Room Over the Store

In January 1841, just a few weeks shy of his thirty-second birthday, Abraham Lincoln had reached a new low in a brief lifetime already full of setbacks and disappointments. Bedridden at the home of a friend in Springfield, Illinois, Lincoln was so distraught over a broken romance that the two men now caring for him feared he might well be on the verge of suicide. Not wanting to take any chances, they hid all razors, knives, and “other such dangerous things.”

His descent into “hypo”—Lincoln’s name for his condition, hypochondria—had come abruptly. Only months earlier, Lincoln had been in high spirits for a change. His nascent legal practice was starting to gain traction, he was the vibrant center of a social life that gave him immense satisfaction, and his political future, anchored by his stirring oratory and personal warmth, seemed limitless. “He was the favorite of all,” one friend remarked. “… He loved all of them as they loved him.”

But beneath Lincoln’s veneer of bonhomie and stability lay a man who had struggled with depression for many years, most likely due to a succession of losses during childhood that left him feeling unloved and untethered. Those who knew him best as an adult were well aware of his dark moods and debilitating sadness; they were always on guard. Now two events—unrelated but in rapid succession—conspired to overwhelm Lincoln at the very moment he seemed to have his life on track.

Earlier that fall, Lincoln had begun courting Mary Todd, a new arrival to town. They were an “odd couple,” admitted Todd’s sister, who first introduced the two. Lincoln “could not hold a lengthy conversation with a lady—was not sufficiently educated and intelligent in the female line to do so.” But Lincoln, she added, was “charmed with Mary’s wit and fascinated with her quick sagacity—her will—her nature—and culture.” Despite lacking both a steady income and prior intimacy with a woman, Lincoln steeled his nerves and proposed to Todd. And, despite her own family’s objections, she accepted.

What should have been a time of joy, however, soon turned to agonizing misgivings. Almost as soon as he got up from his bent knee, Lincoln began to question the wisdom of his proposal. Did he know her well enough? Was he marrying too far up? Consumed with doubts bordering on dread, Lincoln impetuously decided to break off the engagement and wrote a letter to his fiancée about his change of heart. But before sending it, he showed it to the one person in his life he trusted enough to share his deepest fears and darkest secrets. “Burn it,” his best friend told him. “Once [you’ve] put your words in writing… they stand as a living and eternal monument against you.” Instead, he advised Lincoln to rely on his “manhood” to see her in person.

Lincoln heeded his friend’s advice, telling Todd to her face what he had written earlier: “I don’t love you.” She immediately broke into tears, and just as quickly the six-foot-four-inch, onetime suitor was on his knees, kissing the five-foot-two-inch crying woman. The engagement was now postponed, neither on nor off.

In the midst of this painful romantic saga, Lincoln had to confront another, even more devastating development, this time not of his own making: His best friend, roommate, and soulmate—the one who had just advised him on Mary Todd—had decided it was time to leave Springfield for his hometown in Kentucky. For the past three and a half years, Abraham Lincoln and Joshua Speed had shared not only their most intimate emotions and thoughts, but also a bed. Now the other half of the bed would be empty—just like, Lincoln feared, his life itself. When he heard about Speed’s plan to return home “that fatal first of Jany. ’41,” the news simply overwhelmed him.

That Lincoln could be so devastated by the prospect of losing a friend speaks to how few intimate relationships he had enjoyed over the first three decades of his life. Popular lore long held that Lincoln from birth was gregarious and fun-loving, full of yarns and good cheer that attracted legions of friends. But the reality, as historians like David Herbert Donald have unearthed, was a reserved man unable to forge close friendships—perhaps only six, including Speed, in his fifty-six years. Partly accounting for this dearth of companionship, his law partner and friend William Herndon described Lincoln as “the most shut-mouthed man” who ever lived.

With the realization of Speed’s planned departure, the already fragile Lincoln collapsed. Some historians believe that even without the aborted engagement, Lincoln would have become unhinged—simply by the thought of losing the one man who gave meaning and stability to his life. “That threatened the ground of his being,” the historian Charles Strozier writes. For the next few precarious weeks, Speed and a local doctor cared for Lincoln as he hovered between life and death. It was then that the room had been cleared of anything sharp.

Lincoln would of course survive, going on to become one of America’s greatest leaders. But without Speed’s timely and compassionate intervention, Abraham Lincoln might very well have been lost to history.

The Sangamon River is shaped like a sickle and courses for 264 miles right through the belly of Illinois. For six years beginning in 1831, when he was just twenty-two years of age, Abraham Lincoln lived alone on a bluff overlooking the Sangamon in a small settlement named New Salem. A year earlier, Lincoln had moved to Illinois with his father, stepmother, and eleven other family members to escape “insecure titles” the family held in Indiana and a new outbreak of “milk sickness” that years earlier had killed his mother. Life in Illinois turned out to be just as bad for the Lincoln family as it was in Indiana. Flooding at his new home a few months later forced Lincoln to set out on his own and seek gainful employment for the first time in his life. His prodigious talents working a barge caught the eye of a New Salem storeowner who offered him a job in his store. Lincoln eagerly accepted, and he soon found himself living alone miles away on a different bank of the Sangamon. When he first arrived in New Salem in the spring of 1831, he was by his own admission a “strange, friendless, uneducated, penniless boy.” In a town of just one hundred people, he worked variously as a storekeeper, postmaster, and surveyor, ingratiating himself into the small community with his sharp wit and physical strength. His gift for splitting rails and chopping down trees impressed his neighbors, and in a town with numerous illiterates, so did his ability to read and write.

Within a year of his arrival, Lincoln had made his mark in town, especially when the leader of an out-of-town gang that frequently terrorized New Salem citizens challenged Lincoln to a fight. Lincoln insisted it be a proper wrestling match instead of a brawl. He followed all the rules in fighting Jack Anderson to either a draw or a victory (the history is still muddled). His neighbors already admired his physical gifts; now they saw in him a moral courage for taking on the town bully with such exactitude. From that point forward, his neighbors marked him for future leadership.

Seizing the moment, Lincoln decided in March 1832 to run for the Illinois House of Representatives despite being only twenty-three years old. Before his campaign could even begin, however, the Black Hawk War broke out, and Lincoln instead joined a local, all-volunteer militia to fight Native Americans. Within days, his fellow soldiers elected Lincoln their captain, an honor he would later say exceeded even his presidential nomination. Over the following eighty days, Lincoln served three tours of duty but never quite faced any battles (he would later poke fun at himself for his “charges against wild onions”). Still, he earned the respect of both his men and his commanding officer, John Todd Stuart, a Springfield lawyer who would later play an important role in his life.

Upon returning home, Lincoln threw himself back into his legislative campaign, but missing three months left him little time to become known across the larger district. Undaunted, Lincoln made his case to voters in his honest and direct way:

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.… I was born and have ever remained in the most humble walks of life. I have no wealthy or popular relations to recommend me. My case is thrown exclusively upon the independent voters of this county, and if elected they will have conferred a favor upon me, for which I shall be unremitting in my labors to compensate.

Those voters who knew him supported him overwhelmingly, but as he feared, his long absences away from the campaign trail—as well as his lack of money and influential friends—doomed his chances of victory. He won more than 90 percent of the vote in New Salem but lagged far behind in all the other precincts, finishing eighth out of thirteen candidates—the only time he would ever lose a direct election. Two years later, in 1834, he ran again for the Illinois House, and this time he won, beginning a four-term, eight-year stint of service.

