# The Dream, or, The True History of Deacon Giles's Distillery, and Deacon Jones's Brewery

THE
DREAM:
OF
THE TRUE HISTORY
OF
Deacon Giles's Distillery,
AND
DEACON JONES'S BREWERY.
By Rev. GEO. B. CHEEVER, D. D.
"It was a Dream, yet not all a dream."
NEW YORK.
THOMAS HAMILTON,
48 BEEKMAN STREET.
1859
Price, per Single Copy, 10 Cents, $1 00 per Dozen, or $7 00 per 100.
THE
DREAM:
OR
THE TRUE HISTORY
OF
Deacon Giles's Distillery,
AND
DEACON JONES'S BREWERY.
By Rev. GEO. B. CHEEVER, D. D.
"It was a Dream, yet not all a dream."
NEW YORK.
THOMAS HAMILTON,
48 BEEKMAN STREET.
1859
INTRODUCTION.
A re-publication of this remarkable production, seems called for at the present time, when, from many sections of our country, the complaint is heard, that the tide of intemperance, which for a time had been checked, is beginning to rise again, and overflow communities that had been, in a measure, reclaimed from it. For the information of the reader, some account of its origin, is here prefixed, which we extract from a "History," prepared for a former Edition, by Rev. John Marsh, D. D., Corresponding Secretary of the American Temperance Union.
"The Rev. George B. Cheever was at this time a young minister in Salem, Mass. He had commenced his ministry with an uncompromising spirit toward whatever hindered the spread of the Gospel kingdom. He often passed those murky establishments where, day and night, Sabbath and week days, the lurid fires were burning, and the horrid machinery was in motion. From four distilleries there, no less than six hundred thousand gallons of ardent spirits were annually poured forth; through whose instrumentality, it was believed, a thousand individuals were reduced to pauperism, and four hundred were sent to the drunkard's grave. Of three thousand persons admitted to the work-house within a few minutes' walk of his study, two thousand nine hundred were brought there, directly or indirectly, through intemperance. Over these evils, and an untold corruption of public sentiment, desecration of the Sabbath, and ruin of souls connected with them, lie could not sleep. And if he slept he dreamed. He dreamed "a dream, which was not all a dream."
"Inquire at Amos Giles's Distillery."
Upon its appearance in the Salem Landmark, of February, 1835, the public excitement was tremendous. Every distiller and importer, every vender and moderate drinker, almost the entire community, believing that what was legally right, must yet be respected and honored, how horrid soever might be its moral results, cried out against it as an outrage upon society. "With one accord, they rushed to the halls of justice for protection.—Among the four distilleries of the place, one was singled out as answering more directly to the description; and the proprietor, himself a Deacon of a Christian Church, and a man of unexceptionable character, feeling aggrieved and injured in his person and property, a prosecution was commenced by the Commonwealth for a libel. Mr. Cheever pleaded not guilty to the charge, solemnly averring that it was never written or intended as an attack upon any individual; the object of the piece was to portray, in as forcible a light as possible, through the medium of the fiction he had conceived, the real nature and consequences of the manufacture of ardent spirits. ​"If any man (said Mr. Cheever.) is at a loss for a motive to the publication of the article, let him contemplate for a moment the nature of the traffic in ardent spirits. Let him cast his eyes over the vast catalogue of human crime and misery. There are no enormities which the business of distilling does not produce, no extravagances of iniquity to which it does not lead. It is literally the wholesale manufacturer of iniquity of every description. It would challenge the ingenuity of mankind to show that it is anything else. I stand here accused of crime in attacking a trade which in itself is the production of all crime, and has occasioned more criminal litigation than all other causes. I stand here accused of violating the laws of my country in attacking a business whose direct, inevitable, supreme, and incessant result, is the trampling under foot, and defiance, and destruction of all law and all obligation, human and divine. I am here to answer to a charge of defaming the character, and wantonly and maliciously injuring the peace, of families and individuals, in vividly depicting an employment which is nothing but ruin to the character, and death to the peace, temporal and eternal, of thousands of families, and hundreds of thousands of individuals. I am arraigned as a criminal at this bar for disturbing the peace of the Commonwealth, and the domestic happiness of its households, in attacking a business whose positive, unchangeable operation is to till the Commonwealth with brawls, riots, robberies, murders, and its households with drunkenness, wrath, poverty, and anguish. You can not show that the business of distilling is anything else. It tends to break up all social order, prostrate all barriers of law, set fire to all violent human passions, and whelm all institutions of blessedness, domestic, civil, and religious, in one blasting, fiery tide of ruin. It leaves no man s character, no man's property, no man's family, safe. I stand here accused of crime in attacking this infernal traffic, and painting its consequences in colors but too faithful to the life.
