Chapter Thirteen: 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 ContentsChapter Thirteen: On the heights of Mount Chimborazo
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| Capitol in 1800 |
In late April 1800, Vice President Jefferson wrote to Thornton sharing ideas about the Senate chamber, especially the position of the seat for the presiding officer, i.e. the vice president. In closing, he conceded all power in the matter to Thornton: "I pray you to consider these hints as written privately to yourself, and as meant to have no other weight than your own judgment may give them."
One would think Thornton would jump at the opportunity to go back and forth with the man he hoped would be the next president. But with an eye to his legacy, rather than making the building more convenient for those obliged to use it, he jumped at the opportunity to confirm the supremacy of his plans: "I am much obliged by your kindness in suggesting several important considerations respecting the Arrangements in the Capitol & I have the satisfaction of informing you that they are so nearly consonant to my Plans that what I had directed will I flatter myself meet with your approbation...." Then Thornton wrote at length about the treatment and prevention of yellow fever, and, by the way his prescriptions were somewhat dated. Philadelphia had been cleaning residents' necessaries for almost two years.
Jefferson
asked one direct question: "Are the rooms for the two houses so far
advanced as that their interior arrangements are fixed & begun?"
Thornton didn't directly answer other than saying "that what I had directed will I flatter myself meet with your approbation." A month after sending his letter to Jefferson, Thornton met
with Thomas Claxton, who, Mrs. Thornton wrote, "is empowered to procure
the necessary furniture for the Capitol." She added: "they sent for Mr.
Hoban and were consulting respecting the seat for the President of the
Senate."(1)
Claxton was the doorkeeper of the House of Representatives which sent him to the federal city. Did Thornton and Claxton send for Hoban to receive Thornton's orders or Claxton's, or perhaps Hoban, to whom Thornton had passed on the responsibility of making drawings to make expedient arrangements to get the Senate chamber ready, would explain to both where the seat had to be. What is clear is that Thornton did not carry on a consultation about the chair with the first man who would sit in it. It is not clear if Thornton ever made a plan showing the internal arrangements of the Senate chamber.
The seeming snub from Thornton didn't faze the vice president. Not until 1821, when Jefferson was 77 years would he weary of Thornton. Friends of Thornton learned to tolerate or even appreciate his magisterial way of addressing problems over which he had little or no control. However, his propensity to exaggerate what he had done or would do casts doubts on anything he claimed to have done or would do.
For example, Thornton, more or less, forced James Madison to become his next door neighbor. In March 1801, he invited Madison to stay with them and enjoy "our plain Mode of living." Madison thanked him but relied on the president for temporary accommodations. Both the Madison and the president spent most of the summer at home in Virginia. Then in late July, Thornton determined that a house Madison was counting on wouldn't do. Without Madison's permission, Thornton paid the rent in advance for a house that was being built next door to his. In an August 15 letter, he told Madison that by agreement, the builder would pay $1,000 if the house wasn't ready on October 1. Then he explained to Madison with typical flourish: "I have directed the third Story to be divided into four Rooms, two very good Bed-chambers, & the other two smaller Bed chambers. The Cellar I have directed to be divided, that one may serve for wine &c, the other for Coals &c—and for security against Fire a Cupola on the roof, which will add to the convenience of the House in other respects. There will be two Dormer Windows in front, & two behind." In a letter to Thornton, Madison had mentioned the need for a good stable and good plastering. Thornton responded by telling Madison "I shall urge the Plaistering as soon as possible, and every thing shall be done to give you satisfaction."
On
the basis of that letter, C. M. Harris claims that Thornton "supervised
the construction" of Madison's rental. Unlike the claims Harris and
others make about Thornton designing Law's, the General's and Tayloe's
houses, this claim at least is based on what Thornton wrote, not on
inferences, but did he really tell experienced builder how to arrange
the house's interior? Assuming the builder appreciated the advice and at
the same time agreed to pay a $1,000 if he failed to fulfill it,
evidently, Thornton still exaggerated his role in finishing the
house. Madison signed a rental agreement with the builder in June
1802 on condition that he build a brick stable and "what remains to be
done to the dwelling house shall also be finished." Seeing that all the
work is done before occupancy is the superintending
architect's principal job. In his letter to Thornton, Madison made having a good stable
his highest priority.
