Epilogue: John Quincy Adams' Diary
In 1801 after returning from Berlin, John Quincy Adams called on President Jefferson to report on his negotiations with the Prussian government. At a social gathering, he met Thornton and briefly noted in his diary that Thornton “was by turns ingenious and humorous, but all the time very talkative.” In 1803, Adams was elected to the US Senate by the Massachusetts legislature. Once back in the federal city in November of that year, he made obligatory social calls on the Thorntons and received their visits. Finally, on March 5, 1804, after a dinner party given by Justice Bushrod Washington, Adams noted what Thornton said. He explained “his plan for a new confederate system of Government for the United States.” In December, back in the city for the 8th congress's second session, Adams checked on a patent. That brought him to “Dr: Thornton’s Office; acting under the Secretary of State as Commissioner of Patents.” Thornton told him that it was “not a new invention— Which indeed he says is the case of almost all the applications for Patents— And others are for things impossible— In the present state of the Law, a Patent cannot be refused to any person, who takes the Oath, and pays his thirty dollars— The Doctor told me of many egregious impositions on the public, under this system— One particularly by a Clergyman of Bordentown, New-Jersey, named Burgess Allison, who has a patent for improving Spirits by filtration through charcoal, which had been known and practised for many years—.” A few months later on March 12, Adams once again enjoyed the doctor’s ideas: “Dr: Thornton opened to me another of his projects; which is of an universal system of education; the result of which in his opinion would be to produce in fifty years time a greater number of ingenious and learned men in the United States, than in all the world besides.”(1) In his diary at least, Adams did not comment on the Capitol or the controversies surrounding its design.
Since Adams worked for two of the principals involved in it, when he returned to Washington, he probably heard another story about Thornton. After the conflagration, British troops in ships off Alexandria seemed poised to invade the city. On August 27, President Madison and Secretary of State Monroe rode to the Navy Yard. 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."(4)
The president was incensed and told Adams to find out which member of the cabinet met MacGregor. Adams got Thornton to reveal Rush, who had just left to become the American minister in London. Monroe wrote to Madison “of the absurdity” of what Thornton wrote, “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. This intimation, may assume, in the sequel, all the force that Dr Thornton can give it, & perhaps do some harm, in the absence of Mr Rush.” Adams asked Thornton for "the substance of his Conversations” with MacGregor, and Rush. Then 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." Meanwhile, Bagot squelched rumors that he cooperated with MacGregor. He told Adams about his chilly reception of MacGregor and his amazement that Thornton sent him. As for Bagot's version of events, Thornton told Adams that Bagot was 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."(8)
His persistent use of the same methods to promote himself was remarkable. 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 rifle, Thornton had lost his drawings and relied on his clerks to attest that they had once seen them. When Thornton challenged inventors, he usually bullied them. Then they left town. In 1811, young John Hancock was advised by others in Washington to simply give in and share patent rights with Thornton. Then Thornton made clear that he had no interest in making rifles. He only wanted royalties from all that were made.(9)
Judging from his diary, Thornton never regaled Adams with his narrative about his design for the Capitol. However, after Thornton once again dismissed the importance of a patent application sent to Adams, he told him "the whole Story of his own Steam-boat, which actually ran upon the Schuylkill several years before Fulton’s-” Adams didn’t recount his story, but mocked how Thornton ended his story. The the new boat was to be called Perseverance. Thornton had to go home to his mother. Adams concluded that Thornton “failed of ultimate success, merely by his want of Perseverance and pecuniary means..."(10)
In his diary for August 23, 1819, Adams got a full accounting of the doctor off his chest. Ironically, a scheme being hatched by Thornton and Burgess Allison, the inventor he excoriated in 1804, sparked Adams' reaction. Their idea was that the president would send Thornton on a mission to South America and Allison would head the Patent Office. In return, Allison would rally Baptists to support Adams for president. Such a deal disgusted Adams and he couldn't fathom why Thornton would give up his current job:
— 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.
Adams knew that Thornton’s would never be tapped for a diplomatic mission. In that same entry, he continued:
[Thornton] 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.