Over that time period, Lincoln cemented his standing in the Whig Party, which had emerged in the 1830s to oppose President Andrew Jackson, whom members pilloried as “King Andrew.” The Whigs fervently supported a program of economic modernization that encompassed the Second Bank of the United States, protective tariffs, and internal improvements. Though they did not formally endorse anti-slavery, northern Whigs hewed closer to abolitionism than did Jacksonian Democrats.

Lincoln envisioned himself as following in the footsteps of influential Kentucky statesman and Whig leader Henry Clay, who had played a pivotal role in passing the Missouri Compromise of 1820. That legislation had averted the sectional crisis by barring slavery north of the 36°30’ parallel except for Missouri. Echoing Clay, Lincoln in the late 1830s began endorsing a middle-of-the-road, “free soil” stance on slavery: He did not support outright abolition but he did oppose extending slavery westward. As he proclaimed in 1837, “[The] institution of slavery is founded on both injustice and bad policy, but… the promulgation of abolition doctrines tends rather to increase than abate its evils.” And like Clay, who founded the American Colonization Society, Lincoln advocated for the “return” of freed slaves to Liberia on the west coast of Africa.

Partly due to his growing preoccupation with these charged political issues, Lincoln made the fateful decision to pursue law as a profession while serving out his term in the Illinois House. Mentored by his former commander and new friend, John Todd Stuart, he dove into every law book he could find, most of them provided by Stuart. Exceedingly driven to learn the law, Lincoln would sometimes walk the fourteen miles from his home in New Salem to Stuart’s office in Springfield to borrow more books. When he started studying law, Lincoln only had a single year of formal schooling under his belt. Largely self-taught as a reader and writer, Lincoln pursued his legal studies in much the same way—through a combination of hard work, perseverance, and innate gifts.

Lincoln was admitted to the Illinois bar in the spring of 1836 and took a position as Stuart’s junior partner in Springfield, a town of 1,200 that had just become the Illinois capital. It was a minor move geographically but a daunting one professionally and personally. On April 15, 1837, Lincoln set out on a borrowed horse, with seven dollars in his pocket and saddlebags packed with a pair of underwear, other clothing items, and a well-worn copy of his legal bible—William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England. Lincoln had already hired a cabinetmaker to build him a bed for his new home—a spare room in Stuart’s law office. When he arrived in Springfield, he tied up the horse in front of a dry goods store on the corner of Washington and Fifth. He then walked into the store and immediately came face-to-face with its storekeeper: a pleasant, twenty-two-year-old Kentuckian with the social grace and education that one might expect from a young man who came from a well-to-do family.

There was no way to know it at that moment, but Lincoln’s fortunes were about to change dramatically. Two weeks earlier, asked by a friend why he was so down, Lincoln responded that he had nothing to look forward to nor anyone to keep him company. Within a matter of hours, he would have both.

Joshua Fry Speed’s ancestors had distinguished themselves for hundreds of years. His great-great-grandfather prospered as an eminent historian and cartographer in sixteenth-century England; his grandfather James Speed became one of Kentucky’s largest landowners; and his father, John Speed, oversaw a large plantation filled with slaves who harvested the hemp fields. Joshua was one of thirteen Speed children to grow up on those bountiful lands, shaped by the hierarchical systems upon which plantation life depended.

Like Lincoln, Speed as a child suffered from depression, as did many other members of his immediate family. And he was often sick, losing months at his elite private schools to return home for medical care. After becoming estranged from his father, he decided after one illness to set out on his own with no particular idea of what to do. He headed to Louisville at the age of seventeen for a job as a clerk at a wholesale store. Then, three years later in 1834, when a downturn hit the city, Speed moved north to Springfield, Illinois, by then a fast-growing community and a destination for prominent businessmen. With its new hotels and bustling retail stores, Springfield seemed to hold a promising future.

Partnering with a first cousin who lived in Springfield, Speed established a dry goods shop in a two-story brick house at the corner of a town square. He named it Bell & Co. With money likely advanced by his father, with whom he had since patched up his differences, Speed and his cousin opened with $12,000 worth of dry goods, groceries, mattresses, and books. By 1837, when Lincoln strode into that store for the first time, Speed was comfortably ensconced in the economic and social life of the vibrant town.

Greeting Lincoln as he entered the shop, Speed was struck immediately by his customer’s ungainly appearance, with limbs as long as cornstalks, disheveled clothes, and gray eyes that reflected gloom. This man has the saddest face I’ve ever seen, Speed recalled thinking. Lincoln inquired about the cost of a mattress, sheets, blankets, and a bedspread. Seventeen dollars, Speed told him. Lincoln replied that the price was reasonable but still beyond his means.

“If you will credit me until Christmas, and my experiment here as a lawyer is a success, I will pay you then,” Lincoln bargained. “If I fail in that, I will probably never be able to pay you at all.”

Speed had never met Lincoln before, but he surely knew him by reputation as the legislator widely credited with moving the Illinois capital to Springfield earlier that year. He had also seen Lincoln on the stump in a particularly electrifying moment during his 1836 reelection campaign. The speaker preceding Lincoln had been a tart-tongued political operator, George Forquer, who had left the Whigs to become a Democrat, a switch that enabled him to secure a coveted position in the local government. Forquer lived in one of the finest homes in town, complete with a lightning rod—the only one around. Vowing to “take Lincoln down,” Forquer delivered a cutting, sarcastic speech. Then Lincoln’s turn came, and he did not hold back:

I am not so young in years as I am in the tricks and trades of a politician; but live long, or die young, I would rather die now, than, like the gentleman, change my politics, and simultaneous with the changes receive an office worth $3,000 per year, and then have to erect a lightning-rod over my house to protect a guilty conscience from an offended God.

Hearing Lincoln eviscerate Forquer with this “lightning rod” remark, Speed was left awed by Lincoln’s ability to turn a phrase. Later, Speed would write that he had never heard a more compelling or persuasive speaker than Lincoln, a man whose mind was nothing less than “a wonder.”

By the time Lincoln appeared in his store, Speed himself was becoming more politically involved. Just hours before Lincoln arrived that day, the local paper had reported that Speed would act as secretary of a public meeting to discuss attracting a railroad to run through Springfield. Fascinated by his earnest, melancholy customer, and also sensing that a relationship with such a rising star would benefit him in both politics and business, Speed presented Lincoln with an option that would eliminate the need for a seventeen-dollar expenditure.

“I have a large room with a double bed, which you are very welcome to share with me if you choose,” Speed offered.

Lincoln asked where the room was.

“Upstairs,” Speed replied.

Lincoln collected his saddlebags, ascended the winding staircase, and surveyed the chamber. He left his saddlebags in the room, came back down, and smiled gratefully at the storekeeper.

“Well, Speed, I’m moved,” he stated.

Abraham Lincoln and Joshua Speed, who shared the same home state of Kentucky and very little else, slept together in that double bed for four years. It was the start of an enduring, intimate friendship—a decade before Speed would become one of the most successful businessmen in Louisville and two decades before Lincoln would become one of the most beloved presidents in history.

These sleeping arrangements have long prompted speculation that Lincoln and Speed were more than just friends. Speaking at a 1999 conference, the playwright, author, and gay activist Larry Kramer declared that Lincoln was a “totally gay man,” and he claimed to have discovered a revealing diary and trove of letters in the floorboards of the room Lincoln and Speed shared. Kramer’s sensational charge garnered major headlines but withered under scrutiny, and Kramer eventually admitted it was all a fabrication. Still, his claim spawned a virtual cottage industry that sought to establish Lincoln’s homosexuality, fueled in large part on this single data point that he shared a bed with a man for four years.

