Coverdale's fears of decline, dissipation, and loss of control parallel the fears giving life and urgency to the temperance movement, the largest reform movement of the antebellum period. In part, the popularity of temperance reform can be attributed to the fact that Americans had a real drinking problem: the national per capita consumption of distilled spirits jumped from under two gallons in 1800 to just over five gallons in 1830. But temperance also melded well with a variety of ideological orientations. In the tradition of Protestant admonitions, ranging from Increase Mather's Wo to Drunkards (1673) to Lyman Beecher's Six Sermons on Intemperance (1826), Finney warned that temperance was of crucial importance because alcohol wreaked havoc on the spiritual and rational resources necessary for conversion. Emerson similarly believed that "unnatural" intoxication crippled the individual's spiritual resources and, like the Enlightenment temperance reformer Benjamin Rush, he also remained concerned about the effects of drinking on bodily health. The institutional sources of temperance activity in America were set in place by Federalist and Protestant directed societies — such as the -136- Massachusetts Society for the Suppression of Intemperance, founded in 1813, and the American Temperance Society, founded in 1826 — which concerned themselves with reforming the drinking habits of the working classes. Proclaiming the virtues of self-denial and thrift, temperance tracts from these organizations promulgated a capitalist ethic conducive to the demands of the newly expanding factories. Many of the male workers who took the temperance pledge, however, were influenced less by these elitist groups than by the working-class Washingtonian Societies of the 1840s, which championed temperance in the Ben Franklin tradition of self-help and upward mobility.
Women, too, participated in great numbers in the temperance movement, as they saw drinking as a male activity threatening to violate the purity and harmony of the home. During the 1820s and 1830s, middle-class women organized female moral reform societies, which regularly conducted home visits of urban working-class tenements in an effort to purge those dwellings of the alcoholic beverages believed to transform honest laborers into shiftless, wife-beating beasts. (Concerns about violation and purity contributed as well to the rise of Magdalene Societies — groups of evangelical women offering refuge and the possibility of reformative conversions to urban prostitutes.) Women were also particularly responsive to a variety of health reforms championed by writers who took temperance as their starting point. Sylvester Graham's high-fiber cracker, William Alcott's vegetarianism, Orson Fowler's nondeterministic phrenology (according to Fowler, the defects of character detected in the skull could be remedied through diet and exercise), Amelia Bloomer's dress reforms, and the spiritualist Mary Gove Nichols's hydropathic water cure — all of these reforms were embraced by a number of women as ways of regaining control of their bodies from an increasingly professionalized male medicine and, more generally, the impinging male body.
An issue that spoke to a wide range of constituencies, temperance became a central motif of the writings of the period. Between 1829 and 1834 the New York State Temperance Society circulated over four million copies of its publications, while the American Tract Society distributed over five million of its temperance pamphlets by 1851. Significantly, in 1836 the American Temperance Union, challenging Finney's assertion that novel reading was a corrupting waste -137- of time, endorsed temperance fiction as an efficacious method of gaining converts to the cause. For temperance crusaders, the novel itself was of special importance, as book-length fiction, in the narrative tradition of William Hogarth's print cycle The Rake's Progress (1734), could trace the degeneration over time of the individual tempted to drink, and could trace as well the impact of drinking on the individual's family. An important forerunner of antebellum temperance fiction was Mason Weems's The Drunkard's Looking Glass (1813). During the 1830s, Mary Fox's The Ruined Deacon (1834) and George B. Cheeve r's Deacon Giles' Distillery (1835) achieved a considerable readership. In 1842 Walt Whitman wrote a temperance novel, Franklin Evans, for the Washingtonians, and three years later George Lippard published his enormously popular and sensationalistic The Quaker City; or, The Monks of Monk Hall, which presented numerous scenes of depraved group drinking among Philadelphia's degenerate aristocrats.
Temperance themes had an important, though often satirical, place in Herman Melville's sea fiction (recall Aunt Charity's failed temperance work in Moby-Dick), as he tended to romanticize the fraternal bonds forged among his drinking sailors. Redburn's short-lived allegiance to the Juvenile Abstinence Association, White-Jacket's perception of the Neversink as "the asylum for all the drunkards," and Ishmael's initial shock at the unrestrained drinking at the Spouter Inn are meant to signify the greenhorn status of characters soon to become fraternal salts. That said, Melville's extended account in Redburn (1849) of dissipation in Liverpool's sailor bars, his portrait of despotic, hard-drinking Captain Claret in White-Jacket (1850), his demystifying picture of fraternal drinking in The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids (1855) as dependent on the exploitation of women and the working class, and his wonderfully perverse rendering of the cunning con games masked as fraternal drinking between Charlie Noble and the Cosmopolitan in The Confidence-Man (1857) — all suggest that he, like the conventional temperance writers of the day, viewed alcohol as a considerable social problem.
Temperance themes and images also found their way into many of the popular women's novels of the period. Concerned with addressing the problem of patriarchal power, women writers tended to image -138- the drunken husband or father as a brute who, under the influence of ardent spirits, gave unconstrained sway to his predatory passions. In Caroline Chesebro's Isa: A Pilgrimage (1852), for example, the heroine's adoptive father is an abusive drunkard who, fortunately, dies early on in the novel. Devoting her novelistic energies principally to the temperance cause, Metta Victoria Victor wrote two temperance novels, The Senator's Son; or, The Maine Law: A Last Refuge (1853) and Fashionable Dissipation (1854). In The Senator's Son in particular, Victor underscores the ravages wrought over time by paternal drinking. Opening with the protagonist accepting a glass of wine from his father at the age of four, the novel shows how this seemingly innocent act leads to the death of the boy's mother and, eventually, assorted ills to his sister, wife, and daughter before he kills himself while suffering delirium tremens. A more complex account of the ravages of drinking appeared in Elizabeth Stoddard's The Morgesons (1862), which, in the larger service of exploring the themes of free will and companionate marriage, counterpoints an alcoholic, who fathers a retarded child and dies of the d.t.'s, to a reformed drinker who participates in the shaping of a potentially happier marriage.