Authors: Reid Mitenbuler
Cognac’s influence has always remained on the periphery of bourbon’s story—what kind of modern red-blooded American would really want to admit that blue-collar bourbon took any cues from blue-blooded cognac? Nevertheless, signs surfacing in modern-day New Orleans and
Louisville reveal faded historical links of the French connection shared by the two cities. Each place is one of the oldest cities in its respective region, has a French namesake, and is festooned with the ever-present fleur-de-lis. Both cities also have the most shotgun houses of any cities in the United States. These elongated homes resting on small city plots were built out of dismantled ramshackle flatboats that traded goods between the two towns but were unable to make the return voyage.
Empires don’t become great through agriculture but through trade, which was what would eventually make bourbon great as well. The queen of North American commerce was New Orleans, by far the biggest market for whiskey shipped through the important regional trading hub of Louisville.
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Before the railroads, more than 95 percent of whiskey exported from the western states through the middle of the century went through New Orleans, according to trade data from the era. Once there, spirits generally weren’t reexported elsewhere, as were most other goods, but were consumed within a city that was one of the heaviest-drinking places in the world.
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New Orleans demanded whiskey, but what were they calling it? In the first decades of the nineteenth century, the term “bourbon” wasn’t common. The first known case of anyone in Kentucky calling the whiskey bourbon was in 1821, but that was a rare instance. Three years later, France’s Marquis de Lafayette visited Kentucky, but his hosts didn’t offer him bourbon. Instead, they presented him with a “wiski,” according to one journal account. Lafayette had helped arrange the financial assistance that France had sent to America during the Revolution, after which Bourbon County was named in its honor. If Kentuckians had been calling their whiskey by the same name, they surely would have let Lafayette know.
Up until the 1840s, whiskey was typically referred to generically—simply as “whiskey”—or was given the name of the closest town or village: “Bardstown whiskey” or “Loretto whiskey.” Almost all of it was consumed locally. In 1812, Kentucky alone had two thousand registered distilleries, and probably many more unregistered ones. The only places that imported whiskey—and thus might have cared about the name or origins—were large cities. Grocers and middlemen such as the Tarascon brothers would have needed a way to make their whiskey stand out in these far-off places, especially in New Orleans, their biggest market. More modern theories speculate that a name like “bourbon” would have been a perfect marketing tool, appealing to the city’s large French-speaking population.
But the explanation for bourbon’s name as it’s often told today is that the spirit was named after Bourbon County in Kentucky after liquor dealers in New Orleans started asking for whiskey shipped from the port at “Limestone, Bourbon County, Kentucky.” Unfortunately, this explanation isn’t backed by a paper trail, as historians such as Michael Veach and Charles Cowdery have pointed out. Limestone, Kentucky, which is today called Maysville, was only briefly part of Bourbon County before Kentucky became a state in 1792. When that happened, Bourbon County shrank drastically as it was divided into many smaller counties. The port at Limestone, to which the name is so often attributed, became part of Mason County. People continued calling the port “Old Bourbon” for about twenty years after the name change, but that habit ended well before the term came into common usage for the whiskey. During the period when “Old Bourbon” was still a widely used moniker for the port at Limestone, trade with New Orleans was still limited, and it’s highly unlikely that liquor dealers in New Orleans would have noticed a spirit by that name.
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The most interesting theory about the origins of bourbon’s name is
that it was likely a shrewd marketing ploy cooked up by middlemen merchants like the Tarascon brothers. The French population living alongside the Tarascon brothers around the shipping hub of Louisville would have been well aware of the affiliation the name once had in the region and its suitability to their biggest market. Many French residents moving to New Orleans in the early nineteenth century were royalists fleeing the Revolution and would have appreciated the name. For any revolutionaries taking offense at it, the term could simply be linked back to the Bourbon County that had been named in honor of France’s support of the American Revolution. “Bourbon” was a perfect marketing tool—it meant different things to different consumers and didn’t offend anyone. It also had the perfect sound: a word full of round vowels that rolls off the tongue with the same easy warmth as the spirit itself.
