One of the bizarre personages that makes history fun.
Hey! Neal Dow was a good guy!
I don't even wanna know what you think about Thurlow Weed. It's like I don't even know you any more, Widey!
You do know that "the pledge" to abstain "teetotally" from alcohol was started by an Irish Catholic priest, don't you?
But Father Matthew was always a very popular figure among the long-suffering wives of overindulging husbands.
It is astonishing, though, how much more alcohol people consumed on a daily basis in the early 1800s than they do now. The average person had two drinks every day. Which really means that the average grown man had something like 5.
A pretty large percentage of the adult male population spent their lives as functioning alcoholics.