 160 years ago, this morning, if we were standing on a June day in Monument Square, we would have called it Market Square then, in the shadow of our then city hall, there'd be wagons all around us, horses tethered in dogs sleeping in the shade, dust and straw would blow by us from the hay scales nearby, and up would run a little boy and thrust a flyer into our hands. And the flyer booms that there's illegal liquor stashed in the hall behind us. Let's get it, it says. Quote, let the lash which Neil Dow has prepared for others be applied to his own back when he deserves, unquote. That was Neil Dow, we'd say. Neil Dow was the mayor of Portland. Portland, our town is the birthplace of prohibition. The mayor is hiding liquor? How could this be the case? Well, this is the story of the rum riot, so-called in its own day one of Portland's most remarkable but unremembered moments, and one of Portland's most remarkable and well-remembered sons. That is Neil Dow. Neil Dow was one of the very first main-born American mega-celebrities. He was in his day and moment in a league with Henry Wardsworth Longfellow, famous on two continents, celebrated in both the old world and the new. He was hailed and he was hated. He was loved and he was feared. He was lionized. He was loathed. In the 1850s, the political moment was just like our own times. The great extremes were growing. The middle ground was going. Rhetoric was heating up and the hot button issues of the day were anti-alcohol, anti-slavery, and anti-immigration. Neil Dow was all of those things. Foursquare, an individualist, an abolitionist, and a prohibitionist, Neil Dow was neutral about few things, and few people were neutral about Neil Dow. To his friends, he was the moral Columbus and the Napoleon of temperance. To his enemies, he was a blue-nosed naysayer. General, a complete stranger once said to him on the street, I was damn glad yesterday to hear that you were dead. I am damn sorry today to find that you're dead. Neil Dow relished it all. He was wiry. He was muscular and active. That was how he described himself. He was about five-five or five-six, well-dressed, very wealthy from birth. He had a fine set of manners and an excellent baritone voice. He'd been born in 1854, so he was just 50, and in his prime this day in 1855 that we're talking about when that leaflet was thrust into our hands and his name was set for our eyes. Around us in Market Square, we note that a small group of sailors and men and boys are grumbling and gathering. I've posted this, so we might know what we're speaking about. Here is Portland City Hall that then stood in Monument Square, Market Square as it would have been known to us. The Civil War Monument stands on the same spot now. In fact, the corners of the base of the monument are canted to exactly where the much larger footprint corners of the old City Hall once stood. So the current monument is not square in the square, but it's true to what was then. Congress Street is here. The public library be out of the picture on this side. Over here is Middle Street going down. City Hall faces down Congress Street in the same way as the current monument faces. It's important that we talk about that, but we will come back to it in a moment. Neil Dow was our mayor, been elected mayor in a heated election in April 1855 by 47 votes. Now why? Because Neil Dow and his thousands of followers have succeeded in moving the main legislature to pass the first statewide anti-alcohol law in 1851, an act for the suppression of tippling shops, banning the manufacture, sale and possession of hard liquors within the state of Maine. It's the first statewide law anywhere in the United States to do this, and so everywhere it was called the Maine Law and understood by everyone exactly what that shorthand meant. So by 1855 Portland had become so bone dry that Mayor Neil Dow in office since April by June had to import certain legal liquors allowed by that law, the medicinal and mechanical liquors meaning industrial alcohol, and had to do so over his own signature. The difficulty with this is that when the liquor arrived, he had it stored in the basement of City Hall. We'll talk more about that in just a moment. And the entrance doors in both cases are in the rear of the buildings on these side. Congress Street, here's the public library of today out of the picture, Middle Street. This will be facing the long fellow books and the various little shops that are there. Now technically, storing it in the basement of City Hall put it in a difficult position. Mayor Dow and the city Alderman should have established a legal liquor agency first to receive that liquor. So now they'd have to do so after the fact. And a transfer of the liquor from the signature of the mayor to the agency could be considered a sale, maybe. So a scramble ensued. Now Mayor Dow's many enemies found out and swore out a warrant for his arrest for breaking his own liquor. Now this warrant went to the city's brand new police court, a court established at the request of Mayor Neil Dow to deal with malefactors about the liquor law. And under the eye of Judge Henry Carter, a Dow ally appointed at the request of Mayor Dow himself, Carter is also the publisher of the Portland advertiser, the city's pro-Dow newspaper. So nothing came of this warrant. Now once again, review where we are here. The ground level down here is used for supplies and storage in Portland City Hall. The second level, where these