Your Friend Forever, A. Lincoln

The Enduring Friendship of Abraham Lincoln and Joshua Speed

Charles Strozier

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780231541305
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: History

On April 15, 1837, a "long, gawky" Abraham Lincoln walked into Joshua Speed's dry-goods store in Springfield, Illinois, and asked what it would cost to buy the materials for a bed. Speed said seventeen dollars, which Lincoln didn't have. He asked for a loan to cover that amount until Christmas. Speed was taken with his visitor, but, as he said later, "I never saw so gloomy and melancholy a face." Speed suggested Lincoln stay with him in a room over his store for free and share his large double bed. What began would become one of the most important friendships in American history.

Speed was Lincoln's closest confidant, offering him invaluable support after the death of his first love, Ann Rutledge, and during his rocky courtship of Mary Todd. Lincoln needed Speed for guidance, support, and empathy. Your Friend Forever, A. Lincoln is a rich analysis of a relationship that was both a model of male friendship and a specific dynamic between two brilliant but fascinatingly flawed men who played off each other's strengths and weaknesses to launch themselves in love and life. Their friendship resolves important questions about Lincoln's early years and adds significant psychological depth to our understanding of our sixteenth president.

1

BEGINNINGS

On Saturday morning, April 15, 1837, with the sun shining on the dusty village of New Salem and the local white-throated sparrow singing its high whistling song, twenty-eight-year-old Abraham Lincoln said goodbye to Bennett and Elizabeth Abell, Kentucky emigrants who for years had hospitably opened their hilltop cabin to him. Lincoln was particularly fond of Mrs. Abell, who had once sewn and “foxed” his pants, as she put it later, and made him a buckskin outfit. He tossed his saddlebags, containing a change of underwear and his treasured copy of William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England, the core legal text of the era, over his shoulder and walked to the home of Bowling Green. This Virginia-born justice of the peace, whose courtroom dress consisted of a shirt and breeches “supported by one tow linen suspender over his shoulder,” had served as a mentor and “allmost Second Farther,” as one neighbor described the relationship, for young Lincoln. He set off on what Joshua Speed described as the fourteen-mile trip to Springfield, the new capital of Illinois. Lincoln had seven dollars in his pocket and carried a large debt from his failed business ventures of recent years.¹

It was seven years since Lincoln, clad in buckskin and wearing moccasins and a coonskin cap with a tail, had arrived in Illinois with his father, Thomas, his stepmother, Sarah, along with two families of his stepsisters and their husbands and children, a total party of thirteen people and a mutt dog. As he described later, they came on “waggons drawn by ox-teams,” one of which was driven by Lincoln. They were then pioneers, which Sandburg describes as half-gypsy, whose “lookout is on the horizons from which at any time another and stranger wandersong may come calling and take the heart, to love or to kill, with gold or with ashes, with bluebirds burbling in ripe cornfields or with rheumatism or hog cholera or mortgages, rust and bugs eating crops and farms into ruin.” Thomas Lincoln was constantly bothered by insecure titles to the lands he held first in Kentucky and then in southern Indiana. He disliked slavery, mostly because he felt—as did many white yeomen farmers—that slave owners threatened to take all the good land and undermine the livelihood of men like himself. As Lincoln put it in his autobiography: “This removal [from Kentucky to Indiana in 1818] was partly on account of slavery; but chiefly on account of the difficulty in land titles.” Later, some of the same problems, along with fresh outbreaks of the milk sickness that had killed Lincoln’s mother, Nancy Hanks Lincoln, and malaria, which had spread through the family, prompted Thomas and his clan to pull up stakes in the spring of 1830 and move to Illinois.²

The site where the family settled had been selected in advance by Lincoln’s cousin John Hanks on the northern side of the Sangamon River, at the junction of the timberland and prairie ten miles west of Decatur. As John Hanks put it later, Thomas and the family built a log cabin “about 100 Steps from the N. F [north fork] of [the] Sangamon River &…on a Kind of bluff” and planted corn and vegetables for food and enough cotton to meet their clothing needs. Lincoln helped the family build a cabin and “made sufficient of rails to fence ten acres of ground, fenced and broke the ground, and raised a crop of sow[n] corn upon it the same year.”³

