Around the F Street house, Anna relied on George Plant, her driver and jack-of-all-trades. In an arrangement not unknown at that time, Plant did not actually have to live in the household. Although Anna owned George and was entitled to the fruits of his labor, he spent evenings with his free wife and children in Georgetown. In the mornings, he showed up for work on F Street. George Plant was that peculiar Washington character: a slave who commuted.
Personally, she depended on three generations of Bowens. There was Maria Bowen’s mother, Nelly Bowen, who had been her servant when she and William first came to Washington in 1795. Now elderly, she had passed the job to Maria, her daughter. Maria, in turn, had given birth to a boy, John Arthur, who by 1830 was going on fourteen years old.
Without this retinue, Anna Thornton could not have enjoyed her active social life. Maria Bowen shopped, cooked, and helped her take care of Mrs. Brodeau, who often fell ill. Nelly did sewing and cooking, and Arthur was expected to work as a servant himself, though he wasn’t very good at it.
Arthur had grown up a frisky boy who loved the streets of Washington City. At an early age, he picked up on Dr. Thornton’s passion for horses. “Races today + Arthur gone without leave,” Anna noted dismally in her diary in 1828. When Maria Bowen finally found her son in a billiards hall the next morning, the lad explained that he had slept in the backyard, as if that set matters straight.
Arthur was soft-spoken and quick-witted. Mrs. Brodeau had taught him to read and write at an early age. He had few duties around the house and plenty of room to roam. As Arthur grew older, the memory of William Thornton grew dimmer. He had no father. No older man lived in the house. The women expected George Plant to wield a manly hand with the boy, but Plant had four children of his own. As Arthur explored the city at will, his wayward ways disrupted the household. One day Anna overheard George shouting at Maria and Nelly about Arthur. “They are violent and unreasonable when in passion,” Anna wrote in her diary, “but who is not?” When the spring races came, Arthur ran away again.
Around the Fourth of July, George had a ferocious fight with Arthur. Anna had an urgent errand, requiring a trip on horseback, and George had failed to show up for work, perhaps sleeping off the effects of patriotic inebriation. Normally, she wouldn’t entrust such a job to a boy, but this time she did. Arthur took the horse and somehow the animal was injured. When George finally showed up, Anna was furious at him, and George was in turn furious at Arthur, threatening to whip him for mishandling the horse. Arthur took off and did not return until night had fallen.
“Archy is dead.”
Maria Bowen was speaking to Mrs. Thornton as they stood in the parlor of the house on F Street. Archy was the oldest of the male slaves, a member of the family household.
“He was killed yesterday by the blowup of a rock at the quarry,” Maria said bleakly.
Anna could not believe it. Archy? Dead?
“I didn’t know they blew up rocks there,” Anna said, a dubious claim. She was the one who had hired Archy out to the quarry, and she was the one who received his wages. The women no doubt wept and consoled each other.
Arthur felt the loss as much as anyone. Archy had been working and living at the Bethesda farm ever since Arthur was a little boy. His death left him even more alone in a house full of women, his own father nowhere to be seen, never to be mentioned. The house was dismal. It rained for days. To cheer up Nelly and Maria, Anna gave them three dollars to buy themselves gowns.
Not long after Archy’s death, Anna decided it was time to do something about Arthur. The boy knew what he could expect as an enslaved person. Just down the street at the southwest corner of Thirteenth and F streets stood Miller’s Tavern, home to a notorious incident around the time Arthur was born. Like many taverns in Washington City, Miller’s had a locked room where slave-owning travelers might house their bondsmen. One night, an enslaved woman, despondent that her two children had been sold to the South without her, jumped out of the window of her third-floor cell. She was badly injured but lived to tell her story to a young writer, Jesse Torrey, who made it famous with a dramatic drawing in his book on the cruelties of slavery in America. Arthur passed Miller’s Tavern often, a reminder of the cruelty of the world outside the comfortable house in which he was growing up.
