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

Chapter Twelve: On the heights of Mount Chimborazo

Capitol in 1800

In a brief memoir about 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."(1) 

Actually, beginning in 1802, Thornton's genius was confined by bureaucracy, and he attained celebrity. He vexed patent applicants by claiming a free speech right to attack their patents, and vexed president's by practicing the same right to undermine their foreign policy. Congress refused to raise his salary and in response he bullied inventors to share their profits. He did wrest enough support from congress to hire workers and oversee Dr. Thornton's "museum of the arts" that became a notable tourist destination. He was the best known bureaucrat in the city. Not surprisingly, he wanted more, especially continued control of the Capitol design as well as credit for inventing the steamboat and royalties from whoever built one. In regards to both the Capitol and steamboat, he deceived himself as to extent of his accomplishments. He was not successful convincing contemporaries and once Jefferson left office lost any influence over the design and construction of the Capitol. However, historians believe his claims about the Capitol and accepting those claims makes it easier to credit Thornton for designing the General's, Law's and Tayloe's houses. As for his claims about the steamboat, they too prove that Thornton's writings are not the best source for any history of the period unless the goal of the historian is the glorification of Thornton.

On June 21, 1802, a little after two weeks of contemplating the meager file of American patents, Thornton wrote to his old master Dr. Fell. A letter he wrote to him 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 didn't mention Fitch and blamed the company's failure on his orders not being obeyed. As he left for Tortola, he had told the company's board to make the boat bigger but not to simplify it. They did and it failed. 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." Then he turned to the Capitol but at the part where "I was opposed by regular architects from France, Italy and various other countries," the draft ended and what he actually sent is unknown.(2)

In the summer of 1802, once Superintendent Munroe dismissed Hoban, Thornton had no rival at Capitol. Then the debacle of 1795, that darkened his relationship with President Washington, almost repeated itself. 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.(3)

A week after the experts made their report, on November 2, 1802, Jefferson asked Benjamin Latrobe, then Philadelphia's most prominent architect and engineer, an active fellow in the Philosophical Society, and ardent republican, 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 the dry docks. 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, and with relatively little debate.(4)

In 1803, the city experienced its second short session of congress which adjourned on March 3. Capitol Hill boarding houses emptied. Law, Carroll and lesser landlords suffered. However, that year there were advantages for the city. One of the longer unresolved debates was on a resolution to leave the city. One of the shortest debates ended with a $50,000 appropriation to build the South Wing. During that short debate a friend of the administration assured his colleagues that an "eminent architect" vouched for that sum. No one asked about the design of the South Wing.(5)

On March 6, the president sent a message to F Street asking Thornton if he could "come a quarter or half an hour before the company, say at three a clock & bring with you the plans of the Capitol, on which & the avenue I wish to consult you?" He also sent two letters to Latrobe who was back in Philadelphia. One offered him the position of "Surveyor of the Public Buildings," and asked him to get to the city as soon as possible and get to work. In a "private letter" sent the same day, he admitted that $50,000 was not enough money. "I think it will raise the external walls to the uppermost window-sills, being those of the entresols; and I have no doubt Congress at their next session will give another 50,000. D. which will compleat that wing inside & out in the year 1804."(6) The president likely had previously discussed the South Wing with Latrobe. A word like entresols, a French variant on  mezzanine, does not pop up in a letter out of the blue. He sent a "private letter" because of his devious way of financing the project. He did not mention consulting with Thornton.

What conversation the president had with Thornton a half hour before dinner is not known. At some time, the president asked Thornton to show how committee rooms would be distributed in the South Wing. As for "the avenue," the landscaping of Pennsylvania Avenue was then being done. There was no immediate follow-up with Thornton. On March 7, the president left for three weeks vacation at Monticello. 

Latrobe left Philadelphia as soon as he could and soon after his arrival, he consulted Thornton. He asked why the principal chambers were on the basement floor, and Thornton told him that he was advised to lower them to allow for greater height in the chamber for the House. He did not mention Jefferson. Latrobe inspected what had been built and in a long report to the president, he noted that the elliptical room seemed to be "intended for the permanent basement of the elliptical colonnade." He found its foundation poorly laid and "wholly unfit to carry the weight of the colonnade." The surrounding foundation walls of the rectangular building also had to be pulled down. Then he criticized the workmanship and design of North Wing and, not knowing Jefferson's role in its design, ridiculed the South Wing at length. 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." Latrobe also attested to Thornton's "talent."(7)

