Sources

What this site is built on — the documentary record first, scholarship second, and the image provenance ledger.

Primary sources

• The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, ed. Roy P. Basler (Rutgers University Press, 1953), 9 vols. — the standard edition of Lincoln’s writings and speeches. All verbatim quotations on this site are checked against it unless otherwise noted.
• The Abraham Lincoln Papers, Library of Congress — the largest Lincoln manuscript collection (c. 40,550 documents), digitized and freely available, including the Nicolay and Hay copies of the Gettysburg Address.
• The National Archives — the engrossed Emancipation Proclamation and the Thirteenth Amendment.
• The Miller Center, University of Virginia — transcripts of the major speeches.
• National Park Service — chronologies and site histories (Ford’s Theatre, Lincoln Home, Gettysburg).

Secondary literature cited

• Merrill D. Peterson, Lincoln in American Memory (Oxford, 1994) — the essential reception history.
• David Herbert Donald, Lincoln (Simon & Schuster, 1995) — the standard one-volume biography.
• Doris Kearns Goodwin, Team of Rivals (Simon & Schuster, 2005) — the cabinet thesis; see The Cabinet for the scholarly pushback.
• Joshua Wolf Shenk, Lincoln’s Melancholy (Houghton Mifflin, 2005).
• Garry Wills, Lincoln at Gettysburg (Simon & Schuster, 1992) — on the Address and its versions.
• Lerone Bennett Jr., Forced into Glory (Johnson, 2000) — the prosecution brief; read against the mainstream literature.
• Michael Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln: A Life (Johns Hopkins, 2008) — the exhaustive modern life, 2 vols.

Image provenance

See the image captions for credits and context. Illustrated character art is a dramatization.

• 14 real historical images — public-domain photographs and artworks from Wikimedia Commons (one, the Lincoln deathbed sketch, is CC BY 2.0 and is attributed as such in its caption), verified against their Commons file pages on 2026-09-26.
• 1 owner-supplied banner (lincoln-character-banner.jpg) — the owner’s Vizlings Lincoln character art, displayable, labeled as dramatization art.
• 1 owner-supplied character sheet (lincoln-character-sheet.jpg) — style reference only, never displayed; the build excludes it and QA enforces the exclusion.
• 10 AI-generated images — produced in-house 2026-09-26 in the character sheet’s style: 4 scene/portrait illustrations and 6 quote cards carrying verified Lincoln quotations. All labeled “AI-generated dramatization art — not a historical depiction.”
• Two corrections made 2026-09-26: the Emancipation image was verified against its World Digital Library description as the preliminary proclamation of September 22, 1862 (file and caption corrected), and the Gardner 1863 portrait’s extension was corrected from .png to .jpg (JPEG data; contents unchanged).

How quotations were verified

Each quotation was checked against the Collected Works citation or the holding archive (Library of Congress, National Archives). Famous attributions with no documentary trail were moved to the misattributed section rather than printed as his words. Where authorship is disputed (the Bixby letter), the page says so.

Source notes

• This page is itself a source note; it has no deeper layer. The bibliography above is the complete list of works directly relied upon.
• Corrections and challenges are welcome in principle: any documented error found in the primary sources above will be fixed and logged here.