Your Friend Forever, A. Lincoln: The Enduring Friendship of Abraham Lincoln and Joshua Speed

by Charles Strozier

Overview

On April 15, 1837, a "long, gawky" Abraham Lincoln walked into Joshua Speed's dry-goods store in Springfield, Illinois, and asked what it would cost to buy the materials for a bed. Speed said seventeen dollars, which Lincoln didn't have. He asked for a loan to cover that amount until Christmas. Speed was taken with his visitor, but, as he said later, "I never saw so gloomy and melancholy a face." Speed suggested Lincoln stay with him in a room over his store for free and share his large double bed. What began would become one of the most important friendships in American history.

Speed was Lincoln's closest confidant, offering him invaluable support after the death of his first love, Ann Rutledge, and during his rocky courtship of Mary Todd. Lincoln needed Speed for guidance, support, and empathy. Your Friend Forever, A. Lincoln is a rich analysis of a relationship that was both a model of male friendship and a specific dynamic between two brilliant but fascinatingly flawed men who played off each other's strengths and weaknesses to launch themselves in love and life. Their friendship resolves important questions about Lincoln's early years and adds significant psychological depth to our understanding of our sixteenth president.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780231171328
Publisher:	Columbia University Press
Publication date:	05/03/2016
Pages:	352
Sales rank:	680,830
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.30(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Charles B. Strozier, a historian and psychoanalyst, is a professor of history at John Jay College and the Graduate Center, CUNY, and faculty, training, and supervising analyst at TRISP in New York City. His books include Lincoln's Quest for Union: Public and Private Meanings (1982) and Until the Fires Stopped Burning: 9/11 and New York City in the Words and Experiences of Survivors and Witnesses (2011).

Table of Contents

Preface
Acknowledgments
A Note on Sources
1. Beginnings
2. Two Friends, One Bed
3. Friendship
4. Depression
5. Sex and Prostitution
6. Broken Engagement
7. The Winter of Discontent
8. Kentucky Bluegrass
9. Homeward Bound
10. A Vicarious Romance
11. Mary Todd, Once Again
12. The Crucible of Greatness
Conclusions: On Friendship
List of Abbreviations
Notes
Index

Editorial Reviews

This is a useful, timely, and thought-provoking book for Lincoln scholars and general readers. Strozier is to be commended for producing it.

Civil War Book Review

The men's frank exchanges about their anxieties proved therapeutic, Strozier compellingly argues, enabling both men to ultimately take the plunge into marriage and become, for lack of a better phrase, grown-ups.

Daily Beast - Ronald K. Fried

Strozier's book on the friendship of Lincoln and Speed is a valuable contribution to the voluminous literature on the 16th President and virtually a casebook of superb psychobiographical writing.

Journal of Psychohistory

In this compact and fluent study of Lincoln's anguished inner life in the five years preceding his 1842 marriage, Strozier anatomizes his intense, complex and therapeutic relationship with his closest friend, Joshua Speed. Drawing on a huge range of previously scattered sources (as well as current psychological notions of mutuality and empathy), he meticulously recreates the mirrored crises both men underwent as they lurched into the desired but dreaded realm of marriage and sexual intimacy. It will stand as the definitive account of this critical period in Lincoln's life.

Cullom Davis

Strozier is a masterful psychobiographer, one who manages to combine diligent research into archival materials and other types of primary sources with a creative and often inspired approach to the close reading of documents. That is a rare combination.

Matthew Pinsker

Strozier brings a shrewd psychoanalyist's insight to this vivid chronicle of perhaps the closest and most consequential friendship of Abraham Lincoln's life.

Geoffrey C. Ward

[A] brisk, fluent examination of Lincoln's profound and psychologically consequential friendship with Speed.

Illinois Times - J. Michael Lennon

Lincoln was the hub of an important wheel of political and social life, and Strozier has repaired the missing spoke that is Joshua Speed. He has done so in part by reconnecting Speed to Lincoln's other friends and acquaintances, to provide as full a picture of these young American men's interior lives as we are likely to get. His use of often-ignored archival sources is brilliant.

James M. Cornelius

Original, perceptive, and persuasive.

Wall Street Journal

Charles Strozier is unique in his combination of psychological and historical imagination. This highly original book tells us a great deal about Lincoln himself, about the nature of friendship, and about the surprising ways in which friendship can contribute to greatness.

Robert Jay Lifton

[A] well-thought-out psychohistorical case study.

Choice

Original, perceptive, and persuasive.

Wall Street Journal

Given his psychoanalytic expertise, Strozier's high quality psychohistorical work helps illuminate important emotional events that other biographers and historians have left in the shadows.