Thornton gloried in the “politeness” which he described in a letter to Adams' father, the former president: President 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."(11)
Despite all that, in the spring of 1820, John Quincy Adams bought the house next door to Thornton’s. He and his family moved into on October 19, 1820. He soon thought better of his neighbor. For example, "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." There were downsides. He learned that the sportsman and Tortola slave owner was not rich. In the fall of 1822, “Dr Thornton called at the Office, with a proposal to borrow money, which I declined—.”(12)
When Adams moved into the White House, he kept in touch. In 1825, Adams gave Thornton a chance to make 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 noted that it attracted “perhaps” 50 carriages, a good turn out. 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."(13) In that era, “elegant accomplishments” meant impeccable presentation in society and Thornton prided himself on being well tailored with a bearing to match. Only when he began to talk did he become, as another remembrance put it, “a complete antidote to dullness.”(14)
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." That said, he never freed his half of the slaves working the Pleasant Valley plantation. His widow got the last payout from Tortola; 131 slaves, 73 females and 58 males, were sold and she split the proceeds with Thornton's half-brother's heirs. In his will he encouraged her to free their domestic slaves, if they were worthy. (15)
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.(16)
When his wife wrote a brief memoir of his attainments, she also didn't mention the Capitol. Instead, she 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 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."(17) That the ingenious are sometimes frustrated by being only almost good at everything might be the best lesson to draw from Thornton’s life.
But posterity hails him as a genius, and more. When C. M. Harris quotes Thornton’s recollection of how he tried to bring the General back to life, he offers little editorial analysis. Harris only sets the scene: “Tobias Lear recorded that the Laws and WT arrived at Mount Vernon ‘about two’ on Sunday afternoon, 15 Dec. 1799, and noted that WT gave advice on matters relating to the burial and was in attendance at the funeral three days later.” Then he quotes Thornton’s long false memory, written years later, which begins: “The weather was very cold, and [the corpse] remained in a frozen state, for several days.” However, it wasn’t that cold and the corpse was not frozen. 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. 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. To Lear’s suggestion that funeral services be delayed longer to permit more relatives to attend, the attending physician and Dr. Thornton objected. The inflammatory nature of the General's fatal case of croup that stopped his breathing made the corpse susceptible to decay. Thornton joined the other doctor in insisting that the funeral had to be held as soon as possible, and the body was entombed four days after his death.
Thornton crafted his hare brained scheme of a transfusion with lambs blood in a medical letter but it wound up in the same file as his never submitted M. D. dissertation “On Sleep.” Much to the amazement of John Quincy Adams, he did talk about the ideas that informed his plan to work a miracle: "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."(18)
Another of Thornton’s tales surfaced in his wife’s obituary and embarrassed the memory of both her and her mother Mrs. Brodeau. Incidentally, 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 swallowed 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, 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 their 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."
Thornton certainly knew of the Reverend William 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 too fashionable dress and demeanor. He was famous for his uplifting sermons to the fallen women at London's Magdalen Hospital. Perhaps Thornton 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 had a fascination with forgery and fancied himself 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.(19)
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 by offering to single-handedly surrender the city to the British then in Alexandria. Thornton denied he intended to do that but he had openly collaborate with the enemy, and seemed to enjoy doing so. He visited and befriended Colonel William Thornton, a wounded British officer whose brigade had spearheaded the British charge at Battle of Bladensburg. When the British finally retreated, the president ordered the models removed and the Patent Office prepared to receive congress. The priority of northern members was to move the federal government back to Philadelphia, but thanks to Thornton’s heroics, congress met in the Patent Office. In the summer of 1815, the doctor wrote to the colonel, who had since survived the Battle of New Orleans, and returned to England. The doctor reported that he had coined a bon-mot that had swept the city: "One William Thornton took the city and another preserved it.” When Madison left office in 1817, Thornton wrote to him about the shock Mrs. Thornton felt at not getting a farewell visit from Mrs. Madison. As for himself "I have long had to lament a marked distance and coldness towards me, for which I cannot account."(20)
Measuring Thornton through the eyes of presidents makes sense because he was essentially a courtier and he knew it. When the Old Capitol was finished, what should have been the peak of his career,amounted to nothing. President Monroe had no use for Thornton. Then he failed to take advantage of the pity John Quincy Adams had for him. He let pass the chance to decorate the pediment upon which he had planned to mount a statue of Hercules. 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. It will be a brave architectural historian who separates Dr. Thornton from what was the headquarters of the American Institute of Architects from 1899 to 1970. The history of the Capitol has been over written. Glenn Brown credited Thornton for everything that caught the eye. Of course, the General was right, it was the work of a committee. Thornton certainly did not own the Rotunda. To him it became a grotesque sugar bowl between cannisters of tea. However, the General and Jefferson let their guard down out of desperation to get the work started. One wonder what Col. Trumbull said when he unrolled Thornton’s plans before the president. In 1818, Trumbull was in the city and showing one of his historical paintings about the Revolution in a room near the Capitol. He was also lobbying Bulfinch, the new architect in charge. He said kind words about Thornton’s floor plan. Then unrolled his own plan and drawings for the perfect Rotunda for his paintings.1 The committee was once again in session, so to speak, but Thornton refused to sit at the table.(21)
