Section 47:  Thoughts on Tobacco

As far back as I have personal knowledge and recollection of my ancestors, they were chewers or smokers of tobacco. My grandfathers were chewers and my grandmothers smoked pipes as long as they lived. I don't know at how early a period they commenced. My Father chewed from the time he was a man and our Mother smoked from the time she was seventeen years of age till she died in her eighty-ninth year. It is not remarkable, therefore, that before I was fairly in the "teens" I had learned to chew tobacco. My appetite for it became very strong and I had not stronger powers of resistance than many others, but there was enough of brimstone in my disposition to induce me now and then to rebel against a slavish habit and I have a recollection of shutting down on the habit more than once before I left home to go to College, but still got back to it.

After I went to Cannonsburg I quit for two or three years. I think from when I was about 19 till perhaps 22. This probably caused my form to mature more perfectly than it would have done with the nicotine poison. I don't now recollect why I quit at that time, but usually when I quit it was caused by some little disgust and I seemed to enjoy a fight between a filthy habit and myself. And I think I never let up till I felt myself the master and till I was thirty I don't know why I returned to the habit after a longer or shorter abstinence; but after that age when I quit a year or two, I had a tendency to grow confident. After I came to live in Clarion I took a notion one day and broke short off and did not taste tobacco for more than five years. When I quit my weight was about 175 pounds. I had noticed myself growing fatter, but one day I happened to get weighed and found I had run up to 204 pounds, and being still a bachelor and feeling myself growing lubberly, I went right back to the tobacco.

I don't know how many times I quit after that, but generally I used the "weed" on till about 1870. About that time I was sitting one evening in the office trying to read and at the same time smoke a hard and strong old tobie. I recollect of pulling away at the old cigar and trying to read for a good while and made very poor progress at either, when a strong and sudden feeling of indignation took me and the old tobie went into the grate with a force that broke it all to pieces. I thought no more about it till next morning after breakfast when I thought of a cigar, and I thought well, you may starve a while. Well, the result was that I did not taste tobacco again for fifteen months and in that time I ran up in weight from 216 to 227 pounds, and so I thought I had better go to smoking again, which I did. I believe it reduced my weight some 10 or 15 pounds.

I then continued to smoke till about the first of April, 1888, when I again quit, and I found the appetite about as strong as it was when I was fifty years younger. I can't say that I know of any particular injury that tobacco did to me. My nerves are pretty good for one of my age and my appetite is regular, but still I might have been a stronger man with better intellect if I had never tasted the weed. But why any human being should use it is most extraordinary. The habit is filthy and disgusting to others. The first taste of it is nauseating and sickening to everyone and it requires some time to overcome the disgust and abominable taste of tobacco.