John Ford and producer Darryl F. Zanuck fought an extended battle over control of the film. Ford even had unused takes of the film destroyed so the studio could not insert them into the movie. One scene that Ford insisted on cutting was a scene where Lincoln met his future assassin, a very young John Wilkes Booth.
Henry Fonda originally turned down the role of Lincoln, saying he didn't think he could play such a great man. He changed his mind after John Ford asked him to do a screen test in full makeup. After viewing himself as Lincoln in the test footage, Fonda liked what he saw, and accepted the part. He later told an interviewer, "I felt as if I were portraying Christ himself on film."
During the Springfield parade scene, the crowd chants "hayfoot, strawfoot!" at the militia soldiers as they march past. This is a reference to the army training practice of the time of putting hay on the left hand boot of recruits, and straw on the right hand boot, so that sergeants could get recruits to march in step. The largely rural farm boy population of the country that made up the army often didn't know left from right, but they knew the difference between hay and straw. The practice was most common in the Civil War.
The trial of William "Duff" Armstrong, on which the fictionalized defense of Matt and Adam Clay shown in this movie is based, took place in 1858, when Lincoln was a successful railroad attorney and soon to be a nominee for the Senate. The other person accused of murder had been convicted in a separate trial several months earlier.