Chapter Twelve: On the heights of Mount Chimborazo

 

The Doctor Examined, or Why William Thornton Did Not Design the Octagon House or the Capitol

by Bob Arnebeck

Table of Contents

I am revising this chapter

Chapter Twelve: On the heights of Mount Chimborazo

Capitol in 1800

In a brief memoir of her husband written just after his death in 1828, Mrs. Thornton regretted his embracing "a greater variety of sciences" because it prevented him from attaining what he truly wanted. She credited him for genius in many fields - "philosophy, politics, Finance, astronomy, medicine, Botany, Poetry, painting, religion, agriculture, in short all subjects by turns occupied his active and indefatigable mind." She concluded that "had his genius been confined to fewer subjects, had he concentrated his study in some particular science, he would have attained Celebrity."(30)

He would have challenged what she wrote. He simply knew too much and could have done so much to have his genius confined to fewer subjects. He also simply made things up in order to flatter his kaleidoscopic vanity. He arrived with the Laws the day after the General died. He  later claimed that since the weather was "very cold," and that the body "remained in a frozen state for many days," he urged the family to take advantage of that and "attempt his restoration in the following manner. First to thaw him in cold water, then to lay him in blankets, and by degrees and by friction give him warmth, and to put in activity the minute blood vessels, at the same time to open a passage to the lungs by the trachaea, and to inflate them with air, to produce an artificial respiration and to transfuse blood into him from a lamb.... But, I was not seconded in this proposal...."

However, judging by Thomas Jefferson's temperature readings at Monticello where it is usually not markedly warmer, the weather at Mount Vernon was not that cold. On December 15 at Monticello, it was 41 at 4 pm, 36 on the 16th and 41 on the 17th. It was cold the day he was buried on the 18th, only 22 at 4pm at Monticello. Thornton's story contradicts what he actually said to the mourners. Tobias Lear wrote in his diary that he wanted to delay the burial so more members of the family could attend, but Drs. Craik and Thornton insisted that because of the inflammatory nature of Washington's illness, there could be no delay in his burial. In that day, it was thought that death did not still the corrupting powers of some diseases. Thornton's memoir was written as if intended for publication in England but evidently was never sent.

In her memoir, Mrs. Thornton did not mention architecture or the steamboat. Since he never signed a manifest or set a schedule, his interest in the steamboat was purely architectural. Likely she didn't mention architecture because from 1792 architecture became an obsession. Only breeding thoroughbreds and liberating South America concentrated his energies as much as architecture did. But most of that energy was expended by revising his memories. 

On June 2, 1802, Madison hired him to be the one State Department clerk who would process patent applications. All Thornton had to do was pass on the $30 application fee to the Treasury, fill out a patent form for the signatures of the Secretary of State and President, file away the application and a description of the invention, and if possible, retain a model. Thornton did not have to verify that the invention was both useful and novel. The applicant signed an oath that it was. The salary was very high for a clerk but not for a federal officer, only $1400. After 8 years of government service, he took a 12.5% cut in salary. But the president also appointed him a Commissioner of Bankruptcy for the District of Columbia and calculated that Thornton would make $600 a year in fees. (Thornton later claimed that out of pity for bankrupts, he never asked for fees.)(1)

From his perch as the patent clerk, Thornton immediately sensed possibilities. There are two drafts in his papers of letters written and presumably sent to Dr. Fell. The one written in 1797 celebrated his Capitol design but didn't mention his work with the steamboat company. The one written in June 1802 glorified his work on the steamboat which predated his Capitol design:  "I engaged in constructing a steamboat capable of carrying 150 passengers and made it go eight miles an hour through dead water...." He doesn't mention Fitch and blames the company's failure on his orders not being obeyed. As he left for Tortola, he had told the company's board members not to make any changes in the boat. As he put it to Fell, he had to work against "wind, tide and ignorance." He overcame the first two but "the last is an overwhelming flood."

For the moment he did nothing about the steamboat. Fitch had committed suicide in 1798. His steamboat patent expired in 1805. He had favored Thornton in his will but others as well. Anyway, Thornton wouldn't want to claim his rights through another's patent. For the moment, his design of the Capitol remained much more important to him. He would give himself patents for the steamboat after 1809.

At the close of the summer 1802, he and his ladies spent time with the president at Monticello. There is no evidence that they discussed the Capitol as they rusticated together. At some time, he gave the president a copy of his floor plan. The president asked where committee rooms would be in the South Wing, and Thornton provided another floor plan with the rooms drawn in just outside the colonnade that was the only feature drawn inside the large rectangle. He had no reason to think that Jefferson did not think the best of Thornton and the general outlines of his Capitol design.

Then in October 1802, just before congress returned for its second session in the city, the president, who got his exercise by riding around town on horseback, became alarmed. He wrote to Claxton: "Observing that the roof of the Representatives chambers has sunk in the middle, that the walls are cracked in several places and pressing out from the perpendicular, I think it necessary that the cause should be examined into by good & experienced persons...." He mentioned Hadfield and Blagden, but not Thornton, Hoban and Lovering. The next day, the experts blamed the roof "which presses the walls outward," and recommended buttressing the walls. No one in the city had yet built an oval roof.(8)

A week after the experts made their report, on November 2, 1802, Jefferson asked Benjamin Latrobe to come the city. The president wanted to put most of the US Navy's frigates in dry docks along the Eastern Branch and wanted Latrobe to design and build them. That was a cost-cutting measure. With ships on land and their captains only getting half pay, money saved could pay down the national debt. Latrobe drew elaborate plans but congress tabled the idea.(9)

The president liked working with Latrobe who shared several drawings for the aborted project. In 1803, the president responded to legislation to build the South Wing of the Capitol by appointing Latrobe "Surveyor of the Public Buildings." Problems with Thornton's elliptical room might not have prompted the president to call for Latrobe. However, one of the first things Latrobe did was report on the condition of the work so far. He noted that the room seemed to be "intended for the permanent basement of the elliptical colonnade" He found that foundation poorly laid and "wholly unfit to carry the weight of the colonnade." He hired a contractors to take down the walls, and the president checked on that operation because he thought it was taking too long.

He talked to Thornton before writing his report and in it attested to his "talent." Then he criticized the workmanship and design of North Wing and ridiculed the South Wing. But he stopped short of demeaning the Capitol: "The Senate chamber independent of its slight construction and badness of workmanship is otherwise a handsome room, and if justice should be done to the vestibule in the execution, Europe will not be able to exhibit a more magnificent public Saloon. It will be worthy of the intention of the building."(10)

Meanwhile, Latrobe at least met Hadfield. Given that he in effect took the position Hoban had held, and also inspected the President's house, he likely didn't mix with those who thought Thornton a "fribbling quack architect." He was also frequently away from the city. However, as he took his measure of Thornton, he balanced his personal liking for the man and respect for his multiforious activities with his distress at his talents as an architect. He described one of the the details of what remained of the temporary House chamber as more evidence of "Thornton' stupid genius." Within a year, his growing unease at all Thornton had done or supervised at the Capitol crystalized as a reflection of the same impositions Hallet and Hoban suffered. Thornton didn't speak the language of an architect. There were no detailed drawings. 

Both the president and Thornton gave Latrobe a copy of the Capitol floor plan. In a memoir written years later, Latrobe recalled his reaction: "They were copies of each other and both perfectly useless; neither of them agreed with the work as founded or carried up, and there were no details whatever. In the superintendent's office no drawings existed." The president did not give Latrobe the plan with committee rooms added until 1805. Evidently, he forgot he had it. 

