109 Fun Facts About Thomas Jefferson

Thomas Jefferson was which number US president?

Third came after four years as vice president to the very rival who had beaten him: under the original rules, the runner-up in 1796 took the second office.

In which city did Jefferson write most of the Declaration of Independence in June 1776?

He wrote it in Philadelphia, in rented second-floor rooms of bricklayer Jacob Graff's house at 700 Market Street, largely alone, between June 11 and 28, 1776.

Jefferson's home Monticello takes its name from Italian words meaning what?

Monticello means 'little mountain' in Italian; Jefferson began building on the hilltop in 1768, on land inherited from his father, and went on reworking the house for decades.

At which family plantation was Jefferson born in 1743?

Shadwell burned down in 1770, taking almost all of the young lawyer's books and papers with it, and he moved to his unfinished Monticello.

Jefferson's face appears on which US coin?

The nickel got Jefferson in 1938 after an open contest: Felix Schlag's design was picked from 390 entries for the $1,000 prize, then he had to redraw his Monticello for the back.

In what year was the Louisiana Purchase completed?

The treaty was signed in Paris on April 30, 1803 and the territory formally transferred that December; Napoleon sold after his army failed to hold Saint-Domingue and war with Britain loomed.

Which pair did Jefferson send west in 1804 to explore the newly bought territory to the Pacific?

Lewis and Clark's Corps of Discovery set out from the St. Louis area in May 1804 and reached the Pacific in 1805; Jefferson first sent Meriwether Lewis to the country's top physician and botanist for crash courses.

Carvers dynamited their first attempt at Jefferson's face and started over at which national memorial?

Mount Rushmore's first Jefferson was begun on the opposite side of the neighbouring head, but the granite there proved unfit to carve, so the half-made face was blasted off and begun again where it sits today.

On what date did Jefferson die in 1826?

July 4, 1826 was the 50th anniversary of the Declaration's adoption; waking the evening before, Jefferson asked his doctor, 'Is it the Fourth?', the last words the doctor heard him speak.

Which fellow signer of the Declaration died on the very same day as Jefferson?

John Adams died hours after Jefferson; his family recalled his last words as 'Thomas Jefferson survives', spoken without knowing that his old friend and rival was already gone.

Which institution did Jefferson found in 1819 and design himself?

The University of Virginia, chartered in 1819 and opened in Charlottesville in 1825, was laid out by Jefferson as an 'Academical Village' with a library, not a chapel, at its centre.

Under which president did Jefferson serve as Secretary of State?

George Washington made Jefferson the first Secretary of State in 1790, but cabinet battles with Treasury chief Alexander Hamilton wore him down and he resigned at the end of 1793.

Who served as Jefferson's vice president during his second term?

George Clinton, the long-serving governor of New York, was Jefferson's vice president for his second term, 1805–09, and stayed on under Madison until his death in 1812.

Congress struck a passage from Jefferson's draft Declaration attacking what?

The slave trade: the passage blamed the king for forcing it on the colonies, and it went along with about a fourth of the text; Jefferson resented the edits and sent friends copies showing what Congress had changed.

Which college did Jefferson enter at 16 in 1760?

William & Mary in Williamsburg took him at 16, and Professor William Small became his mentor; family tradition has him studying fifteen hours a day, his only break a run at twilight.

Which young widow did Jefferson marry on New Year's Day 1772?

Martha Wayles Skelton was 23 when they married at her father's plantation; his death the next year left the couple more than 11,000 acres and 135 enslaved people, along with heavy debts.

Jefferson succeeded which man as America's minister in Paris in 1785?

Benjamin Franklin was so admired in Paris that when people asked Jefferson whether he was replacing him, he would answer that no one could: he was only his successor.

Which momentous event was Jefferson present in Paris for on July 14, 1789?

The storming of the Bastille came while Jefferson was US minister in Paris; that summer he let French reformers meet at his house and advised on a draft of the Declaration of the Rights of Man.

To keep letters safe from prying postmasters, Jefferson described which device in the 1790s?

The wheel cipher, as Jefferson described it, strung 36 lettered wooden disks on a spindle to scramble a message; he seems never to have used it, yet a similar device served the US Army from 1922.

