Neal Dow and the Maine Law

The house at seven fourteen Congress Street belonged to Neal Dow, a Portland tanner's son who became the most effective temperance crusader in American history and, depending on who you ask, one of the most dangerous mayors this city ever had.

Dow was born into a Quaker family in Portland in eighteen oh four. He watched alcohol destroy workers, families, and neighborhoods, and he decided prohibition was the only answer. Not temperance education, not moral suasion, but an outright ban enforced by law. By eighteen fifty he was president of the Maine Temperance Union. The following year he was elected mayor of Portland.

He used that position to draft what became known as the Maine Law, the first statewide prohibition law in the United States, signed on June second, eighteen fifty-one. Maine was more than sixty years ahead of the Eighteenth Amendment. Within four years, twelve other states had adopted versions of the Maine Law. Temperance reformers across the country called Dow the Napoleon of Temperance and the Father of Prohibition.

Then came June second, eighteen fifty-five, exactly four years after the law passed. Opponents had discovered that Dow, while enforcing prohibition, had ordered a shipment of medicinal alcohol stored at City Hall and had it placed in his own name in the inventory. It looked, to his critics, like rank hypocrisy. A crowd gathered outside City Hall in what became known as the Portland Rum Riot. Dow ordered the state militia to fire on the mob. One man was killed and several wounded. Dow was charged with illegal liquor purchase, tried, and acquitted, but his political standing never fully recovered.

Most accounts put the toll at one man killed and seven wounded, though a few contemporary reports cite different numbers.

He later served as a general in the Civil War and ran for President of the United States in eighteen eighty on the Prohibition Party ticket.