Monticello Blog

Around 1811, Jefferson wrote a letter to his granddaughter Cornelia Jefferson Randolph, which contained a list of twelve “Canons of Conduct in Life” – rules to live by, in essence. In 1825 he sent the same list, minus two rules, to a baby boy named Thomas Jefferson Smith in response to a request from the child’s father.

Much as I love debunking Jefferson quotations that were probably made up by college students last week on Facebook, it’s somewhat more intellectually stimulating to revisit some venerable old spurious quotes.

At least once every year I have the unpleasant task of having to tell someone that what they have got is not an original Jefferson document.

Everybody loves countdowns, right? Right. So, I’ve come up with my own list of things people get wrong about Jefferson, based on my extensive observation of the stuff people put on the Internet or ask us about.

With the coming of Thanksgiving comes also a burble of chatty news stories about the origins thereof, and usually something about turkeys. Not far behind comes some sort of mention of the Founding Fathers, and how they all felt about turkeys. I've seen several of these articles in the last few days and I don't know what else to think but that somebody out there has been working overtime, making up stories about Founding Fathers and turkeys.

Did Jefferson really have Asperger's Syndrome? Nope.

It is claimed, by websites and other sources various and sundry, that Thomas Jefferson, upon hearing of a meteorite crash in Connecticut in 1807 and its subsequent reportage by two professors at Yale, scoffed that it "was easier to believe that two Yankee professors could lie than to admit that stones could fall from heaven."

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."

Jefferson was an accomplished amateur violinist and an avid concertgoer who once declared music is "the passion of my soul." This time we present a selection of music related to Jefferson and Monticello, ranging from popular tunes to classical pieces.