Spirit of 1776: 18th Century Tavern Night

Enjoy First Friday, eighteenth-century style. Patrons are invited to an evening of storytelling, merriment, and the colonial tavern experience complete with period cocktails by the Regimental Brewmeister available for purchase, tavern games, and competitive toasts.

Outside the church, the tavern was the most important institution in most towns. Taverns were used as meeting places for political assemblies (like the militia or the courts). When people needed to conduct business meetings or hold markets, their choices were generally the church or the tavern. Since the Colonial Legislatures often offered inducements to tavern owners, they saw these businesses as “operating for the common good,” which ultimately meant that tavern meeting rooms could be appropriated for government business like courts, polls, and meetings of the militia. People relied on taverns as the primary means of spreading news and ideas. Newspapers and stories were often shared by travelers in taverns. As conflicts erupted between the Crown and her colonies in the 1760s, it was in the taverns that men discussed their responses and ultimate aims. It was in the colonial tavern that the revolutionary spirit launched our nation.

“To drink at a table without drinking to the health of someone special, should be considered drinking on the Sly, and as an act of incivility.” – Poor Richard

Beyond good ale, cocktails, and punch, patrons will enjoy the following entertainments you were likely to encounter at a tavern in 1770:

• Competitive Toasting: Toasts would solidify the bonds of groups. Toasts add a competitive element of drinking. To give a proper toast requires courage, it’s sort of a mini performance, one that requires facing the chance of achieving great success, or stumbling over what you say. Toasting elicits laughter, dispenses well wishes, and venerates people, events, and ideas (like liberty).
• Parlor Games: Just like today, people of the 18th century enjoyed parlor and tavern games, often gambling. There are two primary types of parlor games—card games and dice games—but certainly some establishments, especially in London, also had draughts, backgammon, chess, darts, and billiards. The aim of most tavern games is not to create a competition but rather an excuse to sit together and discuss the day’s news.
• Sharing of news and current events: Because the roads were poor, travel in the 18th century was difficult and slow, but there were travelers and they came with news. Travelers also often brought their newspapers, pamphlets, and even books, which when they had finished reading, they frequently left or even loaned at the tavern.
• Glees and Tavern Songs: Glees and songs made for and about drinking are, of course, nothing new. Americans used drinking songs as a way to band together in ale and song. In the ultimate homage to a night of drinking, Francis Scott Key borrowed the tune of a bawdy British drinking song (“To Anacreon in Heaven”) about overindulgence and questionable relationship choices when he wrote “The Star-Spangled Banner.”