James A. Garfield
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50 free James A. Garfield trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
James A. Garfield held the presidency for only a few months, yet his life reads like several biographies stitched together. He grew up fatherless and poor, talked his way into an education, and became a teacher, a preacher, a lawyer, a soldier and a long-serving congressman before a deadlocked convention handed him a nomination he had not asked for. Along the way he picked up a reputation as one of the most learned men in Washington, with party tricks and scholarly feats that are still repeated as fun facts today. This quiz follows the whole story. There are questions on his childhood and schooling, his battlefield service, his years on Capitol Hill, and the strange campaign that carried him to the White House. Others cover his short time in office, the feuds inside his own party, the attack that cut his term short, and the weeks of treatment that followed. A last group looks at how he has been remembered, in monuments, books and on screen. It is written for history fans, students working through the presidents, and anyone who enjoys a good piece of presidential trivia. The early questions are ones most people can reason out, and the later ones dig deeper. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so even a wrong guess leaves you knowing more about the man and his era.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Legend says the ambidextrous James A. Garfield could write Latin with one hand and which language with the other?
Greek
Greek is the language in the tale, though biographer Allan Peskin said the evidence does not support it. Garfield did teach classical languages, and he was the first known left-handed president.
Q 02While serving as a congressman, James A. Garfield published his own original proof of which famous result in geometry?
The Pythagorean theorem
The Pythagorean theorem got a fresh proof from Garfield in 1876, worked out while trading maths puzzles with fellow members of Congress. An education journal printed it that year.
Q 03Which famous inventor built an early metal detector to hunt for the bullet lodged inside President James A. Garfield?
Alexander Graham Bell
Alexander Graham Bell hurried his new device to the White House, yet it never found the bullet. The chief physician let him search only the side of the body where the bullet was not.
Q 04The lead physician who treated the wounded James A. Garfield, Willard Bliss, had which unusual given first name?
Doctor
Doctor really was his first name: his parents named him Doctor Willard Bliss after a New England surgeon. He then earned the title, and took personal charge of the president's care.
Q 05James A. Garfield, raised in poverty in rural Ohio, was the last US president born in what kind of home?
A log cabin
A log cabin in Orange Township was his birthplace, and no president since has been born in one. His father died before James turned two, leaving the family to scrape by on a small farm.
Q 06To help the wounded James A. Garfield through a hot Washington summer, Navy engineers built an early form of what?
Air conditioner
Air conditioner is the modern name for it: fans drove air across ice and then dried it, cooling the sickroom by about 20 degrees Fahrenheit. Noise and damp were the early snags.
Q 07Which member of James A. Garfield's cabinet, a president's son, stood nearby when Garfield was shot in 1881?
Robert Todd Lincoln
Robert Todd Lincoln, the secretary of war, was at the scene 16 years after his own father was killed. He was also in Buffalo in 1901 on the day William McKinley was shot.
Q 08James A. Garfield's 1880 presidential run made famous a style of campaigning named after which part of his Ohio home?
The front porch
The front porch of his Mentor farmhouse became his stage, as thousands of visitors travelled there to hear him speak. Later candidates, William McKinley among them, copied the idea.
Q 09At sixteen, the future president James A. Garfield worked on an Ohio canal boat, managing which animals that pulled it?
Mules
Mules hauled the boat and young Garfield managed them, lasting six weeks before illness sent him home. While he recovered, he promised to give up the canal for a year of school.
Q 10Historians blame which complication, worsened by his own physicians, for the death of the wounded James A. Garfield?
Infection
Infection spread after a dozen physicians probed the wound with unwashed fingers and instruments. One surgeon-historian argues that today he would have gone home within two or three days.
Q 11Which disappointed office seeker shot President James A. Garfield in Washington in the summer of 1881?
Charles Guiteau
Charles Guiteau believed a speech he had printed won Garfield the election and earned him a diplomatic job. Turned away again and again, he bought a revolver and trailed the president for weeks.
Q 12Which New Yorker, vice president under James A. Garfield, became the 21st president when Garfield died?
Chester A. Arthur
Chester A. Arthur took the oath at his own home in New York City at 2:15 in the morning. By coincidence, he and Garfield had once held the same teaching job in Pownal, Vermont.
Q 13President James A. Garfield was shot in the waiting room of what kind of building in Washington, D.C.?
Q 21The young James A. Garfield paid his way through the Western Reserve Eclectic Institute by working as what?
Janitor
Janitor was his job on arrival. Within a few years he was teaching there while still a student, and by 26 he was running the place.