Jefferson co-founded which political organisation in 1792 to oppose the Federalists?

The Democratic-Republicans (then simply 'Republicans') were organised by Jefferson and his allies around 1792 against Hamilton's Federalists; the party dominated national politics for a generation after his 1800 win.

The 1800 election ended in an Electoral College tie between Jefferson and which running mate?

Jefferson and his running mate Aaron Burr each received 73 electoral votes because electors could not distinguish president from vice president; the mess produced the Twelfth Amendment in 1804.

Which body broke the 1800 election tie and chose Jefferson?

The House, voting by state, deadlocked 35 times before electing Jefferson on the 36th ballot on February 17, 1801; Alexander Hamilton had lobbied fellow Federalists to switch to him.

Jefferson's 1801 swearing-in was the first presidential inauguration held where?

Jefferson's was the first inauguration held in Washington, D.C.; he walked to the unfinished Capitol from Conrad and McMunn's boarding house, or so the tradition goes.

How much did the United States pay France for the Louisiana territory?

$15 million bought about 828,000 square miles and doubled the country's size; Napoleon sold because fever and revolt had wrecked his army in Saint-Domingue and war with Britain was coming.

Which two American envoys signed the Louisiana Purchase treaty in Paris?

Robert Livingston and James Monroe far exceeded their instructions when they agreed to buy the whole territory; the treaty they signed in Paris is dated April 30, 1803.

Doubting he had the legal power to buy Louisiana, what did Jefferson consider doing?

Proposing a constitutional amendment was the instinct of a president who preached strict reading of the document, but his cabinet talked him out of it and the Senate approved the treaty on October 20, 1803.

What is Jefferson's 1801–05 war against the North African pirate states called?

The First Barbary War began in 1801 when Tripoli declared war over unpaid tribute; Jefferson, against paying tribute since the 1780s, had already ordered a naval squadron to the Mediterranean.

Jefferson's war with Tripoli is recalled in the opening lines of which military service's hymn?

The Marines sing of 'the shores of Tripoli' because in 1805 a few of them joined William Eaton's march of some 400 mercenaries across the Libyan desert to capture the port of Derna.

Which law of Jefferson's, meant to pressure Britain and France in 1807, instead crippled America's own ports?

The Embargo Act of December 1807 kept American ships from sailing to foreign ports; smuggling boomed, the economy sank, and Jefferson signed its repeal three days before leaving office in March 1809.

Jefferson cut the national debt by nearly a third even after scrapping which hated frontier tax?

The whiskey tax, which had sparked the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794, went in 1802 along with other internal taxes; Treasury chief Albert Gallatin still shrank the debt to $57 million by cutting the army and navy.

Who served as Jefferson's Secretary of State for both terms before succeeding him as president?

James Madison ran the State Department for all eight years; his refusal to deliver a justice of the peace's commission made him the Madison of Marbury v. Madison, the 1803 case that established judicial review.

Jefferson's refusal of a subpoena at his former vice president's 1807 treason trial asserted what doctrine?

Jefferson claimed executive privilege, declining to testify in person though he sent some of the papers; Chief Justice John Marshall, a political foe, presided, and the jury acquitted the defendant.

Which president revived the in-person State of the Union in 1913, ending Jefferson's custom of sending it in writing?

Woodrow Wilson spoke to Congress in person in 1913, ending the practice Jefferson began in 1801 of sending a message for a clerk to read; Jefferson is often said to have found a speech too much like a king's address from the throne.

What was Jefferson's only full-length book, written to answer a French diplomat's questions?

Notes on the State of Virginia began as answers to a French diplomat's questions; Jefferson had a small edition printed privately in Paris in 1785 and published it openly in London only after a French translation appeared.

What is Jefferson's cut-and-paste compilation of Jesus's teachings popularly called?

The Jefferson Bible is the popular name for The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth, which he assembled around 1820 by cutting passages from printed gospels and leaving out the miracles.

Which piece of furniture is Jefferson credited with creating, and using while writing the Declaration?

The swivel chair is credited to Jefferson, who had an English-style Windsor chair altered so its seat could turn, and is said to have drafted the Declaration in it; he gave away his improved plow design unpatented.

