96 Fun Facts About Lincoln

In what state was Abraham Lincoln born?

Kentucky: Lincoln was born in a one-room log cabin near Hodgenville, yet he had no memory of the place, because the family moved away when he was two.

Who served as president of the Confederacy while Lincoln led the Union?

Jefferson Davis, the Confederacy's only president, was born just eight months before Lincoln and in the very same state, though he grew up in Mississippi.

Lincoln, Washington and Jefferson share Mount Rushmore with which other president?

Theodore Roosevelt: the sculptor picked the four to stand for the nation's birth, growth, development and preservation, with Lincoln chosen for holding the Union together.

Lincoln was shot five days after Robert E. Lee surrendered his army at which Virginia village?

Appomattox Court House: Lee surrendered on April 9, 1865 in the parlour of Wilmer McLean, who had moved there to escape the war after its first big battle was fought on his farm near Manassas.

Who won the Best Actor Oscar for playing the president in Steven Spielberg's 2012 film Lincoln?

Daniel Day-Lewis took the part only after Liam Neeson, cast in 2005, dropped out five years later; the role brought him his third Best Actor Oscar.

Which speech did Martin Luther King Jr. deliver from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in August 1963?

'I Have a Dream' opens by echoing the man in the marble chair behind him: 'Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation.'

Lincoln's second inaugural address urged 'malice toward none' and what 'for all'?

Charity: the line closes a speech in which Lincoln, five weeks from victory, declined to gloat and called the war a judgment on North and South alike for the offence of slavery.

What famous speech by Lincoln begins with 'Four score and seven years ago...'?

Gettysburg Address: 'four score and seven' counts back 87 years from 1863 to 1776, the year of the Declaration of Independence, whose 'all men are created equal' Lincoln quotes in the same sentence.

Where did the 6-foot-4 Lincoln famously stash letters and legal papers as a travelling lawyer?

Inside his hat: for years Lincoln used his stovepipe hat as a briefcase, tucking letters into the lining, and in 1850 he blamed a late reply on leaving the letter in his old hat when he bought a new one.

Lincoln lost his first legislative race in 1832, then won four terms in Illinois as a member of which party?

Whig Party: Lincoln came eighth of thirteen in 1832, although his own New Salem precinct gave him 277 votes and backed him overwhelmingly, then won four straight terms as a follower of Henry Clay.

What was the name of Abraham Lincoln's stepmother, who encouraged his education?

Sarah Bush Johnston, a widow with three children, married Thomas Lincoln in 1819; Abraham bonded with her at once, and she took his side in his frequent arguments with his father.

Which legal safeguard did Lincoln suspend along Maryland's rail lines in April 1861?

Habeas corpus, the right to challenge unlawful detention: Lincoln suspended it in Maryland on April 27, 1861 to keep the route to Washington open, and ignored a federal ruling that only Congress could do so.

In which city was Lincoln nominated for president on the third ballot in May 1860?

Chicago: the party met in the Wigwam, a temporary wooden hall put up for the convention; Lincoln stayed at home while his campaign managers worked on the delegates through the night.

What was the total amount of formal schooling Abraham Lincoln received during his childhood?

Approximately one year: Lincoln wrote in 1860 that he went to school 'by littles' and that all of it 'did not amount to one year'; after his term in Congress he taught himself Euclid's geometry.

What job did Lincoln hold in New Salem, Illinois, in 1831 and 1832?

Store clerk: Lincoln clerked in Denton Offutt's general store from 1831, but within a year the business was failing, and he was out of work when he volunteered for the militia in 1832.

The Lincoln Memorial looks out along the Reflecting Pool towards which other landmark?

Washington Monument: planners put the memorial on land reclaimed from the Potomac because the site sat on the same axis as the monument and the Capitol; the Reflecting Pool now lies between them.

Which Lincoln cabinet member, initially a rival for the Republican nomination, became his Secretary of State?

William H. Seward led on the first ballot in 1860 before losing to Lincoln; as Secretary of State he was badly wounded by one of the plotters on the night Lincoln was shot, and later bought Alaska.

