Stonewall Jackson
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
6correct to beat the crowd
50 free Stonewall Jackson trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Thomas J. Jackson is one of the most studied commanders of the American Civil War, and one of the strangest. Orphaned young and largely self-taught, he was an unpopular professor before the war and a battlefield legend within months of its start. His wartime career lasted barely two years, yet soldiers and historians have argued about it ever since. This quiz follows him from a frontier childhood through the Virginia Military Institute classroom to the marches and battles that made his name, and on to the night it all ended. Along the way it covers his family, his faith, his odd personal habits, the officers who served beside him, and how he has been remembered and reassessed. It suits Civil War buffs, history students and anyone who knows the nickname but not the man. The early questions are friendly; the later ones will test readers who know their campaigns.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which part of Stonewall Jackson, amputated in 1863, lies buried under its own granite marker?
His left arm
His left arm was amputated after he was shot and buried by his chaplain at Ellwood Manor, far from his grave. A former staff officer put up the marker in 1903.
Q 02Until 2000, Virginia combined its Lee–Jackson Day holiday with a day honoring which civil rights leader?
Martin Luther King
Martin Luther King Jr. Day was fused with the Confederate holiday as Lee–Jackson–King Day until a governor split them in 2000. Virginia dropped Lee–Jackson Day altogether in 2020.
Q 03How was Stonewall Jackson mortally wounded as he rode back toward camp after dark in May 1863?
Shot by his own troops
Shot by his own troops, Jackson was hit three times when North Carolina sentries mistook his party for Union horsemen. The bullet's caliber later confirmed it was Confederate.
Q 04Which fruit is Stonewall Jackson famously said to have sucked on during campaigns, supposedly to ease indigestion?
Lemons
Lemons are the legend, spread by a fellow general's memoir, but his biographer found no such obsession. Jackson simply loved fruit, peaches above all.
Q 05Stonewall Jackson's dying words, about crossing a river to rest in the shade, gave which novelist a 1950 book title?
Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Hemingway borrowed them for Across the River and into the Trees, whose dying colonel recites Jackson's words to his driver.
Q 06Which World War II general, who as a boy prayed before portraits of Lee and Jackson, vowed to be Eisenhower's Jackson?
George Patton
George Patton assumed the two portraits showed God and Jesus. Douglas MacArthur paid the same compliment, calling a favorite subordinate his Stonewall Jackson.
Q 07What was the name of the captured Union horse that Stonewall Jackson rode all through the Civil War?
Little Sorrel
Little Sorrel came off a Connecticut farm, outlived his rider and died at 36. His mounted hide is displayed at the VMI Museum.
Q 08At which July 1861 battle did Thomas Jackson's Virginia brigade hold firm and earn him the nickname Stonewall?
First Bull Run
First Bull Run, known in the South as First Manassas, was the war's first major battle. Jackson's brigade lost more men that day than any other Southern brigade.
Q 09Which relative of Stonewall Jackson was so staunch a Unionist as to reportedly prefer him dead to leading a rebel army?
His sister
His sister Laura, once his closest confidante, sided so firmly with the Union that it later estranged her from her own husband too.
Q 10Stonewall Jackson rides beside Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis in a giant carving on which Georgia landmark?
Stone Mountain
Stone Mountain carries the world's largest bas-relief, cut 42 feet deep into the rock face and showing all three men on horseback.
Q 11Clarksburg, where Stonewall Jackson was born in 1824, is in which present-day state?
West Virginia
West Virginia did not exist when Jackson was born. Clarksburg belonged to Virginia until its northwestern counties broke away in 1863, the year he died.
Q 12Which academy did Thomas Jackson enter in 1842 near the bottom of his class, graduating 17th of 59 four years later?
West Point
West Point classmates said that with one more year he would have finished top. He arrived with so little schooling that he struggled with the entrance exams.
Q 13In which conflict did the young Thomas Jackson make his name by defying an order to retreat at Chapultepec?
The Mexican War
Q 21At which May 1863 battle did Stonewall Jackson lead his last flank attack before being fatally wounded that night?
Chancellorsville
Chancellorsville has been called Lee's perfect battle: he split his army twice and sent Jackson's entire corps around the Union flank.
