Secession and the opening shots
Fourteen questions covering the winter of 1860-61 and the first year of fighting. This is the gentlest round on the page and the right one to open a family table or a classroom with: most of it turns on dates, firsts and names that appear in any American history course.
Two of them are worth a word before you read them out. The Fort Sumter question about fatalities catches almost everybody, because the instinct is to guess a number at all. And the question about army names turns on a naming convention the two sides did not share - which is why the Union Army of the Tennessee and the Confederate Army of Tennessee are two entirely different armies that fought each other.
Q1.Which state was the first to secede from the Union?Tap to reveal
Answer: South Carolina
Its convention voted on December 20, 1860, six weeks after Lincoln's election and nearly four months before any shot was fired at Fort Sumter.
Q2.Which was the last state to secede from the Union?Tap to reveal
Answer: Tennessee
Tennessee ratified secession by popular vote on June 8, 1861, almost two months after Fort Sumter and more than two weeks after North Carolina. It went on to send more men into the Union army than any other Confederate state.
Q3.How many soldiers on either side were killed by enemy fire during the bombardment of Fort Sumter?Tap to reveal
Answer: None
Thirty-four hours of shelling and roughly three thousand rounds fired, and not one man on either side was killed outright. The war they were starting would kill more Americans than any other in the country's history.
Q4.Who is counted as the first soldier to die in the Civil War?Tap to reveal
Answer: Private Daniel Hough
He was killed on April 14, 1861, when a cartridge ignited early during the hundred-gun salute the Fort Sumter garrison was allowed to fire as it surrendered. A second gunner, Edward Galloway, died of his wounds days later.
Q5.Which Union officer is credited with aiming the first shot fired back at the batteries ringing Fort Sumter?Tap to reveal
Answer: Abner Doubleday
Doubleday was the fort's second-in-command. The separate story that he invented baseball was produced by a commission in 1907 and has no evidence behind it at all.
Q6.Which Union general was defeated at the First Battle of Bull Run on July 21, 1861?Tap to reveal
Answer: Irvin McDowell
McDowell told Lincoln his men were too green to attack; Lincoln answered that the Confederates were green too. McDowell was replaced within days by George B. McClellan.
Q7.Who was the first Union general killed in the war?Tap to reveal
Answer: Nathaniel Lyon
Lyon died leading a charge at Wilson's Creek, Missouri, on August 10, 1861, less than three weeks after Bull Run.
Q8.What was Ulysses S. Grant doing for a living when the war broke out?Tap to reveal
Answer: Working in his family's leather goods store
Grant had left the army in 1854 and was clerking in the Galena, Illinois, shop run by his younger brothers. Within four years he commanded every Union army in the field.
Q9.What nicknames did the soldiers of the two armies use for each other?Tap to reveal
Answer: Johnny Reb and Billy Yank
Pickets traded coffee for tobacco and newspapers across the lines often enough that officers on both sides had to issue orders forbidding it.
Q10.Union armies were generally named after what kind of geographic feature?Tap to reveal
Answer: Rivers
Federal armies took river names - the Potomac, the Tennessee, the Cumberland, the James - while Confederate armies took states and regions. That is why the Union Army of the Tennessee and the Confederate Army of Tennessee are two different armies.
Q11.Which battle did Lincoln wait for before issuing the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation?Tap to reveal
Answer: Antietam
He had kept the draft in a drawer since July 1862 because he did not want to announce it from a position of defeat. Antietam was fought on September 17; the preliminary proclamation followed five days later, and the final version took effect on January 1, 1863.
Q12.Which of these did not appear in the Civil War: observation balloons, naval mines, submarines, or tanks?Tap to reveal
Answer: Tanks
Balloons went up over Virginia in 1861, mines sank dozens of ships, and the Confederate H. L. Hunley became the first submarine to sink an enemy warship in 1864. Tanks did not reach a battlefield until the Somme in 1916.
Q13.Union raiders hijacked which locomotive in the Great Locomotive Chase of April 1862?Tap to reveal
Answer: The General
James Andrews's raiders stole the engine at Big Shanty, Georgia, and were run down by Confederate crews who chased them on foot, by handcar, and finally in a locomotive running in reverse. Buster Keaton's 1926 comedy borrowed the engine's name.