But the overwhelming weight of evidence reveals no hint of a sexual relationship. Most persuasively, a thorough reading of the verified letters between Lincoln and Speed offers no suggestion that the relationship was anything other than platonic. In fact, what is most striking about the letters is a lack of any colorful or playful language that could be interpreted to support the theory they were lovers. Furthermore, the men who occasionally shared the room upstairs with them or belonged to their informal social club downstairs never reported seeing or hearing anything that would have given rise to this suspicion. And as historian Donald notes, even respectable lawyers when riding the circuit “tumbled unceremoniously into bed together.” In the nearly two centuries since Lincoln and Speed last slept in bed together, no one—despite repeated and persistent attempts to prove the contrary—has conclusively determined they were anything other than very close friends.

What is not in doubt is the respect Speed felt for Lincoln upon first meeting him. A man without a trace of artifice or false pride, Lincoln had stated very plainly that he might not be able to cover the $17 for the goods he hoped to purchase. There was something about this unkempt beanpole of a man, a sensitivity and a kindness cloaked by gloom, that told Joshua Speed he could completely trust him. And so Speed had offered Abraham Lincoln his bed. Neither man’s life would ever be the same.

From the moment Lincoln first walked into Bell & Co., he and Speed forged a friendship unequaled in its intimacy by any other person, including their wives. They were rarely apart except when at work—Speed at the store, Lincoln at his law office down by the courthouse. They even made sure to eat all their meals together. When Lincoln was arguing in court, Speed would often saunter down to the courthouse to watch his friend. In the evenings, the two men would preside over a rolling social club made up of friends from Springfield who were increasingly attracted to the lively banter, mostly coming from Lincoln himself. As Speed recalled, “Mr. Lincoln was a social man, though he did not seek company; it sought him. After he made his home with me, on every winter’s night at my store, by a big wood fire, no matter how inclement the weather, eight or ten choice spirits assembled, without distinction of party. It was a sort of social club without organization. They came there because they were sure to find Lincoln.”

Afterward, Speed and Lincoln would retire to their room upstairs, where they would converse about books, poetry—the more depressing the better—and, of course, politics. Both were Whigs and for a time in general agreement on the issues of the day. During his nearly four years as Speed’s roommate, Lincoln emerged as one of the best-known young men in Springfield, gaining a reputation for his eloquence articulating Whig positions in court. His future law partner, Herndon, took note of Lincoln’s boundless ambition, calling him a “little engine that knew no rest.” And while Lincoln seemed destined for greatness, Speed himself also played a central role in civic life—albeit more in the shadows. He acted as a booster for the town of Springfield, held positions with Lincoln on many key Whig committees, and helped strengthen the Whig Party in Illinois.

Apart from his rising legal career and his standing as an effective Whig legislator, Lincoln stood out for his vast store of clever anecdotes, his ability to engage intelligently on most any issue, and his deft use of self-deprecation. Once when riding a train, as Lincoln told the tale, a stranger insisted on speaking to him.

“Excuse me, sir, but I have an article in my possession which rightfully belongs to you,” the man said.

“How is that?” Lincoln asked.

The stranger took a jackknife from his pocket.

“This knife was placed in my hands some years ago with the injunction that I was to keep it until I found a man uglier than myself,” the stranger said. “I have carried it from that time to this. Allow me now to say, sir, that I think you are fairly entitled to the property.”

That episode did not offend Lincoln in the least. Years later, when a critic accused him of being “two-faced,” Lincoln replied, “If I had two faces, would I be wearing this one?”

By laughing at himself, Lincoln endeared all around him—including Speed—with his humility and honesty. In Reminiscences of Abraham Lincoln, Speed wrote that Lincoln possessed a sweet and tender disposition that expressed itself most dramatically whenever he encountered anyone in distress, man or beast. These qualities emerged one day on a trip the two took with a group of friends out to the country. Along the road, Lincoln noticed two baby birds, too young to fly, on the ground. A fierce wind had kicked up and knocked their nest out of a tree. Lincoln stopped and hitched up his horse while the others rode ahead to a creek. It took some time, but Lincoln found the nest. He gently placed the young birds safely inside and tucked it back in a tree. When his friends found out why Lincoln had fallen behind, they laughed.

“Gentlemen, you may laugh, but I could not have slept well tonight if I had not saved those birds,” Lincoln said. “Their cries would’ve rung in my ears.”

Yet behind Lincoln’s easy laugh and conviviality was a man far more prone to depression and darkness than was apparent to his growing legion of admirers. Shortly after moving to New Salem in 1831, Lincoln had fallen in love with Ann Rutledge, a woman of “exquisite beauty” and mind. For most of the three years he courted her, she was engaged to another man who lived in New York. Time and distance weren’t kind to that relationship, and by 1835 Ann abandoned any hope of marrying him and agreed instead to marry Lincoln. But before they could tie the knot, Ann came down with typhoid fever. Lincoln stood at her bedside three weeks later when she took her last breath. The death of his first love left Lincoln so shattered that friends later described him as “suicidal” and needing to be “locked up by his friends” to keep him safe from himself.

Lincoln’s extreme reaction to Ann’s death and his inability to cope with it would not have surprised anyone aware of the debilitating losses he had suffered and the circumstances he had endured before setting out on his own for New Salem at the age of twenty-one.

As every American student learns in grade school, Abraham Lincoln was born in a Kentucky log cabin on February 12, 1809. Measuring 16 by 18 feet, the cabin had only one door, one window, a stone fireplace, and a dirt floor. Three other people lived there: Lincoln’s father, Thomas; his mother, Nancy; and his sister, Sarah. That pitiable arrangement marked the start of Lincoln’s isolated childhood in the near wilderness, growing up bereft of friends with “absolutely nothing to excite ambition for education,” as Lincoln recalled. Over time, his scorn grew deeper for his near-illiterate father, who had no desire to learn or to write beyond “bunglingly sign[ing] his own name.” Once he reached age seven, his family crossed the Ohio River into Indiana, where Lincoln would live out the rest of a lonely childhood.

In 1818, when he was nine, Lincoln’s mother died of fever. He had adored her, calling her his “angel mother.” If he loved too deeply, he learned, that love could be snatched away. Underscoring that lesson, Lincoln later suffered yet another abrupt loss when his sister died during childbirth. After this string of tragedies, Lincoln entered adulthood with no close friendships and in a delicate emotional state he couldn’t shake. It would be Joshua Speed who assumed the central role in pulling Lincoln out of his depression.

Five years after Ann Rutledge’s death, Lincoln felt ready to fall in love again. Through Speed’s intercession, he met twenty-one-year-old Mary Todd, an educated, witty, and cultured woman who came from a wealthy family in Lexington, Kentucky. Mary had grown up in a household steeped in politics. Her father used his wealth to host many political functions during her youth, including one event when she met Henry Clay. Like Lincoln, she too became an outspoken supporter of Clay’s liberal ideology and, in her sister’s words, a “violent little Whig” who embraced party politics with uncommon zeal. In 1840, hoping to escape a stepmother she loathed, Mary moved to Springfield to live with her sister Elizabeth. Speed, who happened to be Elizabeth’s friend, pushed Lincoln to meet Mary Todd sometime after she arrived, and once he did, he was left enchanted. Elizabeth later recalled Lincoln listening to Mary and “gazing on her as if drawn by some superior power, irresistibly so.”

