Easy Presidential Trivia to Warm Up
Open with these. Every question here is answerable by anyone who sat through an American history class, which is exactly the point: a quiz that starts hard loses half the room before the scoring even begins.
If you are hosting, read the whole question before anyone can shout, and give the money questions a beat of silence. Most of a typical table will get most of this round, so treat it as a leveller rather than a test.
Q1.In which present-day U.S. state was George Washington born?Tap to reveal
Answer: Virginia
Washington was born in Westmoreland County, Virginia, in 1732. Virginia went on to produce eight presidents, more than any other state.
Q2.Where is George Washington buried?Tap to reveal
Answer: Mount Vernon
Congress wanted him entombed in a crypt beneath the Capitol, but his will asked for a vault at his own estate on the Potomac, and his family honored it.
Q3.True or false: George Washington lived in the White House.Tap to reveal
Answer: False
The government only moved to the new capital in November 1800, near the end of John Adams's term, so Adams was the first president to sleep there.
Q4.Which president's face appears on the $20 bill?Tap to reveal
Answer: Andrew Jackson
Jackson has been on the twenty since 1928, which is a lasting irony: he spent much of his presidency fighting the national bank and distrusted paper money.
Q5.Which president joins Washington, Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt on Mount Rushmore?Tap to reveal
Answer: Thomas Jefferson
Sculptor Gutzon Borglum chose the four to represent the nation's birth, growth, development and preservation. Jefferson's head had to be started over after the first attempt hit unstable rock.
Q6.Which president was nicknamed 'Old Hickory'?Tap to reveal
Answer: Andrew Jackson
His soldiers said he was as tough as hickory wood after he marched them home through Tennessee rather than abandon the sick, and the name followed him into the White House.
Q7.Who shot Abraham Lincoln?Tap to reveal
Answer: John Wilkes Booth
Booth was a well-known stage actor, which is how he walked into Ford's Theatre unquestioned on April 14, 1865, five days after Lee's surrender.
Q8.In what year was John F. Kennedy assassinated?Tap to reveal
Answer: 1963
He was shot in Dallas on November 22, 1963, in the third year of his term, and Lyndon Johnson was sworn in aboard Air Force One that same afternoon.
Q9.Which president said 'ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country'?Tap to reveal
Answer: John F. Kennedy
It came near the end of his inaugural address in January 1961, a few paragraphs before the close. Kennedy drafted and redrafted the speech for weeks, and it ran under 1,400 words.
Q10.Which president delivered the Gettysburg Address?Tap to reveal
Answer: Abraham Lincoln
He spoke for barely two minutes in November 1863, about 272 words, after the main orator of the day had held the crowd for two hours.
Q11.Under the 22nd Amendment, how many times can a person be elected president?Tap to reveal
Answer: Twice
The limit is law only because of the 22nd Amendment, ratified in 1951. It caps elections rather than years — a vice president who inherits two years or less of a term can still be elected twice — and before 1951 two terms was simply a tradition Washington started and Franklin Roosevelt broke.
Presidential Firsts, Onlys and Records
This is the round that separates the history buffs from the rest of the table. Every answer is a superlative of some kind: the shortest term, the only wedding, the first father and son, the four-term record that will never be repeated.
Two useful hosting notes. Several answers repeat, so players who spot the pattern will start guessing 'Harrison' and 'Cleveland' on instinct, which is fine and rather fun. And if you want a tie-breaker later, keep the 31-day term question in reserve, because nearly everyone gets the president right and the number wrong.
Q1.Which two former presidents died on the same day, and what day was it?Tap to reveal
Answer: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, on July 4, 1826
It was the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Adams died a few hours after Jefferson, reportedly believing his old rival had outlived him.
Q2.Which president was born on the Fourth of July?Tap to reveal
Answer: Calvin Coolidge
Coolidge was born on Independence Day in 1872 in Plymouth Notch, Vermont. He is the only president born on the holiday, while three others died on it.
Q3.Who were the first father and son to both serve as president?Tap to reveal
Answer: John Adams and John Quincy Adams
John Quincy took office in 1825, 28 years after his father. Neither man won a second term, and both lost to opponents who painted them as elitist.
Q4.Which president was the grandson of another president?Tap to reveal
Answer: Benjamin Harrison
The 23rd president was the grandson of William Henry Harrison, the ninth. He is the only grandson of a president to hold the office.
Q5.Which president served two non-consecutive terms, as both the 22nd and 24th president?Tap to reveal
Answer: Grover Cleveland
He won in 1884, lost the 1888 electoral count to Benjamin Harrison while winning more votes, then beat Harrison in a rematch in 1892.