"That I may not seem to your honor to be dealing in declamation, and that you may have fully before your mind the motive that actuated my efforts, let me here refresh your memory with some of the dreadful statistics dependent on the existence and activity of the distillery. They are statistics of misery, uninterrupted in their recurrence and accumulation, in authenticated estimates, catalogues, and certificates, of the wreck of property and character, and the spread of pauperism, crime, disease, and death. On a calculation taken from one of the most temperate communities, by actual census of the counties of Wayne and Seneca, and five towns in Cayuga county, in the state of New York, and showing one drunkard to every twenty-seven inhabitants, in the fourteen millions of our country, there are at this day more than five hundred thousand drunkards in the United States. Are we startled at the fact? There is nothing speculative in the statement. The returns were made from actual examination, by competent, respectable men, and the particulars of each town were given separately. Does the result seem incredible? Surely we do not meet an intoxicated wretch in every twenty-seven individuals. We may not meet them in our daily walks and occupations. They are not commonly out in the face of the community, and we well know they are not an active, enterprising race. Their very habits exclude them from the sweet light and the wholesome business of society. Theirs are the abodes of filth and raggedness, the homes that they fill with guilt and anguish. Part people our alms-houses and prisons. Part line our canals, and crowd the hidden, impure, and almost subterranean streets of our cities. They inhabit the dens and caves of civilization, the pest-haunts of sin, the cellars, and bar-rooms, and grog-shops. There they congregate; there they inflame their passions, and profane the name of God. But on every occasion of brawls and riots, whenever deeds of wickedness are in progress, or the elements of a mob have opportunity and space for combination, then they emerge from their darkness, and your sight is arrested by savage faces and haggard forms, reeling and reeking from the hot hells, where the stream of the distillery is poured and drank at a thousand fountains.
"Consider next the fearful waste of life attendant on the prosecution of this horrid business. Of these live hundred thousand human beings, between fifty and sixty thousand die every year. Their places are supplied by an unfailing corps, who are passing hourly from the ranks of the so-called temperance drinkers, to the vast body of the intemperate. An immense procession to the grave is thus kept up, whose miserable conscripts are from all families; a stream of diseased and vicious human life, swollen from all classes in society, like the troubled sea, for protracted vice and anguish in this world, and poured annually into an eternal world of ruin!
"It seems little after this, to remind your honor of the national and individual pecuniary loss consequent on the successful business of the distillery. The Attorney-General of the United States has stated the annual loss to the Union from the use of ardent spirits to be one hundred millions of dollars. ​This statement is doubtless much within the truth: and calculations have been made, which show that directly and indirectly the amount lost is from one hundred and fifty to two hundred millions annually. It is more than enough, as computed by Judge Cranch, to buy up all the houses, lands, and slaves, in the United States every twenty years.
"The waste of money is nothing to the waste of mind; the loss of sound minds in sound bodies; the loss of so many temperate and intelligent mechanics, artisans, farmers, and professional men. who would otherwise go to swell the moral and intellectual power ot the nation; the loss of a thousand influences, hitherto swept onwards in a tide of ruin, that might have been a tide of blessing to the world. In all other ways there has never been such a waste of intellect and morals as by this one vice. It has brooded, like a mighty incubus of death, over our whole physical, intellectual, and moral system. The money lost is infinitely worse than if it had been annihilated, or taken from the mint and sunk in the ocean; for it is expended in the annual production of wretchedness and crime.
"Of the crime and pauperism connected with intemperance, and sustained by the business of the distillery, I may state that out of 25,707 individuals found in the poor-houses and jails in the city of New York in a single year, 21,553 were brought there directly or indirectly from intemperance. Estimating the people of New York at one-seventh of the population in this country, we have in the United States, 148,799 criminals and paupers, made such by the use of ardent spirits.