Yet, Madison also remained Thornton's friend. He was amused by the quid pro quo Thornton unveiled three weeks after paying his rent. He lobbied to be appointed Treasurer of the United States, an office "which is too respectable not to be coveted." It also would have almost doubled his salary to $3,000. In a letter he wrote to the president, what amused Madison was that news of an appointment had leaked out and still their friend tried to get the job.(2)
It was generally expected that
congress would abolish the board of commissioners, so it was not thought odd that Thornton wanted to be Treasurer, an office that was essentially a sinecure. But
if he had indeed been instrumental in turning the shell of a house next
door into a suitable townhouse, the powers that be might have kept in
mind that Thornton had to be instrumental in what ever the future held
for the Capitol and President's house. As it turned out, within a
decade, Thornton was no longer involved in the development of the Capitol. His biographers excuse that by heralding his "mechanical knowledge and executive abilities." As Glenn Brown put it, "the Patent Office, which has fostered and encouraged the inventive ability of the country began under his management." Actually, Thornton took a dim view his fellow citizen's "inventive ability." 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."
A better way to put it, is that Thornton did not have the
political acumen or personality to create a working relationship with
Jefferson or Madison. To be sure, he began to shine with notoriety at the
Patent Office. However, that needs to be examined. With his vain cant about his steamboat, his rifle, his bubbly water, etc. etc.,
Thornton stifled American inventors. He had as little respect for them as he had for rival architects at the Capitol. His lies and exaggerations about his steamboat cast doubts on the narrative he spun about the Capitol.
In Mrs. Thornton's book long diary for 1800, there is no accounting for what the doctor was up to as his friends became the two most powerful men in the government. She did make at least two copies of his letter to Jefferson. He sent "Extract of a Letter to vice president Thomas Jefferson..." to correspondents in Baltimore and Philadelphia where newspapers printed what amounted to running commentary on yellow fever epidemics. His thoughts were published in Baltimore but not Philadelphia. She noted the federal officials who upon moving to the city wound up at the Thorntons for tea and a glimpse at the East elevation. She didn't characterize their reactions. Judging from what some visitors wrote home, the man made more of an impression than the plan. Treasury secretary Wolcott wrote to his wife that Thornton assured him that the city would have "a population of 160,000, as a matter of course, in a few years." Then Wolcott added "No stranger can be here a day, and converse with the proprietors, without conceiving himself in the company of crazy people. Their ignorance of the rest of the world, and their delusion with respect to their own prospects, are without parallel."
Mrs. Thornton also noted when he worked on his Capitol elevation or floor plan. She helped. On December 19, she noted "I began to copy the Ground Plan of the Capitol. But she didn't intimate what her husband expected to happen when the congress abolished the board. She kept track of his budding friendship with the current Treasurer but didn't say why. One ominous development forced her to think of the future. Her husband didn't get the annual payout from Tortola. On their 10th wedding anniversary she wondered where they would be next year.(3)
On Christmas Day 1800, his colleague Gustavus Scott died a bankrupt leaving a wife and seven children. His other colleague Alexander White was weary of the job and only remained out of a sense of duty and the hope that because of that the incoming president would reward him with a judgeship. Briefly, William Cranch and then Tristram Dalton filled out the board. Thornton supported Cranch's appointment and in return Cranch saw that his uncle appoint Thornton as one of the District of Columbia 28 justices of the peace.(4)
As senior member and winner of the design contest, Thornton likely crafted the agreement making Hoban superintending
architect at the Capitol and President's house until their completion.
