Epilogue: John Quincy Adams' Diary
Thornton's heroic claims about designing and overseeing construction of the Capitol have all been examined. His long tenure at the Patent Office relieved him of any power over the Capitol beyond what the president might grant. However, the way he managed his new office reflected on his pretensions as an architect. In general, he thought there was nothing new under the sun, but he soon gained a reputation for claiming prior invention for anything that was new. He tried to boast his way into being more than just the Author of the Capitol. Then as his enthusiasm for South American revolutions grew so did his claims. In Secretary of State John Quincy Adams's diary, one finds the best documentation of Thornton's way of lying.
As his boss, next door neighbor, and friend, Adams got to know Thornton well. His reaction in his 1823 diary to their most disconcerting encounter is an apt preface to Thornton's most absurd fable, which like his Capitol tales is believed by historians: "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."
Thornton probably wrote his absurd fable a few years before that. It was crafted as a medical letter but evidently never sent, and put in the same file as his never submitted dissertation “On Sleep.”
The weather was very cold, and [the corpse] remained in a frozen state, for several days. I proposed to attempt his resurrection, in the following manner. First to thaw him in cold water, then to lay him in blankets, and by degrees and by friction to give him warmth, and to put into activity the minute blood vessels, at the same time to open a passage to the lungs by the trachea, and to inflate them with air, to produce an artificial respiration, and to transfuse blood into him from a lamb. If these means had been resorted to and had failed all that could be done would have been done, but I was not seconded in this proposal for it was deemed unavailing. I reasoned thus. He died by the loss of blood and want of air. Restore these with the heat that had subsequently been deducted, and as the organization was in every respect perfect, there was no doubt in my mind that his restoration was possible.
As soon as he had time after the funeral, Tobias Lear wrote a detailed account of the death of the General. He did not mention that the corpse was frozen. Jefferson's weather record suggests that the average temperature in Virginia was above freezing.(BB) Lear wrote that on his death bed, the General had requested that he not be entombed for two days on the odd chance that he wasn't really dead. On the day after his death, the attending physician and Dr. Thornton vetoed Lear’s suggestion that funeral services be delayed to permit more relatives to attend. They objected because the inflammatory nature of the General's fatal case of croup that stopped his breathing made the corpse susceptible to decay. The funeral had to be held as soon as possible, and he was entombed four days after his death.
It is possible that Thornton's fable answered those who doubted that the General asked him to restore his Capitol design. His offer to resurrect the General proved that he knew the General would vindicate his claim. A more likely catalyst was the enormous reaction to the death of Dr. Benjamin Rush in 1813. In his published remembrance, Dr. Lettsom hailed Rush's memoir of the 1793 yellow fever epidemic as a "vast effort of genius and science."
To be sure, the Patent Office presented the most temptations to Thornton's vanity. Government clerks worked from 9 to 3 and as the sole clerk processing patent applications, all Thornton had to do was pass on the $30 application fee to the Treasury, fill out a patent form for the signatures of the secretary of state and president, file away the application and a description of the invention, and, if possible, retain a model. He did not have to verify that, as required by law, that the invention was both useful and novel. The applicant signed an oath that it was. If anyone challenged the validity of the patent, a federal court would decide and Thornton was not involved. In December 1804, Senator John Quincy Adams checked on a patent application 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."(1)
He had a virtual sinecure and depending on how quickly he could write up a few hundred patents a year, he had ample time to write philanthropic essays and found the North Carolina Gold Mine Company. Instead, he used his office to leverage his claims of prior invention and tried to negotiate a share of profits.
In 1819, after a year of being his boss, Adams assessed Thornton's performance:
— He is a man of some learning, and much ingenuity; of quick conception and lively wit; entirely destitute of Judgment, discretion and common sense. He has been nearly twenty years Superintendent of the Patent Office; a place principally made by Mr Madison to put him in it, and there has scarcely issued from it during the whole time a Patent, for any invention, but the Doctor had a counter claim, as the inventor of the same thing himself. He has a fine taste in Architecture, and a real turn for mechanical invention; but no steadiness to pursue any thing to a useful result— .... In the course of my life I have met with very few men of minds at once so active, intelligent, and weak. Yet he is withal a man of good intentions, and generally harmless deportment. As Superintendent of the Patent Office, he is useful; and fully competent to the place— Though by his interfering pretensions he gives great offence to many of the Patentees.