Jefferson's 'Great Clock' at Monticello was powered by the gravitational pull of what?

Cannonballs serve as the Great Clock's weights, sinking down the entrance-hall wall past labels for the days of the week, so the clock doubles as a calendar.

Which instrument did Jefferson play well enough to perform in weekly concerts at the Governor's Palace?

Violin: Governor Francis Fauquier welcomed the young Jefferson into his musical circle, and in later years he often accompanied his wife's harpsichord, calling music 'the favorite passion of my soul'.

After British troops burned it in 1814, Jefferson sold his books to restart which library?

Congress paid Jefferson $23,950 in 1815 for his books, to replace the Library of Congress burned by the British; he promptly began collecting again, writing 'I cannot live without books.'

The fossil claws Jefferson took for a lion's belonged to which animal?

Ground sloth: Jefferson named the beast Megalonyx, 'giant claw', and thought it might still roam the unexplored West; the species is now Megalonyx jeffersonii in his honour.

Which learned body, America's oldest, did Jefferson head throughout his two terms as US president?

The American Philosophical Society installed Jefferson as its president in 1797, and a week later he read it a paper on a mystery beast's fossil claws; it re-elected him every year until he resigned in 1814.

What happened to Jefferson's decades-old collection of Native American vocabularies?

A thief dumped it in the James River: he stole the trunk on its way home from the capital in 1809, found only papers inside, and threw them in; a few muddy fragments were saved.

How did Jefferson's two Monticello vineyards of European grapes turn out?

The vines kept dying: European grapes had no defence against local rot and pests, so Jefferson replanted again and again and probably never made a Monticello wine; one vineyard was restored in 1985.

Jefferson died roughly how deep in debt, forcing the sale of his estate and enslaved people?

He had even won permission for a public lottery in his final months to try to raise money.

Besides the Declaration and his university, which of his writings did Jefferson list on his gravestone?

Virginia's religious freedom law, the 1786 Statute for Religious Freedom, completed the trio he chose for his epitaph; he left off every political office he had held, the presidency included.

Over his adult life, roughly how many people did Jefferson hold in slavery?

About 600 people were enslaved by Jefferson over his lifetime, most through inheritance and births on his plantations; he freed only a handful, and more than 100 were auctioned after his death to pay his debts.

A 1998 study in Nature linked Jefferson's male line to descendants of which enslaved woman at Monticello?

Sally Hemings's youngest son, Eston, left descendants whose Y chromosome matched the Jefferson male line; in 2000 Monticello's own foundation concluded Jefferson was probably the father of her children.

Jefferson's ban on importing enslaved people began on January 1, 1808, the first day allowed by what?

The Constitution barred Congress from ending the slave import trade before 1808, so Jefferson asked for a ban in his 1806 annual message and signed it months early; slavery and the domestic trade went on.

Jefferson modelled the Rotunda at the centre of his university on which ancient building?

The Rotunda is a half-scale version of the Pantheon in Rome, which Jefferson knew from Palladio's Four Books of Architecture; he taught himself architecture from such books and helped popularise Palladian style in America.

At a 1790 dinner hosted by Jefferson, Hamilton's debt plan won support in exchange for what?

A capital on the Potomac was the price, as Jefferson told it: over dinner, Virginia's leading congressman dropped his fight against federal payment of the states' war debts, and Hamilton agreed the seat of government would move south.

Jefferson's 'wall of separation between church and state' was his reading of which amendment?

The First Amendment's religion clauses, Jefferson told Connecticut's Danbury Baptists in 1802, built that wall; the Supreme Court later called his letter an almost authoritative guide to the amendment and quoted it again in 1947.

How many letters did Jefferson and John Adams exchange after Benjamin Rush reunited them in 1812?

They exchanged 158 letters between 1812 and 1826, 109 from Adams and 49 from Jefferson; historian David McCullough called it 'one of the most extraordinary correspondences in American history'.

Which 1798 documents, one of them drafted by Jefferson, argued states could resist unconstitutional federal laws?

The Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions answered the Alien and Sedition Acts; Jefferson, the sitting vice president, drafted Kentucky's in secret, and his authorship stayed hidden for years.