By labeling what would become the Rotunda as the "vestibule," Latrobe signified both his and the president's acceptance of the major feature of Thornton's design. Latrobe also suggested that the brilliance of the design was not in question. All depended on the execution. Latrobe began hiring men and arranging to acquire building material, but also had work to do in Philadelphia and on the Delaware-Chesapeake canal. Although seldom on the scene, faulty foundation walls were brought down and the permanent South Wing began to arise around the buttressed temporary House chamber. John Lenthall, Latrobe's assistant sent the president a copy of the weekly, largely statistical, report he sent to Latrobe. When Lenthall shared a drawing of curious building technique in the old wall, Latrobe described it as more evidence of "Thornton's stupid genius."(8)

However, as he took his measure of Thornton, he balanced his distress at his talents as an architect, with his liking the man and his respect for his multifarious activities. For two years they were friendly. 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, the doctor 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. 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." Latrobe joked about their different approaches to monumentalizing the General. He wanted a pyramid shaped mausoleum near the President's house. Thornton seemed offended by Latrobe joking about the snake in his design but the latter thought they remained friends.(9)

In February 1804, Latrobe's plans for the upcoming building season required presidential approval. Latrobe also had to appear before a House committee in support of the  appropriation for the work. The elliptical room had to be taken down, and Latrobe had to describe what would replace it. In April 1803, Latrobe had heaped criticism on the design given to him, but the president had not responded in writing and Latrobe was out of the city during the summer and most of the fall.  In February, Latrobe anticipated a crisis even though the president offered to talk to Thornton about difficulties with the plan. Latrobe went to see Thornton first. 

During a brief encounter outside Thornton's office in the house that housed the State department, Latrobe found that Thornton had not forgotten the Capitol. In a letter to the president, Latrobe paraphrased Thornton's stance: "that no difficulties existed in his plan, but such as those that were made by those too ignorant to remove them...." Latrobe allowed that his first impulse was to resign, but told the president he would make the project his "difficulte vaincue." That is to say, given the design in hand, the only boon to his reputation as architect would that he managed to build such an impossible plan. The president responded immediately and sympathetically, but somewhat disingenuously. He took refuge in a simplified history of the design process. Thornton's plan won the design contest, then "on Dr. Thornton's plan of the Capitol, the North Wing has been executed, and the South raised one story. In order to get along with any public undertaking it is necessary that some stability of plan to observed. Nothing impedes progress as much as perpetual changes of design. I yield to this principle in the present case more willingly because the plan begun for the Representative room will in my opinion be more handsome and commodious than any thing which can be proposed on the same area." The president neglected to mention Hallet's critique of Thornton's winning plan which a committee of experts chaired by Jefferson echoed which in turn led Jefferson, who was empowered to do so by the president, to endorse a revised plan drawn by Hallet. Plus, the "handsome and commodious" room was Jefferson's idea, not Dr. Thornton's. However, Jefferson did assure Latrobe that if circumstances arose in the building process changes could be made. In his reply, Latrobe assured the president that changes had to be made but the "elliptical form and the colonnade, the principal features of the work will remain." Then he closed the letter railing at Thornton and vowing that while Thornton had bested Hallet and ruined Hadfield, he would not beat Latrobe: "If I felt the slightest respect for the original author as an architect, I should be fearless as respects to myself but placed as I am on the very spot from which Hallet and Hadfield fell, attacked by the same weapons, and with the same activity, nothing but a resolute defense can save me."(10)

Latrobe miss-read the history of the design process. Hallet had taken the stand that Thornton's ideas were actually his. When Hadfield presented his plan to President Washington in Philadelphia, Hoban, not Thornton, was also there and defended the adopted plan which had been drawn by Hallet. By attacking Thornton, Latrobe gave the doctor undeserved credit for the design, but how else could he disabuse the president from his belief that Thornton's design was worth building?  

Then the next day, in writing, he assured the House committee that Thornton's plan had the force of law and that he would  build it and have it ready by 1806, thus he acceded to the president's view. Then he shared a more accurate history of the design. Latrobe noted that the original design was missing, that Hallet was hired to correct its deficiencies which he did until he was sacked. Then Hadfield succeeded him and, with only imperfect sketches to work with, he tried to correct the "radical deficiencies of the design." With the loss of Hadfield, Blagden "assured the excellent execution of the freestone work of the North Wing." Latrobe obliquely referenced the role the author of the design played while he was a commissioner: "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." He then listed ten objections to the plan, principally the need for more rooms to make the chamber convenient. He assured the committee that changes he recommended have been "laid before the President of the United States and received his serious consideration."(11) A little over a week later, 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." Not until his 1811 letter to Latrobe would Jefferson reveal how much he was invested in the design of the South Wing.(12)

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, and, for the moment left it at that.(13) 

Ironically, a month after his letter to the committee, Latrobe wrote to 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?(14)

Then 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."

