One Drunk to Another Rule 62
Watch The Kitchen Table
Illustration · A tavern table at night, with six pewter tankards around a written pledge and empty chairs pushed back. An imagined scene: the six signed their pledge at one of their houses, and no picture of Chase’s Tavern is known.

Baltimore · 1840–1848

The Washingtonians

A century before AA, a society of drunks helping drunks swept the country and then faded, and Bill W. made its fall AA’s warning.

“If you would win a man to your cause, first convince him that you are his sincere friend.”

Abraham Lincoln, to the Washington Temperance Society of Springfield, Illinois, February 22, 1842 · Temperance Address

Six at Chase’s Tavern

On the evening of Thursday, April 2, 1840, six regulars were drinking at Chase’s Tavern on Liberty Street in Baltimore: a tailor, a carpenter, two blacksmiths, a coach maker and a silversmith. A temperance preacher, the Rev. Matthew Hale Smith, was lecturing in town that night, and four of them went to hear him. On Sunday they decided to quit, and to start a society of their own. The tailor, William K. Mitchell, wrote a pledge that they would “not drink any spirituous or malt liquors, wine or cider.” They named the society for George Washington.

What was new was who did the talking. At their meetings members got up one after another to “state their temperance experience,” drunks speaking to drunks, and they went after their old drinking companions to bring them in. John H. W. Hawkins, one of the early Baltimore members, became their best-known speaker. In the spring of 1841 the movement reached New York and Boston, and women formed Martha Washington societies to feed and clothe the poor and to reclaim women who drank.

A lithograph portrait of John H. W. Hawkins.
John H. W. Hawkins, the Washingtonians’ best-known speaker, in a Boston lithograph of 1842, made from a portrait presented to the Washington Total Abstinence Society of Boston.Library of Congress

Nobody knows how big it grew. Claims of reformed drunkards ran into the hundreds of thousands, and many who signed the pledge had never been drunkards.

By the end of the decade it had faded. Fraternal orders such as the Sons of Temperance, founded by Washingtonians in 1842, drew members away. The temperance cause turned from persuading drinkers to passing laws. The speeches lost their novelty. By 1848 the American Temperance Union’s yearly report didn’t mention the Washingtonians at all.

A century later, AA’s members had never heard of them. In July 1945 a member in Lansing, Michigan, wrote them up for the Grapevine, AA’s monthly magazine, and said their groups had split as men took sides over slavery. The next month Bill W. admitted that “few of us had ever heard of it,” and drew the lesson. In 1953 he wrote that the society “didn’t have a chance from the moment it determined to reform America’s drinking habits,” and that its wreck was where AA learned to stay out of public controversy: “Thus was laid the cornerstone for Tradition Ten.”

Listen The Washingtonians About 1 minute

Compare the accounts

Two accounts

Bill told the Washingtonians’ story as a warning, and he told it the same way for twelve years. Historians who went to the 1840s records found a different fall.

AA’s telling: a member’s Grapevine article (July 1945) and Bill W. (1945, 1953, 1957). The historians’: Milton A. Maxwell, writing in 1950 from the records of the 1840s.

How big

AA’s telling

“Their membership passed the hundred thousand mark.”

Bill W., 1953. In 1957 he wrote “five hundred thousand.”

The historians

Claims of drunkards reclaimed ran from 100,000 to 600,000, and pledge signers were counted in the millions. Maxwell called the figures “varied, contradictory and, hence, unreliable.”

Maxwell, 1950

Who belonged

AA’s telling

“At first, the society was composed entirely of alcoholics trying to help one another.”

Bill W., 1953

The historians

Many members had never been drunkards. In Cincinnati in 1841, 900 of the society’s 8,000 members were reformed drunkards, about one in nine.

Maxwell, 1950

What sank it

AA’s telling

Politicians and reformers used the society. Its speakers took sides on slavery, and then it set out to reform the nation’s drinking.

Bill W., 1953 and 1957

The historians

Weak organization, members lost to fraternal orders, speeches that lost their novelty, and the temperance cause’s turn to the law. “…the original purpose of rehabilitating alcoholics was lost to sight.”

Maxwell, 1950

Slavery

AA’s telling

First in a member’s Grapevine article of July 1945: “there was division within groups as men took their stand on the issue of slavery.” Bill repeated it in 1945, 1953 and 1957.

C.H.K., 1945; Bill W.

The historians

Maxwell’s account of the decline doesn’t mention slavery at all.

Maxwell, 1950

The rule they had

A Washingtonian handbook of 1842, the Washingtonian Pocket Companion, already told societies to “Forbid the introduction of sectarian sentiments or party politics.” On both accounts, a movement of drunks helping drunks drifted into other causes.

For a closer look

Go deeper

What Lincoln told the Washingtonians in 1842; how temperance had spoken to drinkers before them; and when AA first heard of them.

A drop of honey

On Washington’s birthday in 1842, the Washington Temperance Society of Springfield, Illinois, heard a young lawyer named Abraham Lincoln. He was thirty-three.

“On this point, the Washingtonians greatly excel the temperance advocates of former times,” he said. The old advocates had spoken to the drinker in “the thundering tones of anathema and denunciation.” The Washingtonians spoke to “their old friends and companions,” men who “know they are not demons, nor even the worst of men.”

Persuasion, he said, worked better than blame: “It is an old and a true maxim, that a ‘drop of honey catches more flies than a gallon of gall.’”

The drunkard’s progress
A hand-colored print showing a drinker’s life in a series of steps, from the first glass to the grave.
Nathaniel Currier’s The Drunkards Progress. From the First Glass to the Grave, 1846.Library of Congress

Much of the temperance message of the 1840s was a warning. Prints like Currier’s showed the drinker’s road in steps, from the first glass down to the grave.

The Washingtonians added the man who had walked that road and come back to tell it. Maxwell quotes one of Hawkins’s Boston speeches: “Drunkard! Come up here! You can reform.”

When did AA hear of them?

In a talk of 1955, printed in his history in 1957, Bill W. remembered worrying about the Washingtonians as early as November 1937, when he and Dr. Bob, sitting in Akron, counted their recoveries: would the forces that divide society “smash us up” as they had “the promising Washingtonian group movement among alcoholics a century before?”

But in August 1945, right after the Grapevine’s article, Bill wrote that readers had been “startled, then sobered,” and that “few of us had ever heard of it.” When Bill later sent his Traditions essays for the Twelve and Twelve to Jack Alexander, the reporter said he had treated the Washingtonians too briefly: “most people never heard of it.”

The 1937 memory comes from a talk eighteen years later. The earliest AA writing about the Washingtonians that we have found is the Grapevine article of July 1945.

Sources