Eventually, the couple became engaged. But Lincoln’s doubts about his worthiness and readiness to make such a permanent commitment caused him to pull back from the engagement—only then to be racked with guilt over Todd’s heartbreak.

His angst worsened when Speed revealed his plans to leave Springfield for his family homestead in Farmington, Kentucky. Speed’s father had died in March 1840, and Speed needed to comfort his mother and siblings, as well as help settle the family’s affairs. Facing life without both Todd and Speed proved too much for Lincoln to bear. “He opened up to Speed in a way that he did with nobody else,” Strozier writes. “Lincoln was very guarded with his personal relationships. He never had another friend like Speed, before or since.”

By January 1841, Lincoln’s life, as well as his mental health, seemed to be unraveling fast. Only sporadically fulfilling his legislative duties, he had become bedridden with “hypo.” In a letter to John Todd Stuart, a law partner who was now serving as Springfield’s congressman, Lincoln confessed his “deplorable state”:

I am now the most miserable man living. If what I feel were equally distributed to the whole human family, there would not be one cheerful face on the earth. Whether I shall ever be better I cannot tell; I awfully forebode I shall not. To remain as I am is impossible; I must die or be better, it appears to me.

Speed’s unshakable loyalty and fundamental kindness empowered him to be, when necessary, brutally honest with his friend. When Lincoln would utter such grandiose, self-pitying remarks, Speed refused to indulge him and pressed him to show more strength in moving beyond his illness. If not, Speed warned, he was heading for full-blown insanity or even death. Lincoln replied that dying didn’t worry him at all, except that he was convinced he had left such an insignificant mark on the world that he would quickly be forgotten once gone.

In view of Lincoln’s condition, Speed delayed his return to Kentucky and continued to watch over his friend. If his attending doctor wasn’t there, Speed almost certainly was. He had come to understand Lincoln better than anyone, so his presence became one of the only comforts the sick man had. As January turned to February, the pall hanging over Lincoln finally began to lift. Feeling stronger and more focused, he returned to his law practice and to his work in the Illinois legislature. Despite Lincoln’s improvement, Speed stayed in town in case of a setback.

By May 1841, confident that Lincoln had sufficiently recovered, Speed finally left for Kentucky after his friend promised to come for a long visit. Three months later, Lincoln took his first-ever vacation to stay with the Speed family—a trip he would remember as one of the happiest times of his life.

The Speeds lived in a fourteen-room brick mansion, situated on their 550-acre Farmington plantation and designed to mimic Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello estate. Such opulence was foreign to Lincoln, but he warmed to his welcome from the entire Speed family. Joshua’s mother, Lucy Speed, took a special liking to Lincoln, even as she noted his deep sadness. Near the end of his visit, she presented him with an Oxford Bible, saying it was the best cure for depression he would ever find. Not a churchgoer but nevertheless a profoundly spiritual man, Lincoln was moved by the gift. Two decades later, he would send Mrs. Speed a photo of himself after his election as president: “To my very good friend Mrs. Lucy G. Speed (from) whose pious hands I received an Oxford Bible twenty years ago.”

After a three-week stay, Lincoln headed home in September 1841 to Springfield. Needing to tie up some business affairs in Illinois, Speed accompanied him. They boarded a steamboat named Lebanon in Louisville and took the Ohio River down to St. Louis. Along the way, the boat stopped to pick up a slave trader, who herded a dozen slaves onto the ship, likely on their way to the slave-trading hub of New Orleans. Born and raised in Kentucky, Lincoln had certainly seen slaves before and witnessed their ill treatment. Both his father and mother had firmly opposed slavery and belonged to a Separate Baptist congregation, which believed that human bondage violated Christian teachings. When the Lincolns had moved across the Ohio River to the free state of Indiana, they joined thousands of other anti-slavery Southerners fleeing southern states like Kentucky.

But Lincoln’s visit to the Speeds’ plantation and his experience aboard the Lebanon left a deeply disconcerting impression. At Farmington, he had seen not just slaves, but slaves at work, including one who was ordered to serve him during his stay. He had also observed between forty-five to sixty slaves laboring in the fields. Already disturbed by those images on the Speed plantation, Lincoln was left even more troubled when confronted with the realities of the slave trade on the Lebanon. He later wrote to Mary Speed, one of Joshua’s sisters, describing his horror over seeing those bodies shackled “six and six together… strung together precisely like so many fish upon a trot-line.” Lincoln lamented that these captives faced a life of “perpetual slavery where the lash of the master is proverbially more ruthless and unrelenting than any other where [sic].” His letter to Mary Speed provides the earliest evidence of his evolving thoughts about slavery.

For now, though, Lincoln had more immediate matters to face. Disembarking as planned in St. Louis, he and Speed took a stagecoach to Springfield. Before long, the two friends found themselves ironically reversing roles in a brand-new romantic entanglement. Speed had become engaged to a woman from back home in Farmington, Fanny Henning. This time around, it was Speed who was beset with doubts, and Lincoln who urged him to the altar.

Lincoln had met Fanny on his visit to Farmington and told his friend that she was “one of the sweetest girls in the world.” Applying the same logic that helped him not too long ago, Lincoln urged Speed not to succumb to his inner bogeymen and turn away from a woman he truly loved. As his friend prepared to return to Kentucky on January 1, 1842, Lincoln handed him a letter. The date was highly significant to Lincoln. It marked the one-year anniversary of his “Fatal First”—the day he broke off his engagement with Mary Todd. With a tone of deep care and gratitude, the letter began:

Feeling, as you know I do, the deepest solicitude for the success of the enterprize [sic] you are engaged in, I adopt this as the last method I can invent to aid you, in case (which God forbid) you shall need any aid. I do not place what I am going to say on paper, because I can say it any better in that way than I could by word of mouth; but because, were I to say it orrally [sic], before we part, most likely you would forget it at the verry [sic] time when it might do you some good.

More than anyone else, Speed had ministered Lincoln through one of the most painful and precarious times of his life. As this letter bore witness, for both men—but particularly for Lincoln—that agonizing experience had enriched and deepened their bond, and Lincoln now wished to aid Speed just as Speed had aided him.

How much of Speed’s new struggle arose from witnessing Lincoln’s own a year earlier is uncertain; but what is clear is how Lincoln and Speed, now at the ages of thirty-two and twenty-seven respectively, were finding it difficult to commit to marriage, in all likelihood because each man harbored fears about whether he would be able to consummate a marital bond. In five letters that he wrote to Speed in January and February of 1842—“the most intimately personal letters that Lincoln ever wrote,” according to Donald—he continued to offer quiet encouragement to his friend about the upcoming marriage. At one point, apologizing for his boldness and his “rude intrusion upon your feelings,” he told Speed, “You know the Hell I have suffered on that point and how tender I am upon it.” Speed’s angst over his ability to perform on his marriage night churned nearly to the moment he said “I do” on February 15, 1842—three days after Lincoln’s thirty-third birthday.

After Speed had described his “indescribably horrible and alarming” worries, Lincoln tensely waited for word on how Speed had fared on his wedding day and night. When a letter finally arrived, sent the morning after Speed’s marriage, Lincoln opened it with “intense anxiety and trepidation.” Luckily, Speed shared only favorable reviews, and Lincoln wrote back: “I tell you, Speed, our forebodings for which you and I are rather peculiar, are all the worst sort of nonsense.” A month later, Speed marveled how much marriage had transformed his life for the better.