White would tell the president that he would have never countenanced
such an appointment. When the new president and the board faced their first
architectural problem, Thornton
took charge. To better accommodate its 106 members, the commissioners
ordered a
temporary meeting place built on the site of the South Wing. Once again
the board needed the services of an architect and once again Thornton
didn't mind Hoban making the design, with the caveats that it be
elliptical in shape, use the foundation already laid and, as much as
possible, its brick walls should become part of the permanent South Wing
to be built in the future. President Jefferson agreed with that
approach with a caveat offered by Hoban. He wrote to the commissioners:
"mr Hobens observes there will be considerable inconveniencies in
carrying up the elliptical wall now without the square one, & the
square one in future without the elliptical wall, and that these
difficulties increase as the walls get higher." For that reason, the
president only approved the one story building. Of course, Hoban was
warning that Thornton's stricture that the elliptical chamber must stand
alone on the elliptical foundation wouldn't work. The president hoped
that Thornton was right. Hoban hired Lovering as the contractor. He had
designed and supervised construction of oval rooms in Law's and Tayloe's
houses.(5)
The Seventh Congress convened on December 7, 1801, in what Thornton called "the elliptical room" and members soon called the "oven," either because it was stuffy or it resembled a Dutch oven. While it is now treated as an amusing sidelight, the elliptical room was a second step, after laying the foundation in 1795, in the fulfillment of Thornton's plan for the South Wing. The triumph of his design wasn't clear to everyone else.
Senate confirmation of a new Treasurer dashed Thornton's hopes in that regard. In April 1802, congress abolished the board as of June 1, and authorized the president to hire a "Superintendant of the City of Washington"to more or less do what the board had been doing. With the board's days number, it seemed that Thornton took a back seat, leaving it to White to propose resolutions to legal issues to do with the plan and obligations to pay back loans from the State of Maryland. Then on April 17, Thornton sent a 2,100 word letter to the president describing a Water Street along the city's front with the Potomac and Eastern Branch. By doing that Thornton added to his qualifications. Not only could he work with Hoban to finish the public buildings, he also knew how to fulfill the L'Enfant Plan.
A few days later, the president invited Thornton and his ladies to dinner. However, on June 2, 1802, Jefferson appointed the board's clerk, Thomas Munroe, as the Superintendent. Mrs. Thornton complained. The president said the job was temporary. Munroe served until 1815.(6)
Thornton
lost his power over the Capitol in the nicest way. Madison appointed
him to be the one State Department clerk who would process patent
applications. All he 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. The salary was very high for a
clerk but not for a federal officer, only $1400. To soften the blow, the president also
appointed him one of four commissioners of bankruptcy for the District of Columbia
and calculated that Thornton would make $600 a year in fees. All that
was worked out when Thornton and his ladies, after a visit with the Madisons at Montpelier, joined the president at
Monticello.(7)
There
is no evidence than they discussed the Capitol as they rusticated
together, but Thornton thought a presidential appointment proved that he was trusted. He assumed that he would still have say when building resumed. At some
time, Thornton gave the president a copy of his floor plan. There is no reason to think that Jefferson did not think the best of Thornton and the general outlines of his Capitol design.
Then 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 asked for a report from experts and mentioned Hadfield and Blagden, but not Thornton, Hoban and Lovering. The next day, October 27, the experts blamed the roof "which presses the walls outward," and recommended buttressing the walls. No one in the city had ever built a large oval roof.(8)
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| Glenn Brown's conjectural drawing of Capitol with "the Oven" |
On November 2, 1802, Jefferson asked Benjamin Latrobe to come the city. He 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 measures. With much of the fleet on land and captains getting half pay, money saved could pay down the national debt. Latrobe drew elaborate plans but congress tabled the idea.(9)
The president had been thinking of dry docks since June and there is no evidence that he tapped Thornton's knowledge of the city's water frontage. Problems with Thornton's "Oven" did not prompt the president to call for Latrobe. He was already ignoring Thornton in regards to architecture. He had hired Hadfield to build the City Jail and Marine Barracks. In 1803, the president responded to legislation to build the South Wing of the Capitol and finish the President's house by appointing Latrobe "Surveyor of the Public Buildings." One of the first things Latrobe did was report on the condition of the work so far. He noted that the elliptical 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."(10)
Latrobe was not trying to embarrass Thornton. Indeed, during the city's social season that winter the Latrobes enjoyed being entertained by the Thorntons. Latrobe first tried to improve the North Wing. Not until he began making plans for the South Wing did he begin studying Thornton's Capitol design. Both the president and the doctor give him a copy of the floor plan.