large windows are, is a huge gathering chamber. It was the largest gathering chamber in Portland for many years and well into the 20th century till the building of Portland City Hall, in fact. For speeches, plays, gatherings, Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, Sojourner Truth all spoke in that enormous chamber up there. It is the chamber in which Neil Dow had been nominated for mayor. It is the chamber in which the trial for the rum riot will take place. Third floor windows only here along the Congress and Middle Street side is Military Hall. This is where the city's several militia companies have their headquarters, where they store their arms, their bayonets, and their uniforms. All are going to figure into the story. By 6 p.m. that day, that crowd around us in Monument Square is growing. By 7 p.m. there are a lot of rowdies. Some sailors, some boys, young laborers starting to lounge around in the dusk. By 8 p.m. Mayor Dow, well aware of the growing crowd, sends his city marshal and eight policemen with pistols drawn down into the basement to be there and guard that liquor, as he says, quote, at all costs. And he sends the sheriff out to read the riot act to the crowd. The sheriff retreats under a hail of hisses and of rocks. By 8 35 p.m. June 2nd, 1855, it is dark. It was last night. I went out and timed it. It's perfectly pitch dark at 8 47. And Dow had called out by that time one of Portland's larger militia companies. The Portland light guards and 24 people dressed just like you and me, because after all they were called from their homes, arrive at Portland City Hall. And they march with him out beneath the pillars of the main entrance of City Hall. The large windows frame the large meeting place and the four pillars there flank the stairwell. To go down the stairs, you must go to the right or to the left. You can't go forward, right or left, Congress Street or Middle Street. And the 24 men of the light guards march with him down the front and around the corner and form two ranks in front of the door there that faces out onto Congress Street toward where the public library is now. Dow is waving either a watchman's hawk or, says one account, a sword and orders the crowd to disperse. In response, like the sheriff before him, he gets a shower of curses and stones. Dow turns to the militia and orders them, fire! Nothing happens. Captain Green, completely startled, turns to the mayor and said, must I serve? It's hard to fire on our own people. Dow says, according to different accounts, that just to get your attention. And the group marches back with Mayor Dow back around the side of the City Hall. See the cowards run roars the crowd, throwing the stones and showering them with pieces of bricks and curses. Now, on the Middle Street side of City Hall, Dow, marching Captain Greensman, now bumps into a company of the Portland Rifle Guards, second military company, militia. So the light guards were there first and the rifle guards are now together. And all of them march under Dow's command back into City Hall and up to the third floor, where the light guard armory is opened up and the muskets and the bayonets are distributed. Now, the muskets and the bayonets now used actually belong to the light guard, but they are handed out to all the rifle guard and the light guard. This is going to get General, Colonel Dow and Mayor Dow at this point in trouble just in a moment. While he is up here, he hears a sudden thunder and rumble coming all the way from the basement. Now, down there, don't forget, are the members of the police squad that are down in the basement. Dow hears perhaps 50 of the boldest members of the mob hitting the doors on the Congress Street side here with a loud crash There are probably now in the square, mostly on this side, but all around City Hall, one or two thousand people, some as spectators, some as active participants ringing this place. And as Dow and his men come clattering down the stairs, he hears the glass shatter and the door is starting to buckle to the room in the basement of this building where the liquor is kept. Here, the main charitable mechanics enter the picture. I was delighted to find that this grand building, the course is not yet built. The mechanics are meeting out of frame here in the clap block. The building is gone, but the block is still there and there's a big plaque on it. And that's where they previously met. According to the Eastern Argus, after Captain Green has refused to fire and the crowd is getting larger and louder, opposite the entrance to the hall of the Mechanics Association in claps block, the doors spin open and outmarch the mechanics who have been having their meeting there that night. And the fire, had it taken place, would have taken effect if at all, upon the people on the sidewalk, a part of whom were mechanics just coming from their hall, were entirely unconscious that any such proceeding was calling or contemplated. We have this part from the gentleman who had just come from the hall where there had been some 300 persons during the evening and had stepped across the street to Mr. Dow, when to his astonishment, the order to fire was given. That would have been under Brother Bancroft whose picture is up in the corner, the then president of the main charitable mechanics. Down in the dark, the police start firing blanks across the width of the basement of City Hall at the door that is buckling and the glass that is