The president promised to talk to Thornton about, as Latrobe put it, "objectionable parts of his plan." Latrobe decided not to wait. He thought matters with Thornton about the Capitol's design could be adjusted amicably. In 1798, while passing through the federal city on his way between building a bank in Philadelphia and a prison in Richmond, Latrobe visited Thornton, saw his East elevation and allowed that he thought it one of the most notable designs of that era. In 1804, he thought Thornton would understand that he had his best interests at heart. For two years they had been friends. In 1802, the president had invited them both to the same dinner along with the Madisons and a few other notables. During the city's social season the Latrobes enjoyed being entertained by the Thorntons. 

In social situations, Thornton talked about all manner of things. He seemed to have other consuming interests that would take his mind off the Capitol. Other than his Patent Office work, he offered himself as a public intellectual. A Baltimore physician had the portion of his 1800 letter to Jefferson that discussed yellow fever printed in one of that city's newspapers. Thornton returned to slavery as a topic. In 1803, the government swelled the national debt by buying Louisiana from the France for $15 millions. In 1804, Thornton published a 24 page letter that proposed going into to debt to buy all the country's slaves, putting them to work on canals and roads, and then freeing them in the outer reaches of the newly acquired territory, thus keeping the races separated forever.(12) He also amused the city's politicians by offering "a new confederate system of Government for the United States." On the back burner was his plan for "an universal system of education; the result of which in his opinion would be to produce in fifty years time a greater number of ingenious and learned men in the United States, than in all the world besides."(AA)

However, during a brief encounter at the Patent Office, Latrobe found that Thornton had not forgotten the Capitol. He told him "that no difficulties existed in his plan, but such as those that were made by those too ignorant to remove them...." On February 28, 1804, Latrobe sent a damning report on the state of the Capitol to a House committee: "The most indisputable evidence was brought before me to prove that no sections or detailed drawings of the building existed excepting those that were made from time to time by Messrs. Hallet and Hadfield for their own use in the direction of the work."(11) Thornton sent a letter to Latrobe couched in terms that generally served as a prologue to a duel: "I am sorry to be obliged to declare that your Letter to the Committee is, as it respects me, not only ungentlemanly but false." Latrobe scrambled to defuse the situation. He joked about a duel and complimented Thornton for his ideas about slavery. Thornton confirmed in a letter to Latrobe that some months ago he had been prepared to take a dispute to the field. In 1808, he would claim in a newspaper diatribe that he had challenged Latrobe to a duel.

Ironically, at the same time, while away from the city, Latrobe wrote to his assistant John Lenthall and fumed about a senator's proposal to save money by stopping work on the Capitol,  moving congress into the President's house, and the president into a private house. Latrobe observed that "there is absolutely not a house in Washington into which he might go, excepting Mr. Tayloe's." If Thornton had designed the house would the feud between Second and First Architects of the Capitol have raged for almost a decade?(BL to Len 28 March 1804 p. 463) Latrobe might not have impugned Thornton's pretensions as an architect. With the realization of an innovative house design, Thornton might have decided that Latrobe's putting semi-circles at the short ends of a rectangular room was homage enough to his genius to assure his fame as Author of the Capitol.

Even though Latrobe doubted that Thornton's incompetent design was of any use to Hallet and Hadfield, his impugning Thornton and his plan raised the status of that plan both to contemporaries and posterity. At the same time, Latrobe was stunned by the power of the "original ideas of Doctor Thornton." Their enduring commitment to those ideas saved Washington and Jefferson from seeming to be complete fools for being taking in by Thornton's contest winning design. Both presidents also had feared that if congress got the impression that the plan for the Capitol was not settled then congress would get involved and make its own plan. In a letter to Lenthall, Latrobe vented his spleen: "when once erected the absurdity can never be recalled and the public explanation can only amount to this that one president was blockhead enough to adopt a plan, which another another was fool enough to retain, when he might have altered it."(13)

Latrobe by Peale

Latrobe had to make annual reports on his progress to congress,  which members could verify visually when they convened in the fall and until the adjourned in the spring. In the fall of 1806, Latrobe also sent a special "private letter" giving more personal details of problems he faced, one of which was the design contest that Thornton won. He pointed out that while popular, contests attract amateurs who know nothing about building. In the fall  of 1807, as the House moved into its new chamber, the editor of the National Intelligencer asked Latrobe to describe the South Wing. He was gracious in giving some credit to Thornton but he also had much good to say about Hadfield.

On January 1, 1805, Thornton responded to Latrobe's 1804 report to congress with a printed letter "To the members of the House of Representatives replying to criticisms of Benjamin H. Latrobe on the Capitol." In it, Thornton made much of Latrobe complimenting his plan when he first saw it: "....he never saw any plan of a building beside his own that he would deign to build.... I must own that I can not easily conceive why previous to this appointment I should hear nothing but approbation of my plan and after his appointment nothing but condemnation."(15) But he has the compliment coming in 1802 and claimed Hoban as witness. In his journal, Latrobe described his meeting Thornton and his enthusiasm for Thornton's plan in 1798.

The witnesses that he summoned to prove that his design of South Wing could be built were anonymous: "It has been deemed practicable by very skillful and practical architects and I have never heard it disputed by other than himself." As for drawing sections, he mocks the idea that Hallet could have drawn one because he never superintended the building. The only section extant is attributed to Hallet. Referring to Hadfield, Thornton wrote: "the other did not make a single section that I ever heard of, but requested sections of me, which I drew, of which Mr. Munroe informs me he had informed Mr. Latrobe." However, Murnoe was not the board's clerk when Hadfield made his request, and Thornton artfully verifies his claim by merely offering evidence that someone else remembered his making the claim. He doesn't explain what happened to the sections he drew, let alone produce them.

Thornton effectively employed a typical approach to turning a memoir into a polemic. Surrounded by other men seemingly seeking the same goal, only he understood and did what needed to be done. Unlike in his 1797 letters, he did not celebrate his defeating envious rivals. Hallet and Hadfield were geniuses, and Hadfield offered some minor improvements. But, they simply didn't understand. The old board had asked Thornton to superintend the construction of the Capitol. He trusted Hallet and then had no difficulty correcting his mistakes. He made sure that Hadfield didn't make any. However, Latrobe let misinformation motivate his scorn for Thornton obviously for his own advantage.

At that time, there was a published contradiction of Thornton's 1805 claim that the General told him to and he did restore his design. In 1806, Samuel Blodget published his 226 page opus Economica, the first American tome on economics. Along with pages of valuable statistics, he included a brief discussion of the City of Washington. Blodget was familiar with Thornton's original design. He had studied it at the request of the first board of commissioners and found it wanting. In his book, he lauded and tempered Thornton's Capitol design: "For this truly sublime and beautiful building, Dr. William Thornton received the premium; but as it has undergone some changes, by deviations agreeably to taste... of the several ingenious gentlemen who have superintended the work, we know not how much the architect will disown." Two years later, Thornton would disown everything Latrobe built and try to destroy his reputation.

On March 3, 1807, at the end of the short session, according the editors of Latrobe's collected letters, Thornton distributed the "Index to my Private Letter & C." in which Thornton aped Latrobe's writing style and arrogance in order to ridicule Latrobe's "Private Letter." He would explain in his next published attack on Latrobe that "his reports to congress are full of miscalculations and misrepresentations, some of which have been explained by an 'Index to his Private Letter.'" In the Index, he had Latrobe making light of his mistakes, failing to credit Thornton, and expressing contempt for General Washington who need not be entombed under the dome because "he was not higher in the scale of creation than some other great men or myself."

