The Admiral and the Ambassador Read online

  Sherburne wasn’t done with Jones, though. In 1845, he approached navy secretary George Bancroft seeking permission to use a navy ship to bring Jones’s body to the United States for a proper burial and memorial. Never mind that he didn’t know where the body was. It didn’t matter; Bancroft never responded. (Bancroft, in a bit of historical symmetry, also founded the US Naval Academy at Annapolis that same year.)

  Sherburne moved on to other projects. When his father died fifteen years earlier, in 1830, Sherburne had inherited the old man’s library, which included a copy of The History of the Administration of John Adams. A controversial book, it had been published in 1802 and then immediately bought up by some of those scandalized by what the author, John Wood, had written. Aaron Burr, in particular, took umbrage, claiming libel and factual errors, and Wood, in a change of heart, wrote his own publisher repudiating the work, asking that it be scrapped, and offering to pay for the production costs. The printed copies were dumped in a pile and burned, but a few copies escaped the conflagration. One of those copies was in the Sherburne family library; Sherburne claimed (without detailing how he knew) the book had been a gift from Jefferson, a political rival of Adams, to his father.5

  Sherburne began shopping the book around in 1840 and finally found a taker at Walker and Gillis, publishers in Philadelphia. As the book neared publication, the publisher distributed a pamphlet seeking subscribers, promising that the book would be “printed on fine white paper; new type, bound in cloth of 400 pages and delivered for one dollar.” Sherburne sent copies of the prospectus far and wide, including to President James Polk, saying that the former president and son of John Adams, John Quincy Adams, had “personally observed to me at his own mansion that should the work be published, he should publicly notice it in order to correct the early history of the Republic.”6

  The new version, with an introduction by Sherburne detailing the book’s history, was published in 1846 as The Suppressed History of the Administration of John Adams. Sherburne’s additions were a distraction. His writing voice was pompous, spotlighting his family connections and heritage with an overwrought writing style common to the era. Critics found as little to like in it as they had in Sherburne’s life of Jones. “Fortunate indeed is it that the endorsement of [Sherburne’s] name is not sufficient celebrity to give it currency,” the Southern and Western Literary Messenger and Review wrote of the book. “A want of method and discrimination is manifest in this volume as well as in the Life of Jones, both exhibiting a dull collection of disjointed documents thrown together without order, taste, or judgment, while to keep up the appearance of legitimate narrative…. The conclusions at which Mr. Sherburne arrives in almost every instance, so palpably contradict truth as to excite disgust in every reader conversant with our annals.”7 The review was unfair; the book was written by Wood, not Sherburne, so he wasn’t responsible for its disjointed nature. Still, it was hardly the kind of review any writer would want to stomach.

  Yet Sherburne kept writing. He had traveled to Europe in the mid-1840s and in 1847 published The Tourist’s Guide, or Pencillings in England and on the Continent with the Expenses, Conveyances, Distances, Sights, Hôtels, Etc., and Important Hints to the Tourist (Philadelphia: G.B. Zeiber and Co.). Later that year he was back in England, part of a tour that would also take him to Ireland and France. He rented a room at 96 Strand, in the heart of the hustle and bustle of London. Part of his trip was to serve as something of a diplomatic courier, “as bearer of dispatches” to, among others, George Bancroft, who had been moved from President Polk’s cabinet to the Court of St. James’s as the American minister to Great Britain.