Q14.Who wrote the song 'Dixie' in 1859?Tap to reveal
Answer: Daniel Decatur Emmett
Emmett was an Ohio-born performer writing for a New York minstrel troupe. The South adopted the tune anyway, and Lincoln had a band play it outside the White House after Lee surrendered.
Generals, admirals and commanders
Thirteen questions on the men who ran the armies. The difficulty sits in the middle: the names are mostly familiar, but several questions ask for something specific about a commander rather than the commander himself, which is harder than it sounds under time pressure.
Two answers here are usually misremembered. Grant's best-known regret is quoted constantly as though it were his only regret of the war, and his memoirs name a second one in the very next sentence. And the four-generals question trips people who assume any list of famous Union names must point to Gettysburg, because that is the battle where everybody expects them to collect.
Q1.Which general, nicknamed 'Old Fuss and Feathers', was general-in-chief of the United States Army when the war began?Tap to reveal
Answer: Winfield Scott
Scott was seventy-four, too heavy to sit a horse, and had been a general since the War of 1812. His Anaconda Plan - blockade the coast, take the Mississippi, squeeze - was ridiculed in the newspapers and is roughly what eventually won the war.
Q2.Grant and Lee had served in the same army during which earlier conflict?Tap to reveal
Answer: The Mexican-American War
Both were with Winfield Scott's army in 1847. Grant wrote that he remembered Lee well from Mexico and assumed, when they met at Appomattox, that Lee would not remember him.
Q3.What was Ulysses S. Grant's first battle as a commander?Tap to reveal
Answer: Belmont
Grant attacked a Confederate camp at Belmont, Missouri, on November 7, 1861, overran it, lost control of his men while they looted it, and had to fight his way back to the boats.
Q4.Which Confederate general was a relative of Grant's wife and stood with the party at the Grants' wedding?Tap to reveal
Answer: James Longstreet
Longstreet was a cousin of Julia Dent and was there when she married Grant in 1848. After the war he joined the Republican Party, and much of the South never forgave him for it.
Q5.Which Union general earned the nickname 'the Rock of Chickamauga'?Tap to reveal
Answer: George H. Thomas
When the Union right collapsed in September 1863, Thomas held Snodgrass Hill and covered the retreat into Chattanooga. He was a Virginian who stayed loyal to the Union, and his sisters never spoke to him again.
Q6.At which battle did Grant, Sherman, Thomas and Hooker all fight in the same engagement?Tap to reveal
Answer: Chattanooga
The fighting around Chattanooga in late November 1863 put four of the Union's most important commanders on one field, and ended with Thomas's men climbing Missionary Ridge well past the point their orders had told them to stop.
Q7.Which Union general rode back from Winchester to rally his broken army at Cedar Creek?Tap to reveal
Answer: Philip Sheridan
Jubal Early's dawn attack on October 19, 1864 had scattered the Union camps. Sheridan, returning from a conference, reached the field in the afternoon, counterattacked, and ended organised Confederate resistance in the Shenandoah Valley.
Q8.Which Southern port did Union flag officer David Farragut capture in April 1862?Tap to reveal
Answer: New Orleans
It was the largest city in the Confederacy and it fell barely a year into the war. Farragut's more famous line, at Mobile Bay in 1864, is usually quoted as 'Damn the torpedoes' - torpedoes being what the period called moored mines.
Q9.Sherman's March to the Sea ran between which two cities?Tap to reveal
Answer: Atlanta to Savannah
Sherman left Atlanta in mid-November 1864 and reached Savannah in December, cutting loose from his supply lines and feeding his army off the country for roughly three hundred miles.
Q10.Which assault did Grant single out in his memoirs as one he always regretted ordering?Tap to reveal
Answer: The last assault at Cold Harbor
'I have always regretted that the last assault at Cold Harbor was ever made,' he wrote. The Confederate field entrenchments there look, in photographs, like a preview of the Western Front fifty years later.
Q11.Which Union warship sank the Confederate raider CSS Alabama?Tap to reveal
Answer: USS Kearsarge
The two ships fought in tightening circles off Cherbourg, France, on June 19, 1864, watched by a crowd on shore. The Alabama had taken or burned around sixty-five merchant vessels in under two years.
