Brian Kilmeade - The President and the Freedom Fighter: Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, and Their Battle to Save Americas Soul

I do not remember to have ever met a slave who could tell of his birthday.

Frederick Douglass, 1845

Abraham Lincoln had a problem. His flatboat, carried by the rush of spring waters, had run aground atop a mill dam in the Sangamon River. The square bow of the eighty-foot-long boat hung over the dam, cantilevered like a diving board. Meanwhile, the stern was sinking lower and lower as it took on water. If Lincoln didnt think of something quickly, the vessel might break apart.

The young man had built the boat with a plan in mind. Along with his cousin, he would take on cargo, travel down the river from central Illinois to New Orleans, and there dismantle the boat, selling both its timber and the cargo on behalf of a man willing to underwrite the venture. Together, he and his cousin had cut down trees for lumber upstream from where they were now marooned. They had built the boat and loaded it with dried pork, corn, and live hogs. All had seemed well when they set off only hours before, but now, on April 19, 1831, far from his intended destination, Lincoln had to do something to save his boat and his cargo.

As goods slid slowly astern in the tilting craft, Lincoln went into action. Removing his boots, hat, and coat, he improvised. First, he and his two-man crew shifted most of the goods to the nearby shore. Next, while he hurriedly bored a large hole with a hand drill, his team began rolling the remaining cargo of heavy barrels forward, thereby shifting the boats center of gravity.

The strategy worked: As the flatboats bow began to tilt downward, water poured out the hole. As the boat got lighter, it rose in the water. After plugging the hole, Lincoln and his men, helped by the spring currents, managed to ease the box-like craft clear of the dam.

The crowd of villagers that had gathered to observe the spectacle of a sinking boat was astonished. No one had seen anything like it. But then they had also never met Abraham Lincoln, just two months beyond his twenty-second birthday. At first sight, he was unmistakably a country bumpkin, dressed in ill-fitting clothes that exaggerated his six-foot, four-inch height, with long arms and exposed ankles sticking out of too-short shirts and homespun trousers. He made, said one observer, a rather Singular grotesque appearance. But the young man who saved the boat possessed a loose-limbed grace that disguised both unexpected strength and a driving ambition to make something of himself. Weighing over two hundred pounds, he could lift great weights and throw a cannonball farther than anyone around. He ran and jumped with the best of his peers.