YOUR F RIEND FOREVER,
The
Enduring Friendship Ab r a h a m L i n c o l n and Jo s h u a S p e e d
of
CHARLES B. STROZIER
PR EFACE
I landed my first university teaching job at twenty-eight years of age in 1972 at what was then Sangamon State University in Springfield, Illinois (now a branch of the University of Illinois). With my family, I lived on an old, decidedly nonworking farm in the country. I did have chickens and horses in the barn, but otherwise things were a bit feral. My dogs fed on rabbits in the fields, there were lots of weeds, cars kept breaking down, and I never had enough money. I had a freshly minted PhD from the University of Chicago and was about to begin formal psychoanalytic training. I was young and ambitious, perhaps a bit brash, and committed to the serious study of history from a psychoanalytic point of view. As I had gotten my PhD in European history, under the direction of William McNeill, it was something of a treat to stumble onto Abraham Lincoln. Besides, what else can one do in Springfield, Illinois, but study Lincoln? I found the subject utterly engrossing and spent the next decade working on a psychoanalytic study of prepresidential Lincoln. That book came out in 1982 (Lincoln’s Quest for Union, Basic Books; rev. ed., 2001, Paul Dry Books) and caused quite a stir as the first serious psychological study of Lincoln. One chapter described Lincoln’s
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friendship with Joshua Speed. I have watched now for decades, mostly from the perspective of my professorship at the City University of New York and from within my psychoanalytic practice in the city, at times with bemusement but also with some annoyance, at the way my work on the story of Lincoln’s relationship with Speed has been so misunderstood. After much reflection, I decided to explore the subject of young Lincoln and his relationship with Joshua Speed in the depth it deserves. It seems that every forty years or so I write another book on Lincoln. Speed was with Lincoln at every point in these years but mostly silent. He moved at the edges of politics, tentatively as Lincoln’s friend. He ran a store in Springfield and dabbled in other business ventures. Historians have not known quite what to do with him. Why was he so important for Lincoln? Lincoln had a way of making everyone feel he was his best friend, but in fact only Speed really mattered. Everyone in Springfield knew Speed, and most liked him. He was often mentioned in the oral history that Lincoln’s law partner, William Herndon, later gathered. Compared to Lincoln, Speed played only a small role in history (though after his election Lincoln tried to entice Speed to serve in his cabinet, and in the early part of the war he played a pivotal role keeping Kentucky in the Union). But for the most part, it is Lincoln we remember and seek to understand. Nevertheless, I argue Speed needs to be brought out of the shadows and his role in seeing Lincoln through the worst extended personal crisis of his life examined in detail; at the same time, we should not make Speed into more than he was in Lincoln’s life. The book is mostly centered on understanding Abraham Lincoln; it is not a dual biography, but neither is Speed ignored. I seek to make him a three-dimensional figure, someone truly worthy of Lincoln’s devoted friendship, even his love. Nearly every detail of the narrative arc in Lincoln’s life between 1837 and 1842 has been hotly debated; in fact, it is fair to say that, while books will undoubtedly continue to be written about all facets of Abraham Lincoln’s life, the meaning of these years represents the last area of real disagreement about Lincoln’s identity and character. Some see Lincoln’s relationship with Speed as having been sexualized, thus turning Lincoln into a gay hero, which of course calls into question what has come down to us as the story of his early life, his identity, his marriage, his depressions, and much else. This line of thinking about
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Lincoln as gay has a curious context in recent history, embedded as it has been in the age of AIDS from the early 1980s, a disease that has finally moved from the apocalyptic to the merely dreaded, along with all the recent legal, social, and political areas of acceptance of homosexuality. But the image of gay Lincoln, however, has occasioned a good deal of other books that portray him as vigorously heterosexual and pushes Speed into the background. In this version of the narrative, Lincoln litters the ground with broken hearts, prostitutes attract his eye, and the reason for the broken courtship with Mary Todd in late 1840 was his infatuation with another woman (and, it has been argued, Mary had gotten fat anyway). In these studies, Mary Todd Lincoln has been vilified, turned into a shrew in ways not seen in many years in the Lincoln literature, and the idea of Lincoln actually loving her dismissed as foolish. Mary’s leading biographer (Jean Baker) further complicates the story by accepting the idea that Speed was Lincoln’s lover but feels Lincoln was probably bisexual, and she argues that Mary broke the engagement. At least in that biography of Mary, as in some earlier ones, the storyline captures the texture of love in the Lincoln marriage, and the portrait of Mary is that of an interesting and complicated figure in her own right. In all these tangled lines of argument, Lincoln’s friendship with Speed is either made more of than it really was or unduly diminished in significance. Neither view is supported by a close read of the sources, especially Lincoln’s own letters. A surprising number of extremely important and psychologically revealing such letters have survived. No other source trumps the significance of something Lincoln actually wrote, which is what this book most heavily relies on. But the letters themselves have long defied understanding. To grasp their deeper meaning, some theory matters. These letters—and much else—don’t come to us naked. We can’t settle contentious issues in the Lincoln story by a false positivism. My approach is avowedly psychohistorical. I apply concepts from psychoanalysis, hopefully critically and unobtrusively, to bring the evidence alive in new ways in order to appreciate the true role of Speed in the making of young man Lincoln. I do abandon tired Freudian ideas about sex and various complexes and instead draw on current notions of mutuality, empathy, and the self. Besides Lincoln’s letters, other sources of significance abound, including quite a lot of mostly unpublished material about Speed and
