 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 about the deep south, we’re talking about Appalachia – Kentucky, southern Ohio, West Virginia. Corn whiskeys are 80% corn, with a birth of rye and barley. It was usually aged in oak barrels. These early corn whiskeys were easily eclipsed in popularity by bourbon (named after Bourbon county in KY), which used a smaller volume of corn and took on a dark color as it was stored in charred oak barrels. Kentucky found a niche in bourbon production and is still the bourbon capital of the world today. They have lots of Kentucky bourbon tours I hear.
America’s’ new love affair with whiskey meant that it became a lucrative commodity during and after the war. But in some areas, such as western Pennsylvania, still a sparsely populated frontier at the end of the war, distillers were struggling to eke out a living.
Cody: Awesome, thank you Marissa for kind of setting this up. I’m going to come back to a few of the points that Marissa made earlier but for now I’m going to dive a little bit into the history of the actual conflict itself.
Now, in 1790, just like what we have today, the United States had two major political parties. They were the Federalist party and the Republican Party. Now even though one of them is called the Republican Party there’s some big differences between that republican party and the Republican Party we have today, and the Federalist party has some big differences with what we would consider the Democratic Party today. But generally speaking the federalists were in favor of a more centralized government and more federally funded programs, while Republicans looked for more local, and state lead initiatives, so in that sense there are some similarities.
And again, the same as it is today, there are certainly more than two voices that represented each of these parties but for this discussion we’re going to focus on one voice from each side. One of these individuals has been made rather famous by a recent musical, Alexander Hamilton, and he’ll be the voice for the Federalist. The other will be Thomas Jefferson