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Taverns and Drinking in Early America. By Sharon V. Salinger. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 2002. Pp. xi, 303. $42.00.)
Plantation patriarch William Byrd strolled to the Williamsburg courthouse on a summer night in May 1710 to find "most" of the people there "drunk." Byrd himself drank heavily on almost every occasion, on the road and at meetings with his slaves, for instance, and he often encountered people who did much the same. Byrd's drinking is generally well known among historians of early America, thanks to close analyses of his diary and studies of "Court Day" rituals in Virginia. It is this sort of familiar evidence on which Sharon Salinger leans a little too heavily in her study of colonial taverns and drinking habits. The reader often has a sense of deja vu. Moreover, the evidence is narrowly interpreted into a portrait of colonial America "segregated" in public by "race, gender, and class." One feels that the author would conclude with this formulaic mantra whatever the evidence under consideration.
Because of their oral, informal atmosphere, taverns are admittedly difficult institutions to unveil. Still, the author might have resisted the impulse to rehearse once again in detail the increasing number of laws enacted in England and its colonies to control them. Four of the chapters focus on the failure to enforce the laws effectively-a failure generally well known from the preambles to new laws and the recurring laments of clergymen and magistrates. But Salinger does argue that law officials prosecuted the proprietors of taverns catering to the lower ranks for "disorder" far more vigorously than those selling to a more substantial clientele; the disparity, she insists, was due to elite fears of possible conspiracy and revolt among mixed companies of slaves, Indians, women, sailors, and apprentices.
Yet the evidence presented suggests a more complex scenario. Salinger treats the 1741 execution in New York City of twenty-nine blacks and four whites who had been accused of involvement in an insurrectionary plot-planned in a tavern-as a reflection...