  Sherburne’s mission, though, was primarily personal.8 He wrote to Richard Rush, a former member of the Monroe and Madison cabinets and the current US minister to France, that he was heading to Paris soon and wanted help finding Jones’s body and shipping it to the United States. Rush replied in January 1848 that “I will gladly aid you in any suggestions or steps that may be proper and practical.” Rush noted that Sherburne said he planned to have Jones reburied somewhere in Washington, DC, but as in previous endeavors, Sherburne was overstepping his authority. In fact, his approach throughout his adult life seemed to be to act on a whim. In this instance, Sherburne had no claim to the body, no right to have it exhumed, and no authority to determine where it might be reburied on American soil. Rush noted that he himself had little authority to act. “Uninstructed by the Secretary of State on this subject, and uninformed if Congress has passed any resolution in regard to it, I must await your arrival for information on these and other points, preliminary to any steps of mine, official or otherwise, with this government or the public authorities of Paris on the occasion.” And he added a telling point: “I have no knowledge of the place of his interment, of which, perhaps, you may know something.”9

  Sherburne took detailed notes of his travels, but they have disappeared, so it’s unclear exactly what steps he was taking to try to find Jones’s body. British newspapers reported that he delivered a speech in Leicester Town Hall on emigration to America, which sounds like little more than cheer-leading as he extolled “the advantages of high wages paid for labour of all kinds, the low price of good land, the cheapness of all kind of provisions, and the numerous chances for an industrious man to improve his social position and elevate himself in the scale of society.”10 It’s unclear whether Sherburne even made it across the channel to France. At some point, he returned to the United States, and there is no record of his efforts for three more years, when in 1851 he once again traveled to Europe.

  Sherburne arrived in England in early May aboard the Washington, an American steam mail ship, this time with a plan. In January, he had written to Daniel Webster, President Millard Fillmore’s secretary of state, seeking his help. The letter is a bit disingenuous—Sherburne told Webster that he had received administrative power on behalf of Jones’s estate, which was on file in the appeals court in Washington, but he didn’t mention that he had subsequently lost that authority for failing to post the required bond. Sherburne invoked his family connections to Jones and reminded Webster that the secretary had known Sherburne’s father and uncle. Citing those “friendly feelings,” Sherburne asked Webster to write a private letter to the US minister to France, William Cabell Rives, urging him to help Sherburne locate and exhume Jones’s body. Sherburne already had raised $500 from American shipping businessmen in Liverpool, so he wasn’t seeking money. And, oddly for a man who openly sought publicity, Sherburne asked Webster to keep details of Sherburne’s quest from “newspaper writers in Washington who generally write news without a knowledge of what they write and [who have] spies throughout all the Departments, I am informed.”11 Sherburne also sought a second private letter of endorsement for the project, over Webster’s signature, which Sherburne could use in Paris, should it be necessary. If Webster ever replied to Sherburne, that letter is lost.

  Sherburne also wrote to the secretary of the navy, William A. Graham, soliciting help. Graham in turn wrote to Captain Joshua R. Sands of the frigate St. Lawrence, which was slated to sail for England in May carrying some additional US exhibits for the recently opened Great Exhibition in London, the first in what became a long-running series of international world’s fairs. Graham instructed Sands to be ready to transport Jones’s body, and Sherburne with it, back to the United States.

  Once in London, Sherburne sent a note to Sands announcing that he had arrived, and Sands replied on May 6 asking Sherburne when he thought the body might be ready for transport. “The voyage for which the St. Lawrence came to this country has been effected,” he wrote. With the exhibits unloaded, “there is no further reason for her detention at Southampton.” Sands was cooperating, but he also made it clear that he wasn’t very happy sitting around waiting.12

  Sherburne didn’t tarry in England. He went on to Paris where he “paid my respects to the American Legation and Consulate, to state the object of my mission to Paris and my anxious desire to pro
ceed at once in order that the frigate St. Lawrence should not be detained any longer than necessary.” There would be delays anyway. Despite his attempts to move without much media notice, small items appeared in several newspapers about Sherburne’s journey and plans. His second edition of The Life and Letters of John Paul Jones was due to be published in June (dedicated to Graham, the navy secretary), and one suspects either his publisher in New York or Sherburne himself let the word out, hoping to fan sales. Returning Jones’s body to the United States just weeks before the new edition was to hit the streets would have been a significant marketing coup. Perhaps anticipating such timing, the new edition of Sherburne’s book included some of the letters Sherburne had received related to his quest.

