Chapter Nine: John Tayloe III Comes to Town
The Doctor Examined, or Why William Thornton Did Not Design the Octagon House or the Capitol
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| Sir Archy, an engraving of Tayloe's most famous horse |
In mid-March 1797, the General left Philadelphia. By
the way, once out of office the former president was universally called
the General. He made his slow way home to Mount Vernon receiving the
heartfelt plaudits of his countrymen. After acknowledging a volley from Captain Hoban's artillery militia at the unfinished Capitol, he dined at the Laws. There he gave the commissioners the signed orders transferring ownership of the streets and public lots to the government. They noticed that the documents did not have the seal of the United States, and the General sent them back to Philadelphia. Then he rode on past the President's house, where he received another volley, and spent the night along Rock Creek with Patsy and Thomas Peter. The next day, he sent his regrets to public dinners in Georgetown and Alexandria and had dinner at Mount Vernon. There, as he
would write to the secretary of war, he was surrounded
by joiners, carpenters and masons waiting for orders for the work to do
at Mount Vernon.
Tayloe family legend has the General having "much to do" with the location of the Octagon. If so, he would have to have put his mind to that during his March visit.(1) The newspaper report of his passing through was closer to the truth. He was in a hurry to get to Mount Vernon. Plus, picking out the site for a rich man's house southwest of the President's would have fueled a war that had begun between the East and West sides of the city.
The General could fairly blame the war on the commissioners. Thanks to them, decisions he didn't make blew up in his face. He didn't want embassies on the Mall, and thought foreign countries should choose where to put them. He approved the design Hadfield drew for the two Executive Offices which would house the Treasury and War Departments, but he had left it to his successor to pick the sites for the two buildings. Then in late January, George Walker, who owned most of the lots well east of the Capitol, wrote to the president and raged that Commissioner Scott "would sacrifice everything to promote his own interest, and having large property above Geo. Town, besides, having purchased considerably in and about that place, he has laid a deep Scheme to keep back the Capitol, in order that Congress may be forced to hold their Sessions in the Presidents House, and to lodge in and about Geo. Town." Walker begged the president to act or "Scott will reign an absolute Bashaw in the city." Law wrote too and recounted that Scott "amused" him and other land owners on Capitol Hill by shewing the President's House on the Map and by pointing out where the [Executive] Offices should be and by anticipating "the future splendor of that part of the City by the residence of Ambassadors and by the Assemblage of Americans who were great Courtiers."(2)
How the Bashaw persuaded Tayloe, who had all the makings of a great courtier, to buy a lot just southwest of the president's house is not known. In Building the Octagon, Orlando Ridout argues that Thornton was the catalyst and eventually designed the house. Establishing his role as a catalyst for the purchase is important because very little is known about the design process for the house. There are two floor
plans similar to the Octagon's floor plan in Thornton's papers at the
Library of Congress, but they are unsigned and undated. Ridout notes that there is no contemporary
documentary evidence extant explicitly associating Thornton with the design. As Ridout puts it: "his correspondence is
almost entirely devoid of clues to his involvement in the project, but
much can be inferred."
Ridout infers that since he witnessed the deed of sale, Thornton went out of his way to meet Tayloe. Scott owned the lot, so neither he nor Thornton were there in an official capacity for which the signatures of two commissioners were requisite. Ridout also infers that neither Tayloe nor Scott would have bargained over a lot in that square if Commissioner Thornton had not dissented from Scott's and White's suggestion that embassies be along Mall near the Capitol. Thanks to Thornton's proposal that embassies grace Square 170 and neighboring squares south of the President's house, Tayloe was joining potentially "the most exclusive residential company in the city...." Ridout argues that Thornton's witnessing the sale all but proves the point. He also infers that by virtue of buying a Lot 8 in Square 170, which faced the acute angle made by the intersection of New York Avenue and 18th Streets NW, Tayloe had to return the drawings Benjamin Latrobe gave him for a rectangular lot. Thanks to building regulations requiring outer walls to parallel nearby streets designing a house for an angled lot challenged an architect. Ridout finally infers that Thornton relished an opportunity to best another trained architect and befriend another rich Virginian.
Ridout infers that since he witnessed the deed of sale, Thornton went out of his way to meet Tayloe. Scott owned the lot, so neither he nor Thornton were there in an official capacity for which the signatures of two commissioners were requisite. Ridout also infers that neither Tayloe nor Scott would have bargained over a lot in that square if Commissioner Thornton had not dissented from Scott's and White's suggestion that embassies be along Mall near the Capitol. Thanks to Thornton's proposal that embassies grace Square 170 and neighboring squares south of the President's house, Tayloe was joining potentially "the most exclusive residential company in the city...." Ridout argues that Thornton's witnessing the sale all but proves the point. He also infers that by virtue of buying a Lot 8 in Square 170, which faced the acute angle made by the intersection of New York Avenue and 18th Streets NW, Tayloe had to return the drawings Benjamin Latrobe gave him for a rectangular lot. Thanks to building regulations requiring outer walls to parallel nearby streets designing a house for an angled lot challenged an architect. Ridout finally infers that Thornton relished an opportunity to best another trained architect and befriend another rich Virginian.