Psychohistory News

Few people played as large a role as Joshua Speed did in helping Abraham Lincoln become Abraham Lincoln. American history was shaped nearly 180 years ago when the tall, thin, ambitious but uncertain 28-year-old walked into Speed's store and struck up a conversation.

Chicago Tribune - Patrick T. Reardon

Bringing the twin skills of a professional historian and trained psychoanalyst, Strozier has beautifully illuminated the real significance of the relationship between Joshua Speed and Abraham Lincoln in a crucial formative period in each of their lives. He has shown that their intense relationship was an essential part of both of their developments as mature, heterosexual males. In the process of the unfolding understanding of their bond, Strozier also has given us a new and deeper insight into the cause of Lincoln's depression and his vacillating courtship of Mary Todd. We also learn about the nature of male bonding in 19th century America. This is a must-read for anyone who is interested in and wants a nuanced understanding of one of the most important figures in American history.

David M. Terman

No one has previously succeeded in re-creating the nuances of the Lincoln-Speed friendship as deeply or seriously as Prof. Strozier. Moreover, I think it would be safe to say that Strozier is uniquely situated within the Lincoln scholarly fraternity to write on precisely this subject.

Allen Guelzo

Charles B. Stozier long ago established himself as a pioneering student of Lincoln's inner life. He now returns to the field with the first comprehensive study of Lincoln's close friendship with Joshua Speed. If history is any guide, Strozier's compelling account of this crucial aspect of the Lincoln biography is sure to become definitive.

James Oakes

04/01/2016
Historian and psychoanalyst Strozier (history, John Jay Coll. of Criminal Justice) discovers the character and consequences of Abraham Lincoln's friendships, especially with his longtime confidant and fellow Whig politician Joshua Speed (1814–82). Through a careful, if sometimes imaginative, reading of the Lincoln-Speed correspondence and accounts of Lincoln's friendships by those who knew him, Strozier finds that Speed understood the young Lincoln better than anyone except the president's wife, Mary. By Strozier's reckoning, Speed "saved" Lincoln from suicide by sharing confidences about their mutual concerns and worries about courtship, marriage, and public life—and by giving Lincoln perspective during his darkest days of doubt as a bachelor and rising politician. Strozier points to the emotional intimacy, but not any sexual one, that formed and sustained the Lincoln-Speed friendship and that of many other men in their day. The result is a brilliant, if unverifiable, argument that by wrestling with his early self-doubts Lincoln achieved an emotional and psychological balance that gave him the self-assurance to succeed in politics, public service, and, until war took its toll, in marriage. VERDICT Anyone wanting to know more about the elusive private Lincoln will need to read this book.—Randall M. Miller, St. Joseph's Univ., Philadelphia

Library Journal

2016-02-04
An examination of one of Abraham Lincoln's male friendships that has been profoundly "misunderstood." Strozier's (Until the Fires Stopped Burning: 9/11 and New York City in the Words and Experiences of Survivors and Witnesses, 2011, etc.) first book on Lincoln, Lincoln's Quest for Union (1982), was a psychoanalytic study of the president containing one chapter about his close friendship with Joshua Speed from 1837 to 1842. The misunderstandings and insinuations of a homosexual relationship have led him to write this account of their friendship. They met at Speed's store. Since Lincoln was broke, Speed offered to share his room and bed with him at no charge. This was the gathering place where Lincoln polished his narrative talent. The two men lived together for almost four years, and Speed largely became the center of Lincoln's emotional well-being, assuaging his fears while sharing his own inadequacies. Both men suffered from depression, and both had endured troubled relationships with their fathers. Speed was known as a lady's man, while Lincoln was painfully shy. Speed was a born businessman, eventually becoming very rich—too rich to accept a cabinet post in his friend's administration. Lincoln was poor, but he was certain of his future greatness. Lincoln's fall into depression and thoughts of suicide after his broken engagement were only relieved with Speed's help. William Herndon, Lincoln's law partner, collected an oral history after Lincoln's death. While Strozier uses it as one of his sources, he warns the work should be taken with a grain of salt. As a slave owner, Speed didn't even vote for Lincoln, but he was largely responsible for keeping Kentucky in the Union. Lincoln trusted him so much that he even showed him the draft of the Emancipation Declaration. Speed's marriage and move to Louisville left Lincoln desperate for his "crutch," but it also freed him to renew his proposal to Mary and work to overcome his debilitating depressions on his own. An enjoyable look at a man on the "edge of politics" who had a strong influence on Lincoln's development.

Kirkus Reviews