s as prophetic of things to come. Mention
has already been made of his two long trips down the Mississippi. With
the novel responsibilities which they threw on him, and the novel
sights and company which he met all the way to the strange, distant
city of New Orleans, they must have been great experiences. Only two
incidents of them are recorded. In the first voyage he and his mates
had been disturbed at night by a band of negro marauders and had had a
sharp fight in repelling them, but in the second voyage he met with the
negro in a way that to him was more memorable. He and the young
fellows with him saw, among the sights of New Orleans, negroes chained,
maltreated, whipped and scourged; they came in their rambles upon a
slave auction where a fine mulatto girl was being pinched and prodded
and trotted up and down the room like a horse to show how she moved,
that "bidders might satisfy themselves," as the auctioneer said, of the
soundness of the article to be sold. John Johnston and John Hanks and
Abraham Lincoln saw these sights with the unsophisticated eyes of
honest country lads from a free State. In their home circle it seems
that slavery was always spoken of with horror. One of them had a
tenacious memory and a tenacious will. "Lincoln saw it," John Hanks
said long after, and other men's recollections of Lincoln's talk
confirmed him--"Lincoln saw it; his heart bled; said nothing much, was
silent. I can say, knowing it, that it was on this trip that he formed
his opinion of slavery. It ran its iron into him then and there, May,
1831. I have heard him say so often." Perhaps in other talks old John
Hanks dramatised his early remembrances a little; he related how at the
slave auction Lincoln said, "By God, boys, let's get away from this.
If ever I get a chance to hit that thing, I'll hit it hard."

The youth, who probably did not express his indignation in these
prophetic words, was in fact chosen to deal "that thing" a blow from
which it seems unlikely to recover as a permitted institution among
civilised men, and it is certain that from this early time the thought
of slavery never ceased to be hateful to him. Yet it is not in the
light of a crusader against this special evil that we are to regard
him. When he came back from this voyage to his new home in Illinois he
was simply a youth ambitious of an honourable part in the life of the
young country of which he was proud. We may regard, and he himself