For Thornton the Tayloe project underscores his dilemma as an architect. He considered himself foremost a gentleman and an intellectual. While architecture was not an ungentlemanly profession, the collecting of fees was pointedly disagreeable to him. Neither did he care to commit himself to the tedious work of a full-time architect directly engaged in the construction project. Rather he saw architecture as an intellectual challenge, another arena which he could periodically and voluntarily enter to demonstrate the breadth and superiority of his skills. In this case, the opportunity to prepare a design for Tayloe was sufficient reward in itself. He could match his skills against the trained and successful professional architect Latrobe and could design the greatest private residence then under consideration in Washington.
More important to Thornton, one suspects, was the opportunity the project provided to solidify his position in Tayloe's social circle. Already active in Washington society, the Thorntons became close acquaintances of the Tayloes in the years following the completion of the Octagon, an occurance that would have been impossible for George Blagden or a master craftsman. Certainly a shared interest in fine horses, Thornton's prior friendship with upper-class Washingtonians, and his participation in many civic affairs would have inevitably brought him into close contact with the Tayloes. As it happened, however, the Octagon served as the catalyst for a friendship that endured for years.(3)
That Tayloe had Latrobe on his mind in April 1797 is a rather shaky inference. Yet, Ridout devotes a chapter to making the case that Tayloe asked Latrobe for a design. However, the only evidence that Tayloe had a design drawn by Latrobe at that time are undated drawings labeled "ground plan for Mr. Tayloe's house in Federal city" that are in a folder labeled "Designs of Buildings Erected or Proposed to be Built in Virginia from 1795 to 1799." The drawings were obviously put in the wrong folder. Latrobe was active in Virginia from 1795 to 1799, principally lived in Richmond and designed several houses as well as a prison. He mentioned them and the problems arising from doing the work in his letters and journal. He saw Tayloe's horse Lamplighter win a race in Petersburg and saw Tayloe's iron works in northern Virginia, but he didn't mention Tayloe, let alone making eight drawings for a house for Tayloe. Latrobe did not venture north of Virginia until 1798 and didn't begin working in the federal city until 1802 just after construction ended on the Octagon. In a private letter written in 1804, Latrobe touted Tayloe's house as the best in the city, but not in a way allowing one to infer that its design in anyway rivaled any of his own designs. Also, as he tried to demean Latrobe in their dispute over the Capitol design that played out in newspapers in 1808, Thornton never mentioned that he bested Latrobe when he demonstrated "the breadth and superiority of his skills" by designing the Octagon.(4)There is documentation for a rumor that in 1796 Tayloe was interested in building in the federal city. In the context of the war between East and West, in February 1797, Thomas Law taunted Scott and his two colleagues with news that "Mr. Cook of Annapolis, Samuel Ringold of Hagerstown and Mr. Tayloe of Virginia resolved last year to build on Square 688."(5) The square just southeast of the Capitol was, certainly in Law's eyes, a good place for a row of townhouses, similar to what Greenleaf tried to do on the Point. Law's listing three worthies at once rather than making a trophy out of Tayloe, the richest of the three, suggests that was his expectation. For Tayloe, Latrobe would draw an urban mansion with gardens which would have been a ridiculous waste of space near the large open square surrounding the Capitol. A more likely inference is that when Latrobe lived in the city in 1816, Tayloe reacted to Dolley Madison's complaint that the Octagon, which had briefly housed the First Family, was unhealthy. At the end of December 1814, she wrote to a friend "We shall remove in March to the 7 buildings, where we shall be better accomodated, in a more healthy region. Mr. M has not been well since we came to this house, & our servants are constantly sick, oweing to the damp cellar in which they are confined." The Seven Buildings were a row of townhouses on nearby Pennsylvania Avenue. Perhaps, Tayloe contemplated moving his family to higher ground and asked Latrobe for his design. The rather busy architect was then restoring the Capitol, but needed private work to support his family. He did not keep a journal. Both he and Tayloe lived in the city and were sometimes business associates. Instead, Tayloe built what became the nucleus of the Willard Hotel in Square 225 on Pennsylvania Avenue. He hired George Hadfield to design a row of six town houses.(6)
