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Questions to ask Abraham Lincoln

10 min read

Good questions for Abraham Lincoln (1809 to 1865) ask about things he wrote down: his frontier boyhood, how a self-taught lawyer argued his way into politics, when and why he moved against slavery, how he bore the Civil War, and how he wrote the Gettysburg Address. Below are 25 questions in six groups, what the record says for each, four sample answers in his own words, and the questions he could not have answered.

Who Lincoln was, in five lines

Abraham Lincoln was born on 12 February 1809 in a log cabin in Hardin County, Kentucky. His family moved to Indiana in 1816 and to Illinois in 1830. He taught himself law, served four terms in the Illinois legislature and one term in Congress (1847 to 1849), and became the sixteenth President in March 1861.

He led the Union through the Civil War, issued the Emancipation Proclamation on 1 January 1863 and pushed the Thirteenth Amendment through the House in January 1865. John Wilkes Booth shot him at Ford's Theatre on 14 April 1865, five days after Lee's surrender at Appomattox. He died the next morning.

One fact students like: Lincoln is the only President to hold a patent (No. 6,469, granted in 1849, for a device to lift boats over shoals).

How to use these questions

For a written or recorded interview project, pick eight to ten questions across at least four groups, so your Lincoln talks about more than the war. For a wax museum, choose two or three and memorise answers of 30 to 45 seconds each: visitors press the button and move on quickly. For a class presentation, open with a childhood question and close with one about the Second Inaugural.

Every group below ends with a note on what the record says. That is what a good answer contains. If your answer cannot point to a letter, a speech or a dated event, rewrite it until it can. Our interview project guide has a full planning sheet, and how to write interview questions explains why open questions get better answers than yes or no ones.

Questions about his frontier boyhood

  • 1. Your mother, Nancy Hanks Lincoln, died when you were nine. How did your stepmother, Sarah Bush Johnston, change your life?
  • 2. You had less than a year of school in total. How did you get hold of books, and which ones mattered most?
  • 3. What did splitting rails and working a flatboat to New Orleans teach you?
  • 4. You once said you had been hired out to work for neighbours. What did you think of your father's way of life?

What the record says: in a short autobiography he wrote for the campaign writer John L. Scripps in June 1860, Lincoln said his schooling added up to less than a year. He made two flatboat trips to New Orleans (1828 and 1831). His relationship with his father, Thomas, was cool; he did not attend his father's funeral in 1851. Good answers mention the Bible, Aesop, Pilgrim's Progress and a borrowed life of Washington, all named by people who knew him.

Questions about law and Illinois politics

  • 5. How did you teach yourself law without going to law school?
  • 6. Why did you oppose the war with Mexico when you were in Congress?
  • 7. The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 brought you back into politics. Why did it make you so angry?
  • 8. You lost the 1858 Senate race to Stephen Douglas. Why do you think the debates still mattered?

What the record says: he was licensed as a lawyer in 1836 and practised in Springfield, riding the Eighth Judicial Circuit. In Congress he introduced the “spot resolutions” (December 1847) demanding to know where American blood had been shed. His Peoria speech of 16 October 1854 is the fullest statement of why he opposed spreading slavery into new territories. The seven debates with Douglas in 1858 were printed as a book in 1860 and made him a national name.

Questions about slavery: what he believed, and when

  • 9. You wrote that you could not remember a time when you did not think slavery wrong. Why did you not call for abolition before the war?
  • 10. In 1862 you told Horace Greeley your aim was to save the Union. Was ending slavery a goal or a tool?
  • 11. Why did the Emancipation Proclamation free people only in the states in rebellion?
  • 12. In August 1862 you urged a group of Black leaders to support colonisation abroad. How do you answer Frederick Douglass's criticism of that meeting?
  • 13. In your last speech, on 11 April 1865, you spoke of the vote for some Black men. What changed your mind?

What the record says: this is the group where a careless answer goes wrong. Lincoln opposed slavery as a moral wrong, but in 1858 at Charleston, Illinois he said he did not favour social and political equality of the races. He supported colonisation as late as 1862. Historians such as Eric Foner (The Fiery Trial, 2010) describe a man whose views moved over time. A strong answer admits the change instead of pretending he always held modern views.

Questions about leading in wartime

  • 14. What did you feel when you heard Fort Sumter had been fired on in April 1861?
  • 15. Why did you suspend habeas corpus, and how do you answer the charge that you broke the Constitution?
  • 16. Why did it take you so long to find a general you trusted?
  • 17. After the Dakota War in Minnesota, 303 men were sentenced to death and you approved 39 of the sentences. How did you decide?

What the record says: Chief Justice Taney ruled against the suspension in Ex parte Merryman (1861); Lincoln answered him in his message to Congress of 4 July 1861. His generals included McClellan, Burnside, Hooker and Meade before Grant became general-in-chief in March 1864. Of 303 Dakota men sentenced by a military commission, he approved 39 executions after reviewing the trial records; one man was reprieved, and 38 were hanged at Mankato on 26 December 1862, the largest mass execution in American history.

Questions about his speeches and words

  • 18. How did you write the Gettysburg Address, and why was it so short?
  • 19. What did you mean by “a house divided against itself cannot stand”?
  • 20. Which speech made you a serious candidate for President?
  • 21. Your Second Inaugural sounds more like a sermon than a victory speech. Why?

What the record says: the Gettysburg Address (19 November 1863) survives in five manuscript copies in his hand, and the drafts show he worked on it in Washington before the trip. The House Divided speech was given in Springfield on 16 June 1858. The Cooper Union Address in New York (27 February 1860) won over eastern Republicans. The Second Inaugural (4 March 1865) is about 700 words long and ends “With malice toward none, with charity for all”.

