THORNTON, Thomas C., clergyman, born in Dumfries, Virginia, 12 October, 1794; died in Mississippi, 23 March, 1860. He was educated in his native place, became an exhorter in the Methodist Episcopal church at the age of sixteen, and was received into the Baltimore conference three years later. In 1841 he was appointed president of a college in Mississippi. He left the Methodist church in 1845, and attached himself to the Protestant Episcopal church, but returned to his former connection in 1850, and in 1853 was readmitted to the Mississippi conference, He was the author of " Inquiry into the History of Slavery in the United States" (Washington, 1841), in which he replied to the antislavery arguments of William E. Channing, and of "Theological Colloquies."