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Promoting Irish Culture and History from Little Rock, Arkansas, USA

Tag Archives: Temperance


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Birth of John Edgar, Minister & Professor of Theology

John Edgar, minister, professor of theology, moderator of the Secession Synod in 1828 and moderator of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland in 1842 is born near Ballynahinch, County Down, on June 13, 1798. He is Honorary Secretary to the Presbyterian Home Mission during the Great Famine in 1847.

Edgar is the eldest son of Samuel Edgar (1766-1826) and Elizabeth McKee (1771-1839). He attends the Royal Belfast Academical Institution where he excels as a student. He is ordained a minister in the Presbyterian church in 1820. He becomes D.D. of Hamilton College in Kirkland, New York, in 1836, is elected moderator of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland for 1842–43, and obtains LL.D. of New York in 1860.

Edgar is known as the origin of the Temperance movement in Ireland because he pours alcohol out his window in 1829. On August 14, 1829, he writes a letter in the Belfast Telegraph advocating temperance.

Edgar forms the Ulster Temperance Movement. In 1834, he tells a parliamentary committee inquiring into the causes and consequences of drunkenness in the United Kingdom that there are 550 “dram shops” in Belfast and 1,700 shops selling intoxicants in Dublin as well as numerous illicit distillers “even in the most civilised districts of Ulster.”

Edgar is also the founder of the Ulster Female Penitentiary in 1839 which is a residential home for prostitutes. He is also instrumental in getting the Deaf, Dumb and Blind Institute set up in Belfast. A meeting which leads to the establishment of the Presbyterian Orphan Society is held in 1866 in his drawing room.

Edgar is also involved in the relief effort by the Presbyterian church in Connacht during the Irish famine. The church is accused of proselytizing during the famine period. In the May Street Presbyterian Church he says, “I hope soon to have an opportunity of directing public attention to spiritual famine in Connacht, but our effort now is to save the perishing body … Our brother is starving, and, till we have satisfied his hunger, we have no time to inquire whether he is Protestant or Romanist.”

Edgar is interested in Gaelic language and culture, and is critical of other Protestant faiths particularly the Church of Ireland (Anglican) for not preaching in the Irish language.

Edgar dies at the age of 68 on August 26, 1866, in Cremore, Rathgar, Dublin, where he had gone to get medical treatment. He is survived by his wife Susanna, and is buried in Balmoral Cemetery, Belfast.


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Death of Activist James Haughton

james-haughton

James Haughton, Irish social reformer and temperance activist, dies in Dublin on February 20, 1873.

Haughton, son of Samuel Pearson Haughton (1748–1828), by Mary, daughter of James Pim of Rushin, Queen’s County (now County Laois), is born in Carlow, County Carlow, and educated at Ballitor, County Kildare, from 1807 to 1810, under James White, a quaker. After filling several situations to learn his business, in 1817 he settles in Dublin, where he becomes a corn and flour factor, in partnership with his brother William. He retires in 1850. Although educated as a Friend, he joins the Unitarians in 1834 and remains throughout his life a strong believer in their tenets.

Haughton supports the anti-slavery movement at an early period and takes an active part in it until 1838, going in that year to London as a delegate to a convention. Shortly after the Temperance campaigner Father Theobald Mathew takes the pledge, on April 10, 1838, Haughton becomes one of his most devoted disciples. For many years he gives most of his time and energies to promoting total abstinence and to advocating legislative restrictions on the sale of intoxicating drinks.

In December 1844 Haughton is the chief promoter of a fund which is raised to pay some of the debts of Father Mathew and release him from prison. About 1835 he commences a series of letters in the public press which make his name widely known. He writes on temperance, slavery, British India, peace, capital punishment, sanitary reform, and education. His first letters are signed “The Son of a Water Drinker,” but he soon commences using his own name and continues to write until 1872.

Haughton takes a leading part in a series of weekly meetings which are held in Dublin in 1840, when so numerous are the social questions discussed that a newspaper editor calls the speakers the “Anti-everythingarians.” In association with Daniel O’Connell, of whose character he has a very high opinion, he advocates various plans for the amelioration of the condition of Ireland and the Repeal of the Union but is always opposed to physical force.

Haughton becomes a vegetarian in 1846, both on moral and sanitary grounds. For two or three years before his death he is president of the Vegetarian Society of the United Kingdom. He is one of the first members of the Statistical Society of Dublin (1847), a founder of the Dublin Mechanics’ Institute (1849), in the same year is on the committee of the Dublin Peace Society, aids in abolishing Donnybrook Fair in 1855, and takes a chief part in 1861 in opening the National Botanic Gardens at Glasnevin on Sundays.

James Haughton dies at 35 Eccles Street, Dublin, on February 20, 1873, and is buried in Mount Jerome Cemetery on February 24 in the presence of an immense crowd of people.

Haughton’s son, Samuel Haughton, publishes a memoir of his father’s life including extracts from his public correspondence in 1877.