Accommodating the Republic: Taverns in the Early United States by Kirsten E. Wood (review)

Reviewed by: Accommodating the Republic: Taverns in the Early United States by Kirsten E. Wood Vaughn Scribner Accommodating the Republic: Taverns in the Early United States. By Kirsten E. Wood. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2023. 352 pages. Cloth, paper, ebook. In a classic and influential article, historian W. J. Rorabaugh contended that by 1830, Americans above the age of fifteen consumed more than seven gallons of whiskey per year, roughly three times the nation's rate of alcohol ingestion in 1991, when the article was written.1 Such a statistic might lead one to conclude that early Americans navigated the republic through a haze of drunkenness, clanking bottles and tankards at the same time they dipped quill pens and debated governmental policies. Yet as Kirsten E. Wood demonstrates in Accommodating the Republic, where the early American public gathered to imbibe mattered perhaps more than what, or even how much, they consumed. From roughly the late 1780s through the mid-1850s, she contends, "taverns were both vectors and theaters for American pursuits of mobility, economic opportunity, and republican self-rule" (2). As customers and keepers "accommodated the public" (6), often by making expensive improvements to adjust to changing social practices and expectations, they also inadvertently helped to transform taverns into "places of significant contestation" (2) over the future of American citizenship and political participation. Through it all, taverns emerged as "small engines of [social and material] expansion and development" (6)—common spaces in which people sought to realize the ever-elusive promises of American republicanism. Since Rorabaugh's tour of "the alcoholic republic," scholars have demonstrated that temperance truthers and alcohol's adherents battled each other for supremacy in early America.2 So too have historians argued that colonial and revolutionary-era taverns served as critical spaces where Americans [End Page 473] created, caricatured, and contested myriad identities and ideologies.3 Thus, scholars have established a clear picture of how and where seventeenth- and eighteenth-century colonists congregated to drink and commiserate, just as they have explored why early national Americans did or did not consume alcohol. Until now, however, most scholarly analysis has overlooked the profound transformations taking place in tavern life as a result of major social and political developments during the early republic and nineteenth century.4 Wood tackles this historiographical gap with aplomb, organizing six chapters within three general sections to reveal how taverns fueled Americans' evolving understanding of mobility, economic opportunity, and republican self-governance. Yet questions of definition often preoccupy such studies. What, after all, was a tavern, according to early nineteenth-century parlance? With so many different people filtering through these mutable spaces for different purposes across a vast American landscape and over decades, the very definition of taverns became diluted. Wood avoids these pitfalls by focusing not on how patrons and publicans classified these spaces but rather on how they used them, found meaning in that use, and deployed that meaning to assert themselves as active members of the burgeoning republic. Wood's first section positions taverns as landmarks among a nation of movers and shakers. "East and west, north and south," she explains, "wayside taverns helped a thicket of road, water, and rail routes function as a network" (20). Travelers relied upon taverns to sustain and coordinate their movements just as tavern keepers depended upon travelers to crowd their halls and keep their businesses afloat. And although white men liked to think of taverns as their own spaces of conversation and conviviality, female and Black travelers increasingly "fashioned a 'rival geography' in opposition to taverns' use as places of 'containment'" (45). But motion did not imply only literal headway. Wood explores the ways that tavern owners also invested in spatial improvements in a bid to move [End Page 474] upmarket. Much as in our modern leisure sector, early American publicans paid close attention to fads and trends that necessitated "physical changes, financial costs, and cultural tensions" (48). In what might be the book's most comprehensive section, Wood traces how physical alteration to early American taverns—from pastoral porch to proper parlor, lowly laborer to languorous lounger—both reflected and constructed social hierarchies in the new republic...