The Admiral and the Ambassador (20 page)

But by the time the documents reached Paris, Jones was dead.

Three weeks after Jones was buried in his lead coffin, Paris erupted in violence. Anti-royal mobs stormed the Tuileries, and the Swiss Guards protecting the royal family were no match. A slaughter ensued. Louis XVI was deposed and taken prisoner, and the bodies of the dead Protestant soldiers were heaved into carts and hauled off, many of them to the Saint Louis Cemetery. It was still the only place in Catholic Paris that could receive
Protestant dead, though it's unclear how much the revolutionaries were hewing to religious doctrine and protocol. Deep trenches were dug in the cemetery, a few yards from where Jones was buried, and the dead men were stacked in like cordwood then covered over with dirt.

The cemetery continued to receive Protestant dead for a few more weeks, but was then closed and eventually sold off, its location, and its best-known body, quickly forgotten amid the turmoil. Five months later, the king who had decorated Jones and presented him with a golden sword was executed on the guillotine in the middle of la Place de la Révolution, which until recently had been la Place de Louis XV, named for the freshly killed king's predecessor and grandfather.

The day after Jones died, his friend Jean-Baptiste Beaupoil, former aide to Lafayette, wrote a letter to Jones's sisters informing them that he had died, where the will was filed, and that his possessions had been sealed up in his apartment on Rue de Tournon. He also wrote that Samuel Blackden, another Jones friend, was heading to England and could be reached at No. 18 Great Titchfield Street in London. Janet Taylor, one of the sisters, wrote to Blackden there, and on August 8, Blackden replied with details on Jones's final days and his burial.

Taylor traveled to Paris in October to collect her brother's belongings and money owed him by the French. She found the city in violent uproar. She checked into the Hôtel Anglais on le Passage des Petits-Pères, where Beaupoil lived, a few blocks from the Tuileries, and then went to the Rue de Tournon apartment to collect her brother's papers and possessions. She also linked up with an unidentified friend and an Irish-born Parisian
valet de place
—something of a tour guide for people seeking to navigate the local bureaucracy—to petition the French National Assembly for payments Jones had felt he was due.
¹²

Paris, though, was coming apart. A few weeks before Taylor arrived, the Republic had been declared, and roving mobs attacked prisons, executing some 1,400 inmates. Other revolutionary gangs invaded the homes of royalists, priests, and observant Catholics, or others not perceived to be aligned with the masses; others were simply the victims of score-settling under the guise of revolution. Revolutionaries roamed the streets, and Taylor quickly perceived that it would not be safe for her to linger. She fled
before the Assembly could consider her request, a decision that may have saved her life. Three days later, the proprietor of her hotel was arrested and his assets seized. The Irishman and
valet de place
were also swept up and quickly lost their heads to the guillotine.

Interestingly, for all of Jones's naval battles in the name of freedom from the rule of the British king, in France he was aligned with the king against those who sought their freedom. Had he not died of his illnesses, he could well have lost his head on the guillotine, too, a reminder—much like Jones's role in the American Revolution—that often one man's hero is another man's pirate.

F
ROM
P
ARIS, THE
A
MERICAN
war with Spain was a distant affair, though it permeated life in the diplomatic community. Ambassador Porter's daughter, Elsie, filled her diary with the light social events of the day as well as details from a trip to Germany with her father. She also tracked the early progress of the war, noting with nationalistic pride when American ships took Spanish ships. “The torpedo boat
Porter
captured a Spanish vessel yesterday, which makes me quite proud of the family name sake,” she wrote on April 25. (The ship was named after David Porter, no relation, a former navy officer and diplomat.) She fretted that while the official French diplomatic position was neutrality, the French people and institutions seemed to side with Spain.
¹

The war was moving quickly. The first battle, for which Dewey received so much praise, came at Manila Bay on May 1, 1898. At the same time, US warships half a world away were establishing a blockade outside Cuban port cities. In early June, American ground troops landed at Guantanamo
Bay on Cuba's southeast coast, and then at nearby Daiquiri and Santiago de Cuba. With American forces—including Teddy Roosevelt's Rough Riders—seizing Cuban towns at the start of July, a half-dozen Spanish navy ships under Admiral Pascual Cervera tried to break through the blockade and leave the Santiago de Cuba harbor. A US naval squadron under Rear Admiral Winfield Scott Schley, with the USS
Brooklyn
as his flagship, cut them off and destroyed all six ships, including the
Infanta María Teresa
, which had been part of the 1897 Hudson River flotilla marking the dedication of Grant's Tomb in Manhattan. The death toll was high: some 350 Spanish sailors were killed, with another 160 wounded and more than 1,700 men captured. As at Manila Bay, the US losses at Santiago de Cuba were minimal. Aboard Schley's
Brooklyn,
which was hit by some twenty-five Spanish shells, one sailor was killed and one was wounded. Those were the only casualties on the American side, though two other ships were damaged in the fighting.

Horace Porter received a wire in Paris with skeletal details about the destruction of the Spanish fleet at Santiago de Cuba. “Father, when he received the telegram, rushed into my room, took me in his arms and whirled me about, to the destruction of my hair, but what did I care when I heard him exclaiming with tears in his eyes that ‘It's all gone, all destroyed, the fleet, Cervera's I mean,' this between whirls and kisses.” Later, during the open house party, “Father read it aloud, while the people cheered and shouted and the band played
The Star-Spangled Banner.”

