Thomas Jefferson Trivia
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This Thomas Jefferson trivia quiz has 109 free questions with answers and follows the third president from Shadwell Plantation to his death on the fiftieth Fourth of July: the Declaration of Independence and the quarter Congress cut from it, the years in Paris, the tie with Aaron Burr and the 36 ballots, the Louisiana Purchase and the Lewis and Clark expedition, the Barbary war and the embargo, and the long retirement spent building a university and trading letters with John Adams. It also covers the Jefferson people argue about: the more than 600 people he enslaved, Sally Hemings and the DNA study, the debts that broke up Monticello. And the Jefferson of the workshop, with his swivel chair, wheel cipher, cannonball clock, giant sloth and failed vineyards. Early questions suit a classroom; the back half will test a history buff. Every answer has been checked against a primary source, mostly Wikipedia's Jefferson articles, and shows its citation once you have answered.
30 of 109 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Thomas Jefferson was which number US president?
Third
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.
Q 02In which city did Jefferson write most of the Declaration of Independence in June 1776?
Philadelphia
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.
Q 03Jefferson's home Monticello takes its name from Italian words meaning what?
Little mountain
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.
Q 04At which family plantation was Jefferson born in 1743?
Shadwell
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.
Q 05Jefferson's face appears on which US coin?
The nickel
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.
Q 06In what year was the Louisiana Purchase completed?
1803
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.
Q 07Which pair did Jefferson send west in 1804 to explore the newly bought territory to the Pacific?
Lewis and Clark
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.
Q 08Carvers dynamited their first attempt at Jefferson's face and started over at which national memorial?
Mount Rushmore
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.
Q 09On what date did Jefferson die in 1826?
July 4
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.
Q 10Which fellow signer of the Declaration died on the very same day as Jefferson?
John Adams
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.
Q 11Which institution did Jefferson found in 1819 and design himself?
University of Virginia
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.
Q 12Under which president did Jefferson serve as Secretary of State?
George Washington
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.
Q 13Who served as Jefferson's vice president during his second term?
George Clinton
Q 21The 1800 election ended in an Electoral College tie between Jefferson and which running mate?
Aaron Burr
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.
Q 22Which body broke the 1800 election tie and chose Jefferson?
The House
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.
Q 23Jefferson's 1801 swearing-in was the first presidential inauguration held where?
Washington, D.C.
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.
Q 14Congress struck a passage from Jefferson's draft Declaration attacking what?
The slave trade
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.
Q 15Which college did Jefferson enter at 16 in 1760?
William & Mary
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.
Q 16Which young widow did Jefferson marry on New Year's Day 1772?
Martha Wayles Skelton
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.
Q 17Jefferson succeeded which man as America's minister in Paris in 1785?
Benjamin Franklin
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.
Q 18Which momentous event was Jefferson present in Paris for on July 14, 1789?
The storming of the Bastille
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.
Q 19To keep letters safe from prying postmasters, Jefferson described which device in the 1790s?
The wheel cipher
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.
Q 20Jefferson co-founded which political organisation in 1792 to oppose the Federalists?
The Democratic-Republicans
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.
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.
Q 24How much did the United States pay France for the Louisiana territory?
$15 million
$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.
Q 25Which two American envoys signed the Louisiana Purchase treaty in Paris?
Robert Livingston and James Monroe
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.
Q 26Doubting he had the legal power to buy Louisiana, what did Jefferson consider doing?
Proposing a constitutional amendment
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.
Q 27What is Jefferson's 1801–05 war against the North African pirate states called?
The First Barbary War
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.
Q 28Jefferson's war with Tripoli is recalled in the opening lines of which military service's hymn?
The Marines
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.
Q 29Which law of Jefferson's, meant to pressure Britain and France in 1807, instead crippled America's own ports?
The Embargo Act
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.
Q 30Jefferson cut the national debt by nearly a third even after scrapping which hated frontier tax?
The whiskey 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.