Introduction
Doctor T. Examined, and the Case of the Ingenious A or Why William Thornton Did Not Design the Octagon House or the Capitol
Introduction
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| 1. William Thornton in 1804 |
In a riposte to Doctor Thornton, the Mayor of Washington hit below the belt: "Doctor T. has been living upon the Public Treasury for near twenty years, and I dare say he cannot point to a single service that entitles him to the patronage of the Government." They had been friends but Thornton had gone too far. In his attack on the mayor, he couldn't resist a rhyme: "The Mayor, Collector of the Taxes, Doctor Blake/ Is a malicious, and insinuating snake...." The editor of the National Intelligencer stepped in: "The Public and the editor conceive that this sort of BADINAGE to be unsuited to the times and expect it to cease."(1) It was 1814. The British had just burned the Capitol. Blake didn't seem get the message, but was reducing Thornton to "Doctor T." an insult? To scholars, that appellation is indelible. In her 1800 diary, Mrs. Thornton referred to her husband as "Dr. T_" 762 times. It seems that because he didn't practice medicine, the nation's upstart capital, too sparsely populated for punctilio, embraced the T. However, one of the stern tasks of history is to see that a joke is not carried too far, certainly not as far as Dr. Blake went: not a single service that entitles him to the patronage of the Government!
Posterity now credits Dr. William Thornton for being the First Architect of the Capitol, the leading Commissioner for the Public Building and the founder of the Patent Office. His non-governmental contributions were as notable. He is credited for designing the Octagon House, the gem of the city's residential architecture. He is credited for superintending construction as well as designing two houses built by General Washington on Capitol Hill. He is also credited for designing houses built by Thomas Law, Thomas Peter and Lawrence Lewis, all husbands of Mrs. Washington's grand daughters. After General Washington himself and Major L'Enfant, the next man to have on one's tip of the tongue when seriously discussing the founding Washington, D.C. is "Thornton, the idealist architect." Only an effort in the early 20th century to trumpet Thornton's claim that he invented the steamboat ran out of steam.(2) Although it was his reason for coming to America, his schemes to separate the races are now hushed up. His alleged scheme to resurrect General Washington two days after he died remains only a footnote to history.
However, five days after Thornton died in 1828, an obituary mentioned none of that save his long association with the Patent Office.(3) Subsequently, guides for tourists mentioned Thornton and the Capitol but always in a list along with architects who actually built the tripartite building. Not until 1850 when thought provoking squibs appeared in newspapers occasioned by the Fillmore administration's bowing to congressional pressure to expand the Capitol did Thornton regain his place in the sun. A paragraph in the Republic observed: "Another statement in the Sun is that Mr. Latrobe was the author of the plan of the Capitol - the premium for which was obtained by Dr. William Thornton, and alterations made by Mr. Latrobe by the direction of Mr. Jefferson." In 1851, a squib made the rounds in various newspapers quoting the official proceedings from April 1793 that proved Thornton's design was approved by President Washington. However, evidently there were doubters. In 1856, a squib on top of a column in the National Intelligencer reiterated: "As some people do not know, and some pretend not to know, that Dr. William Thornton's design for the Capitol was the accepted one, we think it just to publish the following document...." and the April 1793 letter from the president appeared again.(4) By that time, work was well underway to expand the Capitol which gave the obvious impression that although designed and built as a "monument for the ages," the Old Capitol reigned just long enough to get its photo taken.