That attack was more of an amusement than a polemic. Glenn Brown make much of his 1805 letter, but nothing of the Index, nor is there any known reaction to it by contemporaries. Thornton change in tactics probably reflected his disenchantment with the president. In the summer of 1806, Thornton wrote a letter to Madison sounding an alarm for the fate of the Capitol dome. He cited an example of what must be done. He claimed that in 1794, President Washington had personally banished Hallet after he tried to change Thornton's design of the Capitol. That described something that had never happened which didn't prevent Thornton from applying that lesson to defeat a threat that didn't exist: "Mr. Latrobe, as if determined to oppose every thing previously intended has carried up a large block of building on the very foundation intended to be taken up, by which the Dome is so encroached on that the part already carried up on the north side will be useless. I am confident the President could never have permitted such a deviation from the original Intention if it had been made known to him. I think it my Duty to mention it now before it be too late to prevent its progress."

Thornton knew that Madison would forward the letter to the president because they both would be at their Virginia seats. In the summer of 1805, Thornton and his wife and mother-in-law had visited them both when Thornton returned after inspecting and purchasing North Carolina gold lands for a company he had formed in Washington that would make every investor rich. Madison sent on Thornton's letter to the president and described it as "disclosing the perturbation excited in his mind, by some of the operations of Mr. la Trobe." 

Jefferson took Thornton's letter more seriously and replied to Madison: "If Dr. Thornton’s complaint of Latrobe’s having built inconsistently with his plan of the middle part of the capitol be correct, it is without my knolege, & against my instructions. For altho’ I consider that plan as incapable of execution, yet I determined that nothing should be done which would not leave the question of it’s execution free." That is to say, nothing should be done to preclude Thornton and congress from thinking that his plan would be carried out even though both Jefferson and Latrobe knew the plan was "incapable of execution."(16)

Latrobe 1806 drawing of his idea for finished Capitol

Mrs. Thornton kept a journal during their 1806 trip to North Carolina, but didn't mention any topic of conversation at Monticello. How Jefferson replied to Thornton's letter is unknown, but Latrobe was not banished and Thornton soon made clear that he was an anti-administration Federalist.

In his December 1807 description of the South Wing in the pro-administration National Intelligencer, Latrobe gave Thornton credit for his design but hammered the theme that he was not a trained architect: "it must be confessed he has, in his design, exhibited talents which a regular practical education, and a practical knowledge of architecture would have ripened into no common degree of excellence...." In his critiques of what had already been built, Latrobe blamed Thornton for every troublesome design feature. He complimented Hadfield: "His exquisite taste appears in many parts of the North wing, particularly in the introduction of the impost tablature which crowns the basement story and gives an harmonious character to the whole mass which it could not have otherwise possessed." He added that his job building the South Wing would have been easier and the interior even better if he had not been constrained by its exterior having to match the North Wing's.(18)

Thornton found the condescension and insults intolerable. He attacked Latrobe in the April 27, 1808, Washington Federalist, the anti-administration newspaper. Thornton first addressed Hadfield's supposed contributions with an avuncular tone. Yes, the young architect made some minor changes, but as for what Latrobe claimed he did, Thornton still had the sketch of "the Guilloche" that was cut "before his arrival here." No one disputed him on that but it bears noting that in October 1795 when Hadfield urged the advantages of not having a basement story, Thornton's long November letter to the president defending the basement did not mention the guilloche, which was the narrow ban of braided stone work that would mark a line between the basement and first story. Nor was there any mention of a drawing of same. Evidently, Thornton found words and drawings to defend his design well after the element of it in question was built. 

In 1808, he eloquently explained the Classical influences that informed a feature Latrobe scorned. Then with thrusts in the sharpest early 18th century style of Steele and Swift, Thornton tried to destroy Latrobe. Why does he go against the wish of General Washington to have Thornton's design built: revenge! "...for that great man was asked by a very respectable gentleman now living, why he did not employ Mr. Latrobe: 'because I can place no confidence in him whatever-' was the answer." Thornton also ridiculed every decoration in the South wing: an eagle looked like an Egyptian ibis, Liberty on an eagle looked like Leda and the swan, country people mistook an eagle on the frieze of an entablature "for the skin of an owl, such as they have seen nailed on their barn doors." He ridiculed the echoes in the House chamber. He dismissed Latrobe as a "carver of chimney pieces in London" who came to America a "missionary of the Moravians." Thornton attacked other buildings Latrobe had designed and his gate at the Navy Yard.

Then he returned to the avuncular tone. Thornton defended his own standing as an architect, not by  revealing other buildings that he had designed, but by striking grand chords:

I travelled in many parts of Europe, and saw several of the masterpieces of the ancients. I have studied the works of the best masters, and my long attention to drawing and painting would enable me to form some judgment of the difference of proportions. An acquaintance with some of the grandest of the ancient structures, a knowledge of the orders of Architecture, and also of the genuine effects of proportion furnish the requisites of the great outlines of composition. The minutiae are attainable by a more attentive study of what is necessary to the execution of such works, and the whole must be subservient to the conveniences required. Architecture embraces many subordinate studies, and it must be admitted is a profession which requires great talents, great taste, great memory. I do not pretend to any thing great, but must take the liberty of reminding Mr. Latrobe, that physicians study a greater variety of sciences than gentlemen of any other profession.... The Louvre in Paris was erected after the architectural designs of a physician, Claude Perrault, whose plan was adopted in preference to the designs of Bernini, though the latter was called from Italy by Louis the 14th.(19)

Recall that Thornton landed on continental Europe at the end of December 1783 at the earliest and returned to Britain by mid-August 1784. Based on a watercolor, biographers also credit him with a trip to the Alps during that 8 month period. 

In his immediate reply, Latrobe didn't bother to probe into Thornton's background. Instead, he defended his own background as a Moravian, and described his relations with George Washington. But he couldn't resist smearing Thornton as "a calumniator who is the subject of ridicule, of pity, or of contempt to all who know him..... a man too feeble for personal chastisement, and too ignorant, despicable and vain for argumentative refutation."

Thornton's response came a few days later. He credited Ferdinando Fairfax for Washington's devastating assessment of Latrobe. Then he further smeared Latrobe in a style reminiscent of British farces: "The late Moll Turner who lived between Havre de Grace and Baltimore, a woman so infamous in character, that the Poissardes of Paris would have appeared as vestals in comparison, was never outmatched in blackguardism, except by Mr. Latrobe, and it is suspected that this broke her heart,--" Then he ascended the heights:"if I had been so reprehensible a character as he represents, I should hardly have been appointed to the honorable office I had under General Washington, and have received letter of approbation on his retiring from public life, nor should I have been appointed and continued in other respectable offices by his two successors...." He closed by revealing that he challenged Latrobe to a duel in 1804 but received no answer. Finally, he put a couplet under his name: "Only five feet eight; limbs straight;/ and about one hundred and sixty weight." Latrobe was six feet two.(20)

In a May 28, 1808,  letter to a friend, Latrobe opined that Thornton "has miserably fallen in public estimation of late, but I think the worst that can be said of him is that he is a Madman from vanity, incorrect impecuniary conduct, and official intrigue from Poverty."(21) Judging from Mrs. Thornton's notebook, Thornton did not fall in public estimation. The day his attack came out in the Washington Federalist, the Thorntons had the editor of the Intelligencer and his wife for dinner. The Thorntons had hired a man to manage their farm and their slaves brought all that might be needed for a festive dinners, teas, and now and then a ball. Thornton continued to have social visits with the Madisons and the president.

However, his poverty was real, had ramifications, but could be managed. Liquidity depended on the give and take of banks and judges and the efficacy of powers-of-attorney sent to Tortola and to England where his Lancaster properties were sold. In 1803, he had secured Blodget's $10,000 bail necessitated by the lottery winner proving in court that the Grand Hotel was $21,000 short of being finished. In 1807, just when there was a two year hiatus in payments from Tortola, Blodget fled to Philadelphia leaving Thornton responsible for his bail and debts. Also, a dispute over gold lands threatened Thornton with jail until his mother-in-law posted bail. Latrobe's accusation of "official intrigue" referred to Thornton's relatively well known attempts to bully inventors into giving him a cut of any royalties they might make. 

