All of the picturesque life, the violent contrasts of the city, he
would see as he wandered about; and he would carry away the sharp
impressions which are produced when mind and heart are alert, sincere,
and healthy.

In this month spent in New Orleans Lincoln must have seen much of
slavery. At that time the city was full of slaves, and the number was
constantly increasing; indeed, one-third of the New Orleans increase
in population between 1830 and 1840 was in negroes. One of the saddest
features of the institution was to be seen there in its most
aggravated form--the slave market. The great mass of slave-holders of
the South, who looked on the institution as patriarchal, and who
guarded their slaves with conscientious care, knew little, it should
be said, of this terrible traffic. Their transfer of slaves was
humane, but in the open markets of the city it was attended by
shocking cruelty and degradation. Lincoln witnessed in New Orleans for
the first time the revolting sight of men and women sold like animals
Mr. Herndon says that he often heard Mr. Lincoln refer to this
experience: "In New Orleans for the first time," he writes, "Lincoln
beheld the true horrors of human slavery. He saw 'negroes in
chains--whipped and scourged.' Against this inhumanity his sense of
right and justice rebelled, and his mind and conscience were awakened
to a realization of what he had often heard and read. No doubt, as one
of his companions has said, 'slavery ran the iron into him then and
there.' One morning in their rambles over the city the trio passed a
slave auction. A vigorous and comely mulatto girl was being sold. She
underwent a thorough examination at the hands of the bidders; they
pinched her flesh, and made her trot up and down the room like a
horse, to show how she moved, and in order, as the auctioneer said,
that 'bidders might satisfy themselves' whether the article they were