John B Gough and the Joppa Gal: A Temperance Blog Part II (originally published June 21, 2024)

by Bethany Groff Dorau, Executive Director

John Bartholomew Gough (1817-1886), in later years.

If you missed it, read John B. Gough Part I here.

This happens to me all the time, dear reader. I am introduced to a fascinating character who once graced the mean streets of Newbury(port), and I become immediately taken with their story. As I write about them, I do more research, and I find more things, and suddenly this blog is thousands of words long and I despair.

And then, voila, a solution. I will write a series! But life, and work, come at me sideways and I am distracted (or making sure you know all about the Garden Tour), or another article is more timely, and so I wander off the path only to discover, months later, that I have left some readers hanging. 

Popular images such as this 1832 lithograph promoted temperance long before John B. Gough found his calling on its stage. Courtesy of the Library of Congress

Gosh, I love thinking of you sitting around waiting to hear more about John B. Gough, because it made me return to this story, which returns to me with the ease of a visit with a high school chum. So let us pick back up where we left off.

When last we left our dubious hero, actor, bookbinder, and erstwhile accordion player John B. Gough had followed the Bunker Hill Diorama to Worcester. It was there on May 20, 1842, that he lost his "Joppa gal", 21-year-old Mary Cheney, and his infant daughter, Mary Jane. According to his enthusiastic biographer, the death of his family led to a new low for John B. Gough. He attended a church revival meeting and clumsily (and, I admit, a little hilariously) tried to steal the collection with a spittoon. 

“Amid a fusillade of glorys, hallelujahs, and amens, the tipsy actor seized a huge, square, wooden spittoon, filled with sawdust, quids of tobacco, and refuse, and passing down the aisle, said: "We will now take a contribution for the purchase of ascension robes." 

He was ejected, arrested, bailed, and turned to singing dirty songs in dirtier pubs for drinking money, and as summer turned to fall and Gough faced a long New England winter homeless, with “no flannels, no woolen socks, and no coats”. Destitute and despondent, he drank everything he had, bought a bottle of laudanum (a mixture of alcohol and opium), and “proceeded to the railroad track, put the bottle to his lips, and was about to make an exit from life through the door of suicide”.

At the last moment, he failed to throw himself under the train as he had planned. A few days later, as he was wobbling down the street to “a rum-hole in Lincoln Square to get a dram”, a man tapped him on the shoulder.

Lincoln Square, Worcester, where Gough met the waiter who would change his life, c. 1852.

The man was Joel Stratton, and he was a waiter at the Temperance Hotel. He noted that Gough was drunk and invited him to a temperance meeting the following night. To make a very long story somewhat shorter, he went to the meeting, told his story to an appreciative audience, and signed the pledge to never drink again.

This sobriety pledge from the 1840's is likely similar to the one signed by Gough in 1842. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

How we understand what followed depends on what you think of John Bartholemew Gough. On the one hand, Gough the actor must have quickly noted the effects of his heart-rending tale on the audience, who proved willing to offer not only sympathy but food, clothes, and cash. On the other hand, Gough the hard drinker walked through the door looking for help. That his story struck a chord and led to wealth and fame beyond his wildest imaginings was a stroke of luck. Was he a desperate addict, a cynical opportunist, or both? Well, I can tell you one thing – John B. Gough knew a good thing when he saw it, and by December, 1842, an announcement in the Worcester Waterfall, a temperance newspaper, announced that he was available to lecture (for a fee), and was also selling subscriptions of the Waterfall on commission. Of course, his entire career now depended on not drinking, or at least keeping his drinking a secret.

The Massachusetts Cataract and Worcester County Waterfall was a short-lived temperance newspaper where Gough first announced his availability as a lecturer.

When the spring lecture season began, Gough set his sights on Newburyport, where he could return in triumph in his flashy new suit. By his own account, he made his way first to Boston, where he met with some chums for oysters and brandy and then went to his hotel to sleep it off. The next morning, he “started in the cars for Newburyport”. What exactly happened there is a mystery, though on March 20, a scandalized representative of the Women’s Temperance Society wrote to the newspaper to apologize for their speaker. “In all my experience and my knowledge of temperance lectures, I never saw one before who had the bold affrontery, the deliberate vulgarity, the cold impedance, to get up before respectable audience like that convenient in Phoenix Hall, and pour out such a heterogeneous mass of unmeaning, unintelligible sentences without the least connection and without point, and which could be understood only by those were in the habit of visiting those miserable abode of vice and infamy when the language used can only be equal by the vices which engender them.” Was this Gough, still in his cups? It seems likely, given his next move. Gough, humiliated, his blossoming career in jeopardy, returned to Worcester and did the only thing he could do – he confessed that he had fallen off the wagon, blaming some medicine given to him by a doctor for a headache. To his surprise, after tearfully pledging that he would “rise up and combat King Alcohol”, he found himself not shunned, but exalted by his audience, whose attendance, and donations, at his events only grew.

"King Alcohol", which Gough swore to "combat", was a common image in temperance literature. Image courtesy of the Library of Congress

On May 2, 1845, the Women’s Temperance Society announced a lecture in Newburyport’s Market Hall (where the Firehouse Center for the Arts is today) featuring Daniel Kimball, editor of the Temperance Standard, a Boston newspaper. The events of two years earlier a distant memory, the redeemed Gough was invited to open the May 4 event with his unique combination of pathos, humor, and song. Though his performance that evening was generally well received, some Newburyporters had a bone to pick with John B. Gough, who had pilfered their wares, run off with their women, and, perhaps most egregiously, failed to pay his debts. And when, on May 6, he passed the time while waiting for his train bellied up to the bar at Jacob Danforth’s establishment, Newburyporters had a thing or two to say about it. 

You see, I did it again, gentle reader! Stay tuned for Part III as John Bartholomew Gough dabbles in extortion, visits a phantom soda fountain, and wakes up in a brothel.