Abraham Lincoln in Bourbon Country

Abraham Lincoln, the 16th president of the United States, was born in Kentucky, where his father was a seasonal distillery hand. One of today's better bourbons, Knob Creek, was named after the site of that distillery. As a young man in Illinois, Lincoln applied for and received a state license to sell liquor, and he operated several taverns. As a politician during the period when anti-alcohol forces were gaining strength, Lincoln often straddled the fence on that issue. Here is the story of Abraham Lincoln's connection with bourbon whiskey.

The Abraham Lincoln Birthplace is one of the most popular tourist sites in Kentucky. It is a National Historic Site operated by the National Park Service. The Birthplace is slightly phony, since the cabin it features is from the right site and era, but there is no evidence that Lincoln was born there or that it ever even belonged to the Lincoln family.

The park comprises Thomas Lincoln's Sinking Spring Farm, 348 acres of stony land that Thomas and Nancy Lincoln bought in December of 1808 for $200. Nancy was already pregnant with the future president at the time.

In 1811, because of title problems with the Sinking Spring farm, the Lincolns moved 10 miles northeast to a similar place on Knob Creek. "My earliest recollection is of the Knob Creek place," wrote President Lincoln of his childhood home in Kentucky. He lived there for five years, until he was seven years old.

In those days, if you followed tiny Knob Creek for about a mile, down to the point where it joins the Rolling Fork, you came to a small distillery. Lincoln's father worked there when he wasn't tending the family farm. On many days, little Abraham would carry his father's meals to him at the distillery and sometimes stayed to help out with odd jobs around the plant. Thomas Lincoln's duties probably included barrel making and other carpentry.

After Lincoln started to attend the local school, Knob Creek very nearly changed history when little Abe fell into the rain-swollen stream and almost drowned. He was rescued by a schoolmate named Austin Gollaher.

A "replica" of that second Lincoln family cabin stands on part of the old Knob Creek farm site, at White City on US 31E. The distillery site is a little north of there on the same highway.

The founder of the distillery on Knob Creek was Waddie Boone, a "near relative" of Daniel Boone. Many locals claim that Waddie Boone and Stephen Ritchie were Kentucky's first distillers, starting in 1780, but just about every part of eastern and central Kentucky claims that title for a different favorite son. When Thomas Lincoln worked there, the distillery was owned by Waddie's oldest son, Charles. The plant's master distiller was "Uncle" Johnnie Boone, Waddie's second son. According to legend (and this one gets a big grain of salt), one of these Boones predicted great things for young Abe and said that "if he goes into the whiskey business, he will be the best distiller in the land."

After the Lincolns moved to Indiana, the Boones moved their distillery operation closer to Bardstown. It was the son of Charles Boone, also named Charles, who operated the later Boone & Brothers Distillery near Bardstown. A subsequent distillery on the old Knob Creek site was owned by J.M. Atherton and the site is now called Athertonville. Brown-Forman may have owned a distillery there at some point and so, probably, did the Dant family. (It may have been the same distillery in all four cases, as they changed hands often.)

All of this may seem like a pretty thin basis for naming a bourbon Knob Creek, but that is what Jim Beam did when the company created Knob Creek Kentucky Straight Bourbon Whiskey a few years ago. Knob Creek is, at nine years, the oldest Beam whiskey you can buy. It is bottled at 100 proof in a 750 ml flask-type bottle. It has been the most successful of the four "Small Batch" bourbons marketed by Beam.

Lincoln’s stint as a liquor retailer

From Kentucky, the Lincolns moved west to Indiana. Part of the purchase price for their Kentucky farm was paid in whiskey, which Thomas probably resold for cash or traded for something that was a little easier to carry. Nancy Lincoln died when Abe was about 10 and Thomas soon remarried. The family lived in Indiana until Abe was 21, then moved to Illinois, where Lincoln lived until he became president. Thomas and his second wife settled on a farm in Decatur and Abe took a job in New Salem, near Springfield, as a clerk at Offutt's General Store.