Thus the name got its foothold, although not until the Civil War would it take hold nationwide. Even so, the aged whiskey coming from the Ohio River Valley was making a name for itself—not as a brand, but as a distinctive style—and a national drink was born. Hall, an early champion of what he himself called “western whiskey,” wrote, “The French sip brandy; the Hollanders swallow gin; the Irish glory in their whiskey; surely John Bull finds ‘meat and drink’ in his porter—and why should not our countrymen have a national
beverage?”
A
merica was astonishingly drunk. This was the assessment of many foreigners visiting the young nation during the early to mid-nineteenth century. The roster of guests included luminaries such as Charles Dickens, Alexis de Tocqueville, Frances Trollope, and Harriet Martineau, all arriving with diaries and journals in hand to observe this new country and discover what made it tick. They all noted the whiskey: a binding force that knitted together the economy, infused political life, accompanied America’s strange diet, and was on everyone’s breath. In 1825, the French epicure Jean Brillat-Savarin wrote in his groundbreaking
The Physiology of Taste,
published after his own visit to the United States, that “the destiny of nations depends upon the manner in which they nourish themselves.” America was nourishing itself with whiskey, which was fast becoming a powerful symbol of the young nation’s psyche and forming important parts of an image the drink continues to hold today.
These foreign guests weren’t necessarily harping on Americans or insulting them with their observations. In fact, most of what they said about the new country was complimentary. They praised America’s sense of independence, self-sufficiency, work ethic, and egalitarian ideals. John Stuart Mill in 1840 wrote that every book written by travelers returning to England from America became a party pamphlet, used to
urge positive political and economic change back home. One of the few common points attracting criticism rather than praise, however, was the subject of whiskey. The foreigners who criticized it often considered themselves the Americans’ friends—and indeed, their perspective as impartial outsiders allowed them to appreciate and point out qualities, as good friends do, about the United States that went unnoticed or underappreciated by Americans themselves. Mark Twain would return the favor several decades later when he published
The Innocents Abroad,
detailing his own travels in Europe and
observing the sometimes unflattering qualities about his hosts that they themselves were unlikely to notice or admit to.
The reasons for Americans’ heavy drinking were many. Whiskey was cheap, abundant, and by now firmly established as a patriotic workingman’s drink, an attitude held over from the American Revolution. Drinking it was a way to express national unity and one’s egalitarian credentials. The foreign journalists also noted, somewhat fretfully, that Americans seemed to use whiskey as a way to battle the difficulties of their unique environment: greater numbers of people were moving into a scattered and expanding frontier that was lonely and stressful. During the first third of the nineteenth century, an average of about one in seven Americans lived outside of established communities, creating the highest level of isolation experienced in U.S. history, according to contemporary historian W. J. Rorabaugh. These vast stretches of isolated land also produced most of the nation’s whiskey. Drinking roughly three to five times more than they do today, Americans, Rorabaugh noted, drank from “the break of dawn to the break of dawn.”
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Just as modern critics of the American diet complain that corn is in everything, with high-fructose corn syrup composing a large part of so many manufactured food products, America’s nineteenth-century visitors noticed the same thing. The entire American diet seemed to have a common origin: cornbread, corn-fed meat, and corn-based drink were an American’s “common necessaries,” one English traveler noted. The
English writer Frances Trollope, whose book
Domestic Manners of the Americans
was an enormous best seller, claimed that what little culinary creativity America had was reserved for inventing new ways to serve corn. If not converted into whiskey, it was often served in some sort of mush or pancake form. “All bad,” Trollope sniffed.
Corn that wasn’t eaten or distilled was fed to pigs. In the 1820s, foreign visitors nicknamed Cincinnati “Porkopolis” because of all the corn-fed meat slaughtered there (the city was also a leading whiskey stronghold). When Trollope visited Cincinnati she commented on the “extraordinary quantity of bacon” consumed by Americans living in the Ohio River Valley, and was shocked at the number of pigs wandering the streets. She soon decided that she liked the pigs—in cities with scarce public services, they ate the trash out of the gutters. Once the pigs were done eating the trash, Americans ate the pigs, consuming an estimated pound of meat per person each day, certainly one of the highest proportions in the world. Much of the pork was preserved with salt, adding to the great thirst for whiskey, which helped cut through all the starch and fat.
