John gough temperance movement meaning

This is a voluntary association for the preservation of health and the correction of public opinion, each member having signed the following Preamble & Resolution.

Whereas the undersigned, Officers and Students in Amherst College are Convinced that it is best for us to dispense with Ardent Spirit, Wine, Opium and Tobacco, as articles of luxury and diet ____ therefore,

Resolved: that relying on Divine aid we hereby pledge to one another our mutual Promise, that while connected with this Institution, we will abstain entirely from These articles, except as medicine, and the use of wine at the Lord's Supper. ____

* Venenate: to poison; to infect with poison. An anti-venenean society would be against poisoning, in this case poisoning the body with ardent spirit, wine, opium, etc. (Definition of venenate from the 1835 edition of An American Dictionary of the English Language, by Noah Webster, published in New York, by N. and J. White.)

One way to tell a drunkard’s story is by the distances he travels. John Gough was born in Sandgate, England, in 1817, and was indentured to a family going to America and sent across the Atlantic. For two years he worked for the family on a farm in Oneida County in Western New York. When it became apparent they would not keep their promise to educate him for a trade, he got permission from his father to strike out on his own. He returned to New York City, alone and “glad to have my fate in my own hands, as it were.” Gough found work as a bookbinder’s apprentice, only to lose the job in the economic downturn. He soon made the wrong kind of friends, and by the age of 17 was already a heavy drinker. He traveled to Newport, Rhode Island, found work and lost it by his drinking. By 1842, Gough had ended up in Worcester, Massachusetts. He had gained and lost more jobs; had married, had a child, and drunk his family into destitution. He stood by, intoxicated, as his son died, and again when his wife died in childbirth with their second child. Gough’s wandering had slowed to standstill when, just 25 years old, he stumbled out of a bar into an unusually cold October night and, not for the first time, contemplated suicide.

From that moment until his death in 1886, Gough would transform these facts of his early life into an extraordinary career as a temperance lecturer. As a drunkard, Gough had been “utterly alone in the world,” he later wrote, “forgotten by God, as well as abandoned by man.” Yet by 1844, he was the headliner of a national temperance convention in Boston (fig. 1). Over the next four decades, Gough traveled by carriage, railroad, and steamship to tell his story to audiences in churches, theaters, town halls, and auditoriums in every part of the United States. By the end of his life, Gough’s speaking engagements added up to over 11,000 lectures and some 500,000 miles of

John Bartholomew Gough (August 22, 1817 – February 18, 1886) was a United Statestemperance orator.

Biography

He was born at Sandgate, Kent, England, and was educated by his mother, a schoolmistress. At the age of twelve, after his father died, he was sent to the United States to seek his fortune. He arrived in New York City in August 1829, and went to live for two years with family friends on a farm in Oneida County, New York in the western part of the state. He then entered a book-bindery in New York City to learn the trade. There in 1833 his mother and sister joined him, but after her death in 1835 he fell in with dissolute companions, and became a confirmed drunkard.

He lost his position, and for several years supported himself as a ballad singer and story-teller in the cheap theatres and concert-halls of New York and other eastern cities. He had always had a passion for the stage, and made one or two efforts to become an actor, but owing to his habits gained little favor. He married in 1839, and became a bookbinder on his own account. The effort to do his work without giving up his nightly dissipations so affected him that he was on the verge of delirium tremens. He lost his wife and child, and was reduced to the utmost misery.

Even this means of livelihood was being closed to him, when in Worcester, Massachusetts, in October 1842, a little kindness shown him by a Quaker induced him to attend a temperance meeting, and to sign a temperance pledge. After several lapses and a terrific struggle, he determined to devote his life to lecturing on behalf of temperance reform.

He set forth, carpet-bag in hand, to tramp through the New England states, glad to obtain even seventy-five cents for a temperance lecture, and soon became famous for his eloquence. An intense earnestness derived from experience, and his power of imitation and expressi