On February 25, Lincoln wrote two more letters: one to the happy couple and the other to his friend alone—not wanting to alert the new bride to her husband’s previous doubts. In that letter to Speed, he proclaimed his “confident hope that every successive letter I shall have from you (which I pray here may not be few, nor far between), may show you possessing a more steady hand, and cheerful heart, than the last preceding it. As ever, your friend LINCOLN.”

Having watched his best friend embrace his marriage and the intimacy that accompanied it, Lincoln felt empowered to do the same. With some discreet prodding from mutual friends, including Speed, Lincoln and Mary Todd began to see each other again, wisely keeping it quiet to avoid being influenced by others. The romance rekindled, Lincoln proposed again, and on November 4, 1842, Abraham Lincoln and Mary Todd became husband and wife.

Speed never doubted that their marriages were inextricably intertwined, a point he later made to Herndon: “If I had not been married and happy—far more happy than I ever expected to be, [Lincoln] would not have married.” But while their romantic decisions might have been linked, their busy careers, new families, and fifty-mile separation would nudge Lincoln and Speed apart for much of the next eighteen years.

It had been no easy decision for Speed to depart Springfield in May 1841 and return to Kentucky. Aside from leaving behind his business and political connections, Speed felt deeply guilty over abandoning Lincoln. He also had no desire to help manage the family’s so-called “farm,” which was actually one of the largest and most profitable plantations in the entire state. Once he arrived in Kentucky, though, Speed happily adapted to plantation life. He and Fanny moved into the “Pond Settlement,” a thousand-acre plot of land roughly thirteen miles from Louisville, where the Farmington plantation was located. They would live there for the ensuing nine years, with Joshua focused on farming, planting corn, and overseeing his slaves when he wasn’t helping out at Farmington.

Lincoln and Speed initially tried to maintain their friendship, but the gulf between them gradually widened, even if neither could fully articulate why. Speed’s “farm” no doubt caused some awkwardness, a source of handsome profits as wealth (and the price of slaves) increased across the South in the 1840s and 1850s. When Lincoln wrote to Speed in 1842, shortly after the move, he discreetly avoided using words like “plantation” or “slaves.” But his disapproval pervaded the letter: “As to your farm matter, I have no sympathy with you. I have no farm nor ever expect to have; and, consequently, have not studied the subject enough to be much interested with it.”

Lincoln mostly tried to skirt these issues, though, by sharing details about married life and updates on Mary’s health. In March 1843, with Mary five months pregnant, Lincoln wrote about the possibility of naming the upcoming child Joshua in his best friend’s honor. He also noted that he was awaiting “with impatience… your visit this fall.” But when fall came, Speed never visited, and when Lincoln and Mary’s first child arrived on August 1, they named him “Robert,” not “Joshua.”

The growing distance between Lincoln and Speed likely arose from the divergence in their new lives, values, and priorities. But there were also more practical reasons, stemming from the legal work that Speed had pushed upon Lincoln after leaving Springfield. Speed wanted Lincoln to help collect his leftover debts in town and to secure favorable judgments for him in court. At a time when he needed income to support his new family, Lincoln had agreed to settle Speed’s financial matters with little to no pay. But his resentment grew as he tried to juggle Speed’s work with his own thriving law practice. As he increasingly postponed his duties for Speed, Speed was not shy in expressing his annoyance. It appears Lincoln took offense and did not write Speed any letters between July 1843 and October 1846.

Though this silence may simply reflect a gap in the historical record, it is clear that by October 1846, their rift was real. That month, the two exchanged angry letters over Lincoln’s handling of the estate of Speed’s recently deceased uncle, James Bell. In reply to Speed’s incensed letter, Lincoln wrote curtly: “You, no doubt, assign the suspension of our correspondence to the true philosophical cause, though it must be confessed, by both of us, that this is rather a cold reason for allowing a friendship, such as ours, to die by degrees.” After that, the friends stopped corresponding again for a full year, and Lincoln had Herndon deal with all of Speed’s lingering business affairs. Aside from a short visit that Lincoln and Mary paid to Speed and Fanny in October 1847, the two men barely wrote one another until the mid-1850s.

Ironically, this nearly decade-long silence may have indirectly strengthened their friendship. As the two men drifted apart, they also found the independence to forge their own identities and sharpen their political thinking. Unbeknownst to them, they tracked parallel routes during that extended separation. After serving four terms in the Illinois House and opening his law practice with Herndon, Lincoln in 1847 moved on to the US House of Representatives. And at the same time as Lincoln entered Congress, Speed himself dove into politics, serving one term in the Kentucky House of Representatives, from 1848 to 1849.

During his single term, Speed squarely confronted the slavery crisis in his state just as the Mexican War was coming to an end. Disputes over slavery’s status in lands won from Mexico raised the stakes of the issue within Kentucky. While abolishing slavery had never been part of the equation in Kentucky, debate still raged over whether (and how) to restrict it there. Back in 1833, Kentucky had tried to strike a balance by passing the controversial Non-Importation Act, which limited the importation of slaves into the state. Every year since then, the question of repealing the act came before the Kentucky legislature. During his term, Speed voted with the majority to repeal the 1833 law. In a significant victory for pro-slavery forces, Kentucky after 1849 could once again import slaves without restriction.

Despite an eventful first term, Speed ultimately found legislative work dull and tedious. As he confided to his sister, “My mind has been forced to act upon subjects foreign to my usual habit of thought.” Once his term ended in 1849, he gladly left the House and returned to his plantation. Around the same time, Lincoln also made a similar decision. After completing one term in the US House of Representatives, he retreated from public life and resumed his law practice in Springfield. Soon afterward, he and Mary faced a devastating tragedy, when their second son, three-year-old Eddie, died of tuberculosis on February 1, 1850. They would welcome their third son, Willie, that December, but Eddie’s death continued to cast a dark shadow over their lives.

Lincoln managed to pull himself together and focus on his legal career, but he still nursed a lingering sense of frustration over having left politics. A disconnect arose between his aspiration to be a leading Whig politician in the tradition of Henry Clay, and the stark reality of his work as a small-town lawyer at the country’s periphery. Meanwhile, once back in the comforts of his Louisville home, Speed had arrived at an opposite, though complementary, realization: He had no interest in assuming a conspicuous role in politics and far preferred to operate behind-the-scenes, just as he had done back in Springfield with his old companion Lincoln.

Those twin realizations would soon prove crucial, as Lincoln in due time would need the backroom counsel of his dear friend more than ever.

Ironically, it was during the mid-1850s, as the politics of slavery increasingly tore apart the country, that Lincoln and Speed would resurrect their correspondence and mend their friendship. The catalyst came in 1854, when Democratic senator Stephen Douglas of Illinois—who, coincidentally, had once courted Mary Todd—introduced the Kansas-Nebraska Act. This legislation not only reopened the issue of slavery that had seemingly been laid to rest with the Compromise of 1850; it also canceled the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which had prohibited slavery in all Louisiana Purchase states north of the 36°30’ parallel. The Kansas-Nebraska Act reversed this principle, determining that new states north of the boundary should, through popular sovereignty, determine the legality of slavery in their own territories. The act’s passage soon triggered the “Bleeding Kansas” violence that presaged the Civil War, as both proslavery and antislavery settlers rushed into the region. Watching the violence unfold, Lincoln grew increasingly disgusted by the direction of national affairs under Franklin Pierce (see chapter 2).