So much for inferences, events in April 1797 that might have informed Tayloe's purchase and Thornton's reaction to it are relatively well documented by newspaper ads and an entry in a journal William Tunnicliff sent to John Nicholson. For April 18, 1797, he wrote: "Washington City Races began this day, some of your men at the point have taken a few Barrls Beer of me to sell on there own acct. Taylors Horse of Virga. won to 500 Guin. Genl. Lee, Col. Foreman & his Bro. called and slept here for the Races." The day before he bought his lot, Tayloe's thoroughbred Lamplighter beat the horse of Maryland's leading breeder, Charles Conan Ridgely. The purse was 500 Guineas or $2600. The next day Tayloe Lot 8 in Square 170 for $1,000. One can infer that he didn't haggle about price, although he had contributed half the money to the purse that Lamplighter won. Ridout notes Lamplighter but has him racing in the federal city in November 1798. However, his source had the wrong date likely taken from a history of racing in America published by the New York Jockey Club. That would seem like the bible for doings on the turf, but its 1830 source, the American Turf Register and Sporting magazine, published a list provided by one of Tayloe's sons that listed 114 victories of his late father's horses. There was at least one error. Lamplighter did not beat Cincinnatus on November 6, 1798.(7)
While it is not known if Tayloe's purchase inspired Thornton to make a design for a house to fit the angled lot, there is documentation that two architects were impressed by Tayloe's achievement on the turf. At the December 1802 Washington Jockey Club races, James Hoban's Potatoes, a four year old, won the first heat on the third day of races then had to withdraw. Potatoes was sired by Lamplighter. Two years after the race Thornton imported two prize thoroughbreds from England. In the spring of 1800 sent the younger horse, Driver, to be trained by Tayloe. Then for the rest of life, Thornton would try to beat Tayloe on the turf and as a breeder.(8)
Cohen takes a somewhat cynical view of his mission. "Tayloe offset [his own breeding] costs by training lesser owners' horses. These clients paid a small daily fee that rarely covered Tayloe's stable expenses. But when one of his clients horses proved promising, Tayloe negotiated for rights to organize its breeding and racing schedule, and took a share of any profits" Cohen notes that Tayloe also sponsored races at his own track near the family seat, Mount Airy, just north of Richmond. Horses sent to be trained would race Tayloe's own horses. That's where Thornton's Driver ran his first race.(9)
There is evidence that before 1797 Thornton interested in breeding. In 1793, he had written to his half-brother that he hoped to cover General Washington's jennies with one of his Tortola jacks. In 1795, he bought a horse in Philadelphia and bought a farm in nearby Maryland where he could breed livestock. The racing career of his other imported horse, Clifden, was over and he bought him for breeding. That he also imported Driver to race suggests that he was impressed with Lamplighter's victory.Although they were commissioners, there is no evidence that Scott and Thornton had anything to do with organizing the races, nor did they have anything to do with the featured race. A match race required two breeders to put up an equal sum of money. The site of the race was commonly equidistant between two breeders. Tayloe lived north of Richmond. Ridgely lived north of Baltimore. Coincidentally, Tunnicliff decided to build a track near Nicholson's hotel and the Capitol to drum up business. He thought of it as a permanent improvement, and would schedule more races for November 1797, after which the commissioners cautioned him for allowing gambling and threatened to take away his license.(10)
Of course, Thornton's main take away from the eventful week are unknown, but his next documented action related to the purchase came in May 1797. David Burnes, the original proprietor of the area, offered lots for sale including in the Square 171 across New York Avenue from Tayloe's Lot 8 in Square 170. Tayloe did not take the opportunity to cheaply expand his footprint south of the President's house. Thornton bought all the lots in Square 171 except 9, 10, 11 and 12, which were directly across the avenue from Tayloe's lots. Burnes probably reserved those hoping for a better price once Tayloe woke up. Thornton also bought lots that Burnes offered south of Pennsylvania Avenue and just east of 15th Street. He had recommended that embassies be below the President's house along 15th and 17th Streets. The lots he bought were also not far from his F Street house. Also, New York Avenue went directly down to where the river met the future site of the National University. His lots in Square 33 were also nearby. Plus, just off shore, he spied the emergence of a mud flat. He even filed a warrant giving him priority for purchasing any viable land in the future. Just as Tayloe didn't act like a gentleman intent on building a house, Thornton didn't act like a gentleman intent on designing other gentleman's houses.(11)
Tayloe's next documented reference to his federal city lot was in February 1799 when he wrote to the General that he was raising money to build.
