American Civil War
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189 free American Civil War trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
78 free American Civil War trivia questions with answers. The American Civil War (1861-1865) was the deadliest conflict in U.S. history, claiming over 750,000 lives and reshaping the nation forever. From the first shots at Fort Sumter to Lee's surrender at Appomattox, this quiz covers the battles, leaders, politics, and surprising stories of the war that ended slavery and preserved the Union. How much do you really know?
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Q 01Which president issued the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863?
Abraham Lincoln
Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, declaring slaves in Confederate states to be free.
Q 02What was the flour-and-water cracker issued to Union soldiers as a staple ration called?
Hardtack
Hardtack was so tough that soldiers crumbled it into their coffee, where the weevils floated up to be skimmed off; one veteran called his army memoir 'Hard Tack and Coffee'.
Q 03Who served as president of the Confederate States of America?
Jefferson Davis
Jefferson Davis, a former US secretary of war, was captured in 1865 and held for two years at Fort Monroe on a treason charge, then released without ever standing trial.
Q 04Which legal safeguard did Lincoln suspend early in the Civil War, letting the army jail suspects without charge?
Habeas corpus
Habeas corpus was suspended in April 1861 after rioters attacked troops heading for Washington; when Chief Justice Taney ruled that only Congress had that power, Lincoln simply ignored the ruling.
Q 05What name did white Southerners give Northerners who moved South to take part in Reconstruction?
Carpetbaggers
'Carpetbaggers' mocked Northerners who came South after 1865, supposedly with all they owned in a cheap carpet-cloth bag; white Southern Republicans were derided as 'scalawags'.
Q 06Which side did the state of Virginia primarily fight for during the Civil War?
The Confederacy
Virginia voted to secede and join the Confederacy on April 17, 1861, two days after Lincoln called for 75,000 volunteers; more major battles were fought on its soil than in any other state.
Q 07What was the bloodiest single-day battle of the Civil War?
Antietam
Antietam cost about 23,000 casualties in twelve hours and ended the first Confederate invasion of the North, giving Lincoln the victory he wanted before announcing the Emancipation Proclamation.
Q 08The 15th Amendment of 1870 barred states from denying which right on account of race?
The right to vote
The right to vote was promised to Black men by the 15th Amendment, but literacy tests and grandfather clauses gutted it across the South until the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Q 09Which city was the Confederate capital from February to late May 1861?
Montgomery, Alabama
Montgomery, Alabama, hosted the new government for only three and a half months before its Congress voted to move to a larger city with far more industry.
Q 10The Civil War lasted approximately how many years?
Four
Four years, from April 1861 to the spring of 1865, though Lincoln's first call for troops had asked 75,000 militiamen to serve for just three months.
Q 11Which Union officer, remembered for 'Damn the torpedoes', became the US Navy's first admiral?
David Farragut
David Farragut was a Tennessee-born Southerner living in Norfolk who moved north rather than follow Virginia out of the Union; Congress created the rank of rear admiral for him in 1862.
Q 12Which Union general led the destructive 'March to the Sea' through Georgia in 1864?
William T. Sherman
William T. Sherman cut loose from his supply line, fed some 62,000 men off Georgia's farms, and telegraphed Lincoln offering the captured port of Savannah as a Christmas gift.
Q 13What was the first state to secede from the Union before the Civil War?
South Carolina
Q 21Which Black Union regiment won fame for its 1863 assault on Fort Wagner, later dramatized in the film Glory?
54th Massachusetts Infantry
The 54th Massachusetts Infantry lost about 40 percent of its men at Fort Wagner; Confederates buried Colonel Robert Gould Shaw in a mass grave with them as an insult, and his father wrote that he could imagine no holier place.
Q 22Which Mississippi River fortress city surrendered to the Union on July 4, 1863, after a 47-day siege?
Vicksburg
Vicksburg's civilians sheltered from the shelling in caves dug into the hillsides; its fall cut the Confederacy in two, and Lincoln rejoiced that the river 'again goes unvexed to the sea'.
