A party of rollicking Yankee blades, bold with tavern liquor, pounded one night on the wooden gate of the old Grafton burying-ground, and called out in profane and drunken jest, “Arise, ye dead, the judgment day is come.” Suddenly from one of the old graves loomed up in the dark the gigantic form of Sarah Boston, answering in loud voice, “Yes, Lord, I am coming.” Nearly paralyzed with fright, the drunken fellows fled, stumbling with dismay before this terrifying and unrecognized apparition.
Mrs. Forbes ends the story of Sarah Boston with a beautiful thought. The old squaw now lies at rest in the same old shadowy burial place – no longer the jest and gibe of jeering boys, the despised and drunken outcast. Majestic with the calm dignity of death, she peacefully sleeps by the side of her white neighbors. At the dawn of the last day may she once more arise, and again answer with clear voice, “Yes, Lord, I am coming.”
CHAPTER V
“KILL-DEVIL” AND ITS AFFINES
Any account of old-time travel by stage-coach and lodging in old-time taverns would be incomplete without frequent reference to that universal accompaniment of travel and tavern sojourn, that most American of comforting stimulants – rum.
The name is doubtless American. A manuscript description of Barbadoes, written twenty-five years after the English settlement of the island in 1651, is thus quoted in The Academy: “The chief fudling they make in the island is Rumbullion, alias Kill-Divil, and this is made of sugar canes distilled, a hot, hellish, and terrible liquor.” This is the earliest-known allusion to the liquor rum; the word is held by some antiquaries in what seems rather a strained explanation to be the gypsy rum, meaning potent, or mighty. The word rum was at a very early date adopted and used as English university slang. The oldest American reference to the word rum (meaning the liquor) which I have found is in the act of the General Court of Massachusetts in May, 1657, prohibiting the sale of strong liquors “whether knowne by the name of rumme, strong water, wine, brandy, etc., etc.” The traveller Josselyn wrote of it, terming it that “cursed liquor rhum, rumbullion or kill-devil.” English sailors still call their grog rumbowling. But the word rum in this word and in rumbooze and in rumfustian did not mean rum; it meant the gypsy adjective powerful. Rumbooze or rambooze, distinctly a gypsy word, and an English university drink also, is made of eggs, ale, wine, and sugar. Rumfustian was made of a quart of strong beer, a bottle of white wine or sherry, half a pint of gin, the yolks of twelve eggs, orange peel, nutmeg, spices, and sugar. Rum-barge is another mixed drink of gypsy name. It will be noted that none of these contains any rum.
In some localities in America rum was called in early days Barbadoes-liquor, a very natural name, occasionally also Barbadoes-brandy. The Indians called it ocuby, or as it was spelled in the Norridgewock tongue, ah-coobee. Many of the early white settlers called it by the same name. Kill-devil was its most universal name, not only a slang name, but a trading-term used in bills of sale. A description of Surinam written in 1651 says: “Rhum made from sugar-canes is called kill-devil in New England.” At thus early a date had the manufacture of rum become associated with New England.
The Dutch in New York called the liquor brandy-wine, and soon in that colony wherever strong waters were named in tavern lists, the liquor was neither aqua vitæ nor gin nor brandy, but New England rum.
It soon was cheap enough. Rev. Increase Mather, the Puritan parson, wrote, in 1686: “It is an unhappy thing that in later years a Kind of Drink called Rum has been common among us. They that are poor and wicked, too, can for a penny make themselves drunk.” From old account-books, bills of lading, grocers’ bills, family expenses, etc., we have the price of rum at various dates, and find that his assertion was true.
In 1673 Barbadoes rum was worth 6s. a gallon. In 1687 its price had vastly fallen, and New England rum sold for 1s. 6d. a gallon. In 1692 2s. a gallon was the regular price. In 1711 the price was 3s. 3d. In 1757, as currency grew valueless, it was 21s. a gallon. In 1783 only a little over a shilling; then it was but 8d. a quart. During this time the average cost of molasses in the West Indies was 12d. a gallon; so, though the distillery plant for its production was costly, it can be seen that the profits were great.
Burke said about 1750: “The quantity of spirits which they distill in Boston from the molasses which they import is as surprising as the cheapness at which they sell it, which is under two shillings a gallon; but they are more famous for the quantity and cheapness than for the excellency of their rum.” An English traveller named Bennet wrote at the same date of Boston society: “Madeira wine and rum punch are the liquors they drink in common.” Baron Riedésel, who commanded the foreign troops in America during the Revolution, wrote of the New England inhabitants: “Most of the males have a strong passion for strong drink, especially rum.” While President John Adams said caustically: “If the ancients drank wine as our people drink rum and cider, it is no wonder we hear of so many possessed with devils;” yet he himself, to the end of his life, always began the day with a tankard of hard cider before breakfast.
