John Henry Willis Hawkins
John Henry Willis Hawkins was a prominent temperance speaker born in Baltimore, Maryland, in the early 19th century. The eldest of ten children, he experienced a significant religious awakening in 1815, which led him to become actively involved in his local Methodist Episcopal church and to establish Baltimore's first Sabbath school for boys. Hawkins faced personal struggles with alcohol during his apprenticeship as a hatter, which motivated his later dedication to the temperance movement. After overcoming his own battles with drinking, he became a leading voice in the Washingtonian movement, traveling extensively across the United States to advocate for temperance principles.
From the 1840s to the early 1860s, Hawkins engaged in public speaking, focusing on the social issues surrounding alcohol, including its links to poverty and crime. His efforts were instrumental in promoting the idea of prohibiting the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages, contributing to the enactment of various prohibition laws in the 1850s. Hawkins's dedication to reform extended to serving as a city missionary for the New York City Temperance Alliance. He passed away at the age of sixty due to health complications exacerbated by his strenuous work. His life and contributions to the temperance movement are documented in a biography by his son, Rev. William G. Hawkins.
Subject Terms
John Henry Willis Hawkins
- John Henry Willis Hawkins
- Born: October 23, 1797
- Died: August 26, 1858
Temperance speaker, was born in Baltimore, the eldest of five sons and the second of ten children of John Hawkins, a tailor, and Elizabeth (Dorsey) Hawkins. Educated at home by tutors, he was apprenticed in 1811 to a hatmaker. His parents were Methodists, and in 1815 he underwent a religious experience that left him eager to serve God and society. After becoming active in the local Methodist Episcopal church, he established Baltimore’s first Sabbath school for boys.
In 1822 Hawkins married Rachel Thompson, of Baltimore; they had a son, William George (born in 1823), and two daughters, Elizabeth Dorsey (1825) and Hannah Woolsey (1827). Rachel Hawkins died in 1832, and in 1834 he married Ann Gibson Ruth, also of Baltimore.
Hawkins’s interest in temperance grew out of painful experiences with liquor. As a hatter’s apprentice, he had followed the custom of the time, which allowed workers generous daily rum rations. For the next twenty-five years, while he struggled to make a living as a hatter, his tendency to mental depression was exacerbated by bouts of drunkenness. In later years he often told the story of how one day his small daughter Hannah came to him and said, “I hope you won’t send me for any whisky today.” When he told her to leave the room, “she went weeping.”
Realizing that he was ruining his life, he resolved to seek help from the Washington Society, a group of former drinkers that had formed in Baltimore in 1840. The society helped him become a teetotaler and, more important, provided a sense of direction for his enormous energy. In 1841, as one of the society’s best speakers, he was part of a delegation invited to talk in New York City about Washingtonian principles. Hawkins was one of the men responsible for the great national success of the Washingtonian movement in the next decade. He spoke at public meetings and assemblies all over the country, averaging 10,000 miles and 300 engagements a year. An eyewitness described him as speaking with “much fluency, force, and effect ... in a direct, manly, bang-up style.” His speeches were frequently printed either in pamphlet form or in local newspapers.
For nearly twenty years Hawkins worked for the reformation of drunkards and the abolition of the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages. He soon realized that the easy availability of liquor was a temptation that vitiated attempts to control intoxication through moral suasion alone. His main goal therefore became that of rousing public sentiment, in the hope that it would be possible to prohibit by law the manufacture and sale of liquor. He gathered statistics to show how drunkenness was directly related to poverty and crime and how the advent of the temperance movement had decreased public expenditures for jails and poorhouses. His efforts no doubt contributed to the passage of prohibition laws in many states during the 1850s, beginning with the Maine law of 1851.
For about six months in 1857 Hawkins served as a city missionary for the New York City Temperance Alliance, working to reform alcoholics and to found juvenile temperance societies. He died at sixty of “aggravated dysentery,” while recuperating from the strain of overwork at his son’s home in Pequea, Pennsylvania.
In the absence of any satisfactory later accounts, the best source for his life is the biography written by his son, the Rev. William G. Hawkins, The Life of John H. W. Hawkins (1859).