Which poet mourned Lincoln as a fallen ship's captain in a famous 1865 elegy?

Walt Whitman, then living in the capital, wrote that he saw the President ride past almost every day and that the two had taken to exchanging bows; his elegy 'O Captain! My Captain!' appeared months after the assassination.

To which state did the Lincoln family move in 1816, when Abraham was seven?

Indiana: Thomas Lincoln settled the family at Little Pigeon Creek in late 1816; his son later wrote that the move was 'partly on account of slavery, but chiefly on account of the difficulty in land titles'.

Lincoln and the 'Long Nine' legislators moved the Illinois capital to Springfield from which town?

Vandalia: Lincoln led the legislature's successful campaign to move the capital to Springfield in 1837, and that spring he moved there himself to begin practising law.

Which nickname did Lincoln's 1860 campaign use to sell him as a frontier working man?

The Rail Splitter: at the Illinois state convention in May 1860, supporters paraded in fence rails he was said to have split as a young man, under a banner calling him 'The Rail Candidate'.

Which 1861 crisis over two Confederate envoys seized from a British ship did Lincoln defuse?

Trent Affair: a Union warship took Confederate envoys Mason and Slidell off the British mail steamer Trent in November 1861; with Britain sending troops to Canada, Lincoln's government let the two men go.

In which state did Lincoln give his two-minute speech dedicating the Soldiers' National Cemetery in 1863?

Pennsylvania: the cemetery was at Gettysburg, and the organisers' invitation asked the president only to set the ground apart with 'a few appropriate remarks' once the day's main oration was over.

On the advice of 11-year-old Grace Bedell in 1860, Lincoln became the first US president to do what?

Grow a beard: Bedell wrote from Westfield, New York, that whiskers would win votes because 'all the ladies like whiskers'; the newly bearded Lincoln met her there in February 1861 en route to Washington.

Lincoln's portrait appears on the penny and on which US banknote?

$5 bill: Lincoln's portrait has appeared on the five-dollar Federal Reserve Note since the 1914 series and on the one-cent coin since 1909, the centenary of his birth.

As a young man, Lincoln twice took flatboats of cargo down the Mississippi to which city?

New Orleans: Lincoln made the trip at nineteen and again in 1831; on the first voyage he and his one crewmate were attacked at night by men trying to rob the boat, and drove them off.

The day after Lee's surrender, which Confederate favourite did Lincoln ask a band to play as a captured prize?

Dixie: Lincoln told the crowd at the White House that it was one of the best tunes he had ever heard, that the other side had tried to appropriate it, and that it had now been fairly captured.

Who gave the two-hour oration that preceded Lincoln's brief remarks at the 1863 Soldiers' National Cemetery dedication?

Edward Everett, a former president of Harvard, wrote to Lincoln the next day that he wished he had come as near to the central idea of the occasion in two hours as Lincoln had in two minutes.

Which law partner, taken on by Lincoln in 1844, later co-wrote a famous biography of him?

William H. Herndon was the third and last of Lincoln's law partners; after the assassination he gathered memories from people who had known Lincoln, and in 1889 he and Jesse Weik published Herndon's Lincoln.

Lincoln's December 1863 Reconstruction plan would readmit a state once what share of voters swore loyalty?

Ten percent: Lincoln's Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction of December 8, 1863 offered to recognise a state government once 10% of its 1860 voters took a loyalty oath; he pocket-vetoed Congress's stricter Wade-Davis Bill in 1864.

Which federal stronghold in Charleston harbour did Confederate forces bombard to start the Civil War?

Fort Sumter: Major Robert Anderson had warned his garrison was nearly out of food; Lincoln chose to resupply rather than reinforce, and the Confederate bombardment on April 12 and 13, 1861 rallied the North.

Who was Lincoln's vice president during his first term?

Hannibal Hamlin of Maine, a former Democrat who had left the party over slavery, was picked in 1860 to balance a ticket headed by a Midwesterner; the 1864 convention dropped him for a Southern Unionist.

