George Barrell Cheever: Deacon Giles' distillery (1844)

DEFEICE

MAY IT PLEASE YOUR HONOR:

Before proceeding to my defence in mitigation of judgment at this time, I think it my duty to declare, in order to remove any false impressions in regard to the course I have adopted, that I do solemnly reiterate the plea of not guilty to the indictment preferred against me. I never meant that the resolution, perhaps too hastily assumed, no longer to contend with the commonwealth, should be received as contradictory to that plea. Had I been in a private station in life, I think nothing should have induced me to relinquish this cause, while I could, by any possibility, have commanded the means of sustaining it. Unwilling, as a clergyman, to continue in litigation, especially in opposition to the wishes of any of my friends; desirous to avoid the excitement, interruption, vexation, and expense, of another trial; conscious of the difficulty, not to say impossibility, of obtaining an impartial trial in Salem; wearied, also, with the malignity of enemies, surrounded by a prejudiced community, and depressed, in some measure, by the representations, so industriously circulated, that I have injured the cause of temperance,—I have thought 1 would rather suffer wrong, than longer maintain a contest with the government under such circumstances.

With this expression of my views in the relinquishment of this cause without trial, I proceed to the justification and defence of the article charged as libellous, on the ground that it was never written or intended as an attack upon any individual, and that, while there are portions of it containing allusions to known truth, they were not introduced, as averred in the indictment, for the purpose of a personal, malicious application. It was no part of my object, in the composition of that article, to defame, vilify, or injure the character of any particular distiller whatever, or to bring indignation or disgrace upon any one's family connexions. The object of the piece was to portray, in as strong a light as possible, through the medium of the fiction I had conceived, the real nature and consequences of the manufacture of ardent spirits. The original conception of the article was simply to introduce a company of demons into a distillery, who should label the rum-casks with inscriptions, that might be, as nearly as possible, a literal delineation of the tendency of the occupation of distilling, a literal answer to the inquiry, What is to be obtained at Amos Giles' distillery 1 Nearly all the materials and machinery employed in the execution of this purpose, were the mere creation of the fancy. The conception of the character of the deacon was purely imaginary, and never intended to be applied to any individual whatever. The doctrines which the deacon of the dream is described as having heard preached, were grouped together by me, not to mark an individual, but partly because I knew that the tendency of those doctrines is to lull the conscience in sin, and partly because I supposed that the evangelical churches through the land had very generally adopted the resolution that all traffic in ardent spirit is an immorality, so that it would be difficult to find any such church retaining in its cemmunion, especially in the sacred office of a deacon, a professor of religion, who persists in getting his living by the vices, miseries, and diseases of his fellow-men.