However, while Ridout's inferences are not germane, there may be something in his suggestion that Thornton was intellectually challenged by having to build a house in an angular lot so that all walls were parallel to the nearby street. At least he wound up owning such a lot. While he had suggested that Square 171 as a site for foreign embassies, it was largely an uneven eroded slope cheap to buy not easily built upon. However, it had a large lot analogous to Lot 8 in Square 170 where Tayloe planned to build. Lot 17, the largest in Square 171, faced the angle formed by the intersection of New York Avenue and 17th Street. Tayloe's lot faced the Potomac. Thornton's lot faced the President's house, and was relatively level. However, he never built on the lot but in 1800, after work began on the Octagon, according to his wife's diary, he designed a house for that square, most likely for that lot.(12)
A letter written a month before Lamplighter won and Tayloe bought his lot, suggests that Thornton did not have any thoughts about angled lots that distinguished him from his colleagues. In February 1797, as he tried in vain to rescue Morris's and Nicholson's investments, he had just complained to them about the commissioners' building regulations. He pointed to Square 74 between Pennsylvania Avenue and K Street NW and 21st and 22nd Streets that was divided on December 6, 1796. Evidently while doing that he learned that as well as front walls being parallel to the neighboring streets, side walls had to be perpendicular to it. Cranch insisted that the commissioners did not "have any right to interfere with any other part of a private building than the front."(13)
A month later, Cranch wrote to his uncle, the new president, about the commissioners. All three commissioners were polite, but Scott "appears hasty and overbearing." Thornton was also hasty, not firm, "a little genius at everything," and little respected. White was "more mild" than Scott, "more firm" than Thornton, "and more respectable than either." Cranch had just become a lawyer, and if he ranked Thornton above lawyers Scott and White, he would have had some explaining to do in his letter to his uncle who was also a lawyer. Given that he dismissed Thornton as a "little genius" suggested that in March 1797 Thornton carried a reputation for being at least clever. In his letter, Cranch went on to discuss the generic needs of a commissioner. Men of science had best give way to men of business. Particularly damning Thornton was that he was "a little genius at everything," which suggested that he didn't really know about anything of importance. When one had to do business with the commissioners, the patchwork of Thornton's know-it-all patter did nothing to solve the problems at hand. What Cranch wrote suggested that, despite being a man of science with for taste in architecture, Thornton was like his colleagues. For example, he had no sympathy for developers and their architects who had to put houses in angled lots. If he had, Cranch would have accorded a man of science with a place on the board.(14)
Thornton had no sympathy for Cranch's problem because in 1797 he had no sympathy for private builders. He was dealing with more important projects. In an October 1797 letter to Dr. Fell, his master when he was an apprentice in Lancashire, Thornton claimed that General Washington asked him for a plan "on a general system of education." He had done much writing but intimated to Fell that "the multifarious business I have on hand prevents me from finishing several pages."(15)
Given his future reputation, it would seem his colleagues had to welcome his handling the board's architectural problems. However, when the board needed an estimate of the cost of Hadfield's Executive office design. It could not ask Hoban because of his rivalry with Hadfield. Thornton did not step up and, as he had done in March 1795, at least evaluate Hadfield's figures and offer his own estimate. Then Lovering returned from Philadelphia. He parlayed making an estimate of Hadfield's design into making a simpler design that would save $6,300 on each office building.(16)
However, while his colleagues didn't defer to Thornton on architectural matters, that did not diminish his own high estimation of his talents, especially as a designer. One advantage he had over other architects was that because he had no experience as builder, he could draw a design without worrying if it could actually be built. However, while history has decided that he became famous in January 1793 when the General embraced his Capitol design, no one in 1797 celebrated that achievement, not even the General. In October 1797, he wrote to Fell and another Quaker doctor principally about his genius. But he didn't write about future projects like a house for Tayloe. He still had to seal his fame as the author of the Capitol. In the meanwhile, among his multifarious tasks was framing the brilliance of his Capitol so that the world could appreciate his genius. It was very slow going and offering an innovative design for another building might only embolden his rivals to attack even more. What if, once again, he offered a design that could not be built?
In his letter to Dr. Fell, Thornton bragged that he had "worked day and night at the Capitol. I finished, and obtained the prize against a world of competition; some regularly bred architects. I went at once to the highest order - viz, the Corinthian. I was attacked by Italian, French and English - I came off however victorious. President Washington's determination joined by the Commissioners, after long and patient attention to all, was final, and in my favor." The Italian who attacked him may have been a model maker named Provini who was briefly on the scene in 1794-5, and had refused to show Thornton how to work in stucco. Or, was it Hadfield who was born in Italy?
Then he described the Capitol and gave Fell a promise: "This building will be 353 feet in length, and will contain some of the grandest rooms in the world: - one, the grand vestibule, will be about 114 feet in diameter. It is circular, and to be cover'd with a dome. I am making drawings now for publication; and if published, thou my dear friend will not be forgotten."