What was bound servant Samuel Howell suing for when young lawyer Jefferson took his case in 1770?

His freedom: Howell was held under a law that had bound his mixed-race grandmother to serve until 31, and Jefferson told the court that 'every one comes into the world with a right to his own person', but lost.

Which old friend rushed into Jefferson's arms at Monticello in November 1824?

The Marquis de Lafayette had not seen Jefferson since 1789; a grandson recalled the two old men breaking into a shuffling run, crying 'Ah Jefferson!' and 'Ah Lafayette!', and bursting into tears.

Building the Jefferson Memorial meant uprooting which trees, prompting protests in 1938?

Cherry trees ringed the Tidal Basin site, and in November 1938 a group of women chained themselves together among them; the 'Cherry Tree Rebellion' ended with a promise to plant more trees around the memorial.

As a student Jefferson joined the Flat Hat Club, often called America's first college what?

Secret society is the usual label for the F.H.C., founded in 1750 and limited to six students at a time; Jefferson later admitted it had 'no useful object'.

Jefferson acquired Virginia's Natural Bridge in 1774 by a grant from whom?

King George III's name was on the 1774 patent that gave Jefferson 157 acres around the bridge for 20 shillings, two years before his Declaration listed the king's offences; he called it 'the most sublime of Nature's works'.

Which naval officer, later the US Navy's first Jewish commodore, bought decaying Monticello in the 1830s and saved it?

Uriah P. Levy, who also helped end flogging in the Navy, bought the house out of admiration for Jefferson and began repairs; his family kept it until a foundation bought it in 1923.

What kind of bird was Dick, the favourite pet that President Thomas Jefferson kept at the White House?

A mockingbird named Dick was the favourite of at least four that Jefferson kept during his time in office.

Jefferson's portrait is on which US banknote, whose back shows the Declaration of Independence being presented?

The $2 bill has carried Jefferson's portrait since 1869, yet it circulates so rarely that many people do not realise it is still printed.

Thomas Jefferson had which large American animal sent to Paris to prove a French naturalist wrong?

A moose was Jefferson's proof for the Comte de Buffon, who held that New World animals were smaller and weaker. Twenty soldiers went into the New Hampshire woods to find one.

Which president quipped that a room of Nobel laureates was the White House's finest talent since Jefferson dined alone?

John F. Kennedy made the quip in April 1962 at a White House dinner whose guests included 49 Nobel laureates.

Which everyday verb did Thomas Jefferson probably coin in the 1780s, to the scorn of a London magazine?

Belittle first appears in Jefferson's writing in 1781, describing a French claim that American species were smaller than Europe's. A London review jeered at the new word in 1787.

Thomas Jefferson's original tombstone, an obelisk given away by his heirs, now stands on which campus?

University of Missouri was given the obelisk by Jefferson's heirs in 1883, as the first university founded in the lands of the Louisiana Purchase.

Jefferson's cabinet feud with which Treasury Secretary helped give rise to America's first political parties?

Alexander Hamilton wanted the federal government to take over the states' debts, and Jefferson's efforts to undermine him nearly cost Jefferson his own cabinet seat.

Under the election rules of 1796, which office did Jefferson win by finishing second in the presidential race?

Vice President was then the runner-up's prize, so Jefferson spent four years as deputy to the rival who had just beaten him.

Which president dedicated the Jefferson Memorial on the 200th anniversary of Thomas Jefferson's birth?

Franklin Roosevelt opened the memorial on 13 April 1943, but wartime shortages meant a plaster statue stood in for the bronze one for four years.

Which English philosopher's writings on natural rights shaped Jefferson's language in the Declaration of Independence?

John Locke wrote that everyone has a natural right to life, health, liberty and possessions, and most scholars trace the Declaration's best-known phrase to his theory.

Which Virginia office did Jefferson hold in 1781 when he escaped Richmond just ahead of invading British troops?

Governor was a post Jefferson won for two one-year terms, and Benedict Arnold's invaders razed the capital soon after he got out.

Which Virginia judge, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, trained the young Thomas Jefferson in law?

George Wythe stayed so close to his former pupil that he left Jefferson his substantial book collection in his will.

