incident of the trip occurred at the plantation of Madame Duchesne, a
few miles below Baton Rouge. The young merchants had tied up for the
night and were asleep in the cabin, when they were aroused by
shuffling footsteps, which proved to be a gang of marauding negroes,
coming to rob the boat. Abraham instantly attacked them with a club,
knocked several overboard and put the rest to flight; flushed with
battle, he and Allen Gentry carried the war into the enemy's country,
and pursued the retreating Africans some distance in the darkness.
They then returned to the boat, bleeding but victorious, and hastily
swung into the stream and floated down the river till daylight.
Lincoln's exertion in later years for the welfare of the African race
showed that this nocturnal battle had not led him to any hasty and
hostile generalizations.

The next autumn, John Hanks, the steadiest and most trustworthy of his
family, went to Illinois. Though an illiterate and rather dull man, he
had a good deal of solidity of character and consequently some
influence and consideration in the household. He settled in Macon
County, and was so well pleased with the country, and especially with
its admirable distribution into prairie and timber, that he sent
repeated messages to his friends in Indiana to come out and join him.
Thomas Lincoln was always ready to move. He had probably by this time
despaired of ever owning any unencumbered real estate in Indiana, and
the younger members of the family had little to bind them to the place
where they saw nothing in the future but hard work and poor living.
Thomas Lincoln handed over his farm to Mr. Gentry, sold his crop of
corn and hogs, packed his household goods and those of his children
and sons-in-law into a single wagon, drawn by two yoke of oxen, the
combined wealth of himself and Dennis Hanks, and started for the new
State. His daughter Sarah or Nancy, for she was called by both names,