Abraham Lincoln in the Kitchen Read online

  It is hard to imagine the magnitude of the river of food that connected Lincoln’s central Illinois world to New Orleans. During the 1830s travelers wrote home from the bustling delta city, telling of hundreds of flatboats choking the levee at this “most wonderful place in the world.” One observer wrote that, as far as the eye could see, the Mississippi River bank was “lined with flat-boats, come from above, from every part of the Valley of the Mississippi. Some are laden with flour, others with corn, others with meat of various kinds, others with live stock, cattle, hogs, horses, or mules.” In 1831, one of those flatboats was built and piloted by Abraham Lincoln.

  The plan was for Lincoln, his stepbrother John Johnston, and cousin John Hanks to take the boat down to New Orleans and sell the goods. Offutt would travel aboard as a passenger. But when the three crewmen met up, as planned, with Offutt in Springfield in early March, he had bad news. The man he had hired to build the flatboat over the winter hadn’t shown up. So the flatboat crew instantly became boatbuilders.

  Lincoln had built boats before. Back in Indiana days, he had built a small scow to ferry travelers across the Ohio River and sometimes just halfway out, hailing passing steamboats that would then pause in midriver for the passengers to come aboard. On one trip, his two customers each tossed a silver half-dollar into his boat. He recalled that “the world seemed wider and fairer” now that he had earned a whole dollar.

  Lincoln had made an earlier flatboat trip down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers, too. In 1828, when he was just nineteen, he and Alan Gentry, the son of the local Indiana merchant, built a flatboat for a similar trade journey. Gentry no doubt had a store filled with the agricultural products he acquired bartering with area farmers. He needed to convert them into cash so he could restock the store with goods he would purchase in New Orleans, St. Louis, or other cities to the south or east. What was on Gentry’s flatboat? Indiana newspapers reported on the cargoes shipped from the area just two years earlier: bushels of corn, bacon hams, barrels of [salt] pork, barrels of cornmeal, live cattle, live chickens, bushels of oats, beeswax, beans, and venison hams.

  Did Lincoln spend much time in New Orleans on this first trip? It is hard to say. He wrote in his 1860 campaign biography that the nature of the cargo “made it necessary for them to linger and trade along the Sugar coast.” This region south of Baton Rouge including Iberville and Ascension Parishes was the most densely populated, most cultivated hundred-mile region of the Mississippi River. Here Lincoln and Gentry presumably sold most of their goods trading directly with plantations along the river. They may have spent just a few days, possibly more, in the city before boarding a steamboat to hurry back home.

  Now, three years later, in the spring of 1831, Lincoln planned to go all the way to New Orleans. Some writers suggest he was considering relocating there and spending the winter gainfully employed cutting wood. But before he and the others could do anything, they had to build the flatboat. Lincoln, Johnston, and Hanks set up camp at Sangamo Town on the Sangamon River, northwest of Springfield. Hanks explained in an interview with William Herndon, “We made a shantee shed. Abe was elected cook” during the four weeks it took to build the boat.

  No one knows exactly what Lincoln’s flatboat looked like—how long it was or how wide. Most flatboats were set up with a house-like structure above the cargo decking. The crew would stand on its roof and steer the way downstream with a rudder at the back and substantial poles, or sweeps, as long as twenty feet or more, attached on the sides. Hanks did give a hint of a description to Herndon: “We kept our victuals & in fact slept down in the boat—at one End—went down by a kind of ladder through a scuttle hole.”

  Neither do we know what cargo Offutt loaded aboard to make his fortune in New Orleans. Hanks told Herndon, “I saw it loaded with bacon, pork and corn.” But we don’t know if that corn was still on the cob, loose kernels, or even cornmeal. One report suggested they carried barrels of salt pork, flour, and cornmeal from Bogue’s Mill. Hanks also mentioned that live hogs were along for the journey. Flatboats could carry an impressive amount of cargo. Filled with barrels of goods weighing between one hundred and two hundred pounds, the total load could be somewhere between twenty-five and one hundred tons.

