LincolnEverything you need to know about Abraham Lincoln.

Methodology

The rules this site runs on — so you can check our work instead of trusting it.

Editorial rules

  1. Verbatim or nothing. A quotation appears as Lincoln’s only if it is documented in the Collected Works, a holding archive, or a contemporary transcript. Paraphrase is never presented as quotation.
  2. Uncertainty is labeled, not smoothed. Dates carry certainty labels on the Timeline: certain, approximate, disputed. Disputed authorship (the Bixby letter), disputed wording (the Gettysburg Address as delivered), and disputed interpretation (what Lincoln would have done in Reconstruction) are marked in place.
  3. Neutral tone. Neither hagiography nor prosecution. Facts that flatter and facts that indict appear under the same rules; moral judgments are the reader’s.
  4. No invented facts. No invented dates, quotations, statistics, or scholarly consensus. Where the record is silent, the page says the record is silent.
  5. Attribution for every claim that needs it. “Historians debate” is never left hanging — the page names who says what (Bennett, Shenk, Tripp, Goodwin and her critics).

Image rules

  1. Real photographs and artworks for the historical Lincoln — public-domain works from Wikimedia Commons, each verified against its file page (artist, date, subject) before publication.
  2. Caption traps get checked. Beard chronology (beard from late 1860 — the 1846 and June 1860 portraits are correctly beardless); the Emancipation document image was corrected to the preliminary proclamation of September 22, 1862, after verification against the World Digital Library description; the Gardner 1863 file’s extension was corrected from .png to .jpg.
  3. AI images are labeled everywhere they appear as “AI-generated dramatization art — not a historical depiction.” The writing-scene illustration’s manuscript pages are decorative AI handwriting, not a real document, and its caption says so.
  4. Never generate fake historical photos. No AI-generated image imitates a period photograph or depicts a real person as if photographed.
  5. The character-sheet firewall. The owner’s character sheet (lincoln-character-sheet.jpg) is a private style reference. It is excluded from the published build, referenced by no page, and its exclusion is enforced by automated QA. The quote cards’ quotations are verified Lincoln texts (see Sayings).

The dramatized character

The animated Lincoln character on the Stream and Social Pack pages is a produced dramatization from the owner’s Vizlings app — not the historical person, not a source of facts. Where the character quotes Lincoln, the words are verbatim from the documented sources cited; everything else the character says is illustrative invention, labeled as such. The reference pages on this site are the authority on the real history.

What “verified” means here

A quotation is “verified” when a primary source (manuscript, contemporary transcript, or the Collected Works) attests the wording. “Reported” means a contemporary or near-contemporary reported it but no manuscript survives. “Anecdotal” means a later recollection with no contemporary corroboration. Each page uses these words consistently.

Source notes