The Board of Appeals denied Simpson’s claim to the idea and moved to recommend that the application be finally rejected. The Board of Appeal’s recommendation was then forwarded to the Commissioner of Patents, J. Holt, who confirmed and rejected the application on February 2, 1859. Rufus' nephew, Thomas Rhodes Duval, moved to Washington, D. C. to study law under Rhodes. He was enumerated on the 1860 Washginton, D. C. census with Rufus, Martha, their children, and a domestic servant named Nancy on June 12, 1860. At this time, Rufus was a Master Mason at Dawson's Lodge (#16) of the Grand Lodge of the District of Columbia. The family lived at 461 E Street North, after moving there from a boarding house on Louisiana Avenue in 1858. Its neighboring structure, 463 E Street North was described in 1859 as a four story brick house with a back building, a bathroom, and gas [lighting] throughout. The home sat just four blocks east of Ford's Theater. Abraham Lincoln won the presidential vote on November 6, 1860. Four days later, Rufus Rhodes wrote a letter from Washington, D.C. to Mississippi Governor John J. Pettus, leaving no question as to where his loyalties lay. ""I cannot with my views hold office under a Republican President a single instance of time without a total sacrifice of my self-respect. To do it would involve not only a loss of my own self-respect, but brand me as a disgraced and dishonored man in the estimation of all for whose good opinion I am anxious, namely the Southern people. I regard the election of Lincoln as a verdict against the equality of the southern states on the part of the sectional majority of the north….” “Infatuated by a spell which love of the Union and a veneration for the works of our Father’s hands cast over our own perceptions,” he wrote, “we have hitherto refused to see and hear, or, seeing and hearing, to take heed of the lurid glare which lighted up and the muttering thunder which resonated from the northern skies with increasing spread and volume….Not altogether unnaturally we permitted this Delilah by her blandishments to steal away our judgment and persuade us to cling to the fond delusion that a sense of justice and of the right only slumbered among the northern people and would yet be awakened to gladden us by renewed demonstrations of fraternity and affection as in bye gone days when our fathers lived, until lo!