Customs and Fashions in Old New EnglandEarle, Alice Morse
History
Customs and Fashions in Old New England
Earle, Alice Morse
New England -- Social life and customs -- To 1775
Chocolate became equally popular. Sewall often drank it, once certainly
as early as 1697, at the Lieutenant-Governor's, with a breakfast of
venison. Winthrop says it was scarce in 1698. Madam Knight took it with
her on her journey in 1704. "I told her I had some chocolate if she
would prepare it, which, with the help of some milk and a little clean
brass kettle, she soon effected to my satisfaction." Mills to grind
cocoa were quickly established in Boston, and were advertised in the
_News Letter_.
Even in the early days of our Republic there were reformers who wished
to establish the use of temperance drinks, which were not, however,
exactly the same liquids now so called. A writer in the _Boston Evening
Post_ wrote forcibly on the subject, and a Philadelphia paper published
this statement on July 23d, 1788:
"A correspondent wishes that a monument could be erected in Union
Green with the following inscription.
In Honour of
American Beer and Cyder.
It is hereby recorded for the information of strangers and
posterity that 17,000 Assembled in this Green on the 4th of July
1788 to celebrate the establishment of the Constitution of the
United States, and that they departed at an early hour without
intoxication or a single quarrel. They drank nothing but Beer and
Cyder. Learn Reader to prize these invaluable liquors and to
consider them as the companions of those virtues which can alone
render our country free and reputable.
Learn likewise to Despise
Spirituous Liquors as Anti Federal
and to consider them as the companions of all those vices which are
calculated to dishonor and enslave our country."
VIII
TRAVEL, TAVERN, AND TURNPIKE
When New England was colonized, the European emigrants were forced to
content themselves with the rude means of transportation which were
employed by the aborigines. The favorite way back and forth from
Plymouth to Boston and Cape Ann was by water, by skirting the shore in
birchen pinnaces or dugouts--hollowed pine logs about twenty feet long
and two and a half feet wide--in which Johnson said the savages ventured
two leagues out at sea. There were few horses, and the few were too
valuable for domestic work to be spared for travel, hence the journeyer
must go by water, or on foot. When Bradstreet was sent to Dover as Royal
Commissioner, he walked the entire distance there, and back to Boston,
by narrow Indian paths.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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