splintering. Dow and the sheriff and the rifle guards now come clattering down the front steps to the rescue and they go around to the middle street door which they burst open and march into City Hall in the basement. And there framed against Market Square on the opposite side through the broken windows in the heaving door, Dow can see figures, torches and mobsters moving back and forth. Dow assembles the rifle guards in four ranks. Dow then in the dark aiming at the light square over here orders the fatal firing. The order would have been this, level, aim, fire. Captain Roberts of the guard repeats the order. Four volleys roar across the width of the basement of Portland City Hall out onto Congress Street and through the smoke and the flash, they then march forward shouting with bayonets level to clear the square with the bayonet. As the mob retreats, behind they leave broken glass, litter, rocks, ruins and seven people. Seven men are wounded, one lays dead. As Dow emerges into the torchlight, these are the names they gather of those wounded or dead. McCarthy, Robinson, Denison, MacKendrick, McGuire, Sullivan, Milligan, Mahoney. Yeah, some are Irish names. Yes, it's been a wild night. One of them is just a boy who was seated across the street and was shot in the foot accidentally, which is amputated later. The powerful railroad man, John Alfred Poir, is just exited from his newspaper office, which is out of frame on this side. He's editor of the State of Maine newspaper and as he comes out of his office, a bullet cuts through his hat. Now, John A. Poir is the builder of Commercial Street. A little lower, Commercial Street might have looked very different today. By midnight, Dow has had the square cleared. There under the hissing gas lights lie the strange silence and an eerie light across all the rubble. One account says that water, cheese and crackers are sent into the gathered light guard and the rifle guard with the mayor were down in the basement here of City Hall, gaining some refreshment. One account I cannot verify says that Mayor Dow is told that a dead man has been taken from the outside to the doctor's office. Dow allegedly replies between bites of cheese. Is the body Irish? Well, Market Square comes dawn as a rubble of stones and bricks and hats and coats and clothes and debris. City Hall, that's City Hall, the windows have been broken, the door has been broken, but the liquor is untouched. And now smoke and irony hang thick in the air. Neil Dow, the foe of Demon Rum, has just killed a man defending the City Rum. The day of the riot is June 2nd, 1855. It's a Saturday, so there's a full weekend for the fierce news to stew and by Monday to have come to a boil. A roaring city meeting is called in Portland City Hall, that's the purpose of the flyer. On the second floor, called by John A. Poor, who hangs a banner across the front of his newspaper office in blood red letters that says murder. Dow's many enemies, and largely the city democratic organization, run this large, loud and angry meeting. And now I have to tell you the difficulty of researching these things at a distance. All weekend, rumors have been boiling, and by Monday morning, when the newspapers are printed, the hot rhetoric of the city papers hits the mean streets. And each newspaper, the pro and anti-Dow newspapers, are reaching for their allies and for whatever possible advantage can be gained about what appears. Here is what is said in the advertiser. And don't remember, don't forget, the advertiser is published by Dow's great friend, Judge Carter, who is presiding over things at this moment. Says the advertiser, it remains to be seen whether the spirits of lawless violence among the ignorant and the brutal, then appealed to by the designing the unprincipled and the reckless shall reign triumphant in our midst or whether law and order shall prevail and the authorities be protected in protecting the laws of the state. There can be but one answer. Whatever may be men's opinions or sympathies on the subject of the liquor law, the principles of self-preservation will lead all considerable and considerate citizens to frown upon the mob spirit which has been manifested on this occasion. It is due to Mayor Dow, to the Marshal, to his deputies and to the policemen and also to our high sheriff to say that they all acted promptly, fearlessly and judiciously in the discharge of their duties on this occasion. Says the major anti-Dow newspaper of the city, the Eastern Argus, the Democratic Oregon, takes the side of the Irish. Not that the Argus hasn't made plenty of fun of the Irish all other times that they publish. Here is what they say, such is the indisputable fact. All this has happened not in Nebraska but in Maine, a state of liberty, loving America for all of which Neil Dow is obsequious followers are responsible for God and man. Now the optimates of the advertiser, the paper I just read to you, knowing this sought out the best method of casting the baneful stigma upon the innocent and in this case the unoffending Irish in order thereby they might change the current of indignation from its proper course and lead it with a blood wet finger to the doors of the industrious. Therefore they, the editors of the advertiser did most emphatically and seriously state that the Irish people of Portland were the principal actors in the so-called mob of Saturday, which is one of the most base cowardly and unwarrantable falsehoods that was ever uttered