical organizations seeking to “do good”—or make themselves “useful”—by producing Christian converts and reducing immorality, thereby shoring up public virtue and increasing the public’s happiness. Congregationalists and Presbyterians numerically dominated these groups, although they also included a few Baptists and Methodists. These organizations of clergy and laymen spoke of themselves as “advancing the Kingdom of God” and did so within the context of revivalism. This “empire” included over a dozen societies, but the most well known were the American Bible Society, American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM), American Tract Society(ATrS), American Sunday School Union, and American Home Missionary Society. These groups drew on a similar donor base and shared common aims, and several individuals held key leadership positions in two or more societies, creating an interlocking directorate. Comparable denomination-specific groups created by Baptists and Methodists—like the American Baptist Home Mission Society—are traditionally not included in the Benevolent Empire because they were not ecumenical, but they emerged from the same nexus of revivalism, theology, and ideology and together with the ecumenical groups can corporately be understood as “nexus organizations.”

These benevolent organizations began forming as early as the late 1790s, and through the 1820s their efforts were the primary institutional expressions of the evolving temperance message. Tract societies published the early temperance sermons and tracts, and home missionaries distributed the literature and organized local temperance societies throughout the West. Sunday school literature often included temperance stories. It was in this context that Ebenezer Porter’s weekly meetings germinated the idea of creating a national organization exclusively dedicated to the cause of temperance.

The men who founded the American Temperance Society had previously organized, or were currently serving, in at least five other nexus organizations, and they all understood their work as an outgrowth of their Christian desire to do good, to be benevolent. In fact, 15 of the original 16 ATS members were also members of the ABCFM, and 14 were also members of the ATrS. In the ATrS constitution they had announced they were “busied in discovering every way of access for divine truth into the human heart,” and that tract distribution was an easy way of “doing good.” In like spirit, the ATS constitution connected intemperance with conversions by lamenting that it had such a “fatal efficacy in hindering the success of all the common means which God has appointed for the moral and religious improvement of men” and declared they wanted to “do all in their power to promote the welfare of their fellow men.” ATS founder and agent Justin Edwards advised temperance workers to “Let your object be, the glory of God in the Salvation of men.” The same desire to do good works that animated the founders of other Benevolent Empire organizations was at work in the hearts of ATS founders; after all, they were literally the same people.17

Edwards’s advice points to the fact that temperance served as much as a postlude to revival as it did a prelude. Because pro-revival theology taught an active Christianity, temperance work was one of many avenues of “useful” activity open to new converts. In July 1827, Eatonton Baptist Church in Eatonton, Georgia, witnessed the beginning of Georgia’s “Great Revival.” Pastor Adiel Sherwood, a Northerner fresh from Andover Seminary, preached the first set of meetings of this two-year, 40-county harvest of more than sixteen thousand souls. During these meetings Sherwood used his new converts to establish Georgia’s first temperance society. The next year, during the Georgia Baptist Convention, Sherwood organized Georgia’s statewide temperance society. Likewise, in the middle of Charles Finney’s 1830–1831 Rochester revival, Finney convert Theodore Weld preached an impassioned four-hour temperance sermon that stirred businessmen to dump their whiskey in the streets and the Erie Canal.18 Beginning with this revival it became increasingly common for Finney and other revivalists to expect new converts to sign a total abstinence pledge. Finney actually claimed he and Weld had made temperance an “appendage” of the revival, and bragged about how many of his converts became “temperance men.” Revivalist Asahel Nettleton observed that most church excommunications resulted from intemperance, so to prevent this disgrace he recommended that every new convert sign an abstinence pledge. Nettleton argued that if a convert “does not give evidence that he intends to abstain wholly and forever, I feel decided that he ought not to profess religion. If he cannot be willing to do this, he can have no sufficient evidence of his own repentance or conversion.” E. N. Kirk agreed, warning that “there is immense temptation to backsliding in the instance of those who are all their days walking on the borders of intoxication,” and another preacher announced, “The Church needs the temperance reform for the purity as well as the promotion of revivals. Spurious convictions may be expected of those who, in the light of the present day, do not abandon all intoxicating drinks upon conviction of sin.” In the minds of some, the temperance pledge had become the immediate postlude to conversion; or perhaps the final stage of conversion itself. Leaders of the evangelical reform nexus had fully merged the discourses of revivalism and temperance, logically arguing that temperance both preceded revivals and “naturally” followed them.19

