American politician and temperance advocate whose Maine Law of 1851 presaged national prohibition in the United States.

His Quaker parents and his own observations as Portland city overseer of the poor, as well as the excess of drunkenness that was then commonplace, influenced his attitude toward liquor. He organized the Maine Temperance Union in 1838. As mayor of Portland (1851–58), he wrote a state prohibition law and secured its passage (June 2, 1851) to replace a weaker statute of 1846, for which he also had been partly responsible. After serving in the American Civil War he resumed his temperance activities and in 1880 ran for president of the United States as the Prohibition Party candidate. His autobiography, The Reminiscences of Neal Dow, Recollections of Eighty Years, was published posthumously in 1898.