Questions about the private man

  • 22. Your son Willie died in the White House in February 1862. How did you keep working?
  • 23. Your friends wrote about your sadness. How did you live with it?
  • 24. Why did you tell so many jokes and stories in serious meetings?
  • 25. What was your marriage to Mary Todd Lincoln like?

What the record says: Willie died on 20 February 1862, aged eleven. His friend Joshua Speed and his law partner William Herndon both wrote about his melancholy, and his own 1841 letter to John T. Stuart describes it plainly (see the first sample answer). Treat this gently: describe what he wrote, and do not diagnose him.

Sample answers in Lincoln's own words

Use these as the core of an answer, then add a sentence of context in your own voice. Each one is a real line you can cite.

On question 23 (living with sadness):

“If what I feel were equally distributed to the whole human family, there would not be one cheerful face on the earth.”
Letter to John T. Stuart, 23 January 1841, Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, vol. 1, pp. 229 to 230

On question 5 (teaching himself, and getting on):

“The way for a young man to rise, is to improve himself every way he can, never suspecting that any body wishes to hinder him.”
Letter to William H. Herndon, 10 July 1848

On question 9 (slavery as a wrong):

“If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.”
Letter to Albert G. Hodges, 4 April 1864

On question 10 (Union and emancipation): in the same month he was drafting the Emancipation Proclamation, he wrote publicly that his “paramount object” was to save the Union, not to save or destroy slavery, and added that his personal wish was that all men everywhere could be free (letter to Horace Greeley, 22 August 1862). A good answer quotes both halves.

On question 6 or any question about his law practice, you can also use his advice to young lawyers: “Choose some other occupation, rather than one in the choosing of which you do, in advance, consent to be a knave.” (fragment, Notes for a Law Lecture, dated about 1 July 1850 by the editors of the Collected Works).

Questions Lincoln could not answer, and myths to avoid

  • Anything about Reconstruction, the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment (December 1865) or his own assassination. He died before all of them.
  • “Why is your face on the penny?” The Lincoln cent dates from 1909 and the Lincoln Memorial from 1922.
  • “Did you write the Gettysburg Address on the back of an envelope on the train?” That is a legend. Drafts show he began it in Washington.
  • “Tell us about your famous letter to Mrs Bixby.” Many historians think his secretary John Hay wrote it. See did Lincoln write the Bixby letter.
  • Quotations from internet posters. Many “Lincoln quotes” first appear decades after his death, and some are plain jokes, like the one warning against believing what you read on the internet. Check any quote before you use it with our quote-checking guide.

Also avoid asking him to judge modern politics. Better: ask what he thought of the issues of his own day, then let your audience draw the comparison.

Practise the interview out loud

Reading answers silently is different from saying them to a listener. You can rehearse with an AI recreation of Abraham Lincoln on Yuga, by voice or by text, and hear how he might answer a follow-up you had not planned. You can also hear him argue with Frederick Douglass about the pay of Black soldiers in the 1863 White House debate. The recreation is built from his writings and the historical record, but it is not Lincoln and it can be wrong, so cite the documents below in your project, not the app.

Where to read Lincoln's own words

  • The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, edited by Roy P. Basler (1953): the standard edition, searchable free online through the University of Michigan library.
  • The Abraham Lincoln Papers at the Library of Congress: scans of about 20,000 documents, including a Gettysburg Address draft.
  • The Papers of Abraham Lincoln project (papersofabrahamlincoln.org), which is publishing his complete papers.
  • Project Gutenberg has The Papers and Writings of Abraham Lincoln in a free edition.
  • The National Archives holds the Emancipation Proclamation and explains what it did and did not do.

For his relationship with Frederick Douglass, read our Lincoln and Douglass comparison and Douglass's 1876 Oration in Memory of Abraham Lincoln.

Questions people ask

What are good questions to ask Abraham Lincoln?
Ask about things he wrote down: how he educated himself, why the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 brought him back to politics, why the Emancipation Proclamation covered only rebel states, how he wrote the Gettysburg Address, and how he coped with his son Willie's death in 1862. Open questions starting with how or why get the best answers.
Did Abraham Lincoln free the slaves?
Partly. The Emancipation Proclamation of 1 January 1863 declared enslaved people free in the states then in rebellion, and Union armies made that real as they advanced. It did not cover loyal border states. The Thirteenth Amendment, which Lincoln pressed through the House in January 1865 and which was ratified in December 1865, ended slavery across the country.
What would Abraham Lincoln say about his childhood?
In his 1860 autobiographical sketch for John L. Scripps, he described a poor frontier family, very little schooling and hard farm work in Indiana. He wrote little about his feelings toward his father. He spoke warmly of his stepmother, Sarah Bush Johnston, who brought books into the house after she married Thomas Lincoln in 1819.
How long should a Lincoln wax museum answer be?
About 30 to 45 seconds, which is 80 to 110 spoken words. Start with a fact, add one sentence in his own words from a sourced letter or speech, and end with a date the visitor can remember, such as 19 November 1863 for Gettysburg or 1 January 1863 for the Emancipation Proclamation.
Can I quote an AI Lincoln in my school project?
No. Use an AI recreation to rehearse and to find questions worth asking, then cite what Lincoln actually wrote or said, from the Collected Works, the Library of Congress papers or a named speech. An AI recreation is built from his words but can make mistakes and is not a primary source.

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