What We Were Like

On Thursday evening, April 2, 1840, six drinking buddies gathered, as was their daily custom, at Chase's Tavern in Baltimore. A well-known temperance speaker was lecturing that night, and four of them thought it would be a good joke to go and hear him. As they discussed the lecture later that evening, one of them proposed (still not quite seriously) that they form a total abstinence society, and on Sunday, April 5, while strolling and drinking, the six men did make a decision "to drink no more of the poisonous draft, forever."