"Now, let me ask, Where rests the responsibility of this fearful accumulation of death and crime? It can not be doubted that it rests upon those who make and sell ardent spirits; for they know that that is the agent by which all this misery is produced. They know its destructive tendencies; they know that it is rank poison, in the class of narcotic, vegetable poisons, as sheer poison as henbane; they know that it kills the body and kills the soul They can not help knowing it; amidst all the light poured upon the subject, there is not a dramseller nor a distiller in the land but knows it.
"The distiller is generally wealthy. He must be rich, or he could not well be a distiller. He has not, therefore, even the poor apology, so often alleged for continuing in the traffic, that if he quits it his family must, suffer; an apology without foundation for any individual; for were he to shoulder a sawhorse, and saw wood from door to door for his subsistence, he would be a happier and healthier man, and his family a happier and healthier family. But the manufacturer has grown so rich in this dreadful business, that he could afford to burn down his distillery, and turn all his liquor into the streets, and still possess a competency. He might throw the whole investment into the ocean, and still command ample capital to enter upon any honest livelihood whatever. He is more guilty in continuing this traffic than any dramseller in the land. Yet while the business of dramselliag may be attacked, and the community applaud the exposer, the business of distilling, the source of the whole evil, shall be comparatively shielded; and if a man advers to the fact in the history of a distiller—if he speak of the monstrous conjunction of rum and Bibles in one and the same manufactory—he shall first be assaulted in the streets, and then prosecuted for libel; while the men who outraged the law in assaulting him shall be loaded with applause, and, with one exception, dismissed from, court without even the form of a trial, at the discretion of the same public officer who conducts the libel prosecution against the individual already subjected to that violence.
"I am not willing to believe that your honor will tend your influence to sanction this enormity.—You will see that the respectability of the distiller can with no more propriety shield his occupation from scorn, than that of the dramseller can protect his. He may boast in his veins the blood of all the Howards, or he may have descended from the man who first put a bottle to the lips of his neighbor; his family may be rich and respectable, or poor and degraded; he may be a member of the church, receiving on the Sabbath, the emblems of the body and blood of his Saviour, with the same hands that during the week prepare and circulate the means for his betrayal; or he may be a man excommunicated from the church for persisting in the traffic in ardent spirits: whether he be the one or the other, is to you a matter of entire indifference. You will remember that 'it is just because the sin of intemperance is upheld by the rich and reputable, and by professed Christinas that Temperance Reform drays so heavily.'
"In mitigation of judgment at this time," he said, "I need scarcely remind your honor more particularly of the course taken by the Attorney-General in the discharge of two of the individuals engaged in the assault upon my person, without even the form of trial. Whether it be a greater offence in the judgment of this court to describe a distiller's occupation, as I have done in the Landmark; or with ​personal violence attack an unarmed citizen as they did in the street, the sentence which may be declared will go far to determine. I know not by what rule of justice the latter criminals, with proof clear, full, and conclusive against them, were suffered to depart triumphant in their violation of the law, while the former alleged offence has been prosecuted with such undeviating fixedness of purpose. It seems to me a singularly unjust proceeding.
"I solicit the favor of thy 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 legion 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 mothers who 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 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 them ask what, is their verdict. Need I suppose the judgment? 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."
Such, however, was the state of the public mind that he was condemned, and, on making his defence, he submitted meekly to the sentence of the Court. But the whole procedure gave wings to the production of his genius, and caused it to become one of the great instruments of opening the eyes of a suffering community to the true character of distillation.
The history of this transaction forms a part of the history of the Temperance Reformation. While it presents to posterity one of those signal incidents by which the mighty enginery of drunkenness has been nearly overthrown, it reflects nothing upon those who then felt themselves injured, both in their good name and worldly prosperity. The darkness that overshadowed them and the community in which they dwelt, is the apology for their faults. Haply it may be, that they are now foremost in the condemnation of the business whose character was exposed. The old distillery has long since been abandoned, and the building, now converted to useful purposes, was recently the scene of a joyful Temperance tea party.
(For the Salem Landmark)
"INQUIRE AT AMOS GILES'S DISTILLERY."
Some time ago the writer's notice was arrested by an advertisement in one of the newspapers, which closed with words similar to the following: "Inquire at Amos Giles's Distillery." The reader may suppose, if he choose, that the following story was a dream, suggested by that phrase.
