Speed, James

Life Span
to
    Full name
    James Speed
    Place of Birth
    Birth Date Certainty
    Exact
    Death Date Certainty
    Exact
    Gender
    Male
    Race
    White
    Sectional choice
    North
    Origins
    Slave State
    No. of Spouses
    1
    No. of Children
    7
    Family
    John Speed (father), Lucy Gilmer Fry (mother), Jane Cochran (wife)
    Education
    Transylvania
    Other
    Other Education
    St. Joseph's College, KY
    Occupation
    Politician
    Attorney or Judge
    Educator
    Relation to Slavery
    White non-slaveholder
    Political Parties
    Whig
    Republican
    Union (Unconditional Union, National Union)
    Government
    Lincoln Administration (1861-65)
    State legislature
    Local government

    James Speed, Election of 1860 (American National Biography)

    Scholarship
    Speed detested the xenophobic American (Know Nothing) party that replaced the Whigs in Kentucky in the mid-1850s. Although long a friend of Abraham Lincoln, whom he had met through his brother Joshua Fry, Speed understood that a Republican could not carry a slave state like Kentucky. In the presidential contest of 1860, therefore, he served on a committee that united supporters of northern Democrat Stephen A. Douglas and Constitutional Unionist John Bell to defeat southern Democrat John Breckinridge in Kentucky. After the election, however, confident of Speed's loyalty to the Union, however, Lincoln made him mustering officer for Kentucky under his call for 75,000 volunteers at the outbreak of the Civil War.
    Phyllis F. Field, "Speed, James," American National Biography Online, February 2000, http://www.anb.org/articles/04/04-00933.html.
    How to Cite This Page: "Speed, James," House Divided: The Civil War Research Engine at Dickinson College, https://hd.housedivided.dickinson.edu/node/6619.