Q 22James A. Garfield narrowly beat which Democrat, a Union hero of Gettysburg, in the 1880 presidential election?
Winfield Scott Hancock
Winfield Scott Hancock ran him desperately close in the popular vote, one of the tightest ever recorded. The Electoral College was far clearer, splitting 214 to 155.
Q 23James A. Garfield died in a seaside cottage at Elberon, near Long Branch, on the coast of which state?
New Jersey
Railroad station
Railroad station travellers saw it happen as he set off on a summer holiday. Presidents then moved about without guards, and the newspapers had printed his travel plans.
Q 14Because James A. Garfield won the 1880 Republican nomination without seeking it, he is remembered by which racing term?
A dark horse
A dark horse is exactly what he was: he arrived to nominate another man and left as the candidate on the 36th ballot. He protested to his own delegation that he was not running.
Q 15After James A. Garfield's death, his widow added a wing to their Ohio home that became America's first what?
Presidential library
Presidential library is the name now given to the wing she built in 1885 to hold his books and papers. She spent much of the rest of her life preserving them.
Q 16In 1880 James A. Garfield became the first presidential candidate to give a campaign speech in which foreign language?
German
German was his choice when a party of German visitors joined a crowd of some 5,000 at his home. No presidential candidate before him had campaigned in a foreign tongue.
Q 17James A. Garfield's murder by a frustrated job seeker pushed Congress to pass the Pendleton Act, which reformed what?
The civil service
The civil service began filling jobs by competitive exam instead of party favour. The law was signed by Garfield's successor, a man who had himself risen through the old patronage machine.
Q 18The trial of the man who shot James A. Garfield was an early high-profile American test of which courtroom defense?
Insanity
Insanity was the plea his lawyers argued, while the defendant insulted them in open court and passed notes to spectators asking for advice. The jury convicted him all the same in January 1882.
Q 19President James A. Garfield named which famous Black abolitionist and orator as recorder of deeds for Washington, D.C.?
Frederick Douglass
Frederick Douglass got the Washington job, one of several prominent positions Garfield gave to Black leaders. Garfield also pressed for federally funded schooling for freed families in the South.
Q 20James A. Garfield argued his very first case as a lawyer in 1866, appearing before which judicial body?
The US Supreme Court
The US Supreme Court heard him argue for over two hours in Ex parte Milligan, and he won: civilians could not be tried by army courts while ordinary courts were open. His clients never paid him.
New Jersey sea air was meant to revive him, and volunteers laid a rail spur to the cottage door in a single night. He died there about two weeks after arriving, aged 49.
Q 24Which Marine Band leader composed the march In Memoriam after the death of President James A. Garfield?
John Philip Sousa
John Philip Sousa wrote it in shock at the news, and it was played as the body reached Washington and again at the burial. His band had played at Garfield's inaugural ball months earlier.
Q 25The man who shot James A. Garfield believed he was owed a job as American consul in which European capital?
Paris
Paris was the prize he demanded, though he spoke no French. The secretary of state finally told him never to raise the consulship again, and within weeks he had bought a gun.
Q 26James A. Garfield sat on the 1877 Electoral Commission that gave a disputed presidency to which fellow Ohio Republican?
Rutherford Hayes
Rutherford Hayes won the disputed election by a party-line vote of 8 to 7. Garfield had opposed creating the commission at all, arguing that Congress should simply count the votes itself.
Q 27Which New York senator and party boss resigned in 1881 after losing an appointments fight with James A. Garfield?
Roscoe Conkling
Roscoe Conkling quit expecting the New York legislature to send him straight back in triumph. It chose someone else, which ended his career and showed a president could face down a party boss.
Q 28James A. Garfield made a legendary ride across Missionary Ridge to reach troops still fighting at which 1863 battle?
Chickamauga
Chickamauga was a Union defeat, but Garfield guessed that part of the army was still holding its ground and rode to find it. He was right, and the ride made his name as a soldier.
Q 29Which actor plays President James A. Garfield in the 2025 Netflix miniseries Death by Lightning?
Michael Shannon
Michael Shannon plays the president, opposite Matthew Macfadyen as the man who shot him. Shannon has said he did not know much about Garfield before he began work on the role.
Q 30Which relative of James A. Garfield was the first of her kind to attend a president's inauguration, in 1881?
His mother
His mother, Eliza, had raised him in poverty after his father's early death and lived to see him take the oath. He carried her up and down the White House stairs himself, and she outlived him by more than six years.