Abraham Lincoln's mother, Nancy Hanks Lincoln, died from what illness?

Milk sickness comes from drinking the milk of cows that have grazed on white snakeroot; frontier settlers did not know the plant was poisonous, and Nancy Hanks Lincoln died in 1818, when her son was nine.

Lincoln's 1858 warning that 'a house divided against itself cannot stand' borrowed its image from which source?

The Gospels: the line paraphrases Jesus in Mark 3:25, an image his audience already knew well, and Lincoln turned it on a Union that was splitting apart over slavery.

Which comedy was Abraham Lincoln watching at Ford's Theatre when John Wilkes Booth shot him?

Our American Cousin, a popular comedy, was in its third act when Booth fired, timing the shot to a laugh line so the audience's noise would cover it; he then leapt to the stage and fled.

Lincoln's wife grew up in which city, also the home of his political hero Henry Clay?

Lexington: Mary Todd grew up there in a prominent slaveholding family; with half-brothers in the Southern army, she was even accused during the war of being a Confederate spy.

Which 1862 law signed by Lincoln opened western government land to settlers at low cost?

Homestead Act: free land for small farmers had been a promise of Lincoln's 1860 platform; any adult citizen could claim 160 acres of public land and keep it after five years of living on and improving it.

Which constitutional amendment, ratified in December 1865, abolished slavery?

The 13th Amendment passed the House on 31 January 1865 on the second attempt, and three-fourths of the states had ratified it by that December.

An 1863 Lincoln speech closes by vowing that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not what?

Perish from the earth: five copies of the speech in Lincoln's hand survive, each worded slightly differently, which is why printed versions vary; the last, the only one he signed, became the standard text.

In 1863, urged on by magazine editor Sarah Josepha Hale, Lincoln proclaimed which national holiday?

Thanksgiving: Lincoln's 1863 proclamation fixed it on the last Thursday of November after years of lobbying by Hale, the editor who is also credited with writing 'Mary Had a Little Lamb'.

At which New York venue did Lincoln's February 1860 speech boost his presidential prospects?

Cooper Union: Henry Ward Beecher's Plymouth Church in Brooklyn had invited him, but the February 27, 1860 speech moved to Manhattan's Cooper Institute, where Lincoln argued the Founders had restricted slavery in the territories.

Lincoln is the only US president to hold a patent; what was his 1849 device designed to do?

Lift boats over shoals: Patent No. 6,469 covered adjustable air chambers on a boat's sides to float it higher in the water, an idea he had after seeing river boats get stuck; it was never manufactured.

Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation freed slaves in rebel territory but left slavery untouched in which states?

The border states: the proclamation was a war measure against the rebellion, so it could not reach slave states that had stayed in the Union, and ending slavery everywhere took a constitutional amendment.

After being shot at Ford's Theatre, Abraham Lincoln was carried across the street to die in which building?

Petersen House: doctors judged a carriage ride to the White House too dangerous, so soldiers carried Lincoln to the boarding house across the street, where he died the next morning.

Lincoln's 1858 Senate nomination speech warned the government could not endure permanently in what condition?

Half slave and half free: in the June 1858 speech Lincoln said he did not expect the Union to be dissolved or the house to fall, but that it would 'become all one thing, or all the other'.

Which of Lincoln's sons died in the White House during his presidency?

William Wallace Lincoln, known as Willie, died in the White House in February 1862 at the age of 11; his younger brother Tad caught the same fever at the same time and pulled through.

Abraham Lincoln's father, Thomas Lincoln, primarily worked in what profession?

Farmer: Thomas Lincoln worked frontier farms and also as a carpenter; he regularly hired his son out to neighbouring farms, keeping the boy's wages as the law then allowed.

As a young man in New Salem, Lincoln took on the local champion Jack Armstrong in which sport?

Wrestling: the match won him the respect of the neighbourhood's roughest crowd and the lasting friendship of Armstrong himself, whose son he later defended in a murder trial.

Who, allegedly Lincoln's first love, died in New Salem in 1835?