Deacon Giles was a man who loved money, and was never troubled with tenderness of conscience. His father and his grandfather before him had been distillers, and the same occupation had come to him as an heir-loom in the family. The still-house was black with age, as well as with the smoke of furnaces that never went out, and the fumes of tortured ingredients, ceaselessly converted into alcohol. It looked like one of Vulcan's Stithies, translated from the infernal regions into this world. Its stench filled the atmosphere, and it seemed as if drops of poisonous alcoholic perspiration might be made to ooze out from any one of its timbers or clapboards at a slight pressure. Its owner was a treasurer to a Bible Society; and he had a little counting-room in one corner of the distillery where he sold Bibles.
He that is greedy of gain, troubleth his own house. Any one of those Bibles might have told him this, but he chose to learn it from experience. It was said that the Worm of the Still lay coiled in the bosom of his family; and certain it is that one of its members had drowned himself in a vat of hot liquor, in the bottom of which a skeleton was some time after found, with heavy weight tied to the ankle bones. Moreover, Deacon Giles's temper was none of the sweetest naturally; and the liquor he drank, and the fires and spirituous fumes among which he lived, did nothing to soften it. If his workmen sometimes fell into his vats, he himself oftener fell out with his workmen. This was not to be wondered at, considering the nature of their wages, which, according to no unfrequent stipulation, would be as much raw rum as they could drink.
Deacon Giles worked on the Sabbath. He would neither suffer the fires of the distillery to go out, or to burn while he was idle; so he kept as busy as they. One Saturday afternoon his workmen had quarrelled, and all went off in anger. He was in much perplexity for want of hands to do the work of the devil on the Lord's day. In the dusk of the evening a gang of singular-looking fellows entered the door of the distillery. Their dress was wild and uncouth, their eyes glared, and their language had a tone that was awful. They offered to work for the Deacon; and he, on his part, was overjoyed, for he thought within himself that, as they had probably been turned out of employment elsewhere, he could engage them on his own terms.
He made them his accustomed offer, as much ruin every day, when the work was done, as they could drink; but they would not, take it. Some of them broke out and told him that they had enough of hot things where they came from, without drinking damnation in the distillery. And when they said that, it seemed to the Deacon as if their breath- burned blue; but he was not certain, and could not tell what to make of it. Then he offered them a pittance of money; but they set up such a laugh, that he thought the roof of the building would fall in. They demanded a sum which the deacon said he could not give, and would not, to the best set of workmen that ever lived, much less to such piratical-looking scape jails as they. Finally, he said, he would give half what they asked, if they would take two-thirds of that in Bibles. When he mentioned the word Bibles, they ​all looked towards the door, and made a step backwards, and the Deacon thought they trembled; but whether it was with anger or delirium tremens, or something else, he could not tell. However, they winked, and made signs to each other, and then one of them, who seemed to be the head man, agreed with the Deacon, that if he would let them work by night instead of day, they would stay with him awhile and work on his own terms. To this he agreed, and they immediately went to work.
The Deacon had a fresh cargo of molasses to be worked up, and a great many hogsheads then in from his country customers, to be filled with liquor. When he went home he locked up the doors, leaving the distillery to his new workmen. As soon as he was gone, you would have thought that one of the chambers of hell had been transported to earth with all its inmates. The distillery glowed with fires and burned hotter than ever before; and the figures of the demons passing to and fro, and leaping and yelling in the midst of their work, made it look like the entrance to the bottomless pit.
Some of them sat astride the rafters, over the heads of the others, and amused themselves with blowing flames out of their mouths. The work of distilling seamed play to them, and they carried it on with supernatural rapidity. It was hot enough to have boiled the molasses in any part of the distillery; but they did not seem to mind it at all.—Some lifted the hogsheads as easily as you would raise a tea cup, and turned their contents into the proper receptacles; some scummed the boiling liquids; some, with huge ladles, dipped the smoking fluid from the different vats, and raising it high in the air, seemed to take great, delight in watching the fiery stream, as they spouted it back again; some drafted the distilled liquor into empty casks and hogsheads; some stirred the tires; all were boisterous and horribly profane, and seemed to engage in their work with such familiar and malignant satisfaction, that I concluded the business of distilling was as natural as hell, and must have originated there. ​I gathered from their talk that they were going to play a trick upon the Deacon, that should cure him of offering rum and Bibles to his workmen; and I soon found out from their conversation and movements what it was. They were going to write certain inscriptions on all his rum casks, that should remain invisible until they were sold by the Deacon, but should flame out in characters of fire as soon as they were broached by his retailers, or exposed to the use of the drunkards.
