Victorian Culture - Oh that Noxious Weed! Cigars in the 19th Century

[RJNorton]

Friend Robert L. Wilson wrote that he “never Saw Mr Lincoln drink, he often told me he never drank, had no desire for the drink, nor the companionship of drinking men.” Attorney Joseph Gillespie recalled “He was a remarkably temperate man; eschewing every indulgence not so much as it seemed to me, from principle as from a want of appetites. I never heard him declaim against the use of tobacco or other stimulants although he never indulged in them.”

Most contemporaries testified that Mr. Lincoln seldom if ever drank liquor. Aide William O. Stoddard recalled that “At the table, when his attention was especially called to some rare wine, I have seen Mr. Lincoln barely touch his lips to his glass, ‘just to see what it was,’ but there was no perceptible diminution of its contests.” However, friend Milton Hay said: “He drank lager beer for some time on the advice of a physician. My impression is that he had run down from cold or something and needed building up, and was told to drink lager. He did drink it for quite a while, and that is about the only thing I know that he ever drank.” The practice didn’t continue in the White House. “He was one of the most abstemious of men: the pleasures of the table had few attractions for him,” wrote Milton’s nephew, John Hay. “He drank little or no wine; not that he remained always on principle a total abstainer, as he was during a par of his early life, in the favor of the ‘Washingtonian’ reform, but he never cared for wine or liquors of any sort, and never used tobacco.”

SOURCE:

http://abrahamlincolnsclassroom.org/abra...ns-health/