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." He claimed that the old board had asked him 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. 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, Munroe was not the board's clerk when Hadfield made his request, and Thornton artfully verified 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.(15)

Neither of the rival newspapers, the pro-administration National Intelligencer or the Washington Federalist, printed or mentioned Thornton's letter. Latrobe did not respond to it, nor did Hallet and Hadfield. The French architect had lost interest in the city and evidently architecture, too. The English architect was in the city, but had received minor jobs from the administration, the jail and Marine barracks, and had designed and was building the Custis mansion that overlooked the President's house from Arlington Heights. He had no reason to invite controversy.(16)

Hoban likely knew about the Capitol design process better than anyone, but he concentrated his fire on Latrobe for his impugning the design and workmanship of the roof of the President's house. The first newspaper war that would flare up involving Latrobe was initiated by Hoban who, in the March 6, 1805, Washington Federalist, lampooned the often absent and seemingly always arrogant architect. Lovering was among those who attested to the quality of work done on the President's house roof when Hoban was in charge. Anonymous squibs in Federalist mocking Latrobe's work at the Capitol soon followed, and Latrobe suspected that Thornton wrote them. He probably didn't. He kept to the high road, right to the president.(17)

Beginning in 1805, Thornton had another distraction that he was convinced would make millions for himself and investors. Gold had been found in North Carolina in 1799. In 1805, Thornton toured sites with an eye for minerals trained by Faujas in the summer of '84. He calculated how much land had to be bought, formed a company in the federal city and even Latrobe bought stock in it.(18) In the summer of 1806, just before he left for North Carolina, 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."

Madison sent 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."(19)

Latrobe 1806 drawing of his idea for finished Capitol

Thornton, his wife and mother-in-law stopped at Monticello on their way back from North Caroline. Mrs. Thornton kept a journal during the trip, 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. Madison jokingly accused him of being another Vicar of Bray.(20)

Latrobe by Peale

Latrobe had to make annual reports on his progress to congress.  In the fall of 1806, he 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. On March 3, 1807, at the end of the short session, Thornton had friends distribute a satire on Latrobe's private letter. "Index to my Private Letter & C." had Latrobe making light of his own mistakes, failing to credit Thornton, and his 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."(21)

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 began by describing Thornton's plan as a striking combination of circumlinear rooms: two circular rooms in the middle, the semi-circular Senate chamber and the larger elliptical House chamber. But then he explained that to fit in other convenient features, he had to change the elliptical chamber into a parallelogram with two semi-circles at each end. Then he described the North Wing and lauded 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." Then, somewhat cancelling that remark, Latrobe 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.(22)

Thornton found the condescension and insults intolerable. Latrobe seemed to mention Hadfield just to make him mad, and it did. He attacked Latrobe and the South Wing in the April 27, 1808, Washington Federalist. He claimed that he had a drawing to the North Wing proving that he drew the elements that Latrobe lauded before Hadfield was hired. Then, he damned Latrobe for squeezing the elliptical room. A growing nation with ever more representatives needed more room not less. Then, he turned to Latrobe's motives. Why does he go against the wish of General Washington to have Thornton's design built? He claimed Latrobe went against that wish to spite General Washington for not trusting him: "...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 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.

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. At the time, he seemed to have ended his medical studies and embraced mineralogy. 

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.(23)

On May 8, 1808, a little over a week after Thornton's attack that would prompt Latrobe to sue him for libel, Mrs. Thornton noted that her husband drew a plan for his good friend Thomas Peter. There are several undated floor plans with two large elliptical rooms and a circular colonnaded entrance. The Peter's actual house in upper Georgetown, called Tudor Place, which was not finished until 1816, would only have the Roman temple-like entrance. Ridout suggests his design "experimented further with geometrical forms and other elements of neo-classicism...." and implies that it was an elaboration of the Octagon's design. It is even more similar to what he probably actually drew for Lot 17 in Square 171 to rival Tayloe's house. Of course, it is also similar to the Capitol floor plan, and surely to Thornton demonstrated a similar stroke of genius. It put his fingerprints on the Capitol design that Latrobe insisted was as much Hallet's, Hadfield's and, as would be revealed in 1811, Jefferson's as it was Thornton's. In that respect, it too proves that he didn't design the Octagon. Pointing to house that had been built with his ovals would have silenced Latrobe.(24)

