War of 1812 Trivia
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100 free War of 1812 trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
The United States declared war on Britain in June 1812 over impressment and trade, by the narrowest vote for any war in its history, and then launched a string of invasions of Canada that all failed. Britain, busy with Napoleon, burned Washington, bombarded Baltimore and lost at Plattsburgh, while Andrew Jackson won the war's most famous battle two weeks after the peace had already been signed in Ghent. This quiz covers all of it: the causes and the Federalist opposition, Brock and Tecumseh, Hull's surrender of Detroit, Perry on Lake Erie, Laura Secord's walk, Lundy's Lane and Chippawa, the burning of York and of Washington, the storm that put out the fires, Fort McHenry and the poem that became an anthem, the Creek War, the Treaty of Ghent, New Orleans, the Hartford Convention and what the war left behind, from Old Ironsides to Uncle Sam. Fifty questions, four options each, with a short explanation after every answer. Play on your phone or print it for a history quiz night.
30 of 100 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which nickname was given to the congressmen who pushed the United States into declaring war in June 1812?
The War Hawks
The War Hawks. Mostly members from the South and West, they hoped the fighting would let the United States take Canada, an ambition the war proved was beyond its army.
Q 02What did the anti-war Federalist Party call the War of 1812?
Mr. Madison's War
Mr. Madison's War. Not one Federalist in Congress voted for it, and the party's north-eastern strongholds kept up their opposition for as long as the fighting lasted.
Q 03Which party supplied the votes for war in June 1812?
The Democratic-Republicans
The Democratic-Republicans. They carried the House 79 to 49 on Southern and Western votes, while most members from the trading Northeast opposed a war declared mainly over grievances at sea.
Q 04The fall of which ruler in April 1814 freed thousands of British troops for the war in North America?
Napoleon
Napoleon. Once he had abdicated, Britain could ship whole brigades across the Atlantic, and within months they had invaded New York and burned Washington.
Q 05Which British prime minister was assassinated on 11 May 1812, weeks before the war began?
Spencer Perceval
Spencer Perceval. The government that followed his repealed the trade orders America had protested against, but the news did not cross the Atlantic in time to stop the war.
Q 06Which American post guarding the Huron–Michigan passage was the first to fall to the British in 1812?
Mackinac
Mackinac. Its commander had not yet heard that war was declared when British regulars, fur traders and several hundred Indigenous warriors arrived, and he gave up without a shot.
Q 07Which city did American general William Hull surrender to Brock on 16 August 1812?
Detroit
Detroit. Brock had the smaller force but marched straight at the fort while Tecumseh's warriors closed in, and Hull gave up to spare the town 'the horrors of an Indian massacre'.
Q 08Isaac Brock was killed during which October 1812 battle on the Niagara River?
Queenston Heights
Queenston Heights. Brock was shot leading a counter-attack up the slope, yet the Americans still lost, because much of their militia refused to cross the river onto foreign soil.
Q 09USS Constitution, a frigate made famous by the War of 1812, is preserved as a museum ship in which city?
Boston
Boston. She was built in the city in the 1790s, and when word spread in 1830 that she was to be scrapped, a poem by Oliver Wendell Holmes raised a public outcry and she was repaired instead.
Q 10The River Raisin massacre of January 1813, which gave American troops a rallying cry, took place in which present-day state?
Michigan
Michigan. Wounded prisoners left behind at the village of Frenchtown were killed by warriors allied to the British, and 'Remember the Raisin!' became the Americans' battle cry.
Q 11Which American commodore reported his 1813 victory on Lake Erie with the words 'We have met the enemy and they are ours'?
Oliver Hazard Perry
Oliver Hazard Perry. He scrawled the note on the back of an old envelope after capturing an entire British squadron, a win that forced the British army to pull back into Upper Canada.
Q 12The battle flag flown at the 1813 Battle of Lake Erie carried which dying words of Captain James Lawrence?
Don't give up the ship
Don't give up the ship. Lawrence gave the order as he lay mortally wounded three months earlier, and his crew could not obey it: the British boarded and took his frigate anyway.
Q 13Which future president led the American delegation that negotiated the Treaty of Ghent?
Q 21Who commanded the American squadron that won the Battle of Plattsburgh on Lake Champlain?