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his family members, including letters, wills, and other documents such as court records, as well as material that is more readily available, such as Speed’s own Reminiscences and his many letters to and interviews with William Herndon about Lincoln after the war. Those letters and interviews are part of the trove of oral-history materials from all kinds of people who knew Lincoln, gathered mostly by Herndon and deposited in the Library of Congress, and recently published in a masterful (and massive) edition by Douglas Wilson and Rodney Davis. That book, Herndon’s Informants, needs to be read along with a much earlier but crucial volume of Herndon’s letters, The Hidden Lincoln, edited by Emmanuel Hertz, as well as other relevant memoirs and interviews, including in newspapers, often from many years later. In one sense, the sheer number of documents about young man Lincoln can be overwhelming. But one must read with caution and a critical eye. It is certainly not the case that merely stacking up endlessly derivative references in the oral history settles a given issue about Lincoln. Context is everything. Nothing that anyone wrote or said about Lincoln after 1865 is free from the shadow cast by a figure of mythic proportions in American memory. Nevertheless, oral history is invaluable, and much of what we know about Lincoln in this period is because of Herndon’s work. But to draw intelligently on his research we need to keep in mind the dates of what people said to him and the all-important context in which they told Herndon things. Herndon lacked good judgment in distinguishing what he knew firsthand and what he interpreted based on his understanding of what others told him. The record he collected about young Lincoln is invaluable (though itself inevitably filled with contradictions). But his interpretations of what it meant needs serious caution in accepting. Based on this criterion, anything Herndon writes about Lincoln before his direct experience with him is open to question. Some of the rest is equally problematic but for different reasons. As Lincoln’s friend after 1838, someone who lived in the same room with him and Speed for two years, and after 1844 his law partner, Herndon knew a great deal about young Lincoln, though he was prone to overstate his own significance. Herndon was an outgoing, flamboyant young man who intensely idealized Lincoln, something played out and reinforced by the way they addressed each other. He called him “Mr. Lincoln”; Herndon was “Billy.” Herndon was well read and a
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competent lawyer, but his mind was always rushing forward, frantically searching for a new idea before digesting the last one. He wrote with desperate dashes and piled on adjectives with breathless haste. But he was devoted to the truth and, as best one can tell, never lied or tried to skew his story to fit a predetermined view. Many scholars have attacked Herndon’s credibility. Full and uncritical acceptance of his work as opposed to ready rejection of it because some of what he said is fraudulent seems to me to be the wrong way of framing the issue. Herndon sought to be utterly reliable, and as a researcher and oral historian he mostly succeeded—except when his own psychological conflicts clouded his vision. In his interviews, for example, he sought to elicit full and complete accounts. The data from an interview, however, as in psychoanalysis, are shaped by the questions asked. Herndon was curiously intrigued by anything sexual about Lincoln, from odd accounts of something off-kilter about his father’s testicles to his hero’s seeming interest in prostitutes. Herndon also seems to have nursed some fantasies—and grudges—in his account of Lincoln’s romances, struggles with intimacy, and sexuality. Herndon’s “findings” on such issues, even when grounded in the oral history, must be taken with a grain of salt. Most importantly, Herndon despised Mary Lincoln, and the feeling was mutual. Douglas Wilson has rightfully pointed out that the enmity between Herndon and Mary Lincoln has been exaggerated, that much of the bad blood between the two came from postwar writings of Herndon, and that Herndon went to some lengths to try to be fair to Mary in his letters and biography of Lincoln. But Wilson may go a bit too far in his efforts to correct the story. She certainly turned her wrath on Herndon for his lectures about Ann Rutledge in 1866, for which she never forgave him. He was, she wrote in 1867, a “miserable man!” and a “dirty dog” who had been a “hopeless inebriate” saved by her husband. That “wretched Herndon,” she wrote later, with all his “falsehoods, and villanies,” deprived her of her “reason” (though she quickly adds “almost”). But her enmity toward Herndon, though mostly suppressed, had a long history. Mary thought Herndon was coarse and a drunken lout. Once Herndon and some drunken cronies broke a tavern window. Lincoln paid the fine to keep Herndon out of jail, something undoubtedly noted by Mary. Herndon also had trouble keeping afloat financially and, in at least one documented case, faced
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charges from two local bankers, Jacob and John Bunn. As the scion of Southern plantation elegance and from her perch in the upper middle class in Springfield, Mary looked down on such indiscretions. She never once let him enter her house, despite the fact that her husband worked on a daily basis with Herndon for seventeen years not four blocks away. Herndon’s revenge was to gather all the negative reports of her he could manage, to portray her in his letters and biography as crazy, and to describe Lincoln’s life with her as a “domestic hell.” He could not tolerate Lincoln’s love for his wife, and she cherished an exclusive love for Lincoln that Herndon’s abject devotion seemed to threaten. That triangle saw Mary Lincoln and Herndon in fierce competition for the attention of the man they both idealized, pitting them against each other like snarling dogs. Lincoln, in turn, probably played an unconscious role in setting up such a competition for his affections. One would think that all these years later observers need not get caught up in taking sides in the struggle between Mary Lincoln and William Herndon. Both were of value to Lincoln, if in different ways and for different reasons. But the sheer volume of material that Herndon left about Mary skews the record and influences the unwary. Some of it is undoubtedly authentic and valuable, but it is all secondhand and much of it tainted. Herndon had an axe to grind in anything touching Mary Todd Lincoln.1 > > >
