The Admiral and the Ambassador (22 page)

In July and August 1898,
Scribner's Magazine
published a two-part military biography of Jones by Alfred T. Mahan, one of the most respected naval strategists of his time, who pushed the influential theory that whatever countries dominated the seas would also dominate the world. Mahan's
biography of Jones was thin and made only passing references to Jones's personal shortcomings, but was highly laudatory of Jones's intellect and seamanship. “It would give a very imperfect idea of John Paul Jones, however, were the impression allowed to remain, uncorrected, that he was distinguished merely by extraordinary energy, valor, and endurance,” Mahan wrote. “On the contrary, he belongs to that class of true sea-kings, whose claim to the title lies in the qualities of his head as well as of the heart…. Jones possessed considerable originality of ideas, resultant upon his insight into conditions round him and his appreciation of their relative value; and this quick natural perception received direction and development from habits of steady observation and ordered thought.”
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The articles were mentioned in several other magazines and newspapers—going viral in a pre-viral media era—which added to the attention already focused on Jones after Dewey's win at Manila Bay.

In Indiana, Republican congressman Charles B. Landis had closely followed the trajectory of the war. He was among those who had lauded Dewey as a hero within hours of the victory at Manila Bay and compared the new American hero with Jones. As a former newspaper publisher, he knew a good story when he saw it. That Jones's final burial place was unknown struck him as both an embarrassment and, potentially, a cause. Landis was an old friend of John Gowdy, the American consul in Paris, and though the war was essentially over, John Paul Jones remained on Landis's mind. So the congressman wrote to Gowdy asking whether it might be possible, after all those years, to poke around Paris and find the burial spot of America's first naval war hero.
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Landis didn't have much hope the grave could be found. Still, given Dewey's success at Manila and the way the victory had stirred national pride in the US Navy, it seemed a shame to not try.

I
N LATE
N
OVEMBER
1898,
Americans in Paris carved out a little piece of home by celebrating Thanksgiving with private dinners and a handful of public functions. In the most high-profile celebration, Consul General Gowdy presided over a banquet at the ornate Hôtel Continental, where the American peace delegation was housed, midway between the Tuileries gardens and la Place de Vendôme. The toasts and speeches went late into the night. Horace Porter, a West Point graduate, gave one of the addresses, speaking of the American universities that had spawned leaders “who have won distinguished positions not only in war, but in the Cabinet and on the bench, whose renown has extended to the uttermost parts of the earth.” Other celebrations stretched into the weekend, including a gathering of expatriate art students in “club rooms” along the Quai de Conti, a party that seems likely to have been much livelier than the speeches delivered at the Continental.
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A few days after Thanksgiving, Congressman Landis's letter, in which he wondered about the location of Jones's body, arrived at Gowdy's desk.
The letter itself has disappeared, but given the men's relationship back in Indiana, the tone was likely a personal overture from one friend to another rather than a congressman's formal request for assistance.

Gowdy seems to have made a perfunctory search and replied in early January that he agreed with Landis that the United States had been remiss in not trying to find Jones's body and in not according him an appropriate memorial. “It does seem strange that we have not identified ourselves in gratitude to him who fought our battles at sea in our struggle for independence,” Gowdy wrote. “Every thoughtful American citizen can not but feel the deepest regret that we have shown no interest in his resting place” while “other heroes of the Revolution have been marked, and honor paid…. He certainly deserves a fitting memorial as the great hero that he was, and as the founder of our American navy.”
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Still, Gowdy couldn't be particularly encouraging. “I very much fear that the remains of John Paul Jones lie in the Catacombs,” the vast network of old quarries and tunnels beneath Paris that hold the unidentifiable remains of some six million people that had been moved there over the decades from old Parisian cemeteries. “I am still trying to get some information, if possible, and if I succeed will write you at once.”

The truth was, it seemed no one knew where Jones's body might be, in part because of the confusion sown by the French Revolution and in part because, as the legend of John Paul Jones grew, so too did erroneous details of his life and death. Public interest in the mercurial war hero had surged and ebbed. In the early 1800s, while the United States was still finding its place in the world, letters between Jones and some of the Revolutionary-era heroes were reprinted in pamphlets, newspapers, and magazines, the first wave of image-buffing.

