worked for a time for
a man who lived at the mouth of Anderson's Creek, and here part of his
duty was to manage a ferry-boat which carried passengers across the
Ohio River. It was very likely this experience which, three years
later, brought him another. Mr. Gentry, the chief man of the village
of Gentryville that had grown up a mile or so from his father's cabin,
loaded a flatboat on the Ohio River with the produce his store
had collected--corn, flour, pork, bacon, and other miscellaneous
provisions--and putting it in charge of his son Allen Gentry and of
Abraham Lincoln, sent them with it down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers,
to sell its cargo at the plantations of the lower Mississippi, where
sugar and cotton were the principal crops, and where other food supplies
were needed to feed the slaves. No better proof is needed of the
reputation for strength, skill, honesty, and intelligence that this
tall country boy had already won for himself, than that he was chosen
to navigate the flatboat a thousand miles to the "sugar-coast" of the
Mississippi River, sell its load, and bring back the money. Allen Gentry
was supposed to be in command, but from the record of his after life we
may be sure that Abraham did his full share both of work and management.
The elder Gentry paid Lincoln eight dollars a month and his passage
home on a steamboat for this service. The voyage was made successfully,
although not without adventure; for one night, after the boat was tied
up to the shore, the boys were attacked by seven negroes, who came
aboard intending to kill and rob them. There was a lively scrimmage, in
which, though slightly hurt, they managed to beat off their assailants,
and then, hastily cutting their boat adrift, swung out on the stream.
The marauding band little dreamed that they were attacking the man who
in after years was to give their race its freedom; and though the future
was equally hidden from Abraham, it is hard to estimate the vistas of
hope and ambition that this long journey opened to him. It was his first
look into the wide, wide world.

II. CAPTAIN LINCOLN.

By this time the Lincoln homestead was no longer on the frontier. During
the years that passed while Abraham was growing from a child, scarcely
able to wield the ax placed in his hands, into a tall, capable youth,
the line of frontier settlements had been gradually but steadily
pushing on beyond Gentryville toward the Mississippi River. Every summer