  No one really knows the experience Lincoln and the others had on the river. Today’s Mississippi, transformed and tamed by the Army Corps of Engineers, is no match for the wild, uncontrolled river of the 1830s with its treacherous snags of half-submerged trees, sunken wrecks of exploded steamboats, and flood-shifting shorelines.

  As a modern-day traveler, on trips to Iowa from the east, I drive across the river on the high I-80 bridge at the Quad Cities of Illinois and Iowa. From the vantage point of the bridge, I can look down and see barges loaded with grain pushing gently along downriver, pausing to pass through the locks and dams. The occasional tourist steamboat paddles along upriver. Recreational motorboats create glistening wakes going in both directions and sometimes bank to bank.

  The 1830s river traffic was dramatically different. Then, the only mechanical sounds would have come from steamboats heading north and south, “dashing through the water with the noise of thunder and vomiting forth columns of smoke.” The downward course of the river was crowded with many more boats, and most of them were simply carried along at three or four miles per hour on their way south.

  How do you capture the experience of this on-the-water community? Surrounded by homemade flatboats of all sizes and descriptions, Lincoln and his boat-mates would have seen, heard, and smelled all the cargoes. Cattle, pigs, and chickens would have been lowing, squealing, and clucking their way to market. It took a month to six weeks for the Sangamon, Illinois, and Mississippi Rivers to carry Offutt’s crew and goods to what was then America’s most sophisticated city.

  The trip would have been an adventure. Lincoln, Hanks, Johnston, and Offutt eased into the Mississippi by first navigating the more lightly traveled Sangamon and Illinois Rivers. These waterways provided the men with a chance to hone their boat-handling skills. The winter of 1830–31 had been particularly harsh. Old-timers referred to it as the “winter of the deep snow.” Spring melted the snow into torrents of water, and all the rivers were at flood stage, spreading out over forest and farmland. Currents would have been strong when the flatboat swept into the Mississippi from the Illinois and even more turbulent when other large rivers joined the Mississippi, especially the Missouri from the west and the Ohio from the east. Lincoln, Johnston, and Hanks would have been pulling hard on the sweeps to keep from being dashed into the shore or colliding with another boat.

  Having been “elected cook” for the meals on shore, it makes sense that Abraham continued to cook during the journey. Their meals in camp and on board were probably simple, quickly cooked from cheap ingredients that were easy to carry along or get as they traveled—corn dodgers, catfish caught with a line dangled over the side of the boat, biscuits. They may have dipped into a barrel of apples taken along to sell or even had a bit of smoked ham. Local boys had helped build the flatboat, and maybe one of their mothers took pity on the crew and sent along some tasty gingerbread as a treat.

  Both the steamboats and the flatboats traveling on the river needed to buy, or barter for, fresh food. Fortunately it was readily available. As one steamboat passenger reported: “Provisions are very good—fresh eggs, butter, and milk are got every day on the banks of the river at the stopping places for wood.” Most boats pulled in for the night, too, as river travel was dangerous in the dark. They stopped either along the shore or at town landings, where travelers could step off and even eat at restaurants or gamble and dance at the nineteenth-century versions of honky-tonk halls.

  As the Mississippi River carried the flatboat closer and closer to New Orleans, more and more vessels crowded into the widening river. By the time Offutt and his crew reached the levee, the river was nearly paved with flatboats, tied up three and four deep and ready to sell their cargo.

  More than any other American harbo
r in the 1830s and ’40s, New Orleans was the dynamic and profitable nexus between the products of the Old World and the agricultural riches of the New. The skyline to the south of New Orleans was forested with the masts of scores of sailing ships bearing spices from the Far East, fresh and exotic fruits from Cuba and the West Indies, and fancy goods from England and Europe. Cargoes from around the world were harbored just outside the city crescent.

  Steamships, which had only come into widespread, practical use in the previous decade, were the powerful connection that made this exchange of riches and resources possible. Flatboats drifted down the river and, because they could not float back upstream, were sold for scrap lumber. Sailing vessels needed a fair wind and enough open water to tack toward their destination, and they did head back across the seas, their holds filled with cotton for English textile mills. But the steamboats, loaded with prize cargoes of sugar, molasses, spices, china, and manufactured goods—all paid for by the sale of upriver crops and foodstuffs—could set and keep a time schedule, steaming northward against the current at five to eight miles per hour.

