In honor of Abraham Lincoln's actual birthday on Tuesday, here are portions of an online interview I conducted with my long-time friend Gerald J. Prokopowicz, history department chairman at East Carolina University, former historical director of the Lincoln Museum in Fort Ft. Wayne, Ind., and author of the new Random House/Pantheon book, " Did Lincoln Own Slaves? And other frequently asked questions about Abraham Lincoln ."



Q: If Lincoln were alive today, whom would he be supporting for president?

A: Lincoln, if he were alive today, would almost certainly be thinking, "Can somebody help me get out of this tomb?" The presidential race would not be his first concern.



Q: OK, you're going to resist speculating on the passions and whims of Lincoln if he were transplanted into our era. Fair enough. You have your academic dignity to maintain. But don't these kinds of questions intrigue you? Leno or Letterman? PC or Mac? Boxers or briefs?

A: Those questions are certainly interesting, but they reflect the narcissism of our society.

If Lincoln actually could be brought back to life for a brief moment (as in fact happened in 1993, according to the Weekly World News), surely we would do better to ask him about his world instead of what he thought about ours.

Q: Your title question—"Did Lincoln own slaves?"—is clearly absurd. Why did you choose it?

A: Because it's still frequently asked. Usually, it's raised as a way of attacking Lincoln, sort of like a historical push-poll .

Q: What motivates those attacks?

A: Some critics look at his careful and politically practical approach to ending slavery and mistake it for reluctance to help African-Americans. Others overlook slavery altogether and romanticize the Confederacy as a libertarian paradise crushed by the tyrant Lincoln.

But since even Lincoln's most extreme opponents can't deny that the end of slavery was a good thing, they have to try to disassociate Lincoln from emancipation, and that leads to the absurdity of implying that Lincoln must have been a slave owner.

Q: What are other popular questions?

A: They change over time. To take one example, 50 years ago, people wanted to know all about Ann Rutledge, who, according to one source, was the only true love of Lincoln's life.

Now it's hard to find people who even recognize the name of Ann Rutledge, but everyone seems to want to know if Lincoln was sexually attracted to men.

Q: Since you bring it up, was he?

A: There's no evidence he was. He had a close male friend, Joshua Speed, with whom he shared quarters when they were both single—as you and I did during and after college. Being less affluent than we were they had only one bed in their apartment, which they shared, but that was common in that era and not proof of physical attraction.

Q: Given that the Q&A format is often recognized by discerning readers as evidence of a lazy writer who doesn't want to struggle with transitions, why did you choose that format for your book?

A: I got it from your columns.

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What was Lincoln's middle name? Was his father a bum? Where did he go to college and law school? What was his funniest joke? What do scholars make of those eerie claims about Lincoln's similarities to President John F. Kennedy— that President Lincoln had a secretary named Kennedy and President Kennedy had a secretary named Lincoln, that they were both assassinated on Friday and so on? The interview continues below.