Latrobe didn't let Thornton's poverty stop him from suing Thornton for libel. Architects in that day were not well paid. However, even though Latrobe was often short of money, he did not tell his lawyer not to ask for damages. Both lawyers delayed the case as much as they could to cool tempers. In 1813, just before the verdict, Thornton offered all his city property for sale. By that time, he had bought the F Street house which was the only property of value that they owned. Latrobe won and the jury gave him one cent in damages. Thornton trumpeted that meager reward as proof that he had won the case. 

Despite Thornton's spirited defense of his plan most contemporaries recognized Latrobe as the architect and organizing genius behind the building's growth. That wasn't necessarily because Latrobe was more persuasive or more professional. In 1805, James Hoban began attacking Latrobe in the press. He had impugned the roof of the President's house. Hoban couldn't resist lampooning the often absent and seemingly always arrogant architect. Lovering was among those who attested to the quality of work done when Hoban was in charge. In the fall of 1808, Lenthall was crushed to death when a stone arch in the North Wing gave way. Latrobe suspected foul play but offered no proof. The death reminded all that men built the Capitol and that Latrobe was the man in charge. Thornton had never risked anything in the way builders had to and few knew of the ideas of Thornton. Even the incoming president, his oldest friend in the city, turned his back on the American Perrault.  

Madison and his wife were anxious to refurbish and open the President's house to the public. They both worked well with Latrobe who proved an apt decorator. In 1810, congress gave him enough money to move the Senate chamber from the basement to the first floor of the North Wing. After the British army burned the Capitol, President Madison hired Latrobe to restore it. Thornton kept his peace but may have found another way to undermine Latrobe. The president appointed Tench Ringgold as one of three commissioners to oversee restoration. He was also Thornton's close friend. Latrobe soon wrote to the president about insults and pressure from one of the commissioners:

On the slightest occasions I have been told that there were plenty of architects ready to take my place, that I had been appointed from motives of charity to my family, that, if I meant to continue in their service, I must obey their orders implicitly, even when contrary to those given to me by the Committee of the Senate;... I had been told indeed by one of them, that my pride should be taken down before they had done with me,....

Although Thornton had sensed the need in 1797, not until 1818 did a printed image of his Capitol design become available, on the bottom right hand corner of Robert King's 1818 map of the city. That didn't prevent the publisher of the Washington Gazette from still getting it wrong. He put an image of the future Capitol on the newspaper's masthead and claimed it was  Hadfield's design "as originally approved of by George Washington." Hadfield quickly wrote a letter correcting the editor. The dome with an attic depicted in the vignette was his, and it was "more consistent with good architecture." But the two wings of the building in the engraved "vignette" were "acknowledged" to be Thornton's design.

However, there was a degree of equivocation in the way Hadfield credited Thornton. He did not write that Thornton designed the Capitol's two wings as depicted on the masthead, only that he is "is welcome to the credit of the design." In his letter, he also noted what he had done. The lack of "galosh ornaments" leaving plain imposts with molding was his contribution to the exterior of the North Wing. In "furnishing the practical working drawings of all the cornices, and other parts of the exterior of the North Wing from the plinth to the top of the ballustrades...," he was only doing his job.

Thornton didn't challenge what Hadfield wrote even though it made Thornton seem less of an architect than the Author of the Capitol might have wished. It was not as if, since 1798, Hadfield had sunk into obscurity and need not be challenged. He had practiced as an architect and would soon win the design contest for City Hall with a plan featuring a dome and grand columns. In 1822, Jefferson wrote to Hadfield's sister that her brother was "much respected in Washington, and, since the death of Latrobe, our first Architect, I consider him as standing foremost in the correct principles of that art...."(35)

In November 1819, congress returned to the restored Capitol, Thornton was among several experts that were asked for advice to solve the acoustical problems in the House chamber. In the draft of a long letter, he recommended curtains and that they be soaked in arsenic so as not to be devoured by moths. Then he attacked Latrobe for changing his ellipses to semi-circles and attacked whatever Latrobe's replacement, Charles Bulfinch, had done or planned to do. In his history of the Capitol, William Allen strung together "Thornton’s gifts of sarcasm and exaggeration:" Skylights were “borrowed from some carpenter’s shop, for there never was so mean a window exhibited before in any public building on the face of the globe.” Dwarf columns belonged in London’s Newgate prison “where the convicts are executed wholesale, for never were such galleries seen in any building of dignity and national grandeur.” As for the whole, it recalled “the old fashioned Tea Canisters, Bohea at one end, Green Tea at the other, and in the center the large sugar dish.” Allen concluded that "Thornton’s letter made it clear that his bitterness had not been soothed by time, and his pretensions to architectural authority were as delusional as ever." It bears noting that his East Front also resembled the "old fashion tea canisters," which suggests that his 1795 West Front with a vaulted colonnade,  unlike a sugar dish, was his true plan for the Capitol. If sent, his letter to Lane was not printed in the newspapers or congressional documents. There were serious controversies that marked the change in command. Bulfinch and others deprecated Latrobe's plan to support the dome which forced Latrobe to publish a vindication.(36)

Thanks to their becoming next door neighbors, Thornton had an extraordinary relationship with John Quincy Adams who, in 1818, returned from almost a decade of diplomatic missions in Europe. After he moved into the White House, Adams remained Thornton's friend. Adams kept a detailed diary. In 1819, when he visited the Patent Office, then under his purview as secretary of state, Thornton told him about how he invented the steamboat. But judging from the diary, he never told him the story about how he designed the Capitol. Adams never noted Thornton mentioning the Capitol. As president, he had to approve the design of the frieze on the pediment to be raised over the portico of the East front. Thornton had put Hercules atop that feature, but did not offer Adams any ideas. The president then made a design.(37)

His biographers suggest that Thornton's duties at the Patent Office crowded out his concerns with other matters. The number patent applications annually increased and while by law Thornton did not have to verify that the applicant's invention was both novel and useful, as a scientific gentleman in a country blessed with free speech, he felt obliged to call out frauds. In December 1804, Senator John Quincy Adams checked on a patent for a constituent. Adams wrote in his diary that Thornton explained that "he thought it not a new invention— Which indeed he says is the case of almost all the applications for Patents— And others are for things impossible." In light of the low salary, he also felt entitled to give himself patents and to bargain for a share of royalties earned by patents that he improved during the patenting process or that he had anticipated with his own ideas.

For example, in her 1808 notebook for August 6, Mrs. Thornton jotted down: "The Hawkins won't stand to their agreement and are very angry at not getting their patent."(23) In 1811, Thornton delayed giving John H. Hall a patent for a breech loading rife until the young Maine inventor let Thornton share the patent as co-inventor. His 1792 letter to the King's gunsmith discussed the principle. An English patent stole his idea from which he did not benefit. He had a gun made in 1810 but lost the drawings. Hall saw that Thornton's rifle was useless but was advised to be agreeable and avoid attacks from Thornton.(24)

At the same time as Thornton successfully bullied Hall, he badgered Robert Fulton who came to Washington to promote national defense with "Torpedo War," as he would call his book published in 1810. He also applied to patent his steamboat which had made successful round trips from Manhattan to Albany with an average speed of 4 miles an hour. In January 1809, three days before he submitted the patent, Thornton received his own patent for steamboat improvements, to wit: "...modes of propelling the same by Paddles, or a wheel or wheels at the Stern and improvement in boilers for Steam Engines for the Same...." Fitch's steamboat had a line of paddles on both sides of the boats. Fulton's boat had a paddle wheel.