Anna didn’t have enough work for him around the house, so she hired him out to her friend Mrs. Thompson, who agreed to pay Anna seven dollars a month for his services. Unfortunately, Arthur didn’t take directions well, and Mrs. Thompson sent him home before the month was out. Anna hired him out to Mrs. Cochrane, a widow who lived a few doors down on F Street. He bickered with her servants and was fired. Anna hired him out to Mrs. Carlisle, who ran a boardinghouse on C Street. Within a few days, he came home claiming he had a sore leg. She hired him out to Mr. and Mrs. Fuller, who owned the American Hotel at 14th and Pennsylvania. Arthur came and went from that job too. He refused to obey any woman, white or colored, free or slave. Even worse, he was making new friends and drinking spirits, which worried Anna.
“It was obvious,” Anna said, “that he had become dissipated and idle and addicted to occasional intoxication, though by no means a confirmed sot.”
The best thing to happen to Arthur Bowen was also perhaps the worst: He met John Cook. In 1833 the onetime shoemaker from Fredericksburg had left his clerk’s job at the Land Office to take over John Prout’s school for colored children at Fourteenth and H streets. Cook was twenty-five years old and in full command of his powers. Arthur was now seventeen years old and still impressionable. Cook was teaching himself Latin. Arthur couldn’t hold a job.
Arthur started attending meetings of the Philomathean Talking Society, where Cook led discussions with prepared remarks about slavery, temperance, and tobacco and handed out copies of forbidden newspapers like the Genius of Universal Emancipation and The Liberator. Arthur was inspired and returned to hear more. As Anna later conceded, he began keeping “the company of such free Negroes as were most actively engaged in propagating notions of general abolition, and disseminating inflammatory pamphlets from the North.”
Mrs. Thornton may have owned Arthur Bowen, but she could not control him.
15
ANNA HAD OTHER worries besides Arthur. For one, there was her mother’s perennial poor health. At nearly eighty years of age, Mrs. Brodeau (as everyone addressed her) suffered from glaucoma, dementia, and the effects of several strokes that had incapacitated her body and afflicted her mind. “Mama poorly” was one of the most common phrases in Anna’s journal, along with its optimistic rejoinder “Mama better” and its inevitable variations “Mama unwell” and “Mama a little better.”
Anna’s servant Maria Bowen provided crucial help in the daunting and emotional chore of taking care of her mother. Anna depended on Maria. When Maria fell sick, Anna noted in her diary “a great inconvenience.”
Fortunately, Anna liked Maria. Yes, they had a great difference in age, and yes, they bickered. Anna was annoyed when Maria wanted to go to a party with her friends. Maria was not pleased when Anna did not give her time to properly prepare for a dinner party. But together they kept the house on F Street in good running order. The rhythm of their life could be idyllic. Happy were the warm and hazy days of autumn when Maria baked a cake while George and Arthur harvested potatoes and Anna read a book.
Anna liked and depended on George Plant too. While she complained about his occasional absences, she took comfort in his presence around the house as well. When George went to visit relatives in Virginia for a week, Anna wrote in her diary, “I shall miss him very much.”
Anna Thornton had sometimes found it hard to live with her late husband, Dr. Thornton, but she was finding it harder to live without him. She had never known another man as well. They had been married when she was fifteen and he was thirty-one. Her mother, then a schoolmistress in Philadelphia, had arranged the match, and it proved a good one for her daughter. With his winning design of the Capitol, Dr. Thornton took his young bri
de and her mother to live in the growing village of Washington, where they gave dinners and parties that constituted the first social society of the new capital.
Almost everywhere she looked in Washington City, Anna could discern Dr. Thornton’s genius. When she rode out on the Avenue for her daily postdinner ride, she saw his magnificent building on Capitol Hill. When visiting friends in Georgetown, she saw Tudor House, the mansion he had designed for George Washington’s kin in the Custis and Lee families. When she passed through the intersection of Eighteenth Street and New York Avenue, she saw the Octagon House, which he had designed and built for her friend Benjamin Ogle Tayloe, and where her friends Dolley and James Madison had lived after the sacking of the presidential mansion in 1814. An eight-sided Georgian home with a central circular hall, a grand staircase, and sculptured mantels, the building was perhaps Washington City’s most elegant residence, a marvel of architectural ingenuity that showed the city’s ambitions for splendor were not entirely unrealistic.
