The Fiery Trial_ Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery - Eric Foner [9]
These trips must have been eye-opening for the young Lincoln. New Orleans, where he spent an undetermined amount of time in 1829 and a full month in mid-1831, was by far the largest city he had ever seen, with a population of some 50,000, including nearly 17,000 slaves and 12,000 free blacks. The diverse residents also included Creoles (descendants of French and Spanish colonial settlers), European immigrants, and Americans from every state. The French observer of American democracy Alexis de Tocqueville, who spent New Year’s Day of 1832 in New Orleans, six months after Lincoln’s second visit, took note of the city’s beautiful architecture, the “faces with every shade of color,” and what he deemed the “incredible laxity of morals” of the inhabitants. Every Sunday, the city’s vibrant black culture was on display at Congo Square, where slaves gathered for dancing, music-making, and other pastimes. The free black population included many propertied skilled artisans. The city’s back streets held numerous grog shops where slaves, free blacks, and whites mingled freely.18
Situated at the mouth of the Mississippi River, New Orleans was, after New York City, the country’s second busiest port, the major export center for the staple crops of the Mississippi Valley. In 1828, vessels from throughout the Atlantic world arrived there, including some 750 steamboats and over 1,000 flatboats. New Orleans was also a major center of the domestic slave trade. Slave pens were scattered throughout the business district, newspapers carried daily advertisements for slave sales, and slave auctions took place not only at the central slave market—a major tourist attraction—but also at numerous other places, including the luxurious St. Charles Hotel. It would have been almost impossible to spend time in New Orleans and not witness the buying and selling of slaves.19
John Hanks later claimed that on the second trip to New Orleans, “we saw negroes chained, maltreated, whipped and scourged. Lincoln saw it. His heart bled…. I can say knowingly that it was on this trip that he formed his opinions of slavery.” But, according to Lincoln’s recollection in 1860, Hanks left the crew in St. Louis and did not accompany the others to New Orleans. After Lincoln’s death, Hanks and Lincoln’s law partner William Herndon recounted that in later life, Lincoln did speak about these journeys and about the New Orleans slave market.20 The impact of these visits on Lincoln’s views of slavery, however, must remain a matter of speculation. His account of being assaulted by thieves is his only surviving reference to these two journeys. But the sight of slaves being bought and sold powerfully affected many a visitor to the South. Lincoln’s friend Orville H. Browning, an Illinois politician who had also been born in Kentucky, described his reaction to a slave sale in a diary entry in 1854:
Saw a negro sold at public auction in the court-house yard…. Although I am not sensible in any change in my views upon the abstract question of slavery, many of its features, that are no longer familiar, make a much more vivid impression of wrong than they did before I lived away from the influence of the institution.21
Lincoln had more to say about a subsequent encounter with slavery, which took place on an 1841 boat trip to St. Louis with his close friend Joshua Speed. The trip followed a visit to Farmington, the Speed family plantation near Louisville, where his hosts assigned a house slave to wait on their guest. Recovering from a period of depression after the temporary breakup of his relationship with Mary Todd, Lincoln remained for a month at Farmington. In September, he and Speed took a steamboat down the Ohio River to St. Louis, from where Lincoln returned to Springfield, Illinois,