Which New England delegate sat with Jefferson on the five-man committee that drafted the Declaration of Independence?

Roger Sherman went on to become the only person to sign all four great American state papers, from the Continental Association to the Constitution.

Which artist painted the Capitol Rotunda scene of Jefferson presenting the draft Declaration of Independence?

John Trumbull's huge canvas is sometimes wrongly described as the signing, but it shows the five-man drafting committee handing its work to Congress weeks earlier.

Jefferson's phrase about a wall of separation between church and state comes from his 1802 letter to whom?

Baptists in Connecticut, a minority uneasy about the dominant Congregational church, had written to the new president as the Danbury Baptist Association.

Which copying machine, worked with pens and ink, did Jefferson call the finest invention of the present age?

The polygraph wrote out a copy at the same moment as the original, and the duplicates Jefferson kept from 1804 onward have given historians a deep record of his views.

Which farm implement did Thomas Jefferson improve with a new moldboard design that he never patented?

The plow was one of several everyday devices Jefferson reworked, and he gave the idea to posterity instead of profiting from it.

What unusual shape is the house at Poplar Forest, the retreat Jefferson designed for himself in Virginia?

Octagonal in plan, Poplar Forest may have been the first house of its kind in the United States, and Jefferson began designing it in 1806 while still president.

What did the small factory on Jefferson's Monticello plantation, worked by enslaved boys, produce for sale?

Nails were made on Mulberry Row by boys aged 10 to 16, and Jefferson had a dozen of them at work in the nailery by 1794.

Thomas Jefferson carried out a careful excavation in Virginia by cutting a trench through what kind of site?

A burial mound of the Monacan people was Jefferson's site, and the trench let him see its layers of human remains and artefacts in order.

Thomas Jefferson wrote his Manual of Parliamentary Practice, later adopted by the House, for which body?

The US Senate received the first American book on parliamentary procedure, which Jefferson arranged under fifty-three headings, ending with impeachment.

Thomas Jefferson based his design for which American building on the Maison Carrée, a Roman temple in France?

Virginia State Capitol plans were drawn up in France with the architect Charles-Louis Clérisseau, after Jefferson had urged moving the seat of government to Richmond.

Whom did Thomas Jefferson call the chosen people of God, seeing them as the backbone of the republic?

Farmers who worked the land made the best citizens in Jefferson's eyes, which is one reason his followers welcomed cheap new farmland in the West.

Abroad during the 1787 Constitutional Convention, Thomas Jefferson backed its work but wanted what added?

A bill of rights was what Jefferson most wanted added to the new charter, and he argued for it from Paris, where he was serving as a diplomat.

Thomas Jefferson entered politics in 1769 representing Albemarle County in which colonial Virginia assembly?

House of Burgesses members sat in Williamsburg, and Jefferson used his first year there to back a bill letting owners free the people they enslaved.

Jefferson's currency plan, adopted by Congress in the 1780s, proposed dividing the American dollar in which way?

Into tenths and hundredths was Jefferson's answer, a clean decimal break at a time when Americans were used to counting Spanish coins in eighths.

What did Virginia's legislature let the indebted Thomas Jefferson organise in 1826 to try to save his estate?

A public lottery was approved that February as a fundraiser, but Jefferson died less than five months later with his debts unpaid.

Which holy book once owned by Thomas Jefferson was used at a congressman's swearing-in ceremony in 2007?

The Quran, in George Sale's English translation, was the choice of Keith Ellison of Minnesota, the first Muslim elected to Congress.

Which landmark is the centrepiece of the park first created as the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial?

The Gateway Arch rose in St. Louis because planners wanted Jefferson honoured at a place symbolic of one of his greatest triumphs, the purchase of the Louisiana territory.

By Thomas Jefferson's own account, a deal struck at his dinner table in 1790 put the national capital on which river?

The Potomac site was the South's prize in the bargain, and in return the national government was allowed to take over the states' debts.

Thomas Jefferson's line about refreshing the tree of liberty was written in response to which uprising?

Shays' Rebellion in Massachusetts alarmed many American leaders, but Jefferson, far away as envoy to France, refused to be worried by it.