Ann Rutledge died at 22; the story of the romance first reached the public in an 1866 lecture by an early Lincoln biographer, and how serious it was has been argued over ever since.

Challenged to a duel by James Shields in 1842, Lincoln had the choice of weapons; what did he pick?

Cavalry broadswords: Shields was an excellent marksman, so Lincoln, much the taller man with the longer reach, avoided pistols; friends stepped in at the duelling ground and the two made peace.

Lincoln Logs, the toy named after the president's log-cabin childhood, were invented by the son of which architect?

Frank Lloyd Wright's son John got the idea in Japan, watching workers lock together the timber beams of his father's earthquake-proof Imperial Hotel; he notched his toy logs to join the same way.

During his single term in Congress, Lincoln challenged President Polk over the origins of which war?

Mexican–American War: Lincoln's 'spot resolutions' of 1847 demanded that Polk name the exact spot where, as the president claimed, American blood had been shed on American soil.

In the 1858 Duff Armstrong murder trial, Lincoln discredited a moonlight witness using what?

A farmers' almanac showed the Moon was low in the sky at the hour of the killing, far too dim for the witness to have seen it from 150 feet as he had sworn; Armstrong was acquitted.

Which railroad, among Lincoln's largest 1850s clients, did he sue to collect his fee?

Illinois Central: Lincoln argued the railroad's cases through the 1850s, yet he still had to take the company to court to recover his fee, and he won.

With no direct election of senators in 1858, who chose Douglas over Lincoln after their debates?

The state legislature: voters chose legislators, not senators, until 1913; Lincoln's side won more votes across Illinois, but Democrats held more seats and re-elected Douglas by 54 to 46.

Which famous naturalist was born on exactly the same day as Lincoln, February 12, 1809?

Charles Darwin was born in a comfortable family home in Shrewsbury, England, on the very day that Lincoln was born in a one-room log cabin with a dirt floor on the American frontier.

Lincoln's question at which 1858 debate produced the Douglas 'doctrine' named after the town?

Freeport: Lincoln asked whether settlers could lawfully keep slavery out of a territory, and Douglas replied that they could, simply by refusing to pass the local laws that protected it.

Which marching clubs of young men paraded by torchlight for Lincoln during the 1860 campaign?

The Wide Awakes began in Hartford, Connecticut, when five young men put on oilcloth capes and carried torches to escort a speaker to his hotel; the look caught on, and within months clubs had formed across the North.

Which of Lincoln's Treasury secretaries did he later put on the Supreme Court as Chief Justice?

Salmon P. Chase, an abolitionist who often criticised Lincoln and kept hoping to be president himself, left the Treasury in 1864; Lincoln made him Chief Justice later that year all the same.

Which Chief Justice, author of the Dred Scott decision, swore Lincoln in as president in 1861?

Roger B. Taney had ruled in Dred Scott that Black Americans could not be citizens, a decision Lincoln had spent years attacking; in 1861 he had to administer the oath to one of its best-known critics.

'Greenbacks', the paper money Lincoln's Treasury issued from 1862, were authorised by which law?

Legal Tender Act: passed in February 1862, it let the Treasury issue $150 million in paper notes that were not backed by gold or silver; people called them greenbacks after the green ink on the reverse.

The 1862 Morrill Land-Grant Act, signed by Lincoln, funded what kind of institution in each state?

Agricultural colleges: each state received 30,000 acres of federal land for every member it had in Congress, to be sold to pay for colleges teaching agriculture and the mechanic arts.

Lincoln reviewed 303 death sentences himself and approved only 39 after which 1862 conflict in Minnesota?

Dakota War: a military commission condemned 303 Dakota men after rapid trials; Lincoln had the records examined, sent back a list of 39 names, and 38 men were hanged at Mankato on December 26, 1862.

Under what banner did Lincoln and Andrew Johnson run together in 1864?

National Union Party: Republicans ran under the name in 1864 to attract War Democrats such as Johnson, a Tennessee Democrat; the label was dropped within a few years of the war's end.

Whose capture of Atlanta in September 1864 revived Lincoln's hopes of re-election?

