The Admiral and the Ambassador Read online

  Against that backdrop, there was no room and little patience for Jones, an ego-driven man selling doomed schemes aimed at his naval resurrection. He had become a boor to his friends, and his failing health gave him a cadaverous look, like “a wine skin from which the wine has been drawn,” as Thomas Carlyle later described him. The former commodore suffered from a nagging pneumonia, and his lungs were weakened. For months, Jones’s ailing kidneys had been developing lesions and small fibrous masses, and scarring over, which interfered with their crucial biological functions. Slowly, they stopped working. The doctor who examined the body ruled the death natural, due to dropsy of the lungs. Jones the sailor had, in effect, drowned in his own fluids.

  The mortician and his assistants did their work with practiced efficiency. Two days after Jones’s death, they placed the body on a table, stripped it, and then dressed it in a long linen shirt decorated with plaits and ruffles. They twisted the hair, more than two feet long, into a ball and tucked it inside a small linen cap at the nape. In the custom of the era, they covered Jones’s hands and feet with foil and then wrapped the whole body in a long burial cloth with, inexplicably, the numeral 2 stenciled on the top.

  When they were done, they carefully placed the body in an expensive lead-lined coffin and secured it in place with wads of straw in case the Americans might someday send for the body. Or maybe Jones’s family in Scotland would claim him. The orders were to prepare the body for days of jouncing and bouncing over roads to the coast and then over the seas to its final resting place, even though the coffin was scheduled to be dropped in the Parisian ground in a matter of hours.3

  Once the body was secured, the rim of the lower half of the coffin was coated with solder; the top was slipped carefully into place and then sealed shut. Someone had drilled a hole in the lid near the head of the coffin, and now the mortician slowly poured in tiny streams of alcohol until the lead box was filled. A metal screw was twisted tightly into the hole and sealed with drops of molten lead, leaving a bumpy scar above the dead man’s head.

  A few hours later, as evening came on, the coffin was taken from Jones’s apartment and slowly wheeled northward in a small funeral parade through the streets of Paris, across the Seine, and on out of the walled city. It continued on until it reached the only place around Catholic Paris in which a Protestant could be lawfully buried, the cemetery of Saint Louis, outside the l’Hôpital Saint-Louis. The distinguished but small crowd of about sixty mourners entered through the gate at Rue des Écluses-Saint-Martin and passed through a fruit garden, the leafy branches beginning to swell with apples and pears, and then another gate at the top of stairs that led eight feet down to the cemetery.

  The mourners included Jones’s friend François Pierre Simonneau, a royal bureaucrat who had covered the 462-franc cost of the burial out of his own pocket rather than see Jones’s body heaved into a pauper’s grave. It was Simonneau who thought that maybe someday the Americans might send for their war hero and so arranged for the lead coffin and the gallons of alcohol to preserve the body. And it was no small expense. Simonneau had paid more than triple the going rate for a traditional burial with a wooden coffin and contemporary embalming methods. (For the poor, whose unprotected bodies were dumped into the ground, the cost of a funeral was even less.) It wasn’t that Jones didn’t have money. He had left an estate of some $30,000, but nearly all of it was tied up in investments and debts owed him from elsewhere in Europe and in the United States. Gouverneur Morris, as the American representative in Paris, declined to front the cost of the funeral on behalf of the government or to assume the burial debts on behalf of Jones’s estate. “Some people here who like rare shows wished him to have a pompous funeral,” Morris wrote to a friend years later. “As I had no right to spend on such follies either the money of his heirs or that of the United States, I desired that he might be buried in a private and economical manner.”

  Simonneau was joined by a delegation of twelve members of the Legislative Assembly, which the day before—amid crucial debates over the future of France—had marked Jones’s passing with a formal vote recognizing his life and long friendship with France. Other faces familiar about Paris at the time were at the graveside as well, including Jean-Baptiste Beaupoil, who had seen Jones on the day he died, and Louis-Nicolas Villeminot, who led a detachment of grenadiers to accompany the cortege. There were some Americans, too, who had crossed paths with Jones in Paris: Jones’s friend Blackden; Reverdy Ghiselin of Maryland, who had recently arrived from Le Havre, where he was trying to establish business; and Thomas Waters Griffith, an American merchant who also became witness to the excesses of the French Revolution as he sought his own fortune.