In 1832, Lincoln ran for the state legislature and lost. After that election, he and two partners applied to the state for a retail liquor license and opened a tavern in New Salem. Lincoln lived in the back room. He may also have worked briefly in a distillery during that period. Among other things, Lincoln's liquor license prohibited him from selling whiskey to "Negroes, Indians, or children."

Later, Lincoln and William Berry (who was apparently the senior partner in the enterprise) bought two more taverns. Because of the later influence of the temperance movement, all three establishments are euphemistically referred to as "groceries" or "general stores" in most Lincoln biographies, but there is little doubt that brandy, whiskey, wine and rum were the major products sold, and there probably was a bar on the premises for immediate consumption.

At least one former clerk reported that liquor was the only thing they sold, at least during part of that period. Lincoln continued in this profession, also functioning as a postmaster and doing some surveying, until he became a lawyer in 1837 and moved to Springfield. He was elected to congress in 1847 and won the presidency in 1860.

Unfortunately for Lincoln the tavern keeper, and for the rest of the whiskey industry, this same period saw the birth and growth in America of a temperance movement that eventually led to national prohibition. In those days, drinking – especially in taverns – was an activity almost exclusively male while the temperance movement's membership was primarily female. The abolitionist movement (the effort to abolish slavery), the temperance movement, and the eventual women's rights movement were all different aspects of a broader social movement, and shared many leaders and partisans.

Lincoln’s stand on temperance

Since the new Republican Party, of which Lincoln was a founding member, was based in large part on opposition to slavery, Lincoln had to at least appear sympathetic to the movement's other major issue, the temperance cause, despite his personal background. Many of his public statements on the subject are carefully hedged, although he appears to have been a temperance supporter for the most part.

He never actually joined a temperance society, but he personally did not drink except for an occasional "drop of champagne, just to be civil." At least that is what he claimed. There is no evidence to the contrary and abstinence seems consistent with what we know of Lincoln's personality. As president, Lincoln signed a temperance declaration that had already been adopted by most of his predecessors in that office.

In Lincoln's time, the temperance movement was mostly about just that, temperance rather than prohibition. Total prohibition of alcoholic beverages only became the movement's goal in the decades after Lincoln's death, culminating in the passage and ratification of the 18th Amendment in 1919.

During his political career, before the Civil War overshadowed temperance as an issue, Lincoln gave many speeches at temperance society meetings. He preached against the evils of alcohol, but mainly advocated education, not government regulation. He believed people would stop abusing alcohol if they appreciated the benefits of a sober lifestyle. In other words, he was more an advocate of sobriety than an opponent of alcohol.

One close associate of Lincoln's who did not agree with him about whiskey was General Ulysses S. Grant, who President Lincoln eventually placed in command of the Union army and who is generally credited with winning the war for the North. Grant was a notorious consumer of Kentucky Bourbon Whiskey, for which he was often criticized. Responding to that criticism, at the height of the war, Lincoln supposedly asked what brand of whiskey Grant preferred, so he could send some of it to all of his other generals. (Grant is said to have favored Old Crow.)

Grant's biggest trouble with whiskey had nothing to do with his drinking habit, however. During his own tenure as president, many of Grant's closest aides (though not Grant himself) were implicated in a scandal known as the Whiskey Ring.

With regard to whiskey, Lincoln was very much a product of his times. During his childhood on what was still virtually the frontier, distilling was practiced (and its products consumed) by almost everyone. As a young man, Lincoln retailed whiskey and other liquors, a profitable and entirely respectable business at the time.

As his legal and political career developed, he adopted and promoted the new view that whiskey appeared to do more harm than good. He advocated what we today would call responsible, moderate drinking, even though he personally abstained. In these small ways, as in so many others, Lincoln stood at the crossroads of history and anticipated much about the America that was to come.