That having a controlling interest in steamboats would make a man very wealthy was a common illusion of that day. A letter Fulton wrote to Secretary of State Monroe in 1812 described the progression of Thornton's demands: a partnership with Fulton and his financial backer Livingston for equal thirds, then 1/8th of the profits, and finally, he threatened to destroy Fulton's patent through litigation. Thornton didn't shrink from going to the highest power to try to check Fulton. According to his wife's notebook, on the evening of April 11, 1812, Thornton "had a long talk" with the president "respecting Fulton & c." After the meeting, he was bitter and wrote to a friend: "If I had never accepted any Employment under the last & present administration I should I really believe have been many thousand Dollars better in Situation than at present. Man is a very selfish Animal." He added a couplet: "I really think a Friend at Court/Is but a kind of Friend in sport."

Thornton never formed his own company to build steamboats, but several other companies did. The best organized was General Aaron Ogden's. He was a New Jersey politician, who started a steamboat service from his state to New York City. To help Ogden and others attacking Fulton, as well as vindicate Fitch's boat, Thornton published a pamphlet with a curious title: "Short Account of the Origin of Steamboats Written in 1810 and Now Committed to the Press, 1814." That he waited until 1814 to make his case public may reflect his desire to keep open private negotiations with Fulton. However, it wasn't until 1814 that two crucial witnesses who could challenge his claims died. He had found a prominent inventor who attested that Voight, Fitch's principal assistant, told him that Thornton suggested using a paddle wheel. That assistant died in early 1814. A fellow federal bureaucrat attested that while in Paris, he was told by an American consul who was Fitch's agent that in 1793 he had given Fulton a complete set of Fitch's drawings and specifications. That agent died in 1813.

In his pamphlet Thornton explained that Fitch's boat only made 4 miles an hour. Then at his suggestion, it was redesigned it and the boat made 8 miles an hour, and also made a round trip of 80 miles. While there remains no corroborating evidence for that first claim, there are several references to the boat going 7 miles an hour as well as providing a ferry service on the Delaware River. Newspaper noted the 80 miles trip, gave Fitch and Voight. Thornton proved that Fitch's company had a working long before Fulton, but Thornton had more to prove and did it a strange way. He made he seem that by leaving the country, he alone of the principals understood the steamboat:

Finding that the works on board the first boat were not strong enough, we built another, of twenty-five tons burthen, rigged schooner fashion, intended to go to New Orleans, and mount the Mississippi. When the principal parts of the works were prepared, and ready to put on board, the author of this, thinking no mistakes could be made by the company, went to the West Indies, on the 16th of October 1790, to visit his mother for the last time, and expected to find, on his return, the boat ascending the Mississippi, at the rate of at least four miles an hour; but a spirit of innovation having seized some of the company, and their attempts to simplify the machine having ruined it, their unsuccessful endeavors to make it work, subjected them to debts, which obliged them to sacrifice both boats and all the machinery; and on my return, after two years' absence, I found, to my inexpressible grief, the whole of this very valuable scheme ruined. I had only then to wait till the patent taken out from the United States, during my absence, [see No. 1] for the benefit of the company, by Mr. John Fitch, in the year 1791, expired, and to take out a patent for those peculiar improvements which I had invented or suggested....

Fulton died from a lung disease in February 1815. Thornton told Benjamin Ogle Tayloe that his pamphlet killed Fulton. As befitted his ideas about what the Superintendent of Patents Office should do, Thornton continued to supply information about damning inconsistencies and plagiarism in Fulton's patents. But American companies competing with the Fulton company had no interest in Thornton's patents. He looked to South America to find vindication and crafted a story at once heroic, sentimental and tragic.

He was granted a monopoly in Columbia. Any steamboat plying the Magdalena River had to pay him royalties. In 1819, he tried to enlist the aid of the American consul in Brazil for a monopoly in Bahia. He explained that Fitch was "a poor ignorant and illiterate man," and his boat was too slow. Thornton "engaged to make it go at the rate of eight miles an hour within 18 months.... In one year I succeeded." He made plans for a better boat, but he had to visit his mother. When he came back two years later, the company failed and sold everything it owned. Still, Thornton's plans lived on. When Fitch's patent expired, "Mr. Fulton came to America from Europe and began a steam boat with the late Chancellor Livingston. But Mr. Fulton had seen my papers describing the steam boat in the hands of one of Fitch's partners in France to whom I had sent them to take out a patent there.... [Fulton] of course succeeded but without having invented a single improvement. Success however give him not only all the profits but the eclat of the Invention, with those who are not acquainted with the circumstances."

Thornton wrote as if Fulton had not died four years earlier and left his wife with an enormous debt. Fortunately for Thornton's tale, all the other principals were dead. Actually, Fitch was a prolific writer and his papers remain in several libraries from New York City to Washington. If Fulton saw a description of Fitch's boat in Paris, that description was written by Fitch, not written or dictated by Thornton.

To be sure, Thornton turned a virtual sinecure into a venue for scheming, but he did not put his many projects behind him, and certainly not architecture. In May 1808, just at the climax of feud with Latrobe, his wife noted that he drew a plan for his good friend Thomas Peter. Several floor plans with two large oval rooms on the first floor and at least one elevation he drew for Tudor Place in Georgetown are extant. However, he never wrote about the house which, as built, didn't have the oval rooms. The stately colonnade, circumlinear entrance is his. The house was built on the relatively vacant heights of Georgetown and is more a country manor than a townhouse. The modern narrative of his achievements hails its similarity to the Octagon. But it is better grouped with the Lewis house in that it kept him close to the Washington family. Patsy Peter and ----Lewis were sisters and grand daughters of the General's wife. 

Thornton disinclination to write about the private houses he designed may reflect his inability to find similarities between the grand seats of the British, about which much was written, with the modest abodes of the American elite. Or, perhaps he considered projects that brought him closer to his memories of the General a private affair. 

His ability to write about Neo-classical, monumental architecture endured even though he offered no designs or ideas for the second wave of such buildings in the city. In a May 9, 1817, letter, Jefferson asked Thornton to "...set your imagination to work and sketch some designs for us [i.e. the University of Virginia], no matter how loosely with the pen, without the trouble of referring to scale or rule; for we want nothing but the outline of the architecture.... A few sketches, such as need not take you a moment." Jefferson sketched a colonnade linking pavilions along the boundary of a large quadrangle. He wanted the exteriors of the pavilions to show off different aspects of the Classical orders. Obviously, the pavilion exhibiting the Corinthian order would be the most important.

In his reply, Thornton was in his element: "I admire every thing that would tend to give chaste Ideas of elegance and grandeur. Accustomed to pure Architecture, the mind would relish in time no other, and therefore the more pure the better.—I have drawn a Pavilion for the Centre, with Corinthian Columns, and a Pediment." Thornton's reply provides evidence enough for some biographers to credit Thornton for designing buildings on the campus of the University of Virginia. As C. M. Harris puts it, Thornton "most noticeably influenced Jefferson in his design for Pavilion VII...."  However, the challenge Thornton faced was choosing the order and arrangement of the columns and dimensions of the pediment. Thornton made wrong choices. The glory of Corinthian columns was lost in his design. If Thornton's sketch did influence his design, Jefferson never discussed it with Thornton. They did not correspond again until 1821. The cornerstone for Pavilion VII was laid in October 1817 and it had Doric columns.

At the same time that he wrote to Thornton, Jefferson wrote to Latrobe pressing him for ideas. Between June and November 1817, he wrote six more letters about the university project to Latrobe. Today, Pavilion VIII, which has "four massive Corinthian columns," is known as "the Latrobe's Lodge."