Five days later, he wrote at length to Dr. Anthony Fothergill, the rising Quaker physician in London and Bath, about the Capitol's grandest room, with promises of drawings to come:
The
grand vestibule will be circular and about 114 feet in diameter. I am
making drawings for publication. I have deviated in some particulars
from the rules, which, from antiquity, custom had established. First I
thought that the amazing extent of our country, and of the apartments
that the representatives of a very numerous people would one day
require. Secondly I consulted the dignity of appearance, and made
minutiae give way to a grand outline, full of broad prominent lights and
broad deep shadows. Thirdly, I sought for all the variety of
architecture that could be embraced in the forms I had lain down,
without mixing small parts and large of the same kind, and keeping the
whole regular in range, throughout the building. Finally, I attended to
the minute parts, that we might not be deemed deficient in those touches
which a painter would require in the finishing.
As usual, he didn't reveal exactly what he was drawing: an elevation? a section? views of the interior? And could a mere drawing match the "grand outline" of his prose?(17)
In 1796, Thornton had hosted the French savant Constantin François de Chassebœuf, comte de Volney, who wanted to meet the author of Cadmus. In July 1797, Volney returned to the city and pressed Thornton to share his drawings of the city and its buildings so that he could use them to illustrate his future book on America. Volney's book on Syria and Egypt had sparked interest in ancient empires. He relished the chance to illustrate a book on the rising empire in embryo. He even told Jefferson, his principal host in the country, about his project. Thornton gave him an engraving of the L'Enfant Plan, and allowed him to copy the floor plan of the Capitol.
Thornton promised to soon send an elevation of the Capitol to Volney. Judging from a letter Volney later wrote to Thornton, he expected to get a drawing of the West Front. While Glenn Brown would draw what that elevation must have looked like, Thornton probably showed the Frenchman his so-called "Alternative design" with a Roman temple-like colonnade vaulting the "small dome." It is in his papers in the Library of Congress. If Thornton and Volney didn't boast of being the world's leading experts on language, one could speculate that the difference between "est" and "ouest" was lost in translation. A reason why there was no mention of an East elevation of the Capitol in their correspondence was Thornton may not have had one.(18)
In 1796, when Commissioner White showed a congressional committee Hadfield's East elevation, Thornton sent up a "roll of papers" to show the true design. Obviously, a roll of the East elevation would have been the better antidote to the false impression given by Hadfield's elevation. During the winter of 1797-1798, Thornton exhibited an uncharacteristically peevish regard for what Hadfield was doing. In October 1797, he had the board write a note to Hadfield designed to put him in his place. It asked Hadfield to stipulate in writing that the roof of the Capitol would not be higher than the balustrades. Such a worry was beyond the ken of Commissioners Scott and White. Hadfield bowed to that idea of Thornton's, but added that if the board decided the roof could be one or two feet higher, it "would make no difference, and some advantage would be gained in the interior of the building."(19)
In January 1798, Thornton accused Hadfield of having given workers the wrong width for the pilasters. As a result, those on the north wall were asymmetrical. Hadfield denied giving the orders that led to the supposed error and added that "some of the best examples of the Corinthian order show that it is not necessary" to have strict symmetry. Blagden calculated that the cost of correcting the mistake would be $1100.
In analyzing a problem, Thornton usually pinpointed a mistake made well before the problem was recognized. But fury at an error that could have been corrected when it was first made left Thornton himself at fault. After promising to keep an eye on everything at the Capitol, why didn't he correct it sooner? So the focus of his attack on Hadfield was how the inept young architect had marred work just completed and not yet installed. Thornton pointed out to his colleagues that the figure of a rose in a modallion "is too small by at least 1 3/4 inch and which, when viewed at the height intended [around 50 feet], will appear as an indistinct spot. It is not in the proportion recommended by Sir Wm. Chambers in his work on architecture...."
After reviewing the opinions of Blagden and another mason, Thornton's colleagues voted not to make the changes Thornton wanted. He could no longer force the board to let the president decide. President Adams had told the board that he would always defer to their judgment. Thornton wrote a dissent to be placed in the board's proceedings. He didn't challenge Hadfield's take on the Corinthian order. Instead he warned that the mistake "can never be renewed or corrected after it is put up, but will remain, forever, a laughing stock to architects."(20)
Throughout that acrimonious back and forth there was no reference to drawings or elevations that would show the width of the pilasters. But he seems to have shown Volney his alternative design which apart from the colonnaded high dome did depict the North Wing as it was built. However, it was not on the conference table when Hallet's changes to Thornton prize winning design were approved. The high dome was not what Jefferson considered "the original ideas of Doctor Thornton." It seems that during the winter of 1797-98, Thornton set out to draw an East elevation which showed the North Wing as built and which showed the central part of building as Thornton had drawn and described with the statue of the Farnese Hercules atop the pediment. There are two miss-steps preserved in his papers. One drawing showed the frustration he faced when his ideas bumped into reality. An unfinished drawing of exterior of the North Wing resembled the actual building in every particular save one: his drawing has fluted pilasters. In the actual building, they are plain.