  Abraham Lincoln stepped off the flatboat sometime in May of 1831 with his pay in his pocket and ready to explore. So now, we’re at the meat of his coming-of-age experience, and that’s all we know. Lincoln never wrote or said a word about his time in New Orleans.

  Luckily, some other young men, just about Lincoln’s age, did write about their adventures on the Mississippi and in New Orleans. Local boosters described the wonders of the city to entice travelers. And we can see the influence the sights and experiences had on Lincoln in his first campaign presentation to the “People of Sangamon County,” written just a year after he made the trip. He speaks of the need for transportation improvements including railroads. One of the first rail lines in the country opened up between New Orleans and Lake Pontchartrain in the month before he arrived.

  Still, we’ll just have to imagine how New Orleans affected Lincoln and make some educated choices from the menu of options the city had to offer. Stand next to the statue of Andrew Jackson in the square that bears his name. Turn your back to the levee and look at the Cathedral of St. Louis. Squint your eyes to blur the modern world from view. You will begin to see the New Orleans that Abraham Lincoln saw: the cathedral, built thirty years before Lincoln’s visit; the essential New Orleans architecture; and the French Quarter’s narrow streets and alleys. Close your eyes and stand in front of an open-air restaurant. Feel the atmosphere, the heavy air perfumed with alluvial and fishy river aromas, sweet flowers, and the delightful seasonings of some of the best cooking in the world. Breathe in New Orleans.

  As complex as this atmosphere is, I think Lincoln’s would have been even richer. In your mind, try to subtract the sharp smell of gasoline that hovers over our modern age and add the rich, heavy aroma of manure from horses on the streets and livestock on the flatboats, the cooking smells from the backyard ovens and smoky fires from scores of surrounding households, all cloaked in the clinging, rising dust from partially unpaved back streets. Eternal, essential New Orleans is here. One youthful traveler wrote in 1830: “No city contains a greater population. Inhabitants from every state in the union, and from every country in Europe mixed with the Creoles, and all the shades of the colored population, form an astonishing contrast of manners, languages, and complexions.”

  Conversations in the streets were a Babel of all those native tongues: French, Spanish, Portuguese, German, English. Complexions were even more varied than the languages. All shades of people walked the streets, and it is here that Lincoln must have had an immediate and stunning immersion into a slave society. Several sets of statistics during the period represent the population of just under thirty thousand as roughly one-half white, one-quarter free persons of color, and one-quarter slave. It would have been hard for Lincoln to miss slave auctions. James Stuart visited New Orleans in March and April of 1830, the year before Lincoln’s trip. He reported the sales of nearly one thousand African American men, women, and children forced to exchange one experience of slavery for another.

  Slave labor, from street sweepers to household helpers, would have been a constant presence, too. Ever-observant Lincoln would have had the opportunity to see all manners of relationships between slaves and their owners. Slave hands prepared much of the city’s food.

  What was the flavor of Lincoln’s time in New Orleans? Did he stay on the flatboat eating catfish and corn dodgers, or did he decide to spend some of his earnings (Offutt had paid him more than twelve dollars) to take a room in a boardinghouse on the American side of the canal, west of the French Quarter? I can’t help but think that he got off the river as soon as he could and began wandering wherever his long legs would take him.

  Certainly Lincoln would have explored the public markets. The city vegetable-market building was finished just a year before he arrived. Open on the sides, the building fronted on Old Levee, St. Philip, and Ursuline Streets and the river. Handsome plastered brick columns supported its tiled roof. Inside, vendors sold all manner of vegetables and fruits from local farms—peas, strawberries, cabbages, sweet potatoes, onions, rice, carrots, lettuce—as well as tropical fruits from the West Indies. The open-air meat market had been completed in 1813. Its “rusticated Doric order” columns supported a slate-covered roof on the levee between St. Ann and Main Streets. In addition to the usual beef, mutton, lamb, chickens, turkeys, wild game, and pork of all varieties, Lincoln may have discovered another local ingredient: “The barred owl is very often exposed for sale in the New Orleans market. The Creoles make a gumbo of it and pronounce the flesh palatable.”