Americans certainly could have had a more varied and interesting diet, but they seemed to actively reject it, the foreigners noted. Even when fresh vegetables were in season, many Americans chose their salted pork and spirits instead. “The luxury of whiskey is more appreciated by the men than all the green delicacies from the garden,” Trollope observed. When Prince Maximilian of Wied visited Missouri, he also was startled to find garden foods ignored in favor of “salt pork, biscuits, and whiskey.”
The Europeans quickly learned that the American diet was an act of defiance. It was simple fare and nonfussy, emblematic of how the Americans wanted to be seen. Meals stood in stark contrast to what many of these Europeans, who tended to hail from society’s upper crust, were accustomed to eating. To Americans, “Obsession with the delights of the palate was considered a symptom of Old World decadence,” the historian Daniel Boorstin would write of American eating habits many years later.
Americans took great pride in drinking the whiskey that helped distance them from the Old World’s cultural protocols. Many of these wealthy European visitors, alongside their prosperous American counterparts, looked down on whiskey, including those styles made on their home continent (this attitude would eventually change, but not until later in the century). Many preferred wine instead, leading some Americans to associate it with the snobbish elite. Nor was wine’s reputation helped by the fact that it regularly cost roughly four times as much as whiskey because the drink needed to be imported (Thomas Jefferson’s attempts to establish a domestic wine industry had failed). Thus the subtle pleasures of wine were often mocked in favor of inexpensive everyman favorites like whiskey and cider. Just as Americans had thrown off political and economic colonialism in the preceding century, they rejected it once again in its culinary form. Frenchman Barthélemi Tardiveau noted that Kentuckians hostile to foreign ideas and drinks had pledged to “drink no other strong liquor than whiskey.”
Not only was whiskey an expression of egalitarian credentials and national unity, it also complemented the fast, intense hustle of America’s work ethic. A quick shot of whiskey versus a leisurely mug of ale was the choice of fast over slow food. British writer Archibald Maxwell observed that America’s national motto could have been “Gobble, gulp, and go.” As soon as food landed on the table, diners would “fall upon it like wolves on an unguarded herd,” he wrote. To Americans, it was an honor to finish meals before everyone else and then move to the bar for a “cock-tail,” wrote Trollope, which “receives its highest relish from the absence of all restraint whatever.”
People increasingly turned to whiskey as a remedy for the massive cases of dyspepsia caused by this fast-and-furious diet. The French philosopher Constantin François de Chasseboeuf noted that Americans ate by “heaping indigestions on one another; and to give tone to the poor, relaxed and wearied stomach, they drink . . . which completes the ruin of the nervous system.” Charles Dickens used the character Martin Chuzzlewit to describe his American dining companions. They were
“dyspeptic individuals” who “bolted their food in wedges; feeding, not themselves, but broods of nightmares.”
These “broods of nightmares” point to America’s anxiety. The experiment in democracy was still young, and the entire world was watching for signs of failure. Americans were self-conscious and aware of the world’s scrutiny. As a result, they obsessed over the tiniest political matters, Trollope noted. They got their news from taverns or groceries that doubled as liquor stores, meaning that being informed often meant getting drunk. Trollope asked one country interlocutor if it was “from a sense of duty, then, that you all go to the liquor store to read the papers?”
“To be sure it is,” he replied, “and he’d be no true born American as didn’t. I don’t say that the father of a family should always be after liquor, but I do say that I’d rather have my son drunk three times in a week, than not look after the affairs of the country.”
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Foreign visitors noting Americans’ intemperance were sometimes only noting a trend they had observed in their own countries, where economic conditions similar to America’s had also led to drinking binges. Drunkenness and gluts of cheap spirits are common in countries on the brink of industrialization. England guzzled gin before its Industrial Revolution in the eighteenth century, just as Sweden, Prussia, and Russia all overindulged in spirits before their economies shifted away from agrarian pursuits. America was no different. As a cottage industry attached to farming, America’s surplus of cheap spirits was the result of too much manpower pooling in one part of the economy.