Q6.Which president was married in the White House itself?Tap to reveal
Answer: Grover Cleveland
He married 21-year-old Frances Folsom in the Blue Room in June 1886. Other presidents married while in office, and other White House weddings have been held since — Nellie Grant's, Alice Roosevelt's — but Cleveland is the only president to have married inside the building itself.
Q7.Which ninth president served a term of only 31 days?Tap to reveal
Answer: William Henry Harrison
He took office in March 1841 and died the following month, the first president to die in office, which triggered the first argument over how succession actually worked.
Q8.Which president gave the longest inaugural address on record?Tap to reveal
Answer: William Henry Harrison
Roughly 8,400 words, delivered outdoors in cold March weather for close to two hours. He was dead a month later, and the speech has been blamed for it ever since, probably unfairly.
Q9.Who was the first vice president to take over after a president died in office?Tap to reveal
Answer: John Tyler
Tyler insisted he was the president, not an acting caretaker, and took the oath in 1841. Opponents called him 'His Accidency', but the precedent stuck for a century before the 25th Amendment wrote it down.
Q10.Which president later became Chief Justice of the United States?Tap to reveal
Answer: William Howard Taft
Taft was appointed to the Court in 1921, eight years after leaving the White House, and always said the judgeship suited him far better than the presidency.
Q11.Which president served the longest, winning four terms?Tap to reveal
Answer: Franklin D. Roosevelt
He was elected in 1932, 1936, 1940 and 1944 and died a few months into the fourth term. The two-term limit was written into the Constitution six years later.
Wars, Crises and Presidents Under Fire
Presidents are remembered for the emergency that landed on their desk, so this round works backwards from the crisis to the man. It also takes in the darker side of the job: four presidents have been killed in office, and the attempts on others fill a long list.
If you are running this for a family audience, the assassination questions here stay on the historical facts rather than the gruesome details, and each one carries something worth learning, such as the X-ray machine that sat unused a few hundred yards from a dying president.
Q1.Which president completed the Louisiana Purchase in 1803?Tap to reveal
Answer: Thomas Jefferson
About 828,000 square miles for roughly $15 million, which doubled the size of the country. Jefferson privately worried the Constitution did not actually let him do it.
Q2.Which president was in office during the War of 1812?Tap to reveal
Answer: James Madison
Madison is the only sitting president to take personal command of troops in the field, riding out to the Battle of Bladensburg in 1814. He had to flee with the retreating army, and the British burned the White House days later.
Q3.Whose 1823 message to Congress warned European powers against planting new colonies in the Americas?Tap to reveal
Answer: James Monroe
The Monroe Doctrine, set out in his 1823 message to Congress, warned Europe against new colonies in the Americas. Britain's navy, not America's, made it enforceable.
Q4.Which president was in office when the first seven states seceded from the Union?Tap to reveal
Answer: James Buchanan
Seven states left between December 1860 and February 1861, while Buchanan was still in office and Lincoln waited to be inaugurated in March.
Q5.Which president was the first to be assassinated, dying in a house across the street from where he was shot?Tap to reveal
Answer: Abraham Lincoln
He was carried to the Petersen boarding house opposite Ford's Theatre and died there the next morning, the first of four presidents killed in office.
Q6.Who was the first U.S. president to be impeached?Tap to reveal
Answer: Andrew Johnson
The House impeached him in 1868 over his fight with Congress about Reconstruction. The Senate acquitted him by a single vote.
Q7.Which president ended the period of Reconstruction in 1877?Tap to reveal
Answer: Rutherford B. Hayes
He reached the White House through a disputed count settled by a special commission, and withdrew the last federal troops from the South soon after.
Q8.Which president was shot at a Washington train station in 1881 and died two and a half months later?Tap to reveal
Answer: James A. Garfield
Garfield survived the bullet and was slowly killed by his doctors' unsterilized probing. His 199 days in office are the second-shortest term.
Q9.Which president was shot at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York?Tap to reveal
Answer: William McKinley
McKinley was shot in September 1901 and died eight days later. An X-ray machine was on display at the same fair, but doctors never used it to find the bullet.
Q10.Which president promoted the 'Big Stick' policy and said 'Speak softly and carry a big stick'?Tap to reveal
Answer: Theodore Roosevelt
He borrowed the line from a proverb and applied it to the Caribbean and the Panama Canal, sending the new American navy where argument alone would not reach.
