George Barrell Cheever: Deacon Giles' distillery (1844)

Without saying a word the man took the Deacon by the arm, and led him into the building, and after pointing out all the extensive transformations and additions, which had been accomplished during the night's work, he threw open the doors of an immense store-room, where the workmen had filled the casks of liquor for the Deacon, after the midnight brewing. "Now, Deacon," said the man, with a singularly expressive grin, "I think I have removed all your perplexities, and you may pursue your business on temperance grounds. Meantime we will be just as good friends as ever; for I do assure you, that as long as you manage this brewery as I have begun it, You Will Be Doing My Work quite as effectually as you were while carrying on the distillery." With that he politely lifted his three-cornered hat, passed gravely out of the building, and the Deacon saw him no more.

The Deacon was greatly puzzled. He knew not what to think of his strange companion, and for a time he hardly knew whether to be glad or sorry for the acquisition of wealth which he saw before him. Especially was he perplexed by the language of the man, when he said, " You mil be doing My Work." He could not tell what to make of it, and it troubled him not a little. However, he soon became absorbed in the study of the new machinery, and began to be particularly pleased with the prodigious size of the tun for fermentation, and the vastness of the well filled store-room. He thought he could almost swim a revenue cutter in the one, and pile more than a thousand hogsheads in the other.

In the course of the day he got busily engaged in his brewery, and the liquor was sent into all parts of the country; and wherever it came, and whoever tasted it, it was pronounced the most delicious of all intoxicating mixtures. Confirmed drunkards smacked their lips, and declared that if they could only live upon such liquor as that, they never would touch another drop of New England Rum in the world. The Deacon was very much pleased, and some time afterwards he was heard to say, in th^ midst of a company of bloated beer-drinkers, that Mr. E. C. Delavati, of Albany, would do more to injure the temperance reformation, by his ill-judged crusades against wine and beer, than he had ever done to forward it by all his energetic efforts against rum and brandy. The besotted crew, one and all, applauded this speech of the Deacon, declaring that he' had expressed their opinion precisely; for they had long thought that the temperance cause was greatly suffering from the imprudence and misguided zeal of its professed friends.

The Deacon continues his brewery on so great a scale, that even his devil-built fermentation-tun is hardly large enough to supply the demands of his customers. Is is said that he manufactures the best "Copenhagen Porter" in the country; but every time I see his advertisement, "Inquire at Deacon Jones' Brewery," I hear again the midnight curses of the demons, and think of the dreadful meaning of their leader's language to the Deacon, "You Will Be Doing My Work."