Record Data
Source citation
Abraham Lincoln to Joshua F. Speed, February 25, 1842, in Roy P. Basler, ed., The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln (8 vols., New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1953), 1: 282, http://quod.lib.umich.edu/l/lincoln/.
Type
Letter
Date Certainty
Exact
Transcriber
Transcription adapted from The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln (1953), edited by Roy P. Basler
Adapted by Matthew Pinsker, Dickinson College
Transcription date
Transcription
The following text is presented here in complete form, as it originally appeared in print. Spelling and typographical errors have been preserved as in the original.
Springfield, Feby. 25, 1842
Dear Speed:
Yours of the 16th. Inst. announcing that Miss Fanny and you ``are no more twain, but one flesh,'' reached me this morning. I have no way of telling how much happiness I wish you both; tho' I believe you both can conceive it. I fell som[e] what jealous of both of you now; you will be so exclusively concerned for one another, that I shall be forgotten entirely. My acquaintance with Miss Fanny (I call her thus, lest you should think I am speaking of your mother) was too short for me to reasonably hope to long be remembered by her; and still, I am sure, I shall not forget her soon. Try if you can not remind her of that debt she owes me; and be sure you do not interfere to prevent her paying it.
I regret to learn that you have resolved to not return to Illinois. I shall be verry lonesome without you. How miserably things seem to be arranged in this world. If we have no friends, we have no pleasure; and if we have them, we are sure to lose them, and be doubly pained by the loss. I did hope she and you would make your home here; but I own I have no right to insist. You owe obligations to her, ten thousand times more sacred than any you can owe to others; and, in that light, let them be respected and observed. It is natural that she should desire to remain with her relatives and friends. As to friends, however, she could not need them any where; she would have them in abundance here.
Give my kind rememberance to Mr. Williamson and his family, particularly Miss Elizabeth---also to your Mother, brothers, and sisters. Ask little Eliza Davis if she will ride to town with me if I come there again.
And, finally, give Fanny a double reciprocation of all the love she sent me. Write me often, and believe me
Yours forever
LINCOLN
P.S. Poor Eastham is gone at last. He died a while before day this morning. They say he was verry loth to die.
No clerk is appointed yet. L.
