It had been said that we Maritimers drink a lot. However, the generations that came before us would find this funny and our drinking quaint!
For generations in the Maritimes, drinking hard liquor was an everyday activity at home, at work, and at all hours of the day on a scale that many of us would find shocking.
The favourite drink of Maritimers in this time before government regulations and liquor stores was rum. And rum back then wasn’t the 40% alcohol by volume that is sold in liquor stores now, back then it was closer to 60 or 70% in strength!
Rum was a constant and shaped society and history in the Maritimes.
Rum is thought to have first been invented in plantations in the West Indies in the 1600s. The first rum was an accident and little more than yeast spores settling in leftover cane juice and molasses left over from the sugar cane mills. Basically, it was compost. It quickly became popular among slaves in those sugar cane plantations.
It was referred to as “rum bullion” which meant “great tumult” before being shortened by the English to simply “rum.”
Sensing a money-making opportunity, a distilling industry popped up in the Caribbean soon after to refine, distil and sell that first compost as a more palatable drink.
Rum first came to the Maritimes but through New England, where by the 1650s businessmen were importing molasses and distilling it into their own crude rums.
This American rum was vastly inferior to even the worst of the Caribbean rums, and one writer said that “its greatest adherents were those who could not afford a choice.” It was this vastly inferior rum which first made its way to the Maritimes.
At a time when the quality of the drinking water in the Maritimes was often suspect — especially in the cities — rum was considered a safer alternative to water.
In Nova Scotia, (which at the time New Brunswick was a part of) part of the enticements offered to attract settlers was a promise of 3.5 gallons of rum a year. That appears to be just a small amount of what was drank though, as the amount imported into Nova Scotia would equal out to something more like 12 gallons per person per year.
For context, a study by the Canadian Centre for Substance Abuse states that in terms of pure alcohol that is consumed per person every year, Newfoundland is the top drinking province at 9 litres, with Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island coming in at 8 litres per person per year, and New Brunswick at 7.5 litres.
Meanwhile, those early Nova Scotians/New Brunswickers would drink would equal out to roughly 30 litres of pure alcohol per year!
There is no question that generations that came before us could drink us under the table.
By the 1800s, the prevalence of rum in Maritime society was to the point where it was in effect a cure-all. It was a medicine. Rum mixed with choke cherry juices was supposed to prevent a cold. If that didn’t prevent your cold, well, the prescription was a hot toddy, which was mostly rum.
Some of the things rum was supposed to cure were more alarming; live eels were put in jugs of rum, and the resulting concoction was drunk to not only cure arthritis but also was supposed to cure alcoholism.
Rum was not—unlike many things at the time—exclusively for men either. Women were not only permitted but encouraged to drink rum, for their health … especially during pregnancy!
Having trouble nursing? Drink rum!
Morning sickness? Drink rum!
Menstruation pains? Drink rum!
It appears that in about 20% of the court cases for ‘drunkenness’ in the 1800s –by far the largest crime in the Maritimes— the accused were women.
Rum wasn’t considered to be simply a recreational activity at the time. It was an all-day everyday activity; a way of life.
Breakfast in both the upper class and the working classes would often begin with what was called an ‘anti-fogmatic’ or simply ‘a morning’ tumbler of rum, much in the same way as our breakfast often begins with a coffee.
Rum was a social activity — it was considered rude to have a guest over to one's home and not offer them a tumbler of rum, and by the same token it was considered rude to be a guest and to not take the rum.
This applied to professions one might not expect — including doctors and priests making house calls. Indeed at least one prominent Saint John priest had to resign after developing a drinking problem which he blamed on making too many house-calls.
Rum was also a work activity. The standard belief at the time was that drinking on the job was a matter of health and safety. It was actually considered unsafe to do work sober outdoors, as alcohol was an “internal antifreeze.” So workplaces would have “rum breaks,” usually at 11am and 4pm, where workers would take a break and have a glass of rum.
Fredericton in the 1820s took its “rum breaks” so seriously that the city installed a bell to mark the time to stop to have a drink of rum during the workday. The bell sounded at 11am and 4pm to mark that it was time to take a break and drink a tumbler of rum. After having their glass of rum – which remember was between 60 and 70% strength — workers would go back to work.
Fredericton at the time was what a writer for The New Brunswick Reporter in 1846 called “a small backwater of the Empire” numbering approximately 4200 people—about the size of Woodstock or Grand Falls today. However, according to the reporter “Fredericton contains 26 taverns and about twice as many private hells for selling rum and carrying on the practice of seduction, and present are a vast number of drunkards. May heaven help us.”
Fredericton’s ratio of bars to citizens was far less dramatic than in Saint John, where, according to The Synoptic Reporter in 1871 had a population of 28,805—only slightly larger than Quispamsis is today—and was home to 275 taverns.
Fredericton’s ‘rum bell’ was not an anomaly – rum and work were strongly linked. Workers would receive rum as part of their pay.
Construction contracts would stipulate in writing that workers get rum, and how much. Workers would walk off the job if the rum ran out. Fishermen refused to go out to sea if there was no rum, believing they would surely freeze. Commercial berry pickers –who were for the most part children—also received rum with their pay too.
