Heritage Column for October 27, 2005
By Fred Anderson
Richard Claybrook liked a hot toddy in the evening. He enjoyed sipping on a julep in the morning. Twice a day Richard Claybrook imbibed.
On the Sabbath Richard Claybrook preached from the pulpit of one of several churches in the choice piece of God's good earth incorporating Essex, Middlesex and King and Queen counties. He was not a closet drinker. He would not have thought of himself as a habitual drinker although he was regular in his partaking of spirits. He certainly would not have thought of himself as an alcoholic.
In the 1820s when he first began serving as pastor of Hermitage Baptist Church in Middlesex, he had an encounter with a drunkard who was a member of his congregation. The interview with the drunkard changed the pastor's way of thinking and acting.
The temperance movement had begun to extend its influence into the area and people were taking sides-pro and con, teetotalers and imbibers. It certainly changed the climate for Baptists. Prior to temperance influences, it was not considered a gross sin to drink. The sin was drinking in excess or public drunkenness. Many a Baptist home served spirits. After all, a Baptist minister, Elijah Craig of Old Virginia, gave rise to the bourbon industry in Kentucky. Some say that Robert Baylor Semple, “Mister Baptist” himself, made the best liquor in King and Queen County. In the 17th and early 18th centuries, it was not uncommon for households, even Baptist households, to operate their own stills and ferment their own wines.
But along came the temperance movement and, one by one, out went the stills. Richard Claybrook was not ready to join the movement. He saw little wrong with his daily consumption of “a half gill” or between two and three ounces.
And then he met with the drunkard. He liked to tell the story. The following is the way a guest in his home remembered the story:
“The evening was mild and pleasant. We were sitting on the porch in full view of a luxuriant orchard that spread all around us in richness and beauty. This sight led us to make distillation and common use of brandy the subject of our conversation.
“In the course of our remarks, ‘Mr. C.' observed to me that he was at first not very friendly to the temperance cause or at least not to the total abstinence principle. Many other good men were once of the same way of thinking.
“ ‘But,' said this man of God to me, ‘I was recently cured of my opposition. [He shared that] there was a member of the church who, though in other respects a good and orderly man, was in the habit of occasionally drinking too much. The deacons had talked with him on the sin and danger of his conduct but without any permanently good result. Mr. C. said, ‘I concluded that I would myself, as pastor of the church, make an effort to reclaim him before the case was acted on publicly. He confessed his fault, appeared penitent and promised to do better-to drink less in the future. I advised him to quit entirely as the only hope of a permanent reformation.”
The drunkard then turned to his pastor and said: “Brother Claybrook, do you ever drink?” It was then that Richard Claybrook 'fessed up. He told about the mint juleps and the night-time toddy. When he told the amount of alcohol actually consumed, the drunkard admired his pastor's constitution and said: “But, Brother Claybrook, you drink more than I do. If I were to drink that much I should be drunk all day long.”
Pastor Claybrook felt “mortified and condemned.” In his story to his guest on the porch, he concluded by saying that the experience caused him to become an advocate of total abstinence. “To think-I was censuring in him a course of conduct which I myself pursued and that I was advising to do what I was not doing.”
Pointing to his orchard, Claybrook reckoned that he had fruit sufficient to make hundreds of gallons of brandy. “I shall not make a drop,” declared the preacher. He even refused to sell his still for fear that it would bring the problem on another. Instead, he was converting the still into cooking utensils. From that time onward, he would be the dry Mr. Claybrook!
Postscript: There is another remarkable story associated with Claybrook. He died in December 1834, and two men of the Middlesex area heard about the death on the same day. Unknown to each other at the time, both men, upon learning the news of the minister's death, felt an immediate call to the gospel ministry.
The two men were Thomas Evans, “a prosperous farmer,” and Richard Christian, a physician in Urbanna. They both had come under the sweet influences of Claybrook; and the news of his death prompted their hearts for a change in their own lives. Both men became pastors in the territory of Middlesex and thousands came to know Christ because of their labors.
Fred Anderson is executive director of the Virginia Baptist Historical Society.