by savage or civilized man. For the statement has not seen even the shadow of a foundation is entirely in contradiction to the palpable and positive facts. The advertiser even went so far as to insinuate that the Irish but unseen rioters were impelled to this act by the advice and sanction of the estimable Catholic priests of Portland, thereby adding villainy to falsehood. However this last I do not feel at liberty to speak of because the person to whom it is directly referring, Mayor Dow, is no doubt qualified to make manly response if it pleases him. Now you can see both sides we call it spin today and boy do they bring in everything facts and outside facts, outlying facts and central facts to keep the heat as high as the thermostat of that June would allow. Mayor Dow went to trial Tuesday June 5th. Justice moves very swiftly then. Not for the death of the one rioter but for violating his own liquor laws for not having imported the liquor appropriately. The trial is held in the big second floor room of Portland City Hall itself right above the locked up liquor. The very same room where Dow was nominated for mayor a few months before and the trial is held before the police court established by Mayor Dow and presided over by Judge Henry Carter, the publisher of the Portland Advertiser. Neil Dow is prosecuted by big booming 300 pound Nathan Clifford, a Democrat. Former Attorney General of the United States of America, minister to Mexico under President Polk who helped deliver the peace treaty that ended the Mexican war. Future United States Supreme Court Justice. Defending Neil Dow is sitting United States Senator William Pitt Fessenden. Shrewd, slender, sharp-tongued, praised for conscience in John F. Kennedy's book of a hundred years in the future profiles and courage. Neither accounts of any newspaper can be totally trusted as you read this. They make great rip roaring reading. Today it would be called a show trial and indeed it was. It was Maine's trial of the century, the 19th century. Now Neil Dow is acquitted of the exact charge of violating his own liquor laws. It's at considerable cost to his personal dignity. Now you say how could all this happened? Well armed men, an angry mob, a heated and very wrong moment. All this makes a very bad combination. It always has. Remember the Boston Massacre. Remember Kent State. Says the staunch advertiser. It remains to be seen whether the spirit of lawlessness and violence among the ignorant and the brutal thus applied to these proceedings shall color the attitude of our city in its noble progress hereafter. Says the argous more bluntly, hang Mayor Dow. Well no one is ever tried for the death of the one man who perished. His name was John Robbins. He came from Deer Isle, Maine. He's 22 years old. He was the second mate of the bark, Louisa Eaton, who was anchored out in the harbor. Some accounts of the riot say he was a lead rioter and so he was shot down at the head of the mob reaching through the shattered window to unbar the storeroom door. Other accounts claim that he left a widowed mother at home and was set to marry his fiance in Portland the very next day. His coffin was carried to the eastern cemetery followed by two sailors burying an American flag at half-mast and 300 mourners in the march. Political theater again and there he was laid to rest in an unmarked grave where he lies to this day. I found where that grave was and could take you to it except that piece of paper fell out of my notebook before I got here today but we we could find the spot. Now Neil Dow's mayor career is over. His political career is not. He's elected to the legislature the very next day, very next year but his career as a crusader for 40 more years continues and he swings his crusader sword in the thick of many another man's business for another entire two generations. In the civil war he's a famous abolitionist general. Very brave, foolhardy brave in some ways. Leading charges on horseback against Confederate artillery sending newly freed slaves that he frees on his own before the Emancipation Proclamation ahead of him carrying rails to be thrown across ditches so that his horse may ride across and his men follow poor darkies he says in his memoirs. He is captured he's imprisoned by the Confederates in Libby prison in the south and he is exchanged for a relative of Robert E. Lee himself. I think the Confederates are probably glad to get rid of him and he comes home to still in his prison rags to march onto the floor of Congress and make a brilliant speech in favor of the re-election of Abraham Lincoln. You cannot stop a man like Neil Dow. In his grand Congress street home he grows slowly and very noisily old till the end of the century. You should visit that home. It looks like he turned the key and left. His enemies say that his grave should be quote lost among the wild grasses and weeds that sprout in places where a human tread fears to go. In fact he was buried in Evergreen Cemetery. Now it doesn't match that description at all. It's a magnificent monument. You should visit it too and keep in mind the unmarked grave of John Robbins. Dow lives to be nearly 100 years old. He runs for President of the United States on the prohibition ticket in the year 1880. He's the first Portlander to run for President of the United States. Incidentally he didn't win and on his 90th birthday telegrams flow in from around the world a long lifetime of friends and foes. He lives to see