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| 108.
Likely an unfinished drawing for Thornton's never published book
celebrating his Capitol design. The actual North Wing does not have
fluted pilasters. |
There is also an East elevation that matches the alternative design of the West Front. If the president and congress simply asked Thornton what should be done, he had the answer. But revealing that answer prematurely would only reveal that his original design was not what his colleagues called the "approved plan." Someone erased the statues atop the pediment of his East elevation. It may have been Thornton himself as he attempted to draw an elevation showing the North Wing as built, the West Wing mirroring the North, and Center building with vestibule and dome as it must be. Taking off the statues would bow to the wishes of the General and his fellow commissioners to leave off ornamentation for the moment.
There is evidence that Thornton had drawn an East elevation suitable for assuring his fame by April 1798. In his journal, Benjamin Latrobe noted seeing Thornton's design during a visit to Thornton's parlor in April 1798. Latrobe was quite impressed. He thought it "one of the first designs of modern times," which suggest that he saw the East elevation not the Alternative design.(18) Given that during the ensuing controversy between the two, Latrobe assumed that the operative design of the exterior of the North Wing had been Thornton's original design than the elevation he saw in 1798 did not have to columns along the north wall. It seems that sometime after 1811, a newly arrived engraver from Bavaria copied Thornton's drawing which by that time had all statues restored. Then in 1818, Robert King printed a map with the engraved elevation design in the lower right had corner. Since then, that engraving has been hailed as Thornton's work, and since 1900, hailed as a work of genius.(21)
Yet, it is not quite accurate to suggest that Thornton renewed his march to fame in the spring of 1798. Something else was a foot that suggests the first days of summer as more notable in that regard. That was when the commissioners justified their termination of Hadfield's contract to the compliant Adams administration. At the same time, for his own eyes, Thornton drafted a narrative celebrating his own genius and command over the North Wing that was about to rise to its full height.
In January 1798, his acting out as an author wronged did not prompt his colleagues to bow to his wishes and needs. However, his posturing resonated in a way that he probably didn't intend. His dissent made his dissatisfaction with Hadfield public knowledge. Once again, Hadfield began to have trouble with the men who worked under him. Redmond Purcell, the foreman of the carpenters at the Capitol, demanded that Hadfield make drawings for each element of the roof. When a drawing didn't come in time, Purcell told the board that the slave sawyers had to stop work. Idle slaves were an anathema, and those working as sawyers were paid a dime a day extra that they not their masters could keep.
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| 139. Payroll for slave sawyers |
Purcell's charges soon spiraled into an accusation that the roof Hadfield designed would not serve and that he ordered men to do what was not needed which wasted time and building materials. Hadfield responded that Purcell was insubordinate and didn't need drawings of everything. The carpenters showed a "great deficiency in the work.... The hips are improperly placed, the rafters are improperly notched to receive the purlines, the trimmers are wrong , &c & c.. All which is contrary to drawings and directions."
Purcell fired back that at the pace Hadfield was going, the roof would not be finished in three months. "The expense to the public is at least 7 as to 1, and part of the work I am certain will not answer to the purpose." With the coming of spring, and the prospect of raising another monumental roof, the carpenters asked for a higher wage because "it required great attention to keep all the laborers at work." That is, they had the added duty of bossing the slaves doing the heavy lifting.
Purcell had been Hoban's partner in South Carolian and likely Ireland too. That doesn't prove that his motive for attacking Hadfield was to prod the board to have Hoban to finish the Capitol. However, after workers covered the President's house in the summer of 1797, Hoban was expendable since there would little work to do there.
