But the combination of a booze-soaked culture and nation building proved to be a volatile cocktail. “This was the power of alcohol,” Barbier writes. “It brought people together and loosened usual comportments. It fostered community and a shared identity.”
Along the way, the book humanizes George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and other founding figures with accounts of their tavern time and appreciation of adult beverages. Adams once “drank Madeira at a great Rate and found no Inconvenience in it,” as he wrote in his diary, and Jefferson spent about 13 percent of his salary on wine during his first presidential term. Washington even became a distiller in his retirement. And yes, that son-of-a-maltster (and modern Boston lager namesake), Samuel Adams, shows up, too.
The book’s title is culled from entries in “The Drinker’s Dictionary,” a lengthy list of euphemisms for drunkenness (which included “Cherry Merry” and “Wamble Crop’d” among the bangers) that Benjamin Franklin published in a 1737 edition of The Pennsylvania Gazette. Barbier includes the list as an appendix.
She offers plenty of examples about how alcohol revved up the colonists in protest and war, but she also explores a less-traveled path — namely, the era’s societal and racial notions about who could acceptably drink to excess. John Adams “was uncomfortable if people thought of the Sons of Liberty as intoxicated,” she writes. “That was the behavior of others: British soldiers got drunk, Native Americans got drunk. Respectable, liberty-loving men did not.”
The book tends to emphasize the jollier side of consumption, though Barbier does explore colonial temperance movements and early examples of addiction. But perhaps for pacing’s sake — or perhaps because losing battles are such a buzzkill — she skips some of the more detrimental behavior attributed to alcohol on the Continental Army’s part, as when Gen. Adam Stephen was accused of such frequent intoxication (among other things) after screwing up the 1777 Battle of Germantown that he was booted from the service. (Sometimes, America runs on drunken. Sometimes, not so much.)