Q11.Who was president when the stock market crashed in 1929?Tap to reveal
Answer: Herbert Hoover
The crash came seven months into his term. A trained engineer with a global relief record, Hoover was undone by a collapse nobody then knew how to stop.
Q12.Which president introduced the New Deal?Tap to reveal
Answer: Franklin D. Roosevelt
A blizzard of programs passed from 1933 onward. Some vanished within years, but Social Security and the Securities and Exchange Commission are still running.
Q13.Who was president when the atomic bombs were dropped in August 1945?Tap to reveal
Answer: Harry S. Truman
Truman had been vice president for 82 days when Roosevelt died in April 1945, and was told about the bomb project only after he was sworn in.
First Ladies of the White House
The job has no salary, no oath and no description, and the women who held it shaped the office anyway. This round is where most players discover how little they know, so expect scores to drop and lean into it.
There is a real theme running through these answers: several First Ladies did work the country had no language for. Edith Wilson screened every paper that reached her incapacitated husband, Dolley Madison decided what was worth saving from a burning capital, Eleanor Roosevelt travelled the country because her husband could not. Read the notes aloud even when someone gets the answer right.
Q1.Who was the nation's very first First Lady?Tap to reveal
Answer: Martha Washington
Nobody called her First Lady at the time; the usual form of address was 'Lady Washington'. The title only settled into common use decades later.
Q2.Which First Lady rescued the portrait of George Washington when the British burned the capital in 1814?Tap to reveal
Answer: Dolley Madison
With British troops close, she had the Gilbert Stuart portrait cut out of its frame and carried off. The painting still hangs in the White House today.
Q3.Which First Lady reportedly prayed nightly for her husband to lose the election?Tap to reveal
Answer: Margaret Taylor
Peggy Taylor wanted a quiet retirement, not the White House. Once there she stayed out of public life almost entirely, and her youngest daughter, Betty Taylor Bliss, hosted in her place.
Q4.True or false: Mary Todd Lincoln was committed to a mental institution.Tap to reveal
Answer: True
In 1875, ten years after the assassination and after losing three of her four sons, her surviving son Robert had her committed. She was released within months and never forgave him.
Q5.Which First Lady lost a son in a train accident shortly before her husband took office?Tap to reveal
Answer: Jane Pierce
Eleven-year-old Bennie Pierce was killed in a derailment in January 1853, weeks before the inauguration. His mother never recovered and largely withdrew from the White House.
Q6.Which First Lady banned dancing and card playing at the White House?Tap to reveal
Answer: Sarah Childress Polk
A devout Presbyterian, she cut the entertainment and instead worked as her husband's political adviser and unofficial secretary, unusual for the 1840s.
Q7.Who was the first First Lady to hold a college degree?Tap to reveal
Answer: Lucy Webb Hayes
She graduated from Wesleyan Female College in Cincinnati in 1850. She also banned alcohol at White House functions, which earned her the nickname 'Lemonade Lucy'.
Q8.Which First Lady is responsible for the cherry blossoms Washington enjoys every spring?Tap to reveal
Answer: Helen Taft
Writer Eliza Scidmore had pushed the idea for twenty-four years and got nowhere until Helen Taft backed it in 1909. On 27 March 1912 the First Lady planted the first two of Japan's gift trees beside the Tidal Basin with Viscountess Chinda, and the festival built around them fills the city every spring.
Q9.Which First Lady was in China during the Boxer Rebellion of 1900?Tap to reveal
Answer: Lou Hoover
She and her mining-engineer husband were caught in the siege of Tianjin. A geology graduate who spoke Mandarin, she later used it to talk privately with him in the White House.
Q10.Which First Lady took over her husband's daily business after he suffered a stroke in 1919?Tap to reveal
Answer: Edith Wilson
For roughly 17 months she decided which papers and which people reached Woodrow Wilson. She called it her 'stewardship'; critics called her the first woman president.
Q11.Which First Lady served hot dogs to the King and Queen of England?Tap to reveal
Answer: Eleanor Roosevelt
At a Hyde Park picnic in June 1939, with war in Europe months away. The menu scandalized the press and did exactly what she intended for Anglo-American goodwill.
Q12.How old was Bess Truman when she died in 1982?Tap to reveal
Answer: 97
She remains the longest-lived First Lady. She loathed publicity, gave almost no interviews, and burned much of her correspondence with Harry.
Nicknames, Quirks and Narrow Escapes
Save this round for last. The questions are harder, but they are also the ones people repeat afterwards: the president who wrote two languages at once, the one who had part of his jaw removed in secret, the one whose family called him Dutch.
