George Barrell Cheever: Deacon Giles' distillery (1844)

With the mass of the population, distilleries were a long time considered a blessing to the country. They furnished, it was said, a ready' market for the surplus grain of the country and encouraged the growing; they gave a new value to the orchard, whose superabundant fruit could at once be converted into brandy; they brought ready employ to the carpenter, the cooper, the carrier, and furnished the nation with an excellent article, which it was importing from Holland and the West Indies at great cost. Pious men, deacons of churches, owned and labored in them, without any loss of character. Many a neighborhood was filled with joy that an immense distillery was to be built, and a spring given to business which would bring riches to every family.

But when the community began to see men gathered in and about these establishments, not a little resembling the inmates of alms-houses and hospitals; when they found drunkenness spreading in all the country round, and once thriving farmers, who could conveniently take for their wood and grain a barrel of whisky, becoming idle, frequenters of taverns and dram-shops, and, with their sons, fast travelling the road to ruin; when they saw how from these great establishments went out over the country hogsheads of liquid tire to afflict and curse every neighborhood, fill up jails and poor-houses with wretched victims, and send 30,000 of their fellow-citizens, falling year after year, to the drunkard's grave, they then saw their error. They then understood that but, perhaps, for the mechanic arts, every distillery in the land was a curse, and that it was the duty of every philanthropist and Christian to unite in its condemnation. But how were they to be broken up? Distilleries were generally run by men of wealth and influence in the community. They were powerfully supported by public sentiment. Interest pleaded for their continuance. Sober argument was tried in vain. The distiller, rolling in wealth, was covered with a coat of mail and laughed at the shaking of our spear.

There was one weapon yet untried? But who should draw it from the armory of truth? Who should wield it, and cause it to expose the horrid secrets of this work of death? Where should the stripling be found, who, with his sling and stone, should slay this Goliath? The Rev. George B. Cheever was at this time a young minister in Salem, Mass. He had commenced his ministry with an uncompromising spirit toward whatever hindered the spread of the Gospel kingdom. He often passed those murky establishments where, day and night, Sabbath and week days, those lurid fires were burning, and that horrid machinery was in motion. From four distilleries there, no less than six hundred thousand gallons of ardent spirits were annually poured forth; through whose instrumentality, it was believed, a thousand individuals were reduced to pauperism, and four hundred were sent to the drunkard's grave. Of three thousand persons admitted to the workhouse within a few minutes' walk of his study, two thousand nine hundred were there, directly or indirectly, through intemperance. Over these evils, and an untold corruption of public sentiment, desecration of the Sabbath, and ruin of souls, connected with them, he could not sleep. And if he slept he dreamed. He dreamed "a dream which was not all a dream,"