Q12.Which African American regiment led the assault on Fort Wagner, South Carolina, in July 1863?Tap to reveal
Answer: The 54th Massachusetts
Its colonel, Robert Gould Shaw, was killed on the parapet and buried in a mass grave with his men, which the Confederates intended as an insult and his family took as an honour. The 1989 film Glory tells the story.
Q13.Which future president served as quartermaster general for the state of New York instead of taking a field command?Tap to reveal
Answer: Chester A. Arthur
Arthur equipped and moved New York's regiments from an office in Manhattan and left state service in 1863 without ever commanding in the field. Hayes, Garfield, Harrison and McKinley all saw combat.
Stonewall Jackson
Ten questions on the Confederacy's most written-about subordinate. Jackson makes a good self-contained round because his life has a clean shape: an orphan who scraped into the military academy, a widely mocked schoolteacher, then two years in which he became the most feared field commander in Virginia, then a death by friendly fire at the height of it.
The fruit question is the one to read carefully. It is in here because it is asked at every pub quiz in the country, and the honest answer is that the habit rests on very little: Jackson ate whatever the army could get hold of, and peaches were far easier to find in Virginia in 1862 than anything shipped through the blockade.
Q1.What was Stonewall Jackson's given name?Tap to reveal
Answer: Thomas Jonathan Jackson
He was born in Clarksburg, in what is now West Virginia, in January 1824, and was orphaned as a small boy.
Q2.Which academy did Jackson graduate from in 1846?Tap to reveal
Answer: West Point
He arrived badly under-prepared and climbed steadily to finish seventeenth in a class of fifty-nine. Classmates said another year would have put him first.
Q3.At which school did Jackson teach in the decade before the war?Tap to reveal
Answer: The Virginia Military Institute
He taught artillery tactics and natural philosophy at VMI in Lexington from 1851, and was reckoned one of the worst lecturers on the staff - he memorised his notes and, when questioned, simply repeated them word for word.
Q4.Which Confederate general gave Jackson the name 'Stonewall'?Tap to reveal
Answer: Barnard E. Bee
Bee said it on Henry House Hill at First Bull Run and was mortally wounded the same day, so nobody was ever able to ask him whether he meant it as praise or as a complaint that Jackson would not move.
Q5.In which valley did Jackson run his celebrated campaign of spring 1862?Tap to reveal
Answer: The Shenandoah Valley
In roughly three months his small command marched several hundred miles, fought five battles, and kept tens of thousands of Union troops away from Richmond. His infantry were nicknamed the foot cavalry.
Q6.Which fruit is Jackson traditionally said to have sucked on before a battle?Tap to reveal
Answer: A lemon
The story comes from his aide Henry Kyd Douglas, who described him with one during the Virginia campaigns of 1862. It became a fixed part of the legend, but the evidence for a lifelong habit is that single sighting.
Q7.At which battle was Jackson accidentally shot by his own men?Tap to reveal
Answer: Chancellorsville
North Carolina troops fired on his party in the dark on the evening of May 2, 1863, hours after his flank march had rolled up the Union right. It was his best day of the war and his last.
Q8.Which limb did surgeons amputate after Jackson was wounded?Tap to reveal
Answer: His left arm
The arm was buried separately near the battlefield at Ellwood and has its own headstone there. Jackson himself died of pneumonia eight days later at Guinea Station.
Q9.What did Lee say when he was told what Jackson had lost?Tap to reveal
Answer: That Jackson had lost his left arm, but that Lee had lost his right
The line turned out to be close to literal. Lee never again found a subordinate he could hand an independent flank march to and simply trust.
Q10.Which of these battles did Jackson not take part in: Fredericksburg, Antietam, White Oak Swamp or Gettysburg?Tap to reveal
Answer: Gettysburg
He died on May 10, 1863, seven weeks before the armies met in Pennsylvania. Whether Jackson would have taken Cemetery Hill on the first evening is the oldest argument in Civil War writing.
Gettysburg
Eleven questions on the three days of July 1863. Neither commander planned to fight there; the armies were groping for each other across southern Pennsylvania and collided over the road network west of a market town of two and a half thousand people.
Expect the two civilian questions to be the hardest in the round for most groups, and the question about the July 3 assault to produce an argument. Longstreet commanded it and opposed it, the man whose name it carries led one of its three divisions, and the other two division commanders - Pettigrew and Trimble - are the names nobody remembers.
