79 Facts About Neal Dow

Neal Dow was an American Prohibition advocate and politician.

In 1850, Neal Dow was elected president of the Maine Temperance Union, and the next year he was elected mayor of Portland.

One man was killed and several wounded, and when public reaction to the violence turned against Neal Dow, he chose not to seek reelection.

Neal Dow was later elected to two terms in the Maine House of Representatives, but retired after a financial scandal.

Neal Dow joined the Union Army shortly after the outbreak of the American Civil War in 1861, eventually attaining the rank of brigadier general.

Neal Dow was wounded at the siege of Port Hudson and later captured.

Neal Dow spoke across the United States, Canada, and Great Britain in support of the cause.

In 1880, Neal Dow headed the Prohibition Party ticket for President of the United States.

Josiah Neal Dow was a member of the Society of Friends and a farmer originally from New Hampshire.

Neal Dow embraced technology, becoming one of the first in the city to incorporate steam power in the tanning process.

Neal Dow struggled to conform to the tenets of his parents' Quaker faith; he was hot-tempered and enjoyed brawling from a young age.

When he turned eighteen, Neal 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.

In 1827, Neal Dow lobbied the Maine legislature to reform the fire companies to increase their efficiency.

At times Neal Dow let his politics interfere with his duties; after being promoted to fire chief, he allowed a liquor store to burn to the ground.

Maria Cornelia was a Congregationalist, and Neal Dow attended services with her at Second Parish Church regularly, although he never became a member.

Many of Portland's middle- and upper-class citizens, including Neal Dow, believed drunkenness was a great threat to the city's moral and financial well-being.

The group initially focused its efforts on the evils of distilled beverages, but by 1829, Neal Dow declared he would abstain from all alcoholic beverages.

In 1837, the Maine Temperance Society split over whether they should seek to ban wine as well as spirits; Neal 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 Neal Dow spoke often and forcefully in favor of the effort, which was unsuccessful.

Neal Dow worked fervently on behalf of Whig candidates and came to detest Democrats as the tools of the alcohol industry.

Nevertheless, Neal 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.

Neal Dow spent the early 1840s attending to his tanning business, but found time to encourage individual drinkers to take up abstinence.

Neal Dow kept up his speaking efforts around the state, despite once being assaulted by a man hired by a liquor dealer.

In 1846, Neal Dow spoke before the legislature in favor of statewide prohibition.

In 1850, Neal Dow was elected president of the Maine Temperance Union.

On election day, Neal Dow slightly increased his vote total from the year before, with 1496, but Parris outpolled him, bringing in 1900 votes.

Neal Dow made efforts to refute the charge made by his enemies that the Maine law was ineffective and that drinking had actually increased in Portland during Dow's term in office.

In 1854, Neal Dow ran for mayor again unsuccessfully; as the Whig Party began to break apart, Neal Dow attracted support from the Free Soilers and the Know Nothings, a nativist party.

Neal Dow ran again for mayor in 1855 and was narrowly re-elected to the office he had left three years earlier.

Two months into his term, Neal Dow inadvertently ran afoul of his own prohibition laws.

Neal Dow neglected to appoint an official agent to hold it there; because the invoice was in his name, this placed Neal Dow in technical violation of the law.

Neal Dow's enemies seized on the mistake and demanded that the police search the municipal building for illegal liquor.

Neal Dow ordered the state militia to block the protesters and had the sheriff read the crowd the Riot Act.

On learning of the fatality, Neal Dow maintained that the shooting was justified.

Neal Dow was tried for violation of the prohibition law; the prosecutor was former US Attorney General Nathan Clifford, a longtime Dow opponent, and the defense attorney was a fellow founder of the Maine Temperance Society, future senator William P Fessenden.

Neal Dow was acquitted, but his opponents convinced the coroner to impanel a jury that pronounced the protester's death a homicide.

Neal Dow continued to travel the country speaking in support of prohibition, but to little legislative effect.

Maine passed a new, much milder Maine law in 1858, which Neal Dow disliked but defended as better than nothing.

In 1858, Neal Dow won a special election to the Maine House of Representatives as a Republican when one of the members elected declined to serve.

Neal Dow won reelection to a full term in 1859, and continued to agitate for stricter prohibition laws, but was unsuccessful.

Neal Dow became entangled in scandal when the State Treasurer, Benjamin D Peck, lent out state funds to private citizens contravening state law.

Neal Dow had guaranteed some of Peck's borrowing, and faced ruin as it became clear that Peck could not repay the state treasury.

