The Admiral and the Ambassador Read online

  From The Admiral and the Ambassador :

  “That night, Porter delivered a previously scheduled speech to the American Club in Paris and talked about his quest to find Jones’s body. The tenor of the speech made it sound more political than historical, and it is hard to imagine that he was not counting on the foreign correspondents in attendance to wire his words to their newspapers back home. He detailed for the expatriate business leaders his efforts scouring records to find the cemetery in which Jones was likely buried, the more recent negotiations to obtain the right to dig for the body, and the need for Congress to approve the president’s request to pay for the exhumation….

  “‘While other nations are gathering the ashes of their heroes in their Pantheons, their Valhallas, and their Westminster Abbeys, all that is mortal of this marvelous organizer of American victories upon the sea lies like an outcast in a squalid quarter of a distant city, in a neglected grave, where it was placed by the hand of charity to keep it from the potter’s field,’ Porter told his fellow Americans. ‘What once was consecrated ground is desecrated by vegetable gardens, a deposit for night soil, and even the burial of dogs. It is fitting that an effort be made to give him an appropriate sepulcher at last in the land of liberty which his efforts helped make free.’”

  Copyright © 2014 by Scott Martelle

  All rights reserved

  Published by Chicago Review Press Incorporated

  814 North Franklin Street

  Chicago, IL 60610

  ISBN 978-1-61374-730-8

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Martelle, Scott, 1958–

  The admiral and the ambassador : one man’s obsessive search for the body of John Paul Jones / Scott Martelle.

  pages cm

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-1-61374-730-8

  1. Jones, John Paul, 1747–1792—Death and burial. 2. Jones, John Paul, 1747–1792–Tomb. 3. Porter, Horace, 1837–1921. I. Title.

  E207.J7M23 2014

  973.3′5092—dc23

  2014002307

  Interior design: PerfecType, Nashville, TN

  Printed in the United States of America

  5 4 3 2 1

  For Margaret, of course

  Contents

  Introduction

  1 Jones: A Hero Dies

  2 A New President

  3 McKinley, Grant, and an Ambassadorship

  4 Jones: The Scourge of England

  5 The Ambassador Arrives

  6 Of War and Heroes

  7 Jones: The Fall

  8 War in Cuba, Peace in Paris

  9 The Missing Grave

  10 A Brush with Fame

  11 The Search Begins

  12 Dreyfus, the Exposition, and Other Distractions

  13 An Assassination

  14 The Negotiations

  15 The Dig and the Discovery

  16 The Return of the Hero

  17 A Celebration and a Delay

  18 Annapolis Celebrates

  19 “Stowed Away Like Old Lumber”

  A Note on Sourcing and Some Thanks

  Notes

  Selected Bibliography

  Index

  INTRODUCTION

  ON A SUNDAY MORNING in late January 1913, the US secretary of the navy, George von Lengerke Meyer, and Horace Porter, the former US ambassador to France, led a small group of political dignitaries on a thirty-mile train trip from Washington, DC, to the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland. It was an unusually warm, spring-like day, and bright sunshine drenched the countryside as the train glided eastward, arriving a little before 11 AM. A small welcoming committee awaited them at the platform. After the dignitaries alit and introductions had been made, academy superintendent Captain John H. Gibbons escorted the group the few blocks to the college grounds for a brief ceremony that would be part funeral and part final chapter of a long and shifting story.1

  As the dignitaries arrived, the academy’s seven hundred uniformed midshipmen were already in place on an expanse of treed parkland between the domed, five-year-old chapel and a ship basin that had been carved into the bank of the Severn River at the northeast edge of the grounds. The grandiose, five-story Bancroft Hall, the cadets’ palatial new dormitory, anchored the southeast corner of the park, and once the dignitaries had entered the chapel, a small detachment of midshipmen marched to an open stone courtyard at the foot of the broad staircase leading up to Bancroft Hall’s main entrance.

  A half dozen of the young men then split off and entered the hall, making their way beneath the grand staircase where they surrounded and carefully lifted a flag-draped coffin from a temporary bier of two sawhorses. The young pallbearers carried the body outside to a small caisson, then fell in behind the navy band and a double line of midshipmen for the short and somber parade to the chapel. While the dignitaries listened to a short service on the main floor, the pallbearers took the coffin down a short flight of stairs to a large room in the middle of the basement where they hoisted it into a massive twenty-one-ton marble-and-bronze sarcophagus supported by bronze dolphins. Workmen then winched the heavy lid into place and sealed the sarcophagus shut.

  The ceremony in the church was short—just a few comments about the significance of the moment and some accolades for the man whose body was freshly placed in the basement crypt, closed out by a prayer. At its end, the celebrants descended the stairs to the basement, where they became the first tourists to visit the final resting place of Revolutionary War hero John Paul Jones. The moment was decidedly anticlimactic, but that shouldn’t have been surprising for what was, in effect, Jones’s fourth funeral.

