The Admiral and the Ambassador (23 page)

The family wanted to publish the letters at a profit, yes, but not at the expense of history. “I apprehend the suppression would have essentially injured the work,” the niece wrote, adding that she hoped the letters would “exhibit my uncle's character in a just point of view.” She asked Hyslop to show the letters around and “let me know if there is any bookseller in New York, who would undertake to publish them, and what I may expect for them. There is one thing however, must be insisted upon, which is, that they are not to be garbled, but are to be given to the world just as they are, without either adding or diminishing.” She acknowledged it was impossible to get an estimate since Hyslop did not have all of the letters, but “you may perhaps, after enquiry, have it in your power to give me a hint of what it is probable that I might receive. If you will have the goodness to assist me in this affair, the papers shall be sent to you, addressed as you shall direct, and to be disposed of as you think best; with only this one provision—that they must be published as they are.”
¹⁰

It's unclear how many of Jones's letters Taylor sent along, but it was only a taste of the collection. Hyslop approached the New-York Historical Society, whose members saw the value of the letters, but a book project there fell through. Hyslop died, and the letters passed into the possession of his brother, John Hyslop, who owned a bakery in New York, and from there to a man named George A. Ward, who turned them over to John H. Sherburne, register of the US Navy.

Sherburne was already at work on what he hoped would be a biography of Jones. He advertised in newspapers that he was seeking letters and other details on the war hero's life, and he approached the Taylors for whatever documents they might have. Jones's heirs refused to share any letters, likely because they were planning their own book. Sherburne, though, gathered letters from other sources, including John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. He had asked Jefferson for his memories of Jones, but Jefferson, then eighty-two years old, demurred. “My memory is so decayed that from that source I can furnish you nothing worth a place in his history,” Jefferson replied. “I believe I cannot better comply with your request than by sending you all the papers relating to him in my presence.”
¹¹

Sherburne published his book,
Life and Character of the Chevalier John Paul Jones,
in 1825 to scathing reviews. Sherburne did little with the material,
simply stitching together excerpts of the letters he collected, with transitions of over-the-top accolades for the Scottish captain. The
New-York Review and Atheneum Magazine
dismissed the book as a money-grubbing exercise by Sherburne that fell far short of the project he had advertised at the start in hopes of gaining public subscriptions. (It was common at the time to publish a book based on preorders by readers.) “We do not hesitate to declare it our opinion that Mr. Sherburne has unfairly disappointed the expectations he had so industriously excited,” the magazine wrote. The work indicates “an ignorance of history, and a crudeness of style, only pardonable in a work of the most moderate pretensions. The want of method and discrimination manifest in the selection of the letters, induces us to believe, that they were taken blindfold[ed] from the mass to complete the complement of pages…. In short, it is very palpably, a money-making concern, and Mr. Sherburne, the editor, and Mr. Van Zandt, the compiler [publisher], are probably the only persons not disappointed.”
¹²
Another critic writing the foreword to a later biography incorporating the Taylors' letters dismissed Sherburne's work as having been presided over by “some singularly capricious demon, wonderfully ingenious in producing puzzling and painful disorder.”
¹³

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 crime-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.