Bloggin' the Bookshelf: Peter Mancall's "Deadly Medicine: Indians and Alcohol in Early America"

Editor's Note: This is a new series started with the aim of reviewing older works that are either directly linked with prelim reading lists or dissertation research. Of course, we invite any reader to contribute content about works valuable to their own research, regardless of period or topic. 

Neither Indians nor colonists could sever the alcohol trade from the workings of empire. The peculiar vice of Europeans had become a fixture in Indian country, deadly medicine that remained to poison relations between the peoples of North America (180).

So concludes Peter Mancall's nearly twenty-year old work on alcohol in early America. Mancall, now at Southern Cal, wrote this book not only with an eye towards trying to figure out the roots of the conundrum of rampant alcoholism in modern Native American communities, but also to try and highlight how contingency - and not simply a biological predisposition - played such an important role in the early alcohol trade. According to Mancall, "Indians in colonial America made choices when they drank" (8), more often than not as responses to opportunities that became available to them. 

Deadly Medicine: Indians and
Alcohol in Early America
(Cornell, 1995)

The concern fraught by the stereotypical "drunk Indian" was made acute because it represented the manifestation of two prevailing anxieties: fear or an overall loss of social control by colonial officials, and fear of Indian attack. This fear was magnified during the second half of the seventeenth century by King Philip's War, an event that Jill Lepore has identified as a seminal event in the making of American national identity (The Name of War: King Philip's War and the Origins of American Identity, 1999) and the memory of which, according to Mary Beth Norton, may have contributed to the Salem Witch Trials (In the Devil's Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692, 2007). Still, a paradox existed for the English: how would alcohol fit into the Elizabethan civilization regimen? Yes, one of the pillars of colonization was to incorporate the Indians into the trade networks of the First British Empire, and the alcohol trade enabled this, but what about the possible consequences?

With the alcohol trade taking off between 1650-1700 courtesy of more mainstream distillation practices - a shift that Sarah Meacham comments on in her Every Home a Distillery: Alcohol, Gender, and Technology in the Colonial Chesapeake (2009) - Native Americans had a number of means by which they could secure alcohol and "participate in the transatlantic market economy" (31): from tavern keepers and women who illicitly sold alcohol, from servants looking to make a profit, "in lieu of wages" (50), and from government officials in the form of public, ritual gift-giving to foster healthy inter-cultural relations. Interestingly, the early alcohol trade aw little involvement by backwoods fur and skin traders. By 1720, though, this group dominated the trade, aided by an internal Indian alcohol trade network driven predominantly by women.

Why, then, did Indians drink? Mancall identifies three specific reasons: Indians valued “the sense of power drunkenness apparently conferred” (67), they utilized the product in hospitality rituals, and alcohol was relied upon for mourning ceremonies. Interestingly, when misfortune befell one or a group of Indians as a result of alcohol, is was the drink itself – not the drinker – who was considered the true offender. Citing the death and devastation wrought by the Columbian Exchange, Mancall concludes that drunkenness “represented an effort to redefine the contours of one’s daily life…liquor could restore [Indians] to positions of authority in a world that had spun out of their control” (84).

Regardless of the reason(s) for getting drunk, the costs of such actions were both physically and culturally catastrophic. Drunkenness threatened the perceived pre-lapsarian tranquil order of Indian villages, contributed to health problems by resulting in accidental injury or death, and directly contributed to Indian debt and poverty. Taking together, we see why Mancall deemed the liquor trade the “most insidious aspect of European colonization in North America” (86).

Some tried to stymy the effects of alcohol on Indian culture, with attempts at temperance largely undertaken in order to protect a sense of cultural identity. These efforts failed for a number of reasons: the movement lacked any type of institutional organization (in contrast to the temperance movements of the late nineteenth century), participation by Indians in the movement proved relatively low, and the overall success of the trade. While mostly every colony placed a general ban on alcohol trade with Native Americans, each ban was short-lived because of empathetic attitudes towards enforcement, as well as difficulty in patrolling the interior woodlands.

It goes without saying that the alcohol trade proved different between British America and it’s French and Spanish imperial neighbors to the north and south. Indians in New Spain had traditions of using alcohol, although with colonization instances of drinking grew, as adoption of imported alcohol in ritual customs. The exception was Spanish Florida, which lacked traditional alcohol consumption amongst its nations. In New France, Mancall explains, “it could be argued that since the fur trade was so vital to the imperial interests of the French, the alcohol trade proved even more important in Canada than elsewhere in North America” (153). In between the French expulsion after the Seven years War and the American Revolution – a period Mancall eloquently refers to as the “British imperial moment” – the trade expanded. Not only did policy makers ensure the presence of the alcohol trade in the empire, the colonial acquisition of Canada provided a new, exciting market that rum traders could tap into.

In his concluding remarks, Mancall again stresses the importance of alcohol in the New World. “Liquor,” he states, “was not a minor component of the Columbian Exchange” (170). Not only did it adversely affects the woodlands Indians of North America in the ways stated above – a cause of death, debt, and threat to social order – Mancall also claims that “the liquor trade became a crucible of culture in North America” (171), directly influencing English conceptions of Native American. Drunkenness on the part of Indians merely came to confirm English self-perceptions of cultural superiority. Even so, Indians did not lack agency in regards to alcohol, but willingly chose intoxication.

Mancall’s work, I think, remains valuable. The study of alcohol in colonial America remains limited – David Conroy’s In Public Houses (1995), Peter Thompson’s Rum, Punch, and Revolution (1998), and Sharon Salinger’s Taverns and Drinking in Early America (2004) come quickly to mind – but Mancall’s work is obviously unique in its attempt to situate alcohol with a Native America perspective. While the overall argument may seem simple – Indians, for a variety of reasons, chose to be drunk – it fits well within the New Indian History paradigm, with its attempts to explain history (in the words of Daniel Ritcher) “facing east from Indian country” (2003).