Q 22Which illness killed Stonewall Jackson eight days after he was wounded in May 1863?
Pneumonia
Pneumonia set in while he recovered in a plantation's small office building, which he had chosen over the owner's offer of the main house.
Q 23Stonewall Jackson, so devout that he was said to prefer pious officers to able ones, was a deacon in which church?
Presbyterian
The Mexican War brought him two brevet promotions. At Chapultepec he judged that pulling back was deadlier than fighting on, and events proved him right.
Q 14In which Virginia town did Thomas Jackson teach at VMI for a decade, buy his only house and lie buried?
Lexington
Lexington later drew Robert E. Lee too: as a college president he lived in the same residence Jackson had shared with his first wife's family.
Q 15In 1859, Major Thomas Jackson commanded VMI cadets' howitzers at the hanging of which militant abolitionist?
John Brown
John Brown went to the gallows at Charles Town that December. Jackson's detail of 21 cadets and two howitzers added to the military guard around it.
Q 16Which general, mortally wounded moments later, is credited with coining Thomas Jackson's nickname Stonewall?
Barnard Bee
Barnard Bee was rallying his own shaken brigade when he pointed to Jackson's line. He died the next day, so nobody could ask whether he meant praise or a complaint.
Q 17Stonewall Jackson's 1862 campaign, in which his men marched 646 miles in 48 days, ran along which river's valley?
The Shenandoah
The Shenandoah was where Jackson's 17,000 men engaged three separate Union armies and kept them from reinforcing the drive on Richmond.
Q 18Which nickname did Stonewall Jackson's infantry earn in the 1862 Valley Campaign?
Foot cavalry
Foot cavalry was a deliberate oxymoron for infantry famed for their speed. Jackson won five significant victories that spring while heavily outnumbered.
Q 19Stonewall Jackson's bold 1862 attacks persuaded which leader to hold a whole corps back from the drive on Richmond?
Abraham Lincoln
Abraham Lincoln read Jackson's aggression as the sign of a far larger force and kept about 50,000 soldiers away from the assault on Richmond.
Q 20Stonewall Jackson's men bore the brunt of the opening attacks at which September 1862 battle near Sharpsburg, Maryland?
Antietam
Antietam ended Lee's first invasion of the North. A division Jackson had left behind arrived at the last minute to stop a Union breakthrough.
Presbyterian faith ran through everything he did: theology was said to be the only subject he truly enjoyed discussing, and his dispatches credited Providence.
Q 24Besides drilling cadets on the guns, Major Thomas Jackson was VMI's professor of which science from 1851?
Physics
Physics went by the grander title of Natural and Experimental Philosophy, and Jackson taught it for ten years until the war began.
Q 25Which nickname did VMI cadets give their stiff professor, the future Stonewall Jackson, in the 1850s?
Tom Fool
Tom Fool was their verdict on a teacher who memorized his lectures and, when asked for help, simply repeated the same words more slowly.
Q 26Which arsenal town was Colonel Thomas Jackson's first Civil War command in 1861, and his prize again in September 1862?
Harpers Ferry
Harpers Ferry is where he drilled the future Stonewall Brigade in 1861. Retaking the town in 1862, his command also seized many people who had escaped slavery there.
Q 27Which disease killed both Stonewall Jackson's father and his six-year-old sibling while Thomas was still a toddler?
Typhoid fever
Typhoid fever left his mother alone at 28 with a newborn and her husband's gambling debts. She sold the family's possessions to pay them.
Q 28Stonewall Jackson's great-grandparents met aboard a ship carrying them from London to Maryland in 1749 as what?
Convicted thieves
Convicted thieves John Jackson and Elizabeth Cummins were each sentenced in London to transportation. They fell in love on the voyage and married in 1755.
Q 29Mary Anna Jackson, Stonewall's second wife, wrote two books about him and became widely known by which title?
Widow of the Confederacy
Widow of the Confederacy was her title for some fifty years. She never remarried, lived until 1915 and often attended veterans' reunions.
Q 30In which June 1862 series of battles outside Richmond did an exhausted Stonewall Jackson repeatedly arrive late?
The Seven Days
The Seven Days found him late at Mechanicsville and Savage's Station and stalled at White Oak Swamp, lapses often put down to a severe lack of sleep.