In a memoir written years later, Latrobe recalled his first
reaction to the plans given to him: "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." Latrobe's first reaction was to bow out but the president promised to talk to Thornton about, as Latrobe put it, "objectionable parts of his plan." Latrobe went to Thornton first and later recalled that Thornton 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 report on the state of the Capitol to a House committee and complained that he had no detailed drawings of the design. "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 latest effort as a public intellectual: "Public Economy: Founded in Justice and Humanity..." in which W. T. urged a legislator who sounded much like James Madison to get the government to buy all slaves, put them to work on canals and roads and then free them in the farthest reaches of the newly acquired Louisiana Purchase keeping the races separated forever.(12)
Latrobe trusted that he had the president's support, but then one of the many curiosities of the Capitol design process fully dawned on him. Despite the design given to him not corresponding to what had been built and not accompanied with any detailed plans of what was to be built, Latrobe found that the design was officially adopted. Latrobe reminded the president that the legislation authorizing resumption of work on the Capitol mentioned making plans. He naively thought he could do just that. He didn't know about the power of "the 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 his assistant John 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)
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| Latrobe by Peale |
Latrobe's arrogance did not serve him well. He possessed the social graces to smooth over difference but he left town periodically for weeks to continue supervising construction of the Chesapeake-Delaware Canal. His report to congress also impugned the work done on the President's house. In March 1805, Hoban wrote the first newspaper letter attacking Latrobe, "Now in Washington!" Hoban mocked the know-it-all outsider and to prove that work had been well done, attached the testimony of old hands, including Lovering.(14)
Thornton kept their dispute private, but after socializing with congressmen in the city for four years, he grasped their importance. He looked to them for help. On January 1, 1805, his pamphlet "A letter to Members of the House of Representatives" exaggerated his relationship with the General and exposed Latrobe's duplicity. It provided the evidence used by Glenn Brown, C. M. Harris and others to prove that Thornton restored his design, complete with drawings and sections, at the request of President Washington. Thornton also made much of all that Latrobe had said to him about the design before he was appointed: "....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)
Ironically, Latrobe's attack on Thornton and his plan immeasurably raised the status of that plan both to contemporaries and posterity. In 1795, after Hadfield's critique of it, Hoban defended Hallet's July 1793 revision of Thornton's prize winning plan. That was the adopted plan that informed construction of the North Wing. Latrobe's attack made Thornton seem the author of what had been built as of 1801 and what was intended.
Thornton's open letter succeeded in increasing congressional sniping at Latrobe but work on the South Wing continued in collaboration with the president. Latrobe used some of his ideas, although to Lenthall he deprecated them as fished out "of the old french books." 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."
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)
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| Latrobe 1806 drawing of his idea for finished Capitol |
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 had done and try to destroy his reputation.(17)
In November 1807 when the South Wing near completion, the editor of the National Intelligencer asked Latrobe to describe what he had done. He gave Thornton credit for the 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 Thornton's design of the exterior. On its outside the South Wing had to match the North Wing.(18)
Thornton found the condescension and insults intolerable. He attacked Latrobe in the April 27, 1808 Washington Federalist. He claimed Latrobe went against the wishes of General Washington for a selfish reason: "...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. As for Thornton's own accomplishments, he didn't reveal other buildings that he had designed. If he had designed the Octagon, Latrobe would have been taken aback. In an 1804 letter to Lenthall fuming at blockhead senators who wanted to leave the Capitol unfinished, move congress into the President's house and the president into a private house, Latrobe opined that "Tayloe's house" was the only house suitable for the president.
