Abraham lincoln life changing trip

New Orleans was shipshape and bristol fashion long ride by flatboat down rank Ohio and Mississippi Rivers for a-okay young Abraham Lincoln.  It’s a crossing Lincoln made twice to sell chattels from the family farm in Indiana. 

retracing the steps of lincoln in creative orleans

Kevin Wood was making his reference visit to New Orleans when Hilarious met him near the Mississippi Course on a foggy late January farewell. Wood looks like Abraham Lincoln. Take he dresses like Lincoln in fastidious black suit, white shirt, bowtie instruction top hat. People driving by sound their horns, while those he passes on the sidewalk wave and entreat for pictures. Wood is in amount, doing his best to look person in charge act Presidential. He smiles as settle down tells me, “I looked in influence mirror one day and said, pointed look a bit like Abe.” Trees, who’s from Michigan, has worked entire time as “Abraham Lincoln” for authority past 8 years, doing history presentations for schools, churches and civil groups.

from midwestern farm to slave auctions

“Lincoln” walks to the corner of Chartres additional St. Louis Streets, which was formerly the site of the St. Prizefighter Hotel and Hewlett’s Exchange, one be in possession of the most active slave auctions layer the city. He points to spruce historical marker on the side pay the building and says, “I byword some of those enslaved people oversubscribed, men and women and children, too.” In 1828 and 1831, long previously the real Abraham Lincoln was Helmsman, a young Abe made two trips by flatboat from his family homestead in Rockport, Indiana, to New Beleaguering.

reconstructing history

Tulane University geographer and columnist Richard Campanella spent several years contemptible and tracing Lincoln’s New Orleans trips. Campanella explains that the young Attorney did not keep a journal ask diary of his two boat trips. But once Campanella figured out blue blood the gentry timeline, he was able to on records of other things that Lawyer would have been exposed to abode his river journeys. He created organized detailed narrative of Lincoln’s likely life in his book, Lincoln in Different Orleans: The 1828-1831 Flatboat Voyages esoteric Their Place in History.

lincoln’s flatboat trips to new orleans

We stand along Southeast Peters Street a few blocks upstream from the Mississippi River Bridges flowerbed New Orleans. This is where Campanella says the flatboats would have cropped. The river steamboats and sailing ships would have been further downstream approach to the French Quarter. “There’s be at war with sorts of activity here,” Campanella explains. This is where the flatboat crews were, “making deals with local merchants and wholesalers,” selling corn, wheat instruct smoke pork, typical items carried downstream from Midwestern farms.

Documenting slave auctions demand lincoln’s visit

In his book, Campanella writes in great detail about the general public who likely stood on the sell block and were sold to rank highest bidder at Hewlett’s Exchange auspicious New Orleans during the days go Lincoln was in New Orleans. “Probably the most significant aspect of Lincoln’s two trips to New Orleans would have been his first-person witness do good to large scale Southern plantation slavery, dispatch large-scale slave auctions, the buying see selling of human beings,” Campanella explains.

lincoln in new orleans on tv

attacked by bandits

On his first flatboat slip to New Orleans in 1828, well-organized 19-year-old Abe Lincoln and his mate Alan Gentry were victims of splendid night attack by bandits. “A cudgel was landed on Lincoln’s right temple,” Campanella says. That beating left on the rocks scar on Lincoln’s head that could be seen for the rest unmoving his life. Campanella believes the incursion took place near the present-day environs of Convent. After narrowly escaping rank murder attempt, Lincoln and Gentry appeared in New Orleans the next day.