At War with King Alcohol: Debating Drinking and Masculinity in the Civil War by Megan L. Bever (review)

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• At War with King Alcohol: Debating Drinking and Masculinity in the Civil War by Megan L. Bever
• Jonathan S. Jones (bio)

At War with King Alcohol: Debating Drinking and Masculinity in the Civil War. Megan L. Bever. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2022. ISBN: 978-1-4696-6954-0. 260 pp., paper, $27.95.

This unique and much-needed book fills a stunning gap in the historiographies of the Civil War and the temperance movement. As Megan L. Bever rightfully observes, most historians of the latter have concluded that the Civil War was ultimately a setback for the temperance movement. Bever also contends that Civil War historians—with a few exceptions including Elaine Frantz, Lorien Foote, Margaret Humphreys, James Marten, and Scott C. Martin—have largely overlooked alcohol use in Civil War armies or approached drinking in the ranks as a window into topics like the culture of Civil War armies, common soldiering, the experiences of veterans, or contests over manhood.

In contrast, Bever makes alcohol the central focus in At War with King Alcohol: Debating Drinking and Masculinity in the Civil War, providing the first thorough scholarly treatment of the topic to squarely address wartime alcohol use in the Union and Confederate armies situated within the historical context of the nineteenth-century temperance movement, medicine, and state development. Building on the work of Holly Berkley Fletcher, Paul Boyer, Bruce Dorsey, Ian Tyrrell, Elaine Frantz, Lorien Foote, Gerald F. Linderman, Kathryn Shively, [End Page 79] Peter S. Carmichael, and Lauren K. Thompson, At War with King Alcohol blends cultural, gender, medical, and military history methodologies. Bever draws on diverse sources ranging from temperance literature to medical texts, soldiers' letters, newspapers, and the records of courts martial and state legislatures. The result is a tightly constructed, well-executed, one-of-a-kind book that advances scholars' understanding of the Civil War and the temperance movement.

While the book's subtitle refers to masculinity, the scope is broader in focus than the title suggests. Much of the book focuses on excavating alcohol use patterns among US and Confederate soldiers and officers during the Civil War. Bever finds that soldiers made war with alcohol as their constant recreational and medicinal aid. Although officers, who could licitly drink for fun, and soldiers, who were theoretically forbidden from nonmedicinal drinking, did not necessarily share a common drinking culture, most men in uniform imbibed regularly. Through trial and error, and despite spirited debate, prophylactic alcohol rations in the US and Confederate militaries became the norm during the war. Holidays and paydays also routinely prompted drunken revelry.

Bever's analysis also moves beyond usage patterns to investigate how wartime alcohol use factored into the temperance movement, the largest social reform movement of the nineteenth century. Far from shrinking into the cultural and political background, temperance proponents used the Civil War to continue their long-running cultural and political war with "King Alcohol." During the war, liquor and beer use not only surged but also took on new political and cultural meanings. To Northern temperance activists—and to many of the soldiers and officers whom temperance actors sought to recruit—endemic drunkenness in the ranks represented something more sinister than nuisance. It threatened military discipline and branded drunkards as unmanly and unpatriotic, and the expansive wartime traffic in liquor threatened to undermine the Union war effort. This was even more the case in the Confederacy, where profitable distilling operations diverted scarce grain away from food production. Confederate civilians also had more exposure to drunken soldiers than most Northerners, Bever suggests, which helped shift white Southerners' fears about drinking away from an exclusive focus on enslaved people toward other demographics. Consequently, Bever convincingly argues that the Civil War gave the temperance movement a boost by making some form of temperance an urgent military necessity. Yet the militaries' reliance on medicinal spirits, which Bever shows were essential to waging war, mostly precluded the outright prohibition of alcohol. While the Union military exerted piecemeal regulations over sutlers and soldiers, Confederate states went farther, with many legislatures tightly controlling [End Page 80] or outright banning liquor distilling and trafficking for the first time. Thus, the Civil War spurred...