In a May 1818 letter to Latrobe, Jefferson regretted that he was  replaced as architect of the Capitol: "I learned with great grief your abandonment of the Capitol. I had hoped that, under your direction, that noble building would have been restored and become a monument of rational taste & spirit.... in the public bui[ld]ings which will be daily growing up in this growing countr[y] [you?] can have no competitor for employ."(38) Latrobe's September 1820 death in New Orleans from yellow fever while working on a waterworks to prevent that scourge put an end to their correspondence.

In January 1821, the last two letters passed between Thornton and Jefferson. The doctor wrote at length but not about architecture. He explained that ever since his university days, well before the French Revolution, he was for revolution, especially against the Spanish crown. There is no evidence of that but by 1807, it became clear which side he was on. In 1807, during the treason trial of former Vice President Aaron Burr, Thornton's role in trying to raise troops for General Miranda, an unsuccessful liberator of Venezuela, was revealed in the proceedings published in the National Intelligencer.  

In 1821, the then 61 years old, Thornton argued that since he had not accepted an offer to join the revolutionary cause in Columbia with the rank of colonel, he was entitled to go on a diplomatic mission for the United States. He knew that country's leaders. Some had visited him in his F Street house. He wanted the former president to use what leverage he had on the current president. There was no chance that James Monroe would appoint Thornton.

In a February 18, 1818, letter to Madison, President Monroe raged that Thornton's Miranda episode had been eclipsed by a dumbfounding report that former Attorney General Richard Rush had supported a plan hatched by Thornton for the government to buy East Florida for $1.5 million from an adventurer named McGregor. Monroe fumed: "Of the absurdity of such a statement, and the impossibility, that Mr Rush, should have warranted it, by any thing on his part, both his character & that of Dr Thornton seem to afford full proof." In his reply, Madison did not impugn Thornton's character, but marveled that anyone could come up with such a stupid idea.

Rather than stare in disbelief at Thornton's schemes, most simply laughed at him.  In 1815, Thornton published his constitution for the union of North and South American republics. He also projected another monumental building. Up in Quincy, Massachusetts, it gave John Adams a good laugh. A friend wrote to the former president about Thornton's "....One Grand Republican Government, to be placed under the surveillance, and legislation, of a Congress of Deputies from all the Cities, and all the States, not only of South, but also of North America, who should hold a permanent sitting on the top of Mount Chimborazo, twenty thousand feet above the level of the Sea;..."Thornton knew the mountain well enough because the Baron von Humboldt had climbed it doing scientific research and then visited Thornton in Washington.(41)

A remembrance of Thornton published in the National Intelligencer shortly after his death in 1828 did not mention his design of the Capitol. He was credited for being one of the city's founders and the first Superintendent of the Patent Office. His eulogist also credited him for his "...early, eager, and disinterested efforts of argument and eloquence which are embodied in his memorials, some of which preceded public opinion, and probably contributed to incline its tardy prudence in favor of Greek liberty and South American Independence..." On the other hand, the board of the American Society for the Colonization of Free Negroes mourned a loss that "must be severely felt by Africa and mankind." Thornton had cheered the society's founding in 1816 and served on its board but never blessed Liberia with one of his slaves. He had eleven in America, and half ownership of 131 slaves in Tortola, 73 females and 58 males who were sold in 1829 for the benefit of his and his step-father's heirs.((42) 43)

The doctor was obsessed with fame and pursued it relentlessly. In a brief memoir of her husband written just after his death, Mrs. Thornton regretted his embracing "a greater variety of sciences" because it prevented him from attaining what he truly wanted. She credited him for genius in many fields - "philosophy, politics, Finance, astronomy, medicine, Botany, Poetry, painting, religion, agriculture, in short all subjects by turns occupied his active and indefatigable mind." She concluded that "had his genius been confined to fewer subjects, had he concentrated his study in some particular science, he would have attained Celebrity."(30)

He would have challenged what she wrote. His vanity, which prompted him to overestimate the importance not only of everything he did, but of everything he once thought he could do. He also simply made things up in order to flatter his kaleidoscopic vanity. The General died on December 14, 1799. He arrived with the Laws the day after. Sometime after 1802, Thornton wrote a memoir of the event. Finding that the weather was "very cold," and that the body "remained in a frozen state for many days," Thornton claimed that he urged the family to take advantage of that and "attempt his restoration in the following manner. First to thaw him in cold water, then to lay him in blankets, and by degrees and by friction give him warmth, and to put in activity the minute blood vessels, at the same time to open a passage to the lungs by the trachaea, and to inflate them with air, to produce an artificial respiration and to transfuse blood into him from a lamb.... But, I was not seconded in this proposal...."

However, judging by Thomas Jefferson's temperature readings at Monticello where it is usually not markedly warmer, the weather at Mount Vernon was not that cold. On December 15 at Monticello, it was 41 at 4 pm, 36 on the 16th and 41 on the 17th. It was cold the day he was buried on the 18th, only 22 at 4pm at Monticello. Thornton's story contradicts what he actually said to the mourners. Tobias Lear wrote in his diary that he wanted to delay the burial so more members of the family could attend, but Drs. Craik and Thornton insisted that because of the inflammatory nature of Washington's illness, there could be no delay in his burial. In that day, it was thought that death did not still the corrupting powers of some diseases, unless the corpse was gripped by a cold spell. The memoir was written as if intended for publication in England but evidently was never sent.

While his design of the Capitol was not mentioned in his obituary, it was in his wife's. She died in 1865, 91 years old. For just over a decade, the city had been focused on the completion of the New Capitol which dwarfed the Old Capitol. Thornton was remembered as the architect of the "original Capitol." That was garbled in her obituary as "the original architect of the Capitol." Then he managed to take over her obituary, written 37 years after his own death, with the improbable claim that "...Mrs. Thornton was the daughter of the unfortunate Dr. Dodd, of London, who was executed for forgery in 1777." According to the obituary, her mother  "emigrated to Philadelphia, under the name of Brodeau, soon after the death of her husband, bringing her daughter with her." She actually came to the city by December 1775 when she advertised the opening of her boarding school. The obituary cited a source for the revelation that Dodd was her father: "It is not believed that she was aware that she was the daughter of Dr. Dodd, although her husband was, and mentioned it to his friend, the late Col. Bomford."(44)

Thornton likely met the colonel in 1808 just before he built the largest mortar in the world. George Bomford died in 1848, but Benjamin Ogle Tayloe picked up the tale for a memoir he wrote in 1863. When Reverend Dodd stretched, Thornton was 18. He also told this story: "when a lad at school he handed his uncle two 5 Pound notes and asked him to select the one better engraved. The uncle selected the counterfeit just made by young Thornton." In an 1819 newspaper essay urging paper currency, Thornton claimed that he had "invented" a test to detect forgeries which also suggests that Thornton well remembered the Rev. Dr. William Dodd. He likely read the lurid coverage at the time of the eccentric profligate known as the "Macaroni Parson" because of his dress. He was famous for his sermons to the fallen women and attendant nobility at London's Magdalen Hospital. Perhaps, he missed coverage of Dodd's wife of 22 years who was taken to the insane asylum after Dr. John Hunter didn't resuscitate his corpse. Thornton probably told the tale, that American historians seem to believe, to explain to his friends why his wife was such an excellent draftsman. Or, miffed at the perception that his wife and mother-in-law had moderated his behavior for the better, he posed as their redeemer who had gave them respectability and  saved them from shame and scandal. (45)

Because a man is a liar does not make him a rascal. Mrs. Brodeau chose him for a son-in-law and lived with him for 33 years. Washington, Jefferson and Madison could weigh his false pretenses. Thornton fancied that he was irreplaceable but they knew that other gentlemen could do his job, even if they couldn't fill his shoes. Measuring Thornton through the eyes of presidents makes sense because he was essentially a courtier and he knew it. Washington appreciated Thornton's commitment to the city. He moved to the district six years before the government. Then the General enjoyed his dog-like loyalty and teaching the pretentious architect how to build a house. Jefferson and Madison situated their friend in the Patent Office despite his problematic tenure as a commissioner and constant harping on grandeur. His omnivorous collection of what then passed for scientific certainties satisfied their epicurean appetite for same. Often ridiculed themselves, Jefferson and Madison tolerated the eccentric court jester that Thornton became. Jefferson tried to work with him on architectural matters but Thornton scorned him. Madison had no interest in architecture and patents. It is likely that his wife Dolley shut down his relationship with a man he enjoyed laughing with more than at. She likely cut the Thorntons because in those perilous times, the nation could not tolerate a loose cannon. Monroe, who reigned for eight years during the so-called Era of Good Feeling, did not suffer fools gladly and had no use for Thornton. 