When they had filled a few casks with liquor, one of them took a great coal of fire, and having quenched it in a mixture of rum and molassses, proceeded to write, apparently by way of experiment, upon the heads of the different vessels. Just as it was dawn, they left off work, and all vanished together.
In the morning the Deacon was puzzled to know how the workmen got out of the, distillery, which he found fast locked as he had left it. He was still more amazed to find that they had done more work in one night, than could havo been accomplished, in the ordinary way, in three weeks. He pondered the things not a little, and almost concluded that it was the work of supernatural agents. At any rate, they had done so much that he thought he could afford to attend meeting that day, as it was the Sabbath. Accordingly he went to church, and heard his minister say that God could pardon sin without an atonement, that the words hell and devil were mere figures of speech, and that all men would certainly be saved. He was much pleased, and inwardly resolved that he would send his minister a half cask of wine; and as it happened to be communion Sabbath, he attended meeting all day.
In the evening the men came again, and again the Deacon locked them in to themselves, and they went to work. They finished all his molasses, and filled all his rum barrels, and kegs, and hogsheads, with liquor, and marked them all, as on the preceding night, with invisible inscriptions. Most of the titles ran thus:
"Consumption sold here. Inquire at Deacon Giles's Distillery."
"Convulsions and epilepsies. Inquire at Amos Giles's Distillery."
"Insanity and murder. Inquire at Deacon Giles's Distillery."
"Dropsy and Rheumatism. Putrid Fever, and Cholera in the collapse. Inquire at Amos Giles's Distillery."
"Delirium Tremens. Inquire at Deacon Giles's Distillery."
Many of the casks had on them inscriptions like the following:
"Distilled Death and liquid Damnation." "The Elixir of Hell for the bodies of those whose souls are coming there."
Some of the demons had even taken sentences from the Scriptures, and marked the hogsheads thus:
"Who hath wo? Inquire at Deacon Giles's Distillery."
"Who hath redness of eyes? Inquire at Deacon Giles's Distillery."
Others had written sentences like the following:
"A potion from the lake of fire and brimstone. Inquire at Deacon Giles's Distillery."
All these inscriptions burned, when visible, a "still and awful red." One of the ​most terrible in its appearance was as follows:
"Weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth. Enquire at Deacon Giles's Distillery."
In the morning the workmen vanished as before, just as it was dawn; but in the dusk of the evening they came again, and told the Deacon it was against their principles to take any wages for work done between Saturday night and Monday morning, and as they could not stay with him any longer, he was welcome to what they had done. The Deacon was very urgent to have them remain, and offered to hire them for the season at any wages, but they would not. So he thanked them and they went away, and he saw them no more. In the course of the week most of the casks were sent into the country, and duly hoisted on their stoups, in conspicuous situations, in the Taverns, and Groceries, and the Rum-shops. But no sooner had the first glass been drawn from any of them, than the invisible inscriptions flamed out on the cask-head to every beholder. "CONSUMPTION SOLD HERE, DELIRIUM TREMEMS. DAMNATION AND HELL-FIRE."
The drunkards were terrified from the dram-shops; the bar-rooms were emptied of their customers: but in their place a gaping crowd filled every store that possessed a cask of the Deacon's devil-distilled liquor, to wonder and be affrighted at the spectacle. For no art could efface the inscriptions. And even when the liquor was drawn into new casks, the same deadly letters broke out in blue and red flames all over the surface,
The rumsellers, and grocers, and tavern-keepers, were full of fury. They loaded their teams with the accursed liquor, and drove it back to the distillery. All around and before the door of the Deacon's establishment the returned casks were piled one upon another, and it seemed as if the inscriptions burned brighter than ever. Consumption, Damnation, Death, and Hell, mingled together in frightful confusion; and in equal prominence, in every case. ​flamed out the direction,
"INQUIRE AT DEACON GILES'S DISTILLERY."
