Gettysburg Address Trivia
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48 free Gettysburg Address trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This Gettysburg Address trivia quiz is devoted to the speech itself rather than the battle: the 271 words Abraham Lincoln delivered at the dedication of the Soldiers' National Cemetery on 19 November 1863. The easy questions are the ones every American student meets: the opening phrase, how long the speech took, who spoke for two hours before Lincoln, and where the text is carved in Washington. From there it moves into the day itself: the lawyer who invited Lincoln with a request for 'a few appropriate remarks', the illness the president was coming down with, the crowd outside his host's house the night before, and the reporters who telegraphed his words. The harder end is for history buffs: the names and homes of the five manuscript copies, which two lack the words 'under God', the Cuban ambassador who bought the Bliss copy at auction, the archivist who found Lincoln in a photograph in 1952, the Chicago paper that called the speech 'dishwatery', the newspaper that retracted its 1863 review 150 years later, the sermon that may have inspired 'of the people, by the people, for the people', and the schoolbook that spread the envelope myth. For the three-day battle, Pickett's Charge and the town, try our Gettysburg trivia quiz. Every answer was checked against encyclopaedia entries on the address, Edward Everett, David Wills and the national cemetery before publishing, and the supporting sentence is stored with each question.
30 of 48 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01One week after the Gettysburg Address, Americans marked which holiday, newly proclaimed for the whole nation by Lincoln?
Thanksgiving
Thanksgiving. Urged on by the magazine editor Sarah Josepha Hale, Lincoln had proclaimed it for the last Thursday of November 1863, which fell a week after he spoke at Gettysburg on November 19.
Q 02Roughly how many words long is the Gettysburg Address?
About 270
About 270. Lincoln needed roughly two minutes to say them, after the day's main orator had held the same crowd for two hours.
Q 03The Address honoured Union soldiers who had turned back which Confederate general's invasion of the North in July 1863?
Robert E. Lee
Robert E. Lee. Three days of fighting cost the two armies around 50,000 casualties, and on the Fourth of July Lee began leading his beaten army back to Virginia.
Q 04Lincoln's opening, 'Four score and seven years ago', reaches back to which founding document?
The Declaration of Independence
The Declaration of Independence. Eighty-seven years before 1863 is 1776, and Lincoln chose to date the nation from its claim that all men are created equal rather than from the Constitution.
Q 05In the Address's opening sentence, Lincoln calls the United States a new nation 'conceived in' what?
Liberty
Liberty. Lincoln pictures the nation as a living thing, 'conceived' and 'brought forth', so that the war becomes a test of whether it will survive or 'perish'.
Q 06In the Address, what did Lincoln predict the world would 'little note, nor long remember'?
What we say here
What we say here. Lincoln added that the world 'can never forget what they did here', yet his own short speech became one of the best-known ever given in the United States.
Q 07Why was the Gettysburg cemetery's dedication put back by almost a month from its first planned date?
The orator needed more time
The orator needed more time. Edward Everett said he could not be ready by October, so the organisers moved the day to suit him and only afterwards invited Lincoln to add a few remarks.
Q 08Three years before sharing the Gettysburg platform with Lincoln, Edward Everett lost the 1860 election for which office?
Vice President
Vice President. Everett was John Bell's running mate on the Constitutional Union ticket that Lincoln beat, yet once the war came he threw himself behind the Union and backed Lincoln's re-election in 1864.
Q 09Who invited Lincoln to Gettysburg, asking him to set apart the grounds 'by a few appropriate remarks'?
David Wills
David Wills, the local lawyer who organised the cemetery, put Lincoln up the night before the ceremony, and the president finished revising his speech in an upstairs bedroom of the house.
Q 10Under which famous Pennsylvania politician had Lincoln's Gettysburg host studied law?
Thaddeus Stevens
Thaddeus Stevens, by then a leading anti-slavery congressman, paid for it that summer: Confederate cavalry burned his Pennsylvania ironworks on their way to the battle.
Q 11What illness was Lincoln probably coming down with when he gave the speech?
Smallpox
Smallpox. His doctors called it a mild 'varioloid', but the illness lasted three weeks, and a 2007 medical review argued it was the full disease, played down to reassure the public.
Q 12Which member of Lincoln's cabinet travelled with him to Gettysburg and addressed a crowd there the night before?
William Seward
William Seward. When serenaders called for a speech that evening Lincoln said only a few words, so they moved on to hear his Secretary of State, whom Lincoln then visited before finishing his own text.
Q 13Which country's constitution adopts Lincoln's phrase 'government of the people, by the people, for the people' as the republic's principle?
France
Q 21The Bancroft copy was requested by George Bancroft, known as the father of what?