The Notion of Virtue: Temperance as an Element of Christian Republicanism

The societies of the Benevolent Empire also spoke of their work in language that is best identified as Christian republicanism. Americans of all classes, races, and locales claimed to be “republicans” in the years between the revolution and the Civil War. Christian republicanism is best understood as the hybrid social-political-religious worldview through which evangelicals justified the American Revolution, subsequently imagined the moral framework for a republican society, and dissected the social, political, and economic issues of their day.20 This language enabled Christians to communicate with others in the public sphere about national issues. Although interpreted variously, its basic tenets were nearly universally held by early nineteenth-century American Christians. The Christian republican worldview took for granted the reality of sin, and that God punished it, so fear of judgment by a very real and very personal God inspired evangelicals to fight sin. Evangelicals believed that if they did not at least exert a serious effort to fight sin, God would judge the nation, effectively ending its “republican experiment,” not unlike his destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah in the book of Genesis. Reformers viewed the individual immorality of intemperance as the source of social evils like poverty, domestic violence, and unemployment, rather than systems and structures beyond the individual’s control. Ending personal intemperance was thus the beginning of efforts to eliminate unhealthy community-wide pathologies. Because evangelicals believed feverish opposition to sin could indefinitely postpone God’s judgment, millennialism naturally inhered within Christian republicanism. This latter point contrasted with secular republicanism, which maintained that the stages of virtue, corruption, and decline naturally inhered in every republic. Typical was the writer who maintained, “Without virtue no nation ever prospered—with it, none would ever fail.”21

Virtue was the sine qua non of all forms of republicanism, and reformers depicted temperance as a virtue essential for the perpetuation of the republic. In the revolutionary and early national periods, public figures frequently expressed concerns about the virtue of the citizenry. Historian Mark Noll argues that one of the reasons a Christian republicanism could evolve was that America was willing to “include several not altogether compatible ideals under the notion of virtue.” Christians used it to mean personal, biblical morality, while their more secular contemporaries used it in its classical sense, as disinterested service to the common good. This tacit embrace of ambiguity within the public sphere enabled both secular and religious individuals to patriotically claim the “republican” mantle and unite as “brethren” in the common enterprise of nation-building. Whatever version of virtue one embraced, for the founders and the first generation of Americans, it was a given that it inhered in the nature of a free citizen, that a minimum level had to be maintained to perpetuate a republic, and that religion was at least helpful, if not necessary, to maintain it. Christians loved to cite George Washington’s farewell address, in which he asserted that “Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, Religion and morality are indispensable supports,” and that “virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government.”22

Antebellum temperance reformers frequently framed their arguments against intemperance in the language of Christian republicanism by calling it a vice that undermined public virtue, republican institutions, and the republic itself. The preamble of the American Temperance Society’s constitution warned that “wide-spreading intemperance . . . threatens destruction to the best interests of this growing and mighty Republic.” Elsewhere it reported that its members had “often dwelt with deep interest” on several questions, among them: “Shall our republic happily succeed in the interesting and crucial experiment of self-government, and, delivered from the dangers and ruin into which other republics have fallen, remain safe and firm, and be a blessing to the great community of nations?” An endless list of published temperance sermons and lectures continually reaffirmed the Christian republican nature of temperance discourse. In Benjamin Rush’s Enquiry into the Effects of Spirituous Liquors he argued that “a people corrupted with strong drink cannot long be a free people,” and Ebenezer Porter’s temperance sermon maintained not just that intemperance was sinful but that it was “threatening to the welfare of my native country.” The Reverend Heman Humphrey, longtime president of Amherst College, warned in one sermon that “our free institutions are more endangered by the love of ardent spirits, than they ever were by the slave trade,” and in another sermon, The Way to Bless and Save our Country, that the only “sure basis” of the government was “the virtue and piety of the people. In the absence of these, should Heaven in its wrath ever visit us with so dark a day, it must inevitably fall.” Whole sermons were committed to arguing for the interconnectedness of temperance with both the advance of Christianity and the health of the body politic. Perhaps the most detailed exploration of this relationship was Albert Barnes’s sermon The Connexion of Temperance with Republican Freedom. In Barnes’s sermon he lamented the drunkenness that accompanied Independence Day celebrations and then described at length eight “settled” items necessary for the perpetuation of republican institutions (such as right to own private property, right to enjoy the profit of your labor, right to vote, rule of law, and so on) and point by point showed how intemperance undermined each of them. Such reasoning completely blurred the lines between temperance work as a fulfillment of a new convert’s obligation to be useful in the Kingdom of God and temperance work as one’s patriotic duty to the nation. Being a good Christian and a good citizen had become one and the same for white evangelicals.23

Political scientist John Hammond argues that revivalism served as both the motive and the method of antebellum reform, and what he argues about reform in general applies to temperance in particular.24 Insofar as temperance advanced revivalism it advanced the Kingdom of God on earth, and insofar as it maintained public virtue it preserved the republic. Temperance was far more than an individual act of morality; it had profound ecclesiastical and political implications. The reform represented an optimism long since lost to American Protestantism. Both before and after the Civil War, various secular influences came to bear on the temperance movement, but we do the reformers a disservice and cloud our ability to explain the movement’s acceptance among the freed people if we downplay or dismiss the evangelical reform nexus—the intersection of religious practice, theology, and ideology—that birthed the movement, its discourse, and the organizations that brought it to the South. It is to these organizations that we now turn our attention.