Thomas Macdonough
Thomas Macdonough. His victory made a British army of some 11,000 turn back to Canada, and pushed Britain's negotiators at Ghent to drop their territorial demands.
Q 22Tariff money the British took from occupied Castine, Maine, helped found which university?
Dalhousie
Dalhousie. Customs duties collected while the British held the port went home to Halifax, where the Earl of Dalhousie used them in 1818 to found a college open to students of every church.
Q 23Which British general led the force that captured and burned Washington in August 1814?
Robert Ross
John Quincy Adams
John Quincy Adams. His five-man team, which included Henry Clay, held out through months of British demands for territory and came home with the pre-war borders intact.
Q 14York, the capital of Upper Canada burned by American troops in April 1813, is now which city?
Toronto
Toronto. The Americans burned its parliament and other public buildings, and the tit-for-tat that followed ended the next year with British troops setting fire to Washington.
Q 15Which Canadian heroine walked some 30 km in 1813, dodging American sentries, to warn the British of an attack?
Laura Secord
Laura Secord. Her request for a pension was refused and her walk went unrewarded for decades, until the visiting Prince of Wales heard the story in 1860 and sent her £100.
Q 16After burning Washington in 1814, the British were beaten off weeks later at which nearby port city?
Baltimore
Baltimore. A sharpshooter killed the general who had burned the capital as his troops advanced on the city, and the fleet's guns failed to batter its harbour fort into surrender.
Q 17Charles de Salaberry's Canadian volunteers turned back a far larger American army marching on Montreal at which 1813 battle?
Châteauguay
Châteauguay. From behind log barricades de Salaberry's men raised a din of bugle calls and cheers, so the Americans could not tell how few defenders they faced and gave up the march.
Q 18Which American general's brigade of grey-clad regulars beat the British in open battle at Chippawa in July 1814?
Winfield Scott
Winfield Scott. Short of blue cloth, his men wore militia grey, so the British commander took them for amateurs; months of hard drill had made them anything but.
Q 19Which inconclusive July 1814 battle near Niagara Falls was one of the bloodiest of the war?
Lundy's Lane
Lundy's Lane. Exhausted troops fought hand to hand around the British guns in the pitch dark of a sultry night, often unable to tell friend from foe, and neither side could win.
Q 20After the British burned the Library of Congress in 1814, which Founding Father sold his own books to restock it?
Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson. Congress bought all 6,487 of his volumes to start again, but a second fire in 1851 went on to destroy nearly two-thirds of them.
Robert Ross. Less than three weeks after his troops burned the capital's public buildings, an American rifleman shot him dead as he rode at the head of his next advance.
Q 24The rout of American militia at which battle opened the road to Washington?
Bladensburg
Bladensburg. The outflanked militia broke and ran with no plan for a retreat, and by that same evening British troops were marching into the capital.
Q 25What put out the fires in Washington less than a day after the British lit them?
A violent thunderstorm
A violent thunderstorm. Possibly a hurricane, it spun a tornado through the city, and its flying debris is said to have killed more British soldiers than the capital's defenders had.
Q 26What did British officers do inside the White House in August 1814 before setting it on fire?
Ate the president's dinner
Ate the president's dinner. The table had been laid for his guests, and a servant who had helped prepare the meal recalled that the invaders finished it and drank the wine.
Q 27The full-length portrait rescued from the White House before the British burned it in 1814 depicts whom?
George Washington
George Washington. Legend has the First Lady cutting the canvas from its frame herself, but a servant who was there wrote that staff took the huge portrait down and sent it off by wagon.
Q 28Which singer topped the American charts in 1959 with the comic ballad 'The Battle of New Orleans'?
Johnny Horton
Johnny Horton. The song was written by Jimmy Driftwood, an Arkansas school principal who set the story of the battle to an old fiddle tune to get his pupils interested in history.
Q 29'Defence of Fort M'Henry' was the original title of the poem that became which song?
The Star-Spangled Banner
The Star-Spangled Banner. Printed as a handbill within days of the 1814 bombardment, it was sung for more than a century before Congress made it the official national anthem in 1931.
Q 30Francis Scott Key's poem about Fort McHenry was set to which tune of a London gentlemen's music club?
The Anacreontic Song
The Anacreontic Song. Its tune was so popular in America that Key had already fitted an earlier patriotic song of his own to it in 1805, and he wrote his new verses to match.