Demon rum

Indiana American, Aug. 1854

SAD AND MOURNFUL PROCESSION

A short time since, a touching spectacle was seen in the streets of our neighboring city, Richmond. An orphan boy who had stemmed the world's destructive tide without the counsel of a father or the prayers of a mother, murdered by rum and rum seller was conveyed to his last and resting place, a drunkard's grave, attended by one solitary mourner, an orphan sister.

His last hours were spent in the ravings of a soul-killing delirium, which haunted his dying couch with all the unearthly phantoms and bloody demons which that loathsome disease brings up to torment men before their time.

-- Ladies' Temperance Wreath

ANOTHER VICTIM

We are fully aware that our liquor sellers, their attorneys, candidates and organ, do not thank us for parading before the public their victims, but in truth, we do not want their thanks.

If we can place before the citizens of Indiana, such facts as will show that the liquor traffic is a work of death, and the slain are in our midst, we expect they will act promptly to remove the destroyer. The rummies and their allies so believe, also and hence they rage.

Let them rage. They hay even charge us with cruelty in alluding to the dead but such a charge comes with a poor grace from men that will take the last dime from a poor drunkard, regardless of wife's sufferings or feelings, or will take a fee against a poor woman, who sues for damages.

Last week, a man living on Blue Creek, once an affable citizen, a kind husband and affectionate father  -- but the liquor made him a demon and his wife applied for a divorce. The man has died, and present desolation of his once happy family is clearly attributable to the liquor traffic.

ANOTHER -- Mr. Cuppy, who ahs been confined in our jail for many months, was sent this week to the penitentiary for two years, ostensibly for passing counterfeit money, but really on account of drinking whisky.

The county has been taxed heavily in his imprisonment trial, and now he goes to spent two years laboring in solitary confinement for the state that has licensed men to make him what he is.

And yet the Democratic party says it would be worse to search doggeries, for mean whisky, than to send men to the penitentiary for drinking it. 

Note: T.A. Goodwin, the paper's editor, was a Methodist minister and strong prohibitionist. He never let up and was ruthless in his editorial comments. "Doggery" was another word for saloon or ginmill. Goodwin was a Republican (or, Whig in those years.)