> Although Young Mr. Lincoln is a fictionalized version of real events, there are some aspects of the real case that were dramatized for the film by screenwriter Lamar Trotti. Adam (Eddie Quillan) and Matt Clay (Richard Cromwell), the two brothers accused of murdering Scrub White (Fred Kohler, Jr.) in the film, were actually based on murder defendant William "Duff" Armstrong, who was accused of striking and killing James Preston Metzker in Mason County, Illinois in 1857. When he heard about the case, Lincoln volunteered to defend him because he had been a friend of the Armstrong's father at law school.
> According to notes on the AFI web site, Trotti had based his screenplay on both a murder trial he had covered during his days as a newspaperman and the Lincoln court case. He was inspired to use the latter after "he discovered that during a farmer's trial, Lincoln had used an almanac to determine the position of the moon on the night of the crime." The Farmer's Almanac reference leads to a major turning point in the case and is used against the key witness in the real case, Charles Allen, who claimed he saw the murder in full moonlight. The Wikipedia entry on the court case claimed, "Abraham Lincoln used judicial notice - a very uncommon tactic at the time - to show Allen lied on the stand when he claimed he had witnessed the crime in the moonlight. Lincoln produced an almanac to show that the moon on that date could not have produced enough light for the witness to see anything clearly. Based on this evidence, the jury acquitted Armstrong after only one ballot." The film presents this same scenario and the two Clay brothers are freed at the end.