However, Thornton's return to ovals came as the saga of Thornton and Capitol effectively ended. With the South Wing finished, Jefferson had Latrobe work again on the North Wing. In 1804, he had told Latrobe that it properly fulfilled Thornton's design. In 1808, he allowed Latrobe to make changes, In October, Lenthall was crushed to death when a brick arch in the North Wing gave way. Hoban renewed his attacks, but Latrobe restrained himself. In the press at least, Thornton was silent, perhaps because Latrobe had sued him for libel in May 1808. Work on the North Wing continued. While he evidently continued to like him personally, President Madison had no interest in the "ideas of Dr. Thornton." By 1811, Latrobe had moved the Senate chamber to the first floor. Thornton made no public comment. The libel case dragged on until 1813. In April of that year, Thornton advertised his house and all his property for sale. The jury found for Latrobe and awarded him one cent in damages.(25)

Claiming that Latrobe sued him for $10,000, Thornton declared victory. Latrobe would claim that he didn't ask for damages.  And in May 1808, around the time his lawyer filed the suit, Latrobe wrote a more intriguing estimate of Thornton suggesting that he saw through the supposed rich plantation owner from Tortola. Assessing the fall out from their newspaper war, he 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."(26)

Judging from what Latrobe wrote, Thornton relationship to the Capitol was not shaped by his genius but by his anxiety at losing his claim to fame. An added anxiety was lack of money to which he also reacted irrationally if not illegally. In 1806, Latrobe had thought of getting a patent for a new bridge making technique, but didn't and didn't explain why. Thornton didn't take pains to conceal what some took as funny business. For example, in her 1808 notebook for August 6, Mrs. Thornton jotted down: "The Hawkins [brothers] won't stand to their agreement and are very angry at not getting their patent."(27)

As the State Department clerk in charge of patents, 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. He did not have to verify that, as required by law, the invention was both useful and novel. The applicant signed an oath that it was. It was up to others to challenge that in federal court. It was also not legally incumbent on Thornton to encourage inventors, and he didn't. 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." However, because of his low salary, Thornton tried profit off the few promising applications. He bargained for a share of royalties earned by patents that he improved during the patenting process or that he had anticipated with his own ideas.(28)

Other men given the job probably would not have conceived of profiting off it in that way. However, in his writings about education, Thornton insisted that an education based on scientific principles was superior to an apprentice system. So in a sense, he was simply demonstrating that to the uneducated men who applied for patents. Only his 1802 letter to his old master Dr. Fell suggested that, from his first days in office, he sensed that he could gain the fame he deserved by exaggerating what he had done with Fitch. In 1802, he represented to President Jefferson that he needed a higher salary, but he managed to match cabinet officers when it came to entertaining. Then his financial predicament worsened. In 1803, thanks to a $21,000 court judgment against Blodget for not finishing the lottery hotel, Thornton was able to buy the house he rented from Blodget. But, despite offering all his federal district property for sale, Blodget couldn't raise enough money to satisfy the court which put him in jail. Thornton put up the security, likely by exaggerating the value of his own property, to allow Blodget freedom from jail within bounds during the day. In 1806, Blodget broke bounds by leaving the city. That left Thornton liable for his debts. In 1807 and 1808, no payments came from Tortola. Thornton had already been getting money from his surviving aunt. The press of his own and  Blodget's debts forced him to sell his Lancaster property for $20,000, less than he thought it worth. Then in late 1808, a North Caroline land owners sued Thornton. Fearing that he might be jailed, Thornton fled to his farm. He explained his predicament, but not the immediate lawsuit, to his boss Madison and asked for a raise.(29) 

In 1828, as the widow Thornton struggled to settle with creditors ranging from four banks, the French ambassador and local shopkeepers and tradesmen, she found a letter her husband wrote to his rich uncle in Tortola begging for money. She had resumed keeping a diary after his death and in it reacted to the letter likely written circa 1807: 

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.(30)

There is no evidence that she saw the dark corners in the kaleidoscope of his vanity. But a man who tells tales to avoid the consequences of debt might well tell tales to gain a greater measure of fame. Certainly, Latrobe thought poverty drove the vanity that forced Thornton to exalt himself and smear rival architects. How he tried to rewrite the history of the steamboat aped how he tried to rewrite the history of the Capitol. 

