Historical Background for the Play

For three weeks, in August and September of 1841, Abraham Lincoln visited his friend Joshua Fry Speed at Farmington, Speed’s plantation home at Louisville, Kentucky.

Though born in Kentucky, by the year 1837 Lincoln was living in Springfield, Illinois where he had just launched his legal career. Joshua Speed was also living in Springfield having left Kentucky for this newly developing state to strike out on his own away from his wealthy family. Lincoln and Speed met that year in 1837 and became intimate friends.

In fact, it is generally considered that Joshua Speed was the best friend Lincoln ever had. It is well documented that they roomed together above Speed’s general store for four years, sharing the same double bed. On the frontier, it was common for men to share beds, but nevertheless, this fact has led to speculations about Lincoln’s sexuality, though none has ever been substantiated. Accordingly, the play does not deal with the matter. Whatever the exact nature of their relationship, it is clear that they were exceptionally close friends. In one of his many letters to Speed, Lincoln wrote,” You know my desire to befriend you is everlasting.” Later Speed said of his friendship with Lincoln, “no two men were ever more intimate.”

When Speed finally left Springfield for good, Lincoln remarked in a letter to Speed, “I shall be very lonesome without you. How miserably things seem to be arranged in this world! If we have no friends, we have no pleasure; and if we have them, we are sure to lose them, and be doubly pained by the loss.”

At the same time, Lincoln was considering starting a family life for himself and became engaged to Mary Todd, still another Kentuckian living in Springfield. Mary Todd hailed from a prominent, aristocratic Lexington family. She was well educated, spoke French and possessed all of the polite, social skills. Both Speed and Todd, with respect to their backgrounds, were the exact opposite of Lincoln, who, as we all know, was born in a log cabin and had hardly any formal education.

On January 1, 1841, Lincoln, for reasons that remain ultimately unclear, broke off his engagement to Mary Todd. Concurrently, his intimate friend Speed, his father having died, was called back to Kentucky to manage the plantation with its 50 or so enslaved Afro-Americans. And to make matters worse, Lincoln had suffered setbacks in his legal and political career. During the winter of 1841, perhaps, as a result of the thought of all these occurrences interacting in his mind, Lincoln became seriously depressed, even suicidal. Lincoln himself recognized his depression and used the then current expression, the “hypo,” to identify his condition.

In a letter he wrote to his then law partner, John Stuart, he confessed that “I am now the most miserable man living. If what I feel were to be distributed to the whole human family, there would not be one cheerful face on the earth. Whether I shall ever be better I can not tell; I awfully forebode I shall not. To remain as I am is impossible; I must die or be better, it appears to me.”

In a later conversation with Joshua Speed, Speed reports that Lincoln stated that he was more than willing to die, but that he had “done nothing to make any human being remember that he had lived, and that to connect his name with the events transpiring in his day and generation and so impress himself upon them as to link his name with something that would redound to the interest of his fellow man was what he desired to live for.”

Lincoln’s depression did ease somewhat as the months wore on, but not completely, as Speed discerned from news he received from Springfield.

While these events were taking place in Lincoln’s personal life, Joshua Speed was courting a lovely Louisville lady, Fanny Henning. Speed too was uncertain as to proceeding into marriage, and the consideration of their respective marriage propositions was the subject of much discussion and correspondence between the two men.

This is the background that led up to Speed’s invitation to Lincoln to come down to the plantation for a restful and hopefully curative visit. The three week stay was probably the only long vacation that Lincoln ever enjoyed. David Herbert Donald, perhaps the leading Lincoln scholar of our time, has written:” In that spacious mansion, built by skilled Philadelphia artisans around 1809, he experienced a life of leisure that he had never known before……..all in all, it was a most successful vacation.”

During the visit, according to David Donald, he was assigned a personal slave to attend him, though this is questionable. With Joshua, he took long walks and rides across the fields and woods of the plantation. Speed’s mother, Lucy, doted over him giving him a bible as a gift, hoping that reading it would relieve his despair. He rode to downtown Louisville to visit Joshua’s brother, lawyer James Speed, in his office where he studiously read his law books. Years later as president, Lincoln appointed James Speed his attorney general in his second administration.

While in Louisville, Lincoln availed himself of its health care establishment. We know from Lincoln’s correspondence with Joshua Speed’s sister, Mary, that he had a tooth pulled by a local dentist who was an amateur photographer. Some think this dentist may have taken the first photographic image, ever taken of Lincoln, a daguerreotype. Regarding his mental condition, he seems to have consulted one of the foremost physicians practicing in America, Dr. Daniel Drake, who at that time had an office in Louisville.

Of some significance is that Lincoln’s visit to Farmington was probably the first time he saw slavery in action. He had visited New Orleans twice, about ten years earlier, where he had witnessed slave markets, but at Farmington, he was living in the midst of a working southern plantation with slaves toiling all about him in the fields and house. Although Lincoln’s position regarding slavery at that time was not fully formed, he was dismayed by the spectacle of slaves chained together on the riverboat sailing down the Ohio to St. Louis en route back to Illinois. Lincoln and Speed did not agree on the issue of slavery, and although they returned to Springfield together in September of 1841, their friendship, perhaps because of this difference, was never again as close as it had been at Farmington and the three months they spent together in Springfield after their return from Kentucky.

As it turned out, while Lincoln subsequently experienced other episodes of depression, none were as severe as the one in 1841. Certainly there were other events in his subsequent life to be very depressed about, but the Louisville sojourn did seem to lead to an elevation of his spirits that continued to sustain him. Lincoln returned to Springfield, continued his legal and political career,resolved to marry Mary Todd the following year and started a family. Hardly seven years later, in 1848, Lincoln found himself in Washington DC as an elected congressman from the State of Illinois. If Lincoln had gone no further in his political career, this in itself would have been a significant accomplishment given the events of the few preceding years.

In summary, we consider Lincoln’s visit to Louisville one of several pivotal moments in Lincoln’s life. Perhaps it was beginning of the thinning of his close friendship with Joshua Speed, a relationship crucial to his passage into maturity. But more clearly and importantly, it was the first hand encounter with slavery, we believe reinforcing an aversion to this terrible institution which he had held from childhood, and which of course was to become a center piece in his future political career. And lastly, the visit marked the beginning of what can be considered a new period in his life in which he was able to successfully manage his tendency to experience debilitating episodes of depression. Thereafter, despite setback, disappointment and tragedy, Lincoln persevered, forging ahead on his path to ultimate success.

In 1861, only twenty years after his 1841 visit to Louisville, Lincoln finds himself in the White House.

An interesting footnote is the fact that many consider that the architectural design for Farmington, Speed’s plantation house, may have been based upon plans prepared by Thomas Jefferson, one of Lincoln's heroes, who was acquainted with Speed’s maternal ancestors in Virginia. Farmington, therefore, is a house associated with two great American presidents.

David S. Traub, AIA, January 1, 2009