Neal Dow (March 20, 1804 – October 2, 1897) was an American Prohibition advocate and politician. Nicknamed the "Napoleon of Temperance" and the "Father of Prohibition", Dow was born to a Quaker family in Portland, Maine. From a young age, he believed alcohol to be the cause of many of society's problems and wanted to ban it through legislation. In 1850, Dow was elected president of the Maine Temperance Union, and the next year he was elected mayor of Portland. Soon after, largely due to Dow's efforts, the state legislature banned the sale and production of alcohol in what became known as the Maine law. Serving twice as mayor of Portland, Dow enforced the law with vigor and called for increasingly harsh penalties for violators. In 1855, his opponents rioted and he ordered the state militia to fire on the crowd. One man was killed and several wounded, and when public reaction to the violence turned against Dow, he chose not to seek reelection.
Dow was later elected to two terms in the Maine House of Representatives, but retired after a financial scandal. He joined the Union Army shortly after the outbreak of the American Civil War in 1861, eventually attaining the rank of brigadier general. He was wounded at the siege of Port Hudson and later captured. After being exchanged for another officer in 1864, Dow resigned from the military and devoted himself once more to prohibition. He spoke across the United States, Canada, and Great Britain in support of the cause. In 1880, Dow headed the Prohibition Party ticket for President of the United States. After losing the election, he continued to write and speak on behalf of the prohibition movement for the rest of his life until his death in Portland at the age of 93.
Early life and family Dow was born in Portland, Maine on March 20, 1804, the son of Josiah Dow and his wife, Dorcas Allen Dow. Josiah Dow was a member of the Society of Friends (commonly known as Quakers) and a farmer originally from New Hampshire. Dorcas Allen was also a Quaker, and a member of a prosperous Maine family headed by her prominent grandfather, Hate-Evil Hall. They had three children, of whom Neal was the middle child and only son. After his marriage, Dow's father opened a tannery in Portland, which soon became a successful business. After attending a Friends school in New Bedford, Massachusetts, and further schooling at Edward Payson's Portland Academy, Dow followed his father into the tanning trade in 1826. He embraced technology, becoming one of the first in the city to incorporate steam power in the tanning process.
Dow struggled to conform to the tenets of his parents' Quaker faith; he was hot-tempered and enjoyed brawling from a young age. As he became wealthy later in life, he enjoyed wearing fine clothes, contrary to the Quakers' preference for plain dress. Some of his family's other virtues, such as thrift and abstinence from alcohol and tobacco, he adopted early in life. When he turned eighteen, Dow sought to avoid the required militia musters, more out of distaste for the drunkenness that they often involved than out of Quaker belief in pacifism. Instead, he joined the volunteer fire department, whose members were exempted from the muster. In 1827, Dow lobbied the Maine legislature to reform the fire companies to increase their efficiency. That same year, he argued against his fire company serving alcohol at its anniversary celebration; the members compromised, and served only wine, not hard liquor. At times Dow let his politics interfere with his duties; after being promoted to fire chief, he allowed a liquor store to burn to the ground.
The next year, Dow met his future wife, Maria Cornelia Maynard, the daughter of a Massachusetts merchant. They married on January 20, 1830. Over the next twenty years, they had nine children, five of whom (two sons and three daughters) survived infancy. Maria Cornelia was a Congregationalist, and Dow attended services with her at Second Parish Church regularly, although he never became a member. Their home, built at 714 Congress Street in Portland in 1829, was converted into a museum after Dow's death and is administered by the local chapter of the Women's Christian Temperance Union as the Neal Dow House.
Temperance advocate Early Prohibition efforts In the 19th century, a typical American male consumed on average more than three times the alcohol of his modern-day counterpart. In his memoirs, Dow noted that in Portland a significant portion of a working man's pay was in the form of daily rum rations: "it was ... the rule to quit work at eleven in the forenoon and four in the afternoon to drink ... In every grocer's shop were casks [of] ... rum punch constantly prepared in a tub, sometimes on the sidewalk, just as lemonade is to be seen now on the Fourth of July." He saw alcohol as responsible for the downfall of individuals, families, and fortunes, often pointing out ramshackle homes or businesses to his family and saying "Rum did that." His quest to reform people by reforming their environment grew out of the religious movements of the Second Great Awakening and, as historian Judith N. McArthur later wrote, "temperance reformers urged their listeners to cast Demon Rum out of their lives just as evangelical ministers exhorted them to cast the Devil out of their hearts."
Many of Portland's middle- and upper-class citizens, including Dow, believed drunkenness was a great threat to the city's moral and financial well-being. In 1827, he became a founding member of the Maine Temperance Society. The group initially focused its efforts on the evils of distilled beverages, but by 1829, Dow declared he would abstain from all alcoholic beverages. At the same time, he associated himself with anti-Masonic and anti-slavery causes and became more involved with politics generally. In the 1832 presidential election, unsatisfied with both Andrew Jackson and Henry Clay, Dow backed William Wirt, a minor-party candidate.