  The Reverend Paul-Henri Marron, a Swiss Calvinist who apparently had never met Jones, delivered a eulogy for the legend, not the man. Marron glossed over the sexual scandal and court intrigues that had driven Jones from Saint Petersburg and romanticized the dead man’s motives, bathing him in a revolutionary light—fitting, for the time and the place. “Paul Jones could not long breathe the pestilential air of despotism,” the minister said. “He preferred the sweets of a private life in France, now free, to the éclat of titles and of honors which … were lavished upon him by Catherine. The fame of the brave outlives him; his portion is immortality.” Then the minister urged his fellow citoyens to let Paul be their inspiration. “What more flattering homage could we pay to … Paul Jones, than to swear on his tomb to live or to die free? It is the vow, it is the watchword for every Frenchman.”

  The grenadiers fired a salute into the air, and the small gathering broke up. The mourners began making their way south in the gathering dusk, back along the road to the walled city, to the lights, and to the revolution. The gravediggers turned to their final task, shoveling the rich French earth onto the coffin of the man who would become known as the Father of the American Navy, and whose grave would soon be lost in the tumult of war.

  2

  A New President

  Washington, DC, March 4, 1897

  Horace Porter sat atop a parade stallion as he waited for a carriage to emerge from a nearby gate. It was a few minutes after 10 AM, and the blustery winds that ushered in the dawn had died down, leaving a pleasantly sunny but chilly day in Washington. Bad weather, of course, is bad news for a parade, so the clear skies gave Porter one less thing to worry about. It was his parade that was at stake on this late-winter morning, and he wanted everything to go according to plan. The celebration was the first of a series of high-profile events in which Porter would play a central role over the next few weeks, and while he wasn’t a man prone to anxiety, one suspects he was well aware of what failure would mean for his reputation for probity, discipline, and reliability—even if no one truly expected him to control the weather.1

  Porter’s sixtieth birthday was a month away, and the years had left their marks. He was in fine health, but his hair and mustache had grayed, and his face sagged around the cheeks. Still, he maintained the military bearing learned a half century earlier as he rose to the rank of brigadier general in the Union Army and as a top aide to General Ulysses S. Grant. After the war, Porter followed Grant into politics. Although Porter had long ago moved into civilian life, on this morning he sported a full dress uniform: dark blue jacket and pants with a gold belt and oversized epaulets, a broad sash, medals on his chest, and a plumed black hat on his head. A new sword dangled in its scabbard at his side, a gift from his staff to commemorate this day for which they had planned and worked most of the previous four months.2

  Porter’s horse stood at the head of a small detachment of cavalrymen in the middle of Pennsylvania Avenue. Rows of forty-five-star flags flapped over the heads of thousands of people overflowing the sidewalks and spilling noisily into Lafayette Square. Porter ignored the human din and kept his eye on a nearby gate, waiting for a carriage to emerge bearing his friend Major William McKinley and President Grover Cleveland. The carriage would be Porter’s cue to spur his horse and start his small squadro
n, the official escort on the short trip from the White House to the Capitol, where McKinley, an Ohio native and former Republican congressman and governor, would soon be sworn in as the twenty-fifth president of the United States.

