19 August 2021
The phrase the whole shebang means the entirety of something. It is akin to the whole nine yards and the whole kit and caboodle. The phrase appears in the years following the American Civil War, during which shebang had become established in soldier slang as a tent or rough dwelling.
Where shebang comes from is uncertain, but it most likely comes from shebeen, or in the original Irish síbín, a slang term for illicit liquor or an unlicensed establishment selling such liquor. The -ín is a diminutive ending, but the meaning of the síb root is unknown. If true, the word went from meaning illicit liquor to a place where illicit liquor was sold, and then on to a rude or makeshift dwelling like such a place, and finally in the phrase meaning the entirety, akin to and the kitchen sink.
Shebeen appears in English by 1743 in the sense of illicit liquor, when it is mentioned in a trial in Ireland involving Richard Annesley, Sixth Earl of Anglesey. A portion of the transcript from 16 November 1643 reads:
Q. What Goods were they that were taken away?
A. A Feather Bed, the Coop, some Casks, and my Lord’s Buckles that he had in his Shoes.
Q. Are you sure you had seen those Goods in my Lord’s House?
A. I can’t say so, but to be sure they were so.
Q. Where were they found?
A. At Bally Hobbart.
Q. In whole House?
A. In her Brother’s. And there were some more of them got at another Place just by Bally Hobbart. My Lord’s Buckles were taken out of her Brother’s Shoes.
Q. What Office was you in then?
A. I was High Constable at that Time.
Q. What did Joan Laffen do at this Time?
A. One while she used to sell Shebeen.
Q. You don’t mean that you saw these Goods in actual Possession of Joan Laffen?
A. No, no; but she liv’d in the House with her Brother at that Time.
Another account of that same exchange reads:
Being asked what Reason he has to believe that Joan Laffan is not a Person to be believ’d upon her Oath; says, she is a Woman of ill Fame that keeps a Shebeen-house, and led an ill Life.
A marginal note here glosses Shebeen-house as “little Ale-[hou]se.” (The digital scan is partially illegible, but the illegible letters can be discerned from context.)
The sense of shebeen referring to a tavern or pub appears by 1749 in a question posed to the mayor of the city of Limerick in regard to a controversy over weights and measures:
Whether the Mayor, who by his Oath of Office, is Sworn Clerk of the Markets, is not in Conscience bound to Visit them frequently, and not to trust any low indigent Man to that Work, whose Exigencies might tempt him to send a Piece of Meat to his own Kitchen, rather than to the Goals? Whether the Shebeen or market Measure that at present used, is not made in such a Form as to Scoop up three times the Toll? and whether the Mayor does not, or ought not to know this?
Shebeen is again associated with the Earl of Anglesey, or more accurately his estate, in yet another trial, this one from 1766, in which his three daughters from his first marriage sued his estate:
Hitherto the said Earl Richard had always lived in great Harmony with his said Wife, and took great Care of the Education of his three Daughters by her; but having soon after, in her Absence, contracted a Familiarity, and criminal Intercourse with one Gillin alias Julian Donovan, the Daughter of one Richard Donovan, who sold an unlicensed Kind of Ale, called Shebeen, in a cabin, in the Village of Camolin, where his Lordship’s Men Servants usually frequented, often at very untimely Hours, and sometimes stayed out of the Family whole Nights, for the sake of the said Gillin’s Company.
A 1773 essay describes the destructive nature of shebeen:
Here it cannot but be taken notice of how much it were to be wished, that the brewers of malt liquors in Ireland would mend their hands by brewing good drink, and not contribute so largely to the impoverishment of the kingdom, by causing so considerable a drain of cash to be sent away for porter, thereby obliging the wealthier part of the people to drink foreign liquors, another part to drink burning spirits, destructive to the human species and productive of all sorts of enormities and miseries seen in the objects who fill the jails and hospitals, or stupified and diseased with drinking foggy ale and shebeen of bad ingredients, and as bad manufacture.
A 1780 travelogue by John Talbot Dillon compares the local Spanish booze to shebeen:
In both countries the common people are passionate, easily provoked if their family is slighted, or their descent called in question. The Chacoli of Biscay, or the Shebeen of Ireland, makes them equally frantic.
And a 1788 summary of Irish law details what happens when the authorities break up an illicit tavern:
V. sect. 28. Ale called shebeen, seized for any offence against any revenue laws, shall be sold at any time after seizure; and if claimed by owner and adjudged not subject to seizure, claimant shall be paid so much money, as produce from such ale amounted to, provided proper permit produced for the malt, of which made.
And a marginal note summarizes the summary:
Shebeen ale, if seized, may be sold, if claimed, and not subject to seizure, produce paid, on permit for the malt.