Judging from one of Purcell's letters to the board, Thornton did not prod Purcell to attack Hadfield. When he didn't get drawings from Hadfield, he asked what to do: "Mr. Scott made answer, if Mr. Hadfield did not give me directions to keep the men employed to the best advantage until the next board which was to be on the Wednesday following; Dr. Thornton at the same time told me to have my work well done. When Mr. Hadfield came into the yard instead of giving me directions, he began his abusive language." What Thornton did next is not known but in a March 13 letter to Commissioner White, he claimed that he "settled matters with Hadfield and Purcell."(22)
White was once again in Philadelphia trying to get money from congress. That was the board's most pressing problem. Thanks to figures presented by Hadfield and Hoban, it seemed clear that the board would run out of money in July, the peak of the building season. White's 1796 lobbying campaign in Philadelphia had unnerved Thorntonand so did this one. In a letter his colleagues he referred to the South Wing as "that superb and elegant building," but worried that it wouldn't be finished "during the present age" unless it housed the Executive offices. The House of Representatives could one day be put in the west end of the "main body," i.e. the Conference room. White had worked with Thornton for almost three years yet his letters suggest that he knew very little about "the original ideas of Doctor Thornton." At the same time, White reported a rumor that Hoban estimated that for $12,000, he could put congress in the President's house and blamed the idea on Scott's friends. But in May, White came back with good news, $50,000 a year for at least two and likely three years, with no strings attached. Finishing the Capitol would have the highest priority.(23)
However, White also assured a congressional committee that work would begin on one of the Executive offices. A strike by masons over at attempt by the board to lower their wages and a rebellion by carpenters over Hadfield's orders brought work at the Capitol to a stand still. But the crisis reached a climax because the lawyers on the board, Scott and White, worried that the only explicit authorization they had for building the Executive offices was President Washington's signature on Hadfield's elevation of his design. However, Hadfield had taken back his elevation when asked to make sections so Lovering could estimate the cost of the building. Hadfield had never returned his elevation. The board did not want to reauthorize the project by asking erratic President Adams to sign anything. In a fit of anger, he had startled White by vowing to return the capital to New York if unruly members of the opposition in congress were not punished. In a moment of whimsy, he had also told White that he wanted the Executive offices next to the Capitol and that being over a mile away from both congress and the executive officers would suit him.(24)
Contractors had to see the design before they could submit bids. The board asked Hadfield to return the signed elevation. In response, he demanded that he superintend its construction. For his insubordination, the board gave Hadfield three months notice. As if on cue, the carpenters complained that Hadfield gave them more orders that wasted their time. The board fired Hadfield and put Hoban in charge at the Capitol. He found that "the principal rafters and girders of the roof were raised on the east and west fronts, and the north end of the building." That suggests that the job was on schedule. He increased the liquor ration and got the job done.(25)
The board offered to pay Hadfield until August if he returned the Executive office elevation. He didn't, so they used Lovering's design. They wrote to the president announcing their unanimous decision to begin building the Executive office next to the President's house. He raised no objections.
While his stubborn refusal to placate Scott and White spelled his doom, Hadfield clearly blamed Hoban and Thornton. He threatened to appeal to President Adams, and told the board that he would teach them about the rights of architects: "I have long since learnt that it is possible to be deprived of ones own, for the advantage and reputation of others." Since he had just learned that his loss of the Executive office was Lovering's gain, the deprivation he referred to must have been his work on the North Wing.
The board promptly presented their case to the administration. In a letter to Secretary of State Timothy Pickering, likely written by Thornton, the board welcomed an investigation and assured him that it would embarrass Hadfield. He was a young man of taste, but "extremely deficient in practical knowledge as an architect." The bulk of the long letter detailed his insubordinate refusal to give the board his elevation of the Executive office that President Washington had signed.(26)
Thornton also drafted a personal letter to Pickering that focused on his professional relationship with Hadfield. In it, he described how he introduced Hadfield to the Capitol and had to assure him that the walls then built were big enough. Thornton soon gathered that Hadfield didn't know anything about architecture or building. He didn't know what a projector was and had to ask Blagden how to write "$100,000." In his November 1795 letter to Thornton the president cautioned him to fire Hadfield if he was incompetent. Thornton did not recall that in his draft, but explained that the board did not dismiss Hadfield immediately because the workers ignored him and did the work properly.
Thornton ridiculed Hadfield's pretensions as a designer. He complained that he "could do nothing without sections being made of the whole building, although one wing only was to be executed." While denigrating Hadfield, Thornton narrated a story revealing his own genius. He knew sections "to be unnecessary," and Hadfield's request "only intended by him to fatigue me by throwing difficulties in my way. These I stated, but by the Board attending to his representations I was under the necessity of complying with their wish to satisfy him. I drew the section of the whole accordingly." Actually, in his November 17, 1795, letter written when the board and president were trying to reconcile Hadfield and Hoban, Thornton volunteered to make all drawings needed, and there is no evidence that he did.
