Reconstruction Era
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50 free Reconstruction Era trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Reconstruction is the stretch after the Civil War when the United States tried to answer two enormous questions at once: how the defeated South would rejoin the country, and what freedom would mean for millions of people who had been enslaved. It rewrote the Constitution, put a president on trial and sent the first Black members to Congress, and it ended in a backroom bargain whose effects lasted a century. This quiz covers what a US history or social studies class does: the rival plans of Lincoln, Andrew Johnson and the Radical Republicans, the laws and amendments of the period, the new lives of freedpeople, the politicians and generals who shaped the era, the violent backlash, and the disputed election that brought it to a close. It works as a review before a test, a ready-made multiple-choice set for a classroom, or a challenge for anyone curious about the most argued-over chapter in American history. Every answer comes with a short explanation, and the full set can be played or printed.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which state ratified the constitutional ban on slavery only in 1995 and filed the paperwork in 2013?
Mississippi
Mississippi had rejected the amendment on December 5, 1865, a day before enough other states approved it to make it law. Its symbolic 1995 vote then sat uncertified for 18 years.
Q 02Which actor reportedly vowed that Abraham Lincoln's call for Black voting rights would be his last speech?
John Wilkes Booth
John Wilkes Booth stood in the crowd outside the White House on April 11, 1865, as Lincoln backed votes for former slaves. Booth shot him three days later at Ford's Theatre.
Q 03Which holiday marks the day in 1865 when a Union general announced in Galveston, Texas, that slavery was over?
Juneteenth
Juneteenth blends June and nineteenth, the date General Gordon Granger's order reached Texas. Few Union troops had been stationed there, so the Emancipation Proclamation had gone largely unenforced.
Q 04Which Union general's land order for freed families inspired the phrase 'forty acres and a mule'?
William T. Sherman
William T. Sherman issued the order four days after meeting twenty Black ministers and lay leaders in Savannah. Andrew Johnson moved to undo it within months, promising pardoned Confederates their property back.
Q 05Which trade did Andrew Johnson, who never attended school, practice in Greeneville before entering politics?
Tailor
Tailor was the trade Johnson was apprenticed to as a boy, and he ran away from his master after about five years. His wife later tutored him in mathematics and writing.
Q 06Which suffragist, arrested for voting in 1872, argued that the Fourteenth Amendment gave her the right?
Susan B. Anthony
Susan B. Anthony was convicted after the judge directed the jury to find her guilty. Fined $100, she said she would never pay a dollar of it, and she never did.
Q 07Which insult was aimed at Northerners, many of them Union veterans, who moved south after the Civil War?
Carpetbaggers
Carpetbaggers were named for the carpet bag, cheap luggage made of carpet fabric that many of the newcomers carried. Critics cast them as opportunists out to exploit the defeated South.
Q 08Which constitutional amendment, ratified eight months after Appomattox, abolished slavery in every state?
Thirteenth
The Thirteenth Amendment reached people the Emancipation Proclamation had skipped. Slavery was still legal in loyal Kentucky and Delaware until the amendment took effect in December 1865.
Q 09Which Confederate leader spent two years imprisoned at Fort Monroe on a treason charge and never stood trial?
Jefferson Davis
Jefferson Davis walked free in 1867 on $100,000 bail, put up by backers including railroad tycoon Cornelius Vanderbilt. The case was dropped after Andrew Johnson's Christmas 1868 amnesty.
Q 10Which agency, created in March 1865, built schools and negotiated labor contracts for formerly enslaved people?
Freedmen's Bureau
The Freedmen's Bureau also helped families torn apart by slavery to reunite and performed marriages for freed couples. It operated only until 1872.
Q 11Which Southern state laws of 1865 and 1866 let officials arrest freedpeople as vagrants and force them to work?
Black Codes
Black Codes struck Republicans in Congress as slavery returning under another name. They answered by writing the Fourteenth Amendment.
Q 12Which farming arrangement tied many freed families in the postwar South to a landowner's fields and a merchant's credit?
Sharecropping
Sharecropping paid families with a portion of the crop they raised instead of wages. A poor harvest left them owing the merchant, and working another year to clear the debt.
Q 13Which 1857 Supreme Court ruling was overturned by the Fourteenth Amendment's guarantee of citizenship by birth?
Q 21Which 1867 law did Andrew Johnson defy by dismissing his Secretary of War, triggering his impeachment?
Tenure of Office Act
The Tenure of Office Act barred a president from removing certain officials without the Senate's approval. Congress repealed it in 1887, and the Supreme Court later said it had probably been invalid.
Q 22Which Secretary of War barricaded himself inside the War Department for weeks after Andrew Johnson tried to fire him?