However, Thornton defended his own standing as an architect by only 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. 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, under his name, he put a couplet: "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) Latrobe didn't let that poverty stop him from suing Thornton for libel, though he did tell his lawyer not to ask for damages. As for the "official intrigue," Latrobe wasn't referring to Thornton's work on the Capitol for which he never asked more than his prize money, prize lot and commissioner's salary. Latrobe's characterization of Thornton's insanity referred to his work at the Patent Office where he was trying to make money off of inventors.
Since he never tried to make money off his occasional architectural designs, his financial woes are not germane to an examination of his trajectory as an architect. However, money from the sale of his Lancaster, England, property went to cover debts and not to build a house on Capitol Hill, or Lot 17 near the Octagon or on Square 33. The Lancaster money also didn't relieve him from obligations made by his North Carolina Gold Company organized in 1806, that plagued him for the rest of his life. Mrs. Brodeau had to put up bail to keep him out of jail.(22)
However, the vanity which prompted him to use his official position to make money off of inventors also speaks to his posturing and prevarications in the Capitol saga. Congress investigated Thornton in 1811 and he gave his word that he never took more than the required $30 for applying for a patent. However, he found another way to try to make money. It was not up to him to certify that an invention was novel and useful. The applicant swore that it was. However, thanks to his vanity, Thornton made the most of his being able to delay issuing patents. He
also honestly believed that anyone who realized his ideas by making an invention did
not invalidate his claim that he was the true inventor. For example, the
Hawkins brothers made an apparatus to make carbonated water and that
too was too telling an advance on processes that Thornton had also cast
his thoughts. 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) That suggests that Thornton wanted a share of their future royalties.
In 1819, three days after a newspaper announced that an army board of officers had approved John H. Hall's breech loading rife, it printed a correction: "We are now informed that the rifle was originally invented by Dr. William Thornton...." A letter giving the details of Thornton's claim relied on the testimony of his clerks. Hall responded: "I would now ask, why does the Dr. have recourse to such writings from such men, for identifying the plan of his gun with the plan of mine, when, by producing the gun itself, and the drawings of which he speaks, and having them compared with my gun, by competent judges, the question of right may be decided at once." That he claimed he invented the rifle before Hall did was but half of his imposition. He issued a joint patent for the rifle and then tried to stop Hall from manufacturing it himself. Thornton insisted on only licensing the patent so whoever made the rifle had to pay royalties.(24) He thought his low salary justified his patenting his own inventions and forcing inventors with similar ideas to accept a joint patent with him.
One long campaign to thwart a supposed fraudulent inventor mirrored Thornton's fights to keep professional architects from stealing glory rightfully his. He failed in both campaigns because not only had he not built what he claimed were his designs, but he had not preserved drawings, if indeed he had ever made them.
In August 1808, a year after the first successful voyage of his steamboat, Robert Fulton began working on a patent application. His business strategy was the same as John Fitch's: get monopoly rights and patents from states for steamboat service on their rivers. Fitch got monopoly rights from New York State in 1787. He died by suicide in 1798, and his patent expired in 1805. In 1803, Fulton's company got monopoly rights in New York, pending a successful voyage. His steamboat made scheduled voyages to and from Albany in 36 hours each way thus making about 4 miles an hour, which, in 1808, won the company a monopoly for up to 30 years depending on the number of boats put in service.(25) A federal patent would allow the company to use federal courts to enforce its rights throughout the nation.