In 1837, the Maine Temperance Society split over whether they should seek to ban wine as well as spirits; Dow sided with the anti-wine forces, who formed their own organization, the Maine Temperance Union. That year James Appleton, a Whig representative in the state legislature, proposed a prohibition law, and Dow spoke often and forcefully in favor of the effort, which was unsuccessful. Appleton proposed a similar law in 1838 and 1839, but despite his and Dow's best efforts, he continued to be defeated.
Dow worked fervently on behalf of Whig candidates and came to detest Democrats as the tools of the alcohol industry. Maine's Whig governor, Edward Kent, granted Dow a colonel's commission in the state militia in 1841 as a reward for his efforts, despite his lack of military experience. Nevertheless, Dow did not consider himself "a party man in the politician's understanding of the term," and had no qualms about encouraging his supporters to vote against any Whig whom he considered insufficiently anti-alcohol.
Dow spent the early 1840s attending to his tanning business, but also found time to encourage individual drinkers to take up abstinence. In 1842, he and his allies succeeded in getting the city government in Portland to require licenses for liquor dealers and to prosecute unlicensed sellers; a referendum on the question was decided in the prohibitionists' favor later that year. The next year saw the Democrats win election to city government, replacing the more prohibition-friendly Whigs, and many liquor-sellers resumed their trade as prosecutions were deferred indefinitely. Dow kept up his speaking efforts around the state, despite once being assaulted by a man hired by a liquor dealer.
In 1846, Dow spoke before the legislature in favor of statewide prohibition. The bill passed but lacked the enforcement mechanisms necessary to give it effect. The following year, he ran for the state legislature in a special election but was narrowly defeated. In 1850, now a member of the new Free Soil Party, he encouraged like-minded legislators to pass a stronger prohibition law. They did so but saw it vetoed by Democratic governor John W. Dana. The legislature fell one vote short of overriding the veto.
Mayor of Portland
In 1850, Dow was elected president of the Maine Temperance Union. The next year, he ran for mayor of Portland on the Whig ticket, and was elected by a vote of 1,332 to 986. Within a month of taking office, he lobbied the state legislature to pass a statewide prohibition law. It did so, and Dow met with the new governor, John Hubbard, who signed the bill into law on June 2. Maine was the first state to ban alcohol, and statewide prohibition became known around the country as "the Maine law". The law's passage propelled Dow to national fame. He was called the "Napoleon of Temperance", and was the featured speaker in August at a National Temperance Convention in New York City.
After the Maine law came into force, Dow allowed liquor dealers a two-week grace period to sell their stock out of state, then began confiscations. His enforcement efforts quickly drove respectable drinking establishments out of business, but less fancy saloons, especially those frequented by Portland's poor and immigrant residents, simply moved their operations to secret locations. Even so, Dow proclaimed in an address to the city council that he had eliminated all but a "few secret grog-shops", whose persistence he blamed on "foreigners".
Despite his growing national fame, Dow continued to face opposition at home. Both Dow and his opponents engaged in anonymous newspaper campaigns against the other, often making personal attacks alongside political arguments. For the 1852 municipal election, the Democrats nominated Albion Parris, a former governor and United States Senator, to run against Dow. While the Democrats rallied behind their candidate, Dow's vigorous enforcement of prohibition divided his party, and in two wards the Whigs ran an anti-Dow ticket instead. On election day, Dow slightly increased his vote total from the year before, with 1,496, but Parris outpolled him, bringing in 1,900 votes. Although the Whigs controlled voter registration at the time, Dow blamed his loss on illegal voting by Irish immigrants.
After his defeat, Dow continued to promote prohibition around the country, and was gratified to see it spread to eleven states. He also made efforts to refute the charge made by his enemies (including his cousin John Neal) that the Maine law was ineffective and that drinking had actually increased in Portland during Dow's term in office. In 1854, Dow ran for mayor again unsuccessfully; as the Whig Party began to break apart, Dow attracted support from the Free Soilers and the Know Nothings, a nativist party. By the next year, those two parties began to join anti-slavery Whigs in a new party, the Republicans. They soon controlled the state legislature and, with Dow's encouragement, strengthened the enforcement provisions of the Maine law. Dow ran again for mayor in 1855 and was narrowly re-elected to the office he had left three years earlier.
Portland Rum Riot
Two months into his term, Dow inadvertently ran afoul of his own prohibition laws. After setting up a committee to dispense alcohol for medicinal and industrial use (the only uses permitted), Dow ordered $1,600 worth of alcohol and stored it at City Hall. Dow neglected to appoint an official agent to hold it there; because the invoice was in his name, this placed Dow in technical violation of the law. Dow's enemies seized on the mistake and demanded that the police search the municipal building for illegal liquor. Because the recent additions to the Maine law had removed judicial discretion, the judge had no choice but to issue the warrant. Police seized the alcohol, but did not arrest Dow.