The Dutch were too constant beer drinkers to become with speed great rum consumers, and they were too great lovers of gin and schnapps. But they deprecated the sharp and intolerant prohibition of the sale of rum to the Indians, saying: “To prohibit all strong liquor to them seems very hard and very Turkish. Rum doth as little hurt as the Frenchman’s Brandie, and in the whole is much more wholesome.” The English were fiercely abhorrent of intemperance among the Indians, and court records abound in laws restraining the sale of rum to the “bloudy salvages,” of prosecutions and fines of white traders who violated these laws, and of constant and fierce punishment of the thirsty red men, who simply tried to gratify an appetite instilled in them by the English.
William Penn wrote to the Earl of Sutherland in 1683: “Ye Dutch, Sweed, and English have by Brandy and Specially Rum, almost Debaucht ye Indians all. When Drunk ye most Wretched of Spectacles. They had been very Tractable but Rum is so dear to them.”
Rum formed the strong intoxicant of all popular tavern drinks; many are still mixed to-day. Toddy, sling, grog, are old-time concoctions.
A writer for the first Galaxy thus parodied the poem, I knew by the smoke that so gracefully curled: —
“I knew by the pole that’s so gracefully crown’d
Beyond the old church, that a tavern was near,
And I said if there’s black-strap on earth to be found
,A man who had credit might hope for it here.”
Josiah Quincy said that black-strap was a composition of which the secret, he fervently hoped, reposed with the lost arts. Its principal ingredients were rum and molasses, though there were other simples combined with it. He adds, “Of all the detestable American drinks on which our inventive genius has exercised itself, this black-strap was truly the most outrageous.”
Casks of it stood in every country store and tavern, a salted cod-fish hung alongside, slyly to tempt by thirst additional purchasers of black-strap. “Calibogus,” or “bogus,” was unsweetened rum and beer.
Mimbo, sometimes abbreviated to mim, was a drink made of rum and loaf-sugar – and possibly water. The “Rates in Taverns” fixed in York County in Pennsylvania, in 1752, for “the protecting of travellers against the extortions of tavern-keepers,” gives its price: —
Many years ago, one bitter winter day, there stepped down from a rocking mail-coach into the Washington Tavern in a Pennsylvania town, a dashing young man who swaggered up to the bar and bawled out for a drink of “Scotchem.” The landlord was running here and there, talking to a score of people and doing a score of things at once, and he called to his son, a lubberly, countrified young fellow, to give the gentleman his Scotchem. The boy was but a learner in the taproom, but he was a lad of few words, so he hesitatingly mixed a glass of hot water and Scotch whiskey, which the traveller scarcely tasted ere he roared out: “Don’t you know what Scotchem is? Apple-jack, and boiling water, and a good dash of ground mustard. Here’s a shilling to pay for it.” The boy stared at the uninviting recipe, but faithfully compounded it, when toot-toot sounded the horn – the coach waited for no man, certainly not for a man to sip a scalding drink – and such a drink, and off in a trice went full coach and empty traveller. The young tapster looked dubiously at the great mug of steaming drink; then he called to an old trapper, a town pauper, who, crippled with rheumatism, sat ever in the warm chimney corner of the taproom, telling stories of coons and catamounts and wolverines, and taking such stray drops of liquid comfort as old companions or new sympathizers might pityingly give him. “Here, Ezra,” the boy said, “you take the gentleman’s drink. It’s paid for.” Ezra was ever thirsty and never fastidious. He gulped down the Scotchem. “It’s good,” he swaggered bravely, with eyes streaming from the scalding mustard, “an’ it’s tasty, too, ef it does favor tomato ketchup.”