Indeed, according to Thornton, Hadfield made his design because he saw that Thornton and Hoban were undoing Hallet's mistakes and restoring Thornton's original design. Hadfield mistook that as an invitation to suggest design changes. Thornton added the otherwise uncorroborated story that after quitting in late June 1796, Hadfield got his job back only after apologizing for attacking Thornton's plan, admitting his envy and vicious motives and promising to follow Thornton’s orders. Thornton did not make a fair copy of his draft and send it to the secretary of state.(27)
Thornton was comfortable making broad claims in drafts of never sent letters and to correspondents in England about his architectural genius. However, face to face, he celebrated his amateur status. At the end of May 1798, a young Polish poet, Count Julian Niemcewicz, came to celebrate America. He toured the federal city and met its leading men. Law told him to see Hadfield who showed him the Capitol. Then Niemcewicz met Thornton. He left this impression in a diary style memoir: Thornton "told me himself that it is not long since he had begun to study architecture and it was while he was taking lessons that he made his plan of the Capitol. Should one be surprised that it is bad? In building an edifice so costly and so important could they not have brought over one of the more celebrated architects of Europe, or at least asked them for a plan?"(28)
While in the city, the Polish count had gravitated toward Law and the General both in the city and at Mount Vernon. It seemed that neither of them vouched for Thornton's genius as an architect. Thornton likely didn't sense that because upon their moving to the city, the Thorntons were accepted in the highest society. The General paid them visits and invited them to Mount Vernon where they were esteemed by the General's family, especially the Thomas Laws and Thomas Peters. The General and Law would both build houses on Capitol Hill. Throughout the 20th and into the next century, the consensus grew that Thornton must have designed them.Footnotes for Chapter Ten:
1. GW's diary 15 March 1797; Harris p. 584;
2. Walker to GW, 24 January 1797; Law to GW 4 February 1797,
4. Ridout pp. 35ff; Latrobe Journal p. 22;
5. Law to Commissioners, Feb. 6, 1797;
6. Dolley Madison to Hannah Gallatin 29 December 1814; Daily National Intelligencer 22 April 1816.
7. Tunnicliff diary April 1797, John Nicholson reels; Bryan, History of National Capital, vol. 1. p. 304 (Google books); Baltimore Advertiser 19 April 1797; Am. Turf, vol. 1, March 1830, p.325 (click link for download); John Hervey, History of Racing America 1665-1865, vol. 2 (1944); For cost of lot see Ridout fn. 4 p. 130; Tayloe family legend credits the Georgetown merchant Benjamin Stoddert for selling the lot to Tayloe. He was not in the chain of ownership of Lot 8 in Square 170, In Memoriam p. 150;.
8. for Potatoes see Washington Federalist 8 December 1802, p. 1.
9. Kamoie, Laura, Irons in the Fire; Cohen pp. 114-6; American Turf Register, vol. 2, pp. 323ff, 376; Maryland Gazette 18 October 1792.
10. WT to J.B. Thomason, 29 November 1792, Chapter Four footnote #19; Commrs. to Tunnicliff 8 November 1797;
11. Burnes Papers 15 May 1797, Burnes to Commrs. re dividing lots. The Commissioners assigned all the lots in the square to Burnes, see Surdocs record book; For WT's lots see Notice for a Marshal's sale in National Intelligence 4 July 1820; for warrant see Morris v. Morris, p. .
12. Mrs. Thornton's diary, p. 102;
13. Cranch to Morris, February 1797, HSP. SurDoc image Record Book Square 74
14. Cranch, William to John Adam 17 March 1797;
15. WT to Fell 5 October 1797, Harris p. 418.
16. Commrs to Hadfield, 18 November 1797; Lovering to Commrs 26 November 1797; Commrs to Adams, 25 November 1797.Commrs. records.
17.WT to Fell 5 October 1797, Harris pp. 418-20; for more on
Provini see Smith, Morris's Folly, p. 116; WT to Fothergill, 10 October
1797, Harris pp. 424-27;
18. Volney to Jefferson 19 July 1797; Volney to WT 13 aout 1797, Harris p. 416.
19. Hadfield to Commrs, 2 November 1797, Commrs. records;
20. Hadfield to Commrs, 3 January 1798, Commrs. records; WT to Commrs. 9 January 1798, Harris, pp.430-1.
21.Latrobe Journal p.189; PP. Glover Park History "Conrad Schwarz" . King map, LOC.
22. GW to Commrs. 29 January 1797;
1790 Federal Census for Charleston;Purcell to Commrs. 7, 12, and 20 March 1798; Commrs Proceedings 13
March 1799; Hadfield to Commrs., 10 March 1798, Commrs. records; White to WT, 17 March 1798, Papers of William Thornton
23. White to Commissioners 8 & 20 March 1798, Harris pp. 440ff.
24. Commrs. to White 27 March 1798; Petition from stone cutters 17 April 1798, commrs. records; Commrs to Pickering 25 June 1798, Harris, Papers of William Thornton, pp. 462-4; White to GW 20 February 1798;
25.Hoban letter to editor,
Washington Federalist 27 October 1808.
26. Commrs to Adams 8 June 1798, commrs. records; Commrs to Pickering, 25 June 1798, Harris, Papers of William Thornton, pp. 462-4.
27. WT to Pickering 23-25 June 1798 draft;
28. Niemcewicz, Julian U., Under Their Vine and Fig Tree: Travels in America, 1797-99, pp. 77-8.
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