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Excerpt from The Kentucky Influence on the Life of Abraham Lincoln: Address at Annual Meeting, Lincoln Fellowship of Wisconsin, Madison, February 13, 1961
In the newly organized state of Illinois Abraham Lincoln was to meet several men who had begun their political apprenticeships back in Kentucky. Two of these were Usher F. Linder and John J. Hardin. John Hardin was of the famous Nelson County family, and disported himself as an aristocrat in the new country. Back across the Ohio his father had long been Secretary of State in Kentucky, and at least one of his relatives was one of the state's most successful attorneys. Hardin in time was to offer serious opposition to Lincoln, and had he not lost his life in the Mexican War he might have continued to do so. A third Kentuckian of aristocratic bearing and background was Ninian Edwards who had once practiced law in Hardin County, served in the statelegislature, and became chief justice of the Court of Appeals before he moved to Illinois Territory in 1809 to become governor. But none of these expatriate Kentuckians was to have the enduring in¿uence on Lincoln of Joshua Speed of Louisville. The story is well-known of the young legislator from the Sangamon and his sharing a room and bed with the Kentucky merchant. Speed was to re main for Lincoln throughout life a source of personal refuge in the dark moments.
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