1. JQA diary 1 November 1801, 5 March & 27 December 1804, 12 March 1805.
2. Ibid, 1, 5 & 24 October 1814; National Intelligencer 7 September 1814; WT to Jefferson 27 June 1814; AMT notebooks vol. 4 p. 7.
4. Monroe to Hay, 7 September 1814, Papers of James Monroe, University of Mary Washington; see also, Journal of Columbia Historical Society, 1916, "Mrs. Thornton's Diary: Capture of Washington" pp. 177-8, 181;
5. JQA diary 14 October & 13 December 1817
6. Thornton, "Outlines..." in Cleven, N. Andrew, "Thornton's Outlines...." Hispanic American Historial Review, Vol.12 No. 2 (May 1932) pp. 198-215; 17. James Lloyd to John Adams, 7 April 1815; reply 22 April .
7. Madison to Lee et al 10 March 1815; Latrobe to Madison, 24, April 1816.
8. National Intelligencer 7 January 1818; JQA diary 27 January, 7, 13, & 23 February 1818;; Monroe to Madison, 13 February 1818.
9. Demerrit, Dwight D., "John H. Hall and the Origin of the Breechloader." American Society of Arms Collector Bulletin, 42; 24-29; National Intelligencer, 25 March 1819, 1 April 1819; see Preston, Daniel, "Administration of Patent Office...." Journal of the Early Republic, Vol. 5, No. 3 (Autumn, 1985), pp. 331-353, for a defense of Thornton.
10. JQA diary 26 April 1819.
11. JQA diary 23 August 1819; WT to John Adams 3 August 1822 ; also see WT to Jefferson, 9 January 1821.
12. JQA diary 30 April 1822 & 3 October 1822.
13. Ibid. diary 17 May 1825, March 30, 1828; other entries mentioning WT include 19 October 1820; 16 October 1821; November 30, 1819; April 8, 1821.
14. unattributed quote in Dunlap, History of the Rise of Arts and Design…, vol. 1, p. 336.
15. History of African Colonization p. 256; Legacies of British Slavery, "Pleasant Valley Estate, Tortola, Virgin Islands”
16. Daily National Intelligencer 4 April 1828;
17. Clark,"Dr. and Mrs. Thornton", p. 199.
18. Harris p. 528; Lear Journal, Clements Library; Harris, p. 528; Thompson, Mary V. "Death Defied" Mount Vernon Museum; Jefferson's weather observations, page 25; Adams' diary, June 25, 1823.
19. 23. 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. Berlin, Jean V. "A Mistress and a Slave: Anna Maria Thornton and John Arthur Bowen" Proceeding South Carolina Historical Association, 1990; 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; 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.
20. WT to Col. WT, 24 June 1815, Gilder Lehrman Institute, (no longer available without registered log-in); WT to Madison 3 March 1817; Dolley Madison to Hannah Gallatin 29 December 1814.
21. Scott, “From the ‘Hall of the People’ to the ‘Grand Vestibule for Great Public Occassions’” Capitol Dome vol. 54 no. 1, pp. 25ff.
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