Joshua Fry Speed

Joshua Fry Speed (November 14, 1814 May 29, 1882) was an American politician who was a close friend of future President Abraham Lincoln from his days in Springfield, Illinois, where Speed was a partner in a general store. Later, Speed was a farmer and a real estate investor in Kentucky, and also served one term in the Kentucky House of Representatives in 1848. Life Ancestors, family and early life Joshua Fry Speed was born at Farmington, Louisville, Kentucky, to Judge John Speed and Lucy Gilmer Speed (née Fry) on November 14, 1814. On his father's side, Speed's ancestry can be traced back to 17th-century cartographer and historian John Speed. John Speed's great-grandfather (James Speed) emigrated to Virginia in 1695. James Speed's grandson, Captain James Speed, fought in the American Revolution and was seriously wounded in 1781, resulting in the Continental Congress awarding him 7,500 acres in the territory of Kentucky. He settled there in 1782 and became a judge and land speculator, eventually accumulating 45,000 acres in central Kentucky and joining the territorial conventions by which Kentucky became separated from Virginia. One of Captain Speed's six children, John Speed, owned a store in the 1790s and operated a salt works using leased slaves. In the 1800s, his father gave him a large tract on which to begin farming. He grew staples and the labor-intensive cash crop of hemp. He would acquire other businesses as well, including a blacksmith. By his death in 1840, he had become one of Kentucky's largest slave-owners with 54. In 1808, following the death of his first wife, John Speed married Lucy Gilmer Fry. She had come from Virginia, where her family was close to Thomas Jefferson. Her father had inherited considerable wealth in land and slaves in Virginia, but left for Kentucky in 1788 or 1789. There, he opened a school in his home, where he taught a number of boys who later became prominent. Joshua Speed was the fifth of 11 children from the marriage; one of his siblings died in infancy the year Joshua was born. Joshua remained close to his mother until her death, but he seems to have had a strained relationship with his father, who complained of "all your abuse of me" when Joshua was 15. Depression seems to have run in the family, with evidence in his father, two of his brothers—James Speed showed signs of clinical depression—and Joshua himself. Lincoln even observed this in Joshua, remarking, "You are 'naturally of a nervous temperament.'"