Puritan New England was, by most accounts, a harsh place to live. Imagine: stark winters, restless natives, scarlet letters (“A” for adulterers, “D” for drunks), witch trials, and living under a strict moral code that embraced hard work and dismissed emotions. No Oprah here. By 1650, a mere 30 years after the founding of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, public drunkenness had become illegal, “punishable by whipping, fines, and confinement in stocks.” One Increase Mather, a prominent colonial minister who would later figure prominently in the Salem Witch Trials in 1692, blames the smallpox outbreak on the proliferation of alehouses. The original text from Increase’s diary of the 1650s reveals his belief that God has enacted revenge on Mr. Windsor, the innkeeper at The Swan, notorious for its stumbling patrons:
This day I hear that G[od] has shot an arrow into the midst of this Town. The small pox is in an ordinary [at the] sign of the Swan, the ordinary Keepers name is Windsor. His daughter is sick of the disease. It is observable that this disease begins at an alehouse, to testify God’s displeasure [at] the sin of drunkenness & [the] of multiplying ale-houses!
A pox on those inebriates, and the alehouses they drink at, too.
Yet somehow, a widowed businesswoman, born into this culture of fear and disdain, embarked on a five-month journey from Boston to New York and back again, laughing all the way. At drunks.
Sarah Kemble Knight traveled the Old Post Road muttering about and mocking drunks. Her record of that 1704 road trip, The Journal of Madam Knight (Massachusetts Historical Society, 1971), recounts her meetings with an array of characters: the mailmen who guided her along the Road, Native Americans, slaves, the New England elite class (think John Kerry circa 1704), and the innkeepers and men who tossed back warm beer after a hard day.
How is it that this well-educated widow, who walked the same cobblestones streets as Increase Mather and hobnobbed with Connecticut Governor Winthrop, cast off the trappings of staid Puritannical New England and found humor in habits that incurred God’s wrath?
Of this we do not know. What we do know is that Madam Knight was a scrivener, teacher, shopkeeper, and real estate mogul by the time of her death in 1727. Her journal is replete with allusions from the Bible and classical Greece, and as a member of the upper class, she complains about the food and lodging every hoof of the way. Typical.
At the first bar in her hometown of Boston, she looks for someone to accompany her on the first leg of her trip. Alas, all available escorts were “tyed by the Lipps to a pewter engine” (p.2). An engineful of ale, no doubt. After some asking about, she contracts with a local by the name of John, who agrees to travel with her for eight pieces and two drams—one for now, one after they arrive.
A few days into her journey, late-night drunken debating keeps her awake. She penned this poem (p.11), invoking the liquor gods to render the revelers too drunk to talk:
I ask thy Aid, O Potent Rum!
To Charm these wrangling Topers Dum.
Thou hast their Giddy Brains [possessed]
The man confounded with the Beast-
And I, poor I, can get no rest.
Intoxicate them with thy fumes:
O still their Tongue till the morning comes!
On her return trip from New York, the now-cantankerous Madam seeks good conversation but finds only “the Impertinant Bab[b]le of the worst of men” at an inn in Norwalk, CT (p.34). Madam is not a fan of Norwalk, where the “Church and Tavern being next neighbors” (p.34). The gall.
Lest we judge, Madam’s heartiness and humility render her likeable: when her horse drops dead just outside of Boston, she secures another horse and continues on her merry way. At journey’s end, she thanks God for her safe passage: “But desire sincearly to adore my Great Benefactor for thus graciously carrying forth and returning in safety his unworthy handmaid” (p.39).
A proper, well-educated woman. Just don’t invite her over for the Superbowl.
Tracey McCormick is Managing Editor at GreatHistory.com.
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