John Quincy Adams pitied Thornton and the disorder of his latter days, but always smiled at his childlike ardor. Adams once confided in his diary that "Thornton gave us after dinner a perfect surfeit of buffoonery."(46) He acknowledged him as "a Man of learning, ingenuity, wit and humour; well meaning, good-natured, and mainly honest, but without judgment or discretion." Adams' wife saw through the pattern of Thornton's eccentric knack of knowing everything and saw a  man without principals. 

Thornton's contributions to the architecture of the Capitol and city are overblown. The design he brought to Philadelphia would not do and he was coached on how to make one that would. It embodied the ideas of Jefferson, L'Enfant and Hallet. The Capitol would more or less have looked the same in 1829 even if Thornton had not pretended that he was an architect. The solution to problem of fitting a house next to an angled intersection was not solved by Thornton. He did embrace it, but his February 1800 design for Lot 17 was never built. Georgian architecture. His tomb-like, Neo-classical entrance to Tudor Place is his only contribution to residential architecture. Fortunately, that idea of Thornton's never caught on.  

In conclusion, if this examination of Dr. T- does not change the current take on the amateur architect and abiding genius of the nation's capital, the author asks one indulgence. Let future historians be more sympathetic to what Hallet, Hadfield, Hoban, and Latrobe faced at the Capitol thanks to Thornton's vain and poorly informed scorn. As for Lovering, when historians happen into that rarity, an oval sitting room, and think of the Octagon, also remember its architect William Lovering, the "ingenious A" who offered specimens of designs suitable for angles acute or obtuse.

Footnotes for chapter 12:

1. On Patent Office appointment see Dobyns History of the Patent Office, Chapter 7 and Preston, Daniel, "Administration of Patent Office...." Journal of the Early Republic, Vol. 5, No. 3 (Autumn, 1985), pp. 331-353; Jefferson to WT, 10 September 1802; in AMT Papers reel 1 image 123ff, Mrs. Thornton described their visits; on his being a commissioners of bankruptcy see Thornton deposition, 1812 American State Papers Misc, vol.1 p. 193

1. Jefferson to WT  23 April 1800;  WT to Jefferson 7 May 1800; "Extract of a Letter to vice president Thomas Jefferson..." Baltimore Daily Advertiser 23 August 1800; Mrs. Thornton's diary p. 134.

2. Madison to WT 8 August 1801; WT to Madison 16 March 1801, 15 August 1801, 8 September 1801 , Madison to Jefferson 16 September 1801 Founders online;  Harris pp. 560-1, 581, National Intelligencer 8 December 1800; agreement with Voss 26 June 1802. Judging by what impact he had on the newspapers at the time, the builder Nicholas Voss had at least built houses in Alexandria and one on Capitol Hill that he still owned. He sold building materials, owned many acres in Virginia, was comfortable with slavery, and in 1802 held the rank of captain in the Washington militia. There is no reason to think he would be awed by Thornton and his eventually pressing Madison to pay back rent suggests that he was not awed by the secretary of state,

3. Brown 1896; JQA diary, 27 December 1804; Wolcott, Oliver, Administration of John Adams, vol. 2; Baltimore Daily Advertiser 23 August 1800; Mrs. Thornton's Diary 13 October, pp. 201, also pp. 206, 223.

4. WT to Jefferson, 31 December 1800;

5.  Jefferson to Commrs., 2 June 1801;  Jefferson to White, 2 July 1802, reply 13 July 1802.

6. WT to Jefferson WT to Jefferson, 17 April 1802, , Jefferson to WT 23 April 1802. Founders online; Clark, "Dr. and Mrs. Thornton" p.    ; Munroe to Jefferson  15 June 1802.

7. 

8. Jefferson to Claxton, 26 October 1802, Harbaugh et al to Jefferson 27 October 1802;

9. Latrobe to Jefferson, 27 March 1802; Jefferson to Latrobe, 2 November 1802; Latrobe to Jefferson, 9 November 1802, 28 November 1802.

10. Latrobe to Jefferson, 4 April 1803 Enclosure,"Report on the Public Buildings:" Latrobe, Benjamin, The Correspondence and Miscellaneous Papers of, p. 278; fn. to Bryen to Jefferson 16 March 1801; "Hadfield's estimate..." June 1802.

11. Latrobe to Jefferson, 27 February 1804, in Latrobe Journal, p. 190."The Report of the Surveyor of Public Buildings," Latrobe Correspondence pp. 444-5.

12. WT to Latrobe     ; Latrobe to Thornton 28 April 1804; W. T., "Political Economy: Founded in Justice and Humanity, in a letter to a friend"  AA  JQA diary march 5  1804  12 March 1805

13. Latrobe to Lenthall, 8 March 1804, Correspondence p. 458; also see footnote to Jefferson to Lenthall 5 May 1805.

14. Washington Federalist  6 March 1805, p. 2. 

15. Harris, Papers of William Thornton. p. 257; Brown, History of Capitol, new edition,  pp. 113ff

16. for examples of Jefferson's involvement see, Jefferson to Latrobe, 16 January 1805, or 8 September 1805; WT to Madison 6 August 1806, Madison to Jefferson 15 August 1806; Jefferson to Madison, 28 August 1806.

17. Blodget, Economica; a Statistical Manual for the United States, 1806, pp. iii, 167.

18. National Intelligencer, 30 November 1807 p. 1.

19. Washington Federalist, 20 April 1808; Latrobe Correspondence vol. 2 pp. 600ff; Latrobe to Lenthall, 28 March 1804, Correspondence p. 463.

20. Ibid., 30 April 1808, p 2;

21. 7 May 1808, p. 3. Brown, Gordon, Incidental Architect, p. footnote 1, p. 67;  National Intelligencer ad date 14 May 1813; AMT notebook June 24, 1813.

22. WT to Madison, 17 December 1808; Thornton v. Carson's Executor, Google Books; In 1828, after he died, Mrs. Thornton found a letter probably written in 1800. It brought back to her all his tribulations: "Oh my god how unfortunate he was - always involved in losses and disappointments, by the failure and dishonesty of others, he became plunged from one difficulty to another - and his mind accustomed to lawsuits, debt and all its dreadful consequences. His heart was good, his feelings good, his principles good, and yet circumstances which in many cases he could not control, (tho' I acknowledge in some he was imprudent and led away by the plausible representations and smooth faced deception of others) made it appear that he was indifferent in his pecuniary transactions to those principles of honor and strict propriety which ought always be adhered to by a man of honesty and correct education." AMT notebook vol. 4, p. 10.

23. American State Papers Misc. vol 2 p. 193; AMT notebook, volume 3, image 47; Preston, Daniel, "Administration of Patent Office...." Journal of the Early Republic, Vol. 5, No. 3 (Autumn, 1985), pp. 331-353

24. Demerrit, Dwight D., "John H. Hall and the Origin of the Breechloader." American Society of Arms Collector Bulletin, 42; 24-29. National Intelligencer, 25 March 1819, 1 April 1819; see also Dobyns Chapter 8 on Jacob Cist patent.