  Jones’s arrival at his ornate crypt came more than 120 years after his death in Paris in 1792. France at that time was in the throes of its own revolution, and Jones’s death—of natural causes—was quickly noted and even more quickly forgotten, an ignominious end for the man many people consider to be the father of the US Navy. Were it not for Horace Porter, one of the men on the Annapolis outing on that January day, Jones’s body would likely still be buried deep beneath modern Paris instead of tucked into the basement of the Annapolis Chapel. How Porter found the hero’s remains—which involved something of a historical detective story—is the subject of this book.

  Jones was most famous for words he never uttered. According to legend, “I have not yet begun to fight” was his response to a demand that he “strike his colors”—surrender—by a British navy captain with whom his barely floating Bonhomme Richard was engaged in a deadly sea battle. What Jones actually said was closer to “I have not yet thought of it, but I am determined to make you strike!” Not quite as resonant or poetic, though equally emblematic of Jones’s preternatural stubbornness and drive.

  Over generations, such embellishments to Jones’s life have helped create a legend that exceeds the scope of the man, which is fine; that is the nature of heroes and hero worship. The real Jones, though, was a fascinating figure without the embellishments. At times petulant and easily offended, at other times a masterful and intuitive naval strategist, Jones cut a wide swath through Revolutionary America and the salons of Europe. He liked women—especially, it seems, those already married. He liked receiving accolades. And he hungered for fame and acceptance from the rich and the powerful, an understandable character trait for the ambitious, lowborn son of a Scottish gardener.

  In the course of his short life, Jones achieved much. He became a successful sea captain and expert navigator, a self-taught and prolific letter writer, a murderer, and a war hero. He was received at the courts of royalty in Paris and Saint Petersburg, was fluent in French, and counted among his friends and acqua
intances a roster of America’s founding fathers, including Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Benjamin Franklin.

  He was the first American naval commander to receive a salute from a foreign power—France—while flying the new American flag, the Stars and Stripes, and showed through his cleverness, bravery, and will, that the eighteenth century British navy was not as formidable as it might have seemed. While Jones never acquired the kinds of riches he sought, he did amass a fortune large enough to make most men comfortable in that time.

  Jones’s story has been well chronicled in many splendid (and some not-so-splendid) biographies, led in 1959 by Samuel Eliot Morison’s Pulitzer Prize—winning John Paul Jones: A Sailor’s Biography, and followed more recently by Evan Thomas’s well-turned John Paul Jones: Sailor, Hero, Father of the American Navy in 2003. Jones biographies invariably end with a full or partial chapter on how Jones’s body went missing after his death, tacked on like an appendix, as though the author is saying, well, I’ve told you a story about this fascinating man and I guess I should tell you that here at the end of his life another little drama took place.

  It’s that last story that fascinates me most. There is something poignant about Jones’s earthly afterlife. It speaks to our national impulse to elevate heroes—particularly military ones—but also our collective short memory and disregard for history. The genesis of this book was my chance encounter with an article, “Home Is the Sailor,” by historian Adam Goodheart, in the April 2006 issue of Smithsonian magazine. The piece explored lingering uncertainty about whether the body in that Naval Academy crypt is indeed that of Jones. I believe it is and that the questions are more of the “what if” variety than serious doubts.

  But the article introduced me to the man responsible for finding the body, Horace Porter, who achieved significant fame during his life but who has since faded into the shadows of history. Curiosity piqued, I began poking around to learn more about Porter and the obsession that led this confidante of presidents—himself a decorated Civil War hero who attained the rank of brigadier general—to spend several years and a small fortune trying to find the body of a man long dead.

  As I worked, it became clear that the lives of Porter and Jones, taken together, were inextricably linked to some of the most significant events in the first half of the nation’s history. Through them, we can see on a human scale the evolution of a nation from its birth in revolt against the British through the patriotic fervor and burgeoning militarism and imperialism that would make the twentieth century the American Century.

  So this book begs a bit of indulgence. It proceeds largely chronologically and focuses primarily on Porter, but it also detours a bit into wars and assassinations, international exhibitions, and the frailties of human endeavors and egos. While this is not a biography of Jones or Porter, understanding who these men were and the times in which they lived is crucial to understanding why their deeds mattered. In some ways, it is a story of obsession, of small acts committed in times of great upheaval, and of lives dedicated both to personal success and to the well-being of the nation.

  In that, it is at heart an American story. And America’s story. But it begins more than 220 years ago in France, with a lonely and ailing man in the midst of another country’s revolution.

  1

  Jones: A Hero Dies

  Paris, July 18, 1792

  John Paul Jones was gravely ill. He had always been a slender man, but over the last few months his body had slowly swelled, first the feet and legs, now the hands and abdomen. He was lethargic and had trouble walking around his Paris neighborhood. Slight exertions left him struggling for breath, and coughing fits punctuated his conversations. In recent days, his white skin had begun yellowing, and Jones was entertaining no delusions about how this precipitous decline in health was going to play out. Less than two weeks after his forty-fifth birthday, Jones was, he believed, dying.

  Jones had spent a fair amount of time in Paris over the years, yet in his final days he only had a small circle of friends he could rely on. One of them, Samuel Blackden, an American businessman, had been quietly pressing the Scottish-born hero of the American Revolution to get his affairs in order. And that morning, Jones was finally ready. He sent word to Blackden and another friend, Gouverneur Morris, the US envoy to France, that he wanted to dictate his will and he wanted them to witness it.