Finally, before we leave shebeen and move to shebang, there is this 1789 slang-filled ditty, “Luke Caffrey’s Kilmainham Minit,” about partying with a dead man:
Pads foremost he div’d, and den round
He caper’d de Kilmainham Minit;
But soon, when he lay on the Ground,
Our bisiness we taut to begin id:
Wid de Stiff to a Shebeen we hied,
But Det had shut fast ev’ry Grinder;
His Brain-box hung all-a-one Side,
And no Distiller’s Pig could be blinder;
But dat, you know, is what we must all cum to.
So shebeen, meaning to an unlicensed tavern or the booze served there, was well established in eighteenth-century Ireland. The word continues to be used in Ireland and Scotland and by the twentieth century would travel to South Africa, where it was used to refer to taverns in the Black townships.
By the 1860s and the U.S. Civil War, we also start seeing shebang in America. We can’t say this for certain, but this American shebang is likely a variation on the Irish word, as several of the early uses of shebang are in reference to an illicit drinking establishment, although most of the early uses are in the sense of a tent or rude dwelling. It may be that the word for a drinking establishment in a makeshift shelter, like what you might find in a soldier’s encampment, generalized to mean any makeshift shelter.
The earliest use of shebang that I have found is from a U.S. Christian Commission report from December 1864 about the organization’s missionary efforts among American soldiers. Here, shebang means some kind of makeshift commercial establishment catering to soldiers, perhaps a tavern, although that’s not made explicit:
Having obtained some idea of the dimensions of the rooms, we erected two large book-cases for Testaments, “soldiers’ books,” hymn-books, tracts, &c.; obtained another large black-walnut one for a library, and arranged suitable shelves for religious papers, and literary magazines of miscellaneous reading. Ample accommodations were also made for writing, and two long file-desks put up for the leading secular and religious newspapers [....] At first, soldiers would come in, rather hesitatingly, to inspect and to inquire the prices of things, and saying among themselves “that they allowed” it to be a sutler’s shop or some “shebang” following the army to keep “greenbacks from moulding.”
Shebang appears in the Yale Literary Magazine of February 1865 in a description of soldier slang. Here, it’s not clear what shebang means:
Here is the way they talk in that benighted neighborhood. “I have saw where you was goin at,” and “I have went where you couldn’t git to go.” “I never seen” any man have “such a right smart git,” as “me and him did.” “That there man there, what owns this shebang,” “Wounded his watch up,” “onct or twict,” “just like I do mine,” &c.
But many of the early uses of shebang refer to tents or other makeshift shelters, especially those used by prisoners of war. Here is one from Charles C. Nott’s 1865 Sketches in Prison Camps:
The prisoners at Camp Ford were poor. They even thought themselves too poor to borrow. They possessed no supplies to sell; and in manufactures they had not risen above carved pipes and chessmen. They lived on their rations and cooked those rations in the simplest manner. Half of them had no tables, and more than half no table furniture. The plates and spoons did treble duty, travelling about from “shebang” to “shebang” (as they called the hovels they had built) in regular succession.
And another prison-camp use can be found in A.J.H. Duganne’s 1865 Camps and Prisons: Twenty Months in the Department of the Gulf:
Fancy, then, a space of half a dozen acres, enclosed with a stockade of timbers eight feet high. One-sixth of this area is allotted to the officers, who dwell in log-cabins, erected by themselves or purchased from some former tenant. Each cabin hut, or “shebang,” as we term it, shelters and accommodates a mess. The numbers of a mess are various; some messes have no more than three, and others muster ten or twelve. These “shebangs” are arranged in streets, right-angled with a central thoroughfare called “Fifth Avenue.”
The sense of shebang meaning a civilian dwelling appears in the 1867 novel The Cabin in the Brush:
The man rose. “That ere boy’s got only a few hours afore him,” he said. “I reckon we’ll not get here afore he’s gone. But when you get him berried you’d better move off. Sime and the rest know as how your old man’s gone to the, Fed’als and they’re gwine to burn your shebang.”
And Ger. Falcon’s 1879 blackface sketch “Swing on the Garden Gate” uses shebang generally to refer to any establishment, in this case a laundry:
Estella—Den how did you know dat de laundry a man said dat?
Pomp.—Well, I cotched a job in his shebang scrapin’ de grease off de buzzoms an’ white—was hin’ dem.