Temperance and the Nexus/Missionary Organizations of Post-Emancipation Black Atlanta

In the wake of Union army advances into the Confederacy, “freedmen’s aid societies” sprang up across the North. Along with the older nexus organizations, these societies offered relief services to slaves fleeing to Union lines during the war and to freed people following the war, including the teaching of basic literacy skills. Many of the newer societies were “nonsectarian,” meaning non-religious, but within a decade the vast majority of them ended their efforts, leaving the older, more established nexus organizations to work long-term among the newly emancipated. The four most prominent organizations in Atlanta coordinated their efforts in the interest of spreading the temperance message among the freed people: the American Tract Society, African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, American Baptist Home Mission Society (ABHMS), and American Missionary Association (AMA). Immediately following the Civil War temperance reformers organized the National Temperance Society and Publication House (NTS), but its sentiments, philosophy, tactics, and leadership were fundamentally antebellum in spirit so, although it is chronologically a postbellum organization, I group it with the antebellum nexus organizations. Each organization was fully vested in the temperance movement long before its arrival in Black Atlanta, as the following brief organizational histories demonstrate.

Prior to their arrival in war-torn Atlanta, nexus organizations had years of experience taking their message to western settlers in the Mohawk, Ohio, and Mississippi River valleys (1810s–1830s) and to the non-Protestant, working-class immigrants in eastern cities (1840s–1850s). The fact that western settlers moved to areas without established institutions like schools, churches, and in some cases government bodies greatly unsettled the sensibilities of traditional easterners. The possibility of westerners “going native” and the lifestyles of non-Protestant immigrants both contradicted their understanding of the public virtue required for a successful republic. Christian republican ideology combined with pro-revival theology to create a common discourse with which these groups articulated their institutional mission and defined individual and communal issues such as intemperance. Their goals consisted of persuading the objects of their benevolence to accept evangelical cultural values and living patterns, including temperance, with the hope of shoring up America’s experiment in republican government—which, since the American Revolution, leading thinkers presumed was predicated on a virtuous citizenry. As one well-known New England minister extrapolated from an obscure passage in the Old Testament book of Judges, “emigration, or a new settlement of the social state, involves a tendency to social decline . . . nothing but extraordinary efforts in behalf of education and religion, will suffice to prevent a fatal lapse of social order.” This lecture, published by the American Home Missionary Society, was ominously titled Barbarism, The First Danger, and captures the mentality behind the efforts of nexus organizations wherever they worked. Unsurprisingly, such sentiments produced more long-term “successes” among western Anglo-Americans with a Protestant background than among non-Protestant immigrants or the freed people.25

The American Tract Society

The same Monday evening meeting in Ebenezer Porter’s study that birthed the American Temperance Society had earlier birthed the forerunner of the American Tract Society. In the fall of 1813 Porter and his Andover Circle organized a local tract society. Tract societies had existed in the United States since at least 1803, so the idea was not new. Their goal was to get “benevolent individuals” to cover the publishing costs of mass quantities of inexpensive gospel literature “best adapted to promote the conversion of sinners, revivals of religion, and experiential as well as practical piety.” Within a few months the society relocated to Boston and became the New England Tract Society, and in 1823 it changed its name to the American Tract Society. The society functioned by printing tracts and shipping them to regional depositories where agents sold them to local tract societies, which then distributed them gratis. By 1825 the society had 112 local depositories and 191 auxiliary societies throughout America and had distributed four and a half million copies of 196 different tracts. At the invitation of some New York philanthropists, in May 1825 the American Tract Society (ATrS) reorganized in New York City. Justin Edwards and William Hallock, who had held positions in the Boston-based society, received prominent positions in the new ATrS. Interestingly, however, the American Tract Society-Boston neither disbanded nor fully merged with the New York group. It simply became a “branch” of the American Tract Society in New York and promised to solicit donations only in Massachusetts and upper New England. In 1858 when the American Tract Society voted not to publish tracts addressing any aspect of slavery, the already semi-independent Boston branch reasserted its independence, broke away, and began publishing tracts on slavery. The two societies merged briefly in 1868, only to split again and then reunite in 1878.26

