When Washington Was All One Tavern
As men wining with Mars expect to sup with Pluto, the drinking at the capital during the war was horrifying. The bars were overflowing with officers, and while, as “Orpheus C. Kerr” was saying of the civil-service corps, that spilling red ink was very different from spilling red blood, the novices in uniform were staining their new coats with port. Coming out of the West with the unique recommendation, “This gentleman from Kentucky never drinks,” President Lincoln had only the American standby, the ice-water pitcher, on his sideboard. And up to the last, even when the jubilation upon the war’s close made many a stopper fly out of the tabooed bottle, he could say: “My example never belied the position I took when I was a young man.” So he could reply to a New England women’s temperance deputation, probably believing the caricaturists who pictured “Old Abe” mint-juleping with the eagle.
“They would be rejoiced if they only knew how much I have tried to remedy this great evil.” Indeed, he was still “meddling” when he wrote and spoke against drunken habits in the army, especially among the officers.
“BREAK THE CRITTER WHERE SLIM!”
Lincoln’s letters to his generals would be a revelation of character if it were not already famed. He warns “Fighting Joe” Hooker, in June, 1863, “not to get entangled on the Rappahannock, like an ox jumped half over a fence and liable to be torn by dogs, front and rear, without a fair chance to give one way or kick the other.” Later: “Fight Lee, too, when opportunity offers. If he stays where he is, fret him—and fret him!” Finally: “If the head of Lee’s army is at Martinsburg, and the tail on the plank road between Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville, the critter must be slim somewhere; could you not break him there?”