Q1.On which dates was the Battle of Gettysburg fought?Tap to reveal
Answer: July 1-3, 1863
Three days and roughly fifty thousand casualties, in a battle neither army had chosen and neither commander had expected to fight that week.
Q2.Who commanded the Confederate army at Gettysburg?Tap to reveal
Answer: Robert E. Lee
It was his second invasion of the North and his last. After Gettysburg he never again had the strength to leave Virginia on the offensive.
Q3.Who commanded the Union Army of the Potomac at Gettysburg?Tap to reveal
Answer: George G. Meade
Meade was handed the army on June 28, three days before the battle, after Lincoln removed Joseph Hooker. He had not asked for the job and learned of it when an officer woke him in his tent before dawn.
Q4.Which Union general was shot dead on the first day of the battle?Tap to reveal
Answer: John Reynolds
Reynolds had turned down command of the army rather than deal with Washington, then died bringing the First Corps up to support the cavalry holding the ridges west of town.
Q5.Which Union cavalry officer's division fought dismounted on the ridges west of Gettysburg on the morning of July 1?Tap to reveal
Answer: John Buford
Buford dismounted his troopers and fought them as infantry long enough for Reynolds to arrive, which is the reason the Union ended up holding the high ground south of town. He died of typhoid that December.
Q6.Longstreet and A. P. Hill were two of Lee's three corps commanders at Gettysburg. Who was the third?Tap to reveal
Answer: Richard Ewell
Ewell had inherited Jackson's old corps. On the first evening Lee told him to take Cemetery Hill 'if practicable'; Ewell judged that it was not, and people have argued about it ever since.
Q7.Which former college professor commanded the 20th Maine on Little Round Top?Tap to reveal
Answer: Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain
Chamberlain taught rhetoric at Bowdoin and took a leave of absence to enlist. He received the Medal of Honor for the fight of July 2 and was later elected governor of Maine four times.
Q8.The final Confederate attack of July 3 is sometimes called Longstreet's Assault. What is it usually called?Tap to reveal
Answer: Pickett's Charge
Longstreet commanded the attack and argued against making it. Pickett led one of the three divisions that went forward and lost almost all of his field officers; the charge carries his name because his men came from Virginia and Virginia wrote the histories.
Q9.Who was the only civilian killed by hostile fire during the battle?Tap to reveal
Answer: Jennie Wade
Mary Virginia Wade, twenty years old, was kneading dough in her sister's kitchen on the morning of July 3 when a bullet came through two closed doors and struck her.
Q10.Which elderly townsman picked up his rifle and fought alongside the Iron Brigade on the first day?Tap to reveal
Answer: John Burns
Burns was a town constable in his late sixties and a veteran of the War of 1812. He was wounded three times, survived, and had a poem written about him the following year.
Q11.Who was the scheduled keynote speaker at the dedication of the Gettysburg National Cemetery, where Lincoln also spoke?Tap to reveal
Answer: Edward Everett
Everett spoke for about two hours; Lincoln followed with roughly two hundred and seventy words. Everett wrote to him the next day that he wished he had come as near the central idea of the occasion in two hours as Lincoln had in two minutes.
Battlefield landmarks
Twelve questions built the same way: here is a name from a battlefield map, tell us which battle it belongs to. This is the hard round. Anyone who has walked a National Park Service field will clear most of it; anyone working from general reading will not, because these are the names that live on the ground rather than in the textbooks.
A tavern in Arkansas, a farmhouse in Virginia, a bridge over a creek in Maryland, a bulge in an earthwork, a crater. Taken together they are a reasonable tour of the war: the first summer in the east, the western campaigns of 1862, the bloodiest single day of all, and the long grinding siege of 1864-65 where the fighting stopped looking like Napoleon and started looking like 1916.
Q1.The Henry House stood on which battlefield?Tap to reveal
Answer: Bull Run (Manassas)
Judith Henry, in her eighties and bedridden, refused to be carried out and was killed when a shell struck the house - the first civilian killed in a battle of the Civil War. The hill her house stood on is where Jackson got his nickname.
