I want to talk about this whole temperance society thing I’m struggling over, but fear that it would make no sense without understanding how it fits into my larger picture. For my present chapter I am working on benevolent societies in Piedmont North Carolina. Benevolent societies in the early nineteenth century are—broadly defined (by me)—as voluntary associations dedicated to improving society. They focused on things like poverty alleviation, education reform, and establishment of “middle class” behavioral standards toward sex, work, (and sex work), and sobriety. Historians have identified benevolent associations as markers of the emerging bourgeoisie and its attempt to direct societal development in industrializing northern cities. In this view, the rural south, lacking similar widespread reform movements (but having slavery) was a place hesitant to become modern, or liberal, and thereby hostile to union with northerners. Overgeneralization? Yes, but I’m trying to be brief. Some historians, however, have identified modernist tendencies in the large slaveholding class, urbanites, and others in the slaveholding south. I am trying to expand that view…that ordinary rural people in parts of the south embraced modern social assumptions as well.
In this chapter, the channel for these ideas (universal education, nuclear family structures, and—forgive me—“imagined communities”) is the work of religious denominations. I’ll skip past what I have so far and get to the temperance societies. These organizations, which promoted a variety of measures from opposition to distillation of liquor to abstinence from all alcohol, were the most secular benevolent societies in the south. Denominations were quite ambivalent toward the Temperance movement for decades before tepidly embracing its goals in the 1850s. The thing is, churches had a long-standing tradition of promoting sobriety in their own communities. Church disciplines banned the making, sale, and use of liquor and by far the most expulsions from congregations arose from members being charged with distillation or repeated drunkenness. Yet membership in temperance societies made headway in rural places. (Bruce Stewart has recently argued otherwise, but I disagree.)
So, what is up with that? Whereas denominations easily found reasons to advocate education, and bases to promote it from the churches and from the government; and while religious people quickly built (relatively) sophisticated commercial structures to spread the sale of printed material, they suddenly hesitated to support secular movements that advocated a thing the churches already practiced. And I don’t know why.
Clearly, if I’m placing this in the pre-modern/modern transitory period, issues of community are at work. What I mean is that congregational regulation of alcohol consumption contains the mark of pre-modern societies—communal, local, patriarchicaly governed, and self-policing. Secular temperance societies are the opposite of that—national, abstract, democratic, and complex. Yet in all other reform causes, denominations (and communities) largely embraced modern techniques and outlooks with much enthusiasm. (Something else to be aware of is the changing temperance movement, particularly the class implications of the Washingtonians and the Sons of Temperance after 1840. I’m keeping that one in mind.)
Anyhow, that’s what I’m working on now. I’m hoping to get this finished up: then I’ll have a draft of Chapter 2 and can move-the-*&*^ on to Chapter 3.
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