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A Lincoln friendship explored

By Marshall Meyers Herald-Leader Contributing Writer

Lincoln and the Speeds: The Untold Story of a Devoted and Enduring FriendshipBy Bryan S. Bush. Acclaim Press. 192 pp. $24.95.

"In the life of a young man, the most essential thing for happiness," William Osler observes, "is the gift of friendship."

That describes the friendship of Kentucky-born Abraham Lincoln and Louisville transplant Joshua Speed, who both chose the fledgling town of Springfield, Ill., to launch their young careers: Speed in business and Lincoln in law.

On April 15, 1837, Lincoln rode into town on a borrowed horse, $17 in his pocket, seeking to buy a bed and a few other necessities from Speed's store to set up housekeeping. The bedraggled, lanky lawyer asked Speed for credit, confessing: "If you will credit me until Christmas, I will pay you then, if I do well; but if I do not, I may never be able to pay you."

The sadness in Lincoln's eyes must have touched Speed, for instead of credit, he offered to share his room above the store with Lincoln.

It was the beginning of a deep and abiding friendship, ending only with Lincoln's assassination on April 15, 1865, 28 years to the day after the two young men began sharing a room.

Bryan S. Bush's new book chronicles this friendship, as well as the affection and devotion Lincoln felt for Speed's extended family.

In his life, Lincoln had many good friends. He was good-natured, kind, loyal, and a good storyteller. When he was riding the circuit, he developed close relationships with other lawyers and judges. His law partnership with William Herndon afforded both men the opportunity to share their lives and ideas with each other. And his political friends were generally quite loyal to him, and he to them.

But no friendship of Lincoln's reached greater depths of trust and respect than Speed's. Curiously, it was not because they thought so much alike. After all, Lincoln grew up on the frontier in Kentucky, Indiana and Illinois, while Speed enjoyed the fineries afforded the son of a prominent Kentucky farmer and slave owner. Yet throughout his life, Lincoln never seemed afraid to mix with those of more delicate breeding and more formal education, including a well-schooled, articulate young woman from Lexington, Mary Todd.

Speed no doubt helped Lincoln acclimate himself to the considerable society in young Springfield. Lincoln admitted to Speed that he felt awkward around women: He wore clothes that accented his clumsiness, with trousers so short that they revealed the long underwear underneath; his hands were so large that he didn't seem to know what to do with them; and he showed little evidence of knowing how to address and treat young ladies.

In New Salem, in his early days in Illinois, Lincoln dated Mary Owens, originally from Greensburg, Ky., who characterized Lincoln's courting and manners as: "deficient in those little links which make up the chain of a woman's happiness." Later, Speed advised Lincoln to meet with Mary Todd and explain to her personally his misgivings about their relationship, instead of sending her a crass, short letter, as Lincoln had originally planned.

On the other hand, Lincoln offered Speed qualities that the young entrepreneur found entertaining and endearing. While Lincoln lived there, Speed's store soon became the local gathering place for young men wrestling with the verities and vexations of young adulthood. As the logs in the fireplace popped and cracked, Lincoln would dip into his plenteous supply of stories, or he would share his thoughts and frustrations with matters theological and philosophical, honing his communication skills, despite having only one year of formal education.

When Speed decided to relinquish his dreams of financial success on the frontier and return to Kentucky, leaving Lincoln behind, Lincoln soon found that he needed Speed's ear to help him understand his feelings for Mary Todd.

So Lincoln arrived at the Speed plantation at Farmington in August 1841, for an extended stay to sort out his feelings. As it happened, Speed, too, was struggling with the same doubts and fears in his romance with a beauty named Fanny Henning. Together, Speed and Lincoln took long walks and had extended conversations, helping each other sift through their feelings toward the women who would eventually become their wives.

Besides the wise counsel of Speed's mother, while at Farmington, Lincoln also met Speed's lawyer brother James, whose political career and legal experience Lincoln later tapped into when, late in his presidency, he needed an attorney general.

What Bush accomplishes best in his book is to put flesh on the skeleton of knowledge about the myriad ways that Joshua and James served Lincoln well — even after Lincoln's death, when some sought revenge in dealing with the defeated South, who seemed to have forgotten Lincoln's call for "malice toward none with charity for all."

Throughout his administration, Lincoln relied heavily on the brothers Speed to gauge the political climate in Kentucky, for his concerns for his birth state ran deep. He once said that "to lose Kentucky would be to lose the whole game," and the Speeds' bellwether was consistently accurate.

In spite of the two brothers' vehement opposition to the Emancipation Proclamation, and rumors of secession in Kentucky, Lincoln knew that freeing the slaves in the Confederacy was a wise moral and military move, but remarkably, as visceral as the topic was to the Speeds, it did nothing to harm Lincoln's friendship with them.

An article published almost 20 years after Lincoln's death notes Lincoln's "undying esteem for the Speed family." It concludes that Joshua Speed "knew more perfectly or revered more profoundly the character of Abraham Lincoln" than any other man.

It was a friendship that in many ways molded Lincoln's personality, allowed him to share thoughts and feelings that he could with no other, gave him a firm faith in the sanctity of the individual, and helped him ultimately realize his need for close communion with another man.

A mythic figure in American history, Lincoln has become, nearly 200 years after his birth, a man so beyond belief that we forget that, like all of us, he needed friends, too.

Marshall Myers is an English professor at Eastern Kentucky University.