In December 1808, Thornton wrote a letter to his boss and friend Secrtary of State Madison. It was a pro forma patent application asking for exclusive rights to profit from his 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...."(26) While he had encouraged Fitch to do so, Thornton had never applied for a patent. He got the requisite signatures on his patent in January 1809, three days before Fulton submitted his application. On May 13, Thornton sent a letter to Fulton. The letter is no longer extant nor is Fulton's reply. Thornton may not have harped on the priority of his patent. He also knew of a paddle wheel described in a book written a hundred years ago. If Fulton bought Thornton's knowledge and experience, he would keep that early paddle design their secret. A letter Fulton wrote to Secretary of State Monroe in 1812 described the progression of Thornton' offers: 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. Meanwhile, in 1810, Thornton began alerting state legislatures, including New York's, that Fulton's patent did not describe a novel invention. He warned states not to let a patent intimidate them into giving Fulton's company monopoly rights for steamboat service. It was not in the national interest. Both the Virginia and Ohio legislatures refused to give Fulton a monopoly. That made patents more important, and in February 1811, Fulton got a second patent for recent improvements to his company's steamboats.
In 1812, the Fulton company advertised throughout the nation that it would defend its patents and would take half the profits after 10% was deducted for capital expenses. At the same time, Fulton wrote to Secretary of State Monroe expressing outrage that the head of the Patent Office attacked patented inventions and gave himself patents. Monroe was sympathetic and asked Thornton to lower his profile. The doctor cited his First Amendment rights and low salary. Firing Thornton was unthinkable. Only habitual drunkenness and embezzlement would justify that. His long tenure only testifies to his long life, not to the approval of his conduct by successive presidents.
His principles did not preclude Thornton from going to a higher authority 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."(27)
Several other companies launched steamboats. 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 Fitch's principal assistant told him that the paddle wheel was Thornton's idea. 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.
Unlike in his other claims of prior invention, Thornton did not bank entirely on his ideas predating Fulton's. As he first intimated in a 1788 letter to Lettsom, Thornton thought he had worked hard on the steamboat. In a pamphlet he published in 1814, he put it this way: "We worked incessantly at the boat to bring it to perfection, and some account of our labors may be seen in the travels of Brissot de Warville, in this country; and under the disadvantages of never having seen a steam engine on the principles contemplated, of not having a single engineer in our company or pay, we made engineers of common blacksmiths;...." And, as he never stopped insisting, their steamboat reached 8 miles an hour.
Thornton had his account published in the Washington City Gazette on July 18. The editor applauded him for it, but congratulated Fitch for inventing the steamboat. It was difficult to credit Thornton for the invention because he didn't have a boat in the water.(28)
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."(29)
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.
The doctor was obsessed with fame and, save in medical practice, 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 of everything he did, marred those moments, at least for contemporaries, when he actually did something worthy of celebration. In 1814, Thornton fled to Georgetown as the British invaded the city and burned government property. Then at breakfast the next day, he heard that the British were still burning government buildings. Clerks had removed papers from the Patent Office, but no one had removed the models of inventions kept there. He was especially concerned about a musical instrument that he invented and hired a man to build. It had "68 Strings which by Keys in the manner of the piano Forte, will give all the tones of the violin—violincello—bass—double bass &c—...." As he put it in a letter to the National Intelligencer that he wrote a few days later: "I was desirous not only of saving an instrument that had cost me great labor, but of preserving if possible the building and all the models." Once the Patent Office moved into the refurbished
Blodget's hotel bought by the government in 1810, Thornton filled a room
with inventions creating a museum to rival the city's other must-see,
the gallery of portraits of Indian chiefs in the Bureau of Indian
Affairs.(31)
Thornton's story of how he saved the Patent Offices still resonates. His plea to British officers is often quoted: the building "contained hundreds of models of the arts, and that it would be impossible to remove them, and to burn what would be useful to all mankind, would be as barbarous as formerly to burn the Alexandrian Library, for which the Turks have been ever since condemned by all enlightened nations." (An August 30 article in a Georgetown newspaper characterized the speech differently: "...the cause of general science would suffer by its conflagration.")
