Chapter 1: First Exposure and Reaction to Slavery

In the spring of 1828, nineteen year old Abraham Lincoln is eager to escape the confines of his parent’s home in Pidgeon Creek, Indiana.

He gets a chance to do so when a local storekeeper, James Gentry, hires him to join his son on a voyage to New Orleans to sell a cargo of foodstuffs. The two lads build a flatboat and head out on a 1,222 mile journey down the river – returning three months later by steamboat.

Abe earns $24 for his efforts, but also experiences his first encounter with the slave trade in the city’s thriving “auction houses.”

Years later he recalls his impressions of what he saw in a letter to a lawyer friend:

I am naturally anti-slavery. If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong. I can not
remember when I did not so think and feel.