A NEW SALEM BONNET.
NEW ORLEANS IN 1831.
The raft over the New Salem dam, the party went on to New Orleans, reaching there in May, 1831, and remaining a month. It must have been a month of intense intellectual activity for Lincoln. Since his first visit, made with young Gentry, New Orleans had entered upon her “flush times.” Commerce was increasing at a rate which dazzled speculators, and drew them from all over the United States. From 1830 to 1840 no other American city increased in such a ratio; exports and imports, which in 1831 amounted to $26,000,000, in 1835 had more than doubled. The Creole population had held the sway so far in the city; but now it came into competition, and often into conflict, with a pushing, ambitious, and frequently unscrupulous native American party. To these two predominating elements were added Germans, French, Spanish, negroes, and Indians. Cosmopolitan in its make-up, the city was even more cosmopolitan in its life. Everything was to be seen in New Orleans in those days, from the idle luxury of the wealthy Creole to the organization of filibustering juntas. The pirates still plied their trade in the Gulf, and the Mississippi River brought down hundreds of river boatmen—one of the wildest, wickedest sets of men that ever existed in any city.
THE SITE OF NEW SALEM AS IT APPEARS TO-DAY.
Lincoln and his companions ran their boat up beside thousands of others. It was the custom to tie such craft along the river front where St. Mary’s Market now stands, and one could walk a mile, it is said, over the tops of these boats without going ashore. No doubt Lincoln went, too, to live in the boatmen’s rendezvous, called the “swamp,” a wild, rough quarter, where roulette, whiskey, and the flint-lock pistol ruled.
All of the picturesque life, the violent contrasts of the city, he would see as he wandered about; and he would carry away the sharp impressions which are produced when mind and heart are alert, sincere, and healthy.
In this month spent in New Orleans Lincoln must have seen much of slavery. At that time the city was full of slaves, and the number was constantly increasing; indeed, one-third of the New Orleans increase in population between 1830 and 1840 was in negroes. One of the saddest features of the institution was to be seen there in its most aggravated form—the slave market. The better class of slave-holders of the South, who looked on the institution as patriarchal, and who guarded their slaves with conscientious care, knew little, it should be said, of this terrible traffic. Their transfer of slaves was humane, but in the open markets of the city it was attended by shocking cruelty and degradation.
Lincoln witnessed in New Orleans for the first time the revolting sight of men and women sold like animals. Mr. Herndon says that he often heard Mr. Lincoln refer to this experience. “In New Orleans for the first time,” he writes, “Lincoln beheld the true horrors of human slavery. He saw ‘negroes in chains—whipped and scourged.’ Against this inhumanity his sense of right and justice rebelled, and his mind and conscience were awakened to a realization of what he had often heard and read. No doubt, as one of his companions has said, ‘slavery ran the iron into him then and there.’
“One morning, in their rambles over the city, the trio passed a slave auction. A vigorous and comely mulatto girl was being sold. She underwent a thorough examination at the hands of the bidders; they pinched her flesh, and made her trot up and down the room like a horse, to show how she moved, and in order, as the auctioneer said, that ‘bidders might satisfy themselves’ whether the article they were offering to buy was sound or not. The whole thing was so revolting that Lincoln moved away from the scene with a deep feeling of ‘unconquerable hate.’ Bidding his companions follow him, he said: ‘Boys, let’s get away from this. If ever I get a chance to hit that thing’ (meaning slavery), ‘I’ll hit it hard.’”