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Abstract
This study revisits the history of temperance in Baltimore in order to present an inclusive and revealing narrative analyzing the work of Catholic men and women, free blacks, and the city's few Jews alongside the more familiar story of white Protestant anti-alcohol activists. Their stories illustrate the ways in which people of different faiths, social classes, and ethnic backgrounds defined "temperance" at different times, and crafted a variety of approaches to alcohol restriction, regulation, or prohibition. My work exposes the ways in which antebellum Protestant and Catholic temperance strategies overlapped, particularly by demonstrating how the Washingtonians both influenced and were influenced by the work of the Irish Catholic temperance reformer, Father Theobald Mathew. But it shows how, in the end, denominational and ethnic differences dashed any real chances for Catholic-Protestant cooperation. And it chronicles how Protestant reformers' turn toward strict regulation and, in the aftermath of a failed "Maine Law" campaign, prohibition, marginalized Catholic temperance reformers. Finally, it answers the question of what happened to this social reform through the Civil War years, on the home front and in the military, by tracing temperance activism during the war and the post-war years, ending up at the Panic of 1873 and the rise of a national prohibition movement. Throughout, it covers the work of both male and female reformers, and the shifting concerns that shaped male and female leadership.
Two points of entry help define the topic: temperance organizations and their leaders. Sources used in this study included temperance society minute books, constitutions, addresses, meeting notices, annual reports, articles of incorporation, city directories, newspapers, estate and cemetery records, church records, census reports, court records, temperance literature (fact and fiction), state legislative records, and biographical files. The abundance of secondary literature on temperance and reform, and on nineteenth-century Baltimore's culture, society, and politics provide context and texture for the dissertation's findings.
