Lincoln
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96 free Lincoln trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
50 free Lincoln trivia questions with answers. Lincoln trivia lives in two places on BrainPickle. This page is the shorter set; the main quiz is Abraham Lincoln trivia, with our deepest question pool on the topic and a source behind every answer.
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Q 01In what state was Abraham Lincoln born?
Kentucky
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.
Q 02Who served as president of the Confederacy while Lincoln led the Union?
Jefferson Davis
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.
Q 03Lincoln, Washington and Jefferson share Mount Rushmore with which other president?
Theodore Roosevelt
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.
Q 04Lincoln was shot five days after Robert E. Lee surrendered his army at which Virginia village?
Appomattox Court House
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.
Q 05Who won the Best Actor Oscar for playing the president in Steven Spielberg's 2012 film Lincoln?
Daniel Day-Lewis
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.
Q 06Which speech did Martin Luther King Jr. deliver from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in August 1963?
I Have a Dream
'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.'
Q 07Lincoln's second inaugural address urged 'malice toward none' and what 'for all'?
Charity
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.
Q 08What famous speech by Lincoln begins with 'Four score and seven years ago...'?
Gettysburg Address
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.
Q 09Where did the 6-foot-4 Lincoln famously stash letters and legal papers as a travelling lawyer?
Inside his hat
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.
Q 10Lincoln lost his first legislative race in 1832, then won four terms in Illinois as a member of which party?
Whig 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.
Q 11What was the name of Abraham Lincoln's stepmother, who encouraged his education?
Sarah Bush Johnston
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.
Q 12Which legal safeguard did Lincoln suspend along Maryland's rail lines in April 1861?
Habeas Corpus
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.
Q 13In which city was Lincoln nominated for president on the third ballot in May 1860?
Chicago
Q 21Which nickname did Lincoln's 1860 campaign use to sell him as a frontier working man?
The Rail Splitter
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'.
Q 22Which 1861 crisis over two Confederate envoys seized from a British ship did Lincoln defuse?
Trent Affair
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.
Q 23In which state did Lincoln give his two-minute speech dedicating the Soldiers' National Cemetery in 1863?
Pennsylvania
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.
Q 14What was the total amount of formal schooling Abraham Lincoln received during his childhood?
Approximately one year
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.
Q 15What job did Lincoln hold in New Salem, Illinois, in 1831 and 1832?
Store clerk
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.
Q 16The Lincoln Memorial looks out along the Reflecting Pool towards which other landmark?
Washington Monument
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.
Q 17Which Lincoln cabinet member, initially a rival for the Republican nomination, became his Secretary of State?
William H. Seward
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.
Q 18Which poet mourned Lincoln as a fallen ship's captain in a famous 1865 elegy?
Walt Whitman
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.
Q 19To which state did the Lincoln family move in 1816, when Abraham was seven?
Indiana
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'.
Q 20Lincoln and the 'Long Nine' legislators moved the Illinois capital to Springfield from which town?
Vandalia
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.
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.
Q 24On the advice of 11-year-old Grace Bedell in 1860, Lincoln became the first US president to do what?
Grow a beard
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.
Q 25Lincoln's portrait appears on the penny and on which US banknote?
$5 bill
$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.
Q 26As a young man, Lincoln twice took flatboats of cargo down the Mississippi to which city?
New Orleans
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.
Q 27The day after Lee's surrender, which Confederate favourite did Lincoln ask a band to play as a captured prize?
Dixie
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.
Q 28Who gave the two-hour oration that preceded Lincoln's brief remarks at the 1863 Soldiers' National Cemetery dedication?
Edward Everett
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.
Q 29Which law partner, taken on by Lincoln in 1844, later co-wrote a famous biography of him?
William H. Herndon
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.
Q 30Lincoln's December 1863 Reconstruction plan would readmit a state once what share of voters swore loyalty?
Ten percent
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.