Monticello Blog

One of our informants encountered a story, related by one Thomas Bloomer Balch, a Presbyterian minister recalling that in his childhood in the D.C. area during Mr. Jefferson's presidency, a little boy wandered onto the grounds of the President's House and was killed by TJ's "ill-tempered goat."

The Internet, it seems, is a breeding ground for spurious Jefferson quotations. I suppose I shouldn't complain about this, since I secretly (okay, it's not a secret now) enjoy hunting the wily Jefferson Quotation. Most of the time they turn out not to be Jefferson quotations at all. I will ruminate on that at some future point, but for now I want to highlight an interesting case in point.

Sometimes we get inexplicable rashes of questions.