Putting the Portland Rum Riot, Maine’s ‘first mega-celebrity’ in context and music

One hundred and sixty years ago today — June 2, 1855 — a violent clash broke out between Portland protesters and militia men called by the mayor to quell the unrest. The brief, but ultimately deadly, encounter would go down in history as the Portland Rum Riot.

The musical retelling of the incident can be heard in the video above by the BDN’s own banjournalist Troy R. Bennett, whose unique skill set I’ve borrowed for this story. Troy would be the first to admit it’s a traditional folk version of the event, complete with some embellishments and lyrics that might’ve been written by the aggrieved rioters.

Current Mayor Michael Brennan and Herb Adams, well-known local historian and longtime state lawmaker, commemorated the event with a proclamation today at City Hall, and used the anniversary to raise awareness of Portland’s historic Evergreen Cemetery, where controversial former mayor Neal Dow is buried and where the city has been making improvements as of late.

Herb Adams stands before a banner depicting Portland City Hall in the mid-1800s, near today's Monument Square. (BDN photo by Seth Koenig)

Herb Adams stands before a banner depicting Portland City Hall in the mid-1800s, near today’s Monument Square. (BDN photo by Seth Koenig)

This week, the group Friends of Evergreen Cemetery are holding a series of events titled “Portland, Prohibition and Evergreen,” including a talk by historian and author Wayne Curtis at the Liquid Riot Bottling Company on Commercial Street Friday at 4 p.m. and a fundraiser party at Bramhall Saturday at 7:30 p.m. Tickets and more information about Friends events can be found by clicking here.

The historic Neal S. Dow House at 714 Congress St. opened for its summer season today as well.

During today’s commemorative event, Adams called the Rum Riot one of Maine’s “most remarkable, but unremembered events.”

On June 2 of that year, Dow’s political opponents learned the notorious anti-alcohol crusader had signed off on a purchase of $1,600 worth of booze and was keeping the stash in City Hall. Working class Portlanders — who’d been deprived of their liquor since Dow had pushed through a statewide ban on alcohol four years earlier –found the news infuriating, and a crowd estimated to be as large as 1,000 people converged on City Hall that night demanding the mayor be arrested and his alcohol seized.

You see, Dow had intended for the alcohol purchase to be a legal one, made using a loophole in the so-called “Maine Law” allowing for state-designated agents to buy alcohol for “medicinal and mechanical purposes.”

View at the Junction of Free and Congress Streets, Portland, Maine, a wood engraving from Ballou's Pictorial Drawing-Room Companion, July 25, 1857. (Public domain/Wikipedia Commons)

View at the Junction of Free and Congress Streets, Portland, Maine, a wood engraving from Ballou’s Pictorial Drawing-Room Companion, July 25, 1857. (Public domain/Wikipedia Commons)

The trouble was, he jumped the gun. The mayor signed for the alcohol before the city’s aldermen officially appointed him an agent, so he wasn’t technically permitted yet to handle the contraband.

Dow called the police and two local militias to defend City Hall from the rioters.

“Waving a watchman’s hook — some say it was a sword — above his head, he orders the crowd to disperse,” the historian Adams said today. “He’s met by a response of stones and curses.”

Dow demanded that the militia men open fire on the otherwise unarmed protesters, starting a series of volleys that injured seven and killed one. The mayor would later be charged for his role in the incident — not because of the death, but because he arguably ran afoul of his own prohibition law by signing for the booze too early.

Here are some interesting things about this sometimes forgotten event in Maine history that put it into some current context:

Dow wasn’t just a killjoy: He had reasons to be a stickler.

Stories of the Rum Riot often cast Mayor Dow as an elitist hypocrite who denied lower income Portlanders the pleasure of a few drinks.

Former Portland Mayor Neal Dow in his later years. (Public Domain/Wikipedia Commons)

Former Portland Mayor Neal Dow in his later years. (Public Domain/Wikipedia Commons)

And there’s some truth to those depictions.

However, Dow’s opposition to drinking was defensible. Author and historian Daniel Okrent wrote that, at the time, the average American drank three times as much as people do today. Not just an evening or weekend activity, Dow wrote in his memoirs that Portland grocery stores and other shops put tubs of rum punch out onto the sidewalks for near constant public consumption — as many as 300 such liquor dispersing establishments along the city’s one-mile-long business district on lower Congress Street.

It’s perhaps understandable that Dow felt that drinking to those extremes warranted an equally extreme response — a total, statewide ban.

Also often forgotten in criticisms of Dow was that he was a fierce abolitionist, and part of his hatred of alcohol came from his opposition to the ties between slavery and the rum trade. Dow went on to volunteer to serve in the Union Army during the Civil War at the age of 57, at a time when the average life expectancy for men was still about 65 years (although Dow lived much longer, dying at 93).