Q 23Which state joined the Union in June 1863, in the middle of the Civil War?
South Carolina's convention voted 169 to 0 to leave on December 20, 1860, six weeks after Lincoln's election and more than two months before he took office.
Q 14The Battle of Gettysburg took place in which state?
Pennsylvania
Pennsylvania was invaded by Lee's army in June 1863; three days of fighting at Gettysburg cost more than 50,000 casualties and forced the Confederates to retreat to Virginia.
Q 15What was the Union plan to blockade Southern ports and control the Mississippi called?
Anaconda Plan
The Anaconda Plan got its name as a jeer: newspapers wanting a quick victory mocked Winfield Scott's slow squeeze as a snake's coils, yet in hindsight his strategy proved broadly right.
Q 16Where was President Abraham Lincoln assassinated?
Ford's Theatre
Ford's Theatre was staging the comedy 'Our American Cousin'; the assassin timed his shot for the play's biggest laugh line so that the audience's roar would cover it.
Q 17During the Civil War, what killed more soldiers than combat?
Disease
Disease caused about two-thirds of the war's soldier deaths: dysentery, typhoid and measles swept crowded, filthy camps at a time when doctors did not yet understand germs.
Q 18Which motto did Booth reportedly shout after shooting Lincoln?
Sic semper tyrannis
Sic semper tyrannis, 'thus always to tyrants', is the cry tradition gives to Brutus as he killed Caesar; Booth also stabbed Major Henry Rathbone, who sat in the president's box, before fleeing.
Q 19What was the significance of the Battle of Hampton Roads in March 1862?
First clash of ironclad warships
The first clash of ironclad warships saw USS Monitor and CSS Virginia pound each other for about three hours without either breaking through; the leading navies then stopped building wooden warships.
Q 20Which slave state bordering Washington, D.C., stayed in the Union, keeping the capital from being cut off?
Maryland
Maryland's loyalty was not left to chance: in 1861 federal troops occupied Baltimore, and that September about a third of the state legislature was arrested as it gathered to meet.
West Virginia
West Virginia was born when unionist delegates meeting at Wheeling declared themselves Virginia's lawful government, then gave the consent the Constitution demands before a state can be divided.
Q 24Which Confederate general was accidentally shot by his own troops at the Battle of Chancellorsville?
Stonewall Jackson
Stonewall Jackson was shot by his own North Carolina pickets in the dark on May 2, 1863, after his flank attack at Chancellorsville, and died eight days later.
Q 25What term described Northerners who opposed the Civil War and wanted peace with the Confederacy?
Copperheads
Copperheads got the name from Republican newspapers, which likened antiwar Northern Democrats to the venomous snake that strikes without warning.
Q 26Which abolitionist's 1859 raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry pushed the nation closer to civil war?
John Brown
John Brown hoped to arm a slave uprising, but US Marines stormed his stronghold within two days; his hanging made him a martyr to many in the North and enraged the South.
Q 27Which former Union general became the 18th President of the United States?
Ulysses S. Grant
Ulysses S. Grant, the commanding general of the Union Army, was elected the 18th President in 1868 and served two terms until 1877.
Q 28What term did General Benjamin Butler use in 1861 for escaped slaves he kept as seized enemy property?
Contraband
Contraband was Butler's lawyerly answer to a Confederate officer demanding three runaways back under the Fugitive Slave Act; word spread, and a steady stream of escapees made for his 'Freedom's Fortress'.
Q 29What was the notorious Confederate POW camp in Georgia where thousands of Union soldiers died?
Andersonville
Andersonville held up to 33,000 men in a stockade built for 10,000; nearly 13,000 of its 45,000 prisoners died, and its commandant, Henry Wirz, was tried and hanged after the war.
Q 30Which 1857 Supreme Court ruling held that Black Americans, enslaved or free, could not be US citizens?
Dred Scott v. Sandford
Dred Scott v. Sandford also struck down the Missouri Compromise; Scott himself was freed by private arrangement weeks later, only to die of tuberculosis the following year.