Abraham Lincoln

“He Was Very Abstemious”

Posted on April 7, 2016

For a glimpse of Lincoln’s habits while a resident of Washington and an executive officer, there is no better authority than John Hay, who served as one of his secretaries. In 1866, Mr. Hay, then a member of the United States Legation in Paris, wrote me an interesting account, which so faithfully delineates Lincoln in his public home that I cannot refrain from quoting it entire. Although the letter was written in answer to a list of questions I asked, and was prepared without any attempt at arrangement, still it is none the less interesting.
“Lincoln went to bed ordinarily,” it begins, “from ten to eleven o’clock, unless he happened to be kept up by important news, in which case he would frequently remain at the War Department till one or two. He rose early. When he lived in the country at the Soldiers’ Home he would be up and dressed, eat his breakfast (which was extremely frugal, an egg, a piece of toast, coffee, etc.), and ride into Washington, all before eight o’clock. In the winter, at the White House, he was not quite so early. He did not sleep well, but spent a good while in bed.
‘Tad’ usually slept with him. He would lie around the office until he fell asleep, and Lincoln would shoulder him and take him off to bed.
He pretended to begin business at ten o’clock in the morning, but in reality the ante-rooms and halls were full long before that hour-people anxious to get the first axe ground.
He was extremely unmethodical; it was a four years’ struggle on Nicolay’s part and mine to get him to adopt some systematic rules. He would break through every regulation as fast as it was made.
Anything that kept the people themselves away from him he disapproved, although they nearly annoyed the life out of him by unreasonable complaints and requests.
He wrote very few letters, and did not read one in fifty that he received. At first we tried to bring them to his notice, but at last he gave the whole thing over to me, and signed, without reading them, the letters I wrote in his name. He wrote perhaps half-a-dozen a week himself-not more. Nicolay received members of Congress and other visitors who had business with the Executive office, communicated to the Senate and House the messages of the President, and exercised a general supervision over the business. I opened and read the letters, answered them, looked over the newspapers, supervised the clerks who kept the records, and in Nicolay’s absence did his work also. When the President had any rather delicate matter to manage at a distance from Washington he rarely wrote, but sent Nicolay or me.
The House remained full of people nearly all day.
At noon the President took a little lunch-a biscuit, a glass of milk in winter, some fruit or grapes in summer. He dined between five and six, and we went off to our dinner also.
Before dinner was over, members and Senators would come back and take up the whole evening.
Sometimes, though rarely, he shut himself up and would see no one. Sometimes he would run away to a lecture, or concert, or theatre for the sake of a little rest.
He was very abstemious-ate less than any man I know. He drank nothing but water, not from principle but because he did not like wine or spirits.
Once, in rather dark days early in the war, a temperance committee came to him and said that the reason we did not win was because our army drank so much whiskey as to bring the curse of the Lord upon them. He said it was rather unfair on the part of the aforesaid curse, as the other side drank more and worse whiskey than ours did.
He read very little. He scarcely ever looked into a newspaper unless I called his attention to an article on some special subject. He frequently said, ‘I know more about it than any of them.’ It is absurd to call him a modest man. No great man was ever modest. It was his intellectual arrogance and unconscious assumption of superiority that men like Chase and Sumner never could forgive.
I believe that Lincoln is well understood by the people; but there is a patent-leather, kid-glove set who know no more of him than an owl does of a comet blazing into his blinking eyes.* Their estimates of him are in many causes disgraceful exhibitions of ignorance and prejudice. Their effeminate natures shrink instinctively from the contact of a great reality like Lincoln’s character. I consider Lincoln’s republicanism incarnate-with all its faults and all its virtues. As, in spite of some rudeness, republicanism is the sole hope of a sick world, so Lincoln, with all his foibles, is the greatest character since Christ.”

Quoted in Herndon’s Lincoln: A True Story of a Great Life Written by William H. Herndon and Jesse W. Weik, ed. Herndon-299-60