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Gerrit Smith Broadside and Pamphlet Collection

Temperance revival in Peterboro, N.Y. : Peterboro, May 3, 1841 [to] Edward C. Delavan.

Smith, Gerrit, 1797-1874.

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Call number: Smith 415

Temperance Revival in Peterboro, N.Y.

PETERBORO, MAY 3, 1841.

EDWARD C. DELAVAN, Esquire:

MY DEAR FRIEND, - You will be gratified to hear of the Temperance Revival in Peterboro.

The wonderful Temperance movement in Ireland; the prompt responses to it from Irish hearts in America; the new, wholly unanticipated and delightfully successful measure of Reformed Drunkards' Societies; were amongst the means of reviving the slumbering temperance spirit of our village and vicinity.

Three weeks ago we scattered thickly over our whole town printed copies of the following Petition. You are aware, that Smithfield is the name of the town, which includes the village of Peterboro.

To John G. Curtis, Preston Armour, Asahel C. Stone, and Geo. W. Ellinwood, Esquires,

COMMISSIONERS OF EXCISE OF TOWN OF SMITHFIELD, COUNTY OF MADISON and STATE OF NEW YORK:

GENTLEMEN - This Petition comes to you from the inhabitants of the town in which you reside, over eighteen years of age.

Your Petitioners, taking it for granted that applications for Tavern Licences will be made to you at your approaching session, beg that you will deny such applications. They represent, that the present public houses in the town of Smithfield afford as ample accommodations for the travelling public, as are contemplated in the law under which you will be asked to grant tavern licences; and they further represent that these accommodations would be none the less, were your honorable body to withhold tavern licences, or, in other words, permission to sell intoxicating liquors from all those houses. It is possible, however, that your honorable body may fear that, were you thus to withhold licences, some of the present public houses would cease to be such, and that an inadequate supply of the accommodations in question would follow. But the reasons for concluding that our present public houses will continue such, only on the condition that intoxicating liquors may be sold in them, are insufficient. One of them has, for many years, been cleared of such liquors. But should so improbable an event occur, as the taking down of the signs of the others, new establishments would speedily take their place and that, too, without the agency of a Board of Excise. There is enough, short of the privilege of selling intoxicating liquors, to secure an adequate number of public houses.

Your Petitioners regard it, then, as a settled point, that the laws of the State, and your oaths to obey them, do not require you to grant tavern licences; and that you cannot consistently grant them, unless you are convinced that a public house in which intoxicating liquors are sold, is more useful - more contributive to human happiness - than one in which they are not sold. But it is of the very reverse of this that you are convinced. Your honorable body is as ready as your petitioners, to admit that, whatever may be said in favor of alcohol for medicinal or mechanical uses, observation and science pronounce it unnecessary for a beverage. But, if unnecessary, how can further indulgence in it be vindicated in the face of the fact, that the drinking of alcoholic liquors makes an annual deduction from American wealth of more than one hundred millions of dollars; makes one-twelfth of all the American people, who drink them, drunkards; and opens yearly in our drunkenness - smitten land forty thousand graves for the bodies of those whose spirits cannot "enter into the kingdom of Heaven."

But your honorable body need not take this extended view to learn whether it is wise to continue the sale of intoxicating liquors in any of the public houses of the town of Smithfield. The history of those in which it is sold, is quite sufficient to solve the question. Let the keeper of either make out the most imposing and exaggerated array of the benefits it has yielded by the sale of such liquors; and still there will be found an infinite overbalance of those benefits in the desolations of conjugal hopes, in the hunger and nakedness of children, in the frightful temporal and spiritual ruin, produced by those identical liquors. For proof of the truth of our assertion, we need not go to the church-yards of our town, where recollections of the woes of drunkenness throng around so many tombs. Some of the unhappy ones, whom present, as well as former, public houses of the town of Smithfield, have made and continued drunkards, still live - and live, too, to testify in their own unutterable wretchedness, that the evils of selling intoxicating liquors for a beverage are as real and measureless, as the benefits are trivial and imaginary.

Deeply do your Petitioners regret that the statute book of our State impliedly sanctions the practice of drinking intoxicating liquors. Whilst it continues to do so, it will be but a too successful snare to the public conscience. But if it were ever safe to graduate our morals by human, instead of divine laws, it surely cannot be safe to graduate them by the laws enacted on the subject of intoxicating liquors, before the public mind had been led to the conclusion of the uselessness of such liquors as a beverage. We have before shown, however, that even human laws do not require you to grant tavern licences. But if they did, we should trust that you would not obey them. We should look for your response to the law of love written upon your hearts. We should expect you to declare with an Apostle: "We must obey God rather than man." We should expect you to resign your offices, if you found that they require you to curse rather than to bless your fellow-men - to sin against rather than to serve your Maker.

