Team of Rivals_ The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln - Doris Kearns Goodwin [39]
If Lincoln, like Seward, confronted the loss of loved ones without prospect of finding them in the afterlife to assuage the loss, one begins to comprehend the weight of his sorrow when Ann died. Nonetheless, he completed his study of law and received his law license and the offer to become a partner with John Stuart, the friend whose law books he had borrowed.
IN APRIL 1837, twenty months after Ann Rutledge’s death, Lincoln left New Salem for Springfield, Illinois, then a community of about fifteen hundred people. There he planned to embark upon what he termed his “experiment” in law. With no place to stay and no money to buy provisions, he wandered into the general store in the town square. He asked the young proprietor, Joshua Speed, how much it would cost to buy “the furniture for a single bed. The mattress, blankets, sheets, coverlid, and pillow.” Speed estimated the cost at seventeen dollars, which Lincoln agreed was “perhaps cheap enough,” though he lacked the funds to cover that amount. He asked if Speed might advance him credit until Christmastime, when, if his venture with law worked out, he would pay in full. “If I fail in this,” added Lincoln abjectly, “I do not know that I can ever pay you.”
Speed surveyed the tall, discomfited figure before him. “I never saw a sadder face,” he recalled thinking at the time. Though the two men had never met, Speed had heard Lincoln speak a year earlier and came away deeply impressed. Decades later, he could still recite Lincoln’s concluding words. Turning to Lincoln, Speed said: “You seem to be so much pained at contracting so small a debt, I think I can suggest a plan by which you can avoid the debt and at the same time attain your end. I have a large room with a double bed upstairs, which you are very welcome to share with me.” Lincoln reacted quickly to Speed’s unexpected offer. Racing upstairs to deposit his bags in the loft, he came clattering down again, his face entirely transformed. “Beaming with pleasure he exclaimed, ‘Well, Speed, I am moved!’”
Five years younger than Lincoln, the handsome, blue-eyed Speed had been raised in a gracious mansion on his family’s prosperous plantation, cultivated by more than seventy slaves. He had received an excellent education in the best Kentucky schools and at St. Joseph’s College at Bards-town. While he could have remained at home, enjoying a life of ease, he determined to make his way west with the tide of his restless generation. Arriving in Springfield when he was twenty-one, he had invested in real estate and become the proprietor of the town’s general store.
Lincoln and Speed shared the same room for nearly four years, sleeping in the same double bed. Over time, the two young men developed a close relationship, talking nightly of their hopes and their prospects, their mutual love of poetry and politics, their anxieties about women. They attended political meetings and forums together, went to dances and parties, relaxed with long rides in the countryside.
Emerging from a childhood and young adulthood marked by isolation and loneliness, Lincoln discovered in Joshua Speed a companion with whom he could share his inner life. They had similar dispositions, both possessing an ambitious impulse to improve themselves and rise in the world. No longer a boy but not yet an established adult, Lincoln ended years of emotional deprivation and intellectual solitude by building his first and deepest friendship with Speed. Openly acknowledging the strength of this attachment, the two pledged themselves to a lifelong bond of friendship. Those who knew Lincoln well pointed to Speed as his “most intimate friend,” the only person to whom he ever disclosed his secret thoughts. “You know my desire to befriend you is everlasting,” Lincoln assured Speed, “that I will never cease, while I know how to do any thing.”
Some have suggested that there may have been a sexual relationship between