Books also emerged, beginning with a translation of Jones's private memoir of his role in the American Revolution, which he had written for the French king Louis XVI. The book was published in Paris in 1798 as
Memoires de Paul Jones
by “Citoyen Andre,” Benoit Andre, Jones's secretary. Eight years later, a first-person memoir of the
Bonhomme Richard's
fight with the
Serapis
came out in the United States. Called
Narrative of the Adventures of an American Navy Officer,
the book was published anonymously because of its scandalous details about Jones, from his treatment of his men to his ego and
his rather full love life in bordellos and in the boudoirs of married women. The author was identified in subsequent printings as Captain Nathaniel Fanning, the midshipman who had directed the rigging-level battle against the
Serapis.
After Fanning died of yellow fever on September 30, 1805, in Charleston, South Carolina, his brother, Edmund, a writer, published the book to raise money for Fanning's widow.
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That book is most interesting for the details Fanning included about the battle with the
Serapis.
Published well before other books that began to romanticize Jones and the famous sea fight off Flamborough Head, Fanning described four hours of blood-soaked confusion, with cannons blasting through timbers and limbs, cutlasses gashing deeply into flesh, and flaming decks slick with gore. Fanning wrote that at one point, as word circulated that Jones and his top lieutenants were dead, three of his crewmen called out a surrender and began lowering the
Bonhomme Richard's
flag as a signal that they had given up. A very much alive Jones shouted out, “What damned rascals are them! Shoot them! Kill them!” Then the commander threw his unloaded pistols at the men, cracking the skull of one of them and knocking him unconscious. The flag remained aloft, and the fighting raged on. When the battle ended, its cost was clear: “I now took a full view of the mangled carcasses of the slain on board of our ship; especially between decks, where the bloody scene was enough to appall the stoutest heart. To see the dead lying in heaps—to hear the groans of the wounded and dying—the entrails of the dead scattered promiscuously around, the blood (American, too) over ones shoes, was enough to move pity from the most hardened and callous breast.”
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Most of the books about Jones, though, ignored the brutality of the battles in which he fought and the occasional petulance of his character, preferring instead to frame him as the embodiment of what many supposed a great naval leader should be: smart, brave, and daring, with a touch of insouciance thrown in. And they served to rehabilitate a reputation that during Jones's lifetime had been dragged down by his personality, his womanizing, and the scandalous circumstances of his departure from Russia. While admired for his seamanship, bravery, creativity (attacking White-haven might have failed militarily, but it had had a significant psychological effect on the British), and ferocity in battle, Jones's peers simultaneously
disparaged him for his ego and boorishness. Naked ambition and a need for public recognition aren't very endearing qualities, and, in the words of James Fenimore Cooper, they engendered “a species of indefinite distrust [that] clouded his reputation even in America, until the industry of his biographers” began reconstructing his public persona.
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Yet Cooper was part of that reconstruction himself. He helped popularize Jones with his novel
The Pilot,
published in 1823—just after
The Pioneers,
which established Cooper as the nation's preeminent novelist.
The Pilot
was based on Jones's raids on the British coast. A former navy midshipman himself, Cooper wrote the book in part as a response to earlier sea tales by Sir Walter Scott, which Cooper thought had failed to capture the spirit of life at sea, because Scott was not a sailor himself. “Paul Jones is the real hero of the novel,” one review said. “Its principal design is to delineate his skill and courage in the most desperate enterprises.” The review then left Cooper's book behind and offered a lengthy biography of Jones. Like other articles of the period, the spotlight was focused on Jones's bravery and contributions to the Revolution, while the more sordid details of his life fell into the shadows.
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Yet Cooper himself was ambivalent about Jones's character, and a close reading of
The Pilot
suggests Cooper viewed him as a consummate sailor and commander but also a man nursing resentment against the aristocratic class for not granting him the recognition he so craved.
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With the newfound interest in Jones, newspapers and magazines reprinted even more letters between Jones and figures in the Revolution, some of whom, like Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, were still alive. This helped cement Jones's public image as a hero of the Revolution while the young nation faced growing tensions over slavery, nagging economic crises, and political turmoil between the Whigs, who favored a more powerful Congress, and Jacksonian Democrats, who simultaneously championed the voice of the common man and sought a stronger presidency. They were divisive, distracting times, and one gets the sense that readers of
The Pilot
and the reprinted Jones letters were looking for the comfort of nostalgia and a time when the political options seemed simpler: freedom or colonial subjugation.

Jones himself, despite his lack of formal education, was a prodigious letter writer. In the latter years of his life and career, he kept copies of many of the letters he sent as well as those he received, leaving behind a significant paper trail. Or rather, many trails, for after his death the letters scattered to the winds. When Jones left for Europe at the end of the Revolutionary War to try to recover the prize money from the ships he and his crews had captured, he put his logbooks and other papers in the hands of his friend Robert Morris in Philadelphia. The rest, mostly letters, he took with him, and they were part of the estate bequeathed to his two sisters when he died.

The estate also included claims to war prizes, and the sisters and their heirs spent years petitioning Congress to make good on debts owed—primarily, three ships and cargo Jones had captured and sent to Bergen in Norway, then under Denmark's rule. Denmark, to appease the British, seized the ships and returned them to England, creating a diplomatic rift with the United States. The heirs believed the issue was between the US government and Denmark; in the interim, the US government owed them their prizes. Jones's heirs hired Robert Hyslop, a lawyer and family friend in New York (Jones had stayed with him in the summer of 1787), to handle the estate's American claims, including petitioning the young House of Representatives “for compensation of services rendered, or property to be secured and recovered in this country.”
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It would be decades before that claim was settled.

While the family members seemed to be hungry for their due under Jones's will, some were also cognizant of their connection with history. At the sisters' direction, Hyslop obtained the papers that Jones had left with Morris in Philadelphia. There were some rustlings about getting them published, but nothing materialized. In late March 1820, Janette Taylor, Janet Taylor's daughter
⁹
and Jones's niece in Edinburgh, Scotland, wrote to Hyslop that she possessed a large—though incomplete—collection of Jones's letters, many of them to or from Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, the Marquis de Lafayette, and other key players from those tumultuous years. Taylor had contemplated publishing the papers in England but feared Jones's anti-British comments would be suppressed.