Western farmer-distillers were most vulnerable to the coming economic upheaval. Eastern farmers could get their grain to distant markets more easily, meaning they were less reliant on converting it into spirits to preserve its value. America’s distilling strongholds thus became the remote parts of the Ohio River Valley—upstate New York, western Pennsylvania, Ohio, Tennessee, and Kentucky—where farmers
still used liquor for currency and as a way to preserve the value of their crops. By 1810, the Ohio River Valley produced more than half the nation’s spirits, although relatively few people lived there. Many of those moving in were distillers, pushing the number of distilleries from fourteen thousand in 1810 to twenty thousand by 1830.
The economics of whiskey were volatile. After the First Bank of the United States died in 1811, the economic link between East and West relied primarily on commodity exchanges, which in the West meant considerable amounts of whiskey. However, surpluses of the spirit drove down prices, undermining the West’s trading relationship with the coast. The western economy stagnated in the 1820s, in part due to a whiskey glut that now flooded the struggling West with a large surplus of an inexpensive depressant. Alexander Hamilton, who had been shot dead by Aaron Burr in a duel in 1804, must have been rolling over in his grave. He had championed the national bank, and his whiskey tax had been intended to prevent this sort of thing from happening—it would have helped build infrastructure to allow farmers get their grain to market. Nevertheless, the tax was poorly designed and executed, and the West’s overreliance on whiskey as currency almost guaranteed resistance against its taxation.
When Frances Trollope visited the besotted West, she was impressed by the independence and rugged individualism of its people, if not with their drinking. The strong character of Americans, however, was accompanied by “something awful and almost unnatural in their loneliness,” she wrote. The disruptive land speculation driving Americans’ western migration meant a continuous cycle of pulling up stakes to move where living was cheaper. People remained isolated from one another, preventing the kind of social institutions from taking hold that help limit heavy drinking. The United States was unencumbered by oppressive authority, but that freedom came with a cost, Trollope noted. The Americans “will live and die without hearing or uttering the dreadful words, ‘God save the king,’” she wrote. But their graves would occupy lonely spots in the forest where “the wind that whispers through the boughs will be their only
requiem.” In America’s most remote outposts she constantly found “reeking forth the fumes of whiskey.”
Americans generally weren’t as introspective about their drinking as Trollope was. They were too busy working, dismissing such ponderous matters with cavalier cheer. Kentuckian Tom Johnson responded to European worries about his drinking with a wisecrack, emblazoning his tombstone with the words:
By whiskey grog he lost his breath,
Who would not die so sweet a death.
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In the drinking world, wine has long carried an elitist reputation that some say dates to ancient times, when sophisticated Romans drunk on wine scoffed at beer-drinking Huns. This perception isn’t necessarily fair; in many places—Southern Europe, parts of South America—wine is a staunchly working-class drink. Nevertheless, Americans don’t typically see it that way. The attitude is traced back to the nation’s coming of age, when the wine drinkers of the old colonial powers came to visit the upstart nation and sniffed at its rough whiskey. They were the Romans and Americans were the Huns. In matters of taste and style, Europeans set the tone.
Even though New World cities such as New York would eventually rival their Old World counterparts as centers for art and fashion, some Americans still occasionally look to Europe for guidance in matters of style. It is this way with wine, which inevitably remains the drinking world’s tastemaker. And as American whiskey undergoes its twenty-first-century renaissance, it finds itself pulled into wine’s sphere. The same thing happened to beer during the 1990s when the craft beer boom suddenly found that drink paired with cheese and sold in 750-milliliter wine bottles. Now the inevitable food and whiskey pairings are shepherded by whiskey sommeliers,
a new breed of food industry professional
born in America’s glitzy coastal enclaves around 2012. You know your drink has arrived when somebody with a fanciful title from the wine world starts telling you how to drink it.
But wine’s rules occasionally need to be defied, the way Americans once joyfully defied those who dismissed their whiskey. The partnership between whiskey and food is often clumsy and awkward, the high proof of whiskey overpowering the food rather than enhancing it the way that beer and wine do. Diluting whiskey with ice or water is one way to overcome this problem and there are a few whiskey and food pairings that work well, but the pairings nevertheless often seem designed to make whiskey more credible by dressing it up like wine. Whiskey, however, yearns to be governed by its own natural style, much like the frontier from which it hails. Perfect before or after dinner, it seems determined to be left alone, in line with its natural character.
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