  Those were some of the raw ingredients. Seafood would have been abundant, too. Maybe Lincoln had his first taste of oysters in New Orleans. He ate them later in Illinois. Discarded oyster shells were found in buried trash areas around his Springfield home. They were famously served to celebrate the success of the Sangamon Long Nine—a group of very tall state legislators, including Lincoln, from Sangamon County—upon their success in passing legislation to move the state capital from Vandalia to Springfield in September 1837. At a party hosted by the Long Nine at Capp’s Tavern, other members of the legislature were treated to oysters, almonds, raisins, cigars, and eighty-one bottles of champagne.

  Today’s classic New Orleans cuisine is a mix of Cajun and Creole. You can’t go to a New Orleans restaurant without having a delicious choice of gumbo and jambalaya. Rich coffee and beignets, too. Recipes for gumbo and okra begin to appear in published cookbooks in the 1830s. Midwestern agricultural writer Solon Robinson shared a recipe for “Hopping Johnny or Jambalaya” in the May 1845 American Agriculturist.

  The foods and dishes Lincoln sampled would have been as varied as the cultural opportunities before him. Aromas from the cuisines of the French, Spanish, Germans, Portuguese, and other nationalities who made New Orleans their home would have perfumed the streets. We know that in his Indiana youth Abraham had tasted ginger and probably cinnamon and nutmeg. Sage and red peppers were commonly grown and used to season meat dishes even on pioneer farms. But what about oregano, basil, tomatoes, okra, turmeric, cumin, coriander? Oranges, lemons, and pineapples were as common in New Orleans as wild plums were in Illinois. Would fruit-loving Lincoln have tasted his first piece of citrus?

  Rich cultural opportunities and the latest in technological advances were there for Lincoln’s eyes and mind to feast upon, too. The first railway west of the Allegheny Mountains had recently started its run between New Orleans and Lake Pontchartrain. It used a horse-drawn locomotive to make the four-mile trip, but there was a demonstration model of a steam engine very near the levee. Certainly Lincoln, with his abiding interest in “discoveries, inventions, and improvements,” would have spent time looking at that. The American Theater was performing. Would he have seen his first real play? He had enjoyed a magician’s show in Sangamo Town during the time he and his crewmates were building the boat. New Orleans was filled with news. It had several local newspapers and a fre
e public reading room with newspapers from around the country and overseas, as well as books. Surely knowledge-hungry Abraham could have visited. Restaurants, bars, taverns, bakeries, and other shops lined the streets. Lincoln must have taken it all in.

  The dish I’ve pulled from the countless possibilities may surprise you. I’ve not picked one of the Creole traditions, but rather a curry. This is a meat-stretching dish a boardinghouse cook seeking to please English and American guests might serve. Poured over a base of Louisiana rice, curry would be cheap and filling. And it represents to me the amalgam of Lincoln’s experience here. Exotic seasonings and tropical fruits combine with homegrown chicken and rice to make a wonderful dish.

  After a couple of weeks, sometime in June, the men decided to return to Illinois. Lincoln, Johnston, and Offutt boarded a steamboat to make the journey home at a speedy eight miles per hour. John Hanks had left the flatboat earlier when they stopped in St. Louis to scout for new Lincoln/Hanks farm locations in southern Illinois. Lincoln and Johnston certainly traveled as deck passengers, riding along on the sheltered top deck of the boat instead of in staterooms. “Deck passengers” paid the cheapest fare. They were “bound to give assistance carrying wood aboard” and cooked on a “small stove” up on the top deck, using provisions they brought or bought. Lincoln probably cooked again, at least his own food if not for Johnston and maybe even Offutt.

  Whatever the uncertain vision of the future had been when the crew set out back in early April, there was a specific plan in place on the trip home in June. Offutt decided that Lincoln would be the ideal person to operate a general store and that New Salem, Illinois would be a good place to set up shop. Offutt stopped in St. Louis to purchase stock for the store and arrange shipment of the goods to New Salem. On July 8 in Springfield, Offutt paid a five-dollar licensing fee indicating the stock in the store would be worth one thousand dollars. Lincoln had had enough of farming. He was ready to settle in a dynamic community and see what he could make of his life.