Excessive drinking has a long history in the United States, as do the reform groups organized to discourage it. The best-known anti-alcohol effort resulted in prohibition, the time in the 1920s when the Constitution was amended to outlaw alcohol. But the battle against alcohol began many years earlier. In the antebellum period, a wave of social reforms swept the country, buoyed by a sense that Americans could become perfect—if only they would give up their sinful ways. Reformers faced a serious challenge, however: Breaking bad habits is hard to do.

We know this from experience today. Every year millions of Americans make a New Year’s resolution—to lose weight, stop smoking, exercise more, or take up a new hobby. Unfortunately, most resolutions rarely last. Changing a society’s behavior is even harder. As a college student, you see around you myriad movements campaigning to get you to recycle more, to say no to drugs, to not text while driving, to fight against date rape and excessive drinking. These are modern problems, but countering them runs into the same basic question faced by the temperance reformers of the nineteenth century: How do you get people to break a bad habit?

Antebellum Americans drank an astonishing amount of alcohol: more than five gallons per capita in 1830, according to one historian. And that counts only “spirits,” hard liquors such as rum, whiskey, gin, and brandy that were typically 45 percent alcohol by volume. Americans also drank some wine, a little beer, and a lot of hard cider. The five gallon figure is also a “per capita” measurement, meaning that it includes not only men but women and children as well. Since mercifully few three-year-olds consumed much whiskey, the amount drunk by the average man was even higher. In the 1820s, the American Temperance Society estimated that the American population of three million men drank sixty million gallons of spirits annually—that is twenty gallons a year for each man or about four and one-half shots a day, every day of the year.

Why did antebellum Americans drink so much? It was a part of the culture and perfectly acceptable to drink throughout the day. In 1839, Fredrick Marryat, a British visitor to the United States, remarked on the drinking habits of his hosts. “I am sure the Americans can fix nothing, without a drink,” he wrote. “If you meet, you drink; if you part, you drink; if you make acquaintance, you drink; if you close a bargain, you drink; they quarrel in their drink, and they make it up with a drink. They drink, because it is hot; they drink, because it is cold. If successful in elections, they drink and rejoice; if not, they drink and swear;—they begin to drink early in the morning, they leave off late at night; they commence it early in life, and they continue it, until they drop down into the grave.

All that drinking resulted in widespread social problems: poor health, poverty, broken families, and broken lives. In response to the damage wrought by rampant drinking, Americans began to devise ways to resist the lure of the bottle by forming groups dedicated to reform. At first they were local, the effort of small communities. But led by Congregational and Presbyterian ministers during a period of social reform that historians call the Benevolent Empire, the movement quickly spread across the nation. In 1851, Maine became the first state to prohibit the manufacture and sale of alcohol. After sparking protests, which occasionally turned violent, the Maine statute was repealed in 1856. Nevertheless, the “Maine Law” quickly became shorthand for prohibition as other states debated enacting similar statutes, leading eventually to a federal constitutional amendment in 1918 prohibiting the production, transport, and sale of alcohol.