After trying to impress the British and French governments with his submarine and torpedo, Robert Fulton came to the federal city in late 1806 to promote national defense with "Torpedo War," as he would call his book published in 1810. He also had a pamphlet on the necessity of a network of canals for defense and commerce. The Navy was skeptical. The Jefferson administration embraced him. Thornton spent New Year's Day 1807 with Fulton. In the summer of 1807, Fulton's steamboat made successful round trips from Manhattan to Albany which was 150 miles away with an average speed of 4 miles an hour. Fitch's steamboat had a line of paddles on both sides of the boat. Fulton's boat had a paddle wheel. That project kept Fulton in New York where the company he organized with the rich Livingston family obtained a monopoly for his steamboat. In the fall of 1808, he spent more time in the federal city to work on a patent application for his boat. Mrs. Thornton's notebook with its daily record of visitors and visits proves her husband socialized with the inventor but what they discussed is not known. In January 1809, three days before Fulton submitted his application, Thornton received his own patent for steamboat improvements. In his patent, Thornton dropped his claim he invented the paddle wheel and he would tell Fulton that he knew of a 100 year old published description of one.(31) 

That having a controlling interest in steamboats would make a man very wealthy was a common illusion of that day. A common illusion among historians is that using Fitch's boat as ferry service was a notable advance. Long boats with experienced oarsmen provided that service reliably. The overnight voyages of Fulton's boat was a notable advance. In 1810, Thornton informed state legislatures where Fulton's company hoped to gain monopoly rights that Fulton's patent described nothing new, but he didn't take Fulton to court. 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. Fulton insisted that Thornton be barred from publicly criticizing patents and giving patents to himself. Monroe sympathized with Fulton but by tradition only habitual drunkenness or embezzlement could force dismissal. And Thornton loudly claimed his First Amendment rights and that he was fighting against monopoly. Of course, he wanted more and 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."(32)

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 Henry Voight, Fitch's principal assistant, told him that Thornton suggested using a paddle wheel. Voight died in early 1814, and Thornton finally got his patent for the paddle wheel. A fellow federal bureaucrat attested that while in Paris, he was told by an American consul, Aaron Vail, who was Fitch's agent that in 1793 he had given Fulton a complete set of Fitch's drawings and specifications. Vail died in 1813.

In his pamphlet Thornton explained that in 1787 Fitch's boat only made 4 miles an hour. Then at his suggestion, it was redesigned and 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, but gave Fitch and Voight full credit. Thornton only proved that Fitch's company had a working steamboat long before Fulton. His claim that because the company failed when he left to see his mother proved that he alone understood the principles of the steamboat was rather tenuous.(33)

Fulton died from a lung disease in February 1815. Thornton told Benjamin Ogle Tayloe that his pamphlet killed him. At the end, their feud became very bitter and personal. While Fulton was in New York City trying to enable a semblance of Torpedo War against the British, Thornton tried to poison his reputation in the capital. Fulton's death made no difference to Thornton. He continued sharing damning inconsistencies and plagiarism in Fulton's patents. That might have encouraged Fulton's other rivals but it didn't improve the steamboats that began to navigate more American rivers.(34) 

After Fulton died, Thornton's steamboat ideas  tacked in another direction. In 1815, he unveiled his constitution for the union of North and South American republics. In April, a correspondent described it to John Adams: "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 in 1804 the famous young Prussian naturalist Baron von Humboldt who had climbed it dropped in to see Thornton when he came to the federal city to meet Jefferson.

Thornton opened his doors to revolutionary and when they won his hospitality was reciprocated. 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." As for Fulton seeing plans for the steamboat, Thornton claimed that "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."(35)

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. Thornton wrote as if Fulton was still alive. He wasn't and without a rival to best, Thornton's steamboat ideas seemed dead in the water. His friend Ferdinando Fairfax tried to carry on the fight in court and congress, then he died in 1820.

At the same time, Thornton sustained his sway over the patenting process. In 1819 the National Intelligencer announced that an Army board approved the breech loading rifle of John Hancock Hall. The next day, the editor, a devotee of the turf, announced that the rifle was actually invented by Dr. Thornton. Indeed, in 1811, citing his 1792 letter to the King's armorer and a gun made according his drawings in 1810, Thornton had bullied Hall into agreeing to a joint patent. The young Maine inventor had been advised to give in. In 1819, he argued back that while he had drawings and a working gun, Thornton had lost his drawings and his gun was a dud.

