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For the liquor-sellers at last revolted, and they held conferences with the Bosses David B. Hill was then the Democratic State Boss and Richard Croker the Tammany Boss and they published in the Wine and Spirit Gazette, their organ, this statement: "An agreement was made between the leaders of Tammany Hall and the liquor-dealers, according to which the monthly blackmail paid to the force should be discontinued in return for political support."
One of the earliest Puritan regulations of this place was that licensed liquor-sellers should not sell to the young, and that half a pint only should be given to four men an amount so small that most drinkers would consider it only a tantalization.
And those single instances only where they were driven to notice the most flagrant abuses. It is strictly "contrary to law in Charleston," to sell liquor to a negro without an order from a white man; the penalty being fine and imprisonment. Yet, so flagrant has become the abuse, that it is notorious that hush-money is paid by a certain class of Dutch liquor-sellers to the officers.
Tammany and the police, however, did not fully live up to the agreement; and much discrimination of a very corrupt kind, and of a very exasperating kind to liquor-sellers who wished to be honest, continued in connection with the enforcing of the law. In short, the agreement was kept only with those who had "pull."
The organ of the liquor-sellers at that time was the Wine and Spirit Gazette. The editor of this paper believed in selling liquor on Sunday, and felt that it was an outrage to forbid it. But he also felt that corruption and blackmail made too big a price to pay for the partial non-enforcement of the law.
The merchants sent for the sheriff, and the sheriff questioned hostlers, liquor-sellers, ferry-owners, tollgate-keepers, and other people in the habit of receiving money; but the questions were to no effect. These people had all suffered, but at the hands of respectable citizens, and no worse by one than by another. Suddenly the sheriff seemed to get some trace of the counterfeiters.
Several States permit women to get damages from liquor-sellers selling intoxicating drink to their husbands; I know of no corresponding statute permitting the husband to get damages for drinks sold the wife. A wife may testify against the husband in certain cases, as actions for alienating of affection, or criminal conversation; not so the husband. The laws aimed at mere sin increase in number.
We do not see much of such scandals among us, but yet we have heard of leagues between liquor-sellers and municipal authorities, which certainly do not 'make for righteousness. When shall we learn and practise the lesson that Isaiah was reading his countrymen, that it is fatal to a nation when the private character of public men is regarded as of no account in political and civic life?
There were a dozen shanties in the town; these were occupied wi' gamblers, storekeepers, an' liquor-sellers, includin' two white women an' Sarah Winnemucca, the Piute princess. But the placer-miners had been at work, an' the gulches were dotted with the tents an' dugouts o' men who had discovered my secret for themselves.
The effect of this policy of prohibition to the liquor traffic was speedily visible in our work-houses, jails and houses of corrections. The jail of Cumberland County, the most populous of the State, had been badly over-crowded, but within four months of the enactment of the law there were but five prisoners in it, three of whom were liquor-sellers, put in for violation of the law.
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