Jimmi Simpson as Joshua Speed, Lincoln's friend and assistant.

Sandburg also wrote that Lincoln and Joshua Speed had "streaks of lavender, spots soft as May violets."

Not long after he signed the Emancipation Proclamation, his old friend, Joshua Speed, visited him at the White House.

Donald gamely takes four pages to explain patiently that the relationship between Lincoln and Joshua Speed was not sexual, not homoerotic.

In 1855, Lincoln wrote to Joshua Speed, a personal friend and slave owner in Kentucky:

Letter to Joshua Speed, Aug. 24, 1855: As a nation we began by declaring that "all men are created equal."

Joshua Speed died on May 29, 1882, in Louisville, Kentucky.

He was crazy as a loon, according to Joshua Speed, his old friend.