Neal Dow

• Neal Dow
• Born: March 20, 1804
• Died: October 2, 1897

Leader in the fight for the first state law to prohibit the sale of beverage alcohol and in his later years a symbol of prohibitionism, was born in Portland, Maine, the second of three children and the only son of Josiah Dow and Dorca S. (Allen) Dow. Both parents were Quakers of old New England stock. His father operated a tannery in Portland; his mother was the daughter of a prosperous Falmouth, Maine, family.

Neal Dow was educated in local private schools, including the Portland Academy, and completed his formal education at the Friends’ Academy at New Bedford, Massachusetts. In 1820 he went work in his father’s tannery, where he exhibited a business acumen that eventually made him a wealthy man.

Dow reached adulthood at a time when the public consumption of alcoholic beverages was attracting increasing attention from ministers, educators, and other community leaders throughout the country. In New Haven, Connecticut, the Rev. Lyman Beecher, a guardian of morality, called for an organized drive against drunkenness. One result was the founding of the American Society for the Promotion of Temperance, organized in 1826, which redefined temperance to mean total abstinence from hard liquor, not just moderate use.

Embracing the new movement, Dow persuaded his volunteer fire company in Portland not to serve hard liquor at its anniversary party in 1828. He also began to work through the Maine Charitable Mechanics’ Association in an effort to reduce drinking by employees of local factories. Inebriated workers, he reminded his fellow businessmen, were less productive than sober ones. In addition, drink contributed to poverty and suffering, which tended to undermine the social fabric. Since he believed that even such milder alcoholic drinks as wine could lead to a desire for stronger ones, he concluded that all beverage alcohol should be prohibited.

In the desire for prohibition he was seconded by his wife. Maria Cornelia Durant Maynard, daughter of an impoverished Massachusetts merchant, and Neal Dow were married in 1830. A devout Congregationalist, Maria Dow (like her mother-in-law) believed in the duty to reform one’s neighbors. Her death, in 1883, ended a long and happy marriage that produced nine children.

In 1836 Neal Dow helped establish a Portland chapter of the American Temperance Union. Founded in 1836 to succeed the old American Society for the Promotion of Temperance, the Union quickly gained as members those temperance supporters who favored abstention from all alcoholic beverages, even wine and beer.

As total abstinence gradually became the generally accepted standard of the temperance movement, Dow and his associates began to plan a statewide prohibition law. In 1846, after one fruitless attempt, they persuaded the Maine legislature to pass a law forbidding the sale of beverage alcohol in small quantities, that is, by the drink. (The sale of liquor in bulk was permitted.) This was the nation’s first statewide prohibition law.

Neal Dow knew that simply passing a law would not automatically abolish the liquor traffic, and he therefore took up politics to help enforce prohibition. Elected mayor of Portland in 1851 (and in 1855), he persuaded the state legislature to pass a more stringent prohibition law. Signed by the governor on June 2, 1851, it forbade all traffic in beverage alcohol, no matter what the quantity, except for medicinal and mechanical purposes. Its greatest innovation, however, was a provision allowing voters to obtain search warrants for any business premises, if they had evidence that an illegal sale of liquor had occurred. This toughened “Maine Law” became famous throughout the country; by 1855 most states in the Northeast and Midwest had passed prohibition laws inspired by it. Educator Horace Mann praised Dow as “the moral Columbus.”

Despite this great victory, Dow found enforcement of the law difficult, and in 1855 he had the legislature pass a still more restrictive measure, the Intensified Maine Law, which mandated imprisonment for first offenders. It was repealed the next year, however, on a wave of antiprohibitionist sentiment generated largely by a riot in Portland. Dow had become the center of a controversy over a stock of medicinal alcohol and, with his usual intransigence, had goaded a mob of “wets” to riot. In the ensuing melee a rioter was killed by the police, who were acting under the orders of Mayor Dow.

The Portland riot became a political issue that helped the Democrats capture the legislature in the election of 1856. They repealed the Intensified Maine Law and passed a licensing measure that effectively legalized the sale of liquor in the state. Repeal in Maine was quickly followed by repeal in many other states, where enforcement was often difficult and unpopular.

Rebuffed at home, Dow toured Great Britain in 1856 to spread the prohibition gospel. In 1858 he won election to the Maine legislature and helped pass a weak prohibition law. Within two years, however, his political career was ruined by a scandal involving some of his friends in the state government.

He turned his attention to slavery, having been an abolitionist all his life. During the Civil War he saw military service, commanding several garrisons as a brigadier general until his capture by Confederate troops near Port Hudson, Louisiana, in 1863. After being held in Libby Prison, in Richmond, Virginia, for a year and a half, he was released.

After the war Dow became a full-time, professional advocate of prohibition. In addition to making two more British tours (1866 and 1873), be took his message to the new American temperance groups that were springing up in the wake of the Women’s Crusade of 1873-74 in which bands of women used prayer and exhortation to close hundreds of saloons in the Midwest. With the cause of prohibition now gaining national strength, he was again in demand as a leader and speaker. In 1880 he received over 10,000 votes as the presidential candidate of the Prohibition party.

During his remaining years Dow slowly underwent canonization as one of the temperance saints, largely through the efforts of Woman’s Christian Temperance Union president Frances E. Willard. An autobiography, The Reminiscences Seal Dow: Recollections of Eighty Years (1898) took up most of his last few years. He died at ninety-three in Portland and was buried there in Evergreen Cemetery.

Throughout his life Neal Dow was a tireless speaker and propagandist who brought the prohibition movement enormous attention and acclaim around the world. Ironically, he was unable to enforce prohibition in his own town. Perhaps he tried to do too much through legislation alone. The Portland Eastern Argus, long in the adversary camp, noted in its obituary that he had proved the failure of compulsion as a means of reform.

Neal Dow’s papers, including diaries and typed copies of his letters, remain in his house in Portland. His autobiography, written from these papers, is accurate but biased in his own favor. The best full-length biography, F. L. Byrne, Prophet of Prohibition: Neal Dow and His Crusade (1961), contains an annotated bibliography of works by and about him. See also the Dictionary of American Biography (1930).