DRINKING HEALTHS

John Winthrop

Here at Drinking Healths, we'll explore the spirit of our namesake custom, from cutting edge grog culture here in the New World to England's traditions of yore.

We begin with our Massachusetts Bay Colony founder John Winthrop's view on the matter. From Cotton Mather's Magnalia Christi Americana, on the subject of Governor Winthrop's view on drinking healths:

There was one civil custom used in (and in few but) the English nation, which this gentleman did endeavor to abolish in this country, and that was the usage of drinking to one another. For although by drinking to one another, no more is meant than an act of courtesy, when one going to drink does invite another to do so too, for the same ends with himself; nevertheless the Governor (not altogether unlike to CLEOMENES, of whom it is reported by PLUTARCH he never urged the unwilling to drink,) considered the impertinency and insignificancy of this usage as to any of those ends that are usually pretended for it; and that it indeed ordinarily served for no ends at all, but only to provoke persons unto unseasonable and perhaps unreasonable drinking, and at last produce that abominable health drinking which the fathers of old so severely rebuked in the Pagans. Wherefore, in his own most hospitable house he left it off; not out of any silly or stingy fancy, but merely by his example a greater temperance, with liberty of drinking, might be recommended, and sundry inconveniences of drinking avoided. And his example began to be much followed by the sober people in this country until an order of Court came to be made against that ceremony in drinking, and then the old wont violently returned with a Niti mur in Vetitum.