  The election had been groundbreaking for American politics, shifting tactics from old-style parades and rallies to a more media-savvy, and media-using, strategy. The main issue as the nation shouldered its way out of an economic depression had been money. McKinley ran on a “sound money” platform, pinning the value of the US dollar to a gold standard. Democrat William Jennings Bryan stood for “free silver,” a policy that would have pegged the value of the dollar to silver, making goods more affordable and boosting the wealth of western silver miners. Gold won, but the real engine behind McKinley’s victory was the maneuvering of his campaign manager, Ohio millionaire and powerbroker Mark Hanna, who built the campaign around letters, pamphlets, and books provided free to the voters. The material explained McKinley’s monetary and trade polices—dry stuff in the best of times—but also reinforced McKinley’s image as a sober and prudent leader, an attractive force of stability in times of financial upheaval and uncertainty. At the time, political radicals were turning to the gun and the bomb to try to overthrow capitalism, and labor activists were sparking strikes to wrest better wages and working conditions from men who were just as strident in their refusals to grant them.

  Mounting such an “educational campaign” of literature, as McKinley’s political advisors called it, took a lot of cash, and Porter, as it happened, was exceedingly good at raising money. Porter brought in hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations, underwriting a campaign that overwhelmed the Democrats and helped propel the Republican Party to national dominance, until the Great Depression caused another political realignment and sent Franklin Delano Roosevelt to the White House.3

  While the 1896 election was significant for the nation, it was also a critical moment for Porter. He had been on the national political stage before—by now, in fact, he was an old and seasoned hand—but McKinley’s victory would mark the start of a fourth chapter in his life and send him on an adventure to rival that of his war years.

  Porter was born in Huntingdon, Pennsylvania, in 1837, the son of David R. Porter, a businessman turned politician who, two years later, would be elected governor of Pennsylvania. The elder Porter himself was the son of a Revolutionary War veteran, Andrew Porter, who began as a captain in the marines aboard the Effingham but then quickly transferred to the artillery. Eventually achieving the rank of colonel, Andrew Porter fought at the battles of Princeton, Brandywine, Germantown, and Trenton.

  Before the war, Colonel Porter, who had a penchant for mathematics, ran his own small private school in Philadelphia, but after the war he settled into farming in Norristown, Pennsylvania, and eventually became a surveyor, helping establish the Pennsylvania state boundaries. His son David Porter, despite his success in politics, lost fortunes at least twice during economic depressions—first running ironworks, then as a railroad investor—but those troubles occurred before and after Horace, his sixth son and seventh child to survive into adulthood, was raised.4

  Horace Porter grew up primarily in Harrisburg, attending school during the day and working at his father’s ironworks in the after hours. A tinkerer, he created several small refinements to the machinery in the ironworks and developed an interest in engineering. As a governor’s son, he also absorbed lessons in politics and military affairs. General Sam Houston was a friend of Porter’s father and an occasional visitor, and the young Horace would listen to the famous Texan’s stories of battles from the War of 1812 to the fight for Texas independence to the Mexican-American War. He also eavesdropped on the adults’ debates over West Point (Houston disliked it) and slavery (Houston was for it).

  The elder Porter also counted James Buchanan, then the US representative to the Court of St. James’s in London, among his friends, and Horace, through their letters, “had his first glimpse of that European world to the problems of which he was later to give so much thought.”5 When he was thirteen years old, Porter was sent off to a boarding school in Lawrenceville, New Jersey, where he excelled academically—first in his class in Latin, French, and math—and also organized a small military company of students.

  As he neared graduation, Porter sought an appointment to West Point but missed the cut. Porter enrolled in the Lawrence Scientific School at Harvard instead and tried again the next year for West Point, this time more forcefully. During his midwinter break, Porter traveled to Washington to lobby Ner Middleswarth, the congressman from his home district in Pennsylvania, for an appointment. It worked: Porter was admitted to West Point in 1855.

  As a cadet, Porter studied engineering and trained in artillery and ordnance management. He was a generally good student in a class that faced severe erosion. Porter’s entering class had eighty-one students; by graduation day five years later (one of only two West Point classes to follow a five-year program), fifty-five students were left.6 Porter placed near the top across most of his subject areas, though he seemed to have trouble with French, placing thirteenth, then fifteenth, and then dropping to twenty-ninth. The cadet apparently hit the books, though, and by the 1857 term Porter was first in his French class too.