The Rum Riot was as much about racism as it was about alcohol.

Dow may have been an abolitionist, but he was arguably also quite racist. The mayor identified with the so-called Free Soilers and Know-Nothings, two groups retrospectively known for their senses of entitlement and hatred for Irish Catholic immigrants.

Opponents of Dow recruited Irish immigrants to vote against him, and his anti-alcohol crusades were considered thinly veiled attacks on the working class Irish in Portland.

St. Joseph’s College professor William Lemke wrote in his book, “The Wild, Wild East: Unusual Tales of Maine History” that when Dow learned someone had died in the Rum Riot, his first response was to ask “if the body was Irish.”

The body wasn’t Irish.

The man killed in the violence was 22-year-old John Robbins from Deer Isle. Adams said he was a sailor — some say he was one of the prime instigators in the riot, while others say he was in the wrong place at the wrong time, visiting his sweetheart in the big city.

Adams said that although nearly 300 people turned out for Robbins’ funeral procession, in part as a massive political statement, he now lays anonymously under an unmarked grave in Portland’s historic East End Cemetery.

Maine was home to the trial of the century.

Historian Adams described Dow, a charismatic international speaker in the temperance movement, the “first Maine-born mega-celebrity,” a bigger pre-screen draw than even renowned poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow at the time.

A street in New York City and elementary school in California were named after the guy.

Nathan Clifford (Public Domain/Wikipedia Commons)

Nathan Clifford (Public Domain/Wikipedia Commons)

So when Dow was put on trial for breaking his own prohibition law, it was a scandal and media spectacle.

Prosecuting the mayor was famed former U.S. Attorney General — and soon-to-be U.S. Supreme Court Justice — Nathan Clifford, while the defense attorney was sitting U.S. Sen. William Fessenden, who would later become President Abraham Lincoln’s treasury secretary.

It’s hard to make a modern-day comparison for that kind of 19th century star-power in one courtroom drama — even saying it would be like Ruth Bader Ginsburg taking on Susan Collins in court over the fate of, oh, say, Vladimir Putin wouldn’t quite be right, because lawyers and politicians in the 1850s didn’t have movie stars and pro athletes competing for celebrity space like they do today.

“Today this would be called a ‘show trial,’ and it was,” Adams said. “It was the Trial of the Century — the 19th century.”

‘The mayor should have been hanged.’

In the end, Dow was acquitted. The court in which the trial took place was one he helped establish, and the judge was one he helped appoint.

Dow benefited in the legal case from other political contacts, as well. According to Lemke, the pro-Dow deputy marshal charged with executing the search warrant at City Hall deliberately dragged his feet in carrying out the search for alcohol, buying the mayor time to scramble together an after-the-fact approval from the aldermen to sign off on the liquor purchase.

Still, wrote Lemke, “Dow’s conduct in the bizarre battle to protect the booze was politically devastating. He chose not to run for re-election in 1856. But that was not enough for his cousin. [Dow’s own cousin] John Neal thought the mayor should have been hanged.”

Dow, the so-called “Napoleon of Temperance” and “Father of Prohibition,” went on to run for president in 1880.

Legal or not, that was a lot of public money to spend on alcohol.

The $1,600 city expenditure on alcohol was the equivalent of about $32,000 in today’s dollars, Adams said.

According to some back-of-the-napkin math, that would be like if the Portland City Council today agreed to set aside part of its annual budget to by 580 gallons of Allen’s Coffee Brandy. You know, for medicinal and mechanical purposes.

Portland was 6 inches away from looking like a very different place today.

Businessman John Poor kept his office across Congress Street from City Hall, which at the time was on the site of today’s Key Bank building near Monument Square, Adams said.

When he left work the evening of June 2, 1855, he stumbled upon the riot. A stray musket ball tore a hole through his hat, Adams said.

Poor was a railroad tycoon whose business activities accounted for the construction of the high-traffic Commercial Street and Marginal Way. If the shot had been “a little lower,” Adams said, Portland “might look a little differently today.”

A Civil War hero gets in one last zinger on Dow.

As previously noted, Dow defied the life expectancy of the day and lived to be a ripe old age of 93.

“On his 90th birthday, letters came pouring in from friends and foes from all over the world,” Adams said. “My favorite is one that came from his Civil War friend, Gen. [William Tecumseh] Sherman, who wrote, ‘Tell Gen. Dow that at his age, an occasional drink would do him good.'”

Seth Koenig

About Seth Koenig

Seth has nearly a decade of professional journalism experience and writes about the greater Portland region.