Jefferson suggested in the 1780s that which giants, known from fossil bones, still lived in North America?

Mammoths, as Jefferson called the animals now known as mastodons, were part of his case that American wildlife was no smaller than Europe's.

What kind of living thing is Jeffersonia, named in Thomas Jefferson's honour by a fellow naturalist?

A wildflower of rich eastern forests, Jeffersonia is also called twinleaf, and the botanist Benjamin Smith Barton named it for his contemporary.

As Secretary of State in 1791, Jefferson argued that Congress had no authority to create which institution?

A national bank struck Jefferson as a deadly threat to republican government, and he told the president that Congress had no power to charter one.

Which actor played Thomas Jefferson in the 1995 James Ivory film about his years as a diplomat in France?

Nick Nolte starred in Jefferson in Paris, first titled Head and Heart, with Gwyneth Paltrow as his daughter Patsy.

Jefferson Rock, named for a view Jefferson called worth a voyage across the Atlantic, overlooks which town?

Harpers Ferry, now in West Virginia, is where Jefferson stood on the rock on 25 October 1783 before praising the scene in print.

Which Italian-English artist did Jefferson fall for in Paris, sending her a dialogue between his Head and Heart?

Maria Cosway received the 4,000-word love letter in October 1786, and the two kept writing to each other until Jefferson's death forty years later.

Thomas Jefferson's rented Paris home as American minister, the Hôtel de Langeac, stood on which famous street?

The Champs-Élysées address, at the corner of the rue de Berri, came with a garden where Jefferson grew Indian corn.

Which unalienable right did Jefferson list in the Declaration of Independence alongside life and liberty?

The pursuit of happiness stands where readers of the day might have expected property, a choice of words that historians still argue over.

Who won a Tony Award playing Jefferson in the original cast of Lin-Manuel Miranda's musical about the founders?

Daveed Diggs won the 2016 Tony Award for Best Featured Actor in a Musical, having originated the part off Broadway the year before.

How did Thomas Jefferson get to his first inauguration in 1801, becoming the first president to do so?

On foot and dressed as a plain citizen without any badge of office, Jefferson set off around noon with a small escort of congressmen and officers.

Which Federalist Chief Justice, a distant cousin of Thomas Jefferson, administered his presidential oath in 1801?

John Marshall had joined the Supreme Court earlier that year, and Jefferson later hoped in vain that his own appointees would weaken the Chief Justice's hold on it.

Jefferson's envoys went to Paris hoping mainly to buy which port city, not the vast territory they came home with?

New Orleans controlled the Mississippi trade of the western settlers, and the envoys quickly agreed when France offered the whole territory instead.

Which military academy, on a fort site above the Hudson River, was founded by an act Jefferson signed in 1802?

West Point had been an army post since the Revolutionary War, and Jefferson ordered plans for a school there within months of taking office.

Which hated federal tax, the spark for a 1794 uprising in Pennsylvania, did Jefferson's administration abolish?

The tax on whiskey went along with the other internal taxes, a cut Jefferson's team paid for by closing offices it considered unnecessary.

Jefferson pardoned those convicted under which 1798 law that made criticising the government a crime?

The Sedition Act expired the day before Jefferson was sworn in, and he pardoned those still serving sentences under it.

A British warship's 1807 attack on which American frigate nearly drove Thomas Jefferson into war with Britain?

USS Chesapeake was boarded off Norfolk by the crew of HMS Leopard, who took away four sailors as deserters from the Royal Navy and later hanged one.

Which Supreme Court justice did Jefferson's allies in Congress impeach in 1804, only for him to keep his seat?

Samuel Chase was accused of letting party loyalty sway his rulings, but he was acquitted on every count and stayed on the bench until his death in 1811.

Which state, once part of the Northwest Territory, was the only one to join the Union under President Jefferson?

Ohio became the 17th state in 1803 and the first carved out of the Northwest Territory, where slavery had been banned since 1787.

Which animals, a gift from the explorer Zebulon Pike, did President Jefferson briefly keep at the White House?

Grizzly bear cubs, a male and a female, struck Jefferson as too dangerous and troublesome to keep, so he passed the pair on to a museum.