25. New York State Library "Steamboats on the Hudson" 

26.  WT to Madison, 9 December 1808; 

27. AMT notebook vol. 3 May 13; Clark, "Dr. and Mrs. Thornton", p. 199; Thornton, Short Account of the Origin of Steamboats Written in 1810 and Now Committed to the Press, 1814 ; History of the Patent Office, chapter 9, (Mostly) IP History blog has copy of Fulton's patents; Century Magazine vol. 70, 1909 pp. 832-3 ; The Daily National Journal 4 May 1827 p. 2. Thornton to Steele, 18 April 1812, Papers of John Steele NC Digital Collection page 219.   

28. Thornton, Short Account of the Origin of Steamboats Written in 1810 and Now Committed to the Press, 1814 ; AMT vol. 3 image 181; Annals of Congress, 12th 1st session p. 1324;  Fulton to Madison, 18 March 1813; In 1824, Ogden's case against Fulton's made it to the Supreme Court but not as Ogden originally intended. He caved into the monopoly and one of his partners, Gibbons, sued Ogden. The court embraced the argument of Daniel Webster that the Constitution's commerce clause was overriding and states could not give a monopoly to control commerce on a river. Patents had no bearing on the court's decision; Henry Voight died February 7, 1814, and Aaron Vail died November 21, 1813. Thornton's account appeared in the July 18, 1814, Washington City Gazette. 

29. Westcott, Life of Fitch, p. 404;  Annals of Congress, 14th congress first session, House, March 15, 1816, p. 204; see Duer, William Alexander, "Reply to Mr. Colden's Vindication of the Steamboat Monopoly," 1819. pp. 87; AMT notebook series 4 (1828)  image 11; WT to Henry Hill 20 April 1818, in Clark, "Dr. and Mrs. Thornton" pp. 187-8.

30. Clark, "Dr. and Mrs. Thornton", p. 199.

31. WT to Jefferson, 27 June 1814; several sources claim that WT helped his clerk pack and move the papers to his farm. In her diary, she did not mention that nor did WT in his report on what he did at the time; National Intelligencer 7 September 1814.

32. Georgetown Federal Republican 30 August 1814 p. 3; National Intelligencer 7 September 1814 on-line copy at Dobyns http://www.myoutbox.net/poni1814.htm

33. Journal of Columbia Historical Society, 1916, "Mrs. Thornton's Diary: Capture of Washington" pp. 177-8, 181; Monroe to Hay, 7 September 1814, Papers of James Monroe, University of Mary Washington;Natl. Intelligencer, September 10, 1814 on-line copy at Dobyns; Natl. Intelligencer, 13 & 15 September 1814.

34. American State Papers, Military Affairs vol. 1, p. 569; Howard, Hugh,  Mr. and Mrs. Madison's War, p. 253; WT to Col. WT, 24 June 1815, Gilder Lehrman Institute; WT to Madison 3 March 1817, Founders online.

35. On charity for Latrobe see Latrobe to Madison, 24 April 1816, one of the commissioners then was WT's good friend Tench Ringgold; The Gazette, 8 February 1819 p. 1; Bryan, History of National Capital volume one, pp. 317-8; Hunsberger,  The Architecture of George Hadfield, p. 61; King, Julia, Hadfield, p. 95; TJ to Cosway 2 October 1822.

36. Allen, William, "The Bulfinch Years 1818-1829" History of the United States Capitol, p. 143; Bulfinch Life and Letters p. 215;  The real controversy at that time was between Bulfinch and Latrobe, see Latrobe, Vindication, 1819 .

37. J. Q. Adams diary 26 April 1819; July 17, 1825.

38.  Harris, Charles M, Library of Congress web article "William Thornton 1759-1828:" Jefferson to WT 9 May 1817;  WT to Jefferson, 27 May 1817, Founders online; for Latrobe's suggestions see Latrobe to Jefferson, 24 July 1817; Jefferson to Latrobe, 9 May 1817; Jefferson to Latrobe, 19 May 1818, Founders online.

39. WT to Jefferson, 9 January 1821; JQA diary September 22, 1820  

40. Monroe to Madison,  13 February 1818; reply 18 February 1818; JQA diary February 14, 1818; see also the diary entry for February 13 

41. James Lloyd to John Adams, 7 April 1815;  reply 22 April , Founders online; Friis, Herman R., "Baron Alexander von Humboldt's Visit to Washington, D. C., June 1 through June 13, 1804" Records of the Columbia Historical Society, Washington, D.C., Vol. 60/62, p. 27 (book version).

42. Ibid.  May 22, 1825; Daily National Intelligencer 4 April 1828.

43. Alexander, Archibald, A History of Colonization on the Western Coast of Africa, 1846, p. 256; Legacies of British Slavery "Pleasant Valley Estate."

44. Berlin, Jean V. "A Mistress and a Slave: Anna Maria Thornton and John Arthur Bowen" Proceeding South Carolina Historical Associationy, 1990 (pdf) p. 70; Daily National Intelligencer,18 & 22 August 1865. 

45. Tayloe, B.O., , In Memoriam. p. 100; Dodd, "Thoughts in Prison...." Wikimedia commons; Dodd to Franklin  29 January 1777 footnote; Clark, "Dr. and Mrs. Thornton", p. 148; Peterson, Nancy Simons,  "Guarded Pasts: The Lives and Offsprings of Colonel George and Clara (Baldwin) Bomford." pp. 283, 298; Fitzgerald, Percy, A Famous Forgery, 1865, pp. 9, 155ff; See also Claude-Anne Lopez, "Benjamin Franklin and William Dodd: A New Look at an Old Cause Célèbre." Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Vol. 129, No. 3 (Sep., 1985), pp. 260-267. Reference to Capt. Bomford in AMT notebooks 1807-1815 image 45

46. JQA diary 30 November 1819. 

Given that a crusade to end slavery brought him to America, it is a pity that no eulogist reckoned his final thoughts on slavery. In essays published in 1804 and 1819, he tied freeing slaves to separating the races. He thought the federal government should go in debt to buy all slaves and that posterity would be ever thankful. He supported the Society for the Colonization of Free People of Color of America but did not shift the focus of his personal dreams of glory from South America and back to West Africa. If they learned to read, he wanted his wife to free their slaves after his death and either give them land or send them to Liberia. A caveat that they be well behaved justified her in selling most of them. She faced daunting debts. His one invention, the musical instrument, proved worthless. (see Sherrwood, "Formation of Amer. Col. Soc." Journal of Negro History 1917; Hunt, Galliard, "William Thornton and Negro Colonization," Amer. Antiquarian Soc. 1921, pp. 57ff; Jenkins, Tortola, p. 61: )

 

32. WT to Jefferson, 9 January 1821; Thornton v. Carson's Executor, Google Books; AMT notebook vol. 7, 1828.

In January 1821, Thornton wrote back to Jefferson wondering what happened to his design offering for the university. Jefferson had never reacted to what he sent him in 1817. But his very long letter was not about architecture. He pressed Jefferson to pressure President Monroe to send him to Latin America on a diplomatic mission. In his diary, Adams would note Thornton's lack of political savvy: "The Doctor is a native of the Island of Tortola; a Man of learning, ingenuity, wit and humour; well meaning, good-natured, and mainly honest, but without judgment or discretion. I told him there would probably not be an early appointment of a Minister at Rio Janeiro."(39)

In his 1821 letter to Jefferson, Thornton argued that since he had not accepted joining the revolutionary cause in Columbia with the rank of colonel, he was entitled to go on a diplomatic mission. He knew that country's leaders. In addition, "one of the great objects I have in view is to write the general & natural History of that almost unknown Country." Jefferson refused to help but flattered Thornton's hopes.