In conclusion, your petitioners implore your honorable body, in the name of the drunkard, his wife, and his children - in the name, too, of the sober, who, whilst tavern licences are granted, are exposed to become drunkards - to refuse to grant such licences. They implore you to do so, even though it should be at the probable loss of your popularity and your offices. They implore you to take such a stand for truth and temperance, for God and humanity, that generations to come shall rise up and call you blessed.

SMITHFIELD, April 13, 1841.

Ten days, ago, we held our first recent Temperance Meeting. Preston Armour, Esq., whom, in my public letter to you of Sept. 1833, I numbered amongst our reformed drunkards, and who has the honor to be one of our magistrates, was in the Meeting; and made a modest and heart-moving confession of his relapse. The speeches made in New-York by reformed drunkards of Baltimore were read: and with what effect is inferable from the fact, that the deeply interested audience welcomed a proposition to take immediate steps toward the organization of a Reformed Drunkards' Society for the town of Smithfield. Mr. Armour, Ambrose Johnson and Henry Devan, in formed the Meeting, that they would become members of such a Society. The Meeting adjourned to the third day following and to Siloam, which is the other little village in our town. Mr. Armour came to it with a Constitution in his pocket. Such are his talents and education, that he needed and had no help in preparing it. The Preamble is as follows:

"We, the subscribers, having ourselves experienced the evil effects of intemperance, and wishing to guard against it hereafter by strengthening one another, and endeavoring to save others of the same habits, Do ordain the following to be our motto and our pledge 'Total abstinence from all intoxicating liquors as a beverage.' We further agree to associate ourselves together for the above purpose under the name of the Washington Reformed Drunkards' Society of the town of Smithfield: and we also ordain the following to be our Constitution."

Another drunkard, (we trust no longer a drunkard,) Hezekiah Culver, gave his name for connexion with the Reformed Drunkards' Society. Mr. Culver is another of our relapsed patients. He was one of the reformed drunkards of whom I wrote you in the letter already referred to. He removed from this town to Naples, several years ago. Whether rum had reconquered him, before or after his removal, I do not know. Suffice it to say, that he again became a drunkard; and that, a few weeks since, at the special urgency of his worthy and afflicted wife, he returned to the more favorable and hopeful atmosphere of Smithfield. He is an industrious and amiable man; and will, I trust, be a blessing to his family and to the community. The Meeting adjourned to Peterboro and to this day at 10, A. M.

Mr. Armour's Address this morning was worthy of the fixed attention, which a large audience gave to it. Stephen Bates made a few appropriate remarks and offered himself for membership in the Reformed Drunkards' Society. Our next Temperance Meeting is to be held about three weeks hence in Siloam; and Mr. Armour is on that occasion to repeat his excellent address. I would here remark, that the drunkard is more ready than the reformed drunkard to give his name to the new Society. The one looks to it for deliverance from his horrid enslavement, and to lift him up from his deep debasement into the enjoyment of the public esteem. But the other feels, that he has no need of the Society, and that to connect himself with it would be to republish his partially, if not entirely, forgotten disgrace. There are in this town reformed drunkards, who have, for many years, been sober and respectable. Some of them are members of Churches. The new Society is a terrible trier of their spirits. It calls on them to make another and a public and recorded confession of the sin in which Satan had, for so long a time, bound them. It calls on them to go forward in this work of love, and to be largely instrumental in delivering others, who are still bound by this sin. It calls on them to make this return to God for their own emancipation.

But they shrink from the trial. The truly pious amongst them will not, however, refuse for a long time to submit to it. They will soon

[along left margin] N.B. Let this Petition be signed and sent to the Store of James Barnett, in Peterboro, by May 1, 1841

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find, that the disturbance of conscience; which the Reformed Drunkards' Society has occasioned them, can never be allayed, until they have so far crucified themselves, as to join it.

At 3 P. M. this day the people flocked in large numbers to the Public House in Peterboro, where the Board of Excise had given notice, that they would receive applications for licenses. The Board kindly adjourned to the Presbyterian Church to provide room for the numerous anxious spectators. If we except the conversation respecting the licensing of one of our merchants, that so he might sell alcoholic liquors for medicinal purposes, there were but two applications. Both of them were for tavern licenses. These applications were met by the presentation of numerous copies of the foregoing Petition, signed by more than one half of the voters in the town and by women and young men without number. Our Board is composed of intelligent men; and they evinced a strong desire to do what is right. There was a deep impression on their minds, that the law required them to grant tavern licenses, even though they should unhesitatingly believe, that spirituous liquors and wines" are not, "absolutely necessary for the actual accommodation of travellers." Happily this impression was removed; and the Board left at liberty of conscience to carry out their temperance views, and to refuse the applications. Thanks to the good Being, who cares for the wretched drunkard and his scarcely less wretched family, there is not a rum license in all the town. It was a touching consideration presented to the Board, that one of their own number had magnanimously and emphatically signified how he would vote on the applications, could he leave his death bed to take his place with them. His emaciated and trembling hand, in its probably last employment of his pen, had subscribed his name to the Petition against licensing Houses of Death. Beloved man! He will soon have the light of eternity to show him, whether, m signing that paper, he espoused the right or the wrong. Ah, where is the Commissioner of Excise, who, knowing that he was writing his name for the last time, would sign it to a license to murder bodies and murder souls!