The tracts of the ATrS and the pronouncements of its officers consistently testified to the society’s commitment to the values of the evangelical reform nexus and to temperance. In the few months between Ebenezer Porter’s organizing of a tract society and the formal organization of the New England Tract Society, the Andover Circle raised almost $3,000 and published three temperance tracts, in addition to tracts on other subjects. On Temperance, their third tract, was the first of many temperance tracts to come off their press. ATrS tracts employed many narrative and rhetorical approaches to persuade readers and curiously, as often as not, omitted Bible verses, indicating their pragmatic tendency to appropriate any potentially efficacious argument. The American Tract Society-New York did all the printing for the American Temperance Society in its early years. The New England Tract Society’s original address to the public asserted in typical pro-revival theology, “A spirit of active benevolence is one of the distinguishing features of Christianity. . . . Where the Gospel has its full influence, it . . . produces the most tender concern for the happiness of mankind.” By claiming tract distribution was “an easy way of doing good” they were clearly targeting the mass of new revival converts seeking to be useful. The society viewed the settlers on the western frontier, like other nexus groups, through a Christian republican lens. “What is likely to be the moral and religious character of these new Societies and States? Will it be such to ensure the Divine favour, without peculiar and vigorous exertions to render it so?” At the first anniversary of the ATrS Justin Edwards reminded the society that they were under obligation to the nation to “make a development of character, such as creation never witnessed.” The extent to which tracts encouraged public virtue was the extent to which their distribution was deemed a public service, even patriotic.

In 1841 the ATrS adopted the colporteur system. Colporteurs were traveling agents who sold tracts and engaged people one-on-one in religious conversations (“witnessing”) and prayer. By the outbreak of the Civil War, the society had employed more than four thousand colporteurs who traveled in all regions of America, both rural and urban. When reviewing the effects of its colportage system on its tenth anniversary, the ATrS boasted that it had helped “check” intemperance, even though no empirical investigation could verify such an assertion. But the point is that the Society wanted to be seen as supporting temperance reform.27

The African Methodist Episcopal Church

The African Methodist Episcopal Church was the largest and oldest national black organization in the United States. Its origins date back to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1794 when a group of black worshippers left St. George’s Methodist Episcopal Church as a body after ushers told them to move to the back of the church while they were in the middle of praying. They began meeting separately in 1794 under the leadership of Richard Allen. Following a successful lawsuit to gain control of their church property from whites, in 1816 Richard Allen was ordained the first bishop of the AME Church. Born into slavery, Allen taught himself to read and write, converted to Methodism as a teenager, purchased his own freedom, and by the time of his death in 1831 had an estate valued in excess of $40,000, a significant sum for an African American in that day.

The creation of the AME Church was the first major Christian schism based on the racial prejudices of fellow parishioners and not on doctrinal differences. This meant that AME theology was essentially the same as that of white Methodists but also that it was strongly influenced by the popular pro-revival doctrines of the day. In fact, many of the revisions of Calvinist theology designed to support revivalism—like the belief that God’s benevolence was meant to facilitate man’s happiness, that Christians should likewise work for mankind’s happiness, the moral government of God teaching, and the idea that sin was in an individual’s behavior, and not imputed—aligned exceptionally well with major tenets of the African worldview popular among African Americans at the time. At its First General Conference, the church adopted the Doctrines and Discipline of the Methodist Episcopal Church without its pro-slavery provisions. The Doctrines and Discipline included a section originally written by John Wesley called the “General Rules,” which outlined the requirements for membership in a Methodist “class,” the basic unit of Methodism. Each class had about 12 people, plus a leader, who saw to the spiritual needs of each member and held them accountable in the practice of their faith. Several classes comprised a “society” or congregation. To be a class member one needed only “a desire to flee from the wrath to come, and to be saved.” Wesley added, however, that the lives of such individuals would show spiritual “fruit.” This fruit, or evidence of salvation, included “avoiding evil of every kind, especially that which is most generally practiced,” such as using God’s name in vain, breaking the Sabbath, and “drunkenness: or drinking spirituous liquors, unless in cases of necessity.” All of this meant that the same theology that white Christians used to support temperance could and was used by AME clergy. Although Wesley only opposed the use of distilled liquors, by the 1830s AME clergy generally taught and practiced total abstinence from all forms of alcohol, and by the 1850s the church backed legal suasion—that is, prohibition.28

AME Church leaders repeatedly reaffirmed their commitment to abstinence. The whole church met every four years in its “quadrennial” conference, and its regional groups, called “conferences,” held annual conferences. By the late antebellum period there were four conferences. The annual conferences repeatedly issued temperance reports. In 1833 the Ohio Annual Conference declared temperance societies were of the “highest importance” to all people but “more especially” to blacks, and the New York Annual Conference also issued a resolution condemning drinking that same year. In 1840 the Quadrennial Conference passed a resolution reaffirming its commitment to total abstinence, and the Ohio Annual Conference called for holding quarterly abstinence sermons and for making ministers give account of themselves if they failed to preach them. Many AME congregations organized temperance societies, and by the 1840s they had enrolled hundreds of their church members. The AME Church was actually ahead of white denominations in its advocacy for temperance and prohibition. In at least 14 different issues between 1854 and 1865,29 the church’s semi-monthly newspaper, the Christian Recorder—the only black-edited, -owned, and -financed newspaper that was nationally circulated—published editorials and other articles supporting total abstinence, urging lay participation in the temperance movement, and even defending government prohibition of the liquor traffic, a very divisive idea during that time. Soon after the commencement of hostilities during the Civil War, the Recorder’s editor, the Reverend Benjamin T. Tanner, became so disturbed by reports of drinking among Union soldiers that he considered publishing a temperance tract. Then he received from the American Tract Society one of its tracts for the same purpose, which so pleased him that he reprinted excerpts on the Recorder’s front page, reminding his readers that the arguments applied to civilians too. Shortly after his ordination, and before the war, Tanner confided in his personal diary that, “Whiskey is as a mighty river of death deluging millions in its fearful course,” suggesting that church leaders embraced such sentiments privately as well as publicly. When the AME Church purchased Wilberforce University in 1863, it prohibited its students from using alcohol. During the early years, many AME clergy were illiterate, and this produced noticeable discrepancies on teachings such as temperance, but denominational leaders were firmly committed to teetotalism by the end of the antebellum period and believed if sobriety was widely practiced by blacks it could only improve their treatment at the hands of white Americans.30