In her 1808 notebook for August 6, Mrs. Thornton didn't describe his grift but did register the pain it caused: "The Hawkins won't stand to their agreement and are very angry at not getting their patent." In 1811, citing his 1792 letter to the King's gunsmith and a gun made according his drawings in 1810, Thornton insisted that John Hancock Hall agree to a joint patent for the breech loading rifle. The young Maine inventor was advised by others to give in and he did. Thornton insisted that Jacob Cist change his patent for making printer's ink from anthracite coal and then angled to become his sales agent.(3) There were mitigating circumstances for his chicanery at the Patent Office. He had lost his personal fortune.
In an 1808 letter to a friend, Latrobe pitied Thornton: "the worst that can be said of him is that he is a Madman from vanity, incorrect impecuniary conduct, and official intrigue from Poverty." Adding to the problem, while he did not have enough money, he tried to act like he did. In 1803, his friend Blodget faced a court judgment to pay $21,000 to the winner of the Federal City Lottery, the unfinished "Superb Hotel." He had to sell his properties and that netted Thornton ownership of his F Street home and other real estate. However, Thornton was not a vulture picking at his friend's estate. He also secured Blodget's $10,000 bail. In 1806, Blodget broke the bounds that confined him to the city, and consequently Thornton became responsible for Blodget's debts. Thornton tried in vain to sell his thoroughbreds. The only property he could sell was in Lancaster, England. His surviving aunt moved in with Robert Foster's sister. The $20,000 from the sale soothed his and Blodget's creditors. Then in 1807 and 1808, he did not get money from Tortola. A year after proclaiming that he would never sell a slave, he sold Joe Key to a North Carolina congressman. In December 1808, Thornton briefly fled the city to escape being jailed. On years when money came from Tortola, as it did in 1810, he celebrated by having US Consul Tobias Lear buy and ship home an Arabian horse from Algiers.(EE) His widow got the last payout from Tortola in 1829; 131 slaves, 73 females and 58 males, were sold and the proceeds divided by her and Thornton's half-brother's heirs.
After his death, Mrs. Thornton now and then resumed keeping a diary. After finding a letter he wrote begging for money from Tortola, she lamented: "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."
His battle with Robert Fulton over the invention of steamboat mirrored his battle with Latrobe over the design of the Capitol. Of course, when Fulton came to Washingtonn in late 1806 and spent New Year’s Day with Thornton, the doctor didn’t have a steamboat he could claim to have invented. John Fitch had killed himself in 1798, and there is no evidence that Thornton ever forgave him for making changes to the design of the boat destined for the Mississippi. Fitch did bequeath his uncertain estate in Kentucky in part to Thornton, but he never touched it. He did keep an eye on the 1804 expiration date of Fitch’s patent. He also certainly understood the idea of the steamboat. But when Fitch’s patent expired, he did nothing.
Pennsylvania born and embarked on an artistic career in Philadelphia, Fulton crossed the ocean and stayed twenty years. In time, he forsook Benjamin West for James Watt. After trying to impress the British and French governments with his submarine and torpedo, 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, thanks to being bankrolled by the Livingston family, Fulton's steamboat made successful round trips from Manhattan to Albany 150 miles up the Hudson River with an average speed of 4 miles an hour. In the fall of 1808, he spent more time in the federal city to work on a patent application for his boat.
Thornton recognized that Fulton had solved the real steamboat problem. He had money backing him up. In January 1809, Thornton have himself a patent the day before Fulton applied for his. In May, Thornton tried to open negotiations with Fulton and Livingston. Fitch's steamboat used a line of paddles. Fulton's had a paddle wheel. However, Thornton credited himself for Fitch's boiler and for suggesting a paddle wheel which was to be on the company's next boat. He asked Fulton and Livingston for equal thirds of their company's profits. Then he whittled that down to one-eighth of the net profits. Fulton didn't take him seriously. Then Thornton attacked, writing letters to state legislatures where Fulton was trying to get a monopoly. His original monopoly for steamboat service on the Hudson was contingent on putting steamboats in service. He had to build and improve to get more passengers. Thornton attested that Fulton's patent described nothing new and thus any monopoly awarded would stifle genuine improvements to the steamboat. In response, Fulton got a patent in 1811 describing improvements he had since made to his steamboats.