Male friendship, especially its psychological texture, has evolved over time, and contemporary attitudes and values complicate our efforts to make sense of Lincoln’s friendship with Speed. The first part of the nineteenth century was a time when young men could be, indeed were assumed to be, close, bonded, and intimate, even sleeping together, without being sexual partners. Some men, of course, were in fact lovers, and a number of good historians are just beginning to uncover a fascinating and ethically important history of male homosexuality in this period (the literature on female friendship and lesbianism, which mirrors that of men but is decisively different in some important ways, is quite well developed at this point). The reason the history of gay male love has been long dormant is its absolute suppression at the time, which meant it left scant evidence, and the belief until
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recently that it was not a story worthy of the telling. They didn’t even have a term for same-sex love: “homosexuality” was not invented until later in the nineteenth century in Germany. Things are different now, which is good for society and all of us who live in it but actually clouds our vision of the past. One of the ironies of our general acceptance of homosexuality (except in the backwaters) in the present is that we assume men who are intimate friends, share their secrets, talk of their everlasting affection for each other, and sleep together are probably sexual partners. It takes a leap of imagination to enter into a time in American history when, on one hand, sex between men was regarded as loathsome and if known was severely punished and the basis for social ostracism while, on the other, intimacy—including sleeping together—and closeness, mutuality, and expressions of love were strongly encouraged and even regarded as desirable for men between mother and wife, men in that narrative space between family of origin and marriage with one’s own children. > > >
I was a young man in my early thirties when I wrote my first book about Lincoln. I was in psychoanalytic training but had not begun to see patients. But now all these decades later and after many years of psychoanalytic clinical work, one thing that I appreciate much more deeply is the distinction between moodiness, sadness, and garden-variety depression and clinical depression. The former is ubiquitous and protean. People struggle with depression in a myriad of ways and, like hitting mercury, it can disperse into pieces and surface in unlikely and disguised ways (including embedded in the body in physical symptoms). Such depression drags one down and can interrupt life’s flow. But it also takes one into experience well below the surface. It is hard to imagine profundity without some melancholy, and no one in our historical experience better expresses that connection than Abraham Lincoln. Clinical depression is another matter. It fragments the self and makes life hopeless. Eating, sleeping, and relating to others lose their value. One withdraws from life. Suicide is almost always imagined and sometimes carried out. Clinical depression takes one into a dark hole where creativity languishes along with the self. Nothing hopeful can emerge from such experience. It is toxic. This distinction in the forms
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of depression leads to an important feature in understanding Lincoln. He was clearly melancholy his whole life in a way that was not unconnected to his profundity. But in the years this book treats he was twice clinically depressed and suicidal in ways that did not again recur in his life. In the late 1830s up to 1842, Lincoln could easily have gone off the rails, and no one played a more important role in healing him than Joshua Speed. Historians have broken apart the period from 1837 to 1842 to fit their interpretations of young Lincoln. But such fragmentation distorts the story and leads to deep confusion about the meaning of the evidence. In fact, those years from toward the end of Lincoln’s life in New Salem and his arrival in Springfield up until his marriage only make sense if seen as of a piece, as one coherent psychological moment in the making of Abraham Lincoln. It was a time of crisis for him. Primarily through his friendship with Joshua Speed, which proved both therapeutic and redemptive, Lincoln vicariously resolved his uncertainties about love and intimacy and after a tortuous broken engagement found his way back to Mary Todd, who had graciously waited for him. In the process, Lincoln established a cohesive self that would never again risk clinical depression. After the early 1840s, he broke free to imagine a new future for himself and eventually, in the fires of war, foster what he called at Gettysburg “a new birth of freedom” for the country. Others have told that later story well. My task is the making of Lincoln. It is one of the more interesting personal stories of a young great man finding himself. N O T E ON T H E AU T HOR S H I P OF T HI S B O OK
I first met Wayne Soini in a workshop on historical narrative I taught in the summer of 2010 at the Norman Mailer Writers Colony in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Soini is a man of great intelligence and a prodigious researcher whose special interest is Anson G. Henry (Lincoln’s doctor friend). Soini later enthusiastically became my research assistant for this book. As it moved forward, we exchanged a good two thousand e-mails on every conceivable aspect of young Lincoln, Speed, and the age and wrote notes to each other that sometimes drifted into arcane corners of scholarship. He was indefatigable in tracking down the answer to everything, and most especially obscure issues in the