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| 2. The Old Capitol in 1846 |
In 1855, around that time when Thornton's name surfaced in discussions of the Capitol design, Mrs. Anne Ogle Tayloe died. She was the widow Col. John Tayloe III who died in 1828 and who built the Octagon, situated on New York Avenue and 18 Street NW just southwest of the White House. None of the five sons wanted to move into the house. Two took charge of selling the house. Their short newspaper ad only distinguished the house by calling it "the Octagon." Since neither their father or mother left any remembrance crediting anyone for designing the house or were quoted in that regard, the chances that Thornton's name dropped into conversations about the house grew after 1855. Tayloe's sons remembered Thornton as a rival of their father on the turf where Tayloe-bred horses ruled. Associating the name of the architect of the Capitol with the house might help it sell. Then, when that failed, might at least assure the proud family that the house had an iconic past well worth remembering. In 1856, it was leased to a Catholic school for girls.(5)
Of the two sons trying to sell the house, Benjamin Ogle Tayloe had the most face to lose as the house didn't sell. He would live just blocks away from it for the rest of his life. In 1828, he had built his own house on very fashionable Lafayette Square just north of the White House. After some stints as a young diplomat, he settled down to a life of genteel and witty entertainment. He wrote about his life for family and friends and, of course, touched on the Octagon. Most amusing was his meeting a Washington contractor who when a boy apprentice with his brick-laying father saw General Washington on a horse observing their progress as they built the Octagon. In an 1863 magazine article that recalled his father's friends, Benjamin Ogle Tayloe allowed that Thornton was "an accomplished and benevolent gentleman, ...remembered more for his eccentricities and the anecdotes related of him than for his well-earned reputation for letters and taste." Tayloe did allow that Thornton "was the architect of the first Capitol at Washington, and laid out some of the public grounds, and arranged the public buildings accordingly." But, he didn't credit him for designing the Octagon.(6)
Tayloe's also recalling Thornton's taste for doggerel which led to a fist fight and a challenge to a duel, as well as his being "quizzed" about patents and "physicking" his jockey, might have inclined Tayloe not to associate his name with the Octagon. But the wit of Lafayette Square probably wrote or at least informed the obituary of Mrs. William Thornton who died at the age of 91 in 1865, just as the Capitol dome was finished. He made up for the Capitol not being mentioned in her husband's 1828 obituary, by mentioning that Thornton was the "architect of the original Capitol." Proof that Tayloe wrote the obituary is found in his repeating a story he told in his private memoir that according to Dr. T, Mrs. Thornton was the daughter of a notorious forger hanged by George III in 1777. Tayloe died in Rome, Italy, in 1868.(7)
The problematic Octagon, then rented out for government offices, became the family problem again. The other brother who tried to sell it in 1855, William Henry Tayloe, returned from his very profitable management of shifting the Tayloe family's slave based operations from Virginia to Alabama. The best he could do with the house was write a description of life in the Octogon, less witty than his late brother's but more complete. He shared it with his son. At the end of several paragraphs, three short sentences traced its origins: “The Octagon was built by your grand father in the administration of President Washington who took much interest and frequently walked to examine the progress. He had much to do with its location. Dr. William Thornton drew the plan."(8) Actually, work on the house began during the Adams administration and ended after Jefferson took office. It was largely built while the government was still in Philadelphia, and while Washington lived at Mount Vernon. He died in late 1799 and never lived or worked within walking distance of the house.
