Civil War Quiz: What Do You Know About the “Lost Cause” of the Confederacy?

Q#1 – When and where did the term “Lost Cause” first appear?

Q#2 – What was the objective of the “Lost Cause”?

Q#3 – Why were so many white Southerners devastated economically, emotionally, and psychologically by the defeat of the Confederacy in 1865?

Q#4 – How did believers in the “Lost Cause” explain the Confederate defeat?

Q#5 – How did many who advocated the virtues of the “Lost Cause” portray the slavery system?

Q#6 – What purpose did these Southern memorial associations such as the United Confederate Veterans, the United Daughters of the Confederacy, and Ladies Memorial Associations have in advancing the concepts of the “Lost Cause”?

Q#7 – How did proponents of the “Lost Cause” movement view the Reconstruction that followed the Civil War?

Q#8 – The 1881 publication of “The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government” by Jefferson Davis, a two-volume defense of the Southern cause, provided what important justification in the history of the Lost Cause?

Q#9 – How did Robert E. Lee indirectly help in advancing the beliefs central to the “Lost Cause”?

Q#10 – Confederate Memorial Literary Society (CMLS), founded by elite white women in Richmond, Virginia, in the 1890s, established the Confederate Museum. What was the main purpose of the Museum?

Q#11 – What was the primary role of The United Daughters of the Confederacy as it related to the “Lost Cause”?

Q#12 – What was one method employed by The United Daughters of the Confederacy that helped promulgate the Lost Cause’s ideology?

Q#13 – What financial and economic action did proponents of the “Lost Cause” initiate to help reduce the severe poverty prevalent in the South after the Civil War?

Q#14 – In October 1875, the second son of General Robert E. Lee made the following statement at the Annual Meeting of the Virginia Division: “I object to the phrase too often used—South as well as North—that the Confederates fought for what they thought was right. They fought for what they knew was right. They, like the Greeks, fought for home, the graves of their sires, and their native land”. What was this person’s name?

Q#15 – “Lost Cause” advocates viewed Confederate generals such as Lee, Albert Sidney Johnston, and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson as representing the virtues of Southern nobility and fought bravely and fairly. How did these same people view Northern generals?