Around the same time, Thornton was invited to comment on the Capitol as restored. President Madison had appointed three commissioners to oversee operations and summoned Latrobe. After physically threatening the supervisor of the project who President Monroe appointed to succeed the commissioners, Latrobe had left the project but left behind a redesigned House chamber as his legacy. The Jefferson/Thornton ellipse was halved. Thornton never publicly commented during the three years of reconstruction. Then in 1820 he was asked for suggestions on how to end the echo in the House Chamber. In a draft of letter found in his papers, Thornton recommended curtains soaked in arsenic so they wouldn't be eaten by moths. He also took the opportunity to attack 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." 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. Despite that portion of the building having long been his pet, Thornton offered no opinion.(39)

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.

Hadfield's dome in the vignette was also more consistent with what was actually built. Bullfinch made models of the dome and solicited the opinion of congressmen and senators. They opted for more grandeur to the extant that Thornton's relatively chaste elevation seemed irrelevant. In 1795, he did make his design grander. He drew his Roman temple west elevation with a smaller dome atop a high colonnade above the roof of the Conference room. But he couldn't share that elevation. He was trapped by his own rhetoric. He insisted his first design perfect and defeated all its critics. His Roman temple had to wait for the right moment, but it never came. Jefferson sent his State of Union messages and refused to ape the throne speech before the joint branches of congress. There was no need for a Conference room.

Fortunately for Thornton's posthumous reputation Jefferson summoned his architectural tastes in 1817 which proved to posterity at least that he was still a great architect. As Jefferson, then 74 years old, began making plans for the campus and buildings of the University of Virginia, he came up with a grand scheme to celebrate and teach Classical architecture. He sent Thornton a sketch of a large quadrangle bounded by "a range" of one story dormatories behind a colonnade linking 36 foot wide two story pavilions with classrooms below and lodging for professors above. He wanted "that these pavilions as they will shew themselves above the dormitories, shall be models of taste & good architecture, & of a variety of appearance, no two alike, so as to serve as specimens for the Architectural lectures." 

In reply, Thornton sent a long letter about how to organize a university and a drawing of "a Pavilion for the Centre, with Corinthian Columns, and a Pediment." That prompts C. M. Harris to suggest that Thornton "most noticeably influenced Jefferson in his design for Pavilion VII...." However, when attacking Hallet and Hadfield, Thornton had made a virtue out of thin columns elevated by arches and that is what he drew. To Jefferson, they must have seemed anemic. A bold presentation of the Classical orders was the whole point of his project. If Thornton's sketch did influence his design, Jefferson never discussed it with Thornton. They did not correspond again until 1821. A month after he wrote to Thornton, Jefferson wrote to Latrobe pressing him for ideas, too. He was still working at the Capitol but over the next year found time draw pavilions and the campus. Between June and November 1817, Jefferson wrote six more letters about the university project to Latrobe. Yet in the cursory histories of the project, Latrobe is paired with Thornton as the distinguished architects who advised the amateur Jefferson.(43)

In 1822, Jefferson hailed Hadfeld as "our first Architect, I consider him as standing foremost in the correct principles of that art...."1 Of course, he was writing to Hadfield's sister, but Hadfield had won the design contest for City Hall with a plan featuring a dome and grand columns. Thornton had not entered the contest, nor did Latrobe who died of yellow fever in September 1820 while in New Orleans working on a waterworks to prevent that scourge. His son had died there previously of the same disease. In a May 1818 letter to Latrobe, Jefferson had "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."

Meanwhile, Thornton continued to fight for the South American cause, with a few diversions. In 1818 he had vexed President Monroe with his plotting to forward the freebooter MacGregor's scheme to sell Florida to the US for $1.5 million. In 182-, he vexed Secretary of State John Quincy Adams by raising money for Greek Revolution. Adams wanted the government to stay neutral which might give him more leverage to support the Greeks through diplomacy. Thornton did all that while remaining in the bureaucracy evidently at liberty to do whatever he want. To say a man has a genius for bureaucracy smacks of an oxymoron. But to remain in office while flaunting opposition to one's bosses with no Constitutional guarantee of immunity was a notable achievement.

