Put on Your Top Hat for This Abraham Lincoln Quiz

Before Lincoln’s likeness appeared on the penny, the American cent depicted the image of an Indigenous person in a feather headdress. Beginning in 1909, the previous design was swapped out for Lincoln’s silhouette to commemorate the 16th President’s 100th birthday. The change marked the first time that an American President appeared on a coin.

Before nominating politician Salmon P. Chase to head the U.S. Supreme Court, Lincoln chose Chase — a former governor and senator from Ohio and a known abolitionist — to serve as his secretary of the treasury. Although their working relationship proved to be strenuous at times, Lincoln nominated Chase to replace Roger B. Taney as chief justice of the nation’s highest court in 1864.

In 1837, the city of Springfield welcomed the future 16th President as a resident. Lincoln lived in the Illinois capital until he moved into the White House in 1861. The city is now home to the historic Lincoln Tomb in Oak Ridge Cemetery, where the former President is buried along with his wife Mary Todd Lincoln and three of his four sons.

Habeas corpus was a long-established legal writ that prevented the government from detaining individuals indefinitely without cause. On May 27, 1861, shortly after the onset of the Civil War, Lincoln suspended the writ to aid in the Union war effort. The decision permitted military commanders to hold Confederate rebels who dissented against the Union.

On March 1, 1872, President Ulysses S. Grant signed the Yellowstone National Park Protection Act into law and formed the country’s first national park — but it wasn’t the first time a President protected America’s natural wonders. In 1864, Abraham Lincoln made the unprecedented decision to sign legislation giving Yosemite Valley to the state of California “for public use, resort, and recreation.”

Throughout his life, Lincoln was known for his sparse eating habits. He wasn’t picky, but he also didn’t eat too much, and seemed to largely stick to healthy foods. (He apparently ate a lot of apples.) Though Lincoln wasn’t known to indulge in much snacking, he did go on the record as really loving gingerbread men.

Robert Todd Lincoln served in the Union Army during the Civil War and became a lawyer like his famous father. He went on to serve as secretary of war and as the foreign minister to Britain, which was his last government position. Although accomplished and capable, Lincoln never escaped the shadow of his father and often said, “No one wanted me … they wanted Abraham Lincoln’s son.”

John Wilkes Booth’s original plan was to symbollically decapitate the U.S. government by killing its President, Vice President, and secretary of state. On the night of Abraham Lincoln’s fateful trip to Ford’s Theatre, a co-conspirator named Lewis Powell stabbed Secretary of State William Seward multiple times in his home. Seward survived the attack as did VP Andrew Johnson, whose would-be assassin lost his nerve and went to a bar instead.

Henry Clay was one of America’s greatest politicians. He helped form the National Republican and the Whig parties and was “the Great Compromiser” in the U.S. Senate. Lincoln called him “the beau ideal of a statesman,” cast his first presidential vote for him in 1832, and campaigned for him in 1844. When Clay died in 1852, Lincoln even eulogized him in the Illinois statehouse.

The former leader of the Union’s Army of the Potomac, George McClellan was relieved from command in 1862 for his inability to pursue Confederate General Robert E. Lee and his Army of Northern Virginia in battle. In 1864, he appeared as the Democratic candidate for President but was soundly defeated after William T. Sherman’s capture of Atlanta in September buoyed Lincoln’s political fortunes.

Of the 46 Presidents that have served as leaders of the United States, none of them hold a U.S. patent except for Abraham Lincoln. On May 22, 1849, Lincoln received Patent No. 6469 for a device that lifts boats over shoals or sandbars. The device was never made, but that doesn’t take away Lincoln’s legacy as inventor-in-chief.

From August to October 1858, Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas took part in a series of seven debates across the state of Illinois, leading up to an election for the U.S. Senate. (Douglas was the incumbent at the time.) Thousands of spectators and newspaper reporters from around the country watched the high-profile events, which centered around the era's most pressing issue: slavery. Douglas ended up keeping his seat, but the national attention Lincoln gained through these debates helped propel him to a successful presidential bid just two years later.

Before joining the Republican Party and winning the presidency, Abraham Lincoln was a Whig. In fact, he spent more time as a Whig than as a Republican; it was as a member of the Whig Party that he first entered the national conversation and served in the House of Representatives. However, after the Compromise of 1850 and the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the Whig Party began to dissolve, and Lincoln jumped ship to join the rising tide of the Republicans.

The story behind this classic name for a pet dog goes back to Abraham Lincoln, who was a devoted animal lover. One of Lincoln’s favorite pets was Fido, a yellow dog whose name came from the Latin word for “faithful.” In the five years before Lincoln became President, Fido was the lawyer’s constant companion, and was used to help promote Lincoln’s down-to-earth image to voters.