A word on sourcing, because presidential trivia attracts tall tales. Where a story is legend rather than record, the note says so, and the two or three items here that sound invented are the documented ones.
Q1.Which president was known as 'Silent Cal'?Tap to reveal
Answer: Calvin Coolidge
Coolidge genuinely said very little in company. Asked once what a preacher had talked about, he reportedly replied, 'Sin,' and when pressed, 'He was against it.'
Q2.Which president, nicknamed 'Old Kinderhook', was the first born as a citizen of the United States?Tap to reveal
Answer: Martin Van Buren
Born in Kinderhook, New York, in 1782, he was the first president not born a British subject. His supporters' 1840 'O.K. Club' is the reason 'OK' spread across the country, though the word itself had already appeared in print in 1839 as a joke abbreviation of 'oll korrect'.
Q3.Which is the only president never to have belonged to a political party?Tap to reveal
Answer: George Washington
He is the only president elected without a party, and spent much of his Farewell Address warning the country about what parties would do to it. Reference tables that file him as a Federalist are recording his sympathies, not a membership.
Q4.True or false: Abraham Lincoln carried bills, mail and personal notes inside his hat.Tap to reveal
Answer: True
The stovepipe hat doubled as a filing cabinet, which is one reason so many Lincoln documents survive in odd condition.
Q5.Which president wore only suits he had tailored himself?Tap to reveal
Answer: Andrew Johnson
Johnson was apprenticed to a tailor as a boy and never attended school; he picked up reading in the shop, and his wife Eliza later taught him writing, arithmetic and grammar.
Q6.Legend has it that this president could write in Greek with his left hand and Latin with his right at the same time. Who was he?Tap to reveal
Answer: James A. Garfield
The parlour trick is probably embroidered, but the scholarship was real: Garfield taught classics and became a college president in his twenties.
Q7.Which president secretly had part of his jaw removed while in office?Tap to reveal
Answer: Grover Cleveland
A cancerous growth was cut from his upper jaw aboard a friend's yacht in 1893, with the country in financial panic. A rubber prosthesis hid the gap and the press was told he had a dental problem.
Q8.Which president liked to swim in the Potomac with no clothes on?Tap to reveal
Answer: John Quincy Adams
He swam at dawn most summer mornings. The story that a reporter sat on his clothes until he granted an interview is a favourite, and almost certainly invented.
Q9.Which president had been president of Princeton University?Tap to reveal
Answer: Woodrow Wilson
He led Princeton from 1902 to 1910, went straight to the governorship of New Jersey, and reached the White House two years after that.
Q10.What nickname did Ronald Reagan's family and closest friends use for him?Tap to reveal
Answer: Dutch
His father called him 'a fat little Dutchman' as a newborn and the name stuck for life. 'The Gipper' came later, from a football role in a 1940 film.
Q11.What was Richard Nixon's middle name?Tap to reveal
Answer: Milhous
It was his mother's family name, and it is why the initials RMN appear on so much of his memorabilia.
Q12.Which president survived the first assassination attempt on a sitting president, in 1835?Tap to reveal
Answer: Andrew Jackson
A house painter named Richard Lawrence fired two pistols at Jackson at the Capitol and both misfired. The 67-year-old president set about him with his cane.
Q13.Which president was the target of two assassination attempts within three weeks, both by women?Tap to reveal
Answer: Gerald Ford
Both happened in California in September 1975, 17 days apart. Ford went on campaigning and refused to change his schedule.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many presidential trivia questions are on this page?
There are 60, arranged in five rounds: easy warm-ups, presidential firsts and records, wars and crises, First Ladies of the White House, and a harder closing round of nicknames, quirks and narrow escapes.
Which presidents do these questions cover?
The set runs from George Washington to Ronald Reagan. Andrew Jackson, William Henry Harrison and Grover Cleveland turn up most often, each in three questions, and Abraham Lincoln runs through more of the page than anyone, because each of them holds a record or a first worth asking about. It deliberately stops well short of current politics.
Are these questions suitable for Presidents' Day in a classroom?
Yes. The first two rounds match a middle-school American history unit, and every answer carries a short explanation a teacher can read aloud. The later rounds work better as extension or bonus questions.
What is a good presidential trivia question for a tie-breaker?
Use one with a number in it. Nearly everyone knows William Henry Harrison had the shortest presidency, but almost nobody remembers it was 31 days, and Bess Truman's age at her death makes a clean 'closest guess wins' finish.
Is this presidential trivia free to use?
Yes. All 60 questions, answers and notes are free to read, print for a party or classroom, or play online at Trivio.NET, with no sign-up.