As usual, Thornton was not satisfied. He incessantly pleaded and schemed to be sent on a diplomatic mission to South America. In his 1821 letter to Jefferson, Thornton briefly asked what became of his suggestions for the university. Then he went to great lengths to prove to the former president that he should press President Monroe to send him on a mission. He claimed that he had been interested in the revolutionary cause since his Edinburgh days, which would have been eight years before the French Revolution and at a time when he showed no interest in the American revolution. His first known association with the cause came in 1807 when his name popped up in testimony at Aaron Burr's treason trial. He had asked an American general to lead one of the armies of the Venezuelan revolutionary Miranda. To Jefferson, he claimed that in Paris the Duke de Penthievre tried to get permission for him to explore the mineralogy of Mexico; that Franklin offered his salary as president of Pennsylvania to support his touring so he could share his observations with the US government; that leaders of the revolution in Columbia had visited him and he "was offered the immediate rank of Colonel of horse; & a high office in their Civil Service; with land enough whereon to settle a Colony."

Thanks to their becoming next door neighbors, in 1820, Thornton had an extraordinary relationship with John Quincy Adams. 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.

Primarily, Thornton pestered Adams about being sent on a diplomatic mission, but he liked his neighbor. Adams once confided in his diary that "Thornton gave us after dinner a perfect surfeit of buffoonery." He acknowledged him as "a Man of learning, ingenuity, wit and humour; well meaning, good-natured, and mainly honest, but without judgment or discretion." Then in 1823: "Dr Thornton called this morning, and gave me some of his ideas about body and soul. He is writing a pamphlet or dissertation in which he will broach some of his own strange ideas. He denies the existence of the Soul, but believes in the immortality of the body— And he has a theory of suspended animation in which he vouches certain wonderful phenomena, to support the wildest absurdities—"

One of those wild absurdities may have been his claim that he could have restored General Washington to life but the proposal "was not seconded." He claimed that when he came to Mount Vernon the day after the General's death, he found the corpse frozen and the temperature still cold. Years later, he wrote a learned fantasy claiming he had asked the family to take advantage of the "very cold" temperature and allow him to "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..."

Actually, before he died, the General asked to be buried two days after his death in case his disease was not mortal. That suggests that the family did not let his body freeze. Judging from temperature readings at Monticello, there was no cold front in Virginia from Saturday afternoon to the Tuesday eve of his burial. Afternoon temperatures were 40F, 41F, 36F, and 41F. Also, Thornton joined the lead attending physician in warning that burial could not wait until the end of the week to allow more relatives to attend because of the inflammatory nature of Washington's illness. That is to say, the corpse would begin to stink.

President Adams was at Thornton's funeral, and he noted that it attracted 50 carriages, a very good turn out. A remembrance of Thornton published in the National Intelligencer shortly after his death in 1828 did not mention the steamboat or 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-brother's heirs. Thornton had sold Joe Key in 1808 but Key escaped. He was found on the farm next to the Thornton's in 1812 and sold again.(45)

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."

Bomford died a decade after Mrs. Brodeau who, her friends admitted never talked about a Mr. Brodeau. Benjamin Ogle Tayloe picked up the tale in a memoir he wrote in 1863. Thornton certainly knew of Dodd. He was 18 when Dodd stretched and likely read the lurid coverage 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 the hanging. Thornton 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 essay urging paper currency, Thornton claimed that he had "invented" a test to detect forgeries. However, just before he was arrested in 1777, Dodd wrote to Franklin asking about a woman who had moved to Philadelphia, and that, for American historians, is satisfactory evidence.(46)

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 until he died. Washington and Jefferson weighed his false pretenses, and managed them to their advantage. Madison seemed to enjoy Thornton's perturbations and his efforts to overcome them until he almost turned the most problematic period of the nation's history into a disaster.  Monroe had no use for Thornton. Measuring Thornton through the eyes of presidents makes sense because he was essentially a courtier and he knew it. John Quincy Adams pitied Thornton and the disorder of his latter days, but always smiled at his childlike ardor. In May 1825 knowing that Thornton was ill, Adams went to see him and found him "exceedingly reduced both by his disease and his remedies— He can scarcely speak, but retains his facetious humour, and his South-American ardour— He was very fearful that the British would cut a canal for Line of Battle and India Ships, and obtain an exclusive right of navigating for forty years."

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 the 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. 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.