Forty years later an aged man was swung precariously out with a violent jerk from a rampant trolley car in front of the Washington Hotel. He wearily entered the gaudy office, and turned thence to the bar. The barkeeper, a keen-eyed, lean old fellow of inscrutable countenance, glanced sharply at him, pondered a moment, then opened a remote closet, drew forth from its recess an ancient and dusty demijohn of apple-jack, and with boiling water and a dash of mustard compounded a drink which he placed unasked before the traveller. “Here’s your Scotchem,” he said laconically. The surprised old man looked sharply around him. Outside the window, in the stable yard, a single blasted and scaling buttonwood tree alone remained of the stately green row whose mottled trunks and glossy leaves once bordered the avenue. The varying grades of city streets had entirely cut off the long porch beloved of old-time tavern loafers. The creaking sign-board had vanished. Within was no cheerful chimney corner and no welcoming blazing fire, but the old taproom still displayed its raftered ceiling. The ancient traveller solemnly drank his long-paid-for mug of Scotchem. “It’s good,” he said, “and tasty, if it does favor tomato ketchup.”
A ray of memory darted across the brain of the old barkeeper, and albeit he was not a member of the Society of Psychical Research and could not formulate his brain impressions, yet he pondered on the curious problem of thought transference, of forced sequence of ideas, of coincidences of mental action resulting from similar physical conditions and influences.
Flip was a dearly loved drink of colonial times, far more popular in America than in England, much different in concoction in America than in England, and much superior in America – a truly American drink. As its chief ingredient is beer, it might be placed in the chapter on small drink, but the large amount consumed entitles it to a place with more rankly intoxicating liquors.
The earliest date that I find flip named in New England is 1690. From that year till the middle of this century there never was a day, never a minute of the day, and scarce of the night, that some old Yankee flip drinker was not plunging in a loggerhead, or smacking his lips over a mug of creaming flip.
In the New England Almanac for 1704 we read under December: —
“The days are short, the weather’s cold,
By tavern fires tales are told.
Some ask for dram when first come in,
Others with flip and bounce begin.”
American flip was made in a great pewter mug or earthen pitcher filled two-thirds full of strong beer; sweetened with sugar, molasses, or dried pumpkin, according to individual taste or capabilities; and flavored with “a dash” – about a gill – of New England rum. Into this mixture was thrust and stirred a red-hot loggerhead, made of iron and shaped like a poker, and the seething iron made the liquor foam and bubble and mantle high, and gave it the burnt, bitter taste so dearly loved. A famous tavern host of Canton, Massachusetts, had a special fancy in flip. He mixed together a pint of cream, four eggs, and four pounds of sugar, and kept this on hand. When a mug of flip was called for, he filled a quart mug two-thirds full of bitter beer, added four great spoonfuls of his creamy compound, a gill of rum, and thrust in the loggerhead. If a fresh egg were beaten into the mixture, the froth poured over the top of the mug, and the drink was called “bellows-top.
Let me not fail to speak of the splendid glasses in which flip was often served – I mean the great glass tumblers without handles which, under the name of flip glasses, still are found in New England homes. They are vast drinking-vessels, sometimes holding three or four quarts apiece, and speak to us distinctly of the unlimited bibulous capacities of our ancestors. They are eagerly sought for by glass and china collectors, and are among the prettiest and most interesting of old-time relics.
English flip is not so simple nor so original nor so good a drink as American flip. It might be anything but flip, since it is compounded in a saucepan, and knows naught of the distinctive branding of flip, the seething loggerhead. If it contained no spirits, it was called “egg-hot.”
A rule for flip which seems to combine the good points of the American and English methods, uses ale instead of home-brewed. It may be given “in the words of the Publican who made it”: —
“Keep grated Ginger and Nutmeg with a fine dried Lemon Peel rubbed together in a Mortar. To make a quart of Flip: Put the Ale on the Fire to warm, and beat up three or four Eggs with four ounces of moist Sugar, a teaspoonful of grated Nutmeg or Ginger, and a Quartern of good old Rum or Brandy. When the Ale is near to boil, put it into one pitcher, and the Rum and Eggs, etc., into another: turn it from one Pitcher to another till it is as smooth as cream. To heat plunge in the red hot Loggerhead or Poker. This quantity is styled One Yard of Flannel.”
A quartern is a quarter of a gill, which is about the “dash” of rum.
No flip was more widely known and more respected than the famous brew of Abbott’s Tavern at Holden, Massachusetts. This house, built in 1763, and kept by three generations of Abbotts, never wavered in the quality of its flip. It is said to have been famous from the Atlantic to the Pacific – and few stage-coaches or travellers ever passed that door without adding to its praises and thereafter spreading its reputation. It is sad to add that I don’t know exactly how it was made. A bill still existing tells its price in Revolutionary days; other items show its relative valuation: —
This is the only tavern bill I have ever seen in which nice distinctions were made in boarding men and women. I am glad to know that the “weomen” traveller in those days had 2s. 8d. of daily advantage over the men.
