The Admiral and the Ambassador Page 16

  Still, the book helped fan interest in Jones. In 1830, the Taylor collection was finally published in New York. A year later, an American naval lieutenant named Alexander B. Pinkham took a year’s leave to travel to the British Isles to seek out the haunts of some of his favorite authors, such as poet Robert Burns and novelist Sir Walter Scott, who was still living. He also wanted to visit the birthplace of Jones, “whose memory he venerated to the point of idolatry, not only as a brother sailor and adopted citizen of America, but above all as the first man who dared to hoist the flag of independence on the gigantic waters of the new world.”14

  Pinkham, the son of an American whaling captain and a Scottish mother, was a powerfully built, heavyset man, gentle in demeanor despite his prizefighter physique, with a face reddened and worn by years of sea, sun, and wind. He landed at Cork in southwest Ireland with a small stash of cash, a single faded blue suit, and a knapsack “containing a change of linen, materials for writing, and a few books and mathematical instruments.” After wandering Ireland for a few weeks, Pinkham shipped out from Dublin across the Irish Sea to Liverpool and then headed north to Dumfries, where he spent a few days resting up and visiting with the editor of the local newspaper. From there, Pinkham journeyed some fourteen miles west to Jones’s boyhood home at Arbigland, where he was saddened to the point of tears to find the cottage a roofless wreck. He sketched the ruins in his notebook and continued on his travels.

  Pinkham wandered western Scotland for a few weeks, then crossed to the east and tried to visit Scott, who refused to see him. (Scott had recently suffered from a stroke and would die the next year.) Pinkham was disappointed but did manage to have breakfast with poet James Hogg, a friend of Scott. He then spent several days in Edinburgh.

  Yet Pinkham was haunted by the condition of Jones’s childhood home. So he reversed course and returned to Dumfries with a plan. Working through the local editor he had befriended when he first arrived, Pinkham approached the owner of the estate, D. H. Craik, and gained his permission to have the cottage reroofed and made habitable. Pinkham left twenty-five gold sovereigns with his editor friend to cover the cost. The amount, though substantial for a wandering seaman, was insufficient for the project; Craik made up the difference, and the cottage was restored the next spring. The renovated building, with its white walls visible from the bay, became a local sailing landmark. Its first tenant was the widow of a local fisherman who had drowned at sea. It stills stands as a summer tourist destination.

  Over the next twenty years, Jones’s legacy made recurring appearances in official Washington and in popular culture in the United States as well as Europe. In Washington, Congress voted in 1834 to honor the commodore by naming a frigate after him, though the plans were never carried out.

  In Paris, Alexandre Dumas père wrote the play Paul Jones: A Drama in Five Acts in 1838 and then converted it into a serialized novel, Le Capitaine Paul. Though viewed as something of a sequel to Cooper’s The Pilot, Dumas’s work made Jones a French captain and staged most of the scenes in Brittany, apparently several years after Dumas had visited Lorient, the home port for Jones’s real-life forays to England. The play was largely ignored, but Dumas’s serialized novel sold well, and several London-based houses published English translations that were also sold in the United States.

  In 1841, US Navy captain Alexander Slidell Mackenzie—a writer as well as a career navy man—published another biography, Life of John Paul Jones, which received wide attention and sales. Novelist James Fenimore Cooper was not a fan of Mackenzie or his work, however. “Mackenzie, I have discovered, is authority for nothing,” Cooper wrote to fellow author William Gilmore Simms in January 1844. “I do not accuse him of intentional departures from the truth, but he has an obliquity of mind, and an obtuseness of morals that are almost as bad.”15