Several months later, in October 1854, Lincoln delivered a noted speech in Peoria, Illinois, in which he detailed his objections to the Kansas-Nebraska Act. He blasted the entire notion of popular sovereignty, particularly its repeal of Clay’s Missouri Compromise. Most significantly, he attacked the morality of slavery itself, calling it a “monstrous injustice” and contending that slaves—as humans—possessed natural rights as surely as white men: “If the negro is a man, why then my ancient faith teaches me that ‘all men are created equal’; and that there can be no moral right in connection with one man’s making a slave of another.” That captivating speech resurrected Lincoln’s political career, signaling his return to the electoral stage just as his cherished Whigs faced looming obsolescence.

The drama swirling around the Kansas-Nebraska Act also led to the resumption of Lincoln and Speed’s correspondence. As the Whig Party disintegrated, Speed was left unsure about which party to join. Though he would eventually become a Democrat, Speed at this point could not decide where he stood as both a slaveowner and a Unionist—a discrepancy that mirrored the inner conflict of many Kentuckians. It was in this context that Speed broke the decade-long ice, writing a letter to Lincoln on May 22, 1855, in which he finally broached the topic of slavery. Without hesitation, Speed claimed that he would rather see the Union dissolved than to surrender his constitutional right to own human property. He would soon be surprised by Lincoln’s sharp response—so different now from the more reserved Lincoln of an earlier time.

Lincoln’s reply on August 24, 1855, marked the first meaningful explication of his evolving position on slavery, in line with what Speed probably sensed was in Lincoln’s heart but written more forcefully and without subtext. In framing his reply, Lincoln already knew the facts and history of Speed’s slaveholding: Even though he now lived in Louisville, back at his thousand-acre “farm” Speed at various times kept between ten and eighteen slaves. When he didn’t need them as servants, he hired them out for work elsewhere. As his colleagues noted, Speed regularly—in three different business partnerships—“engaged in brokering, selling and hiring enslaved African Americans.”

This time, Lincoln did not avoid mentioning such facts, bluntly writing: “You know I dislike slavery; and you fully admit the abstract wrong of it.” He then referred to Speed’s talk of dissolving the Union, saying that though “I acknowledge your rights… under the constitution, in regard to your slaves,” he did not believe Speed could ignore one plain fact that tested one’s humanity: “poor creatures hunted down” and “carried back to their stripes, and unrewarded toils.”

Lincoln then reminded his friend of the shackled slaves they had witnessed during their trip aboard the Lebanon, nearly fourteen years before: “That sight was a continuous torment to me; and I see something like it every time I touch the Ohio, or any other slave-border.” And yet, in those ensuing years, Lincoln wrote, “I bite my lip and keep quiet.”

In his original letter to Lincoln, Speed had tried both to mend the breach and anticipate Lincoln’s moralizing. He insisted that despite his own slaveowning, as a Christian man, he would “rejoice” if those within the Kansas territory voted to reject slavery and become a free state. He appeared to be suggesting that he opposed the extension of slavery into new territories—a stance ostensibly closer to Lincoln’s at the time. However, Lincoln replied that such sentiments meant little if Speed and those who shared his views continued to vote for candidates who made certain that slavery endured:

No such man [who was against the spread of slavery] could be elected from any district in any slave-state.… The slave-breeders and slave-traders are a small, odious and detested class, among you; and yet, in politics, they dictate the course of all of you, and are as completely your masters as you are the masters of your own negroes.

Despairing over the nation’s “pretty rapid” descent into “degeneracy,” Lincoln further wrote: “We began by declaring that ‘all men are created equal.’ We now practically read it ‘all men are created equal except negroes.’” If that came to pass, Lincoln concluded, he would prefer “emigrating to some country where they make no pretence [sic] of loving liberty—to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocracy.”

This letter represented a significant departure for Lincoln, a rare moment in which he committed his opinions on slavery to paper. It was also significant for what it communicated about the status of his friendship with Speed. Despite their coldness over the past few years, Lincoln still implicitly trusted Speed—at least enough to know that his controversial thoughts would not be leaked to the newspapers. Lincoln made a point of ending his emphatic letter with warm feelings and his “kindest regards to Mrs. Speed.” “I have more of her sympathy than I have of yours,” he admitted. For the first time in at least a decade, the two friends had corresponded frankly with one another about the most fraught issue of their day. And ironically, as the nation inched closer to war, their friendship finally began to heal and strengthen.

Lincoln’s correspondence with Speed during this contentious time testified to how much his thinking had matured and evolved over the past decade. In the aftermath of his Peoria speech, Lincoln pulled himself out of political retirement and shot to the forefront of a new anti-slavery force: the Republican Party. With the Whigs now defunct, the new Republican Party had cobbled together various northern factions—not just former Whigs but also members of the Free Soil, Liberty, and Democratic Parties. At first, Lincoln approached the Republican project with caution, fearing that it would become a vehicle for an extreme abolitionist platform. As he wrote to Speed in 1855, “I think I am a Whig, but others say there are no Whigs, and that I am an abolitionist.… I do no more than oppose the extension of slavery.”

But with the nation in a state of constant upheaval, Lincoln moved steadily closer to his emancipationist views. In 1857, the Supreme Court ruled in Dred Scott v. Sanford that Black persons were not citizens and therefore possessed no rights under the Constitution. Lincoln denounced the controversial ruling as a violation of the Constitution and as proof of a Democratic conspiracy to perpetuate the “Slave Power.” He echoed this impassioned argument in the summer and fall of 1858, when he ran for election to the US Senate and participated in a series of seven debates against incumbent senator Stephen Douglas. Nominally, the two men were competing for the Illinois Senate seat, but ultimately the debates contributed to the larger national conversation raging over slavery, and they enabled Lincoln to hone his moral position on the issue. With his ringing (and prophetic) declaration that “a house divided against itself, cannot stand,” Lincoln shot to the forefront of the Republicans’ anti-slavery cause.

Though Douglas ended up keeping his Senate seat, Lincoln would gain a much more coveted prize. Almost immediately after losing the 1858 Senate contest, he began collecting newspaper transcriptions of his debates with Douglas. He then gave his clippings to the powerful Republican operative Oran Follett, whose publishing firm released them in book form in 1860—right in time for Lincoln’s presidential campaign. The book proved to be a blockbuster success, selling out in just a few months, and helped convince the Republican Party to nominate Lincoln for president at its 1860 convention in Chicago.

Hearing the news, Speed quickly sent his congratulations as “a warm, personal friend, though as you are perhaps aware a political opponent.” He expressed his confidence that if Lincoln were elected, he would “honestly administer the government—and make a lasting reputation for [himself].” Speed pointedly avoided promising that he would vote for his friend—he likely voted for one of the two Democratic candidates that fall—but jokingly added that Lincoln could count on Fanny Speed’s vote (women would not gain suffrage until 1920). Taking the ribbing in his good-natured way, Lincoln poked back at his friend: “I scarcely needed to be told Mrs. Speed is for me with her nature and views. She could not well be otherwise.”

Election day fell on November 6, 1860, two days after Abraham and Mary’s eighteenth wedding anniversary. Lincoln won the presidency with 180 Electoral College votes but less than 40 percent of the popular vote. The Southern Democrat John C. Breckinridge and Northern Democrat Stephen A. Douglas divided the vote of their party, while John Bell of the Constitutional Union Party took another sliver of the total. Despite far surpassing Lincoln’s popular vote total, Breckinridge, Bell, and Douglas combined could muster only 128 electoral votes among them.

