Abolitionists and African American communities likewise embraced temperance as necessary for individual and community emancipation — both white and Black — from liquor subordination. William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips and Martin Delany were all temperance men. Frederick Douglass vowed “to go the whole length of prohibition.” And — before going on to greatness in Washington, D.C. — the famously temperate state legislator Abraham Lincoln was a principal supporter of Illinois’ first statewide prohibition.

Similarly, the movement for women’s rights was born of temperance activism. Economically subordinate to their husbands, and legally powerless to oppose the saloons and dram sellers who preyed on their families for profit, women increasingly demanded political rights to defend their homes. Suffragist pioneers Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Amelia Bloomer, Sojourner Truth, Lucretia Mott and Frances Willard were all introduced to social activism through the temperance movement.

“All great reforms go together,” Frederick Douglass claimed: Abolitionism, suffragism and temperance. The underlying political logic was the same: No American has the right to subjugate others for their own benefit. Prohibitionism wasn’t an imposition, it was liberation.