Alcohol Consumption and the Standard of Living in Antebellum America

Robert Fogel has suggested that demographic statistics, such as life expectancy, height, weight, and fertility, can provide alternative measures of the standard of living. In a new volume honoring Fogel's accomplishments [Strategic Factors in Nineteenth Century American Economic History, University of Chicago, 1992], nearly one-third of the articles examine and confirm an important anomaly first noted by Fogel. These demographic statistics declined significantly during the late antebellum period, a period of high economic growth. Several explanations for this anomaly have been offered, such as rising inequality, industrialization, urbanization, higher food prices, banking, westward migration, and the Civil War. However, these suggestions, while helpful, are largely provisional or inconclusive. This note suggests that the changes in alcohol consumption, which followed the Second Great Awakening (religious revivalism), and the temperance movement explain this exception to the relationship between economic output and demographic indicators. Prior to 1830, alcohol consumption was high by modern standards. Rum and hard cider were important sources of energy and nutrition because they were easy to transport and store and were often a safer beverage than milk or water. Alcohol was a common ration for laborers, sailors, and soldiers and was used to boost the caloric content of food. Alcohol also reduced the variance in caloric consumption in a country where food supplies were sometimes erratic. After peaking in 1830, alcohol consumption plummeted by more than 50 percent over the next decade, and by another third by 1850, producing a 500 + calorie per-day deficit in the adult diet. This astounding decline can be attributed to the religious revivalist and temperance movements which viewed alcohol as an inhibitor to eternal salvation. The patterns of consumption also changed at this time. Prior to 1830, the most common pattern of alcohol consumption was "daily drams," or dietary drinking, where people consumed small amounts of alcoholic beverages throughout the day, every day. Unsupervised binge drinking was rare. By 1840, solo binge drinking was common and dietary drinking was rare. Virtually every study on alcohol consumption conducted over the last 100 years has confirmed that moderate alcohol consumption tends to improve health and extend life expectancy while heavy binge drinking reduces health and life expectancy. Therefore, one would expect both changes in alcohol consumption to have had adverse effects on public health during the late antebellum period. The available evidence does yield a positive correlation between per capita alcohol consumption and measures of life expectancy and fertility. These results are bolstered by the fact that slave height in the late antebellum period did not follow the decline in height in free blacks and whites. This note offers a resolution to the anomaly between economic growth and declining demographics and corroborates that religion was indeed a strategic factor in the late antebellum period. It also suggests that the employment of demography to monitor the standard of living needs to be regulated by concerns for the subjective nature of value. Material factors in the standard of living can be traded for ethereal factors of faith.