Anna Thornton
Encyclopedia
Anna Maria Brodeau Thornton (1775?-1865) was a prominent Washington, D.C.
Washington, D.C.
Washington, D.C., formally the District of Columbia and commonly referred to as Washington, "the District", or simply D.C., is the capital of the United States. On July 16, 1790, the United States Congress approved the creation of a permanent national capital as permitted by the U.S. Constitution....

, socialite
Socialite
A socialite is a person who participates in social activities and spends a significant amount of time entertaining and being entertained at fashionable upper-class events....

, and the wife of architect William Thornton
William Thornton
Dr. William Thornton was a British-American physician, inventor, painter and architect who designed the United States Capitol, an authentic polymath...

, who designed the first United States Capitol
United States Capitol
The United States Capitol is the meeting place of the United States Congress, the legislature of the federal government of the United States. Located in Washington, D.C., it sits atop Capitol Hill at the eastern end of the National Mall...

 building. She rubbed shoulders with figures such as George Washington
George Washington
George Washington was the dominant military and political leader of the new United States of America from 1775 to 1799. He led the American victory over Great Britain in the American Revolutionary War as commander-in-chief of the Continental Army from 1775 to 1783, and presided over the writing of...

 and Dolley Madison
Dolley Madison
Dolley Payne Todd Madison was the spouse of the fourth President of the United States, James Madison, and was First Lady of the United States from 1809 to 1817...

.

Anna Maria was probably born in England
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...

 and emigrated at a young age along with her mother, Ann Brodeau, who moved to Philadelphia and set up a schoolhouse by 1780 . In 1790, at the young age of 16, Anna Maria married William Thornton, who was much older, having been born in 1759; because Anna Maria, unlike William, did not have a Quaker background, William was expelled from the Society of Friends . William Thornton came from a slaveholding family based on the island of Tortola
Tortola
Tortola is the largest and most populated of the British Virgin Islands, a group of islands that form part of the archipelago of the Virgin Islands. Local tradition recounts that Christopher Columbus named it Tortola, meaning "land of the Turtle Dove". Columbus named the island Santa Ana...

, and after he died in 1828, though his will seemed to grant freedom to his slaves, his wife and mother-in-law continued to reside with slaves in their Washington, D.C. home (.

One night in 1835, one of those slaves ventured into the bedroom of Anna Maria Thornton, who was then about 60, and he wielded an axe . Anna Maria and her mother, who shared her room, escaped unscathed, but the slave, John Arthur Bowen, was arrested and faced the possibility of hanging . In response to the abortive attack, white residents of Washington rioted, burning a black school, amid other acts of destruction . The capital's restrictive "black codes" were also tightened in response to the Bowen incident.

Despite Bowen's threat to her life, Anna Maria Brodeau Thornton was tormented by his imprisonment - especially when he wrote her a moving letter about awful jail conditions (this letter is still in the Anna Maria Brodeau Thornton papers at the Library of Congress) and went to extraordinary lengths to try to get him pardoned. Her diary chronicles how she appealed to many powerful Washington men at the time, such as Congressman and future Vice President Richard Mentor Johnson
Richard Mentor Johnson
Richard Mentor Johnson was the ninth Vice President of the United States, serving in the administration of Martin Van Buren . He was the only vice-president ever elected by the United States Senate under the provisions of the Twelfth Amendment. Johnson also represented Kentucky in the U.S...

 - who, ironically enough, considered a slave woman to be his common-law wife. She also appealed to military men such as Gen. George Gibson, former Quartermaster General, who was a close personal friend of President Andrew Jackson
Andrew Jackson
Andrew Jackson was the seventh President of the United States . Based in frontier Tennessee, Jackson was a politician and army general who defeated the Creek Indians at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend , and the British at the Battle of New Orleans...

, and to a member of the Washington family . The widow Thornton presented a petition signed by numerous Washington notables to President Jackson, in person, and he acted on it on the symbolic date of July 4, 1836, releasing Bowen from confinement . Thornton immediately sold Bowen to John Henry Eaton to work on a flatboat in Florida. Here the trail grows cold, because only one, uninformative mention of Bowen appears in subsequent Thornton diary entries, and no personal papers appear to have been preserved for Eaton.
It is fascinating to speculate what prompted Bowen's attack on the widow Thornton, and just as interesting to ponder why she went to such trouble to release him, and why she was so bothered by his imprisonment (she constantly wrote in her journal about being too out of sorts to engage in social activities, before his release). Clearly, slaves and masters had peculiar relationships, based on the love-hate model that the white owner will give "love" - as long as the slave "behaves him/herself" and performs well; and the black slave will hate the owner no matter what, but perhaps feel a bit of sentimentality despite him/herself. Countless authors who have studied the dynamics of slavery - Ira Berlin, Stephanie McCurry, and others - have found ambiguities and tensions in the relationships between slaves and masters.

In her petition to Jackson, Thornton described Bowen consistently as a "boy," though he was about 19, and speculated that he had been under the influence of drink. In other words, he had not "really" attacked her; it was not him doing the acting, but merely the "demon rum." This explanation could prevent Thornton from facing the fact that her slaves might harbor some genuine negative feelings against her.

Thornton probably felt a kind of maternal responsibility for Bowen, as many slaveowners felt toward their "people" (see Berlin, McCurry, etc.). His relative youth probably touched her heart, especially since she had no children of her own. Curiously, however, a newspaper article from the time of the trial describes Bowen as a "mulatto," which raises interesting questions about his paternity. If Bowen was William Thornton's son, one would expect hostility by Mrs. Thornton rather than affection. However, it cannot be proven what Bowen's parentage was, or if the "mulatto" designation was even accurate.

Bowen, meanwhile, had become a risk to rebel against his slave condition. He had joined a debating group run by a group of free blacks (newspaper articles of the trial describe this), and he had been described in Thornton's diary as "acting out" from time to time (getting in fights, going to the races, etc.). Also, he was one of the few literate slaves (and his letter from jail demonstrates he had a well-developed skill for writing), which no doubt improved his self-esteem and made him question his status in bondage. (Just as literacy had helped Frederick Douglass
Frederick Douglass
Frederick Douglass was an American social reformer, orator, writer and statesman. After escaping from slavery, he became a leader of the abolitionist movement, gaining note for his dazzling oratory and incisive antislavery writing...

 realize that he was as good as any white person.)

After Bowen's release from jail and sale "South," Anna Maria Brodeau Thornton went about her daily life, finally freeing her few remaining servants shortly before her death in 1865 (in which year they would have been freed, anyway, with the end of the American Civil War
American Civil War
The American Civil War was a civil war fought in the United States of America. In response to the election of Abraham Lincoln as President of the United States, 11 southern slave states declared their secession from the United States and formed the Confederate States of America ; the other 25...

). Her diary, which is a rich source of information about social life in Washington, D.C., in the late eighteenth and early to mid-nineteenth centuries, is available at the Library of Congress. Her petition to Andrew Jackson is stored in the Andrew Jackson papers at the Library of Congress.

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