American history
American history. His ten-volume History of the United States earned him the title, and in 1866 Congress chose him to deliver its memorial address on the murdered Lincoln.
Q 22Near its close, the Address resolves that the nation shall have 'a new birth of' what?
Freedom
Freedom. Lincoln was asking for more than the old Union restored: the soldiers' deaths were to buy a nation remade, ten months after his Emancipation Proclamation.
Q 23What stationery was the first page of the Nicolay copy written on?
Executive Mansion letterhead
France. It wrote the line into its post-war constitution of 1946, in the article that sets out the flag, the anthem and the national motto, and kept it there when the Fifth Republic was founded in 1958.
Q 14Which copy is regarded as the standard text because Lincoln titled, signed and dated it?
Bliss
Bliss. Lincoln wrote it out only because his previous attempt, on both sides of one sheet, could not be reproduced for a fundraising book, so this last copy got the care the others lacked.
Q 15Where is the signed copy that Oscar Cintas left to the nation now displayed?
The Lincoln Room of the White House
The Lincoln Room of the White House. Cintas's will left the manuscript to the American people on condition that it be kept at the White House, which is why it alone of the five copies is not in a library.
Q 16How much did Oscar Cintas pay for the signed copy at auction in 1949, then a record for a document?
$54,000
$54,000. No document had fetched more at a public auction, and when the collector died eight years later he left his prize to the American people.
Q 17What gas fills the sealed cases protecting the two earliest copies at the Library of Congress?
Argon
Argon. The inert gas pushes out the oxygen that would slowly eat at ink and paper, and when the cases are off display they sit in a low-temperature vault built for the Library's greatest treasures.
Q 18Which two-word phrase is missing from the Nicolay and Hay drafts but present in the later copies?
Under God
Under God. At least three reporters telegraphed the words that same afternoon, so Lincoln seems to have added them as he spoke, a rare ad lib that he then wrote into every later copy.
Q 19Which university holds the Bancroft copy, the only one privately owned?
Cornell
Cornell. Lincoln filled both sides of the sheet, so it could not be reproduced for the charity book and Bancroft simply kept it; a couple who later bought it gave it to the university in 1949.
Q 20Which state library holds the Everett copy?
Illinois
Illinois. When the copy came up for sale at $60,000, the state's schoolchildren gave most of the money in small donations and the Chicago businessman Marshall Field III covered the rest, bringing it to Lincoln's home state in 1944.
Executive Mansion letterhead. The first page is in ink on the president's official stationery, but the second is in pencil on plain lined paper, which suggests he finished the ending after leaving Washington.
Q 24Which 1906 bestseller helped spread the myth that Lincoln dashed off the Address on the train to Gettysburg?
The Perfect Tribute
The Perfect Tribute. Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews's story sold 600,000 copies and was set reading for generations of pupils, yet Lincoln's steady handwriting in every draft points to a desk, not a jolting railway car.
Q 25Garry Wills compared the Address to a speech by which ancient Athenian statesman?
Pericles
Pericles. The parallel is with his funeral oration for Athens's war dead, yet on the day it was the main orator who quoted Pericles by name, while Lincoln's own text mentions no Greek at all.
Q 26Historians hear the King James Bible's 'threescore years and ten' in 'Four score and seven'; which book is that phrase from?
Psalms
Psalms. Psalm 90 puts a human life at 'threescore years and ten', or 'fourscore' for the strong, which is why historians hear Scripture in Lincoln's very first words.
Q 27Which abolitionist minister's line on democracy 'by all the people' did Lincoln mark in pencil?
Theodore Parker
Theodore Parker. Lincoln's law partner William Herndon brought the Boston preacher's sermons back from a trip east, and recalled that Lincoln marked the line and 'in substance afterwards used' it at Gettysburg.
Q 28Which senator's 1830 'Second Reply to Hayne' described government 'made for the people, made by the people'?
Daniel Webster
Daniel Webster. Lincoln thought the reply to Hayne 'the grandest specimen of American oratory', his law partner recalled, and called for a copy when he sat down to write his own first inaugural.
Q 29Thanking Everett for his praise, Lincoln wrote that he was pleased 'the little I did say' was 'not entirely a' what?
Failure
Failure. Everett had wished he had come as near the heart of the occasion in two hours as Lincoln did in two minutes; Lincoln answered that Everett could not have given a short address, 'nor I a long one'.
Q 30Which newspaper called the speech 'silly, flat and dishwatery utterances'?
Chicago Times
Chicago Times. The Democratic paper was so hostile to the war effort that a Union general had shut it down that June, and it was Lincoln who had the order revoked.