State Legislator

[Richard Lawrence Miller]

Perhaps the following is well known, but it is news to me. In Lincoln's state legislature days there was a low quality cigar called "long nine." Several contemporary references are quoted in the tobacco chapter of Marc McCutcheon, The Writer's Guide to Everyday Life in the 1800s (Cincinnati: Writer's Digest Books 1993, p. 182). No doubt the Sangamon County delegation was composed of tall gentlemen, but I suspect that the appellation “Long Nine" given to them was also connected to the cigar, perhaps a way of ridiculing the delegation's members but a name which they gloried in. Or maybe it was used affectionately. Anyway, persons of Lincoln's time would have seen the term's connection to a cheap cigar. Just as if a group of thin Virginia legislators today were called the Virginia Slims.