In the meantime, Thornton made himself and the Patent Office famous. Congress never gave him a raise, but it did give him a clerk and answered his plea for a place to display patent models just as the French government did in Paris. Congress bought Blodget's hotel and Latrobe refashioned it to house the Post Office and Patent Office. The National Intelligencer crowed "as the apartments in this building are spacious and lofty, we may soon expect to see the numerous evidences of the ingenuity of our countrymen in this institution arranged and displayed to advantage." Thornton turned it into a notable tourist destination. In March 1811, he sent a long notice to newspapers throughout the country explaining the patent process and expressed his "astonishment" when viewing the "inventions of his countrymen,... no nation on earth surpasses them in genius."
Fulton tried to get Thornton fired for giving himself patents and attacking inventors and their inventions. But his museum made Thornton an untouchable bureaucrat. Plus, he struck the right chords when he defended himself. Because of low pay, he he had to give himself patents. When criticizing inventors, he exercised his first amendment right of free speech to battle monopolies to save the American people money.
Fulton hit on a way to underscore Thornton's inability to apply any of his ideas. In January 1811, Fulton challenged Thornton to come up with a better design for a boat that would go 6 miles an hour in still water with a 100 ton load. If Thornton made such a boat that "proved his principles in practice," Fulton promised to assume all its costs and pay Thornton $150,000. Or, if Thornton convinced Fulton "with drawings and demonstration I will join you in the expenses and profit." Evidently, Thornton didn't react because Fulton set out to have his lawyers depose Thornton before a judge and force him to admit that Fulton's patents did describe improvements to the steamboat. But in July, Thornton was prostrated by rheumatic fever and didn't recover until September.
Then he resumed his fight against Fulton. To better belittle his patents he 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 have reflected his desire to keep open private negotiations with Fulton. Also, 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 partner, told him that Thornton suggested using a paddle wheel. Voight died in early 1814. A fellow federal bureaucrat attested that while in Paris, he was told by the 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 Thornton's suggestion, it was redesigned and made 8 miles an hour. While there remains no corroborating evidence for those claims, there are several references to the boat going 7 miles an hour. Fitch's boat provided a ferry service on the Delaware River. In June 1790, it made a trip to Burlington, New Jersey. Newspapers noted the 80 mile round trip, and gave Fitch and Voight full credit. In his pamphlet, Thornton claimed that he agreed "at once" to Fulton's offer of $150,000 if he could make a faster boat, but since Fulton "declined to write the terms," he could do nothing. Given his often repeated claims, presumably, Thornton already had the drawings and expertise. He didn't have the money. Why didn't he propose the terms?
To claim victory in his dispute with Latrobe, Thornton cited the jury's only awarding him 1 cent in damages. To prove his vindication in his dispute with Fulton, he credited his 1814 pamphlet for killing Fulton who died after a short illness in February 1815. However, his pamphlet did not satisfy Thornton. It gave too much credit to Fitch. A Washington newspaper filled two pages with it and then thanked Thornton for bringing Fitch's achievement to light. Thornton rectified that. In 1819, he tried to enlist the aid of the American consul for a steamboat monopoly in Bahia, Brazil. 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, he "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."
Actually, Fitch was a prolific writer and his papers, that he once offered to Secretary of State Jefferson, remain in several libraries from New York City to Washington. In a 1794 letter to Thornton, Fitch referred him to "my manuscripts" that he wanted Thornton to revise. He used Thornton and other directors only to improve his prose. However, in a 1791 letter, as Fitch prepared to go to France, a fellow director described to Thornton how he wrote the contract for the agent in France and couldn't resist taunting Thornton: "You still condemn the French scheme." Thornton' did not write the papers for the French patent.
Thornton looked for monopoly rights in South America because he had expanded his horizons. In April 1815, while Americans were trying to convince themselves that they had won the war, Thornton published "Outlines of a Constitution for United North and South Columbia." He divided the Western Hemisphere into 13 commonwealths and in a manner that would force the United States to give up the Louisiana Purchase.