Q2.Elkhorn Tavern is the landmark of which battle?Tap to reveal
Answer: Pea Ridge
Fought in northwest Arkansas in March 1862, Pea Ridge secured Missouri for the Union. Cherokee regiments under Stand Watie fought there for the Confederacy; Watie was the last Confederate general in the field to surrender, in June 1865.
Q3.The 'Hornet's Nest' was a defensive position at which battle?Tap to reveal
Answer: Shiloh
Union troops along a sunken farm road held it for hours on April 6, 1862, under fire the men said sounded like a nest of hornets. Shiloh's roughly 23,700 casualties were more than any previous battle in American history had produced.
Q4.Burnside Bridge crosses the creek on which battlefield?Tap to reveal
Answer: Antietam
A few hundred Georgians held the far bank for hours against repeated attempts to force the bridge, while the creek itself was fordable a short distance away. September 17, 1862 is still the bloodiest single day in American military history.
Q5.Marye's Heights overlooks which battlefield?Tap to reveal
Answer: Fredericksburg
Confederate infantry stood several ranks deep behind a stone wall in a sunken road. Union brigade after Union brigade crossed the open ground below it in December 1862, and none of them reached the wall.
Q6.Lookout Mountain dominates which battlefield?Tap to reveal
Answer: Chattanooga
The fight on its slopes on November 24, 1863 was christened the Battle Above the Clouds for the fog the troops climbed through - a piece of newspaper poetry Grant thought was nonsense.
Q7.Farms belonging to the McPherson, Codori, Spangler, Culp and Rose families sit on which battlefield?Tap to reveal
Answer: Gettysburg
The first day's fighting ran across McPherson's fields, Pickett's Charge passed the Codori barn, and the Rose farm's wheatfield changed hands over and over on July 2, alongside Joseph Sherfy's peach orchard next door.
Q8.The 'Mule Shoe' was a salient in the lines at which battle?Tap to reveal
Answer: Spotsylvania Court House
The fighting at its western face on May 12, 1864 ran about twenty hours in the rain, at arm's length across the parapet. An oak nearly two feet thick was cut down by rifle fire alone; the stump is in the Smithsonian.
Q9.'The Crater' is a landmark of which siege?Tap to reveal
Answer: Petersburg
Pennsylvania coal miners dug a gallery under the Confederate line and detonated four tons of powder on July 30, 1864. The attacking troops went down into the hole instead of around it and were shot at from the rim.
Q10.The 'Field of Lost Shoes' is on which battlefield?Tap to reveal
Answer: New Market
Cadets from VMI, some of them fifteen years old, charged across a rain-soaked ploughed field in May 1864 and came out of the mud barefoot. Ten of them were killed.
Q11.'Hell's Half Acre' was the scene of savage fighting at which battle?Tap to reveal
Answer: Stones River (Murfreesboro)
The stand of cedars and limestone around the Round Forest held the Union line on December 31, 1862. Measured against the number of men engaged, Stones River was among the costliest battles of the whole war.
Q12.Which Virginia town changed hands more often than any other during the war?Tap to reveal
Answer: Winchester
Winchester sits at the northern end of the Shenandoah Valley, at its mouth on the road to the Potomac, which meant both armies wanted it and neither could keep it. It was occupied and reoccupied dozens of times, and three separate battles were fought over it.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many Civil War trivia questions are on this page?
Sixty, split into five rounds: secession and the opening shots, generals and commanders, Stonewall Jackson, Gettysburg, and battlefield landmarks. Every answer is printed with the question, along with a short note on why it is the answer.
Is this Civil War trivia free to use?
Yes. All sixty questions and answers are free to read, print for a quiz night or a classroom, or play online at Trivio.NET. There is nothing to sign up for.
What period does the set cover?
The American Civil War itself, from the secession of South Carolina in December 1860 to the surrender of the last Confederate commands in 1865. The questions cover both armies, the naval war, the campaigns in the east and the west, and the battlefields as they are marked today.
How hard are these Civil War questions?
They get harder as you go. The first round is school-history level and suits a family table. The battlefield landmarks round at the end is genuinely difficult and rewards anyone who has visited the parks - most people score well under half of it on a first attempt.
Which questions work best for a pub quiz round?
Take the twelve battlefield landmark questions as a single themed round: they are uniform in shape, quick to read aloud, and impossible to guess by elimination. For a mixed crowd, pull five from the opening round and five from Gettysburg instead.