The land on which the Lincolns had settled was not particularly productive, but even worse, the area turned out to be sickly. In the fall of 1830, as John Hanks put it, all the members of the family “were greatly afflicted with augue and fever,” resulting in a general discouragement and a determination to leave. But they got caught in what Lincoln called the “very celebrated” deep snow of the winter of 1830–1831, the worst in recorded memory. On March 1, 1831, when those deep snows had melted, flooding central Illinois, Lincoln and his stepbrother, John D. Johnston, and John Hanks floated by canoe down the Sangamon River to Springfield, where one Denton Offutt hired them all for twelve dollars a month to build a barge, load it up with goods, and navigate it down the Sangamon, the Illinois, and eventually the Mississippi to New Orleans. Lincoln never returned home after that trip, setting off, as he said, “the first time by himself.” On the long journey south, Offutt recognized the talents of young Lincoln and offered to hire him as a hand in his New Salem store when he returned on his long journey of 1,273 miles upriver by flatboat from New Orleans. And so Lincoln arrived in New Salem in the late spring of 1831 “like a piece of floating driftwood,” as he put it in his autobiography.⁴

New Salem proved to be an ideally sized small stage for a psychologically unsure young man with increasingly soaring ambitions; his many failures in love and work in this period could be forgiven and forgotten. Lincoln remained in this village of some twenty five homes and about one hundred people for a crucial six years, from twenty-two to twenty-eight years of age; a mark of its significance for him is that his description of his time there occupies over a quarter of his autobiography (written in 1860, before the presidency). New Salem was a bustling community founded with overoptimistic hopes that it would grow into a major commercial hub of river commerce along the river routes southwest from Cincinnati to St. Louis that led eventually to New Orleans. In this village on a hill overlooking a sharp curve in the Sangamon River lived artisans, a physician and graduate of Dart-mouth, a lawyer who served as justice of the peace, a Shakespeare-quoting businessman, and others with enough education, as William G. Greene put it later, to gather occasionally for “publick Discussions in which Mr. Lincoln participated.”⁵

Lincoln, who was an impressive athlete, quickly asserted his manly credentials in this frontier community by outwrestling Jack Arm-strong of the nearby rowdy Clary Grove boys, joining in the rooster fights with the young men from the surrounding villages, participating in the outrageous sport of “gander pulling” (a man riding on horseback at a full gallop attempts to pull off the well-greased head of a live goose fastened to a rope or pole stretched across a road), and in fact chopping wood and splitting rails with a large axe. Ward Hill Lamon added later that Lincoln was “passionately fond of fine horses.” That first summer in New Salem, along with a second stint in the fall, Lincoln volunteered in the Black Hawk War, which was fought mostly in Illinois when the Sauk Indian leader Black Hawk led a brief but ferocious war against the U.S. government. Lincoln never killed anyone and mocked himself later for his “charges against the wild onions” and “bloody struggles with the mosquitoes.” His military service, however, was not without significance. He was elected captain of his company, “a success that gave me more pleasure than any I have had since,” he wrote just before his election as president. He also made some important friends in the Black Hawk War, including Orville Hickman Browning, who would later become a political and legal colleague, and Major John Todd Stuart, who would serve as his first law partner.⁶

Other ventures in the New Salem years proved less successful. Along with William F. Berry, Lincoln purchased on credit the goods for a store that promptly “winked out,” in part because Berry drank himself to death, leaving Lincoln with what he dubbed his “national debt.” He tried surveying for a while, borrowing $57.86 from William F. Watkins to buy a horse, saddle, and bridle, but failed to make the payments, which led to a judgment against him in 1834. Lincoln worked fitfully as the postmaster of the village (mainly to be able to read the newspapers for free), served as the local agent for the Sangamo Journal, clerked during elections, worked in other stores, ground corn in the mill, harvested crops for local farmers, and spent the better part of one winter tending Isaac Burner’s still.⁷

Lincoln put himself up for election to the state legislature soon after his arrival in New Salem. In a handbill he circulated and later published in the Sangamo Journal, Lincoln stoutly defends internal improvements, especially to the Sangamon River. A railroad from “some eligible point on the Illinois river” through Jacksonville to Springfield would be a “never failing source of communication” but would be prohibitive in its expense, which he estimated to be at least $290,000. Lincoln’s much more limited and realistic proposal is to clear the timber out of the Sangamon River and dig out “the meandering of the channel” so that it could serve as a major source of commerce for all the local communities along its banks. In his handbill, debtor Lincoln also rails against usury in references to now-obscure local issues and strongly argues for support of public education (“For my part, I desire to see the time when education, and by its means, morality, sobriety, enterprise and industry, shall become much more general than at present”). He ends with a psychologically revealing note: “Every man is said to have his peculiar ambition. Whether it be true or not, I can say for one that I have no other so great as that of being truly esteemed of my fellow men, by rendering myself worthy of their esteem.”⁸