Other names for the hospital loggerhead were flip-dog and hottle. The loggerhead was as much a part of the chimney furniture of an old-time New England tavern and farm-house as the bellows or andirons. In all taverns and many hospitable homes it was constantly kept warm in the ashes, ready for speedy heating in a bed of hot coals, to burn a mug of fresh flip for every visitor or passer by. Cider could be used instead of beer, if beer could not be had. Some wise old flip tasters preferred cider to beer. Every tavern bill of the eighteenth century was punctuated with entries of flip. John Adams said if you spent the evening in a tavern, you found it full of people drinking drams of flip, carousing, and swearing. The old taprooms were certainly cheerful and inviting gathering-places; where mine host sat behind his cagelike counter surrounded by cans and bottles and glasses, jars of whole spices and whole loaves of sugar; where an inspiring row of barrels of New England rum, hard cider, and beer ranged in rivalry at an end of the room, and
“Where dozed a fire of beechen logs that bred
Strange fancies in its embers golden-red,
And nursed the loggerhead, whose hissing dip,
Timed by wise instinct, creamed the bowl of flip.”
These fine lines of Lowell’s seem to idealize the homely flip and the loggerhead as we love to idealize the customs of our forbears. Many a reader of them, inspired by the picture, has heated an iron poker or flip-dog and brewed and drunk a mug of flip. I did so not long ago, mixing carefully by a rule for flip recommended and recorded and used by General Putnam – Old Put – in the Revolution. I had the Revolutionary receipt and I had the Revolutionary loggerhead, and I had the old-time ingredients, but alas, I had neither the tastes nor the digestion of my Revolutionary sires, and the indescribable scorched and puckering bitterness of taste and pungency of smell of that rank compound which was flip, will serve for some time in my memory as an antidote for any overweening longing for the good old times.
The toddy stick, beloved for the welcome ringing music it made on the sides of glass tumblers, was used to stir up toddy and other sweetened drinks.
It was a stick six or eight inches long, with a knob at one end, or flattened out at the end so it would readily crush the loaf sugar used in the drink. The egg-nog stick was split at one end, and a cross-piece of wood was set firmly in. It was a crude egg-beater. Whirled rapidly around, while the upright stick was held firmly between the palms of the hands, it was a grateful, graceful, and inviting machine in the hands of skilful landlords of old.
Another universal and potent colonial drink was punch. It came to the English colonies in America from the English colonies in India. To the Orientals we owe punch – as many other good things. The word is from the Hindustani panch, five, referring to the five ingredients then used in the drink, namely: tea, arrack, sugar, lemons, water.
In 1675 one Tryer drank punch in India and, like the poor thing that he was, basely libelled it as an enervating liquor. The English took very quickly to the new drink, as they did to everything else in India, and soon the word appeared in English ballads, showing that punch was well known.
Englishmen did not use without change the punch-bowls of India, but invented an exceptionally elegant form known by the name of Monteith. It was called after a man of fashion who was marked and remarkable for wearing a scalloped coat. In the Art of Cookery we find reference to him and the Monteith punch bowl: —
“New things produce new words, and so Monteith
Has by one vessel saved himself from death.”
Monteiths seem to have come into fashion about 1697. The rim was scalloped like its namesake’s coat, or cut in battlements, thus forming indentations, in which a punch ladle and lemon strainer and tall wine-glasses were hung on their sides, the foot out. The rim was usually separate from the bowl, and was lifted off with the glasses and ladle and strainer, for the punch to be brewed in the bowl. When the punch was duly finished, the ornamental rim was replaced. A porcelain imitation of a Monteith is here shown, which was made in China for an American ship-owner, doubtless from a silver model.
Punch became popular in New England just as it did in old England, in fact, wherever English-speaking sea rovers could tell of the new drink. In 1682 John Winthrop wrote of the sale of a punch bowl in Boston, and in 1686 John Dunton told of more than one noble bowl of punch in New England.
Every buffet of people of good station in prosperous times soon had a punch bowl. Every dinner was prefaced by a bowl of punch passed from hand to hand, while the liquor was drunk from the bowl. Double and “thribble” bowls of punch were served in taverns; these held two and three quarts each.
To show the amount of punch drunk at a minister’s ordination in New England in 1785, I will state that the eighty people attending in the morning had thirty bowls of punch before going to meeting; and the sixty-eight who had dinner disposed of forty-four bowls of punch, eighteen bottles of wine, eight bowls of brandy, and a quantity of cherry rum.