The Temperance cause has now a far stronger hold on the affections of the people of this town than it ever had before. The efforts of our unhappy drunkards to reform themselves awakens deep and general sympathy. It would seem impossible, that any could be so hard hearted, as to put the slightest obstacle in the way of that effort? I do not hesitate to say, that no Temperance Society can exert so preservative an influence on the sober, as a Reformed Drunkards' Society. From the sight of such a Society they derive the most affecting and urgent motives to abstain from drinking intoxicating liquors, and to make their examples a blessing, instead of a snare to the man of appetite for strong drink. He has no title to a reputation for humanity, who throws weights upon the head of a drowning man. And how much better title to it has he, who continues to drink intoxicating liquor in the presence of those, who are making death - struggles to escape from its temptation?

It is a cause of deep grief, that there are professing Christians in this town, who sympathize with the rum-seller rather than with his victims. Some of them refused to unite with us in praying the Excise Board not to license the selling of the drunkard's drink. Many of them carry their grain to the distillery. And so low is the standard of Christianity amongst us, that, even during our present hard contest with the mighty influences enlisted on the side of rum, one of our Churches decided, that men might hold themselves aloof from that contest, and even avow their unwillingness to surrender the privilege of carrying grain to the distiller, without showing themselves unworthy of being visibly enrolled amongst the self-sacrificing servants of God.

"This was the most unkindest cut of all." A decision fraught with such cruel treachery to the cause of truth, and made too, at such a crisis, well nigh prostrated the hopes and courage of our hearts. Oh, when will Churches be striving to conform to the requirements of Christianity, instead of striving to drag down that uncompromising and self-denying religion, and to accommodate it to the claims of their depravity and ensnaring circumstances! How common the error of laboring to conform our religion to ourselves, instead of ourselves to our religion

The blindness of men to their own share of a great iniquity is remarkably illustrated in the case of many a farmer, who grows grain for the distiller. Standing as he does along with the distiller, at the very fountain head, whence issue the fiery streams; and responsible as he is, along with his partner, for all the desolations and death, that mark the whole course of those streams, he nevertheless denounces both the vender and drinker of intoxicating liquors, as if entirely unconscious of his exposure to their retaliation. My neighbor, who owns the House of Death in this village, suffers no inconsiderable pecuniary loss by the stand which our Board of Excise have taken. You and I, who have long had to accept of half rents for buildings, because we would not suffer intoxicating liquors to be sold in them, know full well how to sympathize with him. But when he complained to me the other day that men of unclean hands were making war on his tavern, and that many of our farmers, who are in partnership with the distiller, were guilty of the gross inconsistency of signing the Petition to the Board of Excise, and of thus attacking the rum business in one department, whilst they were upholding it in another, I could not wonder at the indignation which swelled his bosom.

You are aware, that I never thought very well of the effort in our State to obtain a law directly prohibiting the traffic in intoxicating liquors. Had I no other, I should still feel that there was a sufficient objection to the effort, in the strong probability, that it will not succeed, or, that if it do, its success will be but temporary, as in the similar case in Massachusetts. The present Excise law is not just what I would have it. But were the Legislature, by modifying it, or by enacting a declaratory law, to remove the very common impression, that Boards of Excise, even when thoroughly convinced that "spirituous liquors and wines" are not "absolutely necessary for the actual accommodation of travellers," are, nevertheless, in certain circumstances, required to grant tavern licenses, I should have little doubt, that a large share of our towns would be speedily cleansed of the pollutions of the rum-traffic. I would, that the friends of temperance in every part of the State might, at the next session of the Legislature, send up their petitions for such a modification or such a declaratory law.

Interpreted, as it is clear to my own mind the Excise law should be interpreted, it leaves a Board of Excise, composed of temperance men at perfect liberty to refuse, in all circumstances, to grant tavern licenses. I regard the spirit of the law as eminently equitable and republican. It allows the people of each town to determine for themselves whether to have their Public Houses best adapted to promote the comfort of the traveller, or to manufacture drunkards. There is equal scope under the law for the friends and the foes of temperance principles. A rum-drinking town can gratify its inclination to have rum in its Public Houses, and a temperance town can have its Public Houses conducted on the principles of temperance.

The Legislative Report of Col. Young, made a year ago, was severely criticised by some of the friends of temperance. It is, nevertheless, an admirable temperance document, and does great honor to the head and heart of its author. It takes right views of the meaning of the Excise law and of the powers it impartially confers on the friends and the enemies of our sacred cause. I wish copies of it could be thickly scattered over the whole State.

With great regard,

Your friend,

GERRIT SMITH.