Abe and me: reconstructing the Lebanon

My sabbatical is rolling right along, a bit too fast. Hard to believe Thanksgiving is right around the corner. As was the case during my last sabbatical a few years ago, I feel like I've been productive, but not enough so, working primarily on this new project of mine--a study of Lincoln and race.

Writing is a funny thing, at least for me. I began with a pretty solid, well-developed outline, and had what I thought was a thorough understanding of just what I'd be writing about in any given chapter. But then I actually began the writing, and the process has taken me off into all sorts of unexpected directions, most of which are constructive, and even quite interesting--but unexpected, nevertheless.

Take for example the Lebanon.

In 1841, Lincoln took a trip aboard the steamboat Lebanon with his best friend Joshua Speed from Speed's home in Farmington, Kentucky (where Lincoln had spent a month or so visiting the Speed family) to Springfield, by way of St. Louis. When he got home, Lincoln immediately went out on the law circuit; and in September he penned a fascinating little letter to Joshua's sister, Mary. This is of interest because of the following passage:

"Nothing of interest happened during the passage, except the vexatious delays occasioned by the sand bars be thought interesting. By the way, a fine example was presented on board the boat for contemplating the effect of condition upon human happiness. A gentleman had purchased twelve negroes in different parts of Kentucky and was taking them to a farm in the South. They were chained six and six together. A small iron clevis was around the left wrist of each, and this fastened to the main chain by a shorter one at a convenient distance from, the others; so that the negroes were strung together precisely like so many fish upon a trot-line. In this condition they were being separated forever from the scenes of their childhood, their friends, their fathers and mothers, and brothers and sisters, and many of them, from their wives and children, and going into perpetual slavery where the lash of the master is proverbially more ruthless and unrelenting than any other where; and yet amid all these distressing circumstances, as we would think them, they were the most cheerful and apparantly happy creatures on board. One, whose offence for which he had been sold was an over-fondness for his wife, played the fiddle almost continually; and the others danced, sung, cracked jokes, and played various games with cards from day to day. How true it is that 'God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb,' or in other words, that He renders the worst of human conditions tolerable, while He permits the best, to be nothing better than tolerable."

I spend quite a bit of time on this passage; in fact, I've built an entire chapter around analyzing its philosophical and intellectual contents (which I won't go into here; hey, buy the book when it comes out :-)). But more to the point, as I was writing, I began to think: how exactly did this work for Lincoln? What was the physical reality of this encounter? i wanted to fix in my mind's eye--and in my reader's mind--an accurate image of what Lincoln likely saw, and how he saw it, when he encountered these slaves.

This led to research down some unexpected byways: steamboat travel in general during the antebellum era, and the precise layout of the Lebanon.

On that last point, there unfortunately isn't much specific information (the picture above is a generic image; there are no known images of the Lebanon). She was a fairly new vessel, constructed in Pennsylvania a few years previously. She was large (141 tons), and a side-wheeler. She was a bit too big, infact, and had a habit of running aground in shallower waters. Only a few years after Lincoln's voyage, in fact, the Lebanon would be wrecked on a western riverway after she ran aground during a storm.

If she was constructed like other side-wheelers of the day (and there's no reason to believe otherwise), then the Lebanon had two decks: a "cargo deck," which was the main deck above the hold, and an upper, or "boiler deck," which housed the ship's galley, saloon, and better cabin accomodations. Poorer passengers traveled on the cargo deck; the better off were above them on the boiler deck, which usually had a railed walkway so the richer folk could get a bit of fresh air without consorting with the unwashed masses below (think Lenardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslett on a much, much smaller scale). I suspect Lincoln and Speed were boiler deck passengers. By 1841 Lincoln could afford such accomodations, and Speed was fairly wealthy.

Why does this matter? Because as I analyzed the passage above, I started to wonder: where exactly were the slaves? They pretty much had to be on the cargo deck. If they were in the hold, or a separate room designed for the purpose (some steamers actually had rooms specifically for the transport of slaves), Lincoln likely would never have seen them, or caught at best only a glimpse--not enough time to take in all the details he wrote above. I think they were likely chained together on the cargo deck, with Lincoln staring down at them from above, from the boiler deck area.

An interesting image, isn't it? Lincoln, leaning on the rail, staring at those slaves, chained together below him. But it had to be even more than that--he must have stared at them quite a long time, to be able to write a letter like that to Mary Speed. Or to carry the point still further--how did he know that one of the slaves was being sold due to an "over-fondness for his wife"? Maybe he had a conversation with the slaves' white owner; or maybe he even descended to the cargo deck below, and talked to the slaves themselves.

Whatever the case may be, he didn't just give them a passing glance and move on. He stopped, stared, thought about the scene, and even investigated some effort into learning their precise circumstances.

Any way you look at it, Lincoln's concern here is extraordinary. Transporting slaves was common on the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers--few whites even bothered to notice such things. But Lincoln did; he noticed. He was no abolitionist, and one can also take issue with the moral conclusions he drew from that scene. But he did at least notice. And he did so in a thoughtful, rather extensive fashion. Says something about the man, doesn't it?

But my overall point about writing here is this: I had no idea I'd be spending so much time with the Lebanon when I began writing this book. I knew I'd use that letter, of course, but not in this fashion, or under these circumstances. And I found I could learn things about Lincoln just by reconstructing as best I could the exact circumstances of that encounter. Writing is often a difficult, even frustrating enterprise--but it's never predictable, or boring.