Off to New Orleans
Young Abe Lincoln went on several flatboat trips carrying produce down the Mississippi to New Orleans.
One of these trips made a deep and lasting impression upon him. In New Orleans, he visited the slave-market. There negro men, women, and children were bought, sold, and flogged. Wives were torn from their husbands, children from their mothers, and auctioned off like cattle.
The anguish of these scenes wrung Lincoln’s heartstrings. With quivering lips, he said, “If ever I get a chance to hit that thing, I will hit it hard.”
John Hanks, a relative who was with him at the slave-market, said in after years:—
“Lincoln saw it; his heart bled; said nothing much, was silent, looked bad. I can say it, knowing him, that it was on this trip that he formed his opinions of slavery. It run its iron into him, then and there.”