William T. Sherman took Atlanta on September 2, 1864; together with Farragut's victory at Mobile Bay, the news united Lincoln's party behind him and turned the November election into a landslide.

Which Southern city did Lincoln walk through with his son Tad two days after Confederate forces abandoned it?

Richmond: on April 4, 1865 Lincoln and Tad came ashore in the still-smouldering Confederate capital, where freed slaves recognised him at once and crowded round to shake his hand.

Who shared the presidential box with the Lincolns on the night of April 14, 1865?

Henry Rathbone and Clara Harris were late stand-ins after the Grants and others declined; Rathbone was stabbed as he grappled with the assassin, and the couple married two years later.

Leaping from the box at Ford's Theatre, Booth caught his spur on what and landed badly?

A Treasury flag draped on the box snagged Booth's spur, and he landed awkwardly twelve feet below; witnesses blamed the fall for his broken leg, though he later said it broke when his horse fell.

In 1864 Lincoln signed a grant protecting which California landmark, now a famous national park?

Yosemite: signed in the middle of the Civil War, the grant handed the valley to California as a public park; four decades later the state gave it back, and it joined the national park that had grown up around it.

Which cabinet member is credited with saying 'Now he belongs to the ages' at Lincoln's deathbed?

Edwin Stanton: witnesses disagree whether he said 'ages' or 'angels'; either way the Secretary of War took charge of the manhunt within hours.

Which Maryland doctor splinted the leg Booth broke during his escape?

Samuel Mudd escaped the gallows by a single vote and was sent to Fort Jefferson in the Dry Tortugas for life; after he treated the sick in a yellow-fever outbreak there, he was pardoned in 1869.

Which boarding-house keeper was hanged with three Booth conspirators in July 1865?

Mary Surratt: Booth had used her Washington boarding house as a meeting place; hanged on July 7, 1865 with Powell, Herold and Atzerodt, she was the first woman executed by the US federal government.

Mary Todd Lincoln won release from an asylum in 1875 with help from Myra Bradwell, a pioneering woman in which profession?

Law: Bradwell, who spent years fighting the courts for the right to practise in Illinois, received letters Mary smuggled out of the asylum, and Mary was released to her sister in under four months.

Which dressmaker and confidante of Mary Todd Lincoln published a tell-all memoir in 1868?

Elizabeth Keckley, who had bought her own freedom in St. Louis in 1855, published Behind the Scenes in 1868; her editor printed Mary Lincoln's private letters in it, and the friendship did not survive.

Robert Todd Lincoln served as Secretary of War under Garfield and then under which president?

Chester A. Arthur: Robert Lincoln stayed on as Secretary of War for Arthur's whole term, 1881-85; he was at the Washington station when Garfield was shot and in Buffalo when McKinley was shot in 1901.

Robert Lincoln became president of which railway-car maker after its founder died in 1897?

Pullman: Robert Lincoln had been the railcar maker's counsel through the bitter 1894 strike; he ran the company as president from 1897 to 1911 and then chaired its board.

The actor Edwin Booth, brother of Lincoln's assassin, once pulled Robert Lincoln clear of what?

A moving train: crowded off a station platform, Robert was slipping into the gap beside the cars when a hand hauled him up by the coat collar, and he recognised the famous actor and thanked him by name.

Whom did Lincoln promote to lieutenant general and command of all Union armies in March 1864?

Ulysses S. Grant: after his victories at Vicksburg and Chattanooga, Lincoln commissioned him lieutenant general on March 9, 1864 and made him general-in-chief of all the Union armies.

Which illness is generally blamed for the 1862 death of Lincoln's son?

Typhoid fever is the usual diagnosis; the boy was buried in Georgetown, and three years later his coffin made the journey home to Illinois alongside his father's.

Each of the 36 columns around the Lincoln Memorial stands for what?

A state in the 1865 Union: architect Henry Bacon modelled the memorial on the Parthenon in Athens, reasoning that a man who defended democracy should be honoured in the style of democracy's birthplace.

