Your gift helps support our civic and educational programming for millions of Americans every year.
GIVE NOW101 Results for: ResearchClear
A patron asked us about a very unusual quotation the other day: apparently someone, sometime said that Thomas Jefferson was "...a mean-spirited, low-lived fellow, the son of a half-breed Indian squaw, sired by a Virginia mulatto father..."; this was supposedly a comment made by Jefferson's political opponents in the election of 1800.
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.
ADDRESS:
931 Thomas Jefferson Parkway
Charlottesville, VA 22902
GENERAL INFORMATION:
(434) 984-9800