Farmington and the Visitor Who Kept Thinking About It

In the summer of eighteen forty-one, a young Illinois lawyer named Abraham Lincoln traveled to Louisville to visit his closest friend, Joshua Speed. Speed had grown up at Farmington, his family's hemp plantation south of the city, and he had returned there after closing a general store he and Lincoln had operated together in Springfield.

Lincoln stayed for several weeks. It was his most sustained encounter with slavery as a domestic institution. Farmington was a prosperous working plantation, and the people who made it work, dozens of enslaved people, were present throughout his stay.

Two years later, in eighteen forty-two, Lincoln wrote a letter to Speed's sister, Mary Speed, in which he described a scene he had witnessed on a steamboat trip that ended with this Louisville visit. He described a coffle of enslaved people chained together and being transported south. He wrote that the sight was a continual torment to him, though he kept trying to think of it as no greater affliction than "strokes of cruel fate." He could not quite persuade himself.

Historians who study Lincoln's developing views on slavery point to the Louisville visit and its immediate aftermath as a period that clarified his thinking. He was not an abolitionist in eighteen forty-one. He was a Whig lawyer from a free state, uncomfortable with what he saw but not yet committed to any particular course of action against it.

Farmington still stands on the edge of Louisville, a Federal-style house built in eighteen sixteen that has been a historic house museum since the nineteen fifties. It presents both the Speed family story and the story of the enslaved community that made the plantation function. Joshua Speed and Lincoln remained friends until Lincoln's death. Speed supported the Union but owned enslaved people when the war began.