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| Circa 1872 |
William Henry died in 1871, and then, just as two pillars of Thornton's future fame, the Capitol and the Octagon, were almost in place, the Thornton bubble burst. In 1873, GATH (George Alfred Townsend) took time off from reporting political gossip in Washington for the Chicago Tribune to write a history of the Nation's Capital. He began his chapter on “Architects of the Capitol and Their Feuds” with this conclusion: “The first architect of the Capitol in the proper sense of a professional man was Stephen S. Hallet....” He came to that conclusion after discussing the matter with Edward Clark who became Architect of the Capitol in 1865. Clark based his crediting Hallet on what he had “heard” and on notations on architectural drawings Benjamin Latrobe's son had recently found and returned.(9)
What Latrobe's son shared informed an 1876 address before architects gathered in Philadelphia to celebrate the nation's Centennial. German born Adolf Cluss, then Washington's leading architect who designed the Smithsonian's Arts and Industries Building, discussed the Capitol's origins. He noted that the government began paying Hallet to work on a Capitol design before Thornton's submitted his design. That alone made Hallet the first architect of the building. Then “Dr. William Thornton, an English amateur of versatile manners, who had come from the West Indies, succeeded in having Hallet’s plans superseded by what he claimed as his own plans....Thornton had, it appears, carried the day by a neatly washed elevation; and when his ground-plans were corrected according to sound principles of construction, they looked so remarkably like Hallet’s that this gentleman formally protested against the award....” In response, the commissioners in charge fired Hallet. Cluss continued:
Hallet’s name disappears from history after this time; but Thornton's claims were ridiculed before long. In the year 1804, Architect Latrobe denounced his plan in an official report to Congress, and animadverted upon the mode of carrying on the competition for plans of this great public building. He intimated that Thornton's work in the premises, being simply pictorial, could not claim dignity and consideration as an architectural composition. Hallet’s original designs were restored to the archives of the Capitol after the lapse of many years, in 1871; and his memory stands vindicated at this day.(10)
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| 4. Adolph Cluss strikes a pose |
Cluss had so thoroughly ridiculed Thornton's pretensions as an architect that the idea of his designing the Octagon did not cross any architect's mind. Then in 1887, Jane Stanford, the wife of Senator Leland Stanford of California, discussed mantels with a restoration architect named Glenn Brown who was building the dining room of her Washington house in fashionable Farragut Square just north of the White House. In his memoir, Brown didn't mention how he discovered the Octagon but he had made drawings of its interior for an architecture magazine that wanted an article on "Georgian houses." He took Mrs. Stanford inside the house. In 1887, only an elderly couple lived in it as caretakers which didn't prevent the house's interior from being "covered in grime and dirt." Still, Mrs. Stanford asked Brown to arrange to buy its mantel. However, Brown found that the Tayloe family was loath to part with anything in the house.(11) Soon, Brown was loath to let go of the house. Instead of Georgian houses, in the January 7, 1888, American Architect and Building News, he wrote only about the Octagon. He claimed that the interior was "elaborately finished, the door and shutters being of mahogany and all still in an excellent state of preservation." He described and drew the house's mantels, its roof trusses and floor plan.
Judging from what he wrote in the article, what especially made the house attractive to him was the aura of Col. John Tayloe III. Brown's father had been a physician who had served in the Confederate army for four years. Brown's grandfather had been a senator from North Carolina. Brown was raised to admire men like Tayloe, a Virginia grandee who had inherited his father's land, slaves and tastes. Brown wrote that Tayloe, "was unrivaled for the splendor of his household and equipages, and his establishment was renowned throughout the country for its entertainments, which were given in a most generous manner to all persons of distinction who visited Washington in those days...." At the end of his short article, Brown added that Thornton was the architect and "was a very interesting character and is deserving of a separate article."(12)
It proved to be 8 years in the making. To begin with, his article didn't make enough of an impression. At the American Institute of Architect's 1889 annual convention in Cincinnati, Brown proposed that its headquarters be moved from Manhattan to the Octagon. His motion was tabled. In 1893, "Historic Houses of Washington," an article in the widely read Scribner's Magazine, extolled the Octagon and Tayloe with his "five hundred slaves" and "his guests the most eminent men of his times" but made no mention of Thornton. The article also gave Thornton no credit for the Capitol. It described Benjamin Latrobe's Decatur House and Van Ness House, and extolled him as "the mastermind of our unequaled Capitol."(13) Brown set out to prove that despite Cluss's 1876 address, Thornton was the mastermind of the original Capitol.
