The Lost Museum Archive

The popularity of the abstinence or "teetotal" pledge signaled the first shift in the goals and strategies of the antebellum temperance movement. In the 1820s, nascent temperance organizations advocated moderation and abstention from distilled liquor only. By the 1830s, in the face of rising consumption of wine and beer among the working classes, temperance advocates began calling for total abstinence from all liquor. The abstinence pledge became both a tactic and a public symbol of this sterner sensibility. This elaborate pledge was issued by a temperance society in Cleveland; it was one of the hundreds of temperance societies that flourished in antebellum cities and towns primarily in the northeast but also in frontier areas that were settled by emigrants from the northeast.