Brewing Sedition: The Insurgent Objects of Drinking in Early America

Abstract

The story of the early American tavern is a story of objects, and of conflicts. Hosting a diversity of persons, things, and events (often simultaneously), the spaces in which people shared company and drink were incubators of a radical cultural power that could be remade over and again across different regions and eras. In Brewing Sedition, I demonstrate how the unique settings of social drinking in early America created opportunities for the insurgence of socially marginalized and politically disenfranchised communities. My project identifies key historical case studies of tavern-keepers, smugglers, performers, the working poor, and the enslaved (both men and women) found in a wide array of archival documents, such as newspapers, broadsides, court records, satires, and political cartoons. Situated at the intersections of material culture studies, performance studies, transatlanticism, and posthumanism, I seek to unpack how diverse artifacts were created and circulated to upend status quos. My dissertation’s primary intervention is to challenge the notion that social sites such as taverns, inns, and ordinaries only reinforced rigid social structures transplanted from Britain and continental Europe. I gather specific artifacts that show how persons who were thought to be excluded from sites of social drinking actually leveraged the unique conditions of those sites to enact their own socio-political agency. My project seeks to understand the ways in which those in power struggled to mitigate the insurgent effects of the tavern, and how that struggle has persisted—resulting in state violence and surveillance that continues to disproportionately target persons of color, women, and persons in poverty.

My first chapter tracks anticlerical print materials that emerged from taverns on both sides of the Atlantic in the seventeenth-century. I suggest that members of the working-class laity and the general public leveraged the same rhetorical and performative tools used by religious leaders from within the tavern in order to publicly humiliate them for sins against vulnerable communities. Satirical pamphlets, dramatic lampoons and ribald mockeries, and broadsides were strategies that started within a tavern and all served to challenge the behaviors of a community’s clerical leaders which targeted women, the poor, and the enslaved.

The second chapter is a case study of Robert Todd’s tavern in New York City between the 1740s and 60s. Todd’s tavern played host to one of the city’s most uproarious drinking clubs, and I investigate the club’s insurgent political activity through the lens of eighteenth-century debates about luxury, excess, and decorum. This chapter examines how the men of the Hungarian Club, most of them relocated Scots, leveraged the space of the tavern into a performance space—performing drunkenness as a screen for anti-British sentiment and seditious action on the heels of the failed Jacobite cause and into the coming American Revolution.

The final section uses Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello estate as a place-based test case for a focused study of how the surveillance, discipline, and policing of drinking and taverns in the past transmuted, and has manifested into the violent policing of marginalized persons in the present. This chapter deploys an incident of police brutality which took place at a bar in Albemarle County, Virginia (across the street from Jefferson’s rotunda) in 2015 in order to understand the ways in which social drinking and the space of the tavern or bar continue to be viewed as potential subversive sites by the state.