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...
Time Surfing: Graphic History... Read it here.
