A Day with Young Abraham Lincoln in New Orleans, 1828
Time Surfing: Graphic History
Time Surfing: Experience History.
Historical Backdrop
In the spring of 1828, a nineteen-year-old Abraham Lincoln was hired by James Gentry, the richest man in Gentryville, Indiana, to help float a cargo of pork, bacon, corn meal, potatoes and flour down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers to New Orleans. His partner was Gentry’s son Allen, four years older. Lincoln was paid eight dollars a month and a steamboat ticket home. The boat was a “broadhorn” flatboat — a big unpainted wooden box, roughly sixty-five feet long, steered by a long sweep oar, moving only as fast as the current. Somewhere below Baton Rouge, at a sugar plantation landing, seven men boarded at night intending to rob them; Lincoln fought them off with a hickory club and carried a scar over his right eye for the rest of his life. Then came New Orleans: a city of about 46,000 people, the busiest port in the South. Lincoln had grown up in the backwoods of Indiana. He had never seen anything like it.
Date/time and location: Friday, May 16, 1828 — 4:40 a.m. — Mississippi River, about eighteen miles above New Orleans
You wake on top of a barrel-stack under a wet blanket, fog so thick you can’t see the bow. The river makes a low hiss along the gunwale. Your shirt is soaked through and it isn’t rain, it’s the air. Mosquitoes have been at your ankles all night. The gash over your right eye still pulls when you frown. You slide down barefoot onto the deck planks, take the sweep from Allen without a word, and lean into it. Somewhere off in the white, a dog barks on a levee you can’t see.
Date/time and location: Friday, May 16, 1828 — 6:15 a.m. — the German Coast sugar plantations, west bank above the city
The fog burns off in twenty minutes and the country changes. Cane fields run flat to the horizon behind grass levees. Whitewashed big houses sit back under live oaks with rows of low cabins strung out behind them like beads. A bell rings across the water. You watch fifty people file out into the rows with hoes, an overseer on horseback at the end of the line. Nobody looks up at your boat. Allen says something about the price of sugar. You don’t answer.
Date/time and location: Friday, May 16, 1828 — 8:05 a.m. — Nine Mile Point, above Carrollton
You hear the steamboat before you see her — a hammering thud and a shriek of escaping steam. She comes up around the point pushing a white bone of water, tall black chimneys throwing cinders, and passes close enough that you can see faces at the rail. Then her swell hits. The flatboat rolls, a barrel breaks its lashing, and the river comes over the gunwale in a sheet. You throw yourself on the loose barrel, wrestle it flat, and Allen bails with a wooden bucket, cursing steady and low.
Date/time and location: Friday, May 16, 1828 — 9:40 a.m. — the great bend, first sight of New Orleans
You come around the bend and the whole river ahead is fenced with masts. Ships two and three deep along four miles of levee, spars crossed like winter timber, and behind them a low brown-and-white city under a haze of coal smoke and cooking fires. Steam whistles. Church bells. A noise like a distant mill running. You have seen Louisville. This is not Louisville. You stand at the sweep with your mouth open a little and Allen laughs at you for it.
Date/time and location: Friday, May 16, 1828 — 10:25 a.m. — the flatboat landing, upper levee near Girod Street