the city hall where his career nearly ended totally destroyed for the new monument which is erected at which he is one of the witnesses and Civil War soldiers who seize the monument. You and I can see today formally dedicated. What were his thoughts about what went on there before? Well we don't know. Telegrams flow in from around the world to this incredible bundle of human principle and human contrariness that was kneeled down. My very favorite comes from his old comrade in wartime, General Sherman, who writes to him by telegraph. Congratulations on your 90th birthday. Please tell General Dow that at this age an occasional drink would do him good, unquote. Thank you. Questions? There are refreshments but as the posters say no rum. Questions? Yes? He did. He has descendants living today. I know many of them. There's a Neil Dow living today who rather resembles him in form and face. Very nice man. He's known as actually, he's the head of the main small woodlot rovers. He doesn't, he will talk about his famous film there but it's not the first thing he'd like to talk about. He has many descendants living today. Absolutely. I don't think any came but you never know. Was he a charitable mechanic? Neil Dow was a member of the charitable mechanics. I forgot what exactly he joined as. His family were tanners. He made a lot of money. All the family made money out of the tanneries that were run and it got him in trouble during the civil war too because he was accused of keeping beef fat and things like that out of the renderings from the cookeries for his troops and using them in his tanneries. Don't think so but on the other hand he was that sort of a magnet for that sort of accusation. He was born across the street from the mansion. In other words where the right aid stands today. It was a lovely federalist brick house. We have a likeness of it but he built the house across the street the one in which he lived all his life but you can go visit today. Matt. What about during the civil war when he stole a property down south and they had to give it all back? That brings up an interesting point. A lot of union officers did this. Neil Dow did nothing on a small scale. When plantations would be overrun sometimes certain things would end up in the possession of both troops. It happens in Gone with the Wind. You remember there was a deserter that interacts with Scarlett O'Hara and the officers. At one point Neil Dow sent home some silver pictures and silver plate and a piano from the plantation of a man whose name was Bradish Johnson who had actually been a union sympathizer. So Neil Dow collected stuff from the wrong side so to speak and sent it home and Bradish Johnson sued him for this and the case went all the way to the United States Supreme Court where sitting and waiting for him is Justice Nathan Clifford from Portland Of course you can't make this stuff up. Dow returned all those things and it's still a matter of jurisprudence today. The argument being that in times of civil emergency is it proper to bring lawsuits by civilians in military court or you have to wait for a civilian court which has presidents. It's an interesting decision and it's still cited today. So you can go to the Dow mansion and not see any of those things. Bradish Johnson has descended still living in Louisiana and they haven't forgotten a thing about this. They still remember it. Yes. So you mentioned that what was the actually liquor being stored was actually a medicinal or was there actual because rum is not medicinal or was it considered medicinal? I wouldn't know being a teetotaler myself but in those days liquor was regarded as a medicine and it was probably fine liquor but there was all sorts of liquor that had come in that shipment. There was brandy, there was rum, there was cheap industrial alcohol all of that and then that day right into the 20th century liquor was considered a medicine you know distilled alcohol. So all that liquor down there was actually intended for medicinal firsts? Medicinal or industrial that's right and they even have a very careful elaborated and signed for shipping you could a shipping label you could you could tell how much liquor there was of what kinds that was in it was under seal and all of that and remains so. The liquor the cause of all of this was never touched except for the legal purposes. Why did it gather so much talk about as the rum riots? It's because it was Neil Dao and you caught him with rum on his hands so to speak. It's hard to it would be very difficult in 50 years to explain to people that have no memory of it the name Paula Page but it is on everybody's mind right now. 160 years after the fact it's hard to bring to mind exactly what Neil Dao meant as a two people at the time. He was the moral Columbus he was the crusader that saved the world or he was a double-dyed villain that made sure I couldn't be here Saturday night. So you know people were worked to a frenzy and it all of a sudden here it is with the irony of ironies being fact there is a mess with liquor and the name of Neil Dao being mixed in it and there's the liquor here's the flyer let's go get it. Can you show us in the most specific way the rum? As opposed to the Scotch that they've been there? Well the Scotch riot doesn't work. It's like the media today. They would probably hang it. In its own day it was called the rum riot. I think also from what I've learned is that rum became just a term for all liquor because