One would have thought that the bare sight would have been enough to terrify every drunkard from his cups, and every trader from the dreadful traffic in ardent spirits. Indeed, it had some effect for a time, but it was not lasting, and the demons knew it would not be, when they played the trick: for they knew the Deacon would continue to make rum, and that as long as he continued to make it, there would be people to buy and drink it. And so it proved.
The Deacon had to turn a vast quantity of liquor into the streets, and burn up the hogsheads; and his distillery has smelled of brimstone ever since; but he would not give up the trade. He carries it on still; and every time I see his advertisement, "Inquire at Amos Giles's Distillery," I think I see Hell and Damnation, and he the proprietor.
DEACON JONES'S BREWERY.
"You will be doing my work."— Demon.
Deacon Jones, from early life, had been a distiller of New England rum. He entered on the business when everybody thought it was a calling as honest as the miller's, and he grew rich by it. But the nature of his occupation, and the wealth he was gaining, sadly seared his conscience. Of seven promising sons, three had died drunkards, two were lost at sea in a vessel whose cargo was rum from the Deacon's own distillery, and two were living at home, idle and dissipated. Yet it never occurred to the father that he himself had been the cause of all this misery to his own family; he was even wont to converse with great resignation on the subject of his trials, declaring that he found comfort in the passage that reads that "whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth, and scourgeth every son whom he receiveth." His business was very extensive, and he plied the trade of death with unremitting assiduity.
When the Temperance Reformation commenced, Deacon Jones took ground against it. He declared it was a great piece of fanaticism. He was once heard to say, that if the bones of his ancestors could rattle in their graves, it would be to hear the business of distilling denounced as productive of death to men's bodies, and damnation to their souls. The progress of the reformation was so rapid, that at length he began to see that it must, in the end. greatly injure his business, and curtail his profits. Moreover, he did not feel easy on the score of conscience, and when the members of the Church proceeded to excommunicate a dramseller, who kept his grog-shop open on the Sabbath, and had been in the habit of procuring all his supplies at the Deacon's distillery, he trembled, lest his brethren should take it into their heads that the business of distilling was the foundation of the whole evil. It was said that he was much disturbed by an article in the newspaper which came strongly under his notice, descriptive of the immorality of the business of the distiller, and ending with these words: "I think I see hell and damnation, and he the proprietor" For a long time the Deacon could not enter his distillery, without thinking of those dreadful words; he considered them so profane, that he thought the article ought to be presented as a nuisance by the Grand Jury.
At length the perplexities of conscience, and the fears of self-interest, drove him to think seriously of emitting the business. One afternoon, as he was sitting at home, absorbed in thought, a loud, impetuous knock at the door of the apartment, startled him, and in walked one of the most singular personages he ever remembered to have seen. It was a man apparently about fifty years of age, very short of stature and sturdy in bulk, with a countenance that indicated uncommon shrewdness, and an eye of preternatural brilliancy and power. Yet his features were extremely irregular, and so evidently marked with strong but compressed passion, as to put one in mind of the crater of a hushed volcano; in fact, his face, in some positions, almost wore the aspect of a fiend escaped from the infernal regions. With all this, he could assume, if he chose, a strange, incongruous appearance of humor; his countenance had that expression when he entered the room where the Deacon was meditating.
He had on a coat of blue broadcloth, of the fashion of Queen Anne's age, a white satin waistcoat with enormous flaps covered with figures of dancing satyrs wrought in crimson silk, and pantaloons of red velvet, over which was drawn a pair of white topped boots, that reached nearly to his knees, with feet of extraordinary magnitude. On his head was a three-cornered adjutant's hat, which lie raised with an easy bow as he entered. His salutation to the Deacon was kindly expressed, though in a very deep, startling voice, that seemed as if it came almost from the centre of the earth. He told the Deacon he was happy to see him, and knowing that he was somewhat troubled in mind, he had called to help him out ​of his perplexities.
The Deacon looked uneasy at this address, and told his visitor that he did not remember ever to have seen him. Upon that the man laughed very extravagantly, and confessed it was not strange that he did not recognize him: "but no matter for that." said he, "I think I can certainly assure you that I am without doubt the best friend you have in the world."