So far, we have seen shebang used in contexts where it probably refers to a drinking establishment but where that exact meaning is not clear. But in U.S. Vidocq’s 1870 The Secrets of Internal Revenue we see that sense clearly. Vidocq was a U.S. Secret Service agent, and that agency was founded to crack down on tax cheats and counterfeiters (the mission of protecting the president would not come until the assassination of William McKinley in 1901), so breaking up bootlegging taverns was within the Secret Service’s ambit:
They first visited a “shebang” which was ostensibly a grocery store and whose appearance denoted honesty and fair dealing. An examination behind a pile of soap and tea, however, disclosed the existence of a “bar,” consisting of a plank extending across some barrels which contained liquors purporting to be of tine quality and choice brands.
And in 1880, shebang meaning a tavern or bar is used in T. Trask Woodward’s temperance play The Social Glass; or, Victims of the Bottle. In the play, the character of Farley owns a bar:
Well, that would be rather hard on old Farley. Why, if I leave off drinking it will surely “bust up” this old shebang. Farley has made more than half of his living off of Charley Thornley and me, ever since this ribbon movement struck the town. And I have got so that I want to guzzle the infernal stuff all the time. (Pause.) But, however, I guess I will try a dose of temperance, and kinder work it off.
So, we a have reasonably clear, albeit somewhat muddled, through line from the Irish síbín or shebeen to the American shebang. Upon coming to the new shore, the word changed form and expanded in meaning from illicit tavern to any kind of establishment or dwelling, although the specific sense of a drinking establishment was also maintained.
Just as the single word shebang starts appearing in the United States, we start to see the phrase the whole shebang. But at first, it appears as a co-location of words with a literal meaning, the entire dwelling, rather than a metaphorical phrase or idiom. In a congressional report on the race riots in Memphis, Tennessee in May 1866, where white residents and white police started massacring Black residents until the riot was suppressed by federal troops, whole “shebang” is used to mean the entire dwelling; the quotation marks around just shebang indicate that the writer did not yet consider this a set idiom:
One man came up and called out to a colored man to halt. The man stopped and gave up his pistol. I was scared. He had his pistol pointed right towards my house. He came into my house and dropped his knife. Then he came again and asked where his knife was. I did not know anything about his knife. He told me if I did not tell him where his knife was he would burn up the whole “shebang.” That was the last word he said.
A similar use appears in the 1868 Civil War novel Randolph Honor, where shebang refers to a soldier’s tent or perhaps to the group of soldiers who live and mess together:
But at that moment Captain Thorne came by. He saw my consternation, and asked the cause, when a shout replied—“Been at old White’s henroost. Captain—see that rooster’s tail sticking out of his hat.” It seems, the Captain had the day before arrested some of the men for that very deed. And when he ordered me to follow to his tent, after us came—“See, boys, chicken-soup for the whole shebang going into the Captain’s tent—cock-a-ra-a.” You may imagine I speedily let the rooster fly. But I did not lose with it my name of chicken-coop.
But we do see the idiom by 1870, when it appears in the novel Sea Drift, by Fadette, a pseudonym for Marian Calhoun Legare Reeves. Here, the phrase the whole shebang refers to a raft and all that is on it:
Eva watched, with anxious eyes, the progress of the little raft. But it floated bravely—bravely enough, as Evan, coming back for Luti, assured her, “to take the whole shebang at once, only Morgan refused to let the trial be made.”
In H.K. Stimson’s 1874 autobiography From the Stage Coach to the Pulpit the phrase is used to refer to a buggy and the team of ponies pulling it:
After we had driven around town for a while, mostly on the back streets, I suggested that he drive down one of the main business streets, and to the hotel. He said the “ponies were afraid of stages and covered wagons, not being used to them, and that we had gone far enough for me to judge.” “Well, I like their movement; what is your price for the outfit?” “Well, I will tell you, stranger: I am in a hurry to go back to Illinois; my father is not expected to live; I will take two hundred dollars for the whole ‘shebang.’ The wagon is a little worn, but the harness is new. I paid forty dollars for it last week.” I saw it was a bargain, and just what I wanted.
And humorist George W. Peck uses the whole shebang in 1880 to refer to an unfortunate iceboat accident:
In about a minute the boat neared the opposite shore, and we proposed to dismount, but before we could think a second time the whole shebang had gone up among the trees, and was trying to climb up one of them, the sail flapping, and the man who run the machine was under the boat with his head scalped. We came to in a couple of minutes, and found the skin knocked off lots of places, and one arm in a sling, one eye blacked, a boot heel torn off, and the back veranda of a pair of pants blown off in the gale. We hired a farmer to take us to Madison, and we sat all the way in a bushel basket of pine shavings, thinking of some way to kill off the man who invented ice boats.
It may be that síbín / shebeen and shebang are distinct words with no etymological connection, but there is reasonable evidence that strongly suggest shebang is an American alteration of the Irish word. In any case, the metaphorical the whole shebang is an outgrowth of shebang’s meaning of a dwelling.
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