Neal Dow was able to settle the debts and conceal much of his role in the affair, but enough of the scandal became known that some of his many enemies attacked him in local newspapers.

Neal Dow continued to promote prohibition after leaving office, but added his voice to the growing chorus advocating the abolition of slavery.

Several slaveholding states seceded after the election of Republican presidential candidate Abraham Lincoln, and formed the Confederate States of America; even before the outbreak of the Civil War, Neal Dow called for the rebellion to be crushed and slavery abolished.

Neal Dow was 57 years old at the outbreak of the war, and determined to stay home and tend to his business and care for his aging father.

Many of the officers Neal Dow recruited to the cause were his associates from the prohibition movement.

Neal Dow blamed Butler for excluding him from the battle, believing that Butler was threatened by his promotion and calling him a "bully and a beast".

Neal Dow spent much of the time quarreling with his second-in-command, Lieutenant Colonel Francis S Hesseltine, while the regiment occupied forts around New Orleans.

Neal Dow confiscated property from nearby planters, including those who supported the Union, and tried unsuccessfully to claim personal salvage rights over Confederate military property abandoned in the river.

In October 1862, Neal Dow was given command over the District of Pensacola, and moved to join other units there.

Neal Dow immediately earned the troops' disfavor by placing Pensacola under prohibition.

Neal Dow began to recruit black troops from the local slave population while continuing his confiscation of rebel property.

Butler soon countermanded the confiscation order, which Neal Dow believed was done in revenge for his banning of alcohol.

Neal Dow did allow Dow to return to New Orleans to take part in the planned spring offensive.

Neal Dow believed the attack to be a mistake, and delayed his units' participation until later in the day.

Neal Dow was taken by wagon and train to Jackson, Mississippi, then to Montgomery, Alabama, before finally being confined to Libby Prison in Richmond, Virginia, the Confederacy's capital.

Neal Dow remained there until February 1864, when he was exchanged for captive Confederate General William Henry Fitzhugh Lee, son of General Robert E Lee.

Neal Dow's health was damaged by his prison experience, and after spending several months convalescing in Portland, he resigned from the Army in November 1864.

Neal Dow spent the rest of the 1860s and 1870s giving speeches in support of temperance across the United States, Canada, and Great Britain.

Neal Dow's efforts produced little success, as the public turned against prohibition and the alcohol industry was better organized to resist.

Neal Dow expended a great deal of effort organizing and giving speeches in support of the Liberal Party before the British elections of 1874, as their leader, William Ewart Gladstone, was sympathetic to prohibition; the Liberals lost decisively, a result Gladstone and Neal Dow blamed on liquor interests.

Neal Dow continued to promote prohibition in Britain until May 1875 when, exhausted, he returned home.

In 1880, Maine Republicans refused to pass more anti-alcohol legislation, and Neal Dow quit the party to join the Prohibitionists; he instantly became the party's most prominent member.

Neal Dow himself did not attend, staying home with his ailing wife.

Neal Dow was nominated, heading a ticket with vice-presidential nominee Henry Adams Thompson of Ohio.

Neal Dow mostly ignored the national contest that summer, focusing on campaigning for pro-temperance candidates in local Maine elections.

Republicans, especially James G Blaine, pressured Dow to withdraw, fearing that he would claim enough votes to cost their nominee, James A Garfield, the election.

Neal Dow declined to do so, but his vote totals were too small to harm Garfield in any case.

Neal Dow was not displeased with the result, happy that the Republicans had triumphed over the "ex-slavedriving rebel element".

Resentful Republicans in Maine refused to advance any more prohibition laws, and as a result Neal Dow made his final break with the Republican Party in 1885.

In 1888, at the age of 84, Neal Dow accepted the Prohibition Party nomination for mayor of Portland, an office he had held more than thirty years earlier.

Many regular Democrats refused to support the fusion ticket, and Neal Dow lost the election by 1934 votes to 3504.

Later that year, Neal Dow attended the 1888 Prohibition Party National Convention in Indianapolis.

Neal Dow spoke against the political expediency of the party backing women's suffrage, although he personally endorsed the idea.

Cornelia Neal Dow had died in 1883, but Neal Dow's unmarried daughter, named Cornelia, lived with him and assisted in temperance causes.

Neal Dow began to write his memoirs, The Reminiscences of Neal Dow: Recollections of Eighty Years, but died on October 2,1897, before completing the book.

Neal Dow's body lay in state at the Second Parish Church in Portland before being buried in that city's Evergreen Cemetery.

Neal Dow had seen the rise of the prohibition movement and, as biographer Frank L Byrne notes, proselytized the cause "more than any man of the 19th century".