The American Baptist Home Mission Society

The third important nexus organization in post-emancipation Black Atlanta was the American Baptist Home Mission Society (ABHMS). Concerns (or perhaps fears) about the morality of settlers in the Mississippi Valley led western minister John M. Peck and Massachusetts pastor Jonathan Going to birth the idea of a Baptist home mission society in the summer of 1831. Skirting opposition from anti-mission Baptists in the General Convention, Baptist believers in revivals and reform came together to form the ABHMS in 1832. This group enthusiastically embraced antebellum pro-revival theology and the full range of benevolent reforms it gave rise to, as well as the Christian republican worldview. Adiel Sherwood, founder of Georgia’s first temperance society in 1827, participated in the organizational meeting. ABHMS founders involved themselves in a variety of benevolent works: Peck established schools, Sunday schools, and Bible societies throughout the Midwest, and Going, while pastoring in Worcester, Massachusetts, served as a founding trustee of Amherst College, founded Sunday schools, and became one of the early temperance preachers in his area. The ABHMS’s first president, the Honorable Heman Lincoln, supported such benevolent empire groups as the American Bible Society, American Tract Society, and American Temperance Society, and William Colgate, its first treasurer, was active in more than one Bible society. With such leaders at the helm, it is not surprising that their annual reports defined piety as “a disposition to do good to others” and observed that the churches “most active in promoting the benevolent enterprises of the age, are most highly favored with revivals.” Regardless of the rivalry between the upstart and less erudite Baptists and Methodists on one hand and the more established and educated Presbyterians and Congregationalists on the other, the pursuit of revivals and reform united many evangelicals behind the same causes. While disparate views on church-state relations may have prevented national level denominational bodies from officially endorsing prohibition, such sentiments in no way prevented multitudes of individual ministers from preaching total abstinence, because moral suasion rested on the same principles as did preaching for conversion.31

Unsurprisingly, the ABHMS also incorporated strong Christian republican language in its reports, especially when commenting on the Mississippi valley. Plagiarizing in spirit from the ATrS, the ABHMS asserted that “The character of its population for intelligence, morality, and religion, will determine the national character and the fate of the American Republic.” In their ninth report they sanguinely observed that “if” God’s blessing on America had been predicated up to this point “upon the intelligence and virtue of the people, and if the perpetuity of those blessings is still dependent upon the holy influence of the religion of Jesus Christ,” then there was reason to have hope because of the successful advances of the Gospel. Baptists were as persuaded as other evangelicals that their effort was of the “highest importance” to the “perpetuity of our republican institutions.”32

The ABHMS also pushed a strong temperance policy. By 1838 nearly all of its missionaries reported giving temperance lectures. The ABHMS supplied all missionaries with total abstinence pledges before they left for the mission field, but by 1847 several of them were reporting that the pledges were almost unnecessary because when they arrived in an area they found many churches were already using them. Beginning in 1841 the annual report listed the number of temperance pledges each missionary reported having signed, and by 1857 at least 17,257 people had signed. Annual reports also speak of many Baptist churches either requiring their members to sign the pledge or establishing temperance societies in connection with their church. Late in the antebellum period annual missionary reports speak of thousands of lectures on “moral subjects,” some of which presumably included temperance. The ABHMS claim to have provided a “strong impulse” to the temperance reform is well supported by its own annual reports.33

