CIRCULAR ROOM IN WHICH TREATY OF GHENT WAS SIGNED
Colonel Tayloe’s occupancy of the Octagon embraced the administrations of four Presidents—Jefferson, Madison, Monroe and John Quincy Adams—and ceased in 1828, just as the picturesque figure of “Old Hickory” rose above the Presidential horizon. In 1814, after the burning of the White House by the British, the hospitality of the Octagon was tendered to the homeless President and his bewitching “Dolly,” and for six or eight months it was transformed into “the President’s house,” Colonel and Mrs. Tayloe retiring to their country seat for the nonce. In the circular room over the round vestibule, Madison signed the Treaty of Ghent, February, 1815, which closed our second war with Great Britain. The table at which the treaty was signed is still in the possession of the Tayloe family.
The fact that Madison is esteemed one of our most intellectual and scholarly Presidents, that his state papers exhibit not only statecraft, but literary construction of a high order, and that a distinguished Southern Senator in a recent speech in Congress named him “more than any other man the author of the American Constitution,” gives peculiar piquancy to the following story, which is vouched for by Mr. Benjamin Ogle Tayloe:
When a member of Congress in Philadelphia, Mr. Madison boarded in the house of Mrs. Payne, the mother of “Dolly,” at that time the beautiful Widow Todd. Mr. Madison, attracted by the personal charms of the fascinating young widow, sent her a book to read and requested her opinion of it—presumably with a view to sounding her mental depth. Whereupon, Mrs. Todd, who, Mr. Tayloe says, was always more remarkable for beauty, tact and manner than for depth of intellect, asked Colonel Burr, who boarded there, also, to write her reply to Mr. Madison, which he accordingly did.
Shortly afterward, Madison offered himself to the handsome and intellectual widow, and was accepted. This story tallies with the statement from other sources that Burr made the match between Madison and the sprightly Dolly, but if our accomplished fourth President really was ensnared by the schoolgirl ruse, he certainly had no occasion to complain of his matrimonial bargain. For in the judgment of her contemporaries and of all succeeding generations, no lady has ever done the honors of the White House more gracefully and acceptably to all parties than the gracious and lovely Dolly Madison. Her brilliant levees and various functions at the Octagon during her brief sojourn there are among the richest traditions of early official life in the Federal city.
Dr. William Thornton, the architect of the Octagon, was remarkable for his talents, benevolence and eccentricities. He was the first architect of the Capitol at Washington, and was appointed one of the three original commissioners to lay off the city. At the request of Jefferson, he furnished designs for the University of Virginia. He was born in the West Indies, of Quaker parentage, and educated in England and Scotland. A man of science, he was head of the Patent Office from the time of Washington’s administration to that of Monroe, and claimed to have preceded Fulton in the application of steam as a propeller of boats, and to have made experiments on the Delaware before Fulton made his on the Hudson.
This claim naturally brought the two into collision, and their quarrel consisted in writing pamphlets against each other, apropos of which, Thornton is said to have declared: “I killed Fulton with that last pamphlet of mine!” Dr. Thornton married the daughter of an English lady who kept a fashionable school for young ladies in Philadelphia, and is reputed to have stood much in awe of both his wife and mother-in-law—a condition of mind which finds scant compensation in worldly honors. The ladies were allies in their opposition to his leaning toward the turf, to which, despite his Quaker blood, the Doctor was passionately addicted. This brought him into close association with Colonel Tayloe, and their deaths occurred in the same year, 1828.
After her husband’s death, Mrs. Tayloe retired from society, although she continued to make the Washington house her principal home until her death, nearly thirty years later. One of her granddaughters, yet living in the District, is authority for the fact that for more than fifty years the Octagon was lighted solely by candles. Although gas was introduced prior to Mrs. Tayloe’s death, she would never permit its use in the Octagon, looking upon it as a “dangerous innovation,” and clinging to her candles to the last. The granddaughter remembers as one of the distinct impressions of her childhood, the sockets over the doorways which held these wax illuminators.
The Tayloe occupancy of the Octagon ceased with Mrs. John Tayloe’s death, in 1855, though its ownership did not pass from the family until its purchase by the American Institute of Architects, in 1903.
Between the dates 1855 and 1865, the Catholic Sisters of St. Matthew’s Parish taught a girls’ school in the Octagon, and from 1866 to 1879 it was leased by the government for the “Hydrographic Office,” incorporated by Congress in 1866 as a branch of the Navy Department.