The Fiery Trial_ Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery - Eric Foner [8]
The historical record contains very little information about Lincoln’s early encounters with slavery or black persons. As a young child in Kentucky, he may have seen groups of chained slaves pass near his house on their way to the Lower South. He could not have had much direct contact with blacks in Indiana. In 1830, on the eve of the family’s departure for Illinois, the census reported no slaves and only fourteen free blacks in Spencer County, where the Lincolns lived. When he settled in Sangamon County, Illinois, the population of around 12,000 included only thirty-eight blacks. When Lincoln moved to Springfield in 1837, the town’s eighty-six blacks comprised less than 5 percent of its residents.14
Lincoln’s first real encounter with slavery—the heart of the institution, rather than its periphery—came on two journeys down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers in 1828 and 1831, when he helped transport farm goods for sale in New Orleans. Lincoln and his companions made the southbound voyage by flatboat and returned north by steamboat (although on the second occasion, Lincoln walked home from St. Louis). Their trip exemplified how the market revolution of the early nineteenth century was simultaneously consolidating the national economy and heightening the division between slave and free societies. In the North, the building of canals and the advent of steamboats and, later, railroads set in motion economic changes that created an integrated economy of commercial farms and growing urban and industrial centers. In the South, the market revolution, coupled with the military defeat and subsequent removal of the Native American population, made possible the westward expansion of the slave system and the rise of the great Cotton Kingdom of the Gulf states. Southern society reproduced itself as it moved westward, remaining slave-based and almost entirely agricultural, even as the North witnessed the emergence of a diversified, modernizing economy.15 Eventually, the clash between societies based on slave and free labor would come to dominate American life and shape the mature Lincoln’s political career.
This, however, lay far in the future when Lincoln made his two trips. The first began at the end of December 1828 when James Gentry, an Indiana storekeeper, hired the nineteen-year-old Lincoln to join Gentry’s son Allen in shipping a cargo of corn, oats, beans, and meat to New Orleans. The second trip, which started in April 1831, took place after Denton Offutt, an Illinois merchant, hired a crew including Lincoln, John Hanks (Lincoln’s mother’s cousin), and John D. Johnston (Lincoln’s stepbrother) to accompany him to New Orleans. These trips were among thousands that followed a similar route during this period, when the Old Northwest shipped its surplus farm produce downriver to be sold in New Orleans and then consumed on slave plantations or transported by sea to the Northeast or Europe.16
What did Lincoln see on these journeys, which covered over 2,000 miles round-trip? The Ohio and Mississippi rivers were alive with vessels of all kinds. Lincoln could not have avoided contact with slaves, who worked on the huge cotton and sugar plantations that lined the Mississippi and on docks and steamboats. There were also bands of black robbers who preyed on shipping. One night as their flatboat lay tied up at the riverbank, one such group