Who sculpted the seated Lincoln statue inside the Lincoln Memorial?

Daniel Chester French designed the 19-foot seated figure, enlarged from a planned 10 feet so the hall would not dwarf it; the six Piccirilli brothers carved its 28 blocks of Georgia marble.

Which singer gave a 1939 Easter concert at the Lincoln Memorial after the DAR barred her?

Marian Anderson: Eleanor Roosevelt resigned from the DAR over the snub, and some 75,000 people heard the contralto sing from the memorial's steps on April 9, 1939.

In 1876 a gang of Chicago counterfeiters tried to steal Lincoln's body from its tomb to do what?

Hold it for ransom was the plan; after the botched grab the coffin was hidden under debris for years, and Robert Lincoln finally had it sealed in concrete ten feet down in 1901.

For one year, 1943, the Lincoln cent was struck in what material instead of copper?

Zinc-coated steel: copper was diverted to the war effort, and the silvery 1943 steel cents rusted and were often mistaken for dimes, so the Mint returned to a copper alloy in 1944.

Which automaker bought the near-bankrupt Lincoln Motor Company in February 1922?

Ford: Henry Ford's $8 million was the only bid at the receiver's sale; twenty years earlier Lincoln's founder Henry Leland had been called in to value a failed company of Ford's and turned it into Cadillac.

The Lincoln Continental got its name from European styling touches including what feature?

A rear-mounted spare tire: the first Continental was a one-off convertible built in 1939 as the company president's holiday car, and its exposed spare was copied for decades as the 'Continental kit'.

Lincoln, a village called Lancaster until it was renamed in 1867, is the capital of which state?

Nebraska: an Omaha senator proposed naming the new capital after the recently assassinated president, betting that lawmakers from south of the Platte would then vote the move down; they backed it anyway.

Which general did Lincoln remove from command of the Army of the Potomac in November 1862?

George B. McClellan: frustrated by his failure to pursue Lee after Antietam, Lincoln relieved him on November 5, 1862 and handed the Army of the Potomac to Ambrose Burnside.

Which state did Lincoln proclaim admitted to the Union on October 31, 1864?

Nevada: Lincoln proclaimed its statehood on October 31, 1864, eight days before the election; the state's entire constitution had been sent to Washington by telegram to beat the deadline.

The Lincoln Tunnel links Midtown Manhattan with which New Jersey municipality?

Weehawken: money ran short in the Depression, so the tunnel opened in 1937 with a single tube; wartime shortages held up the second until 1945, and the third followed in 1957.

The 1913 Lincoln Highway ran from Times Square to a park in which city?

San Francisco: the route ended at Lincoln Park; its backers pitched a coast-to-coast road as a better tribute to Lincoln than the marble memorial Congress was considering, and it was dedicated nine years before that memorial.

Tony Kushner's screenplay for Lincoln (2012) was loosely based on which book?

Team of Rivals: Spielberg asked Doris Kearns Goodwin for the film rights in 1999, before she had written the book, and she sent him chapters as she finished them; the film covers only the last four months of Lincoln's life.

Which detective, warning of an 1861 plot in Baltimore, slipped Lincoln through the city by night?

Allan Pinkerton: his operative Kate Warne, remembered as America's first female detective, travelled with the president-elect on the secret night journey that brought him through Baltimore on February 23, 1861.

Robert Lincoln gave the family's Springfield home to Illinois in 1887 on what condition?

It stay open to the public free: tenants had been charging visitors and letting the house run down, so Robert's gift bound Illinois to keep the only home his father ever owned in good repair and free to enter.

Abraham Lincoln's first inaugural address, in 1861, closes by appealing to 'the better angels of our' what?

'Nature' completes the line; Seward drafted a gentler ending, and Lincoln rewrote it into the 'mystic chords of memory' passage that everyone now quotes.

Which future president crossed America on the Lincoln Highway with a 1919 army truck convoy?

Dwight D. Eisenhower joined the convoy as a young officer, 'partly for a lark, and partly to learn'; the slow crossing stayed with him, and as president he championed the interstate highway system.