Questions to Ask Abraham Lincoln
An imagined interview, for a classroom exercise, a debate club or your own reading. The questions are tied to things Lincoln actually said and did, so that each one can be taken back to the documentary record afterwards.
The questions
Open any question for the note
Your mother died when you were nine. Who raised you after that, and what did you owe them?
Why ask it
The obvious answer is his stepmother, Sarah Bush Lincoln, whom he spoke of warmly, and the useful follow up is what she did that his father did not. Their relationship is one of the few parts of his childhood attested by people who knew the household rather than by campaign biography.
You had barely a year of formal schooling. How did you actually learn to write?
Why ask it
Any answer that amounts to reading widely is a dodge. What a reader wants is the mechanism: copying passages out, arguing in front of juries, reading aloud, the habit of writing things he never sent. His prose is unusually plain for its period, and that was a decision rather than an accident.
You rode the circuit as a lawyer for years. What did that work teach you that politics did not?
Why ask it
Years of persuading ordinary jurors in small county courthouses is the part of his training most often skipped. A good answer would explain how you argue to twelve people who have already made up their minds, which is much of what he did later to a country.
As a congressman you challenged the grounds for the war with Mexico, and it hurt you politically. Would you do it again?
Why ask it
This tests whether he would defend an unpopular position taken early, or concede it was a young man's misjudgment. It also sets up every later question about when he thought dissent in wartime was legitimate, which he had to answer as president from the other side.
You said a house divided against itself cannot stand, then lost that Senate race. Did you regret the phrase?
Why ask it
Contemporaries thought the speech too radical for Illinois, and it made him nationally known while costing him the seat. Any answer has to weigh a line that clarified the stakes against a loss, which is the trade politicians talk about most and admit least.
You were elected with a minority of the popular vote, and states began leaving before you took office. When did you first believe there would be war?
Why ask it
The interesting part is the gap between his public reassurances in the winter of 1860 and what he privately expected. A precise date would settle whether the early conciliation was sincere or a maneuver to keep the border states in place.
You wrote to Horace Greeley that your paramount object was to save the Union, with or without slavery. Was that your whole position?
Why ask it
That letter is the single most quoted evidence on both sides of the argument about his motives, and it was written weeks after he had already drafted an emancipation proclamation. Asking him to reconcile the two would force the distinction between what he believed and what he judged he could say.
For years you spoke in favor of colonization for freed Black Americans. What changed your mind, and when?
Why ask it
This is the question that resists the comfortable version of him. Historians disagree about how far and how fast his views moved, and an honest answer would have to name the people, including Black leaders and soldiers, who changed them.
The Emancipation Proclamation applied to the rebelling states and not to the loyal slaveholding ones. How did you justify that line?
Why ask it
He defended it as a war measure resting on his powers as commander in chief, which is a legal answer to a moral objection. Pressing him on it exposes how much of the document was constitutional caution and how much was calculation about the border states.
You suspended habeas corpus and civilians were tried by military commissions. Where did you think the limit was?
Why ask it
The most serious charge against him, and the one with the longest afterlife in American law. A reader should watch for whether the answer is a principle, or the claim that a threatened government may do what it must and be judged later.
In 1862 you reviewed the death sentences of hundreds of Dakota men and let thirty eight stand. How did you go about deciding?
Why ask it
He commuted most of the sentences under heavy political pressure to confirm them all, and the executions that followed remain the largest mass hanging in American history. The question refuses the framing that his record on race and rights involves only slavery.
You went through several generals before Grant. What were you actually looking for?
Why ask it
The complaint in his letters is not incompetence but reluctance to fight. An answer would have to explain what he learned to look for after two years of appointing men with better training and more caution than he wanted.
Your son Willie died in the White House in 1862. How did you keep working?
Why ask it
This is not a question about resilience as a technique. It is a plain one about grief carried alongside daily casualty returns, and the honest answer may be that he did not keep working well, which is worth hearing from someone usually described as steady.