  Part of Cooper’s dislike for Mackenzie was rooted in a moment of high drama at sea. In November 1842, the year after his Jones biography appeared, Mackenzie ordered that three crewmen be executed after hearing rumors of a possible mutiny aboard the Somers, which was under his command as a training ship for young navy men. The plot purportedly included killing Mackenzie and his officers and converting the ship to piracy. The thin evidence was a conversation between the alleged ringleader and a crewman he supposedly sought to enlist in the conspiracy. Even more troubling was the nature of the Somers’s mission. It was a training ship crewed primarily by teenage midshipmen to test them for careers at sea. The alleged plot, and Mackenzie’s reaction to it, was akin to a school headmaster inflicting capital punishment, and it sparked an uproar, as well as questions about how the US Navy was training young seamen. When the Somers reached port, Mackenzie faced a court martial that was closely followed by the public because one of the dead mutineers, Midshipman Philip Spencer, was the son of a political appointee: John C. Spencer, secretary of war. But the military appeared to take care of its own, clearing Mackenzie of any wrongdoing in a process many dismissed as a whitewash. Cooper was outraged. He conducted his own review of the inquiry based on the transcript, resulting in the 1844 publication of a scathing indictment of the scandal and of the navy’s failure to deliver justice for the three young men against whom Cooper saw little evidence of culpability.

  Cooper, whose novels made him one of the century’s most recognized American writers, had returned to Jones and his life story in 1843, publishing a two-part biography in Graham’s Lady’s and Gentleman’s Magazine as part of a series of profiles destined to be collected in a book. Near the end of the piece, Cooper wrote that Jones’s body had been buried in Paris’s famous Père Lachaise cemetery. Taylor, Jones’s niece, was living then in New York City; she read the articles and sent Cooper a lengthy letter telling him she found the profile “substantially though not precisely correct—its errors are of minor importance.” Because Cooper planned to include a variation of the articles in a forthcoming book, Taylor said she felt compelled to correct the errors she had found, including where Jones had been buried. Père Lachaise, she pointed out, didn’t open until 1812 (she got the year wrong; it was 1804), well after Jones died in 1792. So Jones could not have been buried there. “He was interred in the old Protestant burial ground, purchased by Lord Viscount Stormont (afterwards Earl of Mansfield) when British Ambassador at the Court of France—it was situated near the Barriere du Combat, and is now, I believe, totally covered with buildings.”

  Three years after receiving Taylor’s letter, Cooper finally published his Lives of Distinguished American Naval Officers, which included a chapter on Jones based on the magazine articles. Cooper left out some of Taylor’s added details but corrected the burial error from his magazine piece, writing that Jones “was interred in a cemetery that no longer exists, but which then was used, near la Barriere du Combat, for the interment of Protestants. It is probable that no traces of his grave could now be found.”16

  While that 1846 description of Jones’s final resting spot seems vague, it was only a half century after Jones’s death. To those who knew Paris and Parisian history, there was enough evidence to find the cemetery. Over the centuries, Paris had been encircled by a series of walls, new supplanting old as the city expanded. In 1784, the farmers-general, tax-collecting financiers appointed by Louis XVI, ordered the construction of a fifteen-mile (twenty-four-kilometer) wall around Paris, encompassing some undeveloped areas that had previously been tax-free zones. The wall included sixteen gates aimed at controlling the flow of goods in and out of Paris; they were, in essence, tax collection booths in a customs barrier.17 The Combat district of Paris was in the northeast and encompassed a low hill called Montfaucon. During the Middle Ages it had been a site of public executions. Bodies would dangle from le gibet de Montfaucon—the gallows of Montfaucon—for, in extreme cases, two or three years. Later, the neighborhood earned its Combat name as the site of animal fights and eventually became a slaughterhouse for horses.18

  By the late 1700s, the stench of death was gone, but the neighborhood was a crim
e-ridden slum. When the barriere was built through Combat, the ornate gatehouse was erected near present-day Place du Colonel Fabien—just a few hundred yards from l’Hôpital Saint-Louis and its Protestant graveyard, and about two miles northwest of Père Lachaise cemetery. Neither Taylor nor Cooper specified the name of the cemetery nor the street it was on, but a reader with access to old maps and knowledge of some of Paris’s history would have found enough clues to locate the cemetery, the only one that had accepted Protestant bodies in that era. But to the uninformed, Cooper’s reference just looked like another dead end.

