I came across this story while in Massachusetts in summer 2025, when the first licenses were successfully awarded to local businesses. On the news segment that flashed across the TV screen, entrepreneurs of color expressed their relief and excitement at the opportunity to share culinary traditions and compete with downtown restaurants.[3] As a historian of race, temperance, and alcohol in the nineteenth century, listening to the interviewees resonated. While my recent JER article unpacked the meanings of temperance for antebellum Black reformers, Boston’s liquor license bill speaks to the ways provisioning alcohol could be just as important to people pushed to the economic margins, both in the early republic and today. Whether for oyster cellars in antebellum Philadelphia or restaurants in present-day Boston, seemingly mundane policies such as licensing laws have either stiffened or muddled who can thrive in urban economies.
Black activists such as Frederick Douglass folded temperance into their abolitionist activism, at times controversially. At the World Temperance Convention in London in 1846, Douglass (pictured above, on the right) was the lone Black attendee, and white delegates booed him for linking the two causes in an unprompted speech. “Portraits from the World Temperance Convention, at Covent Garden Theatre,” The Illustrated London News, Aug. 15, 1846.
This is something I take stock of in my broader research on the nineteenth-century United States, following those beyond the bounds of the “Black elite” into the streets, taverns, and halls where they congregated to drink, dance, and socialize. Entrepreneurs could make decent livings selling alcohol in barrooms and eating houses. In these places—sometimes both physically and metaphorically underground—Black men and women made use of the freedoms they had on their own terms.
One prominent boozy space dotting northern cities were oyster cellars, where liquor flowed freely alongside delicacies like pickled oysters and turtle soup. Historians such as Gary Nash and Shane White have noted the prevalence of these locales in the early republic, showing how Black men dominated the oyster trade by opening and frequenting establishments throughout Philadelphia and New York. These could be sites of economic opportunity. For example, the Pennsylvania Abolition Society’s 1838 census of Philadelphia’s Black residents revealed that oyster cellar proprietor Fortune Fullerton owned about $1,450 worth of property, while another, Richard Hawel, reported $2,600.[4]
James Akin, Philadelphia Taste Displayed. Or Bon-Ton Below Stairs, ca. 1830, From the Library Company of Philadelphia.