Frederick Douglass came to see you more than once. What did he tell you that you had not heard from anyone else?
Why ask it
Douglass left his own account of those meetings, so the answers can be checked against a second witness. The pair of accounts is a good way to see how differently the same conversation looked to a president and to a man who had been enslaved.
You spent hours in the telegraph office reading the returns from the field. What did you do with those numbers?
Why ask it
Casualty lists arrived as columns and were read by the man who had ordered the campaigns. Asking what he did with them, rather than how he felt, may get at the practical question of whether the counts changed any decision he then made.
The Gettysburg address runs to under three hundred words. What did you leave out?
Why ask it
The speech is short enough to have been cut hard, and it never mentions slavery, the South, or the name of a single soldier. Asking about the omissions is a better question than asking about the writing, because the omissions were choices about what a war grave could be asked to carry.
In August 1864 you wrote that you expected to lose the election, and had your cabinet sign the paper without reading it. What were you preparing for?
Why ask it
The memorandum survives, which makes this a question about a documented act rather than a mood. It gets at how he planned to hand power to a successor likely to negotiate with the Confederacy, and what he thought would then happen to the people already freed.
You spent real political capital getting the Thirteenth Amendment through the House. What did you trade for those votes?
Why ask it
He wanted emancipation put beyond the reach of the courts and of his own successors, and getting there involved patronage and pressure. An answer would show a man who had concluded that a moral end justified ordinary political dealing, which is a more interesting figure than a saint.
In the second inaugural you spoke of malice toward none. What did you actually intend to do with the defeated states?
Why ask it
The phrase is remembered and the policy behind it was unfinished when he was killed six weeks later. Anything specific here, on voting, land, or the terms for readmission, would speak to the argument about what Reconstruction might otherwise have been.
What did you think the war had settled, and what did you know it had not?
Why ask it
A closing question that asks for his own limits. If the answer is only about union and slavery, a reader should notice everything left out, since the century that followed was spent on exactly that remainder.
Using an imagined interview as a way to study a historical figure
Practical guidance for the conversation itself
What this exercise is good for
- It forces specificity. A question about the Greeley letter has to be answered from evidence; a question about leadership can be answered with anything.
- It exposes the gaps in your own knowledge quickly, because you cannot write a pointed question about an episode you have not read about.
- It works well as a paired exercise, with one person asking and another answering only from documents they can cite.
- It makes disagreement visible. Where two people answer the same question differently, there is usually a genuine historical dispute underneath.
Where to check the answers
- His own letters, proclamations and speeches, which are published in full and widely available, including the ones later thought impolitic.
- The transcripts of the 1858 debates with Douglas, which show him arguing in public before a mixed audience rather than writing for history.
- Accounts left by people who dealt with him directly, including his secretaries, cabinet members and Frederick Douglass, read against each other rather than singly.
- Congressional records and military correspondence for the decisions he shared with others, since presidential intent is often clearest in what subordinates were told.
- Modern historians, chosen so that you read at least one who is critical of him. Any figure this admired needs a hostile reading to stay in focus.
Writing better questions of your own
- 1Anchor the question in a dated act or a quotation. That gives the answer something to be right or wrong about.
- 2Ask about the choice not taken. Every decision had an alternative that contemporaries argued for.
- 3Ask what he would have said to a named critic rather than to critics in general.
- 4Include at least one question he would not want to answer, or the exercise becomes an appreciation.
- 5Avoid asking for advice for the present. It produces a lesson rather than a piece of history, and the lesson will be yours rather than his.
Two ways this goes wrong
Turning him into a source of maxims
Lincoln is quoted more often than he is read, and much of what circulates under his name he never wrote. If you cannot find a line in a documented speech or letter, treat it as folklore.
Choosing between the saint and the cynic
One account has him as an abolitionist from birth, another as a politician who freed people to win a war. The record supports neither cleanly. The more accurate picture is of someone whose position moved under pressure and events, which is why dates matter so much in these questions.