The American Missionary Association

The fourth organization that stoked temperance sentiment in Black Atlanta was the American Missionary Association, an interdenominational and interracial missionary society created in New York City in September 1846 by the merger of four organizations: the Amistad Committee, the Union Missionary Society, the Western Evangelical Missionary Society, and the Committee for West India Missions. The target populations of the precursor organizations and the merged AMA included Africans, communities of former slaves, and American Indians. Black Congregational churches had organized the Union Missionary Society. Open to any person of “Evangelical sentiments” (which they defined in a constitution footnote), the AMA’s stated purpose was “to send the Gospel to those portions of our own and other countries which are destitute of it.” Unlike other missionary societies and boards, the AMA refused to associate with Christians tolerating slavery or any form of “caste discrimination.”34 As the most prominent organization embracing the full range of the logical implications of revival theology, it was known for its abolitionism, its evangelization of people of color, and its insistence on the “brotherhood of man.” It opposed not only slavery but the racism that supported it, giving the AMA arguably the most racially progressive ethos of any national antebellum organization. Four of the first twelve men on its executive committee were African Americans, and a total of eight different African Americans served through the 1860s, four of them being ex-slaves. The AMA also supported many African American missionaries to the freed people. The abolitionist Lewis Tappan, a driving force behind its founding, argued that the association offered a “purer and whole gospel to the heathen world.” Initially the AMA received funds only from individuals, churches, and schools but not denominations; however, by 1865 the Free-Will Baptists, the Wesleyan Methodist Connection, and most important, the National Council of Congregational Churches had adopted the AMA as their official organization for missions among the freed people. Although its missionaries and leadership included individuals from many denominations (Methodist, Baptist, Presbyterian, Orthodox Friends, Dutch Reformed, Episcopalian, and Congregational), as Reconstruction progressed, Congregationalists came to dominate the organization.35

The fact that many AMA missionaries and officials were educated at Oberlin College heavily flavored the organization in its early years. John J. Shipherd, a New England Presbyterian preacher and friend of Charles Finney, founded Oberlin in 1833 about 30 miles from Cleveland, Ohio, with the aim of bringing the Mississippi valley under the influence of the “blessed gospel of peace.” Oberlin colony was a Christian community founded on all the principles of the evangelical reform nexus. Its original residents signed a covenant pledging them to “maintain deep-toned and elevated personal piety,” which included renouncing all “strong and unnecessary drinks.” All “extra” income earned by residents was to be poured into evangelistic, missionary, and reform enterprises. Oberlin was a stop on the Underground Railroad for many fugitives. The college, which initially focused on training teachers and preachers, distinguished itself by being the first American college to accept women and blacks, almost from its founding. One hundred blacks studied at Oberlin between 1835 and 1865, although a much smaller number actually graduated. Asa Mahan and Charles G. Finney, Oberlin’s presidents during these years, placed much emphasis on human agency in the conversion process and developed their own influential brand of holiness that came to be known as “Oberlin perfectionism.” Residents of Oberlin founded the Western Evangelical Missionary Society to support ministry among the Ojibwe Indians, and when the society merged into the AMA, the new society quickly became the most popular missionary board for Oberlin-trained missionaries to affiliate with. And just as most Oberlin graduates joined the AMA, most AMA missionaries were also from Oberlin. Oberlin graduates comprised 90 percent of all AMA missionaries before the Civil War and held key leadership posts into the 1890s. Heirs of the doctrines and praxis of the Second Great Awakening, AMA missionaries and their benefactors always rejoiced at the news of a revival. AMA missionaries enthusiastically extended this revival tradition to Black Atlanta, reporting in the pages of the American Missionary no less than nine separate revivals between 1868 and 1881. The Reverend Michael Strieby, Oberlin alumnus, revivalist, and reformer in his own right, was corresponding secretary for the AMA from 1864 to 1896. The affinity between the two organizations was such that Strieby considered Oberlin and the AMA to be “brothers,” and Atlanta’s AMA missionaries called the school they founded—Atlanta University—a “second Oberlin.”36

The influence of perfectionism on the AMA is suggested by its annual reports. One of the highest priorities of its missionaries was to establish “pure” churches, that is, churches tolerating no known sinful behavior. Although a principal impetus behind the formation of the AMA was to oppose slave-holding among Christians, the AMA sought much more. Beginning in 1850 its annual reports included a chart summarizing missionary work with a column labeled “pledged to abstinence.” Before 1855, missionaries reported a number in that column, but after 1855 every line stated “all.” No year passed without the annual report including missionary tales of either successful temperance work or the sad state of intemperance in their particular field, no doubt designed to inspire increased financial support. Since intemperance and slave-holding were both sins, they both had to be eliminated. The AMA drive for pure churches was a direct outgrowth of their perfectionist theology, as this 1859 resolution demonstrates:

That the only just mode of conducting missions requires the adoption of the perfect standard of holiness given by God in the Bible, and that for missionaries or missionary societies to allow any sin to go unrebuked among the people where they carry the Gospel, or to suffer any members of their churches to practice any sin without using all legitimate means in their power to effect church discipline with such transgressors, is a palpable violation of the spirit and principles of the Gospel, and the sure precursor of multiplied mischiefs to missions and the Church of God.37

These nineteenth-century Puritans had transformed the seventeenth-century drive for congregations composed of only the elect into a crusade for churches full of “perfect” Christians. Missionary John G. Fee, instrumental in establishing antebellum Kentucky’s interracial Berea College, best summarized the no-nonsense approach of AMA missionaries when he declared, “I am engaged in the effort to build up churches having no fellowship with slaveholding, caste, secret societies, dram-drinking or any known sins.” The AMA wanted its churches not to countenance any sin, and when lists of sins were compiled, intemperance made the short list.38