On April 11, President Madison appointed three other men to be the commissioners overseeing restoration of the Capitol. On April 13, Mr. Pinto, from Argentina, dined with the Thorntons. In late August, Thornton took Don Pedro Gual to meet Richard Rush, in hopes that the attorney general would facilitate an arms shipment to Colombia. Not a few American’s of the post-Revolutionary War generation looked for other revolutions to fight. John Quincy Adams’s bother-in-law William Stephens Smith was arrested in New York for aiding Miranda and his nephew William Steuben Smith barely escaped the revolution in Venezuela with his life. Thornton rarely ventured beyond F Street. In 1821, he would inform Jefferson that “all the great revolutionary Characters of South America have considered my House, as a place of friendly Consultation.”
Thornton cast himself as a great inventor and intrepid revolutionary at the same time. In the 1819 diary entry in which he looked askance at the Patent Superintendent, Adams regretted having anything to do with the revolutionary:
He has very foolishly made himself a fanatical partizan for the revolutionary South-Americans; and has committed the grossest indiscretions in pursuit of this ignis fatuus—.... The Doctor is a Horse-racer too, and often boasts that the South-Americans have repeatedly offered to appoint him a Coll. of Cavalry in their service. He considers himself as the principal author of the South-American Revolution, and that all the principal measures of the Patriots have been adopted at his suggestion— ... the President considers him utterly unfit for any such office, and will never appoint him to it; but with him as with other claimants for preposterous things, it is one of the duties of my Office to temper refusal with politeness: the inconvenience of which is that tenacious applicants, return to the attack like flies in dog days; and never will take no, for an answer.
Indeed, in a letter to Adams' father, the former president, Thornton claimed that Monroe "admitted every flattering Observation in my behalf, & wrote to me a letter, testifying to my perfect integrity, attention to my Duties, Learning & Ability,..." but "there were objections to me that could not be removed. I was represented as identified with the South Americans, & as having been deeply engaged in the Revolution."
That he was a liar also kept him in the administration’s dog house. He wrote a series of articles under the name South Columbian and then just Columbian.In June 1817, a freebooter named Gregor MacGregor enjoyed Thornton's hospitality and unveiled his plan to take Amelia Island off the coast of Florida with a force of 1500 men. Then from that base, he planned to take all of Florida. He would then sell it to the US government for $1.5 million. The Monroe administration was negotiating with Spain to buy it for $2 million. Thornton introduced MacGregor to Rush and also sent him to see Charles Bagot, the British minister. That would give the impression that Britain was also bargaining for Florida. In a January 7 letter in the National Intelligencer, "A Columbian" revealed MacGregor's plan, his meeting with Bagot, and that a member of Monroe's cabinet supported MacGregor. The purpose of the article was to ridicule the Monroe administration for not closing a deal to buy Florida.
Monroe and Bagot were incensed. Bagot told Secretary of State John Quincy Adams about his chilly reception of MacGregor and his amazement that Thornton sent him. Then Adams got Thornton to reveal former Attorney General Richard Rush as the cabinet member, and he asked Thornton for "the substance of his Conversations with M’Gregor, and with Mr Rush." That the latter succumbed to MacGregor's wiles was unbelievable. Adams challenged Thornton's recollection of his conversation with Rush. Thornton replied that "he was sure his statement was perfectly correct; for after drawing it up, he had shewn it to his Clerk Elliot, and asked him, if it was not exactly conformable to what he had told Elliott at the time; of what Mr Rush had said— That Elliott fully confirmed it; and if necessary was ready to attest to it upon Oath." As for Bagot's version, Thornton called him a liar because “he did not advise M’Gregor to go and see Bagot to talk with him about Florida, but as a Scotchman, because his family estates had lately been restored to him— And he had a great distrust of M’Gregor, as soon as he had heard he had talked with Bagot about the Florida project."
Of course, it was Thornton promotion of MacGregor months after he met him that stunned the administration. As for Rush's supporting the scheme, Thornton ever relied on his clerks to be ready to attest. He had used that ploy against Latrobe and would again in 1819 when the National Intelligencer announced that an Army board approved the breech loading rifle of John Hancock Hall. The next day, the editor announced that the rifle was actually invented by Dr. Thornton. Hall retorted that while he had drawings and a working gun, Thornton had lost his drawings and relied on his clerks to attest that they had once seen them.
Thanks to their becoming next door neighbors in 1820, Thornton forged a cordial relationship with Adams, e.g. "we spent the Evening at Dr Thornton’s where we were entertained with Music— Mrs Thornton performed on the Piano, and sung Handels’ Anthem of 'Comfort ye my People' —much to my satisfaction." And then there was that evening when "Thornton gave us after dinner a perfect surfeit of buffoonery."
