I suspect that when people imagine Abraham Lincoln and the way he sounded, many imagine him as a bass, or at least a deep baritone. Perhaps this is because of his large stature and the resounding nature of his words. Certainly, the tradition of oratory in the 1850s would support the assumption. “Usually people with centurion, basso profundo voices dominated American politics,” says Harold Holzer, a leading Lincoln scholar. Then, of course, there are the casting choices of film and TV directors over the years. “It can’t get any deeper than Gregory Peck,” says Holzer. Peck played Lincoln in the 1980s TV miniseries The Blue and the Gray.
But, unfortunately, no recordings of Lincoln’s voice exist, since he died 12 years before Thomas Edison invented the phonograph, the first device to record and play back sound. If anyone had an educated guess as to how it sounded though, it would be Holzer, who has written 40 books on Lincoln and the Civil War. The author has pored over reports of Lincoln’s public appearances on speaking tours, eyewitness accounts told to Lincoln’s law partner William Herndon and newspaper commentaries about the Lincoln-Douglas debates, and, surprisingly, he says, one of the only things that can be said with certainty is that Lincoln was a tenor.
“Lincoln’s voice, as far as period descriptions go, was a little shriller, a little higher,” says Holzer. It would be a mistake to say that his voice was squeaky though. “People said that his voice carried into crowds beautifully. Just because the tone was high doesn’t mean it wasn’t far-reaching,” he says.
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