Trivia

After his success playing Lincoln in the film and on Broadway, Raymond Massey began to assume the character in real life. He often appeared at social gatherings dressed in Lincoln-esque attire, assuming a Lincoln-like manner and speech. His friend, the playwright George S. Kaufman, observed, "Massey won't be satisfied until someone assassinates him."

Features Raymond Massey's only Oscar-nominated performance.

Raymond Massey received an Oscar nomination for playing the title role in this film. 72 years later, Daniel Day-Lewis was nominated, and won, for playing the part in Lincoln (2012). While they were not the first pair of actors to receive Oscar nominations for playing the same role, 72 years does mark the longest difference in time between such nominations. The only pairs of actors to win Oscars for the same role are Marlon Brando and Robert De Niro, and Heath Ledger and Joaquin Phoenix. There has yet to be a pair of actors to win Oscars for the same role in the same category.

As recently as January, 2019, many of the buildings filmed in Eugene, Oregon as Springfield, Illinois, are still in use. The Great Western train station is the old SP freight station on 5th Street. The Carson Building where the election results were projected is the Eugene Electric Station restaurant at 5th and Willamette, and the building opposite the restaurant which was also filmed, has several shops.

The original Broadway production of "Abe Lincoln in Illinois " by Robert E. Sherwood opened on October 15, 1938, at the Plymouth Theater, ran for 472 performances and won the Pulitzer Prize in Drama in 1939.

John Cromwell: Abolitionist John Brown. In his next film role, La Piste de Santa Fé (1940), Raymond Massey portrayed John Brown. Massey went on to play the role of Lincoln in the 1953 stage dramatization of the poem "John Brown's Body," in the first television production of "The Day Lincoln Was Shot," and in the Cinerama film "How the West Was Won" (in which he had no spoken lines). He reprised the role of John Brown onstage in "John Brown's Body" and in the 1955 low-budget film "Seven Angry Men".