When he became president in 1825, Adams gave Thornton a chance to design one of the finishing touches to the Capitol. Disappointed by the design for the frieze on the pediment to be raised over the portico of the East front, Adams suggested that Thornton and two others be asked for a design. Thornton did not respond and Adams made the design himself.
Adams was at Thornton's funeral, and he noted that it attracted 50 carriages, a very good turn out. In his diary, his brief reflection on Thornton's life did not mention the Capitol. He confided a higher estimation of his friend. He "was a man of learning, of genius, of elegant accomplishments and of very eccentric humours— His last years were of straitened circumstances and afflicted with disease."
Adams kept that to himself. Publicly, the American Society for the Colonization of Free Negroes that stole the idea that brought Thornton to America, struck a bell that would have pleased Thornton. They hailed the death of one of their distinguished board members as a loss that "must be severely felt by Africa and mankind." A week after he died, the National Intelligencer printed a remembrance that rang out a clarion. "C" hailed Thornton as a founder of the city who had been "a commissioner for laying out this Metropolis" and Commissioner of the Patent Office "during four successive administrations." C also noted that Thornton published arguments that formed popular opinion in support of the Greek and Latin American revolutions. In closing, C exalted the man, not his works: "His temperament was highly sensitive and, of course, his character was not exempt from those alloys that are blended with genius.... He was constant and warm in his friendship open and decided in his enmities. His love of knowledge was great; his love of liberty greater; but his greatest love was that of truth. Truth he incessantly sought in every avenue of science or literature, and fearlessly pursued through the whole course of his career with unabated ardor...." C didn't note Thornton's association with the Capitol.
When his wife wrote a brief memoir of his attainments, she also didn't mention architecture, but she did understand what he incessantly sought. It wasn't truth. She regretted his embracing "a greater variety of sciences" because it prevented him from attaining the fame 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."
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 before her death, the city had been focused on the completion of the New Capitol which dwarfed the Old. 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. It wasn't the recognition of his Capitol design that struck readers, with the improbable claim that "...Mrs. Thornton was the daughter of the unfortunate Dr. Dodd, of London, who was executed for forgery in 1777." One of Thornton's fables got in the way of his fame. 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." At least her mother could keep a secret. She moved in with the Thorntons in 1795 and died in the F Street house in 1835.
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 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 essay published in 1819 that argued for paper currency, Thornton claimed that he had "invented" a test to detect forgeries. All to say, he seemed to have a fascination with forgery, and was much better at it than his supposed father-in-law. Just before Dodd was arrested in 1777 for an easily detected forged signature of the Earl of Chesterfield on a bond, he wrote to Benjamin Franklin asking about a woman who had moved to Philadelphia. For American historians, that verifies Thornton's claim that the then 3 year old Anna Maria Brodeau was Dodd's daughter.
The author of her obituary may have told the tale about Dodd to deflect conversation from Mrs. Thornton’s own brush with history. In 1835, Arthur Bowen, who was the son of Mrs. Thornton's favorite slave Maria, who slept in the same bedroom as her master. Drunk and holding an ax, Bowen entered their room at night and elicited cries of "murder!" Rioters blamed abolitionist pamphlets and attacked free blacks. After Mrs. Thornton begged him to, President Jackson saved Bowen from the hangman. He was sold and sent to Florida where he served as a steward on a Navy steamboat.
The General and Jefferson weighed Thornton's false pretenses, and managed them to their advantage. Madison seemed to enjoy Thornton's perturbations 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 flames of nonsense and brilliance. On a May 1825 visit, he 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.
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 scorn. As for the Octagon, remember the "ingenious A" who offered specimens of designs suitable for angles acute or obtuse.
CC. WT to Jefferson 27 June 1814
EE. Richard Forrest to Madison 12 September 1810
1. 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,
2. WT to Fell 21 June 1802, Harris pp. 573-4
3. AMT notebook, volume 3, image 47; Dobyns, p. 47; 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; Hallet to Madison 9 September 1809.
4.
AA. Jefferson to WT 9 May 1817; WT to Jefferson 27 May 1817.
VV. WT to John Adams, 3 August 1822
MM. Rush to Madison 2 September 1815; Monroe to Madison 13 February 1818
HH. 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.
JJ. Jefferson to WT 29 January 1821
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