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Examining conflict over local option liquor license laws passed in numerous states during the mid-1840s, this article exposes a pioneering moment in the history of direct democracy. Spurred by the temperance movement's crusade against alcohol and liquor licensing, local option laws empowered local voting majorities, in a referendum-like manner, to decide annually at the ballot box whether or not licenses would be issued. Based on investigation of reform literature, legislative reports, newspapers, and court opinions, this article illustrates how reformers' enlistment of the ideas of majority rule and popular political empowerment to legitimate local option prompted debates that moved beyond the propriety of restrictive liquor regulation and resulted in a widespread reassessment of fundamental tenets of American popular sovereignty. Turning to the activities of liquor dealers and others who resisted local option, this article uncovers a groundbreaking strain of dissent that coalesced in Delaware. By suggesting limits to popular political empowerment and majority rule and stressing the ability of representative democracies to protect minority rights, attorneys representing pro-liquor forces convinced Delaware's highest court to declare local option unconstitutional. Not only did their ideas reverberate in other court decisions and policy debates of the period, but they established a lasting practice of questioning ballot box legislation grounded in the ideas of James Madison and other elite thinkers concerned about the threat of majority tyranny. In the process, pro-liquor groups helped democratize the tradition of questioning majority rule for future use by other nonelite minorities.

This chapter explores the contested concept of personal liberty in American public life during the long nineteenth century. A set of legal protections inherited from England and enshrined by American revolutionaries in state and federal constitutions, personal liberty over time became a powerful language that stirred and structured Americans’ struggles over the democratic state. Focusing on conflicts over impressment, fugitive slave laws, and prohibitory liquor laws, this essay reveals how politicos, reformers, antireformers, and others trumpeted personal liberty to legitimate the extension and limitation of state power and mobilize public support for their legal and political agendas. In these ways, personal liberty became an essential language fueling American democracy in its most formative period.