Washington by Fergus Bordewich

Author:Fergus Bordewich [Bordewich, Fergus]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2009-03-17T04:00:00+00:00

OF ALL THE personalities who were struggling to bring the federal city into being, there was one among them who might have been expected to point out the hypocrisy of relying so heavily on slave labor: William Thornton. Appointed to the three-man Board of Commissioners in the autumn of 1794 at a salary of £600 per year, Thornton and his wife, Anna Maria, settled on Falls Street (now M Street), in George Town, where they soon became a magnet for local society and a stream of eminent visitors; they also acquired a farm just across the district line in Montgomery County, Maryland, as well as property in the city, adjacent to lots belonging to President Washington. The good doctor was immensely proud of his appointment: “The trust reposed in us is so great that I do not know a more extensive power in any offices of our government, except the President, or perhaps the Secretary of State, Treasury, and War,” he boasted to his cousin John Coakley Lettsom. He was also happy just to have a paying job, having failed to make a go of it as a medical doctor in Philadelphia, where “the fees were in my estimation so low in comparison to the duties required that I was glad to abandon the practice.”

Thornton fell in love with the Potomac landscape. “The site is the most beautiful I have ever seen,” he enthused. “It is much like that of Constantinople, only we have on one side a river two miles wide, on the other one mile wide, containing a fine harbor for the largest ships. The country round rises in all the diversity of hill and dale that imagination can paint.” He quickly immersed himself in the commissioners’ daily flow of work orders, receipts, bills of procurement, regulations, disbursements, and slave hires, devoting himself with particular ardor to a meticulous reexamination of the Capitol’s troublesome foundation: should the hill’s crown be leveled so as not to overshadow the building, or the building be moved closer to the crown? In a stream of letters graced with his sweeping signature, he reported to the president about the nuances of street patterns, access to wharves, debates over the number of chimneys that should be allowed to each waterfront warehouse, and the knotty problem of trees, pointing out with annoyance that although L’Enfant had intended that the city’s broad streets should be lined by trees, axemen had cut them all down, and that it would take half a century for new ones to grow. “Our country is extensive, our resources great, and our ideas ought to be exalted,” he enthused. “I wish to see the American character outshine all others, and our public characters supported with the consideration due to their stations.” There was no mention now of the grand colonization scheme over which he had rhapsodized just a few years earlier. New enthusiasms crowded in upon him. Perhaps he would establish a philosophical society, he opined, or maybe an agricultural society, or even a university.

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