George Barrell Cheever: Deacon Giles' distillery (1844)

I solicit the favor of the court upon manly grounds. I ask for an acquittal, because I am guiltless of the crime for which I am arraigned before you. I have assaulted no man's character—I have injured no man's family—I have committed no offence against the laws of my country. For the sake of freedom in the proclamation of truth, I am unwilling that an unrighteous and oppressive verdict should be sustained and sanctioned by the decision of this court. For the sake of justice, I am unwilling to be punished for a crime which I have never committed. For the sake of temperance, I am unwilling that the distillery interest, productive in this region of such incalculable misery, should here find a shield.

Could the amount of misery, in time and eternity, which any one distillery in Salem has occasioned, be portrayed before your honor, I should feel no solicitude for the result. Let the mothers that have been broken-hearted, the wives that have been made Widows, the children that have been made fatherless, the parents borne down with a bereavement worse than death in the vices of their children, be arrayed in your presence; let the families reduced to penury, disgraced with crime, and consumed with anguish, that the owners of one distillery might accumulate their wealth, be gathered before you. Let the prosecutor in this suit go to the grave-yards, and summon their shrouded tenants; let him summon before you the ghosts of those whose bodies have been laid in the grave from that one distillery; let him call up, if he could, the souls that have been shut out from heaven and prepared for hell, through the instrumentality of the liquor manufactured there; and let him ask what is their verdict.— Need I suppose the judgment 1 Surely it would be said, Let the defendant be shielded. Even if he has overstepped the limits of exact prudence, in his efforts to portray the evils of intemperance, in the name of mercy let the great object of the effort shield him, and let the law be turned against that dreadful business whose nature he has aimed to delineate.