NEW ORLEANS IN 1831.

The raft over the New Salem dam, the party went on to New Orleans
without trouble, reaching there in May, 1831, and remaining a month.
It must have been a month of intense intellectual activity for
Lincoln. New Orleans was entering then on her "flush times." Commerce
was increasing at a rate which dazzled merchants and speculators, and
drew them in shoals from all over the United States. From 1830 to 1840
no other American city increased in such a ratio; exports and imports,
which in 1831 amounted to $26,000,000, in 1835 had more than doubled.
The Creole population had held the sway so far in the city; but now it
came into competition and often into contest with a pushing,
ambitious, and frequently unscrupulous native American party. To these
two predominating elements were added Germans, French, Spanish,
negroes and Indians. Cosmopolitan in its make-up, the city was even
more cosmopolitan in its life. Everything was to be seen in New
Orleans in those days, from the idle luxury of the wealthy Creole to
the organization of filibustering juntas. The pirates still plied
their trade in the Gulf, and the Mississippi River brought down
hundreds of river boatmen--one of the wildest, wickedest sets of men
that ever existed in any city.

Lincoln and his companions probably tied their boat up beside
thousands of others. It was the custom then to tie up such craft along
the river front where St. Mary's Market now stands, and one could walk
a mile, it is said, over the tops of these boats without going ashore.
No doubt Lincoln went, too, to live in the boatmen's rendezvous,
called the "Swamp," a wild, rough quarter, where roulette, whiskey,
and the flint-lock pistol ruled.