[PW] ? Thomas Jefferson Quotation

[Dennis Lien]

At 08:43 AM 9/26/2007, you wrote:
>Are there any Jeffersonian scholars out there who can tell me the
>original source for the following quote?
>
>                 "We have not heard from our ambassador in Paris for
>years. If we have not heard from him by the end of the year, let us
>write him a letter."
>                         - President Jefferson to Secretary of State
>Madison.
>Another variation of the quote is:
>"We have not heard from our ambassador in Paris for two years. If we do
>not hear from him by the end of this year, let us write him a letter."
>Thank you in advance -
>Bruce
>
>
>Bruce S. Thornlow


Negative evidence: it's not on the "spurious Jefferson quotes" page at

http://eyler.freeservers.com/JeffPers/jefpco13.htm

but since that specializes in political/religious misascriptions to TJ,
the site guy might not have considered it worth exploring.  But you
might try contacting him.

The Jefferson Library, which Sue Kamm already suggested, has in fact
a page of links to finding Jeffersonian quotes; I didn't explore these:

http://www.monticello.org/library/reference/quotes.html#confirm

I searched word  ambassador   in Jefferson papers on the American 
Presidency Project
website at

http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/

without any relevant results; didn't try other words.

It certainly sounds to me like a "too good to be true" spurious quote...

Dennis Lien / U of Minnesota Libraries // d-lien at umn.edu