In early fall of 1841, thirty-two-year-old Abraham Lincoln, then a lawyer in Springfield, Illinois, visited his friend Joshua Speed at Farmington and stayed for three weeks while both men were second-guessing their courtships of Mary Todd and Fanny Henning. Lincoln spent the visit walking the plantation fields, socializing with the Speed family, and traveling to James Speed's law office in downtown Louisville to read law books. At Farmington he encountered slavery again at close range, as the Speeds owned about sixty enslaved African Americans, many of whom likely were engaged in tasks connected to the fall hemp harvest and the cultivation of hemp in the fields there. Lincoln also encountered slavery firsthand on the Louisville waterfront and during his steamboat trip home to Springfield in 1841, when he saw enslaved African Americans shackled together and being taken south. In letters to Mary Speed in 1841 and to Joshua Speed in 1855, he recalled the chained captives and wrote that the sight tormented him and made him miserable.
