(This is a reprint from January of 2014.)
Recently, while giving some Atlanta friends a brief tour of New Orleans, I asked the teenagers in the back seat, “Did you know Abraham Lincoln came to our city?” They didn’t.
Most people don’t.
The teacher in me kicked into overdrive. I love telling people things about our city they didn’t know. And if it involves a celebrity–modern or ancient–so much the better.
Lincoln came twice, once in 1828 when he was 19 and again in 1831, at the age of 22.
In those days, people would built flatboats upriver and float down the Mississippi bringing crafts or produce to our city. Once here, they would peddle their cargo, tear up the boat and sell it for firewood, then walk around for a couple of days and “see the elephant,” as they called it. Eventually, people from Illinois would book passage back to St. Louis on a paddlewheeler and walk the rest of the distance back home.
The first time, Lincoln came as a helper for his boss’ son, and the second time he may have been in charge himself.
Professor Richard Campanella of Tulane University has written Lincoln in New Orleans, published in 2010 by the University of Louisiana at Lafayette Press. It’s the best and most complete thing ever written on the subject, I feel confident in saying. Subtitle: The 1828-1831 flatboat voyages and their place in history.
This is not a review of the book, even though I’m fascinated by it. (In truth, the book is so dense, with tons of interesting insights on every page, reading it is a slow process.) What I find most fascinating, however, is that Campanella tells us where the flatboat probably docked, where Lincoln and his friend may have stayed, which slave auction they may have watched.
I walked today where Lincoln walked. Sort of.
You know where Canal Street hits the Mississippi River. That would have been “city center.” However, flatboats were not allowed to come in that close, but had to tie up a mile or so upriver. Close in were the steamboats, with two or three new ones arriving daily, according to Professor Campanella. Further downriver you found the larger, ocean-going masted ships. This was one busy place.
Slaves were auctioned at numerous places in what we now call the French Quarter. Hewlett’s Exchange on Chartres Street, being the biggest, was the one most likely to have drawn in out-of-towners wishing to see this cruel spectacle. Campanella thinks Lincoln and his friends would have gone there.
I’ve walked the French Quarter, from one side to the other. Back in the 1960s, we seminary students preached on Decatur Street, right in the middle of what is now the grandest tourist section of the area but which back then was run down, seedy, and scary.