The New York Times published a story this weekend by Clay Risen about Nearis Green, the enslaved man who taught Jack Daniel how to make whiskey and the broader efforts (or lack thereof) of whiskey distilleries to understand and tell the stories of how alcohol and slavery were entwined.
According to a 1967 biography, “Jack Daniel’s Legacy,” by Ben A. Green (no relation to Nearis), Call told his slave to teach Daniel everything he knew. “Uncle Nearest is the best whiskey maker that I know of,” the book quotes Call as saying. Slavery ended with ratification of the 13th Amendment in 1865, and Daniel opened his distillery a year later, employing two of Green’s sons. In a photo of Daniel and his workers taken in the late 19th century, a black man, possibly one of Green’s sons, sits at his immediate right — a sharp contrast to contemporaneous photos from other distilleries, where black employees were made to stand in the back rows.
Of course enslaved people played a huge roll in the shaping of American whiskey. That they were ubiquitous and then written out of the legacy of the liquor is, in fact, a very American story. But anywhere in American history you see hard, grueling work someone would have to force you to do, rich people were probably forcing someone to do it then. Here's the other important thing, though — slavery was the theft of labor (it was the theft of a whole life, too, let's not gloss over that). That theft didn't just negatively impact enslaved people. Free people who wanted payment for their expertise were also hurt.
Think of it this way. If you wanted to start a distillery, you were going to need a distiller —someone who could do the work. We have a lot of people of whiskey-making-nations heritage here. There were plenty of people who you could pay to be your distiller. I have no idea how much you would have had to pay a distiller in, say, 1840, but you could buy the son of a distiller your friend owned for a few hundred dollars. Buying a distiller — a set amount of money you pay once— was a lot less expensive than hiring one — an ongoing expense for years — and the distiller you owned couldn't quit or go to work for your competitor. Of course slave owners were going to have enslaved distillers.
As unfair as that was, as Risen points out, this probably lead to a lot of new ideas: "According to legend, the [Lincoln County process of passing new whiskey through charcoal] was invented in 1825 by a white Tennessean named Alfred Eaton. But Mr. Eddy, the Jack Daniel’s historian, and others now say it’s just as likely that the practice evolved from slave distilling traditions, in which charcoal helped remove some of the sting from illicitly made alcohol."
I'm interested in seeing how Jack Daniel's moves forward on this issue. I really, really dislike Jack Daniel's as a whiskey (yes, I know, kick me out of America now) but I also really admire their ability to craft a message and an image. I've long said that Tennessee should study Jack Daniel's ad campaigns and borrow heavily from their approaches in our tourism campaigns. Jack Daniel's knows how to make Jack Daniel's a specific whiskey from a specific place and then how to sell you on that whiskey and that place. We, being that place, benefit a great deal from the Jack Daniel's approach.
In Tennessee now, we desperately need a way to talk about slavery and its legacies that's better and more honest than "well, people didn't know better" or "it wasn't that bad." Don't get me wrong, some places and people are doing a really good job of this, but some places and some people are not. If Jack Daniel's can figure out how to honor all the people who brought us Jack Daniel's, it's important not just for the whiskey world, but for our state. If Jack Daniel's can tell this story honestly in a way people will listen to, they will be doing the whole state a great favor in providing us with a roadmap we can use more broadly.
Good luck, Jack Daniel's. We need you to get this right.