  No one, it seems, bothered to look in the obvious place: Paris’s l’Hôtel de Ville, or City Hall, where Parisian bureaucrats kept detailed records of burials in city cemeteries. Except one person: Charles Read, the French-born son of Scottish Protestants. In 1849 Read had been appointed assistant director of the department of non-Roman Catholic religions at France’s interior ministry, where he helped reorganize the Protestant churches in France, cofounded the Société de l’Histoire du Protestantisme Français, and wrote several books on Protestant history.

  Read lost an internal political battle in the interior ministry and was forced to resign his job in 1857, but he didn’t give up his work. Over the next few years he continued to write, and as part of his archival research, Read made regular trips to the pre-Commune Hôtel de Ville, where he scoured official records for details on the evolution of Protestant Paris. And he made copies of records pertaining to Protestants—including burial records.19

  In March 1859 Read published a small item in the French magazine Correspondance Littéraire that included the detail that Jones had not been buried in Père Lachaise as generally believed but was laid to rest in the now-closed Protestant cemetery near l’Hôpital Saint-Louis. It also set the date of Jones’s death as July 18, 1792, a fact that had been in dispute among historians. And it reported that he died at home at 42 Rue de Tournon as a “consequence of ‘dropsy of the chest’ (hydropisie de poitrine), in the sentiments of the Protestant religion.” The interment came two days later, witnessed by a deputation of members of the National Assembly; Pierre-Francois Simonneau, the king’s representative and a friend of Jones; and several of Jones’s American friends, including Blackden.

  Translated and truncated versions of Read’s article showed up in the American Atlantic Monthly, which credited the source but left out the cemetery reference, and in the June 1859 issue of Russell’s Magazine, which included the cemetery name. The Russell’s article did not cite its source, but in that era, periodicals often republished material without credit.20

  Nearly thirty years later, Read revisited the Jones item in an article in the Société de l’Histoire du Protestantisme Français’s Bulletin Historique et Littéraire that revisited some of the notable death records he had found years earlier in the now-destroyed city archives. Among them was the entry for John Paul Jones.21 Read’s article and notes indicated the original record had come from one of five city registers of burials in a Protestant cemetery near Porte Saint-Martin, which had opened in 1724 after Cornelis Hop, the Dutch ambassador to France, persuaded Louis XV that the city needed a place to inter foreign Protestants who died in France. Catholic doctrine forbade placing non-Catholics in the consecrated ground of parish cemeteries, which forced Protestants to bury their dead on private land, and often in secret. With the opening of the Porte Saint-Martin cemetery, the Protestant dead were accorded some final dignity. That cemetery eventually was closed in 1762 to make way for the extension of Boulevard Saint-Martin. Read, though, discovered that it was soon replaced by another cemetery for foreign Protestants near l’Hôpital Saint-Louis, with the same family of caretakers, the Corroys, in charge. And it was there that Jones was buried.

  So the information was readily available—if one knew where to look.

  10

  A Brush with Fame

  ONE PERSON CAME CLOSE to finding John Paul Jones’s body: John Henry Sherburne, the politically connected naval bureaucrat who wrote the 1825 book based on a collection of Jones’s letters.

  Sherburne’s interest in the Scottish-born sailor was part of his own family legacy. Sherburne was born in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in 1794, two years after Jones died. He was the son of a Dartmouth- and Harvard-educated lawyer who left his Portsmouth practice to fight in the Revolutionary War, where he lost a leg during the August 1778 Siege of Newport. While no doubt painful, life-threatening, and a tremendous sacrifice to the cause, the loss of the limb came about in a rather ignominious manner: a British cannonball barreled through Major Sherburne’s tent while he was sitting at the breakfast table.

