ould mention here that Americans were already familiar with whiskey. Mainland Britons and American colonists imported whiskey from Ireland, the whiskey center of the world, but obviously only wealthy people could afford it). Their skills improved the quality of American whiskey, making it a desirable commodity in other parts of North America. Whiskey was more marketable than grains anyway because it was easier to ship and it kept longer.
The whiskey industry benefited from the Revolution at rum’s expense. During the war, the British Royal Navy blockaded American ports. So imports from the Caribbean, like sugar and molasses, became rare. Rum production suffered as a result. At the same time, civilian and military demand for alcohol sored. Each Continental soldier was given 4 oz. of whiskey per day. In the French and Indian Wars, colonial troops were given rum rations.
What were they given in the Civil War?
Sarah: Nothing, absolutely nothing. No alcohol rations. One of the doctors that I study often talks about how difficult, because of temperance, how difficult it was to get whiskey to transport body parts back to the Army medical museum for study. And so sometimes they would try to transport a barrel of whiskey down to the front line to fill with body parts, and by the time it got there it’d be empty because people would be siphoning it off. And so he writes this memoir that he has this secret hope that people are siphoning it off on the way back and getting this alcohol tainted with human bodies.
Sarah: Yeah, that’s like his revenge.
Marissa: To get back at them?
Sarah: Yeah. It’s disgusting but it illustrates the fight over alcohol during the Civil War. The purposes that it served.
Marissa: Well at this point there was no fight. They were just like give the troops all the alcohol.
Sarah: Yeah, it was seen as necessary for morale.
Marissa: Right, spirits were thought to improve moral and to actually strengthen soldiers’ bodies as they suffered malnutrition, injury and illness. Since alcohol prevented food stuffs from spoiling, early Americans assumed that consuming alcohol would slow down the aging process and preserve their bodies from disease.
Why are you giggling?
Sarah: Because I hope that’s not true!
Marissa: Alcohol, whiskey specifically, was thought to cultivate virility in men, a quality that seemed particularly apt for young warriors. In June 1737, The Virginia Gazette printed a sensational story about an elderly Irish couple of 70 years old who conceived and birthed a child in county Omagh. The newspaper reported: “her pregnancy, ’tis thought, was entirely owing to the Quantity of Whiskey her Husband drank; they have had no child these 20 Years past, for in the Year 1715, the Husband took an Oath not to drink any of that Liquor for 20 years, but the Term being expir’d, he returned again to the Use of it, and did not drink of it above a month, when his wife was discovered to be with Child.”
The 70 year old lady got pregnant because her husband drank whiskey. Sure.
This substitution in military provisions mirrored what was happening in the civilian world. Whiskey quickly replaced rum as Americans’ drink of choice. Most of the Caribbean remained in British hands after the war, so the fledgling republic never got a healthy rum trade going again. The 1808 abolition of the slave trade was the death knell of the rum industry in North America. (#worthit). This paved the way for a robust American whiskey industry that is still going strong today.
Sarah: I never put that together before. That American taste for rum was pulled back because of this, that it was supplanted by whiskey. For some reason that never meshed in my brain.
Marissa: Well, it’s a combination of things, not just the end of slavery.
The first American whiskeys, again made along the eastern slopes of the Appalachians, was a predominantly rye whiskey mixed with corn and barley malt. Rye whiskey became the speciality of Pennsylvania and Maryland distilleries.
Corn whiskeys were more popular in the southernmost areas of the frontier– we aren’t talking abou