It was the most rancorous election in American history, but Speed didn’t get caught up in its vitriol. In a congratulatory letter to Lincoln “upon your elevation to the highest position in the world,” Speed wrote: “As a friend, I am rejoiced at your success—as a political opponent I am not disappointed. The result is what I expected.” Despite not voting for his friend, Speed offered his help to maneuver through the political minefield that was Kentucky, recognizing the daunting challenges ahead: “How to deal with the combustible material lying around without setting fire to the edifice of which we are all so proud and of which you will be the chief custodian is a difficult task.”

But Speed also emphasized that he would give his observations only as a “private citizen seeking no office for himself nor for any friend he has.” If Lincoln wanted to use Speed’s Kentucky connections and his status as a slaveowner and Democrat to preserve the state’s place in the Union, he would have to do so on Speed’s terms. And the president-elect gratefully accepted—recognizing that Speed’s viewpoints on slavery, though diverging from his own, represented a significant cross-section of the Kentucky population.

In Lincoln’s view, Kentucky was a tinderbox—a border state whose politics were curiously split between a pro-Union legislature and a Confederacy-leaning governor. Though a slave state, Kentucky nonetheless was in no rush to leave the Union with its southern neighbors. Still, with animosity toward abolitionism running deep in the state, Lincoln had won just 1,365 votes—barely 1 percent—of all those cast. Aware of this uphill battle, the president-elect was determined to keep all four border states—Delaware, Maryland, Missouri, and Kentucky—in the Union, since they could tilt the advantage against the North if they joined the Confederacy. Kentucky in particular represented the linchpin of Lincoln’s border-state strategy due to its large population and strategic position on the Ohio River, between the North and the Deep South. This central location made it an ideal staging ground from which to launch military invasions into enemy territory.

Given these tricky calculations, Lincoln wasted little time reaching out to his oldest friend. Less than two weeks after the election, they met in Chicago’s Tremont Hotel, a stately, five-story brick building and the most luxurious hotel west of New York City. When they settled into Speed’s room, it had been nearly a decade since the two friends had last laid eyes on each other. Just like the old days in their room above the store, Lincoln immediately flung himself down on the bed, looking worn out but wasting no time getting to the point.

“Speed, what are your pecuniary conditions—are you rich or poor?” he asked.

The message was clear. Despite their differing viewpoints over slavery, and Speed’s earlier protestations, Lincoln wanted Speed in his administration, and ideally in his Cabinet, to increase the diversity of views. At bottom, Lincoln approached politics as a pragmatist, and he recognized that Speed’s political stance—though in conflict with his own—needed to be considered and respected, another illustration of his desire to assemble a “team of rivals” in order to consider all opposing viewpoints. Having a slave state like Kentucky remain pro-Union would represent a crucial victory for Lincoln when secessionist sentiment reached fever pitch. And Speed had all the qualities of someone who could help pull it off: trustworthy, widely respected across partisan divides, a Democratic slaveowner who nonetheless agreed with Henry Clay’s pro-Union ideals.

Speed was flattered by the offer. But Lincoln was such a polarizing figure in Kentucky that accepting the offer might subject Speed and his family to opprobrium and ultimately financial hardship.

“I do not think you have any office within your gift that I can afford to take,” Speed replied. Even without an official job title, Speed soon emerged as an indispensable behind-the-scenes operative for Lincoln. Heeding Speed’s advice, Lincoln sought to reassure Kentucky that he hoped for peace and that any impending war would be fought not to eradicate slavery but simply to preserve the Union. Shortly before his inauguration, the president delivered a speech in Cincinnati directed at his “Fellow citizens of Kentucky—friends—brethren” across the Ohio River. “We mean to leave you alone, and in no way to interfere with your institution,” he vowed. With his deep ties to the state’s Whig Party, his wife’s Lexington family, and his connections to Kentuckians in Springfield, Lincoln remained acutely aware of the volatile situation there.

Once the Civil War erupted at Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861, Lincoln faced even greater pressure to tamp down tensions in Kentucky. During the early months of the war, he privately confessed, “I think to lose Kentucky is nearly the same as to lose the whole game.” It now became imperative to fortify pro-Union forces in the state to guard against a secessionist uprising. So Lincoln authorized the delivery of five thousand muskets in a clandestine operation led by Lieutenant William “Bull” Nelson, a mountain-sized man charged with getting guns into the hands of Union loyalists. Nelson boarded a train for Louisville, guns in tow, with explicit instructions to work closely with Lincoln’s man on the ground in Kentucky, Joshua Speed, who had enlisted the help of his older brother James. The Speeds connected Nelson with a host of leading Unionists in the capital city of Frankfort to distribute the weapons.

Speed remained a key ally throughout the rest of 1861, doing his best to keep Kentucky armed and in the Union. In the late summer he wrote to the president, prodding him to send another shipment of guns, and then traveled to Washington to secure additional funds for the Kentucky militia. The militia’s commander, General William Sherman, had repeatedly failed to obtain more money from Simon Cameron, Lincoln’s first secretary of war. Thanks to Speed, the president overruled Cameron and released $100,000 to the militia. But Speed remained in a most delicate spot. Kentucky’s governor, Beriah Magoffin, was a steadfast Confederate sympathizer, as were many of Speed’s friends and business associates. Seeking to raise seventy-five thousand troops at the start of the war, Cameron sent Magoffin a telegram asking for four militia units.

“Your dispatch received,” Magoffin replied. “In answer I say emphatically Kentucky will furnish no troops for the wicked purpose of subduing her sister Southern states.”

Speed’s position grew even more precarious when Union general John Fremont declared martial law in Missouri and freed all slaves owned by those aiding and abetting the Confederacy. This proclamation went even further than Congress’ First Confiscation Act, which applied only to freeing slaves forced into Confederate military labor. Fremont’s order thus sent a revolutionary message: The war to save the Union was necessarily a war against slavery.

Mindful of Fremont’s political sway and charisma, Lincoln initially responded with caution, urging the general to “conform” to the First Confiscation Act. Not doing so, Lincoln warned gently, would “certainly alarm our Southern Union friends and… perhaps ruin our rather fair prospects for Kentucky.” Speed, meanwhile, immediately viewed the Fremont declaration with alarm, recognizing that it posed an urgent and highly delicate predicament: If this became a war to liberate the slaves rather than to save the Union, Speed knew, Kentuckians would want no part of it.

So Speed wrote Lincoln a series of letters, warning that the Fremont proclamation would unleash violence and insurrection and lead to the possible extermination of slaves themselves: “So fixed is public sentiment in this state against freeing negroes & allowing negroes to be emancipated & remain among us—That you had as well attack the freedom of worship in the north…—as to wage war in a slave state on such a principle—.” Not content merely to correspond, Speed then traveled to Washington to meet Lincoln in person. He also asked a prominent Unionist and Kentuckian, Joseph Holt, to reassure the state that “this is no war upon individual property and the institution of slavery.” Ultimately, Lincoln removed Fremont from his post and had the proclamation withdrawn. Thanks to Speed’s timely and wise intercession, Kentucky never left the Union.

As discreetly as possible, Speed continued to help Lincoln, whether by alerting Washington when more munitions were needed or by working to elect pro-Union candidates to Congress and the state legislature. He even made recommendations for positions the president needed to fill, nearly all of which Lincoln accepted. As the war raged on and Lincoln’s morale sagged, Speed sought to cheer him up: “I sent you some Kentucky hams—six—did you get them?” he closed one of his letters. Nobody had Lincoln’s ear, or stomach, quite like Speed. For Thanksgiving that fall, Lincoln had as his guests Joshua and Fanny Speed.