The AMA repeatedly expressed its hostility toward intemperance, even though the word did not appear in its constitution. At its annual meetings between 1849 and 1859, no less than six resolutions explicitly condemned intemperance, and members strongly criticized the liquor traffic from America to Africa. At the third annual meeting a resolution invited “all friends of a pure Gospel” to join the association’s efforts to spread the Gospel “without conniving at, palliating, or tolerating the sins of slave-holding, caste, war, polygamy, or intemperance.” In 1852 the association explained that ignoring intemperance would undermine the very Christian character they sought to inculcate: “Resolved, That to oppose sin in one set of relations while we do not in another—for example, to oppose intemperance while we do not oppose slavery, or to pray against oppression while we vote for it—is to strike down Christian principle, to deaden conscience, and, in the end, to undermine and destroy Christian character.”39

In another resolution they called both slave-holding and intemperance among Christians “formidable obstacles” to the spreading of Christianity overseas. All sin had to be opposed: institutional (caste discrimination), personal (intemperance), or institutional and personal (slave-holding). Logically, all AMA missionaries were required to sign a teetotal pledge. In 1883 the association distributed a children’s choral recitation on the AMA’s temperance position for use in its Sunday schools. After quoting several Scripture verses, the leader asks what the AMA position has been on temperance “since its organization,” and the response is “It has always taken a decided stand against the use and the sale of intoxicating drink.” Temperance did not appear in the AMA’s constitution, most likely because its abolitionist position was its raison d’être, and temperance was already a “given” among missionary agencies (in 1830 the American Home Missionary Society ordered its missionaries to preach temperance), but the AMA was obviously a temperance organization.40

While the American Tract Society, the AME Church, the American Baptist Home Mission Society, and the American Missionary Association were preaching temperance as just one part of their larger agendas, the temperance-specific American Temperance Union (organized in 1833) was fighting for its life. It was kept afloat by the heroic efforts of its secretary, the Reverend John Marsh, who dutifully prepared its annual reports and oversaw its tract-printing operations. The ATU was the poor stepchild of the Benevolent Empire and was reduced to little more than publishing annual reports on the temperance “advances” and setbacks of the previous year. Although the union successfully supported a range of state-level prohibition initiatives between 1838 and 1855, the political process undermined or overturned most of them, and its reports from the forties and fifties portray an organization (and movement) that was adrift, lethargic, and almost desperate at times. Marsh complained about state legislatures resisting grassroots prohibition efforts, the intemperance of immigrants, the inactivity of churches, apathy within the movement, and a perceived general increase in intemperance. The length of ATU annual reports shrank significantly at the same time as they were increasing their coverage of European temperance news. Indicative of its shrinking stature was one observation that John Marsh himself was the Union for its last 25 years. Internal disputes, funding difficulties, and the rise of the national debate over slavery combined to undermine enthusiasm for the movement and its flagship organization. The American Temperance Union was moribund, temperance supporters knew it, and something needed to be done.

The National Temperance Society & Publication House

The National Temperance Society was the last of the organizations to form out of the evangelical reform nexus. Although it did not exist in the antebellum period, its organization, leadership, approach to temperance, and religious proclivities aligned perfectly with the spirit of organizations formed decades earlier. Within weeks of Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox Court House, New York Good Templar J. N. Stearns and the American Temperance Union leaders issued a call for a national temperance convention (the fifth one), to be held August 1–3 at Saratoga Springs, New York. This convention brought together a “who’s who” list of 378 movement veterans. Their first official resolution enthusiastically offered thanks for the Union victory and the liberation of the slaves, and “for the opportunity now given us to seek . . . a deliverance from intemperance, that other great blot upon our national escutcheon; so that we may under the smile of Divine Providence, move on, through coming generations, in an unparalleled course of liberty, righteousness, and peace.” The optimism of this first resolution reveals that the doldrums of war and the excitement attending emancipation in no way caused these men to reject their theological roots in the evangelical reform nexus; they still viewed their world through the prism of Christian republicanism. The emancipation of the slaves meant that abolitionism would never again divide temperance, so in the Union victory they saw the potential for a truly unified and reborn movement. Emancipation and the political and military realities of four years of war not only exposed the common theological roots of temperance and abolitionism but made it convenient for all reformers to embrace their logical implications.