Punch was popular in Virginia, it was popular in New York, it was popular in Pennsylvania. William Black recorded in his diary in 1744 that in Philadelphia he was given cider and punch for lunch; rum and brandy before dinner; punch, Madeira, port, and sherry at dinner; punch and liqueurs with the ladies; and wine, spirit, and punch till bedtime; all in punch bowls big enough for a goose to swim in.
In 1757 S. M. of Boston, who was doubtless Samuel Mather, the son of Cotton Mather, sent to Sir Harry Frankland, the hero of the New England romance of Agnes Surriage, a box of lemons with these lines: —
“You know from Eastern India came
The skill of making punch as did the name.
And as the name consists of letters five,
By five ingredients is it kept alive.
To purest water sugar must be joined,
With these the grateful acid is combined.
Some any sours they get contented use,
But men of taste do that from Tagus choose.
When now these three are mixed with care
Then added be of spirit a small share.
And that you may the drink quite perfect see,
Atop the musky nut must grated be.”
From the accounts that have come down to us, the “spirits a small share” of the Puritan Mather’s punch receipt was seldom adhered to in New England punches.
The importation to England and America of lemons, oranges, and limes for use as punch “sowrings,” as they were called, was an important part of the West Indian and Portuguese trade. The juices of lemons, oranges, limes, and pineapples were all used in punches, and were imported in demijohns and bottles. The appetizing advertisements of J. Crosby, a Boston fruit importer, are frequent for many years in New England newspapers. Here is one from the Salem Gazette in 1741: —
“Extraordinary good and very fresh Orange juice which some of the very best Punch Tasters prefer to Lemmon, at one dollar a gallon. Also very good Lime Juice and Shrub to put into Punch at the Basket of Lemmons, J. Crosby, Lemmon Trader.”
I don’t know whether the punch tasters referred to were professional punch mixers or whether it was simply a term applied to persons of well-known experience and judgment in punch-drinking.
In Salem, New Jersey, in 1729, tavern prices were regulated by the Court. They were thus: —
Punches were many of name, scores of different ones were given by drink compounders, both amateur and professional. Punches were named for persons, for places; for taverns and hosts; for bar-tenders and stage-coach drivers; for unusual ingredients or romantic incidents. Sometimes honor was conferred by naming the punch for the person; sometimes the punch was the only honor the original ever had. In these punches all kinds of flavoring and spices were used, and all the strong liquors of the world, all the spirits, wines, liqueurs, drops, distilled waters and essences – but seldom and scant malt liquors, if it were truly punch.
With regard to the proper amounts of all these various fluids to be used in composition opinions always differed. Many advised a light hand with cordials, some disliked spices; others wished a plentiful amount of lemon juice, others wished tea. In respect of the proportions of two important and much-discussed ingredients, old-time landlords apparently heeded directions similar to those I once heard given impressively by an old Irish ecclesiastic of high office: “Shtop! shtop! ye are not commincin’ right and in due ordher! Ye musthn’t iver put your whiskey or rum foorst in your punch-bowl and thin add wather; for if ye do, ivery dhrop of wather ye put in is just cruel spoilin’ of the punch; but – foorst – put some wather in the bowl – some, I say, since in conscience ye must – thin pour in the rum; and sure ye can aisily parcaive that ivery dhrop ye put in is afther makin’ the punch betther and betther.”
Charles Lamb tells in his Popular Fallacies of “Bully Dawson kicked by half the town and half the town kicked by Bully Dawson.” This Bully Dawson was a famous punch brewer; his rule was precisely like that of a famous New England landlord, and is worth choosing among a score of rules: —
“The man who sees, does, or thinks of anything else while he is making Punch may as well look for the Northwest Passage on Mutton Hill. A man can never make good punch unless he is satisfied, nay positive, that no man breathing can make better. I can and do make good Punch, because I do nothing else, and this is my way of doing it. I retire to a solitary corner with my ingredients ready sorted; they are as follows, and I mix them in the order they are here written. Sugar, twelve tolerable lumps; hot water, one pint; lemons, two, the juice and peel; old Jamaica rum, two gills; brandy, one gill; porter or stout, half a gill; arrack, a slight dash. I allow myself five minutes to make a bowl in the foregoing proportions, carefully stirring the mixture as I furnish the ingredients until it actually foams; and then Kangaroos! how beautiful it is!”
With this nectar and a toast we may fitly close this chapter. May the grass grow lightly o’er the grave of Bully Dawson, and weigh like lead on the half the town that kicked him!