The happiness of that Thanksgiving soon gave way to tragedy. Only three months later, on February 20, 1862, Lincoln’s third son, Willie, died of typhoid fever at the White House. Having already lost one son in 1850, the death of a second son left permanent marks on Lincoln and Mary (their youngest son, Thomas, would survive his father, but die at age eighteen, in 1871). Elizabeth Keckly, a former slave close to the family, later recalled observing the president stand “in silent, awe-stricken wonder” beside the bed where a lifeless Willie lay. Lincoln’s private secretary John Hay echoed Keckly’s remarks, noting that the president changed profoundly after Willie’s death, though “he gave no outward sign of his trouble, but kept about his work the same as ever.”

Just as he had done after his first son’s death, Lincoln again transcended his personal pain to ensure the welfare of his country. Pushing aside his depression, he busied himself with what would become the crowning achievement of his presidency.

In July 1862, Joshua and his brother James, a prominent attorney, came to Washington just as Lincoln began preparing the Emancipation Proclamation. Before even showing a draft of his speech to his top advisors, Lincoln read it to the Speed brothers. If the president expected them to rally around his plan, their reaction certainly left him disappointed. The objection from James, who had already freed most of his slaves and once called slavery “the greatest national sin,” was mainly over process: freeing slaves should be done by the states, not the federal government. Joshua, still a slaveowner, didn’t disagree with Lincoln that slavery needed to end eventually. His argument was over the tool: Freeing slaves by presidential fiat—just like the clunky Fremont proclamation earlier—might cause a massive backlash in Kentucky that could compromise Unionist support.

Despite the opposition of his friend, Lincoln announced the Emancipation Proclamation on September 22, 1862, and it took effect on January 1, 1863. Ironically, the Emancipation Proclamation came a full year after Fremont’s own Missouri Proclamation. The key difference, however, was timing. A year earlier, Lincoln continued to believe that a war fought to emancipate slaves would be far too risky, particularly in terms of losing the support of the crucial border states, especially his beloved Kentucky. By the summer of 1862, however, Lincoln increasingly perceived that his moral ideals needed to align with political realities—that preserving the Union and freeing the slaves were inextricable goals. In this momentous shift in his thinking, Lincoln finally diverged fully from Speed, convinced that it would be impossible to maintain the Union without outlawing slavery. Ignoring the moral dubiousness of slavery, Lincoln now saw, would ultimately undermine the character and resilience of the nation itself.

One year after the issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation, in a conversation Speed had with the president, Lincoln reflected on how the proclamation was consistent with their conversations nearly a generation earlier. As Speed remembered, Lincoln expressed his hope that the Speed brothers would, soon enough, see “the harvest of good of the act which he would erelong glean from it.” The president also reminded Joshua about his depression in the winter of 1841, when his only objection to dying was doing nothing “to make any human being remember that he had lived.”

“I believe,” Lincoln later told Speed, “that in this measure my fondest hopes will be realized.” The proclamation, by connecting his name to something that will “redound to the interest of his fellow man,” had finally given Lincoln’s life meaning. Both Speed brothers in time came to share Lincoln’s vision.

As the deadliest war in American history continued to grind through 1864, Lincoln appointed Joshua’s brother James as his new attorney general. Lincoln had developed a fondness for James on his first visit to the Speed plantation in 1841, and a separate friendship flourished between them as the years went on. They bonded over a shared love for the law and their increasing agreement on political issues. The position opened when Lincoln’s first attorney general, Edward Bates, quit out of frustration that he was wielding so little authority. When Lincoln explained James’s appointment to a friend, he said: “I will offer [the post] to James Speed, of Louisville, a man I know well, though not so well as I know his brother Joshua. That, however, is not strange, for I slept with Joshua for four years, and I suppose I ought to know him well.”

Early in 1865, Joshua Speed was preparing to leave Washington for Kentucky when Lincoln asked to see him. It would be their last time together. The president had spent much of the day hearing appeals from the dozens of people who waited to see him every day. The last of them, Speed recalled, were two women from western Pennsylvania petitioning Lincoln to release a man imprisoned for avoiding the draft.

One was the mother and the other the wife of the prisoner. When the president agreed to free the man, the younger woman rushed forward and knelt before him in gratitude. Lincoln asked her to stand up, clearly uncomfortable with her awkward display. The older woman then said, “Goodbye, Mr. Lincoln, we will never meet again till we meet in Heaven.”

“I am afraid that I will never get there,” Lincoln replied, “but your wish that you will meet me there has fully paid for all I have done for you.”

Once the women had left, the president sat down in a chair and pulled it close to the fireplace. He took off his boots and watched his feet steaming in front of the flames. Looking drawn and haggard, Lincoln told Speed he didn’t feel well, that his hands and feet were always cold.

“I suppose I should be in bed,” Lincoln said.

Speed chided him for not resting enough, saying he should not be spending so much time and energy on seeing petitioners. Lincoln told him that he was very much mistaken—that a simple act of forgiveness and kindness had brought those two women immeasurable happiness.

“Speed, die when I may, I want it said of me by those who know me best… that I always plucked a thistle and planted a flower where I thought a flower would grow.”

With that, the old friends said goodbye. Joshua Speed never saw Abraham Lincoln again.

Lincoln’s assassination on April 14, 1865, generated an outpouring of grief and mourning unequaled in the country’s history. For nearly three weeks, from his funeral in Washington to his final burial in Springfield, Illinois, millions of Americans left their homes and farms to assemble by the rail tracks as the train carrying Lincoln’s coffin passed slowly by. There is no record of how Speed first heard or reacted to his friend’s death. His brother James, as a Cabinet officer, had been at Lincoln’s bedside when he died on the morning of April 15. But Joshua had stayed home in Louisville, where he organized his own private memorial service rather than participating in any of the official ceremonies. When after years of squabbling the city of Springfield finally decided to erect an obelisk monument above the graves of Lincoln and his two young sons, Speed and sixty members of his extended family helped provide money for it. In the following years, he also exchanged detailed letters with Herndon, who had begun working on a biography of their mutual friend.

Despite Lincoln’s untimely passing, the early postwar years brought tangible success for Joshua Speed. His relationship with Lincoln gave him a social cachet that translated into enhanced business opportunities. Doors opened that allowed him to make more profitable investments, purchase more desirable tracts of land, and even buy a hotel. Companies that witnessed his wartime leadership helping to keep Kentucky in the Union sought his wisdom; public service organizations sought his participation. The experiences he had shared with Lincoln, those that had transformed him, made him stand out in a world grappling with the reverberations of the Civil War.

On that enduring issue of race, Speed’s views finally moved closer to Lincoln’s in the aftermath of his death. The war’s end and the start of Reconstruction did nothing to mollify the bitter divisiveness the issue engendered. In its wake, Jim Crow laws were enacted across the South that replaced physical bondage with legal segregation. The killing may have ended, but racism—and the institutions that supported it—remained as strong as ever. Watching all this from his native Kentucky, Speed gradually developed a more progressive view toward Black persons. At the end of 1865, Speed released his two remaining slaves when the Thirteenth Amendment emancipating slaves became law (though Kentucky was one of only three states that didn’t ratify the Amendment until the twentieth century).

Joshua Speed’s final years were marred by an increasingly futile struggle with Type 2 diabetes, which he had first developed in his early forties. Confined to a wheelchair, he traveled to spas and the Caribbean seeking relief from the debilitating disease, but to no avail. He died on May 29, 1882, at the age of sixty-eight—shortly before the Civil Rights Cases of 1883 proceeded to curtail the rights of Black persons yet again, challenging the legacy his best friend left behind.