The Deacon did not care to contradict him, especially as his face just then looked strangely malignant; so he proceeded to draw the Deacon into a long conversation, in which the man in blue and velvet seemed an adept in the mystery of distilling, and a friend to the art. The Deacon told him all his trouble in regard to the Temperance Reformation. "Not." said he, "that I dislike the thing itself, in the abstract. I am as firm a temperance man as any one. But really they do adopt such hot-headed fanatical measures, and are carrying the thing to such an extreme, that it is enough to put one out of all patience. It is not strange that even good people should be driven to oppose the reformation in mere self-defense. I am for temperance under the broad banner of the law; and the law protects the business of distilling as much as it does any business: in my view the making of rum is just as honest a calling as the making of gunpowder."
The man in blue acquiesced, and told the Deacon that he heartily hated these Anti-Societies for the purpose of putting down particular sins, and he said he thought a great deal more injury was done by intemperate writing than by intemperate drinking. Nevertheless he told him that he thought a brewery would be quite as profitable as a distillery, and that the business, moreover, would work in very well, just then, with the public mind, on the score of temperance. He proposed a visit to the Deacon's, distillery, and told him he thought, between them, they could contrive a new and convenient disposure of the whole establishment.
Accordingly, with this interesting conversation, they proceeded to the distillery, and after examining the premises, sat down in the Deacon's counting-room in which, it may be remarked, he kept a copy of Bangs on Distillation, but no Bibles. Here again they had a long conversation, after which the man in blue told the Deacon that if he would give over to him the care of the distillery for that night, he thought he could make it a good temperance speculation, and arrange matters perfectly to his mind. By this time the man seemed to have acquired a strange power over the Deacon, and he agreed to all his propositions without much delay. So the workmen retired to their homes at sundown, and the deacon to his, leaving the keys of the distillery and counting-room in his velvet friend's possession.
That night there was a violent thunder-storm, and the Deacon slept but little. Had he known the scenes that were transacting in his distillery, he would not have slept at all. The stage-man, who drove the mail, passed the distillery, which was situated on the main road, about midnight, and afterwards declared, that through the windows of the distillery, which he thought burned blue, he could see a crowd of wild and savage-looking creatures hurrying to and fro, and though it was thundering at a fearful rate, he could hear the strangest supernatural voices, amidst all the fury of the storm. This was probably not merely the man's excited imagination; for after the Deacon's departure, as night drew on, the distillery was filled with a troop of demoniacal-looking beings, who seemed ripe even for a midnight murder, and all under the control of the strange man left by the Deacon in the counting-room.
It was soon easy to perceive by their movements what was their object. With supernatural strength and dexterity they proceeded to disorganize the whole internal paraphernalia of the Deacon's establishment. They tore up and emptied all his vats, but carefully deposited the dregs and filth of distillation, wherever they found it, in a large muddy cistern, which they discovered conveniently disposed at one end of the distillery. They took in pieces the whole machinery of distillation, and by a wonderful metamorphosis, they so re-modelled its parts and refitted the vats, as to make them admirably suited to the processes of malting and brewing. The worm of the still they uncoiled, and sheathed the bottom of the new vats with the lead that came out of it.
Some of them I observed were busy in bringing in and piling up huge bags of ​barley; others in constructing the furnaces and chambers where the malt was to be dried; others in filling the cisterns into which the dregs of the vats had been poured, with dirty water dipped from a stagnant pond, covered with green slime and infested with crawling reptiles, hard by the distillery. They set the barley for malt, and so peculiar were the qualities of the malting mixture in the cistern, and so admirable the skill with which they had prepared the furnace and floors for kiln-drying, that a process was accomplished in less than an hour, which ordinarily demanded some days for its completion. The task of mashing was an easy one, and the wort was drawn off and boiled down, and the coolers tilled, with surprising celerity: and, to crown all, they set the liquor for fermentation in a tun of prodigious dimensions, which one party had been engaged in constructing, while the others were busied in the process of malting, mashing, boiling, and cooling.
In the midst of all this astounding bustle, the man in the counting-room was neither idle, nor satisfied with the mere superintendence of his energetic workmen. He stripped off his broadcloth and velvet, disencumbered himself of his huge boots, and appeared the most gaunt, active, and demoniacal among the whole crew. They leaped, and grinned, and jibbered, and swore, in so terrific a manner, that it seemed as if the thunder, which was breaking in such tremendous artillery across the heavens, would have been charged to peal in among them, for their horrible profaneness.