  Once in Paris, Sherburne received a letter from a lawyer identified in the records only as “N. Billings” that stopped him in his tracks. “As your name has been mentioned in the American papers, as superintending the exhumation of the remains of John Paul Jones, it is proper that I should inform you that the legal representative of Jones is Frances E. Lowden [a grandniece], and that, as her attorney I have taken the preliminary steps to prevent any improper interference with the said remains.”

  Billings and Sherburne met later that day at the US consulate in Paris, and Sherburne managed to talk his way out of the mess. Billings wasn’t content with just a conversation, however. He wrote Sherburne the next day asking him to put in writing the gist of their unspecified agreement and Sherburne’s intentions. Sherburne complied, though the letter is lost. Billings, his tone now congenial after receiving Sherburne’s written assurances, told Sherburne he could meet him at his home in the early morning, or after 4 PM, to discuss plans, and then added an enigmatic postscript: “Please let me know about the spy-glass of Paul Jones.”

  Sherburne wrote Captain Sands on May 19 about Billings and the delay the lawyer’s presence had created. “At so unexpected a proceeding and having no time, or desire to have a controversy on such a subject in a foreign land, [I] have suspended for the present, by advice, further action, trusting that all will yet, on my part, be accomplished.” He told Sands to make his own call about whether to wait or sail. Sands replied that he too had received a note from Billings, which he had ignored. With his ship and crew idle and business to attend to, Sands couldn’t accommodate an indefinite delay. With regrets, the captain sailed.

  Billings and Sherburne eventually agreed to work together to search for Jones’s burial place, though it’s unclear if they had reached agreement on whether to move the remains to the United States. Sherburne and Billings poked into Parisian archives, and while nothing indicates which records they consulted, they apparently missed the city hall records detailing Jones’s burial site near l’Hôpital Saint-Louis that Charles Read would soon find. Sherburne and Billings concluded instead that Jones had been buried in an area set aside for Protestants behind the Hôtel-Dieu hospital on Île de la Cite, the island in the Seine that also holds Notre Dame Cathedral. That cemetery, though, was long gone. “The land devoted to such purpose was subsequently sold, and all the bones collected and placed in a pit, or carried to the Catacombs,” Sherburne reported to Graham, the navy secretary, in a letter dated July 14, 1851.

  The mission was a bust, Sherburne concluded. The bones were gone. Or at least irretrievable. So Sherburne set sail for home. A year later he was dead, unaware of the error that had kept him from finding Jones’s body.

  11

  The Search Begins

  IN THE YEARS AFTER losing the White House to Grover Cleveland in the 1892 election, Benjamin Harrison returned to civilian life and a lucrative legal practice in Indianapolis. As a former president, he was in demand as much for his legacy and connections as for his legal acumen, and he took great advantage of it. Among his new clients was the country of Venezuela, which hired him in January 1898 to handle negotiations in a dispute with Great Britain over its border with British Guinea. Harrison’s fee: $100,000, or about $2.4 million in current dollars.1

  Great Britain was in a tight spot. The United States, invoking the Monroe Doctrine, cast a wary eye over the border dispute, ready to push back against any attempts by England—or any other European power—to expand its presence in the Western Hemisphere. President Cleveland upped the pressure on Great Britain by asking Congress to create a boundary commission to unilaterally impose a solution and then be ready to enforce it with military action, if necessary. Great Britain was already wrangling with European rivals over colonies in Africa and trade with China, as well as fighting off a rebellion by the Boers in South Africa. Not wanting another international flash point, the British agreed to arbitration, and three months later the Venezuelans agreed also. It took months to hammer out the details, but the groundwork was set, and the agreement was made to hold the arbitration hearing in Paris in the summer of 1899.2

  So it was that ex-president Harrison found himself and his wife boarding the Europe-bound St. Paul—the same passenger ship that ferried the Porters in 1897—for Paris. The Harrisons arrived in late May, and as a former head of state, Harrison wasn’t just any lawyer showing up for a hearing. Porter prepared the embassy staff for Harrison’s arrival, and throughout his summer-long visit, Harrison was the guest of honor at formal dinners hosted by Porter, French president Loubet, and others. With such an eminent American in Paris, the organizers of the annual Decoration Day celebration at the Marquis de Lafayette’s tomb in Paris’s Picpus Cemetery decided to ask him to give the main speech. Harrison obliged, and on the cool and sunny morning of May 30, Harrison delivered a simple message of peace and friendship between the United States and France, framed around Lafayette’s role as a military leader in the American Revolution.