Edwin Stanton
Edwin Stanton held out until Johnson was acquitted, then resigned. In 1869 he was confirmed to the Supreme Court and died four days later, before he could take his seat.
Q 23Which Kansas Republican cast the decisive vote that kept Andrew Johnson in the White House, then lost his own seat?
Dred Scott v. Sandford
Dred Scott v. Sandford had held that Americans descended from enslaved Africans could never be citizens. The amendment's first sentence erased that by granting citizenship to nearly everyone born on American soil.
Q 14Which part of the Fourteenth Amendment did Brown v. Board of Education use to outlaw segregated schools?
Equal Protection Clause
The Equal Protection Clause had been read the opposite way in 1896, when the Supreme Court upheld segregated rail cars. Brown reversed that reading 58 years later.
Q 15Which former Confederate state, Andrew Johnson's home, was the first readmitted to the Union, in July 1866?
Tennessee
Tennessee earned its early return by ratifying the Fourteenth Amendment, against Johnson's wishes. Every other former Confederate state at first rejected the amendment.
Q 16To which party did Andrew Johnson belong when he joined Abraham Lincoln's ticket as running mate in 1864?
Democratic
Democratic loyalties were the point: Johnson was the one senator from a Confederate state who kept his seat. He and Lincoln ran on a 'National Union' ticket to draw in War Democrats.
Q 17What name is given to the backroom deal, reportedly struck at Wormley's Hotel, that made Rutherford B. Hayes president?
Compromise of 1877
The Compromise of 1877 gave Hayes the White House, and he pulled the last federal troops out of the South. Many Black Southerners called it the Great Betrayal.
Q 18Which New York governor, who had helped bring down Boss Tweed, won the popular vote in 1876 but lost the presidency?
Samuel J. Tilden
Samuel J. Tilden finished with 184 electoral votes, one short of a majority. A special panel then awarded all 20 disputed votes to his rival, each time by 8 votes to 7.
Q 19Which minister, seated in the U.S. Senate in 1870, was the first African American to serve in Congress?
Hiram Revels
Hiram Revels had helped recruit two Black regiments for the Union army and served as a chaplain. Senators voted 48 to 8 to seat him, with every opponent a Democrat.
Q 20Into what did the Reconstruction Acts of 1867 group ten former Confederate states until they formed new governments?
Military districts
Military districts, five in all, were run by the Army until a state accepted the Fourteenth Amendment and gave Black men the vote. Congress passed the measure over Andrew Johnson's veto.
Edmund G. Ross
Edmund G. Ross helped leave the count at 35 to 19, one vote short of the two-thirds needed to convict. John F. Kennedy later featured him in Profiles in Courage.
Q 24Which Chief Justice, later pictured on the $10,000 bill, presided over Andrew Johnson's impeachment trial?
Salmon P. Chase
Salmon P. Chase insisted that the Senate sit as a true court of law. That same year he sought the opposition party's nomination for president, having tried for the Republican one in 1860.
Q 25Which Pennsylvania congressman led the House Radical Republicans and chose burial in a cemetery open to all races?
Thaddeus Stevens
Thaddeus Stevens had the reason carved on his tombstone: to illustrate in death the 'equality of man before his Creator'. He died months after leading Andrew Johnson's impeachment.
Q 26Which Massachusetts Radical, caned on the Senate floor in 1856, championed racial equality during Reconstruction?
Charles Sumner
Charles Sumner spent his final days lobbying for a bill to open public places to all races, and on his deathbed begged visitors not to let it fail. It became law in 1875, a year after he died.
Q 27Which law, passed over Andrew Johnson's veto, was the first to declare people born in the United States citizens?
Civil Rights Act of 1866
The Civil Rights Act of 1866 was the first major bill Congress ever passed over a president's veto. Doubts about whether it was constitutional led Congress to write its guarantees into the Fourteenth Amendment.
Q 28How did Abraham Lincoln kill the Wade–Davis Bill, Congress's tougher 1864 terms for readmitting rebel states?
A pocket veto
A pocket veto works by doing nothing: Congress adjourned and Lincoln simply left the bill unsigned. Its two sponsors hit back with a manifesto accusing him of usurping the power of Congress.
Q 29What is the usual name for Abraham Lincoln's lenient 1863 terms for bringing rebel states back into the Union?
Ten Percent Plan
The Ten Percent Plan let a state rejoin once a tenth of its 1860 voters swore allegiance and accepted emancipation. Radical Republicans opposed it as far too easy on the South.
Q 30Which phrase from Abraham Lincoln's second inaugural address promised the defeated South a forgiving peace?
With malice toward none
'With malice toward none, with charity for all' opened the speech's final sentence, which urged Americans to bind up the nation's wounds. Lincoln was shot 41 days later.