  While Porter enjoyed the military training, he suffered the occasional mishap. During a horseback training drill, his mount reached out and bit the animal in front, which retaliated by kicking out a hind leg that “struck my right leg several inches above the ankle,” opening up a deep gash that wouldn’t heal, Porter wrote his sister on September 20, 1858, from a hospital bed. Porter spent more than a week in the hospital before he had recovered enough to rejoin training and his classes.7

  West Point was an all-male bastion, but family members and girlfriends made regular visits and were quartered at the three-story West Point Hotel, fronted by a broad and deep wooden porch, which became the cadets’ place to meet and woo young women. In the summer of 1859, Sophie McHarg, the daughter in a prominent Albany family, was staying at the hotel with a friend, Mary Satterlee, though the reason for their visit is unclear. Porter happened by while the two young women were on the porch, and was smitten with McHarg. They soon began courting, and after Porter graduated third in his class in July 1860, the couple became engaged. Porter spent the summer as an artillery instructor at West Point and that fall was assigned to the army’s Watervliet Arsenal at Troy, just a few miles from Albany, a convenient posting for his romantic life. But his orders were soon to change.8

  In April 1861 secessionist troops in South Carolina opened fire on the US government’s military installation at Fort Sumter, launching the Civil War. Porter was overwhelmed at Watervliet as orders escalated for supplies and weapons to be shipped to different Union outposts. He was sent on one clandestine mission to Washington, DC, to deliver reports deemed too sensitive for the mail. Wearing civilian clothes, he took the steamer Daylight, along with a contingent of Union troops and military supplies, to Hampton Roads and then up the Potomac, where the ship made it past Confederate gun emplacements without incident. At Washington, the ship was boarded by William H. Seward, the secretary of state, and President Lincoln, who told those aboard he felt compelled to personally thank each of them for their efforts. Porter delivered his messages and made his way back to Watervliet.

  By October, Porter had received orders to join an expedition sailing to Hilton Head, and almost immediately he was engaged in action as the Union troops shelled a Confederate-held fort (with Porter running his own small battery of artillery), then seized the ground after the rebels retreated.

  General Horace Porter during the Civil War.

  Photo by Matthew Brady; National Archives, ARC identifier 529380 / local identifier 111-B-5276, item from record group 111, records of the Office of the Chief Signal Officer, 1860-1985

  In April 1862 Porter was put in charge of ordnance for an attack on Fort Pulaski at the mouth of the Savannah River, which fell after a two-day bombard
ment. There the fight for the Carolinas bogged down, and in July Porter was ordered to assume command of the ordnance for the armies of Virginia under General George McClellan. “This is the greatest position a young man has ever held in this country,” Porter boasted in a July 24 letter to his father. “I am very much gratified, but I will have an immense amount of work.”

  Porter’s rise, though, was soon stymied by the politics and favoritism of McClellan’s top command, and after the Battle of Antietam, Porter was transferred to Cincinnati and then Murfreesboro, Tennessee, where he was named chief of ordnance for the Army of the Cumberland, commanded by General William S. Rosecrans. Rosecrans was engaged in pursuing what he presumed to be rebels fleeing southward, and he became overextended. The rebels, under General Braxton Bragg, were actually regrouping, and on September 19, 1863, they launched an unexpected counteroffensive, engaging the Union troops at Chickamauga, just over the Georgia state line from Chattanooga.

  The thinly spread Union troops crumbled and began retreating northward in complete disarray. In the ghastly two-day battle, some thirty-five thousand men on both sides were killed or wounded. As the Union troops were retreating, and in their confusion at the risk of slaughter and the loss of critical artillery guns, Porter rallied some one hundred soldiers to defend a small hill. The ferocity of Porter’s efforts fooled the Confederates into believing a much larger force was holding the hill, delaying their advance long enough for the other Union troops to retreat safely with their arms. By the time the retreat was complete, more than half of Porter’s men had been killed or wounded; Porter himself suffered a slight hand wound from an exploding shell fragment. The coverage of the retreat had come at a high cost, but Porter’s actions likely averted an exponentially higher number of deaths.