He had a leg up. Architects in the 1890's were on the other side of a divide. The nation's 1876 Centennial looked backward. The approaching 1900 centennial of the City of Washington would look forward. The city had not fulfilled the intentions of the L'Enfant Plan approved by George Washington. During the Gilded Age the city attracted wealth, e.g. the Stanfords, but their mansions overlooked a plain of mediocrity and pockets of squalor. Brown began urging fellow architects and senators, the most potent political force in the city, to not only reshape the Mall as L'Enfant and Washington intended but to also extend it south and west to the Potomac River, squeezing the city's most crime ridden neighborhood in the process. New York Avenue NW, as extended southwest from the White House, should form the Mall's northwest border. Whoever owned the Octagon would have a ring side seat to the pretensions of what was call the City Beautiful Movement which in Brown's view should focus on the "Grouping of Government Buildings, Landscape, and Statuary"(14)
In 1896, the Architectural Record published Brown's "Dr. William Thornton, Architect," that placed Thornton in the forefront of American design. Brown provided a concise biography and also rewrote the history of the Capitol, painting Thornton as its guiding genius who defended his original design from efforts by trained architects to change it. To better quash Cluss's dismissal of Thornton's talents, Brown highlighted Thornton's design of the Octagon. That was an attribution unknown to Cluss. Brown brought up another achievement that Cluss overlooked. President Washington had made Thornton one of the three commissioners overseeing construction of the public buildings. As Brown put it: "when Thornton was appointed commissioner, [President] Washington requested him to see that everything was rectified so the building would conform to the original plan." That is to say, the president realized that a committee of builders chaired by Thomas Jefferson that proved that Thornton's design could not be built were all wrong. While the president had then approved the committees' design, a year later he appointed Thornton to undo the mess they made. According to Brown, Thornton undid all the changes Hallet made to the design and building. As long as he was a commissioner, he prevented other changes. However, Brown's proof was based solely on Thornton's say so. In his letters, Washington made clear that he had no such intention.(15)
That Brown would celebrate an amateur was counterintuitive, but his making Thornton a talented genius who overcame expert naysayers with a plan to fulfill the vision of George Washington moved Gilded Age senators. Cluss had chastised Thornton for "being a thorough man of the world; he founded a race-course and sported blooded horses." Senator Stanford also had blooded horses. After the article and while Brown lobbied congress to make the city beautiful, congress commissioned and published Brown's two volume history of the Capitol building in 1900 and 1903 respectively. In 1901, the Senate Park Commission unveiled the McMillan Plan, named after the senator from Michigan, to supersede the L'Enfant Plan. Meanwhile, Brown became the executive secretary of the American Institute of Architects with an office in the Octagon. To promote himself, Thornton shaded the truth and glorified his relationship with Washington. To promote himself, Brown shaded the truth and glorified Thornton.
In 1998, the Architect of the Capitol had Brown's history of the Capitol reprinted, relegating corrections curbing Brown's enthusiasm for Thornton to footnotes. As the author of the footnotes put it: Brown's "history reflects an unswerving bias toward Thornton in his interpretations of the numerous conflicts and controversies that surrounded the early design and building of the Capitol." Along with his footnotes, William Bushong added an essay, “Glenn Brown and the United States Capitol,” that explored Brown's background, career and ambitions. Bushong showed how Brown's work on Thornton helped him rise in the AIA:
Brown’s zealous promotion of Thornton as the “outstanding architect of his time” was related to his plan to have the AIA acquire and preserve Thornton’s Octagon as its headquarters, an action which has since linked the public’s recognition of the professional organization to this architectural landmark. If Thornton had been portrayed simply as an opportunistic gentleman architect with little practical knowledge of the field, Brown could hardly have convinced his colleagues to lease and later purchase the building. His promotion of Thornton’s genius as a designer and the first Architect of the Capitol was motivated in part by a determination to preserve and adapt the Octagon as the AIA head-quarters....
