The High Council was bent on banishing liquor more than anything else — more even than adultery. Ohio now was engulfed in the rising tide of temperance agitation. In 1834 there were five thousand temperance societies in the United States, with a membership of over a million. Ninety per cent of these lived north of the Mason-Dixon line, and the majority were concentrated in New York and Ohio. After 1836, when the American Temperance Society adopted total abstinence in its platform, there was scarcely a Protestant preacher on the Western Reserve who had not taken the pledge.