it was easy. It was demon rum. It was easily rined with other things. You couldn't really rhyme Scotch very well. Scotch scramble doesn't work. A rummy was something you drank too much so it really just took on a generic term for all alcohol. You had a question. When he joined main charitable in 1827 he listed his occupation as a terror as you said. What was just made clear to us because the records are there is that when he joined main charitable mechanics in 1827 Neil Dao listed his profession as Tanner which would be true. He also was the president of the Portland Gas Light Company. He had his hands in many things. He was a skilled investor. He was somewhat generous with the money to city charities and all of that so he on many respects would have been not standing citizen. It was another question. The question was Neil Dao's family. Neil Dao had several daughters. One married did not have children. The other lived with him and took care of him in his old age. She had no children. I believe another one did marry and have descendants but his son Frederick N. Dao known as Colonel Dao had children and it is through them that the name continues and he was very devoted to his family. Because he knew exactly where he fit in the scheme of things he was proud of what he'd made of himself and rather I think liked some of the notoriety and anti-notoriety. He often wrote as he was small, wiry and tough and lifted weights and went to the gyms that they had then. His cousin John Neil had one up on Monjoy Hill that he had to walk home in the middle of the street at night so he could not get jumped on from the shadows. But he said I do not recall ever having been jumped on by the same person twice. Once he came into the house, you go up and see the house, same house, took his coat off and threw it over the banister and looked up to greet his daughter coming down and the pistol in his pocket discharged and went into the ceiling above her head. And after that he said I would never carry a pistol again. He says in his memoirs and I can see him just writing them. I was well prepared. I think he was, I mean tough but he loved his family deeply and dearly. Yes. I think he married a woman named Allen, family name was Allen and her father had a farm of what is now near Allen's car. All right and there's an account of the way that he would go over there and court her, there was a man in town here, what a buck for, who would go over there to a tavern and get rid of a tank, right? And so Neil would drive over with him and enjoy his company and then on the ride home the guy would be drunk and on the lesson and that's what turned Neil's bow off on alcohol. That experience of going with the sky in the afternoon and seeing the difference in him that was part of what Cliff tells a great story and that's wonderful. You know you, you wonder about the motivations in this. It's probably another manor in that century who's like Dow and it's hard to find anybody who is, is probably Dorothea Dix in order to to pick a female counterpart, an incident in their youth made them desire to change that thing which they saw causing so much evil. In both cases, both of those people totally changed the world they were born into in one life dive. Totally 100% changed the world. In the case of Dorothea Dix that is a humane treatment of women and children and the insane and mentally disturbed and endow the you know the the moral cause of ridding the world of alcohol that was so changed one person that Cliff has described and changed a whole society. Now it's rare you can come into the world one way and leave the world totally different at the when you exited. There's a cost to that. Maybe you can get it done. There's a cost to it and it may be much different than you think. I often pose that question to my my students at college if you could find the way to eliminate crack cocaine from all the world would you devote your life to doing it? Of course they always shoot the hands up. Yeah I would and ah be careful what you wish for as Truman Capote said the answered prayers may be the worst kind so they're remarkable people it's hard to imagine that in a world that instant communication to them meant to telegraph one-on-one communication not instant like we have today to a boundless world instant in the terms of the you know the the travels by the electron you know you could think of what a certain kind of personality could do to the world given the opportunity given the examples we have in Europe in the mid 20th century of what one person could do with the power of radio and a big army. Mark Twain wrote about it at the same time I've often wondered in fact if he's writing about Neil Dow, Mark Twain and his old rage wrote a bitter series of incompleted short stories about the shoemaker the shoemaker who that's his profession who is one of those personalities who conquers the United States and is an absolute dictator and moves on to do many things you can find it in his unpublished short I've always wondered a little bit of that maybe Neil Dow Mark Twain didn't like him Henry Longfellow did remember they came from the same town they knew each other Longfellow drank wine it was not a prohibitionist but they didn't conflict and those brilliant people that did know him you know like like Nathan Clifford didn't like him and yet William Pitt Fessenden sort of sort of did who's to know other questions all right well refreshments await but no wrong thank you