The Maine Law was an early attempt at prohibition. The territory of Maine possessed a strong temperance streak, and as early as 1815 the city of Portland boasted the Total Abstinence Society, the world’s first. The religious revival movement known as the Second Great Awakening only increased public awareness and support for prohibition. Many middle-class Protestants grew alarmed by the rapid effects that the Industrial Revolution and increased immigration brought to their new state. The Irish and Germans, culturally heavy drinkers and usually consigned to low-wage menial jobs, were singled out as examples of who or what behavior to avoid.
In time, the state’s prohibition campaign crystallized around Neal Dow, a former Quaker who had organized the Maine Temperance Union in 1838. Through his ceaseless agitation, his native city of Portland adopted a citywide prohibition of all alcoholic beverages in 1842, which passed by a two-to-one margin. Four years later, Dow spearheaded a petition drive that collected 4,000 signatures on a 59-foot-long petition, which he delivered to the state legislature.
This document called for no less than a complete statewide ban on all alcoholic substances in amounts of less than 28 gallons, a quantity too costly for most people to afford.
But the defining moment in Maine’s temperance efforts happened in 1851, when Dow was elected mayor of Portland. He used his political clout with the state legislature to have them pass the so-called Maine Law on May 31. Subsequently signed by Governor John Hubbard on June 2, 1851, this statute was the first law in the nation to expressly forbid the ownership or consumption of alcoholic beverages other than for medicinal purposes. Moreover, the law granted state authorities the right of search and seizure following the complaint of three citizens. The Maine Law exerted immediate national influence. By 1855 all of the New England states were likewise “dry,” and similar laws were put on the books in New York, Michigan, Indiana, Iowa, and Delaware, along with the Minnesota and Nebraska territories.
In Maine, however, the law’s popularity declined following the so-called Portland Rum Riot of June 2, 1855, when Mayor Dow called in the militia to suppress an antiprohibition protest and an Irish immigrant was killed. Consequently, the Maine Law was repealed in 1856 with little ceremony, although minor restrictions on alcohol remained. By 1861, when only Maine, Vermont, and Connecticut had prohibition laws of any kind still in effect, temperance as a national issue had been completely overtaken by secession. Still, Maine’s experience in the 1850s was a precursor of what would happen nationally with the ratification of the Eighteenth Amendment in 1920.
Further reading: William D. Barry, and Nan Cumming, Rum, Riot, and Reform: Maine and the History of American Drinking (Portland: Maine Historical Society, 1998); Eric Burns, The Spirits of America: A Social History of Alcohol (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2004).
—John C. Fredriksen
World History