  The men arrived around five o’clock at Jones’s third-floor apartment overlooking the Rue de Tournon, a block-long street on the Left Bank that ran north from the Palais de Luxembourg, once the home of art collections and royalty but now standing unused as the French Revolution gathered steam. Blackden arrived with Jean-Baptiste Beaupoil, a former aide to Jones’s friend the Marquis de Lafayette, the French soldier and aristocrat who had helped the Americans during their revolution. Morris, the official face of the young United States, brought two French notaries to handle the legal requirements of recording the dying hero’s last will and testament.1

  The men found Jones “sitting in an easy chair, sick in body but of sound mind, memory, judgment, and understanding”—the prerequisites for writing a will. Despite his success as a sea warrior and his reputation as a captain to be feared by enemies and crewmen alike, Jones wasn’t physically imposing. He was about five feet seven inches tall, with long dark hair rusted to gray at the temples. At sea, he often exploded in violent anger, but ashore he was usually courteous, gratingly so at times. But now he was all business, as though not wanting to waste breath on the inconsequential.

  Amid his coughing fits, Jones itemized his possessions and told the men that he wanted his estate—including assorted debts that were owed him, property in the United States, some business investments and bank accounts—to go to his two sisters in Scotland and to their children. As Jones dictated, his cough worsened; the meeting was wearing him out. The notaries completed their work and left together with Morris. Blackden and Beaupoil lingered a few minutes, but then they left too, and Jones retired to his bedroom.

  Paris at the time was filled with revolutionary fervor, and tension was building rapidly on the streets and in the salons. It was this, not Jones’s failing health, that preoccupied Morris. He went from Jones’s apartment to dine with the British ambassador to France, Lord Granville Leveson-Gower, and the ambassador’s wife, Lady Susannah Stewart Sutherland, where they traded news of the day. It was not good. A month earlier, a mob had invaded the royal palace at the Tuileries and humiliated Louis XVI and his queen, Marie Antoinette, by, among other things, forcing the king to don a red hat—a symbol of the revolution—and drink a toast to the health of his subjects.

  As word of the king’s humiliation spread, royalists from around France converged on Paris to defend the realm. Supporters of the revolutionaries also made their way to the capital, drawn by the scent of radical change. The future of France, and of the rights of man, were being fought over by the ancien régime and those seeking to create a new society, one in which the people, rather than birthright and a kiss from God, would determine who ruled.

  Sensing the looming violence, members of the Legislative Assembly, where royalist Feuillants were locked in raucous debate with the revolutionary Jacobins, began drifting away, not wanting to be caught up if the tensions broke into riots and bloodshed, arrests and guillotines. The struggle was changing Paris at its roots. The sprawling, three-story Palais de Luxembourg would soon become a prison, and in a few months’ time, Louis XVI would lose his head at the freshly renamed la Place de la Révolution with thousands of Parisians cheering the executioner instead of their king. So there was much to concern the diplomats of the United States and England, much to discuss over their meal.2

  Morris made a short evening of it. After dinner, he took his carriage to the home of his married mistress, Adélaïde-Emilie de Flahaut, and went with her to the nearby home of Dr. Félix Vicq d’Azyr, a member of the Académie française whose patients included the queen. The trio moved on to Jones’s apartment. The commodore’s valet let t
hem in, telling them that Jones was in his bedroom. They opened the door to find a corpse. Jones was flopped face-first over the edge of the mattress, his booted feet still on the floor, as though life had left him a step short of his bed, or in the midst of a final prayer.

  Jones died on his own time—a rare event in those guillotine-hungry days in Paris—but he did not die on his own terms. It was the last in a series of events over which Jones had lost all control, a poignant turn for a man accustomed to altering not only the course of a battle but the course of history as well.

  Jones had arrived in Paris in May 1790 after a year of wandering Europe’s capitals, hoping to resurrect a military career that had foundered badly in the service of Russia’s Catherine the Great. Jones was a proven leader of men, or at least of sailors, and an accomplished naval strategist. During the American Revolution, he took the fight to England itself, raiding coastal villages and capturing British warships. The British, noting Jones’s Scottish birth, branded him a pirate and a traitor.

  Yet for all of Jones’s cunning at sea, he was a failure at politics and the intrigues of royal courts. He had left Saint Petersburg in disgrace, the whispers of a tawdry sexual dalliance with a young girl rippling ahead of him. Once in Paris, he found the city remarkably changed from his previous visits, when he had been welcomed at the king’s court. Now he was barely welcomed anywhere, in part because Paris itself was different. The American Revolution had been a fight for separation, a struggle for independence by colonies lying an ocean away from their ruler. In the end, governance had changed, but the social order had remained the same. The French Revolution was something altogether different, a vicious and unforgiving uprising of the masses, a true upending of the social order. Much of the aristocracy among whom Jones felt most comfortable had fled the city, some even the country, and others were in hiding. Even the king and his queen were at the mercy of their subjects, forced to live under house arrest at the Tuileries.