Joshua Speed's Store

When twenty-eight-year-old Abraham Lincoln moved from New Salem to Springfield in April 1837, the newly designated state capital was short of housing. One of his first stops was the general store here, where his old New Salem friend Abner Y. Ellis was part-owner, but Ellis was absent and Lincoln was greeted by another partner, Joshua Speed. Lincoln needed furnishings for a bed but admitted he could not afford them. Speed, struck by Lincoln's gloomy and melancholy expression, offered to share his second-floor room and large double bed. Lincoln carried his saddlebags upstairs, dropped them on the floor, then came back down with a face beaming with pleasure and smiles and said, "Well Speed, I'm moved." Speed, twenty-two years old in 1837, was the son of an affluent Kentucky plantation owner and had more formal education than Lincoln. The two roommates shared anxieties about women, consoled each other in courtship and marriage, and their deep friendship lasted throughout Lincoln's life. Springfield's social world at the time was shaped by a shortage of housing and by a population in which men outnumbered women almost two to one. Many unmarried men in their twenties shared beds and close quarters in rooming houses and often took meals in separate boarding houses. A young male subculture emerged in which men fraternized in the evenings, with drinking and card playing alongside efforts to cultivate middle-class respectability through discussions of poetry, philosophy, and literary compositions. Speed later remembered that on winter nights eight or ten choice spirits gathered at his store by a big wood fire to enjoy each other's company and wit; on one December night, after tempers flared in a political discussion, Stephen Douglas cut it short, and good will returned as the group resumed its banter, including Lincoln's infectious humor.

Springfield, Illinois · United States