Leadership Quote by George Clymer

A founding-era politician praising rum in the same breath as abolition is either breathtakingly tone-deaf, slyly self-aware, or both. George Clymer’s line works because it compresses the young republic’s moral ambition and its appetites into a single, almost comic ranking of “glories.” The joke isn’t just that rum is frivolous next to human freedom; it’s that the new nation routinely treated commerce and consumption as civic virtues. By framing rum as a constitutional “glory,” Clymer hints at how the Constitution was sold not only as a blueprint for rights, but as a machine for stability, credit, and trade - the everyday comforts that make grand political projects feel worth the trouble.

The subtext is darker. Rum was not a neutral pleasure; it was entangled with Atlantic slavery and the triangular trade. Molasses, distilleries, shipping, and enslaved labor formed a single economic ecosystem. So the line can read as a window into the era’s ethical compartmentalization: the ability to denounce slavery in principle while remaining casual about industries and luxuries built on it. Even when the speaker intends humor, the humor exposes a real hierarchy of concern - freedom as aspiration, rum as practical reward.

Contextually, the Constitution arrived amid postwar debt, fragile institutions, and fierce arguments about federal power. Celebrating rum is a wink at what “union” promised: predictable markets, protected ports, taxable commodities. It’s politics as conviviality - a reminder that nation-building wasn’t only fought in pamphlets and conventions, but toasted in taverns, where ideals and self-interest clinked glasses.