1. Clark, "Dr. and Mrs. Thornton", p. 148;

2. WT to  Fell 21 June 1802, pp. 573-4.

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

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

5. Annals of Congress, House, 28 February 1803

6.  Jefferson to WT 6 March 1803; Jefferson to Latrobe 6 March 1803.

7. Latrobe to Jefferson, 4 April 1803 Enclosure,"Report on the Public Buildings:" Latrobe, Benjamin, The Correspondence and Miscellaneous Papers of, p. 278;

8. Latrobe to Lenthall, 5 May 1803, Ibid. p. 289

9.  Latrobe to his wife  ** November 1802, to Thornton 28 April 1804; W. T., "Political Economy: Founded in Justice and Humanity, in a letter to a friend;" John Quincy Adams diary 12 March 1805; Latrobe Journal p. 206; "Extract of a Letter to vice president Thomas Jefferson..." Baltimore Daily Advertiser 23 August 1800;.

10. Latrobe to Jefferson, 27 & 28 February 1804, Jefferson to Latrobe 28 February 1804;  Op. Cit. pp. 437ff 

11. "The Report of the Surveyor of Public Buildings," Latrobe Correspondence pp. 444-5.

12. Latrobe to Lenthall, 8 March 1804, Correspondence p. 458;

13. Latrobe to WT 28 April 1804, Correspondence pp. 481-2;

14. Latrobe to Lenthall 28 March 1804 p. 463  

15.  Brown, History of Capitol, new edition,  pp. 113ff.

16.  On barracks see footnote in Bryen to Jefferson 16 March 1801; on jail see "Hadfield's estimate..." June 1802.

17. Washington Federalist 6 March 1805.

18. ad in National Intelligencer 23 April 1806; Thornton v. Carson's Executor, Google Books. 

19. WT to Madison 6 August 1806, Madison to Jefferson 15 August 1806; Jefferson to Madison, 28 August 1806.

20. AMT notebook      ; Madison account with Thornton. 

21. Latrobe's Private Letter is in Correspondence vol. 2 pp. 305ff where quotes from Thornton's Index can be found in footnotes

22. National Intelligencer 30 November 1807p. 1.

23. Washington Federalist, 20 April 1808; Latrobe Correspondence vol. 2 pp. 600ff; Ibid., 30 April 1808, p 2; 7 May 1808, p. 3.

24. AMT notebook vol. 3 image 121; Ridout p. 122.

25. 

26. Latrobe to Gilpin  24 May 1808, Correspondence vol. 2 p. 628.

27. AMT notebook, volume 3, image 47; 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. 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;

28. 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; John Quincy Adams diary 5 March 1804,

29. Natl. Intelligencer 27 October 1806; WT to Madison, 17 December 1808; Thornton v. Carson's Executor, Google Books;

30. AMT notebook series 4 (1828)  image 11;

31. New York State Library "Steamboats on the Hudson"; Dobyns; (Mostly) IP History blog has copy of Fulton's patents; Century Magazine vol. 70, 1909 pp. 832-3 ; AMT notebook vol. 3 May 13; Clark, "Dr. and Mrs. Thornton", p. 199;  WT to Madison, 9 December 1808;

32.  AMT vol. 3 image 181; Annals of Congress, 12th 1st session p. 1324; Thornton to Steele, 18 April 1812, Papers of John Steele NC Digital Collection page 219. 

33. Fulton to Madison, 18 March 1813; Thornton, Short Account of the Origin of Steamboats Written in 1810 and Now Committed to the Press, 1814 ; on Voight  see Westcott Life of John Fitch; on Vail see his Geni profile.  

34. B. O. Tayloe memoir; Duer, William Alexander, "Reply to Mr. Colden's Vindication of the Steamboat Monopoly," 1819. pp. 87; Dobyns; AMT notebook series 4 (1828)  image 11; WT to Henry Hill 20 April 1818, in Clark, "Dr. and Mrs. Thornton" pp. 187-8.

36. Latrobe to WT       ; Tayloe to Madison 1 December 1820;

37. Latrobe to WT 11 December 1810 Correspondence p. 938; Latrobe          ;

38. Latrobe to Madison     ; JQA diary     ;

39. 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.

40. 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. 

41. Jefferson to Latrobe, 19 May 1818, 

42. JQ Adams

43. 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; Founders online.

44. WT to Jefferson, 9 January 1821; JQA diary September 22, 1820 ; Monroe to Madison,  13 February 1818; reply 18 February 1818; JQA diary February 14, 1818; see also the diary entry for February 13; 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).

45.  Daily National Intelligencer 4 April 1828.

46. 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 

 

 

3. 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;

4. American State Papers Misc, vol.1 p. 193

6. Jefferson to WT, 10 September 1802; in AMT Papers reel 1 image 123ff, Mrs. Thornton described their visit.