In the 1840s shipbuilding magnate Joseph Salter caused a great deal of outrage when he suggested that employees on his Moncton wharf actually work sober.
The workers and Salter went into negotiations and eventually came to an agreement: if the workers would not drink on the job they would only have to work 10-hour days instead of from dawn to dusk.
The suggestion of a workday being merely ten hours long caused a lot of upset among large industrialists, who worried this outrageous idea might catch on. Salter also set up a library in the workshop for employees to read in during their newly rum-less breaks – this was Moncton’s first library.
Currently, our official Department of Health guidelines tell Canadians that men should only have two drinks per day, and women only one.
Back in the 1800s, the government of New Brunswick recommended that citizens only drink alcohol “moderately”, and went on to define “moderate” as half a pint a day — which would be the equivalent of 8 or 9 shots of modern strength rum per day!
That amount of drinking was bound to have consequences.
One consequence was the ‘Spring blowout’ which was an annual event in which men who worked the winter in logging camps returned with the seasons’ earnings and a large amount of money, and evidently thirst.
In small logging towns such as Doaktown, Newcastle and Forest City, they locked their doors and stayed off the streets to avoid the rampaging lumberjacks.
Coastal cities in the Maritimes from Miramichi to Halifax had additional troubles; it appears that the drunken lumberjacks especially did not get along with drunken sailors, and large-scale riots and brawls were not uncommon on waterfronts.
The cost of the rum was a concern. While the government of New Brunswick bragged that it profited the most per capita out of anywhere in the country off of alcohol taxes, rum was not infrequently the highest charge on grocery bills.
There was also the hidden cost of what was not reported or spoken about at the time, but almost certainly occurred: domestic violence and abuse targeting women and children.
With the pervasiveness of alcohol and the problems that came with it, efforts were made to outright ban drinking.
Indeed by that time in growing swaths of the public imagination rum was taking on a more negative connotation: a wider rethinking of the proper place and time for drinking was going on, and moderation was more favoured by the public, with total abstinence becoming more and more highly regarded.
That was quite the contrast from mere decades before, when abstinence from alcohol was considered some sort of mental disease, or at the very least a sign of a weak person.
This was the beginning of the Temperance movement. While the Temperance movement seems to be remembered for extremists like the American Carrie Nation, smashing casks of rum with her hatchet in bars, the movement actually began in the Maritimes.
The first ever Temperance Society chapter in North America started in rural Nova Scotia in West River, Pictou County in 1827 and spread remarkably quickly.
The later Prohibition movements to ban alcohol were not something which was imposed by provincial governments to stop the public drinking, they were quite the opposite. For years members of the public fought to get alcohol banned and provincial governments, worried about the loss of vast amounts of revenue from drinking, were reluctant to do anything about it.
New Brunswick banned alcohol in 1855.
It lasted only 7 months.
The government deemed it impossible to enforce, and despairing at the sudden drop in government revenue quickly gave up.
Meanwhile in Nova Scotia in each year’s session of the Legislature since the 1830s an attempt was made to ban alcohol. After robust debate, they kept failing, but not by much, and many times the laws to curb drinking were voted down by those in favour of Prohibition because they did not go far enough. During this time the public’s drinking in that province began to fall on its own, as the once-radical idea that drinking had a proper time and place —as opposed to an all-day everyday thing—began to take hold.
As the years passed, Temperance grew ever more popular and a national referendum took place, asking Canadians across the country if they wanted to ban alcohol in 1898.
A slim majority of Canadians voted in favour — 51% to 49%. However this masks some deeper divisions, because Quebec really skewed the overall numbers when it voted 82% in favour of drinking. In the Maritimes 72% of New Brunswickers voted to ban alcohol, 87% of Nova Scotians voted to ban alcohol and 89% of Prince Edward Islanders voted in favour of banning drinking.
Despite the referendum result being in favour of banning alcohol, the federal government under Prime Minister Wilfred Laurier, who you can currently find on your $5 bill, chose to not act on the results, fearing it would tear the young country apart.
Instead of taking action, the federal government allowed municipalities and provinces to make their own decisions on banning drinking. Emboldened by the national referendum results and the new power to do something about all of the drinking, Prohibition’s time had come to the Maritimes.
Cities in the Maritimes, exhausted by the drinking and the consequences that came with it, and pushed by the Temperance movement, acted quickly; by the year 1900, of the 40 municipalities in the Maritimes, 26 had banned drinking.
Prince Edward Island took things further: in 1901 they banned drinking. The ban would last until 1948.
New Brunswick’s government brought the question of banning drinking to the people to be voted on in a province-wide referendum in 1920. Two-thirds of the public voted in favour of prohibition.
Seemingly surprised by the results — or perhaps by the drop in revenue into government coffers — the Liberal government of the time almost immediately called a second referendum to clarify the results: did New Brunswickers actually want to ban all alcohol or was drinking beer and wine okay? The referendum resulted in another landslide result in favour of banning beer and wine too.
The following year, in 1921, Nova Scotia finally passed its own law banning alcohol.
Prohibition had come to the Maritimes.
This story appears in the book Backyard History: Forgotten Stories From Atlantic Canada's Past
