Lincoln: Our Only ‘Naval Architect’ President

He Was a Boatbuilder and Inventor of Specialty Sponsons

Peter Swanson Feb 13

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Abraham Lincoln is believed to be the second most written about figure in history behind Jesus Christ, with more than 15,000 books and biographies devoted to his life. Yet, there is an important fact about the 16th President that most readers here probably do not know.

Lincoln was a boatbuilder. And a naval architect. That is, “an engineer responsible for the design construction, maintenance of marine vessels and structures.” Lincoln is the only U.S. President to hold a patent. His was No. 6,469, and it was a marine structure for “Buoying Vessels Over Shoals.”

Back when Lincoln was messing about in boats, one did not need a college degree to be employed as a naval architect. The profession was learned through apprenticeship, shipbuilding experience and practical knowlege of geometry, carpentry and drafting.

Lincoln, in fact, only spent a total of one year in an actual classroom. He went on to become a formidable lawyer of his time, entirely self-taught in law. Even if his time as an amateur marine engineer was fleeting, it provided yet another example of the breadth of his intellect.

Jon Boat

He was 18 when he began working on a ferry crossing the Ohio River from Bates’ Landing, Indiana. Deciding to go into business for himself, he built a jon boat intending to carry produce down river. The Kentucky Historical Society takes up the story:

This business languished, however, and Lincoln, his meager savings gone, turned to carrying passengers to steamboats in the middle of the river. One day he was motioned to the Kentucky shore by John T. Dill and his brother who were operating a ferryboat nearby. A tense confrontation occurred as the brothers accused Lincoln of infringing on their business.

Lincoln’s obvious strength may have encouraged a legal rather than a physical resolution; in any event, Lincoln and the brothers turned to Samuel Pate, a farmer and justice of the peace. The Dill brothers accused Lincoln of interfering with their legally established business.

Lincoln admitted to conveying passengers to the middle of the river, but he argued that he had carried no one who was a potential customer of the Dills’ ferry.

Samuel Pate decided the case for Lincoln by narrowly interpreting the act from William Littell’s Statute Law of Kentucky“respecting the Establishment of Ferries.” The law prohibited unauthorized persons from carrying passengers “over” the river. Lincoln, however, had taken them only to the middle of the river.

This case, the first in which Lincoln appeared as a defendant, led to a friendship between him and Samuel Pate which, somehave speculated, may have stimulated his initial interest in the law.

Carl Sandburg’s six-volume Lincoln biography, published in 1939, devotes a scant eight pages to his days as a river rat. However, Lincoln himself never discounted the effect this period had on his psyche. Speaking later in life to his secretary of state, Charles Steward, Lincoln recalled the moment two passengers in his jon boat tossed him couple half dollars:

I sculled them out to the steamer. They got on board, and I lifted the trunks and put them on the deck. The steamer was about to put on steam again, when I called out, “You have forgotten to pay me.” Each of them took from his pocket a silver half-dollar and threw it on the bottom of my boat. You may think it was a very little thing, and in these days it seems to me like a trifle, but it was a most important incident in my life. I could scarcely credit that I, a poor boy, had earned a dollar in less than a day; that by honest work I had earned a dollar. I was a more hopeful and thoughtful boy from that time

In 1828, a prosperous Indiana farmer hired Lincoln to work with the farmer’s son and build a big flatboat to haul produce and salt pork down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers to New Orleans. It took three months to build from planks that Lincoln had hewn from trees he himself had felled. Once expert said the vessel was probably about 30 feet by 12 and capable of carrying a couple tons of cargo.

Propulsion was by oars and scull or by poling, but mainly they just rode the current southward, using those things to keep away from the shore and avoid shoals and deadhead trees. While not exactly disposable, Mississippi River flatboats were never intended to make a return trip north. Their crews sold them and came back home by steamship.