  After the war, the elder Sherburne, a quick-tempered and disagreeable man, entered politics, first sitting in the New Hampshire legislature before winning a seat in Congress. He knew Jones from the commodore’s days in Portsmouth (they corresponded after the war), and they counted James Madison and Thomas Jefferson among their mutual friends. In 1804, President Jefferson appointed Sherburne to a seat as a federal district judge for New Hampshire. The position came shrouded in controversy. Sherburne had been a key witness in the impeachment of the previous bench-holder, Judge John Pickering, but to avoid cross-examination, he disappeared after giving his testimony. Pickering was duly ousted, and Sherburne then won the appointment to the vacancy he helped create. He remained a federal district court judge until his death in 1830.1

  The Sherburnes were a family of privilege and thus had connections. Descended from one of the earliest settlers in Portsmouth, the elder Sherburne’s sister was married to John Langdon, the shipbuilder with whom Jones had wrangled over the building and outfitting of the Ranger and the America. Langdon served in the Second Constitutional Congress, was a US senator from 1789 to 1801, passed up Jefferson’s overture to appoint him secretary of the navy, and became governor of New Hampshire in 1805. Seven years later, citing his age, Langdon turned down the nomination to stand for election as Madison’s vice president in the 1812 election.

  The younger Sherburne reaped the benefits of those powerful family connections. He entered Phillips Exeter Academy in 1809 at the age of fifteen, and was married at age eighteen to Mary Ann Hall, a daughter of Elijah Hall, who had served as a naval lieutenant under Jones aboard the Ranger. Hall was part of Jones’s most daring escapades, including the raid on the Scottish Selkirk estate (in which the lord wasn’t home but the family silver was captured). And Jones deputized Hall to sail the captured British warship Drake to Brest, France, as a prize. The stories told by his father-in-law, as well as those offered by his father and uncle, intertwined Sherburne’s sense of family history with the life of Jones.

  Sherburne worked for a time as a correspondent for the Saturday Courier newspaper in Philadelphia, traveling extensively up and down the East Coast and into the western territories. In 1825, while his father was still alive and, one suspects, able to pull a string or two, Sherburne was hired as the register for the US Navy, a $1,400-a-year civilian position usually filled as an act of political patronage.

  Yet Sherburne styled himself as a writer more than a military man; the same year he took the bureaucratic job, he published his Life and Character of the Chevalier John Paul Jones. And he commissioned portraits of himself and his wife by Charles Bird King,2 an artist noted for his paintings of Native American tribal leaders who passed through Washington, DC. The Sherburnes made a handsome couple. King depicted Mary Ann with a full face, soft hazel eyes, and curled brown hair. In the portrait, Sherburne’s eyes are a little darker, as is his hair, which is teased upward above a large forehead and a long, aquiline nose. In a mark of ego, Sherburne had King paint into his portrait a copy of a letter from Jefferson on the table at which he sits, and his book about Jones open in his hand, a nineteenth-century version of an author’s publicity photo.3

  Sherburne returned in late February 1837 to the trove of letters and other documents Jefferson had sent him as he was preparing his book on Jones. This time through, Sherburne discovered something h
e had overlooked before: a mention of $50,000 that Jones had given to Jefferson, then the minister to France, as a portion of the prize money due his crew members on the Bonhomme Richard and the Alliance. Digging through Congressional records, Sherburne discovered that the money had never been paid out to the crews or their heirs.

  In February 1839, before the wave of books that renewed public interest in Jones, Sherburne went to the District of Columbia’s Orphans’ Court, an early version of probate court, and sought appointment as the administrator for the Jones estate. As evidence of his legal standing, he provided letters dated 1826 and 1838 from two descendants of Jones’s sister, Mary Ann Lowden, who had granted him power of attorney. Both descendants were dead by the time of the court action. Despite writing about the will in his book, Sherburne told the court that Jones had died intestate and that he anticipated there would be no money to claim for Jones’s heirs, who had already received some cash from the US government. He did believe there would be a small amount due to Jones’s crew. By downplaying the money involved, Sherburne was able to win the court order appointing him administrator by posting a $500 bond instead of a bond equal to the amount of money at stake (as was usual).

  Janette Taylor, Jones’s niece, got wind of what Sherburne was up to and filed an appeal, arguing that Sherburne had no standing to be administrator because Jones had left a will and his heirs were known. The court let Sherburne keep his authority to administer on behalf of the estate in the United States, but ordered him to post a $30,000 bond. Sherburne missed the deadline, and his rights as an administrator were revoked, a decision that was upheld on appeal on August 22, 1842. The claim itself lingered but was finally paid on July 6, 1848, some fifty-six years after Jones died and on what would have been his 101st birthday.4