The convention proceedings reveal the extent to which the delegates were still firmly rooted in the mind-set of antebellum temperance. This was such a tradition-bound group that they chose the man who presided over the first national temperance convention more than 30 years earlier, businessman Reuben Walworth, to give the opening address. Walworth, who reminded the audience that “virtue alone exalted the nation,” was the first of several speakers to appropriate Christian republican language and encourage increased moral suasion efforts. The delegates spoke of virtue and vice, Divine Providence, and the need for repentance; calls for increased efforts to educate the public about temperance almost became a mantra. While they agreed on these antebellum values, the delegates also revisited old antebellum disputes such as the proper roles for the churches and the government to play in the movement. While all agreed that churches and the religious basis of the movement were essential to its ultimate success, they disagreed about the extent to which churches had supported the reform in recent years. Some argued for the need to reinforce moral suasion with legal suasion, but others countered that until the masses could be properly educated to support it, prohibition would never work. They also discussed such divisive issues as voting for prohibition candidates and the use of grape juice instead of wine for Holy Communion. One delegate called for a new temperance tract publication house since so much of the earlier literature had gone out of print, and a Canadian delegate, John Dougall, called for a special effort to reach the freed people with the temperance message. John Marsh reminded the convention that the “great mistake” of the American Temperance Union was that it had “no pecuniary basis,” except Edward C. Delevan’s periodic contributions and subscribers to its publications. The convention ended by approving a long list of resolutions, including one establishing a committee to look into creating a new temperance organization, a call for a new temperance publication house, and one recognizing that the four million freed people were now “thrown open to Temperance efforts” and recommending “their case to the special attention of any national organization that may be formed.”41

To carry out these resolutions, on September 26, seven men, including three clergy, met in the Manhattan offices of Phelps, Dodge, & Company, of which William Earl Dodge was the senior partner. Dodge, who chaired the meeting, and some of the others present had been involved with the ATU and were particularly concerned with creating a more effective organization. During this and subsequent meetings that fall, the committee organized the National Temperance Society and Publication House, whose mission was to “promote the cause of total abstinence from the use, manufacture, and sale of all intoxicating drinks as a beverage” by publishing and circulating literature, encouraging the use of the teetotal pledge, and “all other methods calculated to remove the evil of intemperance from the community.” The NTS purposely revived the temperance movement on the basis of such antebellum values as moral suasion, education, and clergy and church involvement. The respected philanthropist William Dodge was elected the first president, and J. (John) N. Stearns was named its publishing agent. Executive decision-making power was vested in a board of managers, but the publications committee was also powerful because it vetted all publications. Influential and ceremonial (vice presidential) NTS leaders included everyone from the most conservative to the most progressive temperance reformers and eventually grew to include Southerners, blacks, and Canadians. The NTS could embrace such a wide range of reformers because it did not demand ideological conformity but, rather, focused on the lowest common denominators of the movement, namely, educating the public by printing and distributing large amounts of inexpensive literature and defending every local community’s right to conduct local option votes. At the same time, it shrewdly refused to endorse specific state and national prohibition campaigns or take a position on the existence or platforms (after 1869) of the national Prohibition Party.42

The NTS did all this within a Christian republican framework and with a commitment to revivalism. Although the NTS strategically removed itself from rancorous political debates over prohibition, it simultaneously remained firmly committed to the educational aspect of grassroots political organizing, embracing prohibition only where an educated public sentiment demanded it and opposing it elsewhere. For many years its leaders asserted this was the only meaningful path to prohibition. Despite this approach, some of the men who wrote its constitution were involved in organizing the Prohibition Party in 1869 and still remained involved with the NTS. Although it struggled with finances like the old ATU, throughout the period of this study it maintained a relatively stronger “pecuniary basis.” Its monthly publication, the National Temperance Advocate, published without interruption into the 1900s, served as a clearinghouse for all movement news.43

As Union armies marched through the South and the enslaved sought freedom behind Union lines, Northern philanthropic energies quickly focused on the contrabands’ plight. Long before Robert E. Lee surrendered, Northern emergency aid and relief workers began flowing to the freed people in coastal regions. Although the short-lived organizations did much for the freed people, it was the well-established evangelical nexus organizations that settled in for long-term social development among the former slaves. They brought with them a deeply rooted religio-cultural heritage with all its inherent biases, believing their efforts were the cultural phase of the conquest initiated by the Union army. The agents of these organizations generally did not make temperance their primary message upon arrival in the war-torn South, but they also would not, and could not, excise it from their value system and worldview. These nexus organizations were too closely related to temperance, and while they might be rivals in other areas, like true siblings, at the end of the day they closed ranks in defense of their brother, the temperance movement. If nothing else, they agreed on the teetotal pledge. As a result, despite whatever other educational, political, doctrinal, and institutional designs motivated these organizations’ activities among the freed people, they were predisposed to work cooperatively with each other, and with the NTS, to support a temperance reform agenda that was bigger than any one organization. We now turn our attention to exactly what that cooperation looked like.

The ship called Moderation

May cruise a little while,

But soon its wrecks are strewing,

The rocks of Drunkard’s Isle.

The good ship “Total Abstinence”

Well manned by Christian men

With Christ our Lord for pilot

No fear or danger then.

—“The Light House”