Lincoln lost that election in what he says in his autobiography was the only time he was defeated by a direct vote of the people, but he won resoundingly (277 to 7) in his own precinct, where his neighbors knew him. At the next election in 1834, however, he won, as he did in the subsequent three elections of 1836, 1838, and 1840. Lincoln quickly drew the attention and respect of his peers, especially the established Whig leader John Todd Stuart, whom he knew and had served under in the Black Hawk War. Perhaps in Stuart, who served just above Captain Lincoln as a major, Lincoln found a role model, though later Lincoln was adamant that he read his law books “without an instructor.” In any event, as early as 1832 and 1834, Lincoln often walked to Springfield to borrow books from Stuart, who noticed what Lincoln read—and did not read. Lincoln, he said later, was a “schollar from 1835—rather a hard student to 1845” who “read hard works—was philosophical—logical – mathematical” but didn’t like history or biography.” Stuart encouraged Lincoln to read law as early as 1832, an idea that interested him but became a project that moved slowly in the next few years, given his insecurities as mostly an autodidact who sought to overcome his lack of a formal education (Stuart said Lincoln at first was “sluggish—apathetic” and needed to be “driven”).⁹

Lincoln began to dabble in legal affairs in New Salem. A good dozen legal documents in Abraham Lincoln’s handwriting survive from the time before he became a sworn member of the Illinois bar. As law was practiced not only by lawyers but also by pettifoggers, as unlicensed practitioners were then known, documents drafted by Lincoln shaped, memorialized, and regulated transactions of importance in New Salem, including a realty appraisal, two realty penalty bonds, a bill of sale, a mortgage, three promissory notes, three receipts, and even a will for Joshua Short. Lincoln most likely drafted many other such documents; Abner Y. Ellis, for example, noted, “I remember he had an old form Book from which he used in writing Deeds, Wills & Letters when desired to do so by his friends and neighbours.” Lincoln also represented litigants in the local court presided over by Bowling Green. Lincoln may have accepted neighbors’ favors later for his legal work, but he always declined money; Jason Duncan, a New Salem neighbor, said, “As there were no Attorneys nearer than Springfield his services were sometimes sought in suits, at law, and he frequently consented to appear before Esq. Bowling Greens’ court, to argue cases, but never charged his clients any fees so far as I Knew.”¹⁰

Sitting on a wood pile, Lincoln read his Blackstone and other books he borrowed from Stuart’s law library in Springfield, to the amazement of his neighbors, who thought he could be more profitably engaged in real work. But his years serving as a legal draftsman and as a trial advocate in Green’s New Salem court, coaxed along with the indispensable and unflagging support of his mentor, Stuart, and the general esteem in which he was held, paid off. On March 24, 1836, Lincoln’s name was entered into the record of Sangamon Circuit Court as a “person of good moral character,” the first step toward becoming a lawyer. The following fall, on September 9, he was licensed to practice law in all courts of the state by two justices of the Supreme Court, and on March 1, 1837, six weeks before he moved to Springfield, he was sworn in as a member of the Illinois bar by the full bench of the Supreme Court. Stuart was the key figure in the background of this process and enlisted Lincoln to join him in a new law practice as soon as he was sworn into the bar. In anticipation of Lincoln’s arrival, Stuart had some new business cards printed up that read: “J. T. Stuart and A. Lincoln, Attorneys and Counsellors at Law, will practice conjointly, in the Courts of this Judicial Circuit—Office N. 4 Hoffman’s Row upstairs. Springfield, April 12, 1837.” Lincoln had come a long way, though not in a short time. This card came into the new lawyer’s hands some six years after he had first penned, on December 16, 1830, a notarized appraisal, filed with the Macon County clerk, for the farmer Jonathan B. Brown, of a thirty-dollar stray horse.¹¹

