The 20th may have been the American century, but it was during the 18th that we made the transition from an ethnically uniform but marginally viable colony of the British Empire clinging tenaciously to the East Coast of North America to a fully independent polity taking its place and its chances among the nations of the world.
The Declaration of Independence is still a thrill to read 250 years after its composition by a youthful Thomas Jefferson under the watchful eyes of Benjamin Franklin and John Adams, though it’s uncertain just how or on what timetable the manifesto was actually read or heard by the citizens of the envisioned new republic. Were you a partisan of independence, you would have rejoiced to read such a stirring defense of the cause, and perhaps be moved to raise a glass to its prospects. But what would that glass have held?
Let’s survey the possibilities …
Cider. Hard cider was a staple drink wherever the apple tree could be induced to fruit — and that was much of North America. According to the Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America, fermented apple juice was Colonial America’s “foremost beverage and remained so well into the 19th century.” Without further elaboration, apple cider could achieve no more than around 6 percent alcohol by volume, but freezing or boiling the juice would concentrate the sugars and result in the more potent drink known as applejack.
Beer and Ale. One reason the Mayflower landed at Plymouth, Massachusetts in 1620 and not at “Hudson’s River” (its intended destination) was because they were running low on stores of beer and there was fear that if they went further there wouldn’t be enough left for the ship’s crew to make the return voyage. With no barley at hand, the nascent community struggled to ferment whatever grain could be had, including what they knew as Indian corn (maize). The first licensed brewery in Boston was established in Charlestown in 1637. By the 1660’s, there were enough to make legal oversight of brewing facilities advisable.
Whiskey. Emigrants with Scottish or Irish roots arrived in the American colonies with a taste for this distilled spirit and a talent for making it. Scots-Irish immigration rose mightily in the 1730’s and so did the number of stills. The Washingtons maintained a distillery at their Mt. Vernon estate where, in 1799, they produced an impressive 11,000 gallons of whiskey. The young republic’s attempt to raise cash to pay off its Revolutionary War debt by taxing whiskey and bourbon in 1791 resulted in a full-scale rebellion that lasted two years and required 13,000 troops to quell. From the beginning whiskey seems to have been a drink of the frontier rather than of the more well-established colonial communities.
Rum. Distilled directly from sugar or molasses, rum was for a while the most popular and widely available distilled spirit in the northeast colonies. There would have been a dash of bitter irony involved in using it to toast the declaration’s inalienable rights language, however, since rum production anchored one corner of the infamous triangle trade by which molasses shipped to New England from the Caribbean was processed into the spirit that was then exchanged on the West Coast of Africa for slaves. The human cargo was in turn shipped to the Caribbean for sale to planters who needed labor for the notoriously brutal work of cane-cultivation and sugar manufacture, completing the vicious cycle.
Punches. Early versions of what we would later refer to as cocktails were generally rum-based with fruit juice added. Punch was popular at mixed-sex gatherings being thought more genteel than either beer or spirits. Ladled out from a common bowl, it radiated amiable sociability. Grog, mixed and served out twice-daily to seaman in the British and American navies, was a kind of punch, consisting of rum, water and lime juice (to fend off scurvy). To be deprived of it for disciplinary reasons was a serious matter. A threat to “stop your grog” was usually enough to return the surliest foretopman to his duty.
Wine. The vision of Thomas Jefferson sipping vintage Bordeaux in his dining room at Monticello colors our view of wine in this period, but Jefferson was exceptional in this regard. A wealthy man who had spent considerable time in France first as a diplomat and later as a tourist, his deep knowledge and appreciation for French wine was scarcely typical of Americans of the period.
Port; Madeira; Sherry. A trio of fortified wines designed to better tolerate the challenges of moving and shipping over considerable distances emerged in the 17th century and became staples in upper class British households and urban clubs by the 18th. Sherry from Andalusia; the powerful, durable, partially-oxydized wines that had their origins on the Portuguese-held island of Madeira; and Port (also Portuguese) provided affordable and more potent alternatives to the products of French vineyards. In every year from 1696 to 1785 imports of these wines dwarfed those of France, with whom the Brits were steadily at war. In the colonies, the pleasures afforded by casks of Madeira, Port and Sherry (indeed, European wine of any stripe) were mainly confined to the affluent professional, merchant, and land-owning classes.
So what should it be in the glass this holiday weekend? There are plenty of period-appropriate choices. But in recognition of the crucial support the French gave our long-shot revolution (and the fact that they bankrupted themselves doing it) I’ll be raising a glass of the best old Bordeaux in my cellar. And damn the duty.