We don’t think of Lincoln as a tough guy, but one of the stories from this trip serves to remind that life on the Mississippi was could be a Wild West experience. In “Lincoln’s Yarns and Stories,” author Alexander K. McClure wrote about Lincoln’s night in Baton Rouge:

While the boat was tied up to the shore in the dead hours of the night, and Abe and Allen were fast asleep in the bed, they were startled by footsteps on board. They knew instantly that it was a gang of negroes come to rob and perhaps murder them. Allen, thinking to frighten the negroes, called out: “Bring the guns, Lincoln, and shoot them!” Abe came without the guns, but he fell among the negroes with a huge bludgeon and belabored them most cruelly, following them onto the bank. They rushed back to their boat and hastily put out into the stream. It is said that Lincoln received a scar in this tussle which he carried with him to his grave.

In 1831, after moving to Illinois, Lincoln hand-built a second boat on the banks of the Sangamon River. His voyage south was noteworthy for a very public grounding, as Griffin Black wrote in a 2021 Washington Post story:

Townspeople gawked as the boat filled with water and Lincoln offloaded the cargo onto another ship. By cleverly shifting the weight on the deck and drilling a hole to take on water at the bow, Lincoln got the ship dislodged and moving again.

The next phase of his maritime career shows the esteem in which Lincoln, the waterman, was then held. Lincoln was living in New Salem, Illinois, when he was tasked with piloting its first visiting steamboat to town in early 1832. Black wrote:

The state-of-the-art ship risked becoming mired in the ice and dirt, so Lincoln helped manually clear the river way in the days before the ship’s approach. Lincoln had an easy enough time piloting the Talisman into town, but its exit a few days later was plagued by shallow water. Part of the local milldam was demolished so the ship could glide through without grounding.

Lincoln’s preoccupation with ships and shoal water continued during his years in state policitics when he campaigned on maintaining navigable waters and continued during his term Congress as a representative from Illinois from 1847 to 49. This is the introduction to the patent application he submitted on March 10, 1849:

Be it known that I, Abraham Lincoln, of Springfield, in the County of Sangamon, in the State of Illinois, have invented a new and improved manner of combining adjustable buoyant air chambers with a steamboat or other vessel for the purpose of enabling their draught of water to be readily lessened to enable them to pass over bars, or through shallow water, without discharging their cargoes; and I do hereby declare the following to be a full, clear, and exact description thereof, reference being had to the accompanying drawings making a part of this specification.

Lincoln’s concept for inflatable (and thus portable) sponsons was never put into practice. His idea may have been inspired by the Nantucket Camel Back operating at the time. The camels worked like a drydock. Designed by Peter Ewer in 1842, the system used a pair of 135-foot hollow, wooden pontoons to lift, or “camel” whaleships over the shallow Nantucket bar. Filled with water, the pontoons were attached to a ship’s hull and then pumped dry, increasing buoyancy and raising the vessel.

Once he was in the White House—however much burdened by the fate of a nation—Lincoln still took time to visit the model he made of his invention and submitted with the patent application. It’s now in the Smithsonian.

The Washington Post writer quoted earlier in this story summed Lincoln’s nautical influence most artfully when he said:

In the small wooden features and miniature ropes of his patent model lies an overlooked and untapped window into his mind. His patent built to save an endangered ship, allowing it to continue down the river without losing its cargo, was thematically linked to his actions in the Civil War. As he presided over a country going to war with itself, Lincoln’s impulse was to work to salvage the ship of state.

Lincoln’s time spent riding the current through the Deep South also exposed him to the full spectacle of black slavery. Historians say this experience likely hardened his disdain for that odious institution. Could his time on the Mississippi in some way have anticipated that fictional character named Huckleberry Finn?

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Finally, the most interesting tidbit in the book illustrates the extraordinary intellect of our 16th President. Abraham Lincoln is the only American president to hold a patent granted by the U. S. Patent Office — Patent No. 6,469. In the context of this book, it is ironic that this patent is for a method of helping steamboats pass over sandbars without having to remove their cargo.

built.Lincoln’s memories of New Orleans remainedvivid during his presidency and the Civil War, Sandburg wrote. At the end of the first trip, he“lingered and loitered a few days, seeing New Orleans, before taking a steamer north.” He saw“slaves passed handcuffed into gangs headed for cotton fields” and heard talk of “how torawhide the bad ones with mule whips.”Years later Lincoln said, “If slavery is not wrong, nothingis wrong. I can not remember when I did not so think and feel.”

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