Dr. Thornton’s handiwork had also led to one improvement that forever changed the capital’s landscape. When the Thorntons first came to the newly created District of Columbia in 1794, Dr. Thornton had explored the byways and channels of the vast tidal swamp that covered its southern section. As a wandering student he had seen the great capitals of Europe, strolling along the Thames in London and the Seine in Paris. Tramping on the marshy edge of the Potomac, he imagined what this new capital city might one day become. As an experiment, he planted saplings and bushes around the periphery of about eighteen acres of tidal mud on the theory that the roots of the plants would cause it to fill up more rapidly with silt than it naturally would. In time, the swampland within the circle of trees would grow solid and could become a useful part of the adjacent city. Thornton’s folly, people called it. Yet after years of scoffing, people realized Dr. Thornton was right—the ground in the pastures grew more solid and valuable, and soon a man named Kidwell claimed it as his own. What had been an impenetrable bog was now a productive pasture (and would, in the fullness of time, become home to the Reflecting Pool in front of the Lincoln Memorial on the National Mall).
He even found the time to write two full-length unpublished novels, depicting sympathetic females enduring the travails of judgmental Washington society. The first, “Julia,” described the plight of an unhappily married woman who has an affair with a dishonest sea captain. The second, “Lucy,” followed a likable young woman who has a child out of wedlock and has to win back the love of her ashamed family.
And he had moral courage. Who could forget Dr. Thornton’s defense of the Patent Office during the British invasion of 1814? Or his rescue in 1806 of poor Mrs. Turreau, the much-abused wife of the French ambassador? She had saved the ambassador from the guillotine during the French Revolution, and he repaid the favor by beating her. When the shameless man ordered soldiers to drag her onto a boat for an unwanted return trip to France, Dr. Thornton intervened in his official capacity as the magistrate for the Second Ward.
“Mr. Thornton, you don’t know zee laws of the nation,” said the angry French diplomat.
“But I know the laws of humanity,” Dr. Thornton replied, “and I mean to enforce them.”
With the help of a small crowd, Dr. Thornton forced Mr. Turreau to cease his tyranny and let his wife choose her own departure.
Anna remembered her husband’s faults too. He spent money too freely. He had all the attributes of a rich man, said a wag, save the most important one: His intelligence was not always practical. With a man named Fitch, he had devised the world’s first steam-powered boat but, alas, had never perfected the idea. A cannier man named Robert Fulton swiped their design, built a fleet of steamboats, and made a fortune. Thornton filed a lawsuit against Fulton that dragged on for years without result. At the Patent Office, Thornton met, and annoyed, almost every inventor of consequence in the country. He denied more than one patent request by saying that he had actually thought of the invention long before. To those he did not like, he was quarrelsome.
He could also be vain. “He knew many things, indeed, he knew almost everything,” said one bemused admirer. “And what he knew he was disposed to fully let everybody else know.” He was easily distracted. He enjoyed lively company and the pleasures of the racetrack at the expense of his intellectual pursuits. “His thirst for knowledge was great, and perhaps too diffuse and general, but his views were noble and enlarged,” Anna wrote after his death. “. . . Alas, he lived not to complete any of his plans but left all unfinished, tho his industry and activity were unsurpassed.”
Anna’s friend and neighbor John Quincy Adams was harsher. The former president wrote in his diary that he thought Thornton was a fool, “a man of some learning and much ingenuity, of quick conception and lively wit” who was also “entirely destitute of Judgment, discretion and common sense.”
Yet Anna was stubborn in his posthumous defense. The former president might be condescending, yet as she looked around Washington City, she could say without fear of contradiction that her late husband had a more visible and enduring influence on the capital than the estimable Mr. Adams.
