“Three Cheers for Maine,” an 1852 illustration produced for the American Temperance Union. Illustration: Courtesy of The Library Company of Philadelphia

In a democracy, should the majority always rule? If not, how should minorities act to protect their rights? Amid the rising majoritarianism, nativism, and racism of the mid-19th century, a motley array of Americans tackled these recurrent questions. Immigrants, entrepreneurs, drinkers, Jews, Catholics, Seventh Day Baptists, freethinkers, abolitionists, northern blacks, and others rejected unbridled majority rule as the unquestioned source of political authority. Told that minorities should dutifully submit to the majority’s wishes—on issues ranging from Sunday laws to school segregation—they forged a new, minority-rights politics to defend their interests. In the process, they made vital contributions to the theory and practice of democracy that have shaped America’s political culture down to the present.

This essay tells the story of one such minority, the anti-prohibitionists. In the turbulence of the early 19th century, two concurrent forces transformed American public life. On the one hand, there was the rise of mass democracy. Characterized by an expanding electorate, high voter turnout, and vigorous two-party politics, it produced a new reverence for “majority rule.” On the other were the Protestant evangelical ministers and laity who feared this monumental political development. Beginning in the 1820s, these self-described moral reformers started grassroots movements to ensure that a Christian moral majority ruled America’s ascendant democracy. Strategically following the majoritarian currents of the age, many of them insisted that a majority of Americans opposed drinking, and they sought to impose moral order with laws restricting and even prohibiting the sale of alcohol.

Maine led the way in 1846, with an act that forbade the manufacture and sale of alcohol statewide. But the law lacked teeth and went largely unenforced, driving temperance champions to demand a more stringent measure. Seizing the moment was Neal Dow, the “Napoleon of Temperance.” One historian describes Dow as “almost a caricature of the fanatical Yankee reformer: small in stature, vain, thrifty, . . . wealthy, and utterly self-righteous.” In 1850, he became president of the Maine Temperance Society, and a year later voters broke party lines to elect him mayor of Portland. Dow had been working on a new prohibitory bill, and in 1851 he shopped it to the state legislature. Exploiting divisions within the Whig and Democratic parties, he forged prohibitionist majorities in both houses, which moved Democratic governor John Hubbard, who was up for re-election, to sign the bill into law, though he was known to hit the bottle from time to time.

Glowing reports about the Maine Law traveled throughout the United States as well as to Canada and Great Britain. In this law, the brag went, a proper device had at last been created to put “the rum power” out of business, to help control unruly urban, immigrant, and working-class populations, and to dry up all the evils—crime, vice, poverty, the abuse of wives and children, high taxes—that flowed from drink. As the New Haven-based New Englander noted, the long struggle against demon rum had proven that “moral suasion alone” could not bring temperance’s complete victory. And so the Maine Law empowered ordinary citizens, along with the usual authorities, to enforce it. Armed with an easily obtained search warrant, prohibitionist civilians could enter a business or dwelling suspected of housing illegal liquor and dump any contraband they discovered. Presbyterian pastor Samuel H. Hall boasted to a receptive Michigan audience that the Maine Law was unlike “all previous legislation upon the subject of intemperance.” It closed loopholes, ensured violators received quick trials that favored prosecutors, and meted out stiff fines and prison sentences.

Across the North and parts of the upper South, elite and middle-class temperance men and women intensified their single-issue, grassroots pressure to make America dry. There were mass meetings, speaking tours, and propaganda campaigns. New associations sprang up, such as the Ladies Maine Law Society (of Salem, Iowa). Influential newspapers, including Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune, lent support. A torrent of petitions signed by men, women, and children flooded state legislatures, and elections sent growing phalanxes of Maine Law supporters to state office. Temperance reformers organized independent slates of prohibitionists in some areas, but they more often worked with candidates from existing parties. As the Pennsylvania State Temperance Convention explained, “If of two candidates, the Democrat is in favor of Prohibition, and the Whig is opposed, vote for the Democrat. If the Whig is in favor, and the Democrat is opposed, vote for the Whig!” Thus “united and resolute,” the New York Evangelist wrote in 1852, prohibitionists could “hold the balance of power in every election” and force every northern legislature to pass a Maine Law.

The Evangelist was prescient. By 1855, some 12 additional northern states and territories from New Hampshire to Iowa (with a detour south through Delaware) had enacted prohibition. Several others had come extremely close. “In almost every State in the Union,” the Boston Traveller announced, the Maine Law “has become a political question, controlling to a greater or less extent, all party movements and elections.” This course of events wreaked havoc on the party system that had structured much of American electoral politics since the 1830s. Recognizing the divisive nature of prohibition, most Whig and Democratic leaders had hoped to steer clear of the issue. But as prohibitionists forced the question and broke through traditional party lines, their tactics sped the demise of the northern Whig Party, which was already weakened by the national party’s sectional divisions over slavery. Their campaign also helped fuel the rise of the Know-Nothing Party, which organized anti-Catholic and nativist sentiment and used prohibition and the persistent linkage between alcohol and immigrants to bolster its brief but meaningful success in the mid-1850s. Eventually, a new political party—the Republican Party—would emerge from the ashes of the old order.