Despite the war, the ambassadorial dinner parties went on. And Sophie Porter's health worsened. As the mother took to her bed or off to the Alps for rest, Elsie spent more time as her father's hostess, making a quick transition from teenage girl to young woman. Given the health problems and the war, Elsie's social “coming out” dinner was a small affair hosted by a family friend instead of the grand ball one might expect for the daughter of a wealthy diplomat. “I was rather glad [the grand event] with a great ball, brass bands and trumpets at street corners [that was originally planned was canceled],” Elsie wrote. “It was a terrible nuisance, so Mrs. Winslow [the wife of Porter's friend, General Winslow] gave me a beautiful dinner and dance and I managed to kill time in a most agreeable manner.” She also described in great detail the gown she wore that evening, the dancing, and
the French suitor who came calling, the extent of her descriptions suggesting she really would have preferred the grand party.

For Elsie, the war was shrouded in romance. She noted in her diary two men—suitors, actually—who were heading for battle. “Captain Horton
²
is going, I wonder if he will ever come home again. His letters are studiously respectful and yet whenever he can he sends me presents. I mean little remembrances. I don't see why he should care for me, I am certainly not very attractive because I'm such a young volcano.” Another man identified only as Elliott was also headed to the battlefields, and Elsie struck a tone of longing to taste battle herself. “How I wish I were there, yes, right in the war. It's very dreadful, I know, but I want to see it all. I am not satisfied to read about it or to hear Father tell stories. I want to see it myself, the defeat and victory and all the awfulness of war. I want to feel all the sufferings and joys of life, the good and the bad. I don't mean such things as dreadful suffering—but if it's got to come, let it come. I always have such longings for all sorts of excitements and passions.”

Elsie received letters sporadically from Horton, and it's clear she began to develop some affection for him. He wrote little of himself in those letters but instead offered observations of others and some details of the battles he had been through. “When he writes of the most trivial things,” Elsie noted, “he is deep, deeper than I thought, and what a spirit. Passion and love are buried down in a noble heart.” When there was a gap of several weeks, she fretted to her father, who “scornfully replied” to her that she was being silly: “A man in as important position as he is, and in an exciting campaign, has not time to write letters to girls. He has other things to do and think about.” Elsie bet her father that “he will write me, and write me from the battlefield, if he isn't ill or wounded.”

Elsie knew her captain better than Porter did. Horton was writing, he just wasn't mailing, and a packet of letters eventually arrived, including one written as his outfit was engaged in the battle of Santiago. He offered a few details of the campaign and confessed that he had indeed been ailing with malaria. Enclosed in the packet was a swath of the Spanish flag he told her had been cut down as the Stars and Stripes was hoisted above the Cuban city. But there the communications and the burgeoning romance ended, at least as recorded in Elsie's diaries, until an enigmatic mention around her
twenty-first birthday in December 1899, in which she wrote that she had treated him coldly despite her romantic interest in him and that distance seemed to have weakened the attraction. “My soldier boy is in the Philippines dead or alive, I don't know…. It seems so long now since he has loved me…. It seems like my real life only began two years ago when on that never-forgotten Fourth of July, 1898, I woke up to the fact that he was all the world to me and a good deal more besides…. If he lives to [come] back from the Philippines and claims me as he says he will, how good I will be to him. These and nothing else, love to a man and thankfulness to God, are my birthday thoughts.” Records indicate Horton eventually returned to the States, not Paris, and married a woman from New Orleans.

While the French government was toeing a neutral line, many of the top French newspapers were in full-throated support of Spain, something that US State Department officials worried about, fearing that a steady barrage of anti-American articles could build pressure on the French government to pick a side. Secretary Day wrote Porter asking whether the ambassador could find some way to counter or at least quell the voices. Porter replied that public opinion and the French press were volatile and hard to measure “because the conditions change rapidly even from day to day and it is difficult to write a circumstantial account which would be up to date when it reached Washington.”

At the start of the war, Porter had made the rounds of top French government officials and “received assurances that everything would be done to preserve in all respects a strict and impartial neutrality,” even as he delivered a clear threat “that the action of certain elements here adverse to the United States” could affect trade between the two nations and leave the United States “fostering an alliance with their hereditary enemy, Great Britain.” The message to the French was clear: remain neutral or risk a diplomatic and financial backlash.
³

The French government had little sway with the French newspapers, a separation between government and the Fourth Estate that both the United States and France embraced. “They say with truth that the Paris press does not represent the government nor the mass of people,” Porter wrote, before dissecting the mood of the various French factions. Backing Spain were conservative aristocrats who “dislike the Republican Government of
France and look with horror upon another Republic in Cuba” and who, in many cases, still pined for the days of the French monarchy. French bankers with investments in Spanish bonds opposed US intervention, fearing that a free Cuba would leave them with worthless investments. “The radical clericals make common cause to a large extent with Spain, the most prominent of Roman Catholic countries.” Porter assured Day that France had a silent majority of US sympathizers who couldn't be heard over the din of the opposition that set the tone for public discourse. “These elements have a voice, while the great mass of the French people who are friendly, or at least not unfriendly to the United States, have no means of giving public expression to their feelings.” Porter said he was working to wedge pro-American viewpoints into the large papers and had been lobbying US newspaper correspondents “not to exaggerate the state of things and widen the breach, and they are now reporting that there is a change here for the better.” He also intimated that some of the pro-Spanish newspapers were being paid off by Spain; Porter said he did not have the budget for similar investments but arranged a pool of $5,000 to commission pro-American articles by French journalists.