For better and worse, she had loved him. He was her first and only lover, an older man with fascinating and sometimes dubious friends. He was a compulsive inventor and ingenious architect. Well born and well read, he had a love for horses that did him no good. He had a thirst for liberty yet a weak will. He was wise about the human heart, naïve about power. Dependent on women, he was immune to their influence. A failure at fisticuffs, he had a wit that could charm. He was sensitive to slights, prone to argument, imaginative about big things, oblivious about details. He was carefree, valiant, and foolish. And he was gone.
16
ALL THE WHILE Anna was worrying about Arthur, Beverly Snow ran the Epicurean Eating House with ingratiating élan. With wife Julia and business partner William Walker at his side, he tended the stoves, shopped in the Centre Market, met the steamboats down at the Georgetown docks, and wrote up advertisements for the newspapers extolling what his establishment offered. “Luxury Luxury Luxury!” boasted one. The Epicurean Eating House was a busy place, especially at night.
The Avenue had been paved with hard-packed stones, now spanning a width of eighty feet, with fourteen-foot-wide sidewalks on either side. All agreed the new hard surface of the boulevard was a marvel until it was noticed that the steel wheels of the carriages tended to grind the rocks’ surface to a fine powder. On gusty days, tourists gaping at the Pocahontas sign above Brown’s Hotel would find themselves engulfed in a passing thunderhead of powder and emerged looking like ghosts. Shopkeepers took to hosing down the Avenue in self-defense.
Familiar and distinguished faces abounded on Snow’s corner. Andrew Stevenson, the Virginia congressman who served as Speaker of the House of Representatives, lived at Brown’s, as did a half dozen other representatives. Every year there seemed to be more visitors from England and even the Continent. Across Sixth Street, the white and black hackmen in front of Gadsby’s Hotel flicked their reins and steered their carriages out onto the Avenue, ferrying politicians, lobbyists, and ladies to the Capitol. They returned with tourists and attorneys. The shiny blue carriages of Beltzhoover & Company boarded passengers for Baltimore at four and eight thirty in the morning and at three in the afternoon. There were even larger omnibuses, seating a dozen people at a time, that took all manner of passengers to Georgetown, Alexandria, and the Capitol on the hour.
Inside the Epicurean Eating House, Beverly was offering what a future generation would call soul food and what contemporaries regarded as one of the city’s finest dining experiences. Stepping down the stairs to the basement door, visitors entered a cozy, aromatic warren of dining rooms lit by candles. At a time when hotels and taverns were mostly run for men, Snow made a point of welcoming women and children. “Families furnished as usual,” he declared in his advertisements.
At the busiest of times, ladies and gentlemen of the best sort filled his
tables. John Withers, Beverly’s landlord, partook of the food but passed on the spirits. After all, he was vice president of a temperance society. Daniel Webster, the mammoth orator from Massachusetts, was known to duck in the door. So was Harry Clay, not so disdainful of the colored man that he wouldn’t sample his repast now and then. Even John Calhoun, the embittered former vice president, showed up now and again.
Diners chose from a menu specializing in, but not limited to, small game birds, offering roasted woodcocks, partridges, plovers, and pheasants. Each might be dressed with currants, guava, or jelly. The refined scent of canvasback duck competed with the sweeter aroma of the smaller birds likes ortolans and snipes. In the warmer months, he touted trout and soft-shell crabs. At one table, you might see a man eating that new French meat concoction known as “patte” with a glass of Madeira. At another, ladies sipped “champaigne.”
Beverly’s specialty was green turtle, served as an entire meal. In the early summer, he would go down to the docks and buy a massive terrapin right off the steamboat. These creatures, weighing up to one hundred pounds each, were brought in from distant coves and marshes along the Chesapeake Bay. Beverly would cart one, still alive, to his basement kitchen, where he probably prepared it in a manner similar to that prescribed by Mary Randolph in her popular cookbook The Virginia Housewife.
“Kill it at night in winter, and in the morning in summer,” Randolph advised. “Hang it up by the hind fins, cut off the head, and let it bleed well.
“Separate the bottom shell from the top, with great care lest the gall bladder be broken, which must be cautiously taken out and thrown away. Put the liver in a bowl of water. Empty the guts and lay them in water. If there be eggs, put them also in water.”
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