  “The nation that cherishes the graves of its soldiers and assembles to honor them is the nation that preserves and enlarges national life,” Harrison said. Monuments in the United States, he added, celebrated emancipation. That quest for freedom united the Americans and the French, a relationship personified by Lafayette, “the crusader of liberty, who came to our aid in a time of stress, whose name is perhaps more closely than any other connected with the name of [George] Washington. Let the president of France and all Frenchmen be assured of the sentiment of amity and gratitude felt by all Americans.”3

  As speeches go, it was pretty pedestrian, but it served its purpose and was duly reported in the American newspapers back home. James G. Johnson, a lawyer and local Republican Party figure in rural Randolph, New York, some sixty miles south of Buffalo, read an item about the speech in his local paper. It stirred Johnson, a Union Army veteran, to pick up his pen and write to McKinley at the White House.

  “Ex-President Harrison seemed to indicate that the Marquis was the only American officer of prominence during the revolution, buried in France,” Johnson wrote. But that wasn’t the case. John Paul Jones had also died “in Paris and was buried with highest honors by the French government—perhaps in the same cemetery that contains the remains of Lafayette.” Johnson speculated that Jones may have been interred in a grave that had been rented for a number of years, a custom in France at the time, then tossed

  … into a potters field, there to mingle with those of uncounted dead of the French Revolution. Yet, there may be a possibility that owing to Paul Jones having received a national burial, this is otherwise. Cannot you, dear Mr. President, as the head of our great nation, cause search to be made so that these remains, if identified, may be brought home for burial; or if not, that the spot where he was laid to rest may be so designated so that on next Memorial Day loving hands can cover it with flowers in memory of a simple republican hero whose wise statesmanship, cunning seamanship and desperate valor so largely aided in our national deliverance?4

  McKinley’s office sent the letter to Hay at the Department of State, who forwarded it to Henry Vignaud, the first secretary in the Paris embassy. Hay asked Vignaud to look into the matter, apparently either unaware of Gowdy’s efforts six months earlier in response to Congressman Land
is’s letter, or dissatisfied with the results.

  Vignaud, too, had been making some inquiries of his own. In February 1899, the Parisian papers were full of articles about the successful effort by Alfred de Ricaudy, editor of the conservative weekly L’cho du Public, to find the grave of eighteenth-century French laissez-faire economist Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot. The economist died in 1781, and, like Jones, over the ensuing decades his burial spot was forgotten. Ricaudy decided to see what he could find by diving deeply into Parisian and French records. He discovered that Turgot had been buried in a lead coffin at the Hôpital Laennec in Paris, and not in Bons, Normandy, as legend had it. With Turbot’s descendants standing around, the crypt was opened, and the mystery solved.

  Vignaud wrote to Ricaudy congratulating him on the discovery, and as a long shot asked the French editor whether he had seen during his research any hints of where Jones’s grave might be.5 The embassy records don’t include a response from Ricaudy, but if he had written back to Vignaud, the answer apparently was no, he didn’t know where Jones’s body was buried. In late June, Vignaud wrote back to Secretary Hay that “I have had more than one occasion to look into this matter and all inquiries made of the city authorities or persons to be informed failed. One thing however is certain. Paul Jones was not buried in the cemetery where the remains of Lafayette lie. At the instance of a gentleman from Boston, who wrote me on the subject, I am making another effort in that direction and if successful I will inform you at once.”6