Written by English dramatist Tom Taylor in 1857, “Our American Cousin” follows American Asa Trenchard as he meets his English relatives to collect an inheritance. John Wilkes Booth timed Abraham Lincoln’s assassination with a funny line in the play, hoping the laughter would drown out the gunshot. Today, the play is mostly remembered for this historic moment rather than for its artistic merits.

The 13th Amendment — which abolished slavery — was the only constitutional amendment passed during Lincoln’s presidency. In 1864, Lincoln insisted that the 13th Amendment be a critical part of the Republican platform leading up to that year’s presidential election. The law was passed on January 31, 1865, though the amendment wasn’t ratified until December 6, 1865, eight months after Lincoln’s death that year.

In 1820, the Missouri Compromise banned slavery in all future states in the Louisiana Purchase north of the 36 parallel. In 1854, the Kansas-Nebraska Act effectively repealed the Compromise, instead allowing citizens of each state to choose its own slave status. “I was losing interest in politics, when the repeal of the Missouri Compromise aroused me again,” Lincoln wrote years later.

After Abraham Lincoln won the Republican nomination for President in 1860, the party selected Maine Senator Hannibal Hamlin to run as his VP. Hamlin was an ardent abolitionist and came from the Northeast, which helped to geographically balance the ticket. Incredibly, he and Lincoln didn't meet in person until after they had won the election. Lincoln asked him for advice on choosing Cabinet members, but Hamlin didn't have much input otherwise and disliked his job as VP.

Relying on the advice of his Treasury Secretary Hugh McCulloch, President Lincoln established the Secret Service mere hours before his assassination on April 14, 1865. But the timing isn’t quite as ironic as it may seem: The Secret Service’s original mission wasn’t to protect the president, but rather to stop rampant counterfeiting.

While working on the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., an engraver accidentally carved the letters "euture" instead of "future" when inscribing Lincoln's second inaugural address. An attempt was made to correct the error with stone filling, but visitors can still see remnants of the initial mistake, which is found on the north wall of the monument.

The presidential election of 1860 between Abraham Lincoln and John C. Breckinridge was a head-on collision of two differing views of America. After Lincoln won the race, South Carolina seceded on December 20, 1860. Within a month, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, and Georgia also left the Union, and the Civil War soon followed.

The harvest feast shared by Pilgrims and American Indians in 1621 is considered the first day of Thanksgiving in the U.S. But Thanksgiving didn’t become an official national holiday until Lincoln established it in the middle of the Civil War, to help heal a wounded nation. Still, the image of that colonial feast endured in Americans’ popular imagination, and it's what we associate the holiday with today.

Young Abraham Lincoln was known to scrap with the local boys in a style called “catch-as-catch can” wrestling. He was reportedly defeated only once in some 300 matches, and was even awarded the “Outstanding American” award by the National Wrestling Hall of Fame.

Abraham Lincoln met Mary Todd in Springfield, Illinois, in 1840, and they wed two years later. During their marriage, the couple had four sons. As First Lady, Mary Todd courted controversy with her extravagant spending on redecorating, parties, and lavish clothes — an issue made more complicated by the circumstances of the Civil War.

Abraham Lincoln's most famous speech, given at the dedication of the Gettysburg Civil War Cemetery in 1863, four months after the bloody battle on the site, lasted only two minutes. Its opening line is especially well known: "Fourscore and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth, on this continent, a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal." Less recognizable is its ending, which expressed the hope "that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."

Abraham Lincoln stood an impressive 6 feet, 4 inches tall — much taller than the average male height at the time of 5 feet, 6 inches. Lincoln’s imposing stature also makes him the tallest U.S. President in history to date. What’s more, his figure reached heights closer to 7 feet while wearing his signature stovepipe hat.

Abraham Lincoln is most famously known as “Honest Abe,” but he had several other nicknames during his time in politics. During his 1860 presidential campaign, the future President was known as “The Railsplitter” to convey his humble origins, and after the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 that freed thousands of enslaved people, Lincoln was called “The Great Emancipator.”

On May 20, 1862, President Lincoln signed the Homestead Act into law, allowing settlers to claim up to 160 acres of government-surveyed land. It was one of the most significant pieces of territorial legislation in American history, as 270 million acres of U.S. territory were claimed and settled before the act was repealed in 1976.

On March 10, 1864, Lincoln promoted Major General Ulysses S. Grant to the rank of lieutenant general, a rank that had been unoccupied on a permanent basis since the time of George Washington. Lincoln chose to promote Grant — a tremendously skilled military commander — only after the popular general dismissed the idea of running against Lincoln for the presidency.

Abraham Lincoln became the first U.S. President with a beard when he took office in 1861. Lincoln was the first of five bearded Presidents, the most recent being Benjamin Harrison in 1893.

Abraham Lincoln was born on February 12, 1809, in a log cabin on his family's farm in Kentucky. But he didn’t remain a Kentuckian for long; the family moved to southern Indiana when Lincoln was only seven years old. It would be another 14 years until Lincoln finally settled in Illinois, where he began his climb to the White House.