The winter and spring of 1837 had also been a busy political season for Lincoln. One issue predominated, an issue in which Lincoln played a major role. When the legislature met in Vandalia on February 28, 1837, its main task was to decide the seat of the new capital. There was much grumbling at the poor and often unhealthy conditions in Vandalia, which was in any event too far south to be the capital of a state that was rapidly expanding in its central and northern sections. Still, Vandalia had able and self-interested champions, and there was much jostling for the prize. The best-organized group of legislators was from Sangamon County and was quickly dubbed the “Long Nine,” since their collective height was fifty-four feet. Lincoln was the leader of this group of senators and representatives and had shrewdly laid the groundwork for the selection of Springfield as the new capital. He forged a strategy that swapped agreements on internal improvements with legislators from other counties for support in making Springfield the capital of the state. Lincoln managed to keep the Sangamon County group of nine focused on that single goal so that they eventually won the vote. On the first ballot, Springfield, though it led, received only 35 of the 123 votes, with the rest scattered among those for Jacksonville, Vandalia, Peoria, and Alton. By the fourth ballot Springfield gained a majority of 73 and became the selection.

Many in Vandalia, however, and most especially Speaker of the House William Lee D. Ewing, whom Lincoln said was not “worth a damn,” were still politicking behind the scenes to reverse the vote. The economic, social, and political future of the town would be assured if selected, and Vandalia especially smarted at its loss. Lincoln, aware of the tentativeness of Springfield’s new status, moved quickly after February to make it a fait accompli that it would remain as capital: he pushed an appropriation bill, which passed on March 3, to purchase 2.5 acres in the center of Springfield to create a town square for the new building and name a panel of three commissioners to oversee the project. The most active of those commissioners was Lincoln’s close friend Dr. Anson G. Henry. In the next few months the city and the commissioners ceded the land to the state, prepared it for construction, selected an architect, laid the cornerstone with great fanfare, and began construction. Lincoln, in other words, was the local hero when he rode into town.¹²

Joshua Speed was the scion of a distinguished Kentucky clan that was spawned by the English historian John Speed in the early sixteenth century.¹³ That Speed wrote tables of scriptural genealogy published in the very first edition of the King James Bible in 1611, a book that, along with Shakespeare, helped create modern English. John Speed also wrote a noteworthy history of England up to the reign of James I, the son of Mary, Queen of Scots. John’s great-grandson, James, emigrated to Virginia in 1695, and his grandson in turn, another James Speed, married Mary Spencer in Charlotte County, Virginia, in 1767. This Captain James Speed fought in the Revolutionary War before receiving a crippling wound in 1781. To honor his service, the new American government, which had no money but lots of land, awarded him 7,500 acres in the newly formed territory of Kentucky. In 1782 Speed crossed the Alleghenies on the Wilderness Road, marked by Daniel Boone, with his wife, six children, and several slaves to settle on his new land. James Speed immediately assumed a public role in Kentucky, serving as a judge (though he had no legal training) and as a member of the Kentucky conventions of 1783, 1785, and 1787. He also began to acquire vast tracts of land. By the time Kentucky became a state in 1792 Speed possessed 45,000 acres mostly located in central Kentucky.

One of James’s two sons was John Speed, who had “few opportunities for education,” as a friend delicately put it later, but whose mind was “active, vigorous, and free, ever open to new truths.” He was a “true and faithful friend” as well as a “wise and kind father.” Some saw him as an infidel, but for Speed himself that merely meant he refused to believe uncritically in the absolute truth of every word in the Bible.¹⁴ John Speed owned a store with his brother in the 1790s and also operated a salt works at Mann’s Lick in southern Jefferson County. Speed operated the salt works with slaves hired from local plantations. The salt works gave him the means in 1800 to branch out into farming and plantation life after settling on a large tract of land near Louisville given to him by his father. After the death of his first wife, Abby, John Speed, a widower with two daughters and a son (who would soon die), married Lucy Gilmer Fry in 1808. Lucy Fry’s family had emigrated from England to Virginia in the second half of the eighteenth century; they lived near Monticello and were close to Thomas Jefferson. Lucy was widely regarded as beautiful, dignified, intelligent, and a woman of sound judgment. She devoted herself to her family, which was to include eleven children, including James (Lincoln’s future attorney general), born in 1812, and Joshua, born in 1814.

John Speed turned vigorously to farming after his marriage to Lucy in 1808. His main crop became hemp, a cash crop introduced early on by white settlers, who found it grew well in the rich soil of central Kentucky. Hemp was used on plantations throughout the South as rope to bale cotton and for general purposes in a farm’s daily operations. Production of hemp was backbreaking, labor-intensive work. There were two distinct crops. The first, seed hemp, was planted in the spring in the best soil, which had to be carefully prepared. These seed plants were then harvested in early September, cut to the ground with he...