Breakfast with John Adams

A lot of books and articles describe John Adams as drinking hard cider each morning. Not many, however, cite a source for that factoid.

Cider researcher Mark Turdo looked into that statement and expressed skepticism on his Pommel Cyder blog because Adams mentioned cider in his diary only twice:

July 26, 1796
In conformity to the fashion I drank this Morning and Yesterday Morning, about a Jill of Cyder. It seems to do me good, by diluting and dissolving the Phlegm or the Bile in the Stomach.

July 28, 1796
I continue my practice of drinking a Jill of Cyder in the Morning and find no ill but some good Effect.

The first of those entries shows Adams drinking “a Jill of Cyder” for his health as something new and noteworthy. Two days later he was trying to “continue my practice” and make it a habit. And if it became a habit, he would no longer have had cause to write about it. So I’m not sure these entries say anything about Adam’s hard cider habits except that he did not commonly drink it in the morning before July 1796.

The source of the statement about Adams’s habitual cider-drinking was his great-grandson Charles Francis Adams, Jr.’s local history, published first in D. Hamilton Hurd’s History of Norfolk County (1884) and then in his own History of Braintree (1891). He stated:

In the cellars of the more well-to-do houses a barrel of cider was always on tap, and pitchers of it were brought up at every meal, and in the morning and evening. To the end of his life a large tankard of hard cider was John Adams’ morning draught before breakfast; and in sending directions from Philadelphia to her agent at Quincy, in 1799, Mrs. [Abigail] Adams takes care to mention that “the President hopes you will not omit to have eight or nine barrels of good late-made cider put up in the cellar for his own particular use.”

Charles Francis Adams, Jr., was not born until nine years after John Adams had died. His father knew the former President and edited his papers, so he could have passed on this information about cider-drinking in later life. By the late 1800s, prominent statesmen’s drinking habits were caught up in the cultural debate over temperance. But I think the statement seems reliable.

(The image above is a portrait of John Adams distributed in boxes of Kellogg’s Raisin Bran, Shredded Wheat, and 40% Bran Flakes in the mid-1940s. It comes courtesy of the Willard Digital Collections in Battle Creek.)