Party dissolution, however, was only one important political consequence of the Maine Law. Equally significant, enactment of the new law failed to bring about universal obedience. Thousands of Americans in “dry” states continued to make, sell, possess, and consume alcohol, and many defended their right to do so. Anti-prohibitionists practiced both secret and public evasion, and the more creative episodes garnered national media attention. When a Maine man unsuccessfully attempted to smuggle liquor to Portland in a coffin, for example, the press reported an onlooker’s words: “The coffin in this case contained not the body, but the spirit.” Meanwhile, Indiana dealers sold liquor on the Ohio River aboard boats tied to the wet Kentucky shore.

Circumvention was only the beginning. Angry Bostonians hung their Democratic and prohibitionist governor, George S. Boutwell, in effigy, and German immigrants in DuBois County, Indiana, burned effigies of their governor and state senator. Attempts at enforcement turned violent as prohibitionists, sometimes wielding “hatchets and pick axes,” barged into homes and businesses suspected of harboring liquor, only to meet resistance. And there were well-publicized riots, including one in Portland, Maine, in 1855. When a largely Irish-born crowd demanded access to alcohol rumored to be held in City Hall and refused to disperse, Mayor Dow ordered the militia to fire. One man was killed; several others were injured. Some saw the deadly melee as proof of immigrants’ inability to hold their liquor and of the righteousness of prohibition, yet others fretted that the Maine Law had ushered in a prohibitionist “reign of terror.”

Anti-prohibitionists organized grassroots movements across the northern states to repeal Maine Laws and to protect the individual right to drink and sell alcohol. Their efforts comprised America’s first true wet crusade, as well as a turning point in the expansion of the minority-rights politics of the mid-19th century. The most consequential actors were liquor dealers, brewers, hotelkeepers, and others whose livelihoods depended on the sale of alcoholic beverages. Though plenty of native-born Americans worked in the alcohol industry, by the early 1850s it was dominated by Irish and German immigrants, who had flocked to the United States because of famine and Europe’s failed democratic revolutions of 1848. A range of other influential men joined the leadership corps, but newspaper editors and local politicos, who were often, but not always, of Democratic partisan leanings, were the most common. In Chicago, for example, prominent German brewer Michael Diversey was aided by, among others, Alfred Dutch, a Whig newspaper editor, and Francis A. Hoffman, a Prussian-born Lutheran clergyman who would later help organize Illinois’s Republican Party. Looking north to Milwaukee, the mostly German anti-prohibitionists there were led by Moritz Schoeffler, a Democratic newspaper editor and the son-in-law of Jacob Best, a brewer whose business would eventually be renamed the Pabst Brewing Company.

Organizers typically invited all interested participants “without distinction of party” and generally regardless of religion and national origin (though Germans sometimes held their own meetings in addition to attending mixed gatherings). Immigrant and homegrown men and, to a much lesser extent, women; Catholics and Protestants; freethinkers and self-described liberals; business owners and wage workers—together they filled halls, parks, and other public spaces to defend their cultural traditions, their habits and addictions, their financial interests, and their vision of free democracy.

The threat of prohibition proved a powerful force for recruitment. By the time prohibition was in retreat, in 1856—a victim of the courts and grassroots political mobilization—these gatherings had pulled thousands upon thousands of Americans into public life, many of whom might not previously have taken a stand on an issue of policy.

In his Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville emphasized how the pressures of conformity brought by the majority were as coercive and as dangerous as formal governmental authority. “I know of no country,” he famously declared after his 1831 visit, in which “there is less independence of mind and true freedom of discussion than in America.” Tellingly, his prime examples were religious and moral in nature: the lack of organized atheism and the dearth of “licentious books.”

During the several decades after Tocqueville’s journey, the explosion of moral reform would bring Americans to debate the appropriate limits to majority rule and to implement the tactics needed to challenge moral majoritarianism. Those who resisted liquor regulations helped turn the battle for minority rights into an organized, popular endeavor. They created a new institutional form—the rights association, from Pennsylvanians’ “Liquor Leagues” to the Albany-based Metropolitan Society for the Protection of Private and Constitutional Rights—that worked outside of political parties; and they helped develop an array of grassroots, rights-oriented political tactics, including the initiation of test cases before the courts, backed up by often-hefty legal defense funds. Among their diverse heirs are the United States Brewers’ Association, the National Equal Rights League (a 19th-century precursor of the NAACP), and the American Foundation for Equal Rights, a champion of marriage equality.

If the moral minorities of the mid-19th century were somehow transported to our time, they would no doubt be surprised by certain issues. But they would find much that is familiar—in the tension between majority rule and minority rights continually fueled by moral disputes, and in the modes of political engagement embraced by both sides.

Kyle G. Volk ’99 is an associate professor of history at the University of Montana. His essay is drawn and adapted from his new book, Moral Minorities and the Making of American Democracy (2014). Copyright © 2014 Oxford University Press.