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Traces the development of nonviolent theology in the popular literature of the antebellum temperance movement. Though the temperance movement is often portrayed as socially conservative, it had radical implications both for battered women and for the “drunkards” who organized the popular “Washingtonian” movement. A new genre, the “temperance tale,” grew out of the testimonies of “drunkards” and their wives. Temperance tales used a variety of sentimental techniques to promote identification with the victims of the “alcohol system.” Novels like T. S. Arthur's Ten Nights in a Bar‐Room also elaborated a sentimental Christology in which Christ‐like children would usher in a millennium of nonviolence.

Chapter five charts how and why the medical profession developed and popularized the view that heavy habitual drinking constitutes an incurable physiological disease. In public lectures, journals, and speeches, physicians detailed the catalogue of destruction wreaked by alcohol, publicizing a new pathology of intemperance. Through vivid description and illustration, physicians asserted that the drunkard’s compulsion to drink derived from a diseased stomach. While heightening public fear, however, physicians had little inclination to attempt to develop a cure for the condition. Promising therapies emerged in the 1820s which physicians actively discouraged people from using. By mid century, finally spurred on by patient demand, physicians experimented with treating inebriates in hospitals and asylums, but their efforts remained scattered and experimental. This chapter argues that by heightening public fear, but failing to develop therapies, physicians encouraged the popularity of the Washingtonians, who promised to cure drunkards. As Washingtonians exerted an ever-greater influence on popular culture, sensational accounts of delirium tremens proliferated. The medical impulse to pathologize habitual drinking thus led to a popular lurid fascination with the drunkard’s struggle with the cravings for drink.

This chapter describes Washington, D.C. as the nation's most important city for African Americans at the turn of the twentieth century. Black Washingtonians' cultural and educational institutions, political connections, and prospects for stable employment stood out against the penury, terror, and segregation that plagued black lives elsewhere in the United States. Four decades of decent employment in federal offices had made Washington a city of opportunity and relative freedom for black men and women, a place where respectability and status could be earned by work in the nation's service. The salaries paid to black federal clerks fueled a growing black middle class, and its power and prestige limited racial discrimination in the city. Life in the District was hardly free of racism or struggle. But for ambitious African Americans, the social as well as economic value of federal positions was incalculable.