Test Your Knowledge of the American Civil War

Early in the war, in 1862, Ulysses S. Grant led his army to a decisive victory at the Confederate stronghold of Fort Donelson. The Battle of Fort Donelson was a devastating defeat for the South, and Grant was given the nickname “Unconditional Surrender Grant” — a play on his initials (U.S.) and a nod to his prowess on the battlefield.

Throughout the war, no foreign nation officially recognized the Confederacy as a legitimate nation. This was due in part to European society’s opposition to the institution of slavery, which the Confederacy was fighting to preserve. It was also partially due to the American South’s lack of decisive victories over the course of the war.

In June 1862, the Union Army was close to capturing the Confederate capital of Richmond, Virginia, when Confederate Army Commander Joseph E. Johnston was wounded and replaced with Robert E. Lee. General Lee led a series of decisive counteroffensives, now known as the Seven Days Battles, that drove the Union out of Richmond and marked the beginning of Lee’s tenure as the leader of the Confederate Army.

The Confederacy’s original capital city was Montgomery, Alabama, but once Virginia seceded from the United States, the Confederate government moved to Virginia’s capital city, Richmond. After Richmond fell to the Union Army in 1865, the Confederate capital briefly moved south to Danville, Virginia. However, this new capital lasted just eight days before the war ended.

The Second Battle of Bull Run, fought from August 28 to August 30, 1862, was a major Confederate victory that drove back the Union Army as it threatened to advance into Virginia. The Confederate Army was led by General Robert E. Lee, who enlisted troops under the command of General Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson to provide tactical support that proved crucial to the South’s victory in the battle.

Shortly after Abraham Lincoln’s victory in the 1860 presidential election, South Carolina’s state legislature voted to secede from the United States. By May 1861, 10 Southern states had followed South Carolina’s lead and voted to leave the nation, a process that culminated in the formation of the 11-state Confederate States of America.

In 1862, the poet Walt Whitman — celebrated today for poetry collections such as 1855’s “Leaves of Grass” — traveled to Fredericksburg, Virginia, to visit his brother who had been injured while fighting in the Union Army. The suffering of the wounded soldiers Whitman saw in the hospital there inspired him to spend the rest of the war in Washington, D.C., caring for wounded soldiers as a nurse.

Jefferson Davis, a former senator from Mississippi, served as the Confederacy’s first and only president. After the Civil War, Davis spent two years in prison, and though he was charged with treason, federal prosecutors chose not to proceed with the case and he was never tried. Davis refused to request an official pardon for his role in the Civil War, but was nonetheless pardoned by President Andrew Jackson in 1868.

Abraham Lincoln had been President for just over a month when the Civil War began on April 12, 1861, with the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter. Throughout his presidency, Lincoln was determined to preserve the nation at all costs, and as commander in chief he led the Union Army to victory. Tragically, Lincoln was assassinated just six days after the war ended in 1865.

Known as the first “wired president,” Abraham Lincoln embraced the telegraph as a method of receiving and sending information to the Civil War battlefields. Lincoln was known for spending long hours at the War Department’s telegraph office, and even slept there during pivotal battles. These communication arteries allowed the President to issue commands on the fly and become the first true “commander-in-chief.”

Built in Mobile, Alabama, the H.L. Hunley was the world’s first successful combat submarine. On February 17, 1864, the Hunley sank a Union sloop called the Housatonic. The submarine didn’t bask in its glory for long though; it sank shortly after. It was eventually raised from the sea on August 8, 2000 — around 136 years later.

Forced to retreat from Richmond and Petersburg a week earlier, General Robert E. Lee was trapped. On April 9, 1865, Lee made one last effort to punch through the encircling Union cavalry at the Battle of Appomattox Court House, but Ulysses S. Grant anticipated this move and bolstered his cavalry with more troops. Lee surrendered at Appomattox Court House days later.

On the afternoon of July 3, 1863, at the culmination of the Battle of Gettysburg, Confederate soldiers under the command of Major General George Pickett attacked Union General George Meade’s position. The resulting casualties sealed the Confederacy’s loss, as more than 6,000 Confederate soldiers lay wounded or dead after the failed attack.

After seizing Atlanta in September 1864, General William Tecumseh Sherman engaged in a “scorched-earth” military campaign from November 15 to December 21, 1864. He destroyed everything in his path until he reached the coast of Savannah, Georgia. Sherman’s “March to the Sea” helped end the war and became one of the most successful examples of a “total war” military strategy.

In one of the film’s most famous scenes, Scarlett O’Hara (Vivien Leigh) stumbles upon a field of wounded and fallen Confederate soldiers after the Battle of Atlanta. The battle was part of the Atlanta Campaign, skirmishes intended to weaken Confederate supply lines. The eventual capture of Atlanta helped secure a second term for the embattled President Abraham Lincoln.

On July 4, 1863, the Confederate army’s last grip on the Mississippi River slipped away after a 47-day siege. Vicksburg, located strategically between Memphis and New Orleans, had denied Union forces uninterrupted passage along the Mighty Mississippi. With Vicksburg’s capture, General Ulysses S. Grant cleaved the Confederacy in two and strangled its ability to receive outside trade.

The Confederate army surrendered in April 1865, but news traveled slowly at that time, and the last land battle of the Civil War took place outside Brownsville, Texas, on May 13, 1865. An agreement to limit the fighting along the Rio Grande river was broken by the Union army, who marched on the Confederate camp.

Ulysses S. Grant began the Civil War as an infantry colonel and ended it as lieutenant general in supreme command of the entire Union Army. Grant’s rise to command was due in part to his key role in early Union victories such as the Battle of Fort Donelson. As lieutenant general, he coordinated an aggressive offensive that culminated in Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox Court House.

Confederate General Robert E. Lee’s plan to invade the North was effectively foiled in 1863 by the Battle of Gettysburg, the Civil War’s largest and deadliest battle. Some 51,000 men from both sides were killed in the battle, and General Lee’s army was ultimately forced to withdraw. Over four months later, President Abraham Lincoln visited the site to deliver his famous Gettysburg Address.

The first conflict of the American Civil War occured on April 12, 1861, at Fort Sumter in South Carolina's Charleston Harbor. Over a period of 34 hours, Confederate soldiers bombarded Union soldiers in the fort, eventually forcing a surrender. Although there were no recorded fatalities in this battle, it kicked off a four-year war that was the deadliest in American history.