CHAPTER IX.

THE FLATBOAT.

A Trading Voyage-Life in the Southern States-First View of Human Slavery-1828.

ABE LINCOLN had made himself the best known and most popular young fellow in all the region round about Gentryville; but although the whole country liked him, he did not at all like the country. He was now nineteen years of age, but was still subject to his father's authority, and Tom Lincoln was not the man to surrender his legal right to the wages of his stalwart son. All rates for farm-labor were low, however, and there was none too much of it to be sold, at any price, in a community where most men could do all their own work and have ample time left for lounging at neighboring cabins or around the village grocery.

Abe had long since given up the idea of earning a living behind the counter of Jones's store, or any other that he knew of. He was under bonds to his father, but he made an attempt to obtain employment as a boat-hand on the river. His age was against him in his first effort, but his opportunity was coming to him. In the month of March, 1828, he hired himself to Mr. Gentry, the great man of Gentryville. His duties were to be mainly performed at Gentry's Landing, near Rockport, on the Ohio River. There was a great enterprise on foot, or rather in the water, at Gentry's Landing, for a flatboat belonging to the proprietor was loading with bacon and other produce for a trading trip down the Mississippi to New Orleans. She was to be under the command of young Allen Gentry, but would never return to the Ohio, for flatboats are built to go down with the stream and not for pulling against it.

Abe's hour for travel and adventure had at last arrived. He was given the position of "bow-hand," at eight dollars a month and rations, with a paid return-passage home on a steamboat. It was a golden vision indeed, yet not so much for the money as for the grand trip itself.

There was society at the "Landing;" and while the boat was taking on her cargo, her tall bow-hand improved his opportunities.

Miss Roby, whom he had known at Crawford's school, and through whom he had saved the spelling-class from disaster, was deeply interested in the success of that flatboat. Not a great while after the completion of its one voyage she became Mrs. Allen Gentry, and even now she found excuses and occasions for coming on board to chat with the captain and with his queer, fun-loving "crew."

"Abe," she said, late one afternoon, "the sun's going down." "Reckon not," said Abe. "We're coming up, that's all." "Don't you s'pose I've got eyes?"

"Reckon so; but it's the earth that goes round. The sun · keeps as still as a tree. When we're swung around so we can't see him any more, all the shine's cut off and we call it night." "Abe, what a fool you are!"

It was all in vain to explain the matter any further. The science of astronomy had not been taught at Crawford's, and was not at all popular in Indiana. Whatever sprinkling of it Abe had found among his books, there was no use in trying to spread its wild vagaries along the banks of the Ohio River. He knew altogether too much for his time, and a mere flatboatman had no business to dispute the visible truth concerning the daily habits of a contrivance so well known as the sun.

The flatboat was cast loose from her moorings in April, and swept away down the river, with Abraham Lincoln as manager of the forward oars. No such craft ever had a longer or stronger pair of arms pledged to keep her blunt nose well directed.

They drifted down the Ohio into the Mississippi, and on down for hundreds of crooked miles, borne swiftly by the muddy, irresistible current. It was a matter both of skill and toil to effect a stoppage at a landing for trading purposes; but the required visits were made from place to place, and the young merchants met with very encouraging success. The worst enemy they had to contend with was counterfeit money, for they were no experts in detecting the quality of either coin or paper. In fact, there was so much more bad money than good in circulation up and down the Mississippi that a withdrawal of all the spurious stuff at any one time would have caused a disastrous contraction of the currency. The all but universal custom was to take what came and to pass it again without inquiry, unless it were too hopelessly defective in its external appearance.

It was a trip full of life-long consequences to Abraham Lincoln. Now again, for the first time since, a mere child, he had emigrated from Kentucky, the budding statesman came in contact with human slavery. He had seen much of what could be done with white men in their degradation by poverty, ignorance, and intemperance. He was now to observe the effect of all these upon black human beings held as property and not regarded as men and women. He was in a fair state of preparation for such a study. Already, with patient care, he had written an essay on Temperance, the publication of which in a country newspaper at a distance had stirred his young ambition to fever heat. He had followed that with another, the leading idea of which was the necessity of general popular education; and this too had been printed. In these he had worked out and presented the results of his studies of human life among his neighbors. He was now to begin his training and preparation for yet other essays which he was to print, and for speeches which he was to deliver, in the great and terrible years that were to come.

He was not to see the sunny side of plantation-life, such as

it was. Slavery came before him in the shape of negroes under the whip, engaged in loading and unloading river craft, or toiling in unpaid drudgery among the hot fields along the banks. He saw negroes chained in coffles, on their way to and from the market, and he saw them bought and sold like cattle in the slave-mart at New Orleans. Only the unpleasant, the brutally offensive features of the black curse were permitted to make their impression upon him, and the brand they left was an ineffaceable scar.

All that was upon his inner boy, indeed, but it was to be in a manner supplemented and represented by a mark in the body he occupied. At the plantation of Madame Bushane, six miles below Baton Rouge, the flatboat was moored for the night against the landing, and the keepers were sound asleep in their little kennel of a cabin. They slept until the sound of stealthy footsteps on the deck aroused Allen Gentry, and he sprang to his feet. There could be no doubt as to the cause of the disturbance. A gang of negroes had boarded the boat for plunder, and they would think lightly enough, now they were discovered, of knocking the two traders on the head and throwing them into the river.

"Bring the guns, Abe!" shouted Allen. "Shoot them!"

The intruders were not to be scared away by even so alarming an outcry; and in an instant more Abe Lincoln was among them, not with a gun but with a serviceable club. They fought well, and one of them gave their tall enemy a wound, the scar of which he carried with him to his grave; but his strength and agility were too much for them. He beat them all off the boat, not killing any one man, but convincing the entire party that they had boarded the wrong "broad-horn."

The trip lasted about three months, going and coming, and in June the two adventurers were at home again, well satisfied with their success. Allen Gentry had profited the more largely in the mere matter of money, but his bow-hand had brought back with him treasures of information; of experience

and education, gathered all the way from the mouth of Anderson's Creek, on the Ohio, to the very borders of the Gulf of Mexico. The whole country and the world itself was yet to be the better and the wiser for Abraham Lincoln's schooling in his slow summer voyage down the Mississippi and up again. Little he then dreamed that he was yet to direct the course of fleets on that same water, of armies along the winding shores, and the sieges of strong forts upon the bluffs and headlands.

His lessons were not all dark ones, doubtless, but the shadows upon his face were deepening with so much to think of, and there was small probability that he would again settle cheerfully down to the dull and empty life of the Little Pigeon Creek neighborhood.