"Our Founding Fathers Were All Drunks"

"Our Founding Fathers Were All Drunks"

There's a lot of truth to that. Your mental picture of America's founders as stoic men of judicious reason is inaccurate. It was often safer to drink spirits than water in the 18th and 19th centuries, and early America was suffused with alcohol. Even the Puritans consumed alcohol. It has been estimated that the average American's alcohol consumption, was 5.8 gallons per year in 1790, and peaked at about seven gallons in 1830.

Reason.com wrote:

"We still have available the bar tab from a 1787 farewell party in Philadelphia for George Washington just days before the framers signed off on the Constitution. According to the bill preserved from the evening, the 55 attendees drank 54 bottles of Madeira, 60 bottles of claret, eight of whiskey, 22 of porter, eight of hard cider, 12 of beer, and seven bowls of alcoholic punch. That's more than two bottles of fruit of the vine, plus a number of shots and a lot of punch and beer, for every delegate."

Those were the delegates to the Constitutional Convention!

You have to see those numbers in perspective. 5.8 gallons is 742 fluid ounces. Today's Americans consume an average of 9.4 liters of alcohol, which is 317 fluid ounces. In other words, they drank about two and a half times as much as we do, or about one and a half times as much as today's Russians, who consume 15.1 liters per capita. That's a lot, but it doesn't mean they were "all drunks," as stated in the headline. As far as I know, the founding fathers all consumed alcohol, but that doesn't mean they were all drunks.

Sidebar:

Abe Lincoln, although not a founding father, is considered our greatest leader and the embodiment of the spirit of America. He was nearly a teetotaler. (Some say he never drank at all. Others claim he would occasionally consume in very small quantities.)