Not only is Young Mr. Lincoln great cinema in its rare visual eloquence and truly poetic mise-en-scene, but it conveys a genuine feel for a not unsympathetic period of American history. Sergei Eisenstein called Young Mr. Lincoln “one of the most striking of all films of Ford; one of his most elegant and richest; one of the most amusing and captivating. A film I would like to have made.”
Dealing with Lincoln's early days in Salem, the film reverberates with Ford's love for the Great Emancipator, and benefits from a performance by Henry Fonda described by Frank Nugent in the New York Times of June 3, 1939: “His performance kindles the film, makes it a moving unity at once gentle and quizzically comic.... The result...a film which indisputably has the right to be called Americana.”