But the most astonishing scene took place while they boiled down the liquor. They gathered in a double circle, and danced to music as infernal as the rhymes they chanted were malignant, amidst the bickering flames and smoke of the furnace, round about the huge copper cauldron of boiling liquid, into which each of them, from moment to moment, adapting the action to the words they sang, threw such ingredients as they had provided for the occasion. I shall scarcely be credited, while I relate what poisonous and nauseous drugs they cast into the agitated mixture. Opium, henbane, cocculus indicus, nux vomica, grains of paradise, and Bohemian rosemary; aloes, gentian, quassia, wormwood, and treacle; capsicum, cassia-buds, isinglass, cods-sounds, and oil of vitriol, were dashed in turn amidst the foaming mass of materials which they stirred and tasted, scalding hot as it was, with a ferocious exulting delight, that seemed to increase in proportion as the quality of its properties grew more pernicious. They could ​not but remind me of Shakspeare's witches, on the blasted heath at midnight, when the charm was brewing for Duncan's murder. Indeed, the song they sang, as they leaped about the cauldron, and threw in their infernal mixtures, was so similar to that of those "secret, black, and midnight hags," when they were going to "do the deed without a name," that I think the chorus in which they all joined, must have been gathered from some copy of the bedlam's accursed incantations. They repeated something very like the following stanzas, only more horrible:
They sang these devilish curses with dreadfully malignant satisfaction: and when all the processes in the preparation of the liquor were finished, with equal delight they proceeded to draft it in immense quantities into hogsheads and casks of every dimension. Into every vessel, as they filled it, they put a certain quantity of potash, lime, salts, and sulphuric acid, and then drove in the bung, and wrote upon the cask head, according as it suited their fancy. Some of the inscriptions were as follows:
"BEST LONDON PORTER, FROM DEACON JONES'S BREWERY."
"PALE ALE, OF THE PUREST MATERIALS."
"TEMPERANCE BEER, FROM DEACON JONES'S BREWERY"
"MILD AMERICAN PORTER, FOR FAMILY USE."
"BEST ALBANY ALE, FROM DEACON JONES'S BREWERY."
They also filled an immense multitude of bottles, from the fermenting tun, and packed them very neatly in strong square baskets, which they labelled in shining letters in these words:
"RESTORATIVE FOR WEAK CONSTITUTIONS—DEACON JONES'S BEST BOTTLED PORTER."
A very queer label, as I thought, was used by some, and that was:
"PALE ALE FOR THE NURSERY."
This work was finished just as it grew towards dawn, and having converted the Deacon's old distillery into an extensive brewery, they all vanished from the building; before light, in the same unaccountable manner in which they came into it.
In the morning, the Deacon walked out towards the establishment, not a little disturbed in his thoughts, as to what might have been going on ovenight. He found the outside of his distillery not very much altered, though a number of new windows were observable, surmounted with an out-jutting piece of plank like a penthouse, and covered with coarse blinds, through which the steam from the brewery was pouring in volumes. He thought likewise that the brick walls looked larger and longer than ever before, and more saturated with alcoholic perspiration, as though, indeed, they might have taken a midnight sweat. He found the man in blue and velvet walking about in the clear morning air, and surveying the scene apparently with peculiar satisfaction.
Without saving 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 so long as you manage this brewery as I have begun it. you will, be doing my work quite as effectually as you were while you were carrying on the distillery." With that he politely lifted his three-cornered hat. passed gravely out of the building, and tho 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 will 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 couse 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 liquors. 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 the midst of a company of bloated beer-drinkers, that Mr. E. C. Delavan, 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 the 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. It is said that he manufactures the best "Copenhagen Porter in the country: but every time I see his advertisement, "Inquire at Deacon Jones's Brewery," I hear again the midnight curse of the demons, and think of the dreadful meaning of their leader's language to the Deacon, "You will, be doing my work."
Hy. J. Crate, Printer, 181 William Street, N.Y.
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This work was published before January 1, 1929, and is in the public domain worldwide because the author died at least 100 years ago.
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