Brown even began to lobby to become the Architect of the Capitol.(16)
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| 5. Glenn Brown |
Bushong's critique of Brown did not inspire a re-examination of Thornton. It fizzled just as an earlier attempt did and for the same reason. In the January 1919 Proceedings of the American Institute of Architects, Fiske Kimball and Wells Bennett had reaffirmed the credit due to Hallet. They had also noted Brown's exaggerations of Thornton's influence. Their effort to right the record proved in vain. They found that Thornton's claims "with the weight of their official sanction, have naturally become universally accepted, and even to question them has been felt to be disputatious and malignant."(17)
Kimball, Bennett and Bushong didn't examine Thornton's performance as a commissioner, and didn't challenge Brown's claim that Thornton designed the Octagon. Designing such a gem proved that, despite the howls of Latrobe and Cluss, Thornton was an architect. Ironically, the 1798 draft of a letter Dr. T wrote but never copied and never sent mentioned the name of the house's likely designer: "Mr. Lovering, an ingenious A_" Rather than write "Architect" he crossed out what was a rare indulgence. He rarely flattered anyone other than himself and the Great Men from whom he desperately wanted approval. In this book, the "Case of the Ingenious A" follows an examination of Thornton the designer and commissioner. That will make clear why President Washington ignored Thornton; why President Jefferson lost faith in Thornton and relied on Latrobe; and why General Washington, John Tayloe, and Thomas Law didn't ask him to design their houses. But first: who was William Thornton?
In these footnotes I try to direct the reader to the on-line sources, if not the pages in question then to a resource that has a search or find function making finding references to Thornton easy. For important footnotes to sources without an on-line presence, I hope to eventually provide links to another post in this blog with snapshots of the pages quoted.
1. National Intelligencer 12 & 15 September 1814.
2. Brown, Glenn, Memories...p. 53; Hunt, "William Thornton and John Fitch" The Nation vol. 98 no. 2551, pp.602-3 .
3. National Intelligencer 4 April 1828.
4. Ibid. 14 December 1850, 3 July 1851, 25 June 1856.
5. Ibid. 31 December 1855 p. 1, column 1;
6.Tayloe, Benjamin Ogle, In Memoriam, Benjamin Ogle Tayloe, compiled by Winslow Watson. Privately Printed, 1872. pp. 97-101, 149.
7. National Intelligencer 22 August 1865.
8. Harris, C. M. editor, Papers of William Thornton, volume one, 1781-1802. University of Virginia Press, 1995. p. 584.
9. Townsend, Washington Outside and Inside, 1873, pp. 56-60. Google Books.
10. Cluss, Adolph, "Architecture and Architects at the Capital of the United States from its Foundation until 1875", Address Before the American Institute of Architects, October 12, 1876.
11. McCue, Octagon... p. 69; Brown, Glenn, Memories...pp. 235ff. Glenn Brown, AIA: An Alexandria Architect's Monumental Vision, (2007 exhibition catalog pdf);
12. Brown, Glenn, 1888, "The Tayloe Mansion..." American Architect and Building News, vol. XXIII, p. 6.
13. Hamlin, Teunis, "Historic Houses of Washington", Scribner's Magazine, October 1893, vol. 14, p. 475.
14. Peterson, Jon A., "The Senate Park Commission Plan for Washington, D.C.: A NEW VISION FOR THE CAPITAL AND THE NATION," Commission of Fine Arts; Brown, Op. Cit.
15. Brown, Glenn 1896, "Dr. William Thornton, Architect." Architectural Record, 1896 , Vol. VI, July-September (page 53ff) pdf.;
16. Brown, Glenn, History of the United States Capitol, vol. 1, GPO, 1900, Google Books; The AIA leased the building in 1898 and "found the room on right was heaped six feet high with piles of rags and rubbish, the rest of the house was in dilapidated condition." Proceedings of 32nd AIA Convention, p. 31; Bushong, William B., "Glenn Brown and the United States Capitol" pp. 9, 10;
17. Kimball, Fiske, and Bennett, Wells, "The Competition for the Federal Buildings, 1792-1793" Journal of the American Institute of Architect, January 1919, p.11.
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