Thornton did much more. On August 26, he found that, save for some of their wounded, the British army had gone. He called on the mayor and found that he had gone. He soon realized that he was the only justice of the peace in the city. Acting in that capacity, he claimed that he organized a guard for the President's house, Capitol and Navy Yard. He later wrote that at the Navy Yard, "I went and ordered the gates to be shut, and stopped every plunderer." He ordered provisions for the wounded: "I appointed a Commissary, and ordered every thing that the Doctor thought requisite, for which I would be responsible. The [British] Sergeant requested my protection for all his men. I told him they would be protected;... He promised to obey every order. I gave orders and he fulfilled them. Some stragglers, I understand, were taken up, and perfect order kept throughout the city."(32)
After restoring domestic tranquility, Thornton reacted to the rumored return of the enemy on ships coming up the Potomac. He decided that a "deputation" should be sent to the British. In a diary she kept during the crisis, Mrs. Thornton wrote: "The people are violently irritated at the thought of our attempting to make any more futile resistance." The president, secretary of state and attorney general returned to the city on the 27th. On the 28th, they rode to the Navy Yard. Thornton followed them. Secretary of State James Monroe had seen service as an officer during the Revolutionary War and the president intended to make him secretary of war. In the meantime, he placed him in command of military operations. In a letter he wrote to his son-in-law on September 7, Monroe recalled: "...we were followed by Dr. Thornton who stated to the president that the people of the city were disposed to capitulate. The President forbade it. He pressed the idea as a right in the people, notwithstanding the presence of the govt. I turnd to him, and declard, that, having the military command, if I saw any of them, proceeding to the enemy, I would bayonet them. This put an end to the project. The doctor retird, and afterwards changd his tone."
On September 8, Mrs. Thornton visited Dolley Madison at her sister's house next door to the Thorntons. In her diary she wrote: "They have listened to many misrepresentations and falsehoods concerning Dr. T_ and of course are not pleased with him."
The day before the National Intelligener printed Thornton's defense of his actions. He explained that he never urged capitulation. Then he boasted of what he had done. His mention of the absent mayor elicited a response. Dr. James Blake accused Thornton of being against the war and collaborating with "a British officer of distinction." He even gave a key to his office to a British officer. Thornton didn't deny that he was against the war. He was "a man of peace," and his "situation has nothing to do with politics or war, being a member of the great Republic of Letters, and considering it a duty to labor for the happiness of all mankind." Blake replied: "Doctor T has been living upon the Public Treasury for near twenty years, and I dare say he cannot point to a single service that entitles him to the patronage of the government."(33)
The Madisons moved into the Octagon house on September 8 and lived there until March. Mrs. Thornton's never alluded to it in the detailed diary which she kept during the crisis. Later, in her notebook, she mentioned going to Mrs. Madison's "drawing room," but didn't note where it was. Thornton seemed to have enjoyed the remainder of the war vicariously, but not with an intrepid American dragoon in mind. The British officer that Thornton had visited after the burning of Washington was Col. William Thornton. In June 1815, Dr. Thornton wrote to Col. Thornton who had recovered in time to fight in the Battle of New Orleans. Thornton gushed over the colonel's gallantry and discussed European politics. He closed with the happy report that the buildings the British burned would be rebuilt, and that efforts to move the nation's capital elsewhere failed. He took credit for that. Because of him, the British spared the Patent Office which temporarily accommodated the Congress. "Thus it was observed one William Thornton took the city, and another preserved it by that single act."
When her husband's second term ended in March 1817, Dolley Madison made farewell visits to all her friends in the city, but not to Mrs. Thornton. She was devastated. Thornton noted the slight in a letter to Madison and added, " I have long had to lament a marked distance and coldness towards me, for which I cannot account."(34)
Thornton was referring to Madison's continued patronage of Latrobe who moved the Senate chamber to the first floor, helped Mrs. Madison refurbish the President's house and then restored the Capitol after the British burned it. Thornton had a rejoinder to all that: Madison kept Latrobe working as an act of charity. Indeed, by 1814, Thornton exhibited little interest in architecture. However,
with the Capitol rising, Thornton could not be completely forgotten in
that respect. Ironically, the last link in the chain of evidence that
W. B. Bryan thinks proved that Thornton restored his design played out
in a newspaper and Thornton wrote not a word about it. In 1819, the
Washington Gazette began putting an image of the future Capitol on its
masthead and its editor boasted that: "This vignette of the Capitol
[was]... from a design of Mr. George Hadfield, of the city, 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 two wings as
depicted on the masthead, only that he is "is welcome to the credit of
the design." Hadfield still deprecated the design Hoban handed to him in
1795. 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 reply to 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.(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.(37)
Before
Latrobe left the city, thanks to Jefferson, the First and Second
Architects of the Capitol competed for a last time. In a May 9, 1817,
letter, the former president 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. 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 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)
President Monroe could not abide Thornton. 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. A little over ten years later, Thornton was still at it. 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.
Thornton was conducting diplomacy on his own. The president was not amused. Thornton asked Adams to arrange a meeting with Monroe so he could explain his association with "South American Patriots." The next day, Adams told Thornton that "the President said he would not see him, nor have any conversation with him upon any thing, unless it were Patents, and very little upon them."(40)
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.
This last enthusiasm shines no light on Thornton as an architect save for a few touches of Thornton-esque grandeur. In 1815, Thornton trumped all others by publishing 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;..." The mountain is Ecuador, but in 1819 it was in what would become the Republic of Columbia which also included Panama and Venezuela. Thornton knew the mountain well enough because the Baron von Humboldt had climbed it doing scientific research and then visited Thornton in Washington.(41)
Although he always shot down his diplomatic schemes, John Quincy
Adams had the patience to listen to all of
Thornton's ideas. After he moved to the White House, Adams kept track of his old neighbor whose health was poor during the last three years of his life: "He is 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."
A remembrance of Thornton published in the National Intelligencer shortly after his death 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...."(42) 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.(43)
Fittingly, the advent of the New Capitol completed in 1865 kindled remembrances of Thornton even though he had not designed such grandeur and may not have liked an even bigger sugar bowl in the middle. 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. That was 30 years after her one unfortunate claim to fame. She accused a young and drunk slave of attempting to murder her and her mother. He entered Mrs. Thornton's bedroom with an axe. That sparked the so-called Snow Riot that primarily victimizing free blacks living on Capitol Hill and around the Navy Yard.
That was not remembered in her obituary. Her husband was remembered 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 had Mrs. Thornton dying when she was 100 years old and coming to the city in 1800. It 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 1812 just after 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 and 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 and so ably graced the world forged by Thornton's vanity.(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 certainly knew that other gentlemen could fill his shoes. Still, they chose to exalt Thornton. That his ballast was the labor of slaves on the island of Tortola did not disqualify him in the eyes of his fellow slave owners, though they did have to oversee their overseers while Thornton never had anything to do with the management of the slaves who supplied his livelihood.
Measuring Thornton through the eyes of presidents makes sense because he was essentially a courtier and he knew it. Washington and Monroe did not suffer fools gladly. The latter, who reigned during the so-called Era of Good Feeling, had no use for Thornton. Washington appreciated Thornton's dog-like loyalty and enjoyed teaching the pretentious architect how to build a house. 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.
His neighbor John Quincy Adams once confided in his diary that on that day "Thornton gave us after dinner a perfect surfeit of buffoonery."(46) However, he recognized that Thornton did not have "judgment" or "discretion." Adams' wife saw through the pattern of Thornton's eccentric knack of knowing everything and saw a man without principals. He told that to her father-in-law, another president, who likely had another laugh at the expense of a friend of France that he assessed as being too insubstantial to be a threat.
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 designer William Lovering, the "ingenious A" who supervised building the Octagon and